Frank Bidart Reading at the Grolier Tuesday April 29 at 7 pm

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