Aaron McCollough is the Assistant Director and Editorial Director of Michigan Publishing, which includes the University of Michigan Press. His PhD in English literature is from the U. of Michigan and MFA in creative writing from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His 5 books include Double Venus, No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, and Underlight—a lyrical engagement with sadness as part of self-formation and the paradoxes of suffering and joy in codependence.
Featured reader is followed by Open Mic reading at 8 p.m. All writers welcome. Read your own or other favorite poetry. Sign up begins 6:45 p.m.
Poetry Series readings every fourth Wednesday hosted by Joe Kelty and Ed Morin
Special Rider Blues – by Aaron McCooough
It is the special circumstance of abundance
and abjection that makes for the blues
only modifying things
nothing under our boot-soles
only the troubled muddled
and hectoring of modify
your NO your YES
when hailing pleasure is hailing pain
a cautious lot, cocking the head in such a way
you didn’t know if you were being greeted
or being shunned
struck twice by lightning
twice in the american place
modification and sameness : kith and cruel wool
united states of metamorphosis
*
In the giant lawn lightning struck
Or the giant pond lightning threaded
modifying
you have to have a lot of patience
with bureaucracy to live in a river
speak hear see here touch this pulsive community
chartered by fathers fingering the humane
the men who had preceded them had rendered in-between things
more clearly, bringing into focus the gradients that connected
this to that, showing how you got from here to there
this patrimony tho
with everything in between missing or, at best, out of focus
that this ground be under something legal
fungible
with many cells
*
what these blues is
between two seams
sames a long styrofoam plateau
on this parenthesis
“take this message to the other side”
on
this long lonesome loft
from that
between NO and YES
of forever roll-over revolver
the garden is open to visitors between
Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle 