PXP 2013: Schedule of Events

THERMOS’s editors will all be in New Orleans Nov. 7-9 to host the second annual Poetry Exchange Project Symposium at Tulane University and at other locations in the city. All events are free and open to the public. If you’re in the area, please stop by. — AS

Friday, Nov. 8 (Tulane campus, St. Charles Ave. side)

11:30am: PXP presentations, Norman Mayer Hall, Rm. 125
            Students from Tulane, University of Georgia, and University of the Arts deliver
            presentations of completed PXP projects.

1:00 pm: Panel A: Poetry Beyond the Classroom (Norman Mayer Hall, Rm. 200B)
            Moderator: Dan Rosenberg
            Panelists: Nik De Dominic, Melissa Dickey, Anne Marie Rooney, Jay Thompson
1:00 pm: Panel B: Poetic Lineage (Norman Mayer Hall, Rm. 125)
            Moderator: Andy Stallings
            Panelists: Peter Cooley, Robert Fernandez, Carolyn Hembree, Laura Walker

2:00 pm: Panel C: The Life of Contemporary Poetry (Norman Mayer Hall, Rm. 200B)
            Moderator: Zach Savich
            Panelists: Matt Hart, Mary Hickman, Paul Killebrew, Teresa Villa-Ignacio

3:30 pm: Ian Zelazny Memorial All-City Student Reading (Norman Mayer Hall Rm. 200B)
            25-30 students from schools and universities around the city and region read poems.

6:00 pm: PXP Keynote Reading (Rogers Memorial Chapel)
            Robert Fernandez, Matt Hart, Mary Hickman, Paul Killebrew, Anne Marie Rooney and Laura
            Walker read new poetry.

9:30 pm: Party and Concert (2433 St. Claude Ave., Entrance on Music St., byob)
            Students and symposium participants are all invited!

Saturday, Nov. 9 (Buddhist Community Center, 623 N. Rendon St.)

12:00 pm: Hunter Deely Memorial Reading
            Brief readings by Carroll Beauvais, Megan Burns, Carrie Chappell, Peter Cooley, Nik De
            Dominic, Melissa Dickey, Cassandra Donish, Maia Elgin, Rebecca Morgan Frank,
            Elizabeth Gross, Michael Jeffrey Lee, Kay Murphy, Brad Richard, Dan Rosenberg,
            Zach Savich, Shelly Taylor, Jay Thompson, Afton Wilky, Mark Yakich

THERMOS 2: Dan Rosenberg

I like the way Dan Rosenberg treats family — in his poems, and in his life. I like the way Dan Rosenberg treats his friends. And I like his poems, which are at this point friends. You can find these two in The Crushing Organ, his first full-length collection of poems, out from Dream Horse Press. — AS

Reason For Surrender

Long Island again, in the yellow-light time of year:
Your family home juts up like a silty arm.

The dead have no reason to eat,
but they eat. The horizon crumples like fire.

Long Island smelling of your grandmother
in the last hospital days. The drip won’t stop

until it stops. You want to say, “The cathedral is a dildo.”
You can’t trace the reason of your own mouth,

the wet path around home. And you swing
the front door shut like a hammer. Their faces.

“Our past is bracing for some blow,”
you want to say, your feet scraped clean

on the family carpeting. You pile too much
on the edge of the fall. Red-veined maple leaves

leave. They sway into the pool and curl. The grown woman
is a shopper, not a sister. Long Island air

pollinates your head. You remember a sparrow nest.
It crumples and turns. Familiar faces. The cankerworms

silk down from the canopy like psychoactive pills
slugging down your throat.

Sugar Glider

I’m no swimmer but I can skim. A fat mile
of water flaps between us like a beggar’s

self-directed maledictions. It beats
the ground under a frayed curtain of clouds

hanging up to dry around the sun. These days
taste endless on my tongue. I come down

hard on the rhododendrons, feet pacing
my property in the mitigated light until the horizon

clamps its lonely fever down on me. I’m not
healthy all night, curled on one side and shivering.

Come here, where light drools on my face
while I make excuses for myself, for how hurried

the sun was to get here, for how the world is
a set of damp and mismatched jaws.

I think we fit in the cracks between the teeth.
Together, a sour residue, the slow corroding,

the irreparable spill. I toe gingerly into the water,
you turn away, my little blood pump jumps.

THERMOS 9: Dan Rosenberg

Today’s new poems from THERMOS #9 — 8 of them from Dan Rosenberg! Dan, who co-edits Transom with Kiki Petrosino, is a dear friend of THERMOS, and we’ve published poems of his previously to these. He lives in Athens (Georgia, sadly), where he’s completing a Ph.D. You can purchase his first book of poems, The Crushing Organ, from Dream Horse Press.

Coupling

The lawnmower rears back,

blades a fake circle. Damp
grasses launch a halo.
The white dog marks

a perimeter for the mailman
sailing about with shades
like gold coins. Two spiders

in a wind-tossed web hold on.

The Carriage

spokes spin, turn
a walk to stop-
motion

baby steps up
snaps
his hand in the wheel

the body’s a reason
a riot
from work

missing a purpose
beyond? who
isn’t

Ad Hominem

This house is always
losing to the lawn.

Grass watches me be
foolish with garden shears
and foolish upon a trowel.

Mostly I’m present
as periphery.
Sometimes though

the network slips.
A stumble the producer
overlooks, and I fail

to perform my skin,
a bodily laughter

never quite breaching
from a subject
to a person.

America

The passive entrance
to the body politic

collapsed. A door knocked
from its hinges

Oh they were rotten, we say,
and past the threshold

a carpet lolls in spittle.
Step into the squish

like a newborn
backing up. And

past the threshold
we feel the disconnect.

Natural

         O hack
the planet’s bitter
core open,
         the light
drinks deep,
the elemental
womb:
         a realm,
plants tuck
away the sun,
         sequestering,
the primary work:
         adding
a scrotum
to the atoms,
         to our hard
drives
we offer packets
         of desire:
frictionless,
we’ll burn
anything
to keep it
         so.

Kneel

When recovery happens
I’m diminished
like city fog blown.

I creep. My face
dissolves in a fit
of population.

Some commuters
survive. Faced with
what’s peopled, I breathe
into a blunt ache.

Duplex

When the basement
neighbor’s TV calls up,

an anchor’s
rusty chain, you

rattle in it all night,

sad little ghost
when you think

yourself awake.

Default Swap

A deer kicks. Can’t take
another summer fire. Scrub
my ear to the floor

of the pool. This
is rest. I float so low.
We’re far too smooth

to rustle and thump.
Heavy sun. And what
endless drying under.