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Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night) 5th Anniversary

Title: Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night) 5th Anniversary

Date: November 28, 2017

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Description: The most diverse poetry reading and open mic in Toronto, Shab-e She’r has been bridging the gap between diverse poetry communities, bringing together people from different ethnicities, nationalities, ages, disabilities, religions (or lack thereof), poetic styles, voices and visions. At Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night) we don’t just wait for diversity to happen: we actively invite it. Please spread the word through social media and other means. Let our event become as diverse as we are.

Host of the evening is Bänoo Zan, the featured poets are Jacob McArthur Mooney and Ifrah Hussain and the featured musicians are Daniel Robinson and Yvonne Choi.

Learn more here.

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The Story of a Coat

Yusef Komunyakaa

copyright ©2011 by Yusef Komunyakaa



We talked about Baroness Pannonica
driving her Silver Pigeon to the Five Spot
to chauffeur Monk home. I was happy
not to talk football, the inventory of skulls
in a cave in Somalia, the democratic vistas
of the Cedar Tavern, or about Spinoza.
We were saying how the legs go first
& then from the eyes mystery is stolen.
I said how much I miss Bill Matthews,
that sometimes at the Village Vanguard,
Fez, or Small’s, especially when some cat
steals a riff out of Prez’s left back pocket,
I hear his Cincinnati laugh. Then our gaze
snagged on a green dress shifting the light.
If you’d asked me, I couldn’t have said why
I knew jasmine from the silence of Egypt,
or how water lives only to remember fire.
As we walked out of the sanctuary of garlic,
chive, onion, mushroom, & peppery dough,
we agreed Rahsaan could see rhythm
when he blew wounded cries of night hawks
at daybreak. The heat of the pizza parlor
followed us to the corner, & two steps later
I remembered the scent of loneliness
in my coat left draped over the chair.
I had fallen in love with its cut,
how it made me walk straighter.
When I passed the young James Dean
coming out the door with my blue-gray coat
balled up in his arms, I didn’t stop him.
I don’t know why. I just stood there
at the table. But, David, years after
I circled the globe, I’m still ashamed
of memories that make me American
as music made of harmony & malice.

Notes on the Poem

Yusef Komunyakaa's poem "The Story of a Coat" from his 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection The Chameleon Couch exemplifies much for which his work is noted and lauded, not least of which is its vital connections, in form and subject matter, to jazz. As he mines that rich musical vein, he takes the reader in many intriguing directions.

In 2004, the Academy of American Poets offered the piece Yusef Komunyakaa: An Argument Against Simplicity, an interview that explored how the influence of jazz was interwoven with Komunyakaa's work as both a poet and a librettist. The interview ranges from the musical qualities and textures of his work as things beautiful unto themselves, but also as "a means to explore complex issues of race and human relationships".

Komunyakaa espouses the great promise of jazz's improvisational attributes, and reveals "But the surprises happen in the moment of improvisation." And isn't that precisely what happens in this poem?

To improvise is, in part, "to produce or make (something) from whatever is available". "The Story of a Coat" seems to do that by piecing together vivid fragments that run the sensory gamut.

You can see "the democratic vistas / of the Cedar Tavern" (take a look here) and have your gaze "snagged on a green dress shifting the light." You can hear "when some cat / steals a riff out of Prez's left back pocket". You can almost feel "how water lives only to remember fire", not to mention the "heat of the pizza parlor" ... and oh, you can surely taste and smell the mouthwatering inventory of that sanctuary's menu and ingredients. More obscure but still potent is "the scent of loneliness" in the ostensible subject of the poem.

This poem's sensory explosion is both surprising and revelatory.
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Pivot Readings with Del Bucchia, Gordon and Nolan

Title: Pivot Readings with Del Bucchia, Gordon and Nolan

Date: November 1, 2017

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Description: Pivot presents the writers breathing life into Canadian literary culture. Established and emerging, time-tested and fresh; they’re what’s happening in literature, right now. This evening’s readings at the Tranzac Club’s Tiki Room in Toronto are by Dina Del Bucchia, E Martin Nolan and Spencer Gordon.

Learn more here.

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Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize reading with Gjertrud Schnackenberg and Mike White

Title: Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize reading with Gjertrud Schnackenberg and Mike White

Date: November 6, 2017

Location: Washington, DC, US
Description: The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, created in honor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, is awarded annually by The Waywiser Press for a poetry collection by a poet who has published no more than one previous book of verse. The award includes publication with a $3,000 prize. Prize judge Gjertrud Schnackenberg and prize winner Mike White will read.

Learn more here.

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When I Sat Down to Play the Piano: Compositions Inspired by the Poetry of Al Purdy

Title: When I Sat Down to Play the Piano: Compositions Inspired by the Poetry of Al Purdy

Date: November 5, 2017

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Description: The Gerry Shatford Trio will perform and poet Paul Vermeersch will narrate in an event for which all proceeds will be donated to the Al Purdy A Frame Trust.

Learn more here.

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Walt Whitman Award submission deadline

Title: Walt Whitman Award submission deadline

Date: November 1, 2017

Location: US
Description: The Walt Whitman Award is a $5,000 first-book publication prize. The winning manuscript, chosen by an acclaimed poet, is published by Graywolf Press, a leading independent publisher committed to the discovery and energetic publication of contemporary American and international literature. The winner also receives an all-expenses-paid six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in the Umbrian region of Italy, and distribution of the winning book to thousands of Academy of American Poets members.

This year’s judge for the Walt Whitman Award is Joy Harjo.

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Call For Poets: the TheoArtistry Poets’ Scheme

Title: Call For Poets: the TheoArtistry Poets’ Scheme

Date: October 31, 2017

Description: This project offers poets the opportunity to work with Michael Symmons Roberts, Sir James MacMillan and researchers from ITIA (the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts) on a new poem during StAnza 2018. Poets are invited to apply for the TheoArtistry Poets’ Scheme, a collaboration between StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, and ITIA, both based in St Andrews, Fife.

Learn more here.

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