Observable Readings

Mary Szybist and Jerry Harp, A Pair of Portland Poets, Visit Observable Readings Nov. 7, This Time At The Library of Fontbonne University

Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 07:37 PM

Please note: This reading, held in collaboration with Fontbonne University, will be at 8 p.m. on Nov. 7 at  Fontbonne's  Jack C. Taylor Library, 6800 Wydown Blvd. This is a change of pace from our usual venue,  the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood.

For lushness and urgency, for the meditative and the fierce, for the nightlong wrestling with emissaries of the divine, there are few poets like unto Mary Szybist.  She speaks for-and through-Archangel Gabriel, Adam, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus  at an intersection of language where the erotic meets the sacred, and she speaks about the inescapable interpenetration of bodily sensuality and spiritual hunger.  With or without persona, these poems move masterfully between continuous narrative and something more disjunct, even surrealistic, without the least sense of strain in the rich, distinctive, and quiet voice.  Oppositions as old as the Song of Songs are held in position by her very contemporary inventiveness. Szybist will bring us right to the place of the devotional but what emerges on arrival is likely to be surprising: "Sometimes I believe I am transgressing. /When I consider the body in the manger/ I feel it in my face: I must look the same way a hunter looks /when he decides to take an animal he has never seen before."

Szybist is the author of Granted (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  She recently received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the 2009 Witter Bynner Award, selected by Poet Laureate Kay Ryan for the Library of Congress. Holding an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Szybist teaches English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR.  To read some of her work, click here. 

 In the erudite and idiosyncratic laboratory of his head, Jerry Harp animates the Creature, a solitary figure that stalks through two of his books with the world on his mind and vice versa. However familiar his surroundings-at work in a store, on the road in a car-the Creature is perpetually the stranger in a strange land, with an eye that can't help seeing things new. Oddball and eloquent and always at serious play with ideas and poetic form, these creature poems are on the hunt for the answers to essential questions: how to find language that can authentically represent the self and how the self might find language for all that is outside of it. It's a quest in which the reach must necessarily exceed the grasp, but Harp's reaching gives us a range of effects to admire, from the musicality of the line to a delicate balance of atmosphere that has us on the verge of the dream. Like the best of fables, any venture into irreality with the Creature only throws us back to reality, instructed by the trip.

Harp, who received an MFA from the University of Florida, has authored three books of poetry: Creature (Salt Publishing, 2003), Gatherings (Ashland Poetry Press, 2004), and Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains (Salt Publishing, 2006).   Last year marked the publication of a critical biography by Harp titled For Us, What Music?: The Life and Poetry of Donald Justice (University of Iowa Press). With Jan Wiessmiler he co-edited A Poetry Criticism Reader (University of Iowa Press, 2006).  Harp teaches at both Lewis & Clark College and the University of Portland.  To read one of his poems, click here.