Chad Sweeney and Catherine Daly
Monday, March 26, 2012 at 7:30 PM
SPC at 1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Chad Sweeney is a poet and translator. He is the author of four books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), An Architecture (BlazeVox, 2007), and Wolf Milk: Lost Poems of Juan Sweeney (Forklift, 2012, bilingual English/Spanish). He is the translator (from the Persian, with Mojdeh Marashi) of The Selected Poems of H.E. Sayeh:The Art of Stepping Through Time (White Pine, 2011). Sweeney edited the anthology Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: the Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (CityLights, 2009) and is coeditor of Parthenon West Review, a print journal of contemporary poetry, translation and essays, based in San Francisco. Chad’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2008, The Pushcart Prize Anthology 2011, American Poetry Review, Black Warrior, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Qtly, Verse, Volt, Barrow Street and The Writers Almanac. He teaches poetry in the MFA program at California State University, San Bernardino, and lives in Redlands, California with his wife, poet Jennifer K. Sweeney, and their son Liam.
Parable of Hide and Seek
I was a junebug found by a vole.
I was a wave ruffled by a wind.
I stood in long bank lines.
I attended the Third Church of the Heretic.
I hid as the darkness
diminished by a torch.
I wore glasses and a bowler.
I lay flat like a spill.
I hid as a bullet fired into hay.
I hid as a system of government.
You were my partner in everything.
I lived for you to find me.
—Chad Sweeney
Catherine Daly was born and raised in Decatur, Illinois. Educated at Trinity College and Columbia University, once a peripatetic developer of online environments, she now lives in Los Angeles. She has also worked as a technical architect, officer in a Wall Street investment bank, engineer supporting the space shuttle orbiter, software developer for motion picture studios, and teacher.She writes a fair bit of sound poetry and visual poetry in her books DaDaDa (Salt, 2003), Locket (Tupelo, 2005), Secret Kitty (Ahadada), Paper Craft (Moria), To Delite and Instruct (blue lion), and Chanteuse/Cantatrice (factory school), and Vauxhall (Shearsman, 2008).
Least Exclusive Jazz Club
Cuttings for ground cover root in a jam jar
on the stained plastic table lit
by candles guttering in shot glasses.
The music’s close as
a choosy club’s Siberia.
This is a ringside table.
The jam’s recorded,
does not relate
to this landscape.
The music escapes
to another venue, open when you care.
—Catherine Daly
