This year the Poets Out Loud series concludes with a special reading by Edward Hirsch and high school poets, on Wednesday, April 14, at 7 p.m. in the 12th-Floor Lounge, Lowenstein Center, at the Lincoln Center campus. Hirsh is a distinguished poet and director of the Guggenheim Foundation (his latest book, The Living Fire was very favorably reviewed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review on March 28). He will be reading with student poets chosen by the Cristo Rey and LaGuardia schools, and by the GirlsWriteNow program, which pairs at-risk young women and mentors.

In the Language of the Here and Now

1

After a mid-winter death, I heard my aunts
say, He couldn’t pass through that gate.

You are like a Silk Route merchant with
a caravan, in their old idiom; or a minor
official sent to the border regions

to collect a salt tax. Every city has a gate,
the narrow portal between seasons. Difficult to pass.

In unaccustomed light, the daily banishment
of what you knew before, bitter flavors, foreign cold.

Come spring, showers harrow the road,
its shoulder the muted color of an astrakhan coat,
iris in long grass circling weathered milestones.

Forbearance in their words for one arriving
at a new city, seeing the tall embankment, wanting rest.

From Things That No Longer Delight Me
Fordham University Press

See the complete poem at Poetry Daily.

“Evoking sensations ranging from the sight of ancient statuary to the taste of dried watermelon seeds, these extraordinary poems are rooted both in the specificities of Asian and Asian-American experience and in broader questions about memory and loss,” said Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., John Boyd S.J. Chair in Poetic Imagination and director of Poets Out Loud.

Award-winning poet Eamon Grennan said of Chang’s work, “In their mixture of tenderness, delicacy of observation, a feel for textures, and a refined and refining intelligence, all brought to bear by a robust sensibility that doesn’t flinch in the face of the harder matters of absence, loss, and grief, the poems of Leslie Chang compose a complete, remembered, lived-in world.”

Leslie C. Chang
Poets Out Loud
Tuesday, March 23, 2010 | 7 p.m.
12-Floor Lounge, Lowenstein Center, Lincoln Center Campus
113 W. 60th St., New York, N.Y.
Free and Open to the Public

(See a sample of Chang’s work, “In the Language of the Here and Now,” on Fordham’s newsblog.)

The reading is part of Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud series. This year the series concludes with a special reading by Edward Hirsch and high school poets, on Wednesday, April 14, at the Lincoln Center campus. Hirsh is a distinguished poet and director of the Guggenheim Foundation. He will be reading with student poets chosen by the Cristo Rey and LaGuardia schools, and by the GirlsWriteNow program, which pairs at-risk young women and mentors.