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Open Books: Events
April 13, 2012 07:30 PM
TODD BOSS & MATTHEW NIENOW
Following his well received first collection, Yellow Rocket, Todd Boss's new book, Pitch ($24.95 Norton) has now been published, and he travels from St. Paul, Minnesota, to read from it this evening. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The London Times, The New Yorker, NPR, Best American Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. His first libretto, Panic, a verse retelling of Knut Hamsun’s Pan, will premiere in Fall 2012, as a piece composed by Boston Conservatory’s Andy Vores. He is a co-founding co-director of Motionpoems, a new poetry film initiative collaborating with Scribner’s Best American Poetry.
About Pitch:
In his supple, sinuous poems, Boss employs a masterful facility with rhythm and internal rhyme, backing his smart sense with lovely song. Several of these poems concern his farming childhood and upbringing. Here is the title and opening stanza of one such —
"The God of Our Farm Had Blades"
and a rudder. All our acres
begged its pardon. Merest
breezes made its rusty flower
turn and whine and shudder.
But the present moment is given high polish in Boss's collection.
"Don't Be Flip"
when you drop
your mate at
the dock or
your children
at school. Don't
be cool. Don't
be coy. Or if
you do, don't
assume it's
okay to act
that way. For
today may
be your last
chance at
joy before it
flashes away
like a tin
toy in one of
those shooting
galleries in
midways: those
ducks that seem
to paddle a
stream that's
not a stream
but a rotating
axle,
toothed for
disappearance
& reappearance,
a spit
without point
or flame,
along which
randomly clucks
the whole game.
Matthew Nienow is the author of three chapbooks, most recently The End of the Folded Map ($15 Codhill Press), as well as The Smallest Working Pieces and Two Sides of the Same Thing. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation, the University of Washington, and 4Culture. A resident of Port Townsend, Washington, he works as a boat builder and all around handyman.
About The End of the Folded Map:
These poems follow a variety of avenues in Nienow's life, some in the world
and some in the imagination, expressing a kind of joy in the travel and the
telling of it. Shadowy human impulses are touched on here —
.... Even when he tries
to stay away from the river, he walks
with that same weight. Rocks
in his pockets and the river in his head.
— keeping company with poems of love and being loved. The metaphors
inherent in travel and map-making and reading blossom in this slender
collection. Nienow handles those metaphors with striking success.
"Nocturne with Mysterious Leak"
Water’s running down the wall
to the floorboards, making
a bad stain, a warping of the wood, a rotting —
and the white paint is growing fat with water;
brown runs like banks of a distant river, no depth
to the run, so it’s like a map of what’s happened.
Everything has been pushed to the middle of the room
like a raft of upholstery in a pond of wood.
A lamp flickers and goes out. A pale light creeps
through the glass and you climb onto the raft and listen
to the patter grow to a heavy hushing, a song
of nothing
can be done and so you do nothing,
just captain the couch flotilla, drifting off,
charting the flooded country of
this room named for the living.
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