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Open Books: Events
October 03, 2008 07:30 PM
AARON SHURIN
Poet, essayist, teacher Shurin joins us to read from King of Shadows
($16.95 City Lights). Like the flowers he describes with such savory
accuracy, Aaron Shurin's essays gathered together make for a captivating
bouquet, a compelling mix of autobiography and social and literary history
and criticism. The pieces glide from the informative to the delightful to
the touching, gracefully removing the ampersand that separates life & art.
He writes as a voracious reader, a gay man who came of age in the heady 60's
and came through the ravages of AIDS, a poet whose mentors included both
Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, and a canny observer of flora and fauna
(humans included and himself in the bunch). His prose is often lyrical, at
times rocking with iambic motion, perhaps not unusual for one smitten with
Shakespeare at an early age -- "I pluck a bay leaf, crumple it and sniff:
Its menthol pierces the front lobe of your brain like a tiny needle, but it'
s a good pain.." It's a pleasure to follow Aaron Shurin's attention,
whether its turned toward gay bars or birds or Proust. "[T]he poem's
everyday agenda," he writes, "is to read the world's hidden text of
correspondences." That seems to be his everyday agenda no matter what
he's doing.
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