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Community Corner

MacArthur 'Genius' Reads

MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award-Winning Poet

To Read at The Arts Café Mystic

What the Last Evening Will Be Like

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You’re sitting at a small bay window

in an empty café by the sea.

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It’s nightfall, and the owner is locking up,

though you’re still hunched over the radiator,

which is slowly losing warmth.

Now you’re walking down to the shore

to watch the last blues fading on the waves.

You’ve lived in small houses, tight spaces—

the walls around you kept closing in—

but the sea and sky were also yours.

No one else is around to drink with yuou

from the watery fog, shadowy depths.

You’re alone with the whirling cosmos.

Goodbye, love, far away, in a warm place.

Night is endless here, silence infinite.

On Friday, April 25, The Arts Café Mystic will continue its 20th

and music with a program featuring Edward Hirsch who is widely considered “one of our

best poets.”

All poets secretly wish to write poems that touch the reader’s emotions so deeply

they break or grow the reader’s heart. The rest is craft. To move a reader is to

change the world. Some poets try to do this with pyrotechnical language, some with

astonishing metaphors, some with dangerous subject matter. No American poet

touches and enlarges the reader’s heart more consistently, more honestly, and more

generously than does Edward Hirsch. Since bursting on the scene in 1981 with his

debut book For the Sleepwalkers, Hirsch has written poems that are distinguished

for shining an intelligent light into the dark corners where life hides its sweetness

and heartbreak. His recently published The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems

provides new poems that reconfirm what’s best about this special poet, as well as a

useful sampling of his “greatest hits” from past books. This passage from one of the

new poems called “Early Sunday Morning” provides a feel for his quiet power:

No one cares about my old humiliations,

but they go on dragging through my sleep

like a string of empty tin cans rattling

behind an abandoned car.

It’s like this: just when you think

you have forgotten that red-haired girl

who left you stranded in a parking lot

forty years ago, you wake up

early enough to see her disappearing

around the corner of your dream

on someone else’s motorcycle,

roaring onto the highway at sunrise.

About Hirsch, the great and venerable poet Richard Wilbur has said “I can’t

think of any contemporary whose poems have such an unfeigned urgency of feeling

-- at the same time, Hirsch’s poems have a considered richness in them, and repay

rereading.”

His six previous books of poems won many prizes, including the MacArthur ‘Genius’

Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the Delmore Schwarz Award, and the

Lavan Younger Poets Award from the American Academy of Poets. His volume of

inspirational prose essays, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, was a

national bestseller. Mr. Hirsch has also received the Ingram Merrill Award, the Rome

Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and fellowships from the Guggenheim

Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently President of

the Guggenheim Foundation.

Music for this edition of The Arts Cafe will be served up by the fine local jazz combo

the Jim Hunter Quartet with Steve Marien on sax. The program’s Opening Voice will

be provided by Jacquelin Gorman, the author of The Viewing Room, a deeply moving

collection of stories, which won last year’s Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction.

The Arts Café will take place on Friday, April 25, in the main gallery of the Mystic

Arts Center in downtown Mystic. Doors open at 7:00; show starts at 7:30 p.m. General

admission is $10. Students admitted free. For information call 860-912-2444 or write

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