And just like that, summer’s over and a new season begins!

Thursday, October 3, 2013, at 7:00 pm, poets Amy Dryansky and Peter Gizzi will kick off the seventh season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Amy Dryansky (Photo credit: Trish Crapo)

Amy Dryansky’s newest poetry collection, Grass Whistle, was released in 2013 by Salmon Poetry. Her first book, How I Got Lost So Close To Home, was published by Alice James Books and individual poems have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals, including Orion, The New England Review, and Harvard Review. Dryansky’s received honors/awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She’s also a former Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mt. Holyoke College, where she looked at the impact of motherhood on the work of women poets. Dryansky currently teaches in the writing program at Hampshire College and writes about what it’s like to navigate the territory of mother/artist/poet at her blog, Pokey Mama.

Peter Gizzi (Photo credit: Star Black)

Peter Gizzi is the author of Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011), The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998), and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992). In 2004 Salt Publishing of England reprinted an expanded edition of his first book as Periplum and other poems 1987-92. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized here and abroad.

His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry (1993), The Rex Foundation (1993), Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). In 2011 he was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University.

He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM), and Tamaas.

His editing projects have included o·blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993), The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995), The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998), and with Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). From 2007 to 2011 he was the Poetry Editor for The Nation.

He has been on the faculty at Brown University (1993-94), the University of California, Santa Cruz (1995-2001), the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa (1998, 2007), The University of New Orleans Summer Program in Madrid (2004), Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg (2006), The Writer’s Workshop at The University of Iowa (Fall 2008), and Cambridge University (2011). He currently works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE / Amy Dryansky

More fleshy than previously understood (pluperfect),
typically culminating in “who’s that?” when caught
in a reflection. (See objects in mirror are larger
than they appear. See micropsia.) Breaks a paragraph,
a line, like an egg, spilled milk. Then double thinks,
needs to pee, take a walk, lie down for just a bit.
Double dips, as in, takes extra when no one’s looking,
as in squirrelly. (See rat’s nest, fig. 18). Comes to a full stop
without warning. Resultant fender-benders, pile-ups,
collisions. Yes, head-on. Yes, not watching or caring
to map a route. This isn’t to say she’s lost. Yes,
we’ve been here before, (see labyrinth, fig. 14,
see “A Study of the Multiple Pathways of the Brain”
Smithson, Yamagushi, Boorwinkle, et al),
but this is different. (See chapter 6.) For example,
her lists (items represented are not to scale).
For example, people to take care of (or not), situations
from which to extricate (now or ASAP), a constant
nag, the geometry of her ongoing impulse toward
(unrealized) order that’s only now coming to light.
Further study required. (See Notes. See Appendix.)
A discussion group is forming in your area.