Thank you so much for coming. My name is Melissa Mallon. I am a librarian for English here at WSU, and I want to thank everybody who supported the poetry series, Poetry and Fiction Writing series, this year because some really great readings. Special thanks to Margaret Dawe and the English Department, of course, for all of her work. Yes, thanks you.
Yes, you did a tremendous job finding the readers and setting up all the dates and travel arrangements and things like that. That's a huge help. And also, thanks to the University Library's Dean's office for always providing really great refreshments and always bringing great poets. So. All right. That's all the talking I'm going to do. This is our last reading for the semester, so thanks again for coming. I'm going to introduce Matt and he will talk a little bit about our poets today.
Thank you, everybody, for coming. I'm the editor of Mikrokosmos, and as editor of Mikrokosmos, I'm going to sneak a little promo in here. We're having our Mikrokosmos release party Friday, not Friday, tomorrow, a week from tomorrow at McKnight West Atrium at 6:00. So if you guys make that, please, then we look forward to seeing you. And on to the poets.
Our first poet today is going to be Catherine Menefee. Catherine Menefee held the WSU Poetry Fellowship for the past academic year. She has just completed her first manuscript, "Chicken from the Bone", and she's looking forward to graduating this May. So put it together for Catherine.
Thank you so much. I'm just really glad to see everyone out here today and it's always exciting to get a chance to read. And as Matt said, I just finished my first manuscript and I want to share with you a couple pieces from my manuscript today that kind of captured the thematic concerns that I'm dealing with in my book. This first piece.
A few months ago, I was listening to NPR one morning and I heard a story that they were doing about a new telescope that they were building and everyone just seemed really excited about this massive new telescope, the things we're going to be able to see that we have never seen before. And they seemed especially excited about looking forward to that moment for the first time when somebody is going to be able to look through this scope and see the things that we've never seen before.
And it got me thinking about these moments in our lives, moments that, you know, are significant, even if you don't know why, even if you don't know what they mean, really, in the long run, know that it matters somehow. My thesis really kind of deals very much with the idea of the formation of identity, and I thought about how important those moments are to who we become, who we turn out to be in the long run.
So this first piece was the last piece that I wrote for inclusion in my thesis, and it's entitled First Light. Astronomers in Chile are building a telescope so powerful it can resolve the face of a tarnished dime 200 miles away. It has such clarity, it captures revolutions of planets around foreign suns. It is so mighty, it will be the oldest light we've ever seen. Today, they're forging the mirrors that will angle through its massive heart, so delicate and refinement of their edges, curves.
They've built a computer just to measure their asymmetry. It would be months, a year, perhaps, before the body is assembled, before mirrors aligned to pour light to the first looker's eye. A child is sliding finally into a less wet world, opens gummy eyes and sees nothing but indistinct light. That vision is ours, always. The brilliance of the first light seen strong to new eyes as the yet unknown sun glory of the bright prismatic blur.
It's why our eyes tear in sudden light. So we'll recall our original sight, the splendor before focus. Age 12 reading the metaphysicals for the first time I've found twice or thrice had I loved to be before I knew my face or name, I knew this reverent lust in my own eyes, yearning for the words, their brilliance, like the first fluttering movements of a child in the womb.
The early stirrings of a series first oracle. Eye's first view of something long adored. I can still see the gray Xeroxed page glow with pixelated words. In years since, I've forgotten our first kiss, but I recall the second first nothing special. After a dinner date, stopping at a quick shop for a Slurpee to cool the ride home. Both of us anxious in this repeat try.
Except that moment by the Milky Way's. When I looked at his face and saw my life unfold, saw years of joy unrolling like a well known dream. So I raised my face to his shivered at his kiss, a prophet brushing future with dry lips. Months from now in Chile, some stargazer will peer at last through the lenses of the great scope, which opens its new eye.
I know why that first seer may shudder. The touch of infinity on his retina. Glorious clarity when those mirrors result heaven that initial time. They call it first light.
This next piece is, I wanted to read a favorite because it's kind of connected in image to the piece that I just read, talking about astronomical bodies and the things that move the universe. This piece sprang from a conversation that I had with my husband about how the fusion works in the sun, which wasn't something I had known about before, but it got me thinking about how change and and creation of new elements is what fuels all of life in the whole universe.
