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Julie Bruck and Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Monday, November 26 , 7:30 pm
Sacramento Poetry Center. 1719 25th Street
Host Tim Kahl
Free Event … Open Mic
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JULIE BRUCK is from Montreal and has lived in San Francisco for over 20 years. Recent work has appeared in Plume, The New Yorker, Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, and The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry. Her third collection, Monkey Ranch, received the 2012 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, and her latest, How to Avoid Huge Ships, was published in September, 2018. Info @ wwww.juliebruck.com BLUE HERON, WALKING
Not one of Mr. Balanchine’s soloists had feet this articulate,
the long bones explicitly spread, then retracted, even more finely detailed than Leonardo’s plans for his flying machines. And all this for a stroll, a secondary function, not the great dramatic spread and shadow of those pterodactyl wings. This walking seems determined less by bird volition or calculations of the small yellow eye than by an accident of breeze, pushing the body on a diagonal, the great feet executing their tendus and lifts in the slowest of increments, hesitation made exquisitely dimensional, as if the feet thought themselves through each minute contribution to propulsion, these outsized apprehenders of grasses and stone, snatchers of mouse and vole, these mindless magnificents that any time now will trail their risen bird like useless bits of leather. Don’t show me your soul, Balanchine would say, I want to see your foot. (Originally appeared in The New Yorker)
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Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of Spider Season (Cold River Press, 2016) and The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press, 2008). Earlier collections include A Camellia for Judy (Frith Press, 1998), Feather’s Hand (Swan Scythe Press, 2000), To A Small Moth (Poet’s Corner Press, 2001), Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2003), The Land (Rattlesnake Press, 2005), The Book of Insects (Spruce Street Press, 2003) and Cassiopeia Above the Banyan Tree (Rattlesnake Press, 2007) and an illustrated short story The Audience (Uptown Books, 2007).
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Poem to the Stranger
On the Greyhound Bus, 1968 We traveled together for hours, barely touching elbows.
You were broke, running from home. Your big bony knuckles showed through the freckled skin of your hands as they clutched the battered satchel on your lap. –Remember? History was the isolate darkness all around us—the watery ghost-lights of the fishing boats off the coast highway like those flares floating in humid air above the rice paddies on TV news. (I was on my way south to collect a drunk—my father.) We parted wordlessly, in the dusky City of Angels. Tonight I write to you beside a vase of white chrysanthemums. I arrange them into this poem for you. I touch their tufts. (published in Cutthroat)
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