Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Poetry @ PRS Mansion, Hollywood (4/25)



What's it all mean? Let's dive deep
Poet and Peace Activist Mandy Kahn and friends created a poetry series at PRS (the Philosophical Research Society).
  • Deep Dive Poetry
  • Thursday, April 25, 7:30 PM
  • The PRS Mansion Hollywood
  • 3910 Los Feliz Bl., Los Angeles
  • FREE or donate to support PRS
It’s a space for writers to share works that take a “deep dive” —

Host and PRS Peace Teacher Mandy Kahn
poems that consider a philosophical or spiritual dimension to life, poems that plumb the depths of “self,” poems that consider the natural world, or poems that feel contemplative.

Deep is a personal designation, as individual writers see it. Above all, it’s a prompt for poets to pose the question, “In which poems am I focused most deeply?”

This is National Poetry Month. And these are the featured readers:

Inside the PRS (Philosophical Research Society) library of world religions (Manly P. Hall)
Monthly Deep Dive Poetry Series: April's featured poet Katie Ford (poetryfoundation.org)

Featured poet Katie Ford
I.
The Lord Is a Man of War

The Lord is a man of war
I read by window and wick

and for once I believed
the book of Exodus true
the origin of our points sharpened
with fire our axes bows our pikes

and finally I could see
the cooling lava pits of their eyes
their giant gingko ears
their bellows of desert pain
how elephants became elephantry

how the woman who fevered with pox
became after death a weapon
a contagion to catapult over fortified walls

and finally I knew
why in this theater
the missiles are named
Savage Sinner Scapegoat
Peacekeeper and Goblet

Herren er en stridsmann
my descent is of the Vikings so
man is a Lord of war. 

II.
Far Desert Region

Comes August, comes December,
then April thinned of its birds.
Again August, ten times.
Fathers forage the bombed chemical plant
for barrels to carry water
from the lime-bright pools to houses
leaning inside hot wind.

To think a war might give a gift:
a pool, a clean bucket.

III.
The Day-Shift Sleeps,

the night-war wakes:
Torturers button their canvas shirts.
They straighten their cots.
They bite their toast.
They tidy their folders.
They smoke their smokes.
They tidy their blank, blank folders.
All the little chores
before going on a trip,
theirs is the zeal of children.

IV.
[Does the war want

us to unstitch its side and climb in, to become
its good surgeon?
Stupid poet, a war can’t know
what it wants.]

Katie Ford is author of Deposition and Colosseum (Graywolf Press), and of the chapbook Storm (Marick Press). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.
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