Nature is full of change. Everything is changing constantly. And this, too, seemed to me to be a really important element in the formation of who we are, how we become, what we are. We cannot do it without change. So this next piece is titled Fusion. In our suns infernal center that heavenly body cannot stop inventing the fusion that fuels it with burning black means turning hydrogen into helium.
The transformation never ceasing until hydrogen runs out. Even then, though, our sun can still burn by switching fuel. Now changing helium to carbon and nuclear power enough to feed the solar fire for eons. Our sun ends there but hotter stars keep firing longer, changing carbon to an unknown element and making mystery out of mystery until a supernova ends them, too.
All burning bodies are the same in this. we must change to live. Our lungs, children of suns, change oxygen to CO2, our entrails change cheesecake to glucose and our glistening gray neurons change the various sensory stimuli to the image of a lover's face. Remember? If we cease making changes, we die. So I swear on my life tomorrow I will not be the same.
I'll find a way to fuse Buddha to Kansas or Pest to Chicago's squalid streets. I'll kindle a child like a small fire in my womb, all else failing, I'll cut my hair. I must just change because the one I love knows my body burns fuel immutable. My interstellar heat.
This last piece was kind of the beginning and end of the movement I took in writing my thesis. If you've heard me read before, you may have heard me read this piece, but it's so important to the work I've done in the last few years that I wanted to share it with you anyway. I talked a little bit about those significant moments in our lives, the changes we go through.
But I think just as important to making us who we are, are the potentials that aren't fulfilled, the possibilities that don't come true in the future that we're only guessing at all the time. So this poem, I hope, approaches some of those issues a little bit and begins to deal with that. It's a poem in five sections, and it's entitled Chicken.
One. Mike the Headless Chicken died. He was a living legend, feathered to celebrity since, that farmer killing a meal for his wife's mother and meaning to leave a long neck like she liked, beheaded Mike, but missed most of his brain. Headless Mike survive for five more years, fed meticulously by the farmer who changed his ax to a spoon, sustained Mike on ground grain.
Now he's dead. But still Mike will stay famous for only failing so stunningly to become all he was born to be: lunch. Two. I watched Pastor Taybedar eat a chicken foot. I still fear it. Some nights, biting my decently disguised meat, I see his specter rising daintily, devouring the skin stripped foot, I watch again the slide of soft bones between his lips see him suck the flesh toe by toe away, hear the slurp of tendons through the sharp teeth. He sits the black wine. He eats as a lion with a man's manners.
He reveals an animal relish. If he is not satisfied, he will turn in a moment to slurp the flesh from my toes to tasting retreat like a connesseur, feeding a carnivore, remembering I still fear that animal, that beast he could become and almost is. Three. They spend the day sobbing over slaughtered chickens. I did my best. In the beginning, we called the golden chicks name to create the fare they become crispy fritters, potpie fried soup and dumplings, cordon blue. I knew what was at risk.
Now they're fixed in her five year old mind as downy, handsome, fluffy. And she has learned so young, revulsion, knowing friends might change to food. I'm only glad we didn't buy a cat, Four. You don't know horror until you hear a chicken chirp from your steaming pan of eggs onto boil.
Barefoot on linoleum alone. I was sure I heard an infant bird repeat what seemed a panicked cry. High. Clear. The kind of sound you expect to hear early on in a day from a hedge by the fence. I stumbled to the stove, plucks the lid from the pot looking for a golden bird, drowned, burned. The heavy globes were perfectly smooth and white steam streamed out with a wind full of snow healing eyes and notes through the clear water trails of tiny bubbles rose from the invisible cores of eggshells escaping to burst or dissipate on the surface with a sound so like a checks call that even after I crushed the shells, split them, sliced through
the yellow yolks, I still scarcely believed I had heard only eggs boiling in that audible memory of what they could have been, but weren't. Five. Again, On my birthday we eat coq au vin, meat steams and the rich broth simmer so long and slides from the bone like a jam from a knife like snow falling from trees under sun.
It is so long since my first taste. I can't recall who I was then, except as part of the mellow savory sauce. And. But I was too young to be afraid of anything I'd knew I could do. Older, I hold just to the certainties. We are capable of any change. And next time I taste this dish, I will be someone I cannot predict. I'm already sliding away from my past like melting snow, like a chicken from the bone.
