GTZ reads

Poetry

The Long Boat By Stanley Kunitz Read By Gary Zmolek

Train Ride by Ruth Stone read by Gary Zmolek

In the loop by Bob Hicok read by Gary Zmolek

Byzantium by William Butler Yeats read by Gary Zmolek

The Round by Stanley Kunitz read by Gary Zmolek

The Gift by Li-Young Lee read by Gary Zmolek

"Leviathan" by W.S. Merwin read by Ernest Hilbert with music by Basil Poledouris

GOING PUBLIC 5.17.13 - "Love Song," by William Carlos Williams

Poets slip under my defenses by different means. Some pack a powerful punch, especially at the end...they can turn a phrase in such a way that I find myself somewhat destroyed before my brain has caught up with the meaning of the words. And some just sum up what I'm experiencing so perfectly, I have no choice but to allow them in.

But there are those, like William Carlos Williams, Lawrence, e.e. cummings Neruda...those who slip in on a visceral level. They create work that seems to soak into your skin, make you feel something on a physical level. 

So this poem. Hmm. I don't even know exactly what Williams is really trying to say - and I don't need to. I just feel something slide over me, around me, slip under my defenses and float along in my bloodstream. That's a whole lot of power for a poet to have. 

"Love Song," by William Carlos Williams (read by Xe Sands)

THE SECOND COMING
William Butler Yeats


    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


THE SECOND COMING by William Butler YEATS read by MAN POEMS

The Remains
by Mark Strand


I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains. 

THE REMAINS by Mark STRAND read by MAN POEMS

Coming to This
by Mark Strand


We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.

And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.

Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain. 

The Long Boat By Stanley Kunitz Read By Gary Zmolek

GTZmolek