The house was far out of town, at the top of a mountain which you had to reach by winding roads walled in by cliffs and falling rocks, and passing up a steep incline through two automatic gates before entering the property. It was like an abandoned set for Night of the Iguana—and there was no cellphone connection there so I just stood by a drained pool at the edge of the woods looking out at the lights flashing through the broad distance over the opposite mountains to where I imagined the rest of the world was, listening to a silence in my ears like the perfume of wild animals, miles and miles of predatory seduction hidden in and clinging to the dark air. I felt as if time had contracted and stopped. Sometimes we see that we’re really at the edge of things — but all the things that took place before seem to be present. It is like being in eternity. Everything seems to be taking place at once. Fragments of old movies on cable television in the middle of the night were like history repeating itself over and over again — each time with newly understood nuances which seemed to be both separated and united. Disappearing voices and gestures bouncing around — like atoms of light — off the walls of eternity. Accumulating and dissipating ceaselessly, beyond control. I read the account in the San Luis Obispo Tribune, over and over, and the print seemed to be written on the walls of time like a primitive memory, a sealed envelope, a burned letter.

Sure,
Not only the Empire State building,
Not only how that woman might have looked naked in the 1970s,
but after Christmas—
coming home at night
passing the dead end streets
the left and right
mouths of streets lit momentarily
containing a passing figure
++++++++frozen bright
in motion
dying into our dashlight
fading
into the darkness, the still surge
of types of knowing
clothed and dressed in types
of gesture, types of mustaches
then back to the smell
++++++++of an original house
the lit up facades
++++++++fading in a swift douse
like flames
++++++++life burning
or like
streets that my father
++++++++played on before I
was born, before he was married
where uncles were brothers only
tracked him down
to know what they know still
I only surmise
The grandeur of each house
its modest satisfaction
++++++++humble pride
a stigma on the doorstep
++++++++of the world
where dreams and dreams repeat
crowded streets that time evacuated
and the simple shape
+++++the door of home
where visitors call
+++++and where the unfamiliar
extend the matrix of experience
to glimpse the upstairs
++++++++windows,
++++trim and closed
their other worlds
the little worlds
++not ready to disclose
the daily yearning and the daily growth

They flash like storms
+++++like flood tides
++++++++sweeping high
over the wharves of
++++++++knowing
drowning sense
in generalities of myth and type
bathing the dark with darkness
of the soul
the simple emblem
++++++++trellised on the front
and plunge through depths
+++++of similarity

(vast mingling repetitious revelry)

Also the fragments,
++++++++spiritual shards
of the new generations
++++++++taking flight
across the coded inconsistencies
of space that’s lit by
+++++moonlight, by
++++++++streetlamp
where do they go?
+++++who counts them
++++++++apart
where their conviction
+++++is disfigurement
displacing fairy tales?
+++++They shine so bright
my heart bleeds into
+++++trees to fill the dark.

The round o’s of the
+++++face of the wood sprite.

_____________________________

Ben Mazer’s most recent poetry collections are January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010) and Poems (Pen & Anvil Press, 2010).

If you’re in Boston this November, do be sure to check out Ben and Annie’s reading at the Liberty Hotel…

ANNIE FREUD’s poetry collections include The Best Man That Ever Was (Picador, 2007) and The Mirabelles (Picador, 2010). She was Guest Editor of Magna Poetry 47 and teaches poetry composition workshops for the Poetry School in London. The Best Man That Ever Was received the Glen Dimplex New Writer’s Award and The Mirabelles has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (2011). She is the daughter of the Artist Lucien Freud and the Great Grand daughter of Sigmund Freud. Freud is renowned for her live performances.

BEN MAZER’s recent poetry collections are Poems (The Pen & Anvil Press, 2010), January 2008 ( Dark Sky Books, 2010) and, as editor: Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is also the editor of Landis Everson’s Everything Preserved (Graywolf Press, 2006) winner of The Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation. He is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics

This Friday through Sunday, over 80 poets will participate in a weekend-long poetry reading in Boston. Each poet has eight minutes of reading time. The participants range from the up-and-coming to the well established. Such an ambitious and impressive event promises to send thousands of words into the heads of thousands of poetry enthusiasts.

This is one of those events that makes having a private plane seem like an imperative life holding. Strictly for purposes of attending far-off readings, of course…

But if you’re in the area, definitely stop by, for eight minutes or eighty, and enjoy some of Boston’s best poetry voices.

Dark Sky Books author Ben Mazer is scheduled to read on Sunday afternoon. And next week’s featured poet, Elisa Gabbert, takes the stage Friday night.

Check out the rest of the line-up after the jump. And visit the Boston Poet Tea Party for venue information and contacts.

(more…)

None of the 135 poems comprising Ben Mazer’s January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010), written shortly after the death of the poet Landis Everson, have been previously published in periodicals, due to the sudden nature of the book’s publication. Here are eight poems from the collection. May they induce you to acquire this epic, tour de force 149 pp. volume of poetry.

Embarrassing the Gods

My urination violation
helped to pay for my vacation.
Oh do not ask what is it
when you make your mental visit,
quoth the raven, while my mental
escapades are accidental
only when I do not think it.
So I’m making you this trinket
in case you want to contemplate
our coinciding at this date.
I could not express it better
than by talking through your sweater
like an Indian chieftain or
a gentle army of wild boar.
All that I can do is wing it,
hoping back to me you’ll sing it,
sometimes embarrassing the gods,
exposing all the inner thoughts
that make me want to
categorize them all in lots,
I think I can do.
When it is pouring in the noon
maybe it won’t be too soon
to softly name
and itemize the groves of June.
Like a fire then will fame
enjoy its promise without shame.
Occidents of welter rudge
may discontinue to misjudge
the preening prom queen
and turn her quizzi-
cal extremptions to a quasi-
mathematically obscene
half exposition
on the strength of my position
and orgasms of myopic
caring for my biopic.

(more…)

The broad outlines shrink and descend
into the grotto where at land’s end
the many pallored wait by the wall
of night blooming jasmine to recall
the terms of kisses and of promises
that no one misses fading to a turn
of honey briars where the shadows burn
an evanescent moment at the last
resort the present breaks into the past.

What have they become, do they remain
to bury there until the morning plane,
exhibits of headlines that are stellar
until the last keg smashes through the cellar
and reconfigured as Christmas lights
blend Hollywood with Honolulu nights
till the dreamt flights hang from them like pearls
amid an ocean of a thousand girls,
what is it that they whisper in the ear
as if at last their meaning could come near.

_______________________________

Ben Mazer was born in New York City in 1964. His poetry collections include Poems (The Pen & Anvil Press, 2010), and January 2008 (Dark Sky Books). He lives in Boston, where he is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.