Gregory Djanikian's rescheduled Zoom reading, with introductions by Billy Collins

Dear APP readers:

In this rescheduled Zoom reading, Gregory will read poems from his new book, Sojourners of the In-Between, sponsored by the Katonah Poetry Series, on January 31st, at 4:00 PM. 

Please click on  http://katonahpoetry.com  which will tell you how to register and obtain your Zoom link.

 

Gregory Djanikian reads from his work (via Zoom) October 4, 2020 POSTPONED

Due to technical issues, this reading was postponed. 













Gregory Djanikian, poet and professor, will be reading from his new book, Sojourners of the In-Between, sponsored by the Katonah Poetry Series, on Sunday, October, 4th, 4:00 PM. with a special introduction by former U. S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins

Here is the link: http://katonahpoetry.com

Of Djanikian's most recent book, Sojourners of the In-Between, Lawrence Raab writes: "One of the most striking features of Djanikian's lithe and vigorous poems is their refusal to be glum. They don't ignore grief, they just keep surprising themselves into wonder, then praise - how grateful we might feel for 'this everything / of being alive together.' Funny, sad, lyrical, meditative - sometimes all at once - these poems happily reveal the many different kinds of truths the world offers."

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Armenian parentage, Djanikian came to the US at the age of eight after his family's livelihood was lost in the tumult of political change. A graduate of the Syracuse University writing program, Djanikian was the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania for many years. In honor of his dedication to his students, the Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program has been established in his name. Djianikian lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife, artist Alysa Bennett.

In his recent interview with KPS's Ann van Buren, Djanikian expresses the hope that people "find the sense of joy about life that the poems present." Djanikian is the author of seven collections of poetry and is the recipient of many awards and prizes. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies.

Zoom will open at 3:45 p.m. for the reading, which begins at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 4th, 2020. An audience Q&A follows. The Zoom link is posted here: https://tinyurl.com/djanikian.

Suggested donation is $5 for adults, students free. We appreciate your donations of any amount; they enable us to pay our poets as they deserve.

You can donate via PayPal: http://katonahpoetry.com/donations/ See Less

Gregory Djanikian: Reconstitutions, Dispersions

There’s an easiness in how the Black River
parts around the rocks
then comes together almost as itself.

Foxes deep among the trees,
beetles underneath the stones,
I’d like to sense them the way bees sense
the ultraviolet shining in flowers
as if they were the flowers.

I smell the earth in a handful of earth,
touch the atoms I might one day be colluding with.
I look at honeysuckle and think goshawk,
finger a willow branch and say lodestone.

Maybe that loose amalgam I’ve called ghost
might reappear one day as a mourning dove
fluttering at night against my window.

I, I, I, (as in impermeable):
how much of the world
has seeped into that slender vowel,
the carbon from the stars I’ve bonded with,
the oxygen that makes up most of my body.

The cold is pimpling my arms, and maybe
a molecule of me might have been part
of some plump goose a thousand years ago,
the air it breathed what I’m breathing now.

The alphabet of matter
transposing itself into different guises.

The river I put my hand into now,
river I might become, imagining
the feel of trout gill, fox tongue,
taking me, drinking me in.

Gregory Djanikian: A Moment Without Objects

Suddenly I felt something had been forgotten
and I went from cupboard to bed stand
to coffee mug and desk to find what I thought

had been missing from my life
as though I could find it
where I had spent most of my hours.

I sharpened a pencil, I plucked
a guitar string, though nothing seemed to be
different from what had always been.

I said mountain then desert
as if the two contrarieties
would offer me a doorway
to a sideways landscape

though everything stood as it was
while I counted my breaths
without keeping track of the number.

Then there was a shrill sound
outside, a blue jay’s screech,
a shadow of wing tipping the balance.

Then the noise of the house readjusting its planks
and sunlight falling on the kitchen floor
and my fingers running slowly
along the smooth apparition of morning
without knowing why.


This poem appears in Gregory's latest collection, Sojourners of the In-Between. For more information about the author and his books, visit http://gregorydjanikian.com/book/sojourners-of-the-in-between/

Gregory Djanikian: Dark Wings

Now is the time to say

something for the animals 

felled by gunshot and broadax 

cluster bomb and bayonet

who have lain curled in their own blood 

without succor or consolation 

their flanks torn apart, 

their fibulas shattered,

the muscles of their rippled 

animal strengths untendoned, 

horses in their heavy tranquility,

dogs snuffling the marshy grass 

by river bank, by well-spring, 

the sleek, undaunted cats, the goats

meandering by olive groves 

without notion of bullet or 

impending boom of artillery, 

a hot sharp sting of pain

felt in the deepest folds 

where nothing, neither claw, nor tooth, 

nor talon, nor the brightest shoots

of light has ever reached

Gregory Djanikian, So I Will Till the Ground, 2007, Carnegie-Mellon University Press

Gregory Djanikian featured on Poetry Foundation's podcast.

