On
Wednesday, January 14 at 7pm, Friendswood Public Library off the page
poetry series presents a reading with David E. Cowen, president
of Gulf Coast Poets; Sybil Pittman Estess, 2009 & 2015 Texas Poet Laureate
nominee; and UHCL professor Dr. John Gorman. Featured readings will conclude
with an open mic session. Dr. John Gorman will receive the first
annual Friendswood Public Library Award for Outstanding Cultural Programming
at the conclusion of this poetry event.
Excerpt
from the FOREWORD of David E. Cowen’s The Madness of Empty Rooms (Weasel Press
2014)
Danel
Olson, Professor of English, Lone Star College
If you
step quietly for long enough into the coolness of a certain Texas graveyard at
night by the sea, you may hear meditations and narratives just such as these.
You pass by particular half-opened sarcophagi, then around an unmarked grave of
a Civil War veteran, and then over a sheaf of salt-grass growing at the
furthest edge where the mower finally gave up.
But you
may never find that cemetery, so here is the book.
Incidents
of families at war, of dreams slowly achieved and fortunes quickly squandered,
of decadence and vendettas and eternal returns, with a few cases of tombstones
repurposed, are all shared by this deliberative voice of Texas.
Growing
up close to the sun-blanched, salt-encrusted Gulf of Mexico in Brownsville, and
relocating further north to Galveston to practice law, David Cowen has
internalized the central narrative of that hurricane shore: nature is always
indifferent, and life is as merciless as death. If his characters should face
the rubble with courage to begin again, another storm only swells in the Gulf
to take them all down.
If the
keenest instinct of the Gothic impulse is to record decay, that is what these
poems do--with uncommon directness. Abandonment, fragmentation, ruin,
trammelled innocence, and someone's unsentimentalized demise are always in the
middle or at least on the edges of his verse.
Being a
lawyer, and the son of a lawyer, this poet defers to facts over lore, and
remembers them well, recounting and fusing them into poetic cases melancholy,
strong or shocking, yet never in doubt. The effects of evil linger long after a
crime is done. In David Cowen's poetry, they linger twice as long…
…I
certainly am grateful for these poems, their vitality, their atmosphere, and
all their haunting voices. The secrets of an island are in this poet, and when
I read him aloud again, I vow that even the ghosts of this coast stop to
listen.
~Danel
Olson
From
the book The Madness of Empty Spaces
by David E. Cown:
The Traveling Salesman Finishes His Run
anomalies are so cliché --
the soft hum of the Class III
Alcubierre
spitting us
from the lips of the traversable
horizon
always has its side effects
I become a primordial slug
inching on an evolutionary plane
of parallel strings
my antennae probing lost patches
of fractured reality
at least the colors are amusing
but they fade
as I find myself
slithering unexotically
over a half eaten package of peanuts
and an empty can of soda
just hazards of the trade
the movie was boring anyway
I am content
I met my quota
we decelerate through the other door
my arms reform
my legs reshape
I become who I am
I finish the last of the honey roasteds
the garbled recording reminds us
to return our tray tables to an upright
position--
presuming up and down in zero G--
thanking us for taking the “company
plane”
I reach down to secure
my suitcase of samples under the seat
in front
as instructed
looking out
at the cerulean pearl
imbedded with swirls of red storms
circling a familiar bloated star
I sigh
happy
I will again be sleeping in my own bed
my only apprehension
being whether I remembered
to let the cat out
before I left
~David
E. Cowen
Watch David Cowen read:
Jack Rabbit Chicken
David Cowen reads from his Seven Yards of Sorrow
Watch David Cowen read:
Jack Rabbit Chicken
David Cowen reads from his Seven Yards of Sorrow
