A RARE NEW YORK APPEARANCE

The Segue Reading Series Presents

BEVERLY DAHLEN AND CRAIG WATSON

Saturday, April 14, 2007
4PM (sharp!)
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just North of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by Erica Kaufman and Tim Peterson

Ron Silliman writes, "Beverly Dahlen is the most enigmatic American poet since Laura (Riding) Jackson. Not that Dahlen is unnecessarily difficult or obtuse, but that – like Riding – she writes brilliantly, but has also proven exceptionally reluctant to letting her work into print...Dahlen had helped to co-found HOW(ever) (now How2) and was already well into writing A Reading, an "endless" – the term she has used more than once – poem that is, to my mind, one of the masterworks of the 20th century."

Robert Duncan said of Dahlen, "The psychic life she draws in writing may be drawn from her own psychic life, but here its body is the text and it speaks to the psyche of the reader as a reader." Dahlen is the author of The Egyptian Poems, Out of the Third and 4 volumes of A Reading. A native of Oregon, she has lived and worked in San Francisco for many years.

from A Reading 18

"therefore I'd be a shadow freed of former hands and execute this mission of destruction on past lives.
there is nothing that can be safely brought in to the arena. the body question. the Frankfurt school in
a loose coalition with strippers and wombats. he raised the antenna and the picture cleared. wherever
two or three are gathered together in my name the project prospers. ego is now supposed to have
given way to mercy and light. cracks through which you could drive a needle

whatever was the point of organizing the world in this way: the helpless baby. further evidence: my
father thought me up fully armed. no consolation there. where does she arise from the sea or in the
mountains beyond reason."

**
Craig Watson is the author of Secret Histories, True News , and Free Will. He works as a producer and dramaturg at Trinity Repertory Company, a professional theater in Rhode Island.

Andrew Joron writes, "Craig Watson's engaged lyric continues to discover "more songs in the gaps" of the system; as he traces the antinomies, his long poems build toward an almost orchestral scale and ordonnance. Fiercely and deliberately, Watson redesigns the echoes inside such hollow abstractions as Reason and Free Will, and so allows us to hear, even with "ears knotted into the wall," the real music of thought."


from "Last Man Standing"

--January

hello mutant
welcome back
horses are falling
birds freeze under the bed

god told the first lie
ends-over-means

excess is not a weakness

*

the distance between
seeing and thinking
is everything else

what we hated
was expression