So please help me welcome the first introducer, Sylvia Chan.
[APPLAUSE]
Hey, everyone.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
OK.
I first encountered Zachary Schomburg in a thrift store
in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Someone had left a copy of Fjords Vol 1
inside a purse that was marked to sell for 10 litas, or $3.
I bought the purse book, and read it in one sitting.
Reread it in more sittings-- undoubtedly this
was the best thrift store purchase anyone could ever
make.
Zachary Schomburg's poetry gives the song or lyric
to the reader and the professed speaker.
In "Scary, No Scary," fears and memories are premeditations.
"You are so high in the tree.
You will get married to a hummingbird
and raise beautiful part hummingbirds.
You will die of cancer in mid-air."
We become familiar with short and concise prose poems,
imagining actual worlds, persistent images of death,
scary or no scary.
We get cartography of the body--
your badly curved spine, your complex eye,
your badly curve spin--
until the literal sentence of your body parts
becomes a separate sound or meter
that is a realign on brief poetic lines
and their enjambments.
You and your complex spine unravel
into a complex mess, one whose understanding of loss
is very deep.
That's where Fjords, Zachary's most recent collection,
takes us.
In the poems we're asked to make up
beautiful songs that only one of us will ever get to sing.
We're inclined to want death because it's surreal,
infinite, and impossibilities of life--
movie theater ticket booths, refrigerators and lack
of refrigerators, being young and beautiful,
and any kind of travesty.
Any number of death games that we're
invited to experience and come to terms with.
And we die a lot.
We die in sincerity and memories,
and imagined memories, and love and in killings.
We're truthful when it comes to donuts,
Starbucks baristas, crooked unrecognizable teeth.
Our apprehensions are indexed.
Truth is an entry in the back of the book,
as is a number of themes and obsessions--
the closest semblance to organizing
whatever's in our heads Pick one kind of order.
I'm being strangled by the asphyxiated of a person who
I'm resuscitating, and you are being
strangled by the asphyxiated person who
you are resuscitating.
I hope this is it.
I hope we all die just like this, in someone else's arms
young, and beautiful, and true.
Zachary Schomburg is the author of three poetry collections--
Fjords Vol 1, Scary, No Scary and The Man Suit,
all from Black Ocean Press.
He is one editor of Octopus Books,
and co-curates Bad Blood, a poetry reading
series in Portland, Oregon.
I think Zachary wants to predict some life happenings.
In my favorite Fjords line, "we could
have predicted how she would run around
like a piano was about to fall on her,
how her eyelashes would become wires
to hold all our blackness up."
In his Tumblr, at the Lovely Arc,
he writes that he'll read after 7:00 then
ride with a harem of javelinas.
He's out for two coyotes who may get his bare ankles,
but he's back, presumably ready to run."
Please welcome Zachary Schomburg.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.