Special Date — Friday, Oct. 24, 2008 — Special Date
Host: Tim Kahl
1719 25th Street at HQ for the Arts
Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collection, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year and Esquire Magazine named one of its eight Best Books of the Year. Her second poetry book, The Heaven-Sent Leaf will be out with BOA Editions in the fall of 2008.
Katy Lederer's poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, GQ, and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner), and State of the Union (Wave Books), among other compilations.
Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence Magazine. Her honors and awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers Program.
Lederer currently works at the D.E. Shaw group, a proprietary trading firm based in New York City.
Me, a Brainworker
Me, a brainworker toiling in pristine white hallways.
Abnormal, aboriginal, endemic to this site.
Some people sell their wares outside.
In the pulsating light of Times Square they are singing.
In their noses and nipples, the glinting of rings.
Let us call them unoriginal.
Let us call them all these awful things.
The busy unoriginals are throwing out their trash,
But on this lovely parchment they are writing priceless poems.
They suppose that by such rendering they'll be remembered after death.
They suppose that by such influence their souls will sing eternally.
In the hallways, we are killing time,
Its blood now thick and lurid on the freshly painted walls.
Rebecca Morrison (aka Eskimo Pie Girl) graduated summa cum laude from UC Davis. She has published 5 chapbooks. She was the former VP of the Sacramento Poetry Center, was one of the founding editors of Poetry Now, and is currently one of the hosts for the SPC reading series. She has been the editor of eskimopie.net for 7 years. She has been running the 3rd Sunday Writer's Group with Nancy Wallace since 1995. She has given over a 100 readings and has read her poetry in Sacramento, Davis, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Lodi, Stockton, Reno, Auburn, Nevada City, El Dorado Hills, New Hampshire, Fresno and elsewhere
Why I Could Never Be a Saint
My desire bounds through the daffodils
like a jackrabbit.
I hoard memories and moments like marbles,
never giving them to those less fortunate.
My ecstasy is not reserved for God,
I throw it away
carelessly in the afternoon
to an emerald hummingbird.
I gorge myself
on carnal sensations,
burning myself in the mid-day sun,
drunk on robin song.
I offer devotions
to the glorious morning,
already rich and brilliant.
I supplicate
in front of its opening golden petals.
I forsake the path
for the open fields and forest,
sacrificing all thoughts
of the promised land
for a temporary handful of lavender.
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