Poet Meg Schoerke reads at Springer-Croke Fine Art

Fri, Dec 2
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
FREE

Meg Schoerke will read from her book Anatomical Venus on Friday,
December 2 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. at the Springer-Croke Fine Art gallery
on upper-Sacramento Street. Anatomical Venus is a fluid, elegant
collection of poems in formal and finely-sculpted free-verse styles
that ranges across of diversity of subjects and tones--poems about
music, about personal relationships, about the struggles of
violation, about historical figures--that are unified by the author's
sonorous voice and precise eye. Anatomical Venus is a refined and
mature debut for Schoerke, and establishes her as a poet whose career
bears watching.

According to Mary Kinzie, "Meg Schoerke is aware of the two impulses
that oppose each this writer's poems of humans caught in a
tantalizing embrace with spectral tormentors, of the urban nightmare
fed and propelled by jazz music and the extreme life it reflects and
imposes, of the sudden touch, brushing against a life that had seemed
for a while to be unfolding in an ordinary present time, of the
archetype of the soul under orders (Eurydice, Persephone, Narcissus),
and finally in poems of animals in complex encounters dramatized by
mortality. 'Pas de Deux' can be compared to the greatest love poems;
so too can the 'Riptide' poems and 'Beyond Mourning.' Schoerke proves
herself the daughter of Ovid, as well as of Baudelaire."

Meg Schoerke has contributed poems and reviews to journals such as
The American Scholar, TriQuarterly, and Hudson Review, and her essays
have appeared in a variety of collections on twentieth century
American poetry. In 2001, Robert L. Barth published her poetry
chapbook, Beyond Mourning. With Dana Gioia and David Mason, she has
co-edited two anthologies, Twentieth Century American Poetry and
Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry
(McGraw-Hill, 2003). She received her B.A. from Northwestern
University and earned her M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D degrees from
Washington University in St. Louis. An Associate Professor of English
at San Francisco State University, she teaches courses in nineteenth
and twentieth century American and British poetry.

Sight Lines
Like an interior storm
roiling the top floor room, the trapped dove,
scattering feathers floorward from above
the sill and table, rattles
the glass, assaulting
the window, beating and beating against the pane
as if it could break through.
But its view
deceives: those hurrying clouds, those ranks
of roofs and chimney tops
recede to inviting distances.
Beyond the window, other birds
idle along the gusts, wings motionless,
while this dove panics, fooled. Its once soft
calls-the gentle, falling
four beat trills of temperate mourningscatter
in shrieks, high pitched and stuttering,
as it flounders, certain
that nothing bars its escape, not even
the dove it sees there in the glass.

Venue:

Springer-Croke Fine Art
3236 Sacramento Street
San Francisco
415-931-1779
www.springer-croke.com

cross Street is Presidio

Additional Info:
-croke.com
415-931-1779
www.springer-croke.com