Peter Covino & Daniel Hall

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Thursday, December 1, 2011, at 7:00 pm, poets Peter Covino and Daniel Hall will continue the fifth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Peter Covino

Poet, translator, and essayist Peter Covino is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island.  His poetry collections, both from New Issues, are The Right Place to Jump (2012), and Cut Off the Ears of Winter, finalist for the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize and the Publishing Triangle, Thom Gunn Award. He is the winner of the 2007 PEN American/Osterweil Award for emerging poets and also the author and the chapbook Straight Boyfriend (2001), winner of the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize.  His co-edited volume, Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture is forthcoming from Bordighera Press, CUNY (2012).  Recent poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, LIT, Gulf Coast, and The Yale Review; and in the anthologies New Hungers for Old: One Hundred Years of Italian American Poetry, and It’s Not You, It’s Me: Poems About Divorce and Break-ups (Other Books), among others.
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Daniel Hall

Daniel Hall is the author of three poetry collections, Hermit with Landscape (Yale University Press, 1990), Strange Relation (Penguin, 1996), and Under Sleep (Chicago University Press, 2007), as well as the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. He is the Director of Creative Writing at Amherst College.

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MORE THAN A VERB, A NATION / Peter Covino
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Vetted he’s always saying
Should I imagine Uncle Sam horned purple
By war conspicuous in the 1966 edition
’cept for Texas
Where I know I know we got our own ranch
I’m trying not to pick on where you left off
Where the perfect makeup or the dusty
Mauve wrap entitled you to miss my class
@ $2,500 per semester, without insurance
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But I’m ill-equipped to complain
A dictum’s gotta be more than one-dimensional
So I arc the vetted V.
& wed past & tense to the gerund
For a star clustering constellation
5:40 a.m. in that fluorescent before saying
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I can be heavy-lidded or drawing on the board
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Belatedly and not enough
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Dear M.
Meant to say hi
Other night
But I get shy
And beaten down

I’m having trouble with agreement and good verbs.
I waited for the water filter to filter.
I ordered 30 gifts from the Home Shopping Channel and sent 29 back.

(First appeared in Gulf Coast. Forthcoming in The Right Place to Jump, by Peter Covino, New Issues Press, W. Michigan University Press, 2012.)

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COCA-COLA /  Daniel Hall
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What I want is a single uncrumpled can,
still factory-bright, held lightly aloft
in the roadside stubble. I want to see the clouds
warp achingly across it, and to hear
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the one high hawk’s cry drawn out to a wisp,
a flourish perfected over time, that might answer
the crisply branded Circle-R, white on red.
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Want it to end with a perceptible shudder
in the wake of an Airstream or an eighteen-wheeler,
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the aftermath of something really big.
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