Gordon Osing is retired from the writing program at the University of Memphis, where he started The River City Writers Series. He is the author of over a dozen books of both poetry and prose. Tom Carlson taught American literature and creative nonfiction at the University of Memphis for thirty-two years. He is the author of Hatteras Blues. The two will appear together at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis at 5:30 p.m. on June 7 to read from and sign copies of their recent collaboration, a collection of poetry and collage, La Belle Dame. The reading will begin at 6 p.m. Other books by both authors will also be available for signing.
Excerpt from La Belle Dame
What we know every moon takes
them a lifetime to learn, if ever:
blood sacrifice is the heart of any
real religion, as the whole world knows;
it’s just them and their doctrines that don’t.
Men offer up their own sons to man-language,
put off the knife so that their god intervenes,
approving.They present a language maniac
with system and unarguable definitions,
that makes them like their god, themselves,
that rule behind the altar not on it, where
the knife is always raised to a death
not their own but guarding their gender
against us full of them in our blood
Copyright (c) 2012 by Gordon Osing and Tom Carlson. All rights reserved.
Tagged: Poetry
