Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Great. Someone else for me to be jealous of. Christopher Bakken, associate professor of English at Allegheny College has won the Helen C. Smith Prize for the best book of poetry in 2006 for Goat Funeral.

"Duet with Salvatore Quasimodo"

When I die I’ll meet you at Mycenae
where stones mark out an alphabet of spoils,
leaving only a few square facts unquarried.

You’ll remember the place by its painting:
a splash of Sicilian green, cypresses,
and a pointillism of widow’s heads.

The murmurs of every Medieval square
give in to dusk; iron church bells
brim with the ether you leave in your wake.

Take down your lyre from the willow now,
it has sheltered long enough, like a flea
in the sultan’s beard, your island music

with its ancestry in the sea itself,
seasoned with a cloud-burst from Malta,
cannon dust, and bruised acacia blossoms.

Show me how to call beyond vacancy,
since we cannot out sing the megaphones;
when we become famished by their prattle

sustenance will be waiting for us there,
concealed by shadows in a beehive tomb
where the dead mount their chariots for war.


Three local organists — Rebecca Borthwick-Aiken, Kevin Dill and James Ross – will present a concert at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 22 in Ford Chapel at Allegheny College. The concert is free and open to the public.


Chicago Celtic band The Crossing plays at Seneca's Brother Bean tomorrow (Thursday night) from 7pm -9pm. No cover.


The Gypsy Dave plays for free this weekend on the 21 at the Titusville Earth Day Festival in Titusville's Burgess Park.


The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profiles the region's vernacular "2 up 2 down architecture"


What won't you find at the London Book Fair? Authors...or...books...


MP3 site Some Velvet Blog dishes put the love for Pittsburgh's Black Moth Super Rainbow.

1 comment:

Peter Greene said...

Becky Borthwick is the bomb. I heard her play many times when I was a undergrad at Allegheny, back in the day. Every Easter, the entire congregation would stay after the service, just standing in the pews and listening as she banged out the most gut-busting awesome piece of organ postludery you ever did hear!