Poetry on the Page and for the Ear

• Tuesdays, June 10 - July 1 (4 sessions)
• 6:30 - 9:30 pm
• The Ink Spot

 If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice 
and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a 
poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music
and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.
—Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate 1997-2000

Poetry should work on the page and for the ear; however, too many poets read with their head buried in the book or their eyes so focused on the page that the audience is left out of the experience. Taking a cue from Pinksy, the focus of this class will be two-prong: the poem as artifact and the voice as instrument. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop poems of their choosing as well as improve reading/performance skills. In addition, we will discuss and read aloud the work of various contemporary poets, and each week, take home a poem “assignment” that utilizes the work as a catalyst. The class will culminate in a public reading on Friday, July 11 at The Ink Spot.

Sydney Brown writes poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana, Inside English, Red, Two Girls Review, The Southern Anthology, Zaum: The Literary Review of Sonoma State, Angelflesh, San Diego Writer’s Monthly, How2: Contemporary Innovative Writing Practices by Women, and the anthology Hunger and Thirst (forthcoming 2008). She has read/performed her work at a variety of establishments throughout the city. Sydney received an MFA from San Diego State University in 2000, and she is Co-coordinator of the Creative Writing Program and Literary Arts Festival at Grossmont College, where she teaches creative writing and poetry. Photo of Sydney is from the reading series, Photo Booth.

Little Cruelties
by Sydney Brown

My husband announces:
“The lemon tree is dead.”
I look out the kitchen window
and find its place in our setting,
at home among the strong fig
and olive trees. “Okay,” I respond, still
half in love with its bare, sleepy hollow
limbs—something tragic
in our suburban love story. The dead
tree reminds me that it’s almost
October, and then for some reason
the movie, Doctor Zhivago—
a child peering through an iced window,
claws of branches tapping against it,
Julie Christie staring from a train.

The lemon tree was once heavy
with its bitter yellow fruit.
I remember egg-shaped, deep
green leaves, purplish flowers,
our first summer’s sweet lemonade,
and the labor I swore never to repeat
(and have not). Now the branches
look like an etching in a book
of fairytales; my husband stands
in the foreground, hands on hips,
a plan forming logically in his brain,
and I desperately want to make a poem.
One about Lara and Zhivago,
their lost child,
and the kind of love that grows
dangerously out of obsession,
and dies because it has to.

My husband borrows his father’s
chainsaw. He says, “It’s time
for it to go” (and although
I am partial to bare limbs,
the look of dead trees in almost
October, I am muted
by a warm breeze).

He is diligent, my lover.
First he cuts off the branches,
then the middle of the trunk,
then the stub of its base,
then he examines what remains
deep in the grass.

I’m watching from the backdoor
when Emerson, our cream colored indoor-cat,
steals between my legs into the scene,
drags his belly across the grass,
then considers himself hidden
between two of the severed branches.
We are absolutely charmed,
perhaps too charmed
by this cat—he is stalking
a butterfly floating beneath the fig tree.
My husband calls him “Mighty Hunter,”
and grins, his lovely dimples pushing
into a 5 o’clock shadow;
he is more than proud of our
cream-colored cat moving across
the lawn, butterfly dangling from his mouth.

I take a swig from a cold beer,
tuck a strand of red hair behind my ear,
and watch these males like a movie.
I am thankful for their little cruelties:
my dead tree killer, my butterfly eater.