Dust (by Dorianne Laux) – video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIlX8f2TtJE

Video courtesy of PoetryEverywherePTV

Dorianne Laux reads her poem “Dust” as part of the Poetry Everywhere project airing on public television — produced by David Grubin Productions and WGBH Boston, in association with the Poetry Foundation. Filmed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.  For more information, visit http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/.

For more Dorianne Laux, visit http://doriannelaux.com and check out these titles:

   

Moon in the Window (by Dorianne Laux)

Dorianne Laux  [Photo by Tristem Laux]

MOON IN THE WINDOW


I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered.  I read.  Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue.  All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

---

© 2006 by Dorianne Laux
All rights reserved

Included in the Crisis Chronicles Library by permission of Dorianne Laux

We gratefully acknowledge W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
publishers of Facts about the Moon: Poems, where “Moon in the Window” appears

Here’s a biographical excerpt borrowed from the author’s Academy of American Poets page:

Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988.  Laux is the author of Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton 2005), which was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Her other collections include Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000); What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Awake (1990), which was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry.  Superman: The Chapbook was released by Red Dragonfly Press in January, 2008. With Kim Addonizio, she is the co-author of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997). Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Korean, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese.  Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, an Editor’s Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Laux has taught at the University of Oregon’s Program in Creative Writing. She now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves among the faculty at North Carolina State University’s MFA Program.

Please check out these fine volumes of poetry and prose by Dorianne Laux:

    

Facts About the Moon (by Dorianne Laux)

Dorianne Laux  [Photo by Tristem Laux]

Facts About the Moon

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year.  That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth. 
What’s a person supposed to do? 
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face, I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die. 
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen 
for a long time.  I don’t care.  I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon. 
Forget us.  We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only  love, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room, you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuck-up,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

---

Poem © 2006 by Dorianne Laux
All rights reserved

Included in the Crisis Chronicles Library by permission of Dorianne Laux

We gratefully acknowledge W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
publishers of Facts about the Moon: Poems, where the text of this poem appears

Here’s a biographical excerpt borrowed from the author’s Academy of American Poets page:

Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988.  Laux is the author of Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton 2005), which was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Her other collections include Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000); What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Awake (1990), which was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry.  Superman: The Chapbook was released by Red Dragonfly Press in January, 2008. With Kim Addonizio, she is the co-author of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997). Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Korean, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese.  Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, an Editor’s Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Laux has taught at the University of Oregon’s Program in Creative Writing. She now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves among the faculty at North Carolina State University’s MFA Program.

Video featuring Dorianne Laux reading this poem appeared at http://blip.tv/file/444090/

Please check out these fine volumes of poetry and prose by Dorianne Laux:


    

   

Savages (by Dorianne Laux)

Dorianne Laux  [Photo by Tristem Laux]

SAVAGES


                Those two shelves, down there.
                — Adrienne Rich

                For Matthew, Mike, Michael and Carl


They buy poetry like gang members
buy guns — for aperture, caliber,
heft and defense.  They sit on the floor
in the stacks, thumbing through Keats
and Plath, Levine and Olds, four boys
in a bookstore, black glasses, brackish hair,
rumpled shirts from the bin at St. Vincent de Paul.
One slides a warped hardback
from the bottom shelf, the others
scoot over to check the dates,
the yellowed sheaves ride smooth
under their fingers.
One reads a stanza in a whisper,
another turns the page, and their heads
almost touch, temple to temple — toughs
in a huddle, barbarians before a hunt, kids
hiding in an alley while sirens spiral by.
When they finish reading one closes
the musty cover like the door
on Tutankhanen’s tomb.  They are savage
for knowledge, for beauty and truth.
They crawl on their knees to find it.

---

© 2006 by Dorianne Laux
All rights reserved

Included in the Crisis Chronicles Library by permission of Dorianne Laux

We gratefully acknowledge W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
publishers of Facts about the Moon: Poems, where “Savages” appears

Here’s a biographical excerpt borrowed from the author’s Academy of American Poets page:

Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988.  Laux is the author of Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton 2005), which was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Her other collections include Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000); What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Awake (1990), which was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry.  Superman: The Chapbook was released by Red Dragonfly Press in January, 2008. With Kim Addonizio, she is the co-author of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997). Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Korean, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese.  Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, an Editor’s Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Laux has taught at the University of Oregon’s Program in Creative Writing. She now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves among the faculty at North Carolina State University’s MFA Program.

Please check out these fine volumes of poetry and prose by Dorianne Laux: