The Segue Reading Series presents

Wayne Koestenbaum & Marjorie Welish

Saturday, April 5, 2008 ** 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

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen's Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2007. He a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently also a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.

"Brahms Piano Quartet No. 1"

Brahms dreamt
the complacent
girl's allergy to calamine
lotion screwed up her cat's
psyche. Clara's
hubby had a writing
block, which threatened
the Chinese dinner en famille.
Insensate, whorish,
the taxi failed to bring me here.
The hoodlum gang
coalesced. The dime
novel mugged
the Madonna of the Postpartum
Exasperation, a rain of
alphabet-soup letters alighting
on a background landscape's pinched fronds.

***

Recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Fellowship, the Howard Foundation Fellowship, twice winner of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and other prestigious awards for poetry, Marjorie Welish is the author of Isle of the Signatories--just out from Coffee House Press, Word Group, and also The Annotated "Here" and Selected Poems, which was an Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist and a Village Voice Best Book of the Year. Her book of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge University Press). Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books) compiles papers given at a conference held at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to her writing and art. She teaches at Columbia University and at Pratt Institute.

from "Dedicated to"

11.

Translated and with a commentary
Fire, a transient

syllabus, its first word occluded
impending

terrace, identifying the occasion its
element in shadow

being pounded in
signals a scene change

so what
Water, an apparent shroud

pouring
access read at a distance

a proposition from time to time
from the desk of