Samuel Amadon, “Archipelago This, Archipelago That”

Went out to where the leaves spread scuttlefist.
Neva. Tsars. Took the canary you hid at home
where I would find him & had hoped I wouldn’t

ask, would take him, hand him (early, empty)
but how we wouldn’t, for miserable, for bleak-
broke, fly. Soldiers came demanding. Tried

Dutch. Tried Finnish. Brought out, I mentioned
you & bird. Here was some incompetent
morning of gestures and useless task. They took

my coins, didn’t linger or flinch for my bother.
Bird on my finger. Flickless bird. Featherstayed.
You would be up soon. What have I ever been?

Like the Sea, the first extended collection from Samuel Amadon, was a winner of the 2009 Iowa Poetry Prize. Other poems in this collection include “A Uselessness of Amadons” (at the Poetry Society of America website), “A Discrete or Continuous Sequence of Measurable Events Distributed in Time” (Fou Magazine), and “Pass-Pass, or All My Pulses” (H_ngm_n, with several other poems). You can also read three poems at La Petite Zine and two poems at Typo.

And here’s Amadon reading one of his poems for Rabbit Light Movies:

Samuel Amadon from joshuamarie on Vimeo.

19 April 2010 | poetry |

Quick Hits for National Poetry Month

⇒Any poets who have already filed their income tax returns and are thus at loose ends for the next 24 hours? You’ve still got time to enter the 2010 BOMB poetry contest—even more now that they’ve extended the deadline a day since I first got the email announcement! For a reading fee of $20, which includes a one-year subscription to the magazine, you can submit three to five poems for consideration; the ultimate winner, selected by Susan Howe, will receive $500 and be published in a future issue.

⇒Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of attending several iterations of the Academy of American Poet’s annual “Poetry and the Creative Mind” benefit; you can read my dispatches from the 2004 event and the 2005 event here, and then in 2007 and again in 2008 I was at GalleyCat, and then I couldn’t make it to last year’s show, but Mrs. Beatrice was there. We’ll both be unable to attend this year’s event, which is being held next Tuesday night (4/20) at Alice Tully Hall, but you should go if you can: this year’s celebrity readers include Bill Irwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gabriel Byrne, and Rosanne Cash, and if it’s anything like the shows I’ve been to, it’s going to be a wonderful evening.

14 April 2010 | poetry |