LE CORBUSIER IN NEW YORK

Britain's acclaimed architect expert, critic, bon vivant, wit, and writer, Charles Knevitt, is coming to New York for two one-man shows - LE CORBUSIER'S WOMEN - at the famous Bowery Poetry club, soon, to do a reading of his play on the life of great modernist Le Corbusier.

The play is sexy, scandalous, informative, and fun, and it is recommended by Eyewear, not least because Knevitt wears Le Corbusier glasses.

There will be two performances at Bowery, both on Sunday, September 22nd.

The Le Corbusier exhibition at MoMA closes the following day, Monday 23rd. It claims 4,000 visitors a day.

For full details and to purchase tickets: lecorbusier.brownpapertickets.com

Follow CK on Twitter @lecorbusierNYC

POEM BY BETHANY W. POPE ON THE DEATH OF SEAMUS HEANEY

Walk on air

S.H.

A morning progressing in the usual manner, that

Gorgeous every-day glory we’ve almost gone numb to. The

Awful music blared the moment you went from us, far

Into the woods where Mad Sweeney roamed, his hajj

Now yours. Did you pass your father, digging time, tau

Spuds in golden ratio? Did you pass Aunt Mary, broad,

Teaching love with a goose’s wing and a scoop sunk snug,

Years of flour fading its gleam? I hope there was a tree

Outside your window to link you into the firm

Unending network of eternal life. And all the while,

Remember, I was unconscious of your pain.

Beating my legs against a machine, an animal that

Escaped, so far, the pit that you fell into. Seamus,

The gym seemed silent, my muscles spent, feeling your death.

poem by Bethany W. Pope, copyright 2013.

 

Bethany W. Pope is an award winning author of the LBA, and a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Awards. She was a runner up for the Cinnamon Press Novel Competition. She received her PhD from Aberystwyth University’s Creative Writing program. Her first poetry collection, A Radiance was published by Cultured Llama Press last June. Her second collection, Crown of Thorns, was published by Oneiros Books this August. Her third collection, Persephone in the Underworld has been accepted by Rufus Books and shall be released in 2016. Her first chapbook The Gospel of Flies has been accepted by Writing Knights Press and will be released in 2014.

POEM BY BEN MAZER ON THE DEATH OF SEAMUS HEANEY

i.m. Seamus Heaney 1939-2013

The windmills turn, but no one can push back the wind.
It comes from the far darkness, and without a sound
war drops confetti primers where the young will find
the haw beds stirring, laughing where great words resound.
The spires of the citadel are stark and bare,
no longer young, none striding forth with prospects there
to find the mazy streets lead to the fullsome world . . .
for darkness once again has been to darkness hurled.
A great one's passed, who validated much of youth . . .
to rattle in the darkness, finding signs of truth.
His clear voice boomed and worked to put us all at ease
with prospects of a keen, perpetual increase.
Now we shall hear his voice no more, except in signs
the sharp and shaping anvil has its grand designs.

 

poem by Ben Mazer, copyright 2013

POSTER FOR SEAMUS HEANEY BY EDWIN SMET OF EYEWEAR

IN MEMORIAM, SEAMUS HEANEY

In Memoriam, Seamus Heaney

A day after parliament stopped the British from war
and now the heart-stopping news
you are no longer the bearer
of a passport that let you travel far and wide.

Ready to be lugged and thrown, however gently
into the difficult ground you measured
as it was sown, with seed or wound - to flower
only later, for it is near-autumn, and the harvest

coming in is not for you to see or taste.
Seamus, you had the tongue to take what's best
of sound and give out what had to be said -
in a governed way, that understood the dead.

You were no comedian like Wilde,
no tragedian like Yeats; your vision a middle way.
Your Virgil was Ireland, bringing you upwards
to the light, which sees and says the best things.

There will be massacres and weapons inspectors
Sunday, and the year after, and arguably
until time stops working, and it never does.
Only bodies halt, and that is a bitterness

to drink down.  Sweet hearts fail.  Words go on.


poem by Todd Swift, copyright 2013

THE DEATH OF SEAMUS HEANEY

I met Seamus Heaney once - he was celebrating the tenth anniversary of his win of the Nobel prize - and I was part of the dinner party (a guest of Tamar Yoseloff).  We spoke briefly, and he called me "Hot Toddy".  I am very sad - even unexpectedly moved - to learn of his untimely death at the age of 74.  Heaney was the greatest living traditional, lyric poet, since Philip Larkin.  He was not as great as Yeats, or Kavanagh, but he was a poetic genius, and, what is more, he reached out to the common reader in a way that was astounding; his warmth was palpable - he cared about readers and people.  I feel that his poetry will be judged to have shied away too much from the themes of love and bodily passion that made Yeats so universal - and his over reliance on the Classical tradition was perhaps old-fashioned - but in his best poems, no one could match his moral vision, his sonic intelligence, and his gravitas. He saw far and wide. I don't think he was a very witty poet, but he was a great poet.  Now that he is gone, the English world has very few giants of lyric poetry left - perhaps only Walcott and Hill, and a few others.  This is a sad day for poetry.

RIGHT THOUGHTS, RIGHT WORDS, RIGHT ACTION?

