Don Schofield and Dennis Hock
Monday, March 11, 7:30 pm
Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street
Host: Stuart Canton
Born in Reno and raised (mostly) in Fresno and Sacramento, Don Schofield has been living in Greece since 1980. During that time he has been writing, traveling extensively and teaching at various universities—Greek, American and British. Fluent in Greek, a citizen of both his homeland and his adopted country (or, more precisely, the country that adopted him), he has published several poetry collections, including The Flow of Wonder (2018), In Lands Imagination Favors (2014) and Before Kodachrome (2012), as well as The Known: Selected Poems [of Nikos Fokas], 1981 – 2000 (2010) and Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece (2004). He is a recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award (US), the John D. Criticos Prize (UK) and a Stanley J. Seeger Writer-in-Residence fellowship at Princeton University. His first book, Approximately Paradise (2002), was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, and his translations have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Greek National Translation Award. Currently he lives in both Athens and Thessaloniki.
Border Crossing
Jolted awake. Darkness. Train not moving.
windows. Dirty metal sheds.
Soldiers escort us and all our luggage
into the farthest building. Sound of stamps.
Sound of power in multiplicate.
Stepping forward, I answer every question—
where staying, how long, who with, what to declare….
And if my answers or the way they’re put
cause doubt, they’ll take me to an inner room,
strip me down to just my voice repeating
a single phrase, my name perhaps, some well
constructed lie, or a simple truth this country
won’t let in. But if they like my words,
more forms to fill, and then they’ll stamp me through.
Dennis Hock likes to get involved in efforts to improve underserved local communities. He serves as a volunteer resource counselor for the homeless at Loaves & Fishes. He also does volunteer work with groups that use expressive writing as a healing process. Dennis has written two books of poetry: The Secret Cup: Poems of Grief and Healing (2007) and Bringing Birds Through Stone (2015). He is currently working on a third, Follow the Lame Goat Home.
Selfie Similes
Like a car I have a steering wheel in the front seat of my brain.
Like a horse I nicker at a sugar cube in an unfolded hand.
Like a waterfall I pause mid-air after the lip, then fall in sheets through the white sky of my own undoing.
Like starlight I have travelled thousands of years to get finally here.
And like a tired clock I feel my hands lose their nerve as my innards wind down.
This last is a relief actually: to breathe out some final ticks before resting in the sweet anonymous of the defunct.
Engine dead. Like a car’s.
