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These Current Events (feat. Kimiko Hahn)

from The Poets Are Gathering by Benjamin Boone

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about

Kimiko Hahn, president of the Poetry Society of America, is the author of ten books of poems, including: Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020); Brain Fever (WWN, 2014), and Toxic Flora (WWN, 2010), both collections prompted by science; The Narrow Road to the Interior (WWN, 2006) a collection that takes its title from Basho’s famous poetic journal; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. As part of her service to the CUNY community, she initiated a Chapbook Festival that became an annual event co-sponsored by major literary organizations. Since then, she has added chapbooks to her publication list: Write it!, Brittle Process, Brood, Ragged Evidence, A Field Guide to the Intractable, Boxes with Respect, The Cryptic Chamber, and Resplendent Slug. In 2017, she and Tamiko Beyer collaborated on the chapbook Dovetail.

lyrics

From the Liner Notes:

The last word is yielded to New York-based poet Kimiko Hahn, whose “These Current Events” speaks to how the world’s despair comes at each of us and what we do – or don’t – to confront it. She is specifically dealing with the presence of homelessness in her community and at times stalking her beyond its immediate boundaries: “I cannot look in the face of the man cursing me out / because I don't want my car window washed. / I cannot look at the man, empty cup, empty pant legs, / who flashes a razor at me on his tongue. / I cannot speak to the girl pregnant with addiction / thanking me ‘for nothing.’ I can / pick the paper up any day of the week / and find so much sorrow it is difficult to believe / there are solutions. ... if I turn to sheets of paper / in order to turn away from these current events / it is only to revive the heartbeat of commitment. / I know poetry cannot save / but it fuels the gut that is able.”

In this most disorienting and distressing of calendar years, we don’t yet know – and are at best skittish about imagining – how things are going to turn out when the ball drops down to announce 2021. (Will there even be a “ball”?) But in Hahn’s last line, as with so much of the poems contained here, there are clues to be found to absorb the blows, summon the spirits, engage the moment and as Jess suggests, murder the silence that threatens to immobilize us, to keep us away from the reasons to commit, to deal, to hope – and, above all, to imagine.

credits

from The Poets Are Gathering, released October 16, 2020
Kimiko Hahn (p/n), Benjamin Boone, (as), Stefan Poetzsch (vla), Ben Monder (g), Eyal Maoz (g), Peter Brendler (b), John Bishop (d)

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Benjamin Boone Fresno, California

Benjamin Boone is a jazz saxophonist, composer, professor, and U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Ireland (2022-23), Ghana (2017-18) and the Republic of Moldova (2006). His Origin Records album THE POETRY OF JAZZ was #3 "Best Album of 2018" in the 83rd Annual Downbeat Readers Poll and featured on NPR's All Things Considered, The Paris Review, and many others. Websites: BenjaminBoone.com & OriginArts.com ... more

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