Click here to hear the sound clip. Enjoy!

There are more poems by Gregory Djanikian posted on the Poetry Foundations website, and they can be found here.

Literary Quote for March 2015

When you know a poem by heart, that poem is in the body.  It is there when you are walking down the street, or standing in a shower, or walking through the woods. The words come back. It’s like someone else is there with you, reciting the words. Donald Hall says a poem is an inside person talking to an inside person. It’s a melding of consciousness that is done in solitary-ness.

Gregory Djanikian

From "The Poet and the Moment", Penn Gazette, 21 Aug 2014

Gregory Djanikian: After the First Snow

As if in a dream,

you suddenly find yourself walking

in a still country

of snow and moon and trees,

cold and uncomfortable,

blindly pushing

as if your life depended on it

to shelter somewhere on the far side of a field,

or to a place half-conceived,

or perhaps forgotten,

and you find yourself looking down, focusing

on nothing

but the hypnotic, even movements of your stride

and the snow-covered boots

that fall on nothing but snow,

and as you chart your next

turn, you begin to realize that only

your movement

distinguishes you

from this ambush of stillness,

the arrangement of parts, each still

in itself, uncommunicative,

the collapse of motion,

relativity, proportion, order,

and as the mind abandons

the grace and fluidity of motion,

your movements become irregular

and unattractive,

and you begin to stiffen, grow tired,

and gradually,

as you feel your own weight

tottering

above your legs, you begin

to submit, and before the last turn,

near a cluster of bare, empty-headed

trees, stop,

and let all resistance pass out of you,

and as your mind stretches toward that expanse

from where you could have come,

the snow begins to shape itself around you

and you become a part of the whiteness

and the cluster

yet wholly distinct and still

as if in a dream,

as if you had never seen this place

of snow, of moon, of trees, here

as though nothing were yours,

not even

the slight sounds

of your breathing.

Gregory Djanikian: Love Poem with Crowbar

I've walked into the house, I'm trying

to put my finger on it. Maybe it's how

things have been reshuffled, the rugs,

the paintings that are playing musical chairs.

Maybe it's the sitting room suddenly

taking on the sharp scent of mesquite,

mesquite side table, mesquite credenza,

black pots on the shelves

with their large open mouths.

I can hear my wife on the back stairs

ripping the carpet up from the treads,

ringing the crowbar with her hammer

like an alarm, watch your step.

There's new wallpaper in the bedroom,

toucans perched in the broad-leaf vines,

lizards among the mangrove branches—

so many ways of looking at it.

It's as if she's rehearsing for some shift,

her small adjustments furthering us away

from the way we're used to.

On the news this morning, a cow

swept up by a tornado, found miles away

unharmed, nuzzling in the grass—

almost as if nothing had happened,

a small upsurge of terror,

then the taste of sweetness.

I don't stand in her way, especially

when her hands are too busy squaring her goggles

and all I can say is “Honey, unplug the Sawzall,

let's have some wine, feed the birds.”

There are river stones on the sill

lined up like ellipses, horse sculptures

on the dresser that are made of straw.

Whatever proves too conclusive,

like this brick wall along the garden,

my wife sees in it the promise of a doorway,

the light slipping through.

Like the way she'll sleep tonight

with her face to the window,

the house quiet except

for her steady breathing,

what I'll be listening closely to,

hearing the river in it,

hearing horses at the edge

of the river, lithe and riderless.

Gregory Djanikian: Questions for a Late Night

And what if the soldiers came

shouting and clattering, pulling you

out of your house for the journey

which had no clear destination?

What if the road you had to follow

looking for fruit trees, spring water,

had to be imagined each morning,

no jacarandas offering you shade,

the deserts wafting you

like a husk in the simoom?

What if the granaries were leveled, the rivers dry,

young girls bruised in the thighs,

the bird-like men without feet?

What would the darkness bring you—

wolf howls, hoof beats

sticking you like needles—

if all you wanted of it

was a place to enter, disguised

from the smallest reflection?

What if there were no night,

the heavens dismantled, the earth

lit by a hundred suns?

