The Segue Reading Series presents

RAE ARMANTROUT & ELAINE EQUI
Saturday, May 26, 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 & Tim Peterson

Rae Armantrout’s most recent books are Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007) Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies, including Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1993), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, (Wesleyan, 2002), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, UP, 2006) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, and 2004. Armantrout is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

“The Ether”

The room is ether-bright
rigid,

adrift in words

or I am

an afterthought,
refusing to dissolve.

Nothing

to be taken away;
to be added.

*

What can words say?

Chaplain-service at the checkout;

a desire
to be credible
across the straight.

A man and a woman
finish sentences
and laugh.

Each sentence is both
an acquiescence
and a dismissal.


***

Elaine Equi's books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award, The Cloud of Knowable Things, and most recently Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems -- all from Coffee House Press. She teaches in the MFA Programs at The New School and City College of New York, and at New York University. She also edited The Holiday Album: Greeting Card Poems for All Occasions in Jacket Magazine.

“Epic Mountain Hoax”

Always a question of scale
fanning the flames of music.

Temple of crumbs.
Stalwart microcosms.

Swerps of brazen heroes
coup de grease.

Singularly panoptic delirium.

Tales of the mogul
lost in space.

What are you not doing down there—
the sky seems to say.

I am climbing
a flat surface (hence the difficulty)

with a sack of juicy fears—
I mean pears!

Whatever I told you yesterday wasn’t me.
I was mixed up.

Today I can separate,
subtract myself better from the landscape.