Jeff Knorr and Sandra Simonds
Monday, October 15, 7:30pm
Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th St
Host Tim Kahl
Free Event Open Mic
Jeff Knorr is the author of the four books of poetry, The Color of a New Century (Mammoth Books), The Third Body (Cherry Grove Collections), Keeper(Mammoth Books), and Standing Up to the Day (Pecan Grove Press). His other works include Mooring Against the Tide: Writing Poetry and Fiction (Prentice Hall); the anthology, A Writer’s Country (Prentice Hall); and The River Sings: An Introduction to Poetry (Prentice Hall). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Chelsea, Connecticut Review, The Journal, North American Review, Red Rock Review, Barrow Street, and Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America (University of Iowa). He was the founding co-editor and poetry editor of the Clackamas Literary Review and is Professor of literature and creative writing at Sacramento City College.
Unearthing the Garden
The beetle on its back pedals legs against the air,
looking for soil. When my son flips this tank,
it heads for roots, a stray bulb, the dark, cool earth.
My son knows this place by what lives here not what grows.
Kneeling, digging in, he instructs me in insects
then tunnels into my eyes for answers.
The beetle has burrowed out of sight.
We poke the ground lightly, turning small clods,
the way he will search for a piece of his voice
buried under the flowering hibiscus along the house.
He will look for whole days lost to shadows,
and search with sticks, seeking beetles,
following the feet and small tunnels, the mosaic
of burrowing in darkness for any way home.
Sandra Simonds is the author of seven books of poetry: Atopia (forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in Fall 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, forthcoming in 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press, Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems have been published in the New York Times, the Best American Poetry 2015 and 2014 and have appeared in many literary journals, including Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. In 2013, she won a Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand,” which was published on Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.
“When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air—”
BY SANDRA SIMONDS
When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air —
so what is there
to be afraid of?
A cage of air. Baudelaire said
Poe thought America was one giant cage.
To the poet, a nation is one big cage?
And isn’t the nation mostly filled with air?
Try to put a cage around your dream.
The cage escapes the dream.
I see it streak and stream.