What if you were the perpetual witness

walking without sleep

where everyone desired it

and no one dared close his eyes?

What words could you say

to remember the sound of breakage?

In what place would you touch your body

to feel your body touching you back? 

Gregory Djanikian: This, Too, Shall Be a Place of Gathering

Then one day we will find ourselves

standing near a river

the sound of purling water

reminding us of our first incitements.

Yellow leaves will wreath us

like small vanishing suns.

A crowd on the far bank

will gather, their scarves furled,

their hats pulled tightly on,

waiting to return to their own entanglements.

There will be no flourishes, no twittering birds

or wind thrumming in the reeds.

At the edge of the woods

we will stand as shyly

as animals about to enter

their last astonishment.

Someone will be speaking of love

and the words will be falling

like seed-shells into the river

and in different tongues.

And the river will be moving

with no memory of our bodies

or how often we knelt by its side

with open mouths.

Quote of the month

“I feel that poetry is a communication between people on the most intense level, even if it’s only between two people, writer and reader. This relationship may be one of the most intimate we might experience, when one intuitively and deeply speaks to another.”

Gregory Djanikian

Gregory Djanikian: Armenian Pastoral (1915)

Memory is useless if none of us

remembers the same things.

-- Bruce Murphy

If Anoush were holding her child
and watching the sheep 
carted off like men to the slaughter

and Armenag in his dark vest and trousers
were hobbling barefoot in the village square
toward the pockmarked wall

and Ashod in his prison cell
were counting the sprigs of parsley
that must be rising in his garden now

if Araxi were razor-thin by the roadside
dreaming of a while mountain 
turning red in the alpenglow

if Antranig refusing to walk
were shod like a horse
and tethered in his own pasture

and Azniv were a wet nurse now
to a battalion of mouths
her infant slit clean in the straw

how long would it have to go on then
beginning with A and spilling over
into all the alphabets

before mother sister father child
could wear the same faces in any language

be cut from the same tongue.

This poem has appeared in So I will till the ground, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2007. It has previously appeared in Poetry Magazine in 2002 and Ararat in 2004. An audio recording of the author reading his piece is available by clicking on the link below.
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/Pennsound/authors/Djanikian/KWH_02-27-07/Djanikian-Greg_09_Armenian-Pastoral-1915_UPenn_2-20-07.mp3

Gregory Djanikian's Podcast in the Kelly Writers House series

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/writershouse/podcasts/Kelly-Writers-House-Podcast_08_Djanikian.mp3

Click on the link to hear this outstanding podcast of Gregory Djanikian reading from his poems about the Armenian Genocide and his family life.

Gregory Djanikian: Apartment House At Evening

Something about a hundred windows
lit up like a ship's upper decks, something

about the weed trees
tossing like water below

and the cumulus steam
from the boiler stacks billowing away

and something, too, about a woman
taking off her heels and leaning

dreamily on the balcony railing
as if there's an ocean about her

and something about the laundry
strung up between apartments

like flags signalling the future
and about the samba now

wafting in the cool breeze
and moonlight falling from everywhere

and Nevrig dancing on the rooftop with Aram
and the city blazing with lights

like a harbor about to be left behind
with its customs house and identity cards,

the lines untied, the deep
horizonless night rolling in.

Gregory Djanikian, from Years Later (Carnegie Mellon University Press).

Gregory Djanikian: My Uncle's Eye

              Alexandria, 1954

It had happened on a small Cairo street,
the shops smelling of dark leather,
the hookah parlors spilling out
onto the crowded sidewalk.

It had been a fight, someone
throwing a bottle at my uncle's face,
the slivers lodging deep.

I stared hard at that blind watery sheen.
I thought my uncle must live
a shadow life, imagining with one eye
what the other couldn't see.

I walked one day through the house
with my hand over half my face,
bumping into things, swiveling my head.

"Silly boy," my grandmother said,
knitting quietly in her armchair,
"what's to become of you?"

"Loony brain," my sister warbled,
twirling gauzily away like a ballerina.

But I knew my uncle would be arriving for a visit,
driving from Cairo on the long desert road,
and he would be making time,
measuring speeds.

And I was practicing how to move
the way he moved, skimming along
hazy edges, judging distances
by inkling, relying on some part
of the tangible world
without knowing exactly
what to hold on to,
what to let go.

Gregory Djanikian: When I first saw snow

Click here to hear the audio clip When I first saw snow read by Gregory Djanikian.

Tarrytown, N.Y.


