Patrick F. Durgin has taught literature and writing at SUNY-Buffalo, The College of St. Catherine, the University of Michigan, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His poetry and scholarly writings appear in issues of Aerial: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory, Arizona Quarterly, Aufgabe, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and numerous others. He is founding editor and publisher of Kenning Editions and was, for several years, contributing editor of the Electronic Poetry Center. In July 2007, Atticus/Finch published his fourth chapbook of poetry (Imitation Poems) and Atelos Press will publish his collaboration with poet-translator Jen Hofer (The Route) in 2008.
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RELAY (SIX EXCERPTS)
Something can occur to us
as nothing
but it doesn’t occur
to shake a finger at
or foist a stake into
A kind of proleptic exhaustion
or common sense, or
what’s the same
______________________
In an instant
of extramission
an identical plot
of land
is prepared and the gates
are slid over the granite squares
and the green
of the blades of grass exhales
It is summer
It is supper
______________________
Right for being real
or manifest to one
the more of us
starved and slithering
face up from below
footfalls
______________________
Dusk arrives, drizzles dim
hues for blacktop
staring across the sun
demeaned
there are no angles
or no bedrock
A bevy of vendors
surrounds the flower beds
we sort them out of sight
______________________
Mostly there is nothing
to know, although one is
right to evacuate
the city
Loyally saying one’s predictions
in the right means
nothing if not
in orderorderlyAny encumbrance
one’s motive
removed to face another
______________________
The rain emaciates itself
like a foil to the instincts
of the city’s body
where the vapors are only
more or less
with us
more or less horizontallyloyallythough there are no angles
©Copyright 2008 Patrick Durgin
