Douglas Blazek and Dennis Schmitz
Monday, September 23, 2013 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street at SPC
Host: Tim Kahl
By mid-point in his writing life Douglas Blazek had published over1000 poems, collected in over two dozen books and chapbooks, appearing in over 400 journals including New Directions, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly. His editing a magazine (Ole) and publishing a small press (Open Skull) back in the Sixties helped to free poetic restrictions and give impetus to the alternative publishing that now comprises most of poetry’s output. Historians of the era have tagged him one of the main instigators of what is termed the “Mimeo Revolution,” a course correction for civilization dedicated to making poetry dangerous. Writers and artists he promoted included Charles Bukowski, d.a.levy and Robert Crumb.
Despite achieving prominence in his first twenty five years as a poet, he eventually evolved to the point where his previous effort became a self-lit fuse detonating its own limits. His poetry demanded to be fully realized the way a thing in nature cannot be less than its inherent design. Were he not to redress what he had previously published, his early writing would merely serve as an inferior prelude to a greater work synthesized by observing its participation in the evolving mirror of creation.
Over the years, new poems were spliced into the manuscripts of rewrites. His poetics accelerated to express simultaneous dimensions in thought, language, and aesthetics– all concurrent in signature. All cohered by an all-encompassing vision. No old poem is old. Each is as fresh as if never breathed before, yet preserves the bones its body first owned in its natality. Each is a challenge to classification, as is the poet himself. His most recent books are Aperture Mirror (Edition Muta, 2012) and Gutting Cats in Search of Fiddles (Edition Muta, 2012)
A Swimmer Noteless in the Composing Ocean
Cast across my sleep,
a strand of inaugural sun
reels the swimmer to shore
quickly stowing his copious
theft of ebbless motion
I grieve the sea’s lost rebus.
Throw colors to my flesh.
Watch the swimmer’s imprint
unflex upon the mattress.
Dragging the elaborating day,
I know, as one moment
overwaves the next, the swimmer
has recrossed the threshold
heading to wed the depths.
The world cajoles my shoes.
Laces them to a slab of current.
Calculates annulment. Construes
engrainment as concrete views.
from Gutting Cats in Search of Fiddles
Dennis Schmitz grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, graduated from Loras College and the University of Chicago. He taught at IIT, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and most of his career at California State University-Sacramento. He has published seven books: The Truth Squad (Copper Canyon Press, 2002), About Night (Field Editions, 1993), Eden (University of Illinois Press, 1989), Singing (Ecco Press, 1985), String (Ecco Press, 1980), Goodwill, Inc 1976, Double Exposures 1971, We Weep for Our Strangeness, 1969. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He served As Sacramento’s first poet laureate with Viola Weinberg.
Carmel
Vulgar paw prints on the BMW
trivialize the threat, but the car’s siren,
still in pique, pursues
a tired raccoon. A few valleys east,
California recites lightning over Sierra
foothills to curse the cheap
tract houses, but here animals still argue
the wilderness these raked white beaches
& millionaire “cottages” pretend.
Robinson Jeffers built rage first
then poems from the fog-scuffed rocks he bore,
grunting up from this same beach
to make a tower he could be tall in.
We stoop to enter Jeffers’ world;
his wife would rap the low ceiling between them
until his pacing overhead stopped because
the poem might’ve squeezed in the whole
Big Sur coast. Miles south
& a real wilderness away, Hearst bought
an illusion too big for him — the shiploads
of statuary parodied in Citizen Kane,
the private zoo — only the red TOURIST arrow knows
its way through his castle’s cluttered acres.
In Carmel, Loretta & I go out the gate
Jeffers used — now designer homes crowd it.
The BMW is local, the raccoon bred
to add to the car’s relevance.
Prosperity is only a small god,
But you pray to it — just in case.
from The Truth Squad
