Dennis Schmitz and James DenBoer
Monday, Dec. 8 at 7:30 PM
SPC at 1719 25th Street
Host: Bob Stanley
Dennis Schmitz’s reputation as an outstanding poet is international. Over his distinguished career, he has seen hundreds of his poems published in magazines and anthologies. His list of awards and recognitions include the di Castignola Award, the Shelley Memorial Award and the Pushcart Prize. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1978-79 and has been been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow three times. He has had many volumes of poetry published, including We Weep for Our Strangeness, Goodwill, Inc., String, Eden, Singing, About Night: Selected and New Poems, The Truth Squad, and his most recent Animism. Dennis taught English at California State University, Sacramento for over thirty years. He was awarded the Mayor and Chair’s Literary Fellowship in 1996. Also, in February 2000, Dennis was appointed by the Sacramento City Council and Board of Supervisors as one of the first two Poets Laureate for Sacramento County.
Dungeon—Sutter’s Fort, CA
The straw is smelly, but our bodies
smell more—sweat-maps about
the armpits & loins where we cross
other bodies the chains bend us
to, sometimes on the face
another’s face or the repulsive
ornament the rapist showed
in the Bosch painting of DESIRE.
Victims scarred with kisses,
we slide out of reach—the crooked
horse-dealer, or typecast Injun
Joes, maybe any randy
pioneer once a month
with camp whores choosing hatred
over loneliness because each day
decomposed where the next one grew.
Some farms were rich swamps
that a summer sun stunned,
or, north, volcanic outcroppings
pinched roots & nothing ripened.
Whatever we planted,
fingers knotted around what we knew,
children came up foreign,
wives came up dead—home was
a word the wind ate. Now this cellar
memory makes—over it some tried
to build, but underneath, the old bodies
are condemned, me to you.
originally appeared in Poetry Now
James DenBoer lives in Sacramento, California, and works lightly as a rare book scout. He has published books Black Dog, Day Moon, Stonework, Dreaming of the Chinese Army, and the most recent Just Enough Light (Finishing Line Press, 2014) His writing has won grants and awards from the International Poetry Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Council on the Arts, the Carnegie Fund for Authors, the Authors League, PEN/New York, and other institutions. He was the former editor of Swan Scythe Press from 2007 to 2012. He has also translated into English, for the first time, a book of poems by Venantius Fortunatus, a 6th century Latin poet, and the extant 11–13th century Romance kharjas of Arabic and Hebrew muwashshah.
Neighborhood
Your house is filling with smoke.
Your little garden,
beans, onions, radishes, basil and mint,
is dying; small leaves wounded,
covered with ash.
Is this our red-and-ochre street
with blue doors,
where the you men make bombs?
Are these the bare rented adobe rooms
where the lieutenants drink scotch?
32nd Street is a gray ashy desert
with barking dogs and blowing sand.
There is a burning boat
heeling over in the American River.
The next-door child with one eye
is watching the sky for all of us.
