Live from the Bowery Poetry Club: Alan Semerdjian

Gartal and the Armenian Poetry Project are proud to release this audio clip recorded live at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on April 2, 2010. Click to hear Alan Semerdjian’s  reading of his poem LUCKY.

for Diana Der Hovanessian

I thought of her at a blackjack table

with scarlet and midnight

chips at her side pondering

situations for two Armenians

looking sideways for each other,

writing poems during shuffles.

And how she wrote

Playing cards with an Armenian

is different

from playing cards with anyone

else.

almost desperately

before she crossed it out

and looked at me, silent

because when two Armenians

are quiet it’s not

that they’ve found enough to say.

Alan Semerdjian: GRANDCHILDREN OF GENOCIDE

We think of bombfields and big when we think of genocide.

We think of mass cleansing.  We think in holes.  We think

the whole page.  We think what’s under it, what they’ve been

covering up.  We think there might have been people

in those whole pages.

We think of chambers when we think of genocide.  We think

of people crying.  We think of people climbing.  We think of

people climbing and crying, crying and climbing.  We think of both

people climbing and people crying.  We think in chambers. 

We think in those horrible chambers when we think of genocide.

Those horrible 20^th century chambers.

When we think of genocide, we don’t think of mountains and deserts.

We don’t think of bazaars.  When we do think of them,

we don’t think of young democratic people and pomegranates. 

We don’t think of young democratic people with pomegranates

at bazaars when we think of genocide.  We don’t think of them

next to our grandfathers.  We don’t think of next to them.

Then there are young democratic people who don’t eat pomegranates

and don’t think of genocide.  We don’t think of them either.

 

We don’t think of them when we think of genocide, but we do think

of moustaches.  We don’t think of long and lovely moustaches,

but we think of moustaches when we think of genocide. 

We don’t think of grandfathers plural or generations of grandfathers

before that when we think of genocide.  But we do think of mothers.

And mothers before that.  But we do think of mothers,

but we don’t think of women.  We don’t think of women dancing. 

We don’t hear the music when we think of genocide. 

These things we think about and not hear when we think about genocide.

And we don’t think of civil war as genocide.  We hear about it.

We don’t call in enough with such information. 

We think about reconciliation, but we don’t

think about reconciliation when we think about genocide. 

We don’t study the memorials, we don’t explain the play in papers,

we don’t shake hands and make up.  When we think of genocide,

we do other things with our hands.

Alan Semerdjian: How To Read A Fortune In A Cup Of Turkish Coffee

I haven’t gone to places most people visit / mosques
churches temples synagogues sorcerers / but I’ve had my
coffee ground read.
Nazim Hikmet

She studied fate on Sundays. It wasn’t every Sunday,
but it felt like it, mostly because of the way she held the
handle, read the insides like fantastic scriptures or subway
maps. It was easy for her. In ten minutes of work, she’d
find two birds carrying white beaded necklaces, a baby in
the trees, and the curse of an eye exploding out of a volcano.
The young in the family couldn’t wait to grow up,
their tongues hanging out for coffee and a lick of the old
country. In the Semerdjian family room, the women sang
stories like gypsies while I marked my height against the
hall closet door. They read each other’s minds.

I once saw my mother begin her spin of the cup on a
blue afternoon. I remember how she swirled its insides,
loosening the essential fibers at the bottom, then turned it
over. The tiny layer of thick mud poured into the saucer’s
curves. Its descent was slow and complete; the handle of
the cup, upside down now, looked like an Armenian nose.

She, too, gave her cup to my grandmother. She, who
washed her clothes, translated her mail, took the same address
and never made a sound to wake her at night across
the hall. She asked for her fate as well. What could my
grandmother tell her? What could she read in the bottom
of that cup of coffee that she didn’t help write? What
could she unpack that wasn’t already put away? They
tried at it for hours. Hours turned to days, days turned to
weeks and weeks turned the conversations into graffiti you
almost forget is there.

I knew then that I would ask for the same treatment.
Over time, I would finish my cup in a dimly lit middle eastern
café on the lower east side and tell the waiter to keep
the change. My grandmother would be long passed away.
My mother would not be around, perhaps in the old family
home worrying about the length of my coat for the season.
I knew then that when the night came, I would put my
pen and notebook away, turn the cup over, and imagine
what he’d see.

Copyright Alan Semerdjian

Armenian-American poets featured in Poetryvlog.com

Alan Semerdjian and Amy Ouzoonian are featured in the Poetryvlog.com website.

To hear and view Alan reading his poems, click here.


To hear and view Amy reading her poems, click here.


Here are the instructions to sending your own poetry videos:

We welcome videos from published poets. Acceptance will be determined by the poetry editor and technical staff.

Presently, all videos sent to us should be made on a “Mini DV Digital Video Cassette”, the reading should not exceed five minutes, the sound and focus must be of good quality; we will return the cassette if requested. The video will only be edited for sound level and time.

Links to the poet's books, publications, other poems, website, etc. are helpful to viewers who want to read more.

Videos can be sent to Poetryvlog.com, P.O. Box 634, Port Jefferson, NY 11777. As time allows the frequency of poets appearing on the site will increase from once to twice a week, and then maybe even five days a week. All the appearances are archived so once a poet is on the site that video remains, to be seen at will.

Alan Semerdjian: Forensic Knot Analysis

Then, they taught me how to tie my shoes,
this band of migrant characters:
Monkey’s Fist, Sheetbend
Round Turn, Turk’s Head,
Prussick, Diamond
Rodi, Half-hitch.
One is a snake charmed in the grass.
One is a kneeling buddha,
one, directions for angels, and
another, a judaic priest lost in Williamsburg.
One is the captain of the
Harvard crew team.
One, a plowing tool.
There are llamas and cranes,
two swans on a lake,
kangaroos with celtic staffs-
workbooks of people- in my alphabet.
They parade around the incensed corners
Of my life freezing in tangled poses when I dare to look.
A musketeer’s ostrich plume hat-
tricorne cocked,
pomegranate seeds, halva manifested,
all a turn of the lip around the word
asvadtzim, my god. Jigsaw minded composition,
theater of angles, the soft script of candle and flame
alive in a night about to breeze,
alone on a page of resurrections,
you are the desert wizard in a sandstorm
conducting last dances
of a fading people in
secret evening gatherings of ink.

Copyright Alan Semerdjian
Used here by kind permission of the author

Alan Semerdjian: THE ARMENIAN ALPHABET

for Mesrop Mashtots- inventor of the Armenian alphabet

Font

It is not simple mathematics
and symbols, not just
characters on a page. Language
is an almanac.

My alphabet is a crew of dolphins,
a verdict of slanted joshua trees
in transmission,
in ocular mistrust of neighbor,
from the bellies of which spark sharp green fragments
and cadaverous song.

My alphabet is a tank of definitions
foliating like apricot leaves.
It haunts the hinting of its crescents,
the spaces that ellipse themselves
to ceiling of planetarium
to the nebulous of memory,
brazened photographs’ tapestry.

My grandfather taught me how to swim
with onions on his tongue.

I pried the index of his fingers free
to inked palms and shells of thumbs.

I was bent inside my mother
until they cut her open.

Someone told me four blind mice
lay down in somersaults across my name.

They each had a story to tell
about my mutation.

Copyright Alan Semerdjian
Used here by kind permission of the author