Announcement: Upcoming Poetry Reading

Photo credits: Julia Dean

Hi everyone,

Let’s all remember, today, the noble life and sacrifice of Martin Luther King, Jr. Let’s also think of those Angelinos who suffered devastating losses these past two weeks. Julia and I were lucky to get by with no more than a couple of scares, but we know people, as all Angelinos do, who lost their homes or were evacuated.

Let’s, in turn, ignore any ignoble events of the day. Consider this announcement counterprogramming.

I want to let Los Angeles area residents, particularly, know of an upcoming featured reading of mine, this coming Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Eagle Rock Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. If you’re not an L.A. resident, maybe you’ll be visiting town this coming weekend? :) Eagle Rock is a neighborhood northeast of downtown L.A and the home of Occidental College. The monthly readings draw students as well as the broader community.

I’ll be reading from my 2021 collection Waiting for Word. Copies will be available for sale. If you don’t live in Los Angeles or can’t make it to the reading and wish to purchase a copy, you can find out how below. More information on the Waiting for Word page on the horizonal menu up top.

Since I’m taking up your time with this announcement, I thought I’d offer a poem here in thanks. It has a brief backstory.

When Julia and I still lived in Venice, California, I was driving one day along Lincoln Boulevard and noted a sign for what would be a new store. “Universal Art Gallery,” it announced. “Opening Soon.”

This struck me. What exactly, I wondered, would a universal art gallery be? The poem is my imaginative answer to the question. It seems in some of its thoughts appropriate to today’s national significance, and after I have spent the past seven months not only responding to the national situation but also pondering the nature of our humanity, in Reason for Being in the World.

“Universal Art Gallery”
(Opening soon)

They hang themselves
long before some canvass gets stretched 
between any two imaginations.
And the photographs
reproduce on their own, develop in place
ahead of a shuttering eye:
such images as no artist makes
but renders service to.

They claim all the cornered walls
of the large and airy space
take title of every geometry
frame themselves
as round and rolling hips like hills
horizontal in the grass
or envision beyond plain sight
the colors of a form
there is no shape to mold.
They insert themselves in flip bin copies
of an Adirondack lake
or replicate unnumbered
those anointed moments that might be us
in whoever’s kissed or fallen figure
on one of those days we all remember.

They develop on a film
of organ tissue and self:
brain’s brief charge against
the emulsion of experience.
The patrons cannot buy
these ephemera they capture
like themselves in the mirror;
they own them all in common.
In a continuum of sight
along a corridor of blank and wondrous faces
gargoyles grimace, soup cans jingle
and innocents flee themselves.
It’s all a fire in the recess
of a spot in the back
down the stairs at the end
of a far, narrow hallway.

We stand there at angles
our eyes like white diamonds
and stare beneath a lifetime’s 
long and lurid, neon flicker.

AJA

Buy Waiting for Word on Amazon and other bookstores for $14.99.

Purchase a signed copy directly from me for $19.99.

Free digital download on request with a one-year subscription to Homo Vitruvius.

Signed copy on request for only $12.99 with one-year subscription to Homo Vitruvius.

Your readership and your likes, your comments, shares, and recommendations, and your free and paid subscriptions enable me in the project of my writing life. Thank you.

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

ajayadler.com