Good talk. All right, our next reader is Brandon Rush. Brandon K. Rush is at the end of his second year of his MFA at WSU and is firing on all cylinders running headlong into the unknown. And he was recently told he should shave his beard because beards are for mythical holiday figures and hipsters at Bon Iver concerts. Brandon is simply a poet, doesn't know any bands better or worse, beard or otherwise.
Well, that sounds so much better on paper. It's not your fault, Matt, you're okay. My first poem today is, a new one written this semester, is called Our Winter Snow is Shining. Many of you in workshop have probably heard this before. She hit me with her accent. Perfect English, albeit spoken slowly, and I drew small circles along the edge of my coffee cup with a crescent of fingernail. Snow, she said.
And Hokkaido shines when it falls and everyone stops to watch it like people do in movies. She sat in silence for a moment, perhaps to study my reaction. Her mitten hands folded. I looked up at the flakes falling through the beam of the streetlight, making a hazy arc of gray white, and offered her a sip of my coffee. She declined, letting her head rest against my shoulder.
Snow in the Midwest, I told her, makes people fear God or fear themselves. Her reply was quiet and somewhat mournful. That is how our cultures differ, she said. The Japanese stopped to appreciate the little things and you do not. My second poem today I'm going to read three, I've decided. it's called The Exercise. It's pretty self-explanatory what you hear, and so I'll just get it to it. The Exercise.
Your movement is stiff at 5 a.m., a tight grip of muscles, a fighting responsibilities ahead of you. Those responsibilities, meticulously planned to the hour, to the minute now feel hollow. You are a shell filled with precisely measured time and layers one upon another. There is time to eat, to drive, to make coffee, and to silently ponder on the woman who shared your 5:00 am minutes just the day before with a soft, merciful, and with the implicit understanding that you'd let her sleep one more hour, which you did.
Those minutes, that hour is empty today. Just like your bed, your house. The only remnants are the ghosts of molecules where she slept next to you. A stray hair to find stuck to a pillowcase even after the wash. Sheets don't like to forget and they refuse to let you in either. But then you hit the clock, turn off the snooze before the alarm goes off once more.
And as you pull yourself up, you do your best to clear your mind, shake it, clean like a rug before a beating. You have responsibilities for which your perky thought should not dissuade you. And my third poem, final poem for the day, is a new one I've just written this week and nobody has heard yet. It's called Slow Down.
You scare me, you say. Too fast. You drive in an unsafe fashion and it makes me nervous. Behind the wheel of the 734 I am king ruler, commander of the RPF Army, and with each swift rotation of those cylinders, I move the vehicle in and out of lanes, smoothly defying the senior citizens in their Buicks and aged Oldsmobiles squared off Chryslers and touring Cadillacs. I hit 95.
You become uncomfortable. Slow down, you say. Every time the accelerator pushes you back in your seat, you repeat yourself later, adding, I don't want you to kill me. And how would you explain this to my mother? I quietly begin to slow to brake, stay silent, and Mercury-veined throughout the transmission down shifts. I watch the needle move right, turn to the left.
Better you say. This is usually the spot where I get the Z34 up to 105. Why are you so quiet? You ask. Are you angry? No, love, of course not. I'm not angry. Thank you.
Our next reader this afternoon is Maggi Ann McKibben. Maggi Ann McKibben will complete her master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, 2012 at Wichita State University and will surely teach somewhere far from her current Midwest landlocked life and ceaselessly continue her research and studies. Her first book, Excess Leads to a Life of Glamor, was published in early 2005, and she recently completed her capstone in poetry Sleeping Cities in partial fulfillment of her upcoming MFA.
Give it up for Maggi. Thank you, Matthew darling. I will be beginning with a piece that is not my own. It is Coming Up by Ani DiFranco, which honestly, until recently I didn't even think existed on paper. Then I remembered that there's a such thing as the internet too. And so someone else had taken the liberty to copy down her lyrics. Our father, who art in a penthouse, sits in his 37th floor suite and swivels to gaze down at the city that he made me
in, he allows me to stand and solicit graffiti until he needs the land that I stand on. I in my darkened threshold and pine for my pockets. The receipt, the bus schedules, the matchbook phone numbers, those urgent napkin poems, all of which laundering has rendered pulp, strange, loose change and a key. Ask me, go ahead, ask me if I care about the answer here.
