Small Animal Project

Celebrate the middle of summer by coming to hear poets David Blair, David Rivard, and Sam Witt read at Outpost 186. 8 pm, free.

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David Blair grew up in Pittsburgh. His first book Ascension Days was chosen by Thomas Lux for the 2006 Del Sol Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the anthologies The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Zoland Poetry, Boston Review, Fourth River, Fulcrum, The Greensboro Review, The Harvard Review, The Hat, Ploughshares, and Verse. He’s an associate professor at The New England Institute of Art, and he lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Read an excerpt from David’s work.

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David Rivard is the author of four books: Sugartown (Graywolf, 2006),  Bewitched Playground (Graywolf, 2000), Wise Poison (Graywolf, 1996), the winner of the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1996 and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Torque ( Pitt, 1988), winner of the Starrett Poetry Prize.  Among his other awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Arts Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry.  He lives in Cambridge with his wife and teenage daughter, and teaches in the MFA program in writing at the University of New Hampshire.

Read an excerpt from David’s work.

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Sam Witt is the author of two poetry collections, Everlasting Quail (UPNE, 2001), winner of the Katherine Nason Bakeless Prize, and Sunflower Brother (Cleveland State University Press, 2006). He has taught at Harvard University, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and at Whitman College. Witt is currently looking for a publisher for his new manuscript, “Occupation: Dreamland,” while freelancing and living in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Read an excerpt from Sam’s work, below:

FROM THE APHASIA WARD

The sea is approaching. Ghostcrabs approach
on whispering feet, a tumbleweed of newspaper.
The woman approaches, holding her empty camera.
Now. I will not try to say these syllables:
When you first stumbled across this small heap of decay,
black feather, hollow bone, these small dead, the birds,
it must have looked like a sweater for a small child,
or a black bra the sea had washed up in.
I was sleeping, as they say, under the wing.
Unlike these dead birds, fresh from their migration cycle,
I came preforgotten, like a photograph of a dirty beach.
They perfume my loss. They fall out of the sky into the ocean, etc.
They make me want to shed my triploid human gene:
All flesh is black grass, therefore: All flesh
goes the way of flight when it evaporates.
You could almost hear the sea’s ceaseless mathematics
from the aphasia ward, like a xerox of disappeared honeybees,
put together out of the small sounds she made in her sleep.
The sea turns over its dead. The sea delivers us.
The sea persists in washing its white hands of me, at noon.
The sea conjugates these dead
at the cost of a young woman’s form, because already
the body has spilled its liquid shadow like ink, at noon,
like a photographer’s black hood thrown down over the birds.
The sea negates the sky like manna, because living
it’s something like swallowing jewels, isn’t it? Like manna
the birds fall out of the heavens & they eat you
with their small black eyes. We take the light with us,
therefore, flight & decay, thus,
the starched hospital beds are filled. Thus,
from the beachfront hospital, a girl with no hair
watched a small speck fall out of the sky.
Let me tell you how the wind in the leaves
of the Eucalyptus tree outside moved her lips.
She made a wish behind her powerful head
& slept.