Beckman&Coletti/Poem/Birkerts

David Beckman &

Ed Coletti

Poems From the Edge

Wednesday October 24, 2007

7:30 PM

Sonoma Coffee Company

521 4th Street

Santa Rosa

A Sonoma Word-Crossing Borders Event

"Everything about our private and collective systems 
of meaning is bound up in language—  and we don't have a clue 
about its origins.  This may mean ultimately that we do not 
have a clue about ourselves either."

- Sven Birkerts in The Electric Life


Quest For a Perch

Ice dagger dive.
World’s rudder where?
Jib, mizzen, bowsprit.
Athena’s the figurehead.
Maelstrom the medium.
Margin the message.
Minced mink is functional
as fur fried fluke
or fresh flounder’s flop.
Fleshy phalanges flashing.
Colored words splashing.
Amidst shallow eucylptus
rabble, a single deep-root
lodgepole pine’s perfume
overstretches reach.

(Ed Coletti-Sept. 2007)


"The transaction that we call the experience of poetry
always takes place between one being and another.
The energy circulates from privacy to privacy.
Far flung though they may be in space and time, the poet
and his reader are, for the duration of the experience,
adjacent souls with permeable boundaries.  Language can render
the inward experience so persuasively that the space/time axis
yields.  Poetry has no larger 'public' function—  its limits are set.
Poetry readings may be good advertising but they can't alter the monogamous
character of the real event.  In poetry, as in love,
two is company, three is always a crowd."

-Sven Birkerts in his essay "The Poet In An Age Of Distraction"


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