Bing Crosby was singing "White Christmas"
on the radio, we were staying at my aunt's house
waiting for papers, my father was looking for a job.
We had trimmed the tree the night before,
sap had run on my fingers and for the first time
I was smelling pine wherever I went.
Anais, my cousin, was upstairs in her room
listening to Danny and the Juniors.
Haigo was playing Monopoly with Lucy, his sister,
Buzzy, the boy next door, had eyes for her
and there was a rattle of dice, a shuffling
of Boardwalk, Park Place, Marvin Gardens.
There were red bows on the Christmas tree.
It had snowed all night.
My boot buckles were clinking like small bells
as I thumped to the door and out
onto the grey planks of the porch dusted with snow.
The world was immaculate, new,
even the trees had changed color,
and when I touched the snow on the railing
I didn't know what I had touched, ice or fire.
I heard, "I'm dreaming. . ."
I heard, "At the hop, hop, hop. . . oh, baby."
I heard "B & O" and the train in my imagination
was whistling through the great plains.
And I was stepping off,
I was falling deeply into America.

GREGORY DJANIKIAN: MRS. CALDERA’S HOUSE OF THINGS

You are sitting in Mrs. Caldera’s kitchen,
you are sipping a glass of lemonade
and trying not to be too curious about
the box of plastic hummingbirds behind you,
the tray of tineless forks at your elbow.

You have heard about the backroom
where no one else has ever gone
and whatever enters, remains,
refrigerator doors, fused coils,
mower blades, milk bottles, pistons, gears.

“You never know,” she says, rummaging
through a cedar chest of recipes,
“when something will come of use.”

There is a vase of pencil tips on the table,
a bowl full of miniature wheels and axles.

Upstairs, where her children slept,
the doors will not close,
the stacks of magazines are burgeoning,
there are snow shoes and lampshades,
bedsprings and picture tubes,
and boxes and boxes of irreducibles!

You imagine the headline in the Literalist Express:
House Founders Under Weight Of Past.

But Mrs Caldera is baking cookies,
she is humming a song from childhood,
her arms are heavy and strong,
they have held babies, a husband,
tractor parts and gas tanks,
what have they not found a place for?

It is getting dark, you have sat for a long time.
If you move, you feel something will be disturbed,
there is room enough only for your body.
“Stay awhile,” Mrs. Caldera says,
and never have you felt so valuable.


Gregory Djanikian, “Mrs. Caldera’s House of Things” from About Distance. Copyright © 1995 by Gregory Djanikian. Used by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press. Gregory Djanikian’s collections include So I Will Till the Ground (2007), Years Later (2000), Falling Deeply . . .

Gregory Djanikian reading at the Glendale Public Library in March 2008

Gregory Djanikian will be in California to read from his new
collection of poetry, So I Will Till The Ground, at the Glendale Public
Library, 222 East Harvard Street, Glendale, CA, on Monday, March 10.

He will be introduced by fellow poet Lory Bedikian.

Click on the thumbnail below to expand and print the flyer.

Gregory Djanikian: FIRST SUPPER IN THE NEW COUNTRY

Uncle Hagop was grilling kebab
in the fireplace, sitting on a crate,
basting each morsel of lamb
with yogurt and oil.

"This is for your mother," he was saying,
as he drew the brush along a skewer,
"and this is in memory of your grandfather
who swims with the fishes."

There was hardly any furniture,
all our rugs had been left behind,
there were so many echoes.

Outside, it was Pennsylvania
heavy with snow, the sidewalks
had disappeared, streets had become
a mirage of dunes.

"Uncle Hagop," I said, "the place
is filling up with smoke." Our eyes
had begun tearing, we were opening windows,
flapping towels by the front door.

"Look at these beauties," he said, turning
the onions on their sides, singing
O rise up my Armenian heart
above the jeweled Caucasus!

There was nothing to do but shrug helplessly
as the neighbors passed by the door
looking in, amazed to see something
like a campfire in the middle of the city
and Uncle Hagop lifting up his glass

to the sheep herders of Yerevan
and the hardy grasses and grape vines
rooted deep in the rocky soil.

My grandmother was looking heavenward,
my sister was asking if we could return
to normal, we were all wiping our eyes,
waiting for sirens or the eviction notice

and Uncle Hagop was singing another chorus
about the heartland, forking the lamb
to its soft pink center, and bringing
platefuls of it like an offering
to the makeshift table

where we sat down, raising
a toast to the old life and new,
eating and saying as we ate
how everything had been done
to a turn, how really there was
no other way of doing it.

GREGORY DJANIKIAN


COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Poetry Association