Rosmarie Waldrop, Emmanuel Hocquard, & Juliette Valéry, This Saturday, April 22nd, 8pm, Internationalist Books

Who: Rosmarie Waldrop; author of Blindsight, The Lawn of the Excluded Middle, Reproduction of Profiles, Love Like Pronouns, and many others; translator of the work of Edmond Jabes, Paul Celan, and Emmanuel Hocquard; editor of Burning Deck Press; left a German circus at eleven to become one of the US's finest living poets.

Who: Emmanuel Hocquard; author of Theory of Tables (translated by Michael Palmer), Aereas in the Forests of Manhattan (translated by Lydia Davis), A Test of Solitude (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop), among others; director of Un Bureau sur l'Atlantique; invites US poets to weeks long retreats in French chateaus to translate poetry, eat, drink wine, and sleep.

Who: Juliette Valéry; author of Le bolide immobile an centre de l’écran and, with Emmanuel Hocquard, L’année du goujon and Les oranges de Saint-Michel; translator into French of American poets such as Cole Swensen, Norma Cole, Rosemarie Waldrop, Keith Waldrop, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Creeley, Juliana Spahr, Charles Bernstein, Michael Davidson, and Michael Palmer; teaches at the École Supérieure d’Art et Céramique.

What: Desert City Poetry Series, French and English, Bi-lingual, by George.

When: This Saturday, April 22nd, 8:00pm, 2006, the only one this year.

Where: Internationalist Books, 405 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC, Thrill on the Hill.

How much: $2 dollar donation is requested to support the readers and series.

Why: "From no point of the canale is it possible to see / the burnt stump. Not because of the hedge-row. / Because a word is missing." "Still, depth of field allows the mind to drift beyond its negative pole to sun catching on a maple leaf already red in August, already thinner, more translucent, preparing to strip off all that separates it from its smooth skeleton. Beautiful, flamboyant phrase that trails off without predicate, intending disappearance by approaching it, a toss in the air."

See you there.....

Thanks for a great 05/06 season!!!

Stay tuned for news of next seasons readings!

*Internationalist Books

*Rosmarie Waldrop

*Emmanuel Hocquard

*Juliette Valéry

Contact the DCPS: Ken Rumble, director
rumblek at bellsouth dot net

The Desert City is supported by grants from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Orange County Arts Commission and generous donations from anonymous individuals.

from Lawn of the Excluded Middle
by Rosmarie Waldrop

I put a ruler in my handbag, having heard men talk about their sex. Now we have correct measurements and a stickiness between collar and neck. It is one thing to insert yourself into a mirror, but quite another to get your image out again and have your errors pass for objectivity. Vitreous. As in humor. A change in perspective is caused by the clarity by the ciliary muscle, but need not be conciliatory. Still, the eye is a camera, room for everything that is to enter, like the cylinder called the satisfaction of hollow space. Only language grows such grass-green grass.

from A Test of Solitude
by Emmanuel Hocquard (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop)

XIV

This chronicle contains all the words that
stake out the route from the hut to the burnt
stump except one.
The one that is missing. What properties do
the stump and the canale have in common?
Memories: of the chalk pond traced in the
grass and of the ancient cedar uprooted by the
storm.
Italy: canale is an Italian word designating a
long rectangular pond, and the burning of the
stump is a technique brought from Rome.
Two properties in common is not enough.
At least one more is missing.
The missing word.