An Evening of Poetry

This event will be held virtually on BlueJeans. As Always, this reading is FREE and open to the public.

To attend the McEver Reading on 14 April 2022, follow the instructions below. The reading will begin at 7 pm Eastern Time, but our (virtual) doors open at 6:45 pm Eastern Time.

Web stream information:

Joining the reading is easy - just choose the platform that works best for you, and follow the instructions below:

Join via your Computer’s Web Browser: Click Here

https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/udbwwwde

Join on your Mobile Device: Click Here

1. Open the link above ( https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/udbwwwde )
2. Download the app if you don’t have it already.
3. Enter event ID : udbwwwde

Join by Phone:

Dial one of the following numbers, enter the participant PIN followed by # to confirm:

• +1 (415) 466-7000 (US), PIN: 6688858#

Join from outside the US: Click Here

https://www.bluejeans.com/numbers/primetime-attendees/event?id=udbwwwde

Event Access with Room System

Laptop paired with a room system (Best experience):

1. Dial: bjn.vc or 104.238.247.247 in the room system.
2. Go to this link (primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/udbwwwde/room-system/)
3. Enter the pairing code displayed on your room system screen into your browser.

Joining from a Room system:

1. Dial: bjn.vc or 104.238.247.247 in the room system.
2. Enter Meeting ID: 326576667 and Passcode: 5294

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator who lives in Chicago. His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (Coffee House Press, 2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human won the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015); Memories of my Overdevelopment (2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011). His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia won the National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. The son of Chilean immigrants, Borzutzky's work often addresses immigration, worker exploitation, political corruption, and economic disparity. He teaches in the English and Latin American and Latino Studies Departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Bio at Poetry@Tech

Poet, playwright, nonfiction and literary travel writer, Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her poetry collections are Life in a Country Album (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2019), The Republics (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2015), Poet in Andalucía, and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the author of eight plays and editor of two anthologies including the groundbreaking classic The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award. She writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders and resides in New York City. Handal is a professor at Columbia University, and a Visiting Writer at the American University of Rome.

Poet's Website

Bio at Poetry@Tech

Charles Simic is the author of numerous collections of poems, among them, The Lunatic; Master of Disguises; Selected Poems: 1963-2003, for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Classic Ballroom Dances, which won the University of Chicago’s Harriet Monroe Award and the Poetry Society of America’s di Castagnola Award.

A collection entitled Sixty Poems was released in honor of his appointment as US Poet Laureate. Simic has also published a number of prose books, most recently Memory Piano, and many translations of poets from former Yugoslavia as well as an anthology of Serbian poetry entitled The Horse Has Six Legs. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review.

Poet's Bio

Dream Song #17

They took my body to the forest
They asked me to climb a ladder

I did not want to climb a ladder
But they forced me to climb the ladder

If you don’t climb the ladder
we will bury you in the foamy mud

I had to decide: should I die
by hanging or by burial

I climbed the ladder and they wrapped
a belt around the thick limb of a tree

And then when I could no longer breathe
they tossed me into a stream

And I floated to the edge of the village
where someone prayed for my soul

It’s like this in a lullaby
for the end of the world:

The options for the end
are endless

But this is not really a lullaby
for the end of the world

It’s about the beginning
what happens when we start to rot

in the daylight
The way the light shines on

the ants and worms and parasites
mauling our bodies

It’s about the swarms of dogs
gnawing our skin and bones

Do you know what it’s like
when a ghost licks your intestines

Do you know what it’s like
when a rat devours your brain

To avoid the hole
the children must sing sweetly, softly

To avoid the hole
they must fill their songs with love

--Daniel Borzutsky

Noir, une lumière

There is a sorceress in our night. A sky that only moves memory to make
place for the mangoes of last month. There is an old man who says, Libére
moi. And means, Take everything but my blackness. Only in the dark do
doves find reason. Only in the dark do doves have reason to believe that
vengeance is light hanging on fallen tree. After each fall, we ask, where is
the island, the sugarcane that disappeared in our hunger, the water that
emptied our thirst, the song that robbed our nightmare? They mock us.
They tell us to whisper in their ears. They will obey. But curses beat the air
wild. The air is faint. And they tell us, Stop plotting fire. You are in the wrong
land even if the roosters recognize you. They hated our black. What they didn't
understand is that it illuminates their world.

--Nathalie Handal

Charon’s Cosmology

With only his dim lantern
To tell him where he is
And every time a mountain
Of fresh corpses to load up

Take them to the other side
Where there are plenty more
I’d say by now he must be confused
As to which side is which

I’d say it doesn’t matter
No one complains he’s got
Their pockets to go through
In one a crust of bread in another a sausage

Once in a long while a mirror
Or a book which he throws
Overboard into the dark river
Swift and cold and deep

--Charles Simic