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Open Books: Events
November 04, 2010 07:30 PM
DOROTHEA LASKY & LEWIS WARSH
Black Life (Wave $14), Dorothea Lasky’s second collection, is as strung together with nerve and nerves as the human body. The blackness of the title concerns a vision of life -- "I am so very sad / and this is not for some gesture." The poems move, through a kind of rocking motion, across the world of lost and/or empty loves. Her father's Alzheimer's and subsequent death open and close the book, laying an emotional shadow across it. The compulsion to write, to make, may not redeem the black life, but balances the grief. "Not your empty life you write down with no mediation / but a full life full of love / that I write down with partial mediation / ... / but a full life of bitterness with no empty shell / but a joyous and colorful one."
Lewis Warsh, a central figure in the literary history of America in the latter half of the 20th century, co-founded, with Anne Waldman, the seminal magazine and press, Angel Hair and later co-edited, with Bernadette Mayer, United Artists magazine and books. His other literary associates have included Robert Creeley, who called Mr. Warsh an "extraordinary writer," Lyn Hejinian, Robin Blaser, and countless others among the avant-garde writers of the time. His poetry, most recently Inseparable: Poems 1995- 2005 (Granary $17.95), fuses conversational elements of the New York school with collaged rhetoric and perspective to create complex, personal poems alive with a weary sense of survival. "A kind of emptiness floats down / like happiness from the tops of the / trees." He also writes fiction. His most recent novel is A Place in the Sun (Spuyten Duyvil $16), a postmodern film-noir series of narratives and asides weaving sex, guns, jealously, deception, violence, together with a humor born of the pulp novel sensibility and compulsively careening narration.
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