Tomorrow evening …

A Celebration of A.V. Christie 1963-2016
+ the launch of her posthumous chapbook
AND I BEGAN TO ENTERTAIN DOUBTS

Thursday, May 26, 2016, 7 PM
Brandywine Workshop
728 South Broad Street, Philadelphia PA



The evening honors A.V. Christie, her life and her poetry, and her just published chapbook, AND I BEGAN TO ENTERTAIN DOUBTS, from Folded Word Press, a poem whose “urgency and beauty” inspired the Press to create a new Master Series.  This occasion is open to all those who loved and admired A.V. and her poetry; all are invited to bring a poem of hers to read, or read from her new chapbook, or come to listen, mourn and celebrate A.V.

A.V. Christie was the author of Nine Skies (University of Illinois Press, 1997), which won the National Poetry Series; The Housing (Ashland Poetry Press, 2004), winner of the McGovern Prize; and a chapbook, The Wonders, Editor’s Series (Seven Kitchens Press, 2014).






Foreword

I was conceived in the cruelest month
in whatever spring California could muster.
A little rain—with some more likely.
And the buckeyes were they yet on the ground?
Damn my father’s smooth stone eyes,
other prevailing enticements and what Eliot called
the female stench. Damn the oaks,
their histrionics, struggling in the fog.
Spiderwebs lay in the grass, misted
and looking like misspent galaxies.
I cry into and out of this moment.
Pound told Eliot: strike this and this.
What was weak got dropped, and the poem
stood stronger without it.


A.V. Christie