David St. John and Anna Journey stopped on their book tour
at the New School on Tuesday, October 9th to read from their
respective new books of poetry, The
Auroras (Harper) and Vulgar Remedies
(Louisiana State University Press).
The Auroras is David St. John’s first collection of new poems in
eight years, and the book begins with an exploration of the poet’s sensuous,
almost brooding relationship with nature. St. John is interested in
revisiting the past — indeed he later told moderator David Lehman about his love of
discovering new things when re-reading poetry — and in the middle section of the
book he looks back at California as it was not too long ago. Most of the poems St. John read
on Tuesday night were from this section, and they’re at once dark and curious. This is from "Hungry Ghost":
Your ghost
your own ghost
Had already
come
She sat by
you at the small table
& she
was so hungry
At one
point she reached over
Reached
right inside you
&
slowly twisted of a moist
Wafer of
your hear
In the final section of the book, St. John’s poems turn
their attention to death and are best characterized by their ephemeral quality,
like a strong but distant note of music.
After her extraordinary debut, If Birds Gather Your Hair
for Nesting, from which she also read a few poems, Anna Journey strikes a new,
strange and harmonious chord with Vulgar
Remedies. In one poem, the well-named Journey travels through time via
the shapes and textures of the insides of a fistulated cow to unknown and known
realms. Her long, intriguing titles pull the listener into the context of the
poems, an influence of Beckian Fritz Goldberg, she said. With a strong sense of rhyhtm and clever use of language, Journey builds upon the peculiarity that her titles immediately establish.
The readings were followed by questions from David Lehman as well as from the audience, stimulating much discussion on the musicality of language and the
devil. — Philip Brunst