We are proud to welcome poets Mandy Kahn & William Archila for National Poetry Month at Village Poets on Sunday, April 28th at 4:30 pm. These two brilliant writers are well known in the Los Angeles area and beyond.
Two segments of open mic will be available and refreshments will be served. Suggested donation $5 per person for the cost of refreshments and to donate to the Little Landers Society that manages the Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91042. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913.
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Mandy Kahn is the author of three poetry collections: Holy Doors (2023), Glenn Gould’s Chair (2017) and Math, Heaven, Time (2014). Her poems have been included in the Best American Poetry anthology series, have been read on BBC Radio, and have been featured in the national newspaper column American Life in Poetry. She has given readings at Cambridge University, the Getty Museum, MOCA, and the Barrick Museum, has been profiled in the magazines Flaunt, Issue and Malibu, and has been interviewed by The Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s also the subject of Courtney Sell’s feature-length documentary Peace Piece: The Immersive Poems of Mandy Kahn. Kahn holds a degree in English from UC Berkeley. She lives in Los Angeles, where she serves as writer-in-residence at the Philosophical Research Society.
Three Poems from Holy Doors (Hat & Beard Editions, 2023)
The Everyday
Old friends, old loves, I celebrate
the day-to-day you’ve found: the favored cup,
the dog, the child, the husband, wife—
the hat rack by the door, the bowl of keys,
the chair in sun,
weekends with your omelets made
just right.
You graduated into
the encyclopedic pleasures of the everyday,
that brighter vision—
the sharp phantasmagoria you enter
when you watch your child through sprinkler water:
that moving prism.
Didn’t I always tell you, lover, roommate,
there were portals by the dishtowels?
You think you left your dreams.
You’ve entered
the Basilica of the Present
by its common causeway.
This, your striving earned.
I Do Not Fear Death, Yet Go on Living
I do not fear death, yet go on living.
I know choirs wait for me to finish,
wait to paint this clear air with their singing,
wait in gauzy figures, just past seeing.
I know what will greet me is more vibrant
than a field of poppies in the morning
widening their petals for the daylight.
I know what is waiting, past my seeing.
Know its luster. Still, I go on living,
chopping, boiling, eating, scrubbing, sweeping,
writing sonnets seen by just my ceiling,
stacking up old bills—paying, not paying,
then a bath, a walk, and it is evening.
Choirs wait to stir the air with feeling.
Angels wait to steer me towards a drawbridge
made of lighted crystal. I keep living.
All You Have to Do
What happens is, you survive,
and then,
the next moment.
Impossible, it seems,
to careen
to the future
without finishing tasks
from the present,
but it happens,
a new hour,
and you’re there.
And soon
a time arrives
with altered bylaws.
Look:
chairs float
here,
you can ride them,
and there are no banks.
The knots
that had tangled your hairdo
cradle a gosling,
which takes to the air—
downtown
you see choirs
roaming the alleys,
and ballplayers
knit.
Someone hands out
pineapple
on skewers,
and someone
paints flags,
a message arrives on letterhead
saying
You’re free now,
and cars run on thought.
Wait. Survive this.
The old rules
die faster
than you do.
Breathe
as the ship of the new way
sails into focus,
blowing its
festival horns.
William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. He is the author of The Art of Exile which was awarded the International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology which received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He was also awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. He has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickle, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Southern Indiana Review and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Theatre Under My Skin: Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. In 2010, he was named a Debut poet by Poets & Writers. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land. He has work forthcoming in Indiana Review, The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest and Salamander.
Las TÃas
They get together in the evenings
for coffee & pan dulce
when the weather is cool
and the white handkerchief out
for a sniff is a sign of colonial
elegance. They talk
in a tone of hamacas
in a hospice, medieval cathedral
in the form of a son
who can no longer reinvent
the sign of the cross. Eyeglasses
rimmed for the metal frame
of their lives in a small town. Belt
with a metal buckle to mark
the equator line around the barrel
of a gut. They come with flapping arms
around children saying, vengan,
sientense, vengan a comer.
Plaza pigeons are their lonely
apprentices, demanding a court case
for the death of their children.
Where are they going
in their proper sadness. Lament
happens so gradually
no one ever notices the dust
settling on the lemon trees.
Once home, nap of pears
& baby’s hair. Las tÃas
in their lavender & moth scent
in the blue flame of their stove
who boil water & oils
who board a plane every night
& never make it back.
Published in Atlanta Review
When it comes, my father's presence
stands behind the weight of a country
I've lost, like I've lost him, on his way out
over the hill, flooring his decrepit wagon,
exhaust pipe exhausted, which brings me
to bed, to the sleep of a sunken log
at the river's bottom, and my father in it,
like some huge bear wavering through
the thickest depths, all the while, I keep
my eye on the shimmering surface of light ,
wishing to come up for air, but I don't
want to forsake this absent god
tired in the pale grass.
He's been leaving for so long
it almost seems natural, his aimless driving,
aimless thinking. Outside, a helicopter
that may or may not allow me to continue
keeps announcing its presence,
clambering out of the rain clouds.
It's so frustrating, knowing all I have to do
is turn off the light to occupy the dark.
Published in Tin House
After Philip Larkin
After installing the shelves
in the pantry, mid-December
descending for a smoke,
I go out for a steaming shout
of fresh air on the patch
of dead grass. Which is to say
something must be done
about the loneliness it takes
to imagine the dead, which is
a word with a lot of deadweight
for the pallbearer, for dusk light
coming on like a tint of blue
nicked, with no attention
to Mack trucks cussing
like the B-side of a 45.
Something tells me to climb
the plastic tree house, something
tells me I am so near, so far.
Don’t confuse your pros and cons.
Here a plane, here a crow locked
on a telephone wire, 7-11 corner
with more scrapyard cars spatting
than the long crawl of ants
I can see from my three sad steps
over the ivy’s fence. I, too, shiver
knowing it’s in the shaky rooftops
of the Christmas trees, out of
dark mountain throats where the sky
fades like a staircase, but I am
no wolf howling at the moon’s pallor.
Inside me is a casket where I prefer
the dead to this cold, muted moon,
this fleck of foam puffing itself wide
like a stare. There’s as much darkness
around the Os of the moon as there is
much dirt in a grave. I’d love to hear
you tell me what it’s like to see me
propped, what it’s like to see me
drift in and out of clouds. Tell me
at least how my absence grounds
you with the pin of a needle. No one
walking the streets is here to see it.
Published in Colorado Review
