POETRY AT THE ALBANY LIBRARY
2nd Tuesdays Featured Poet & Open Mic: April 10, 7 - 9 pm
Featured Poet:
Barry Goldensohn will read from his new collection of poetry, The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music (Formite Press, 2012; illustrated with monotypes by artist Douglas Kinsey). The author of five books of poetry, Goldensohn has taught at Goddard College, Iowa Writers' Workshop, Hampshire College, and Skidmore College. He and his wife, poet and scholar Lorrie Goldensohn, make their home in Cabot, Vermont, and also spend time in Berkeley, NYC, Paris, and London. Reading followed by Open Mic.
Praise for The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music:
Music leads [Goldensohn] to the deepest places, where contraries are evoked. . .[in] poems sovereign and whimsical: the pianist with "gunfighter's hands," the music of love and the loss of love, strains a of music powerful enough to "rouse to sexual frenzy the eroded statues of the female saints." With this new book, drawn from the work of a lifetime, [Goldensohn's writing is] . . . ever fresh and sustaining.
-- Robert Boyers, editor, Salamagundi
Goldensohn's poems . . . are intense reflections on music as experienced, by ear and by mind....[On] Bach's cello suites...the inviting conundrum of one voice being several. [On] Schumann's Dichterliebe, the clarity and purity of the piano in contest with..."searching," "laboring," "huffing" voice. . . . [In] 'Last Act: Don Giovanni,' "comic murderous lust" and its absurd end..."phallus errant cursing through the trap door and stage flames." [On musicians], "The cellist grinds his teeth, clenches his face in spasms of control." [On blues and jazz] we hear Bessie Smith "with the whole world's sorrow in her voice" and see Thelonius Monk "doing a march time heavy footed non-dance dance." Eros is often up front: "the girls forget themselves, skirts / above their breasts as they flash their white unsunned asses and the house is all meat, / shrieks and hair." . . . Immediacy is Goldensohn's great gift in this brilliant collection. --Lewis Spratlan, composer, Pulitzer Prize winner for his opera Life is a Dream
This lovely collection--witty, sensual, moving. . . is a multi-faceted meditation on the nature of music itself and its meaning. .. from[how] a transcendent performance of a Bach cello suite can turn "the still / gross grounded lump that listens" into music, to how in the poem 'Rest,' the Mozart Requiem becomes "the way, lost, / we want ourselves spoken of, sung of." -- Lloyd Schwartz, poet, Pulitzer Prize in Criticism
"These music poems quietly accumulate our desperate need for art." --Paul Nelson, former Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Ohio University
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