First Tuesdays Presents Martine Bellen

When: October 1, 2024
Where: Espresso 77 Café, 35-57 77th Street, Jackson Heights, NY 11372.
Time: 7:00 — 8:30 PM (open-mic sign up at 6:30)
Cost: $5 minimum purchase at the food counter.
More Information: Richard Jeffrey Newman

Martine Bellen is the author of ten books, most recently, An Anatomy of Curiosity (MadHat Press, 2023). Bellen’s other books include This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil); The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press); and Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon Press), which won the National Poetry Series. As a librettist, Bellen has written the text for Ovidiana, an opera based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (composer, Matthew Greenbaum), performed at Temple University and Dicapo Opera Theater in New York City. She has collaborated with David Rosenboom on AH! Opera No-Opera, which world premiered at REDCAT in L.A. Additionally, Bellen cowrote Moon in the Mirror (composer: Stephen Dembski) with Zhang Er, performed at Flushing Town Hall, California State University in L.A., Cleveland State University, and the Blue Building in New York City. Her poetry has been translated into Chinese, German, and Italian, among other languages. Bellen has been a recipient of the City Artist Corps Grant, Queens Art Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and has received a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy.

Here is her poem Opera*:

I hire Hypnos and his half-brother Death during so-called night,
Night, a subjective / relative overlap

When shadow-mind pulls the lashes down one’s eyes, pulls
The wool over one’s sheep, caws from one’s throat.

Night, as a prognosticating predator, a carrion crow, as a myopic mediator,
A psychopomp, at dusk, birthing into our deluding lucency, echoes of night on ghosted salt flats.

Night, as a farewell when blasting off into astronomical eventide. Once the glow
Fades. Once night went on for days.

Night, as what’s left of glittering detritus in the morn, pointing, declaiming,
“That was Night.” Intelligences perceive night

Through a variety of orbital periods. Dreams, too, Can collide like celestial bodies, like nebulae desires with impacts on life.

Like the disappearance of sunlight, loss of sleep, of an envelope in which night is sealed
Or wrapped in starry gift paper of fearsome lightlessness and midnight vacuum.

Red & black checkered hunting breeches I wore, a de facto Elmer J. Fudd,
Seriously harming myself and shhh, scwewwing up, night after night after night.

Once I believed I couldn’t live one more night, the fecundity of day: triple
Crème brie. Night, a painting I lent you one noon, a parting gap for your private hands,

Recollecting how you collect herbs to dry as visual memories of warm
Nights, a bundle of desiccated twigs strung like stars in a closeted planetarium.      

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.