Good reading Thursday night at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Harvard Square: Katia Kapovich, Philip Nikolayev and Glyn Maxwell. All three were very good, and blended seriousness and levity together quite nicely. I had seen Nikolayev & Kapovich back in October and really enjoyed their books after buying them, especially Nikolayev's embedded sonnets. I had heard of Maxwell, and he’s a good reader. He read a lot of new poems, which I always appreciate. I bought his book Nerve. I liked the very first poem in it, which is always a good sign.

THE SEA COMES IN LIKE NOTHING BUT THE SEA

The sea comes in like nothing but the sea,
but still a mind, knowing how seldom words

augment, reorders them before the breaker
and plays them as it comes. All that should sound

is water reaching into the rough space
the mind has cleared. The clearing of that mind

is nothing to the sea. The means whereby
the goats were chosen nothing to the god,

who asked only a breathing life of us,
to prove we were still there when it was doubted.

The pathetic fallacy is dismantled in this poem - the sea is just the sea - and blind religiosity dispatched, though we're not left completely alone. It reminds me of Pessoa in The Keeper of Sheep when he wrote:

The moonlight behind the tall branches
The poets all say is more
Than the moonlight behind the tall branches.

But for me, who do not know what I think, -
What the moonlight behind the tall branches
Is, beyond its being
The moonlight behind the tall branches,
Is its not being more
Than the moonlight behind the tall branches.

(tr. Edwin Honig & Susan M. Brown)

A doubleplusgood surprise upon reaching the gallery was that they were displaying some photographs by Josef Sudek, an amazing Czech photographer. There had been an exhibit at the MFA some time ago that I really dug.