Sascha Feinstein & C. Dale Young
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
C. Dale Young on Poetry and the Professional World
12 noon, Walls Lounge, Langone Center
Sascha Feinstein on Jazz and Memory
4 p.m. Willard Smith Library, Vaughan Literature Building
Poetry Reading with Feinstein & Young
7 p.m. Bucknell Hall
Sascha Feinstein's second poetry collection, Ajanta's Ledge, was recently published by Sheep Meadow Press; his first, Misterioso, received the Hayden Carruth Award. His other books include a memoir (Black Pearls: Improvisations on a Lost Year), a collection of interviews (Ask Me Now: Conversations on Jazz & Literature), and two critical books on jazz poetry. He has co-edited four books of jazz-related literature and, in 1996, founded Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, which he still edits. Recent honors include the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Artist of the Year. He teaches at Lycoming College and in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
C. Dale Young is the author of three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Torn (Four Way Books, 2011). He practices medicine full-time, edits poetry for the New England Review, and teaches creative writing at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts, he is one of ten poets awarded a 2012 Fellowship in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
C. Dale Young
The Effects of Sunset
Iron Shore, Montego Bay, 1974
At the edge of the yard, the grass thinning
to white sand speckled with the shadows
of late afternoon, the insects—waxy, black
heretics with beetle-like shells—could be found
avoiding the surf, and who but that small boy
could summon such a scream, that lion cub
in the desert, that whimpering Prophet in training?
In Judea, the insects bandaged the rotting wood
(or were they devouring it?), their slick
carapace without even a trace of sand.
One might say these insects swarmed,
but they were not bees, they carried
nothing sweet in their husks.
Exoticism, the late light, O summer—
a foot away, the water was dark, getting darker.
Sascha Feinstein
Town Outcast
Each mole across her neckline—dead stars
oscillating a ravished moon-spins
retrograde as she catches passing stares
as though she'd washed up on shore. She still lives
among the grown school girls who teased her
more viciously than boys tormenting locusts.
Her past's a sand flat of memory:
half-buried mollusks and mussels.
For thirty years, she's grown into a face
swollen like bread in water, ambulatory
as guilt. She'll outlive them all. Each Sunday,
she hears young mothers in the Chinese wet market
mouth her name as though whispering
Cancer—the nebulous disease,
not the sign of the crab, digging mud holes
in response to the dictatorial moon.
Stadler Center for Poetry