Today is a day for British citizens - and I am one of them - to pause, and reflect on what their politicians have done in their name.  For this morning, Britain is - depending on your politics of war - either a seriously diminished, paltry thing, isolated and deflated - or a nation that has shown it is nobody's lapdog, and that parliament is indeed in charge.  This is the day that lays to rest Labour's sins under Blair, and that dodgy dossier - or, makes Ed Milliband the new Neville Chamberlain.  For make no mistake, yesterday's vote against the PM's declared aim to take Britain into war against the Assad regime is historically momentous - never before has a British Prime Minister had their war plans kiboshed in such a way.  It is, depending on your view, a humiliation or a triumph, or maybe both.

Eyewear's view is that it is a potential tragedy, for the following reasons: while it is good that the primacy of parliament was upheld, it is not clear such a domestic aim is so noble when one considers what has been voted against - a plan to aid allies to punish a terrible war crime - a gas attack that killed 1,000 people a few weeks ago, many of them children.  Should this vote change minds in Washington - and this could still happen - and no attacks occur against the depots and soldiers who deployed the terrible chemical weapons - then a very evil group of men has got off Scott free.  One can't give too many blank cheques to wicked people before ever worse crimes against humanity occur.

Syria, that great nation, currently facing so much hardship, is likely no better off this morning.  And Britain?  She has a strong democracy.  And a weak foreign policy.

POEM BY ZACHARY BOS FOR JMD

Zachary Bos

Thinking of Tomorrow in a Drowsy State

                              for JMD

The past drains from the present – Daniel Hoffman

I really mean to say instead is, come back – Denise Riley

Lonely from the beginning of time until now! – Ezra Pound

* *

Tomorrow first thing I’m going to look

straight into your sleepy eyes and urge you

to make something out of the day. Get up,

I’ll say. Shake off the dust. Get a grip of

your apprehensive, self-impeding self.

Scrape the green bilge out of your eye corners.

You’ve got to get to it! It’s time to let

yourself be a person with full needs and

urges, to be that person who wonders

in your beautiful original way.

I know you dream a lot about going

back to that moment that peaceful instant

between the ignition of the cosmos

and its expansion, when light had yet to

build up speed enough to latch onto things

like substantial bodies and glowing gas;

that moment infinitesimal when

every imaginable life was nascent

and simultaneous, in the manner

of compound probabilities woven

into a self-creating sphere. That time

when every future was ready to be

with probability one. Make today

the day, my dear, I’ll say, the day you find

a method that beings you to that moment

when you’ll have all at once all time ever
to pick out a path of choices that might

in their alternate dimensional way

permit us to find each other sooner.

If you can bring us together a day

or an eon sooner, isn’t that worth

an afternoon’s effort? So out of bed.

Let’s get to it. I’ll put the coffee on.

Only, get back before the evening’s gone

for I admit I find it hard to get

to sleep without you. Fears fill up the room

like vacuum, and past mistakes foam up out

of the dura mater like nightmares of

the universal theatre. If you don’t

know the physics of time travel, don’t sweat.

I will take a pen and fill the napkin

on your breakfast tray with formulae. The

blackletter constants, the scalloped quantum

diagrams, the squint and spry equations,

will appear to you as clear as a love

note left on the vanity mirror: red

over transparency, and your face there

tattooed over with math and affection.

At this moment now you are deep asleep.

I wish you weren’t. Your bipartite brow and

lips expanding and contracting in well

behaved wave forms making spirals in space

and time, your lungs regulating, your eyes

shifting under their seashells. I am so

excited to support your journey back

to the beginning of all time I can

hardly contain myself. O wake up keep

sleeping take me with you o leave me here.

I’m of many minds about the matter.

Someone, some sandman or psychopomp, must

have made an observation of me: thus

I’ve been split into gemini selves. O

sleep o wake. Undo my mistakes. Make

tomorrow a better yesterday. Find

the power latent in your worries and

fretting that lets you reign over the branched

paths of instead and other than this and

only if and might have been and will be.

I am dropping off to sleep. Tomorrow

I will encourage you to go and find

and hold the unhatched egg whose potency

will let you unmake this better for us

only please make sure you let the errors

that let us love each other be unspoilt.

Make it all different except for this bed.

 

Source: www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_391404/Egon-Schiele/Sleeping-Girl-2

NOTES. The image I pair with this poem, known as “Sleeping Girl” in English, is by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele. The Hoffman epigraph is taken from “Stop the Deathwish! Stop It! Stop!”, as appears in Hang-Gliding from Helicon: New and Selected Poems 1948-1988 (Louisiana State University Press 1988). The Riley epigraph comes from “Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else”, as appears in Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems, 1986-1993 (Reality Street 1993). The third epigraph is taken from Ezra Pound’s version of a poem by Li Po, “Lament of the Frontier Guard”, as appears in (New Directions 1949).

Zachary Bos is Publisher of The Pen & Anvil Press. His previous editorial positions include the role of Deputy Editor for News from the Republic of Letters, and Web Editor for Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. He is at present Production Manager for The Battersea Review, and Editor of Poetry Northeast. He studied poetry in the graduate program at Boston University, and lives in rural Massachusetts. He keeps a commonplace journal at thewonderreflex.blogspot.com.