Sotère Torregian and Camille Norton
Mon. Sept. 26 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Sotère Torregian’s life is his masterpiece work. Born in 1941 in Newark, New Jersey, he traces his ancestry to the Aghliabid Dynasty of Moorish rulers in Sicily, as well as to Greece, Ethiopia and the Levant on his maternal side and to the Maghreb and Central Asia on his paternal side. Though there is nothing for him to go back to in these places today, his poems are always looking for excuses to travel. His work saw relative success in the 60’s and early 70’s. Then he dropped out of Rutgers University to join the New York group of poets alongside of John Ashbery and Andy Warhol. He taught at the counterculture First Free University of New York in the early 60’s as well. He moved to the Bay Area in 1967 where, after receiving the Frank O’ Hara award in 1968, he helped to create the first Afro-American Studies program in the US at Stanford University while he was writer-in-residence and with the help of Dr. St. Clair Drake. After five years at Stanford he was a librarian at the Menlo Park Library. His work follows in the tradition of French surrealism with its smatterings of French, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Arabic phrases interspersed among the English. Among his 8 books are Song For Woman (Joycian Court, 1965), The Golden Palomino Bites the Clock (Angelhair, 1966), The Wounded Matress (Oyez, 1968), City of Light (Paris and San Francisco, 1971), The Age of Gold (Kulcher, New York, 1976), Amtrak (Telephone 1979) and Because My Pizza’s Cold: Selected Works, 1957-1999 (Skanky Possum, 2002). He currently lives in Stockton, CA, where he resides with several cats that possess varying degrees of visual acuity.
from Amtrak
The Am-Track service number goes on with its GO-GO Music over the phone
“Woe unto you O Chorazin” woe unto you, Bethsaids, even the very dust of your city which cleaves on us.
Voici l’esprit du New York
You’ll be lucky when you collect him wear him trade him Dangle him hate him give him squeeze him
petit meres au buttocks nue beneath shorts
Braying chunks of anthracite from the Sierra Nevada On the pathway today Intimate cloud-swirls teach us Tenderness forever Mr. Man Slaughter. This is Mr. Torregian Yours is but another era that is over save for the next-to-ending lines
I’M COMING TO NEW YORK with my detachable teeth that could have—for their worth—once graced the Faberge Easter egg collection of the Czar!
But since “the Czar” is no more My teeth are worth something only to me now I couldn’t be a good member of “the Flying Wallendas” Aerialist family, for instance, (I’m getting anxious.)Since I’m afraid of heights and my teeth couldn’t Take the strain Of biting the trapeze It’s almost 12:00 P.M. I’m making my preparations. (musing) “What shall I bring of California to NEW YORK!” A black cave-cragg of Carmel-By-The Sea with part of the water-spray still on it Or A Puma-sound from the San Francisco Zoo at lunch-hour
Smile of a young woman
—Sotère Torregian
Camille Norton is the author of Corruption, a National Poetry Series winner published by Harper Perennial in 2005. Her poem, “The Prison Diary of Bartlett Yancey Malone,” appears in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler. Since the early 1990’s, she has collaborated with visual artists and composers on projects that include gallery installations, art performance, music performance, and inter-textual media. She was co-editor, with Lou Robinson, of Resurgent: New Writing by Women (University of Illinois, 1992), an anthology of experimental writing by women working in film, art, and narrative. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, The Colorado Review, Feminist Studies, The Georgia Review, The Greensboro Review, and Tiferet, among others. She was born in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. She earned her B.A. from the University of Massachusetts/Boston and received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Her honors and awards include The Grolier Prize in Poetry and a NEA fellowship at The MacDowell Colony. She has been awarded poetry residencies at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, The Ucross Foundation, Hedgebrook, Saint Mary’s College, Maryland, and Red Cinder. She is Professor of English at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She has replaced her half-blind cat with an affectionate but timid dog named Sam.
NATURE
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I had a little cat who slept under my lamp all night as I read Emerson
in a stiff-backed American Library edition on a hard-backed chair,
with a pencil in my hand squirreling, in the margins,
insights as embarrassing as my intention
to follow him through the snow,
bare-headed on the Cambridge Common—
not out of love, but because I wanted to nail him
into the body of my comprehensive exam,
in the section before Melville and Emily Dickinson.
The cat had brindled paws and the most intelligent eyes
of green cracked marble. She was young then,
but she would become ancient with me,
nineteen, dreaming on sheepskin by a window
or watching through rheumy half-blindness
the shadows of crows chasing a hawk.
We were penny-poor, the cat and and I, and thin.
Each night I broiled one chicken leg and one sweet potato
under the gas fire in my Somerville kitchen.
She got the skin, grew a glossy coat, and slept
while I read what we all read in the late 1980’s:
Freud on “Hamlet”; Derrida on Poe;
Captivity Narratives. It was like happiness
but it was not happiness.
It was concentration, a pool of light,
inwardness, loneliness,
the pattern of all readers and involutes.
Those who don’t know it will never know it.
Those who do, do.
A waste of time; a way into time; both.
Remembering the past by what you had been reading,
and where, and what it felt like, and what it always feels like.
— Camille Norton
From Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics , Number 80, Spring 2009
