.
The Southampton Historical Museum, Rogers Memorial
Library & The North Sea Poetry Scene
are pleased to offer
Hearthside Poetry Readings
Saturday afternoons at 4 p.m. at the Rogers Mansion
17 Meeting House Lane
Southampton, NY 11968
There is no charge. Refreshments will be served.
Reservations appreciated. Please call 204-1240.
or email: Thenorthseapoetryscene@hotmail.com
April 11
Julie Sheehan & Christine Gellineau
Julie Sheehan’s first collection of poems Thaw, Fordham University Press (2001) introduction by Marie Ponsot.
Sheehan second collection Orient Point, W. W. Norton, (2006), and has Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise, W.W. Norton, is forthcoming.
Among Sheehan’s many awards are the Paris Review Bernard F. Conners Prize for Poetry (2003), the Barnard Women Poets Prize (2005),
the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Memorial Award (2005), and her most recent award the Whiting Writers’ Award, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation (2008).
Sheehan is currently an Assistant Professor, Stony Brook Southampton MFA in Writing and Literature, Southampton, NY.
She lends her services to The Southampton Review, Poetry Editor, Stony Brook Southampton and the Writers Speak, Director,
reading series, MFA in Writing and Literature Program, Stony Brook Southampton.
Ghazal: Orient Point
The right whales went startlingly wrong, from capitalism’s viewpoint.
A lighthouse stands corrected, obsolete but sturdy (to a point).
Fetch me a wooden sailor perched on a whittled boat, bobbing for
Luck. Fetch a diminishment of what once rounded Orient Point.
Those old New England towns grow indigents, unoriginal trees
Living on the lyrics to old sea shanties worked in needlepoint.
I pry you like a barnacle from the hull of serenity.
My stillness, you’ve slept through another journey to an eastern point.
You wear your white fishing cap low as if it had no brim. I know
It’s love, that sidestepping afterthought, mislaid and always off-point.
Thoreau is shouting again: awake! To the mast! Reorient
Yourself! The hour wrecks, it sinks, for time honors no distant point.
Today I harvest. Tomato planets. String beans hidden, wishful.
My marriage, a colander. Dill, green hymn. To wash, a counterpoint.
Our towering quarrel withstands high wind, lash of couplets, broken
lines, fresh news. O the folly of shining at starpoint or gunpoint!
Summer revives to poison itself, as if it had green to spare.
Why does the wild month of Julie dwell so long on Orient Point?
Julie Sheehan
Christine Gelineau is the author of Remorseless Loyalty (Ashland Poetry Press, 2006), winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize. Remorseless Loyalty was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Gelineau’s other works include two chapbooks from FootHills Publishing, North American Song Line (2001) and In the Greenwood World (2006), as well as French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets , an anthology she edited with Jack B. Bedell, Louisiana Literature Press, (2007). Gelineau’s poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, The Iron Horse Review, Green Mountains Review, Georgia Review, American Literary Review and others. Her poems have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her essay “Foal Watch” is cited as a “Notable Essay” in the 2004 Best American Essays. Gelineau lives on a farm in upstate New York. She teaches
at Binghamton University, where she is Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program and coordinator of the Readers’ Series. She also teaches poetry in the low-residency graduate writing program at Wilkes University.
Horseshoe Crab
In truth, your shape is less
like a shoe than like the hollow
a horse’s hoof describes:
ancient as absence, you glide
the ocean floor, sword tail
susurring in your wake,
a stylus tracing the small
poem of your passage.
Waves roll in glass-clear and
loquacious: exhale
and then the long
gurgling back of the sands.
Beneath that bright film
the black exclamation
of your body persists,
persists.
Christine Gellineau
Filed under: Calendar, events, local, long island, poetry
Leave a Reply