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Frank Bidart Reading at the Grolier
Tuesday April 29 at 7 pm
by Michael Todd Steffen
Frank Bidart, winner of many major
poetry prizes in America, will be reading from his new book Metaphysical Dog
this Tuesday evening, April 29 at 7 pm, at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop
at 6 Plympton Street in Cambridge. Metaphysical
Dog has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ibbetson Street Lifetime Achievement Award,and was a finalist for
the National Book Award.
Bidart was featured on December 3, 2013
as part of the Louisa Solano Reading Series at the Cambridge Public Library.
The event was nothing less than a performance with the poet engaging the
audience by mood and voice fully in the unflinching honesty and strange beauty
of this new dazzling poetry, true to Bidart’s line from his poem in Metaphysical
Dog entitled “Whitman”:
A
poem read aloud is by its nature a vision of its nature.
Here’s a wonderful second chance to
see Bidart read in the vein of this inspiration. I opened the book to what page
it would open to, and found this to share and interest:
Inauguration
Day (January 20, 2009)
Today,
despite what is dead
staring
out across America I see since
Lincoln
gunmen
nursing
fantasies of purity betrayed,
dreaming
to restore
the
glories of their blood and state
despite
what is dead but lodged within us, hope
under
the lustrous flooding moon
the
White House is still
Whitman’s
White House, its
gorgeous
front
full
of reality, full of illusion
hope
made wise by dread begins again
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