Ben Mazer
Ben Mazer's most recent collections of poems are Poems (Pen & Anvil) and January 2008 (Dark Sky Books), both released in 2010. He is the editor of Landis Everson's Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf Press) and Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press). The Rain is his second verse play to be published in 2011, the other being A City of Angels (Cy Gist).
Praise for Ben Mazer's Poems:
Praise for Ben Mazer's Poems:
"Like fragments of old photographs happened on in a drawer, Ben Mazer's poems tap enigmatic bits of the past that suddenly come to life again. To read him is to follow him along a dreamlike corridor where everything is beautiful and nothing is as it seems." --John Ashbery
"Ben Mazer is lyric poetry's true hero and has not compromised one iota, as his amazing works attest with their singular purity, beauty and heartbreak." --Philip Nikolayev, editor of Fulcrum
"Mazer's layering of details, coupled with a tautness of form that is carefully governed by an exceptional musical ear places him among the most dynamic and original poets of his generation." --Christopher Bock in Jacket magazine
Molly Schaeffer
"Here is what 'Google ads' suggests for me [Molly].
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From Birds:
a beast & look
bell shape
caregiver
bell shapes in light
static molting shuttle
static molting shuttle
air glyph—
sects of birds
fill noise with nursing
at the window
*
silk throated madonnas
I was watching a monument
and I thought of you
silk throated madonnas
I was watching a monument
and I thought of you
fluid impure festivity
faceless sects
*
Susan dreamed the birds
*
Susan dreamed the birds
were made of cloth
projecting themselves
onto her she collapse
with stress
I cannot name
I cannot name
my enemies
only shadows
Kit Schluter
Kit is co-founder and often bookmaker of O'Clock Press & CLOCK magazine. His translation of Marcel Schwob's 1894 Book of Monelle is forthcoming from Wakefield Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts) in October 2012. He was recently awarded the Glascock Prize and lives in a garret in Villefranche de Rouergue, France.
From Journals:
The hours surge away. By the force of an unforeseen gravity, they retract into their turgid centers. We alone are responsible for this recession, and thus we find ourselves in its midst; it attracts us into a space of untruth when we speak.In this silence, we lay down our gratitude gently.There is an earth we cannot walk upon, for it is covered with our descriptions of it, from which blooms a distracting foliage.There are truths you do not believe.There are angles of passing time that house you and cause you to retract like the hours.One smells the infinite here, in the morning before one has awoken, where one must deny what one believes in light of what one knows to be true.Must this series be resolved, or may I wait here to be scattered again by the concerns of the sleeping?Perhaps our frailties, as opposite extremes, must converge, and thus would we ignore the long periods of silence endured, and ascribe them to the faults of the days in which we rest and surpass each other’s edges.Without regret live those who would burn for the lies of a stranger.From these heights it is unclear that it is us whom we are watching.
*
Ruelle des Barres:
Instead of a game, we play a death, a death
That, in fact, couldn’t be more convincing, and certain
Trees, I note, have already blossomed in mid-March. In this city,
There is a cherry tree whose location I want to forget, that
I may pass it again by chance, again, and this rain,
It must be good for it, and I will pick its flowers for no one.
There are certain places to which one can bring no one,
For one has already brought one there; certain times in which
Nothing that has ever rung true before burns true as an axiom; certain places
At which, when one is alone at a certain time of day, no past truths return, and yet, and yet
Nothing of the novelty rings untrue. Beneath a tree, when it rains and the rain falls,
And the rain falls beneath the leaves in beads, and the still ground is piebald
With rings of this rain, the passage to this alley is sealed; and though
I may pass through as I will, I can never return. Thus I cast our death:
You, the specter of death; the falling night, the cobblestones; I, the translucent bodies that
Pass of no consequence at all; the wind, their breath. And it is thus that we depart
Into our death, beneath the leaves with such a scent that it moistens the air, beneath a tree
When it rains, and the rain falls beneath the leaves in beads, thus this rain, this rain.
