Peace On A
presents
Dan Featherston & Catherine Taylor
reading for the launch of Featherston’s *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* (more info below!)
Friday, February 1st 2008 8PM
BYOB & $5 donation
hosted by Thom Donovan with Cuneiform Press at:
166 Avenue A, Apartment #2 (btwn 10th and 11th)
New York, NY 10009
about the readers:
Dan Featherston is the author of several books of poetry, including *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* (Cuneiform Press, 2007), *United States* (Factory School , 2005), and *Into the Earth* (QuarryPress, 2005). His critical writings on American poetry and poetics have appeared in a number of publications, most recently Charles Olson: A Poet's Prose. While living in Tucson , he helped found POG, a poetry group that has hosted dozens of performances by poets and artists, and edited A.BACUS, a journal of experimental poetry and translation. Featherston is currently a visiting professor at Kutztown University. He lives in Philadelphia with Rachel McCrystal and their dog Fredo.
Carceral Time
Forced to sleep with their hands exposed
how will a tool take shape?
Dreams take the shapes of tools
through which the body escapes itself.
A wake. A spoon baked into a cake.
In the fist of memory
time was folding inward.
(from *The Clock Maker’s Memoir*)
Catherine Taylor teaches at Ohio University. Her essays, poetry, and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, Xantippe, The Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Jacket, and ActionNow. Taylor is a Founding Editor of Essay Press (www.essaypress.org), a small press dedicated to publishing book-length innovative essays. She is at work on a hybrid genre book about South Africa and a scholarly book about 20th-century documentary representations of political violence entitled */Documents of Despair/*.
nobody, who are you? A fucking nation? Walcott I’m not. A roseate universe, subcutaneous nipple, prismatic cd playing cum and dust and Oum Kalsoum. National identity’s inevitable as sand, blood, a dark juggernaut MLK refused to accept despair as the only response to the ambiguities of history, but I can’t, today, so far from you, O Canada, who is asked to represent it. Which I’s slip the noose? Salim Halali’s heart may have been a foreign country, mine’s a minefield for you, h’bibi, skip the stones, centrifugal archipelago, ruin
(from an untitled work)
Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and
scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements,
introductions, reading selections and pics.
THE CLOCK MAKER'S MEMOIR by Dan Featherston
Advanced praise for *The Clock Maker’s Memoir*:
Through a series of poised, meditative stanzas, *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* takes on the formidable topics of time and memory. What’s evident throughout this book is a careful craftsmanship leading to novel perspectives all around the clock.
~ Lisa Jarnot
*The Clock Maker’s Memoir* registers the world’s variety in small catalogs of storms, shadows, dreams, memories, and rituals of childhood. In such forms, time returns each time with a difference. Likewise, the supple measure of these poems returns us to a rhythm or tone each time with a difference, sounding a subtle echo of slipped in sleep. As William Blake declares, “There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find / Nor can his Watch Fiends find it.” Yet Dan Featherston finds it — through alert and resourceful art.
~ Devin Johnston
With its precise music, *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* navigates the immeasurable distance between the clock’s face and the face worn by lived experiences. In these poems, memoir is not some static repository: it is a poesis of the present tense. Featherston’s craft and his unblinking commitment to particulars fashion a lyric search that one can trust to ask the questions, the necessary questions of time, space, and how we find one another amidst all this memory.
~ Richard Deming
This book will soon be available from Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org). Order direct from Cuneiform (www.cuneiformpress.com) and you'll receive FREE SHIPPING. Send a $12 check to: Cuneiform | 214 North Henry Street | Brooklyn, NY 11222
“Effort lay in us
before religions”
~ Lorine Niedecker
photos courtesy Dan Featherston & Geoffrey Gatza