I wrote it down somewhere. I just got to find it. I just to find it. Somebody and their spray paint. Got to close. Somebody came on too heavy. Now look at me. Made ugly by the drooling letters. I was better off alone. Ain't that the way that it is? They don't know the first thing, but you don't know that until they take the first swing.
My fingers are red and swollen from the cold. I'm getting bold in my old age, so go ahead and try the door. It doesn't matter anymore. I know the weak hearted are strong willed and we are being kept alive. And til we're killed. And he's up there, the ice clinking in his glass. And I don't ask. I just empty my pockets and wait. It's not fate, it's just circumstance. And I don't fool myself with romance. I just live. Phone number to phone number. Testing them against my thighs in the warmth of my pockets, which whisper history incessantly, asking me, Where were you? I lower my eyes, wishing I could cry more and care less. Yes, it's true. I was trying to love someone again. I was caught caring, bearing the weight. But I love this city. I love this state. This country is too large and who's ever in charge of there had better take the elevator down and put more than change in or cut out sways. We are coming up. Thank you, Ani DiFranco This is Strained Love. I wrote in North Freedom Wisconsin.
I was contemplating our divorce rate and that we just aren't in love anymore. Detachments created by natural wisdom will dwindle as each reaches closer to fully comprehended human adults. But that being human lusty connection between two that only knows so much seems tangible. Yet familiarity breeds contempt. Maybe by overlooking identity we will find us again distance to such a thing.
Finding us is relative and the fabric of time and space is old. This is Mystic. I wrote in Mystic, Connecticut. As a matter of fact, there's a festival there called Anna Karina and didn't quite understand but its interesting. I think in profusion. Therefore I am adapting myself toward absurdity. God came, they conquered, goodness immediately left metaphysical claims are created for the questions of mere existence.
Sprinkle on the speakers something metaphysical, deeper than thought and higher than God inside. Fantastically phenomenal. His space here has been cut out. As a matter of fact, this was, and pardon me backslipping, here, this was slightly inspired by an class that I took from the late, great Dr. Robert Lawless, who we lost recently. He was in the anthropology department here at
Wichita State. Magic, Witchcraft and Religion, by the way, was the course. Highly recommended, although I don't know if you'll get out of it what Dr. Wallace could have given you. But I wrote this piece at the Fairy Gate, at Camp Gaia located in McCloud, Kansas. Lucid Dreams at Camp Gaia. All they know now are metaphysical landscapes, where the trails are trodden only by the feet of lovers and the flights of men. Static transience is the only substance separating vindication.
They go often to this place of rivulets, replete with fish tied together, made of stars. Hike the cosmic paths in light and in love and under love's light loudly in love. Saunter on blind and ominous and insanely intellectual. Unaccompanied except for the weight of the universes on our spinal fluid. This piece, it's quite personal to me. I wrote it a long time ago.
I've worked on it for years, and after all those years of working on it, I find myself much more content with my Kansas surroundings and Grandma always said there ain't nothing like Kansas guy, and she's from Ireland so I think that's super. Fink of Bella Vista asks What need is there for the moon? Piscean limb surrounded and choked by morose and harvestable weeds.
The earth and prairie mud growing from soils of western senses of living. The open prairie is so unworthy of the metaphoric ocean. Is it dangerous to distract a daydreamers, like those walking in sleep? All alone and accompanied by the Atlantic, keeping steady, singing rhythm against the shores, sand that is never dirty and far from wheat seas of uncertainty.
The marine sun's benign scowl released from duty by simple lunar routine. Content piscean waves whisper good night, even to the moon. Seashells slumber calls to run, all the way. Swim even more. Offer me false waves. And what need do you have for the moon? I'll go ahead and close it up here. This was one of my most published and revised pieces I wrote in 2007.
It was initially eight pages. I can still see that little crunchy worm I found on that grass, and now I give you eight lines. Mislaid in all of a Kansas meadows. I found a dead and enduring inchworm on a brown blade of grass, surviving even after the snows of the 06 winter. Still inching. A kind of permanent life caught in the action of dying, even death can be lost and still found somehow. Thank you.