© 2019 . All rights reserved.

Mitch Corber reads from Weather’s Feather

Mitch Corber has lived not only as a poet, performing artist and musician, but as a video documentarian of what has gone down on the Lower East Side among the poets and artists who’ve lived here for over 40 years. Mitch’s eagle eye, his stubborn refusal to quit and his poetic ear have allowed him to lens a historic poetics videography for our times and beyond. His weekly NYC public access cable show, Poetry Thin Air, is now in its 30th year, and its archives boast notables Ginsberg, Corso, di Prima, Micheline, Whalen, Cage, Ashbery, Steve Cannon, Eileen Myles, and Bob Holman among countless others. The list goes on including myself. In the Vimeo below, Mitch reads some poems from Weather’s Feather. The lyricism found in his book flows unabashedly from the poet himself who has been influenced not only by singer-songwriters of rock and roll, but by the poets and artists he’s been around and the sonorous exuberance of some of his favorites like Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane. Corber’s voluptuous turns of image and sound can delight and work like a charm.

And here are three poems that Mitch doesn’t read in the Vimeo. Enjoy.


ECLAIR OF THE HEART

a man overcome with emotion cannot gloam
or gloom his way home…

a snail occupied by a whale cannot prove
nor dispoverish a dish of sardines…

a sack on a madman’s head serves as a hat
dashed by the drive of who’ll keep him alive…

a doom served up by a saucer of milk heals
the welcome of wolves at his doubled
doorway to stay the night heaved by the blitz
of battleshod crumbs at the dumbwaiter’s
beck and call…

a posse of weak-kneed jehosophats splats
head-on with the long grin of one who
knows the most is missing from his puzzled
periphery…

“gotcha!” – get me closer to the gotten
of godspeak as the freak pries back
his laughing garb to lodge a complaint
at the ain’t-been-there-yet…

no solvent nor kosher dill whistle will fill
you up like an eclair of the heart…


ORANGE FERRET

1
Zoos fuse rivers astern till
the worm turns a synagogue
into sensory. A jar of par les vouz
rooms with a few sharks in a mock
marquee. Needless to trot a Scottish
thought till the milk curls in a curd
and craven mush. What’s level
soon sinks into pink and blue hue,
a half-note floating for a minute’s
instant. Dimmed in the during.

2
Women wake a halo, stomp on
the paunch of a Pope in a topiary
trance. Leaves press a kidding heart
into 3 parts origami to 2 parts
Rice-a-Roni. You’ve knit a predatory
wedding as the slew of moonfaced
poodles pads its walkway paws
in a penguin reckoning.
Long tall geezers kiss a whisper
raveling the rarified air.

3
Brilliantined chintz china-doll
Polyannas of famine and their curious
ham-on-rye whatevers
prod up the pride parade in luminous
bandaids wayfarers wear.
I’m inches from obeying a latent
namesake, a cadence a claptrap
enwrapped in fainting spurts
of a New York nurse.

4
Engines rev your severance
to the edge of sweat.
Numbers pummel your
leggy pensions. Wine ripples
a jittery prism, that of moving things
and a blond matinee. Day-glo
moments of eider iridescence
flash magnificence
in the leaky wand of a pond
upended by the blend
of cotton and gin.


OLD DAWN SONNETS

You’re a knit wig of wanton fondle
a lisp bent on the toothy tongue
a lip past kissing old dawn sonnets
the suckered hokum of a few wisps
of mint lamb bedamned

The thing pings and pangs
a landmine nettle
a blackened casual
a wounded booty resuming
in the thick wakeful

Ovoid as in envious roses
supposing tricky risk
a personal moist
a teddy of long looks in the shaking

Azure raises rolling eyes of futile fiber
the skin of dripping windows
in a leaden shudder
wrung of hangnail failsafes

View palatial pool halls in neuter feud
like gizmo fiddles
flaunting a riff of griefs
toned in the manic sawgrass moss

these penny kettles moving
toward tonic teas
your kissy cupboard bare
of sippy sugars



Weather’s Feather is published by Fly By Night Press (Gathering of the Tribes)

Leave a Reply