Rooftop Poetry Club - David Landrey

David Landrey

Bio:
David Landrey spent 38 years teaching literature, 35 of them at Buffalo State College, where he was afforded the freedom to develop courses in American Postmodern Poets and thus to educate himself about what has been most interesting in letters in our time. He studied briefly with Charles Olson at SUNY Buffalo and feels blessed to have met and worked with so many exciting poets, known and unknown. The co-editor of *Drawing From Life: A Selection of Joel Oppenheimer’s Work From the Village Voice* and of Oppenheimer’s *Poetry: The Ecology of the Soul*, he is the author of *Intermezzi to Divorce Poems and Dinner Table Scenes*. *Divorce Poems and Dinner Table Scenes* continue to develop. *Consciousness Suite* has been accepted for publication by Spuyten Duyvil. He has recently had essays published on William Bronk (in a collection from Talisman House) and on Robert Creeley and Joel Oppenheimer (in *The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time* from Talisman House).

Poems

The desk's roll-top concealed pigeon-holes
left and right of a central drawer
cluttered
while over all external surfaces
bubble gum cards
captured
daydreams of glory
statistics kept to key
an imagined future
moving in time to
cluck of
tongue of
crack of
bat and ball in mind's ear.
Where have they gone?
Are those cards on some other surface
or have they
curled or
mouldered in some other
place of
clutter
whose dust infiltrates the
crevices
of present memory mixing
a myriad of lost dwellings
in a dark
cauldron
of soul?

--3/26/07