The Beat: Zachary Schomburg and Gertrude Stein

Alan May: 00:08

Welcome to The Beat, Knox County Public Library’s poetry podcast. Today, we’ll hear Zachary Schomburg read his poems “More About Gravity,” “The Cow,” and “The Cliff Floats Low.” He’ll follow by reading a fragment from the book Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein.

Zachary Schomburg: 00:31

"More About Gravity"

I remember this one

planet, how it had

these two people

kissing on the lip

of a big volcano.

I used to watch them

every night, in the

fuzzy lens of my

telescope. Each time

they'd get too exited

and tip in. Come

home, I said alone

in my room to no one

and no one ever did.

This poem is called "The Cow." It's about a cow that I befriended on my trip to the farm.

"The Cow"

I befriended the cow

on my trip to the farm.

The two of us were

inseparable. I knew

how to make it moo.

But that was so many

years ago. Whose farm

even was that? I don't

really remember. There's

whole swaths of my life

of which I can't even

recall the tiniest things.

One thing I think I do

remember is how wise

the cow was. It said things

like never be afraid

and never give up.

Hold on to hope

and learn from your

mistakes. Don't

be so in love all

the time. It gets in

the way. Stop loving.

Stop wanting to be loved.

Stop loving yourself

so much. Stop letting

love into your life.

Stop eating so much

dairy.

This poem is called "The Cliff Floats Low."

Two nuns are on a cliff looking at a cloud over another cliff. “It looks like a crown, but on what head,” one said. “It looks like a cliff,” said the other. "But that is a cliff," said the first nun. “No, the cloud,” said the other nun. "The cloud looks like a cliff?” asked the first. “Yeah,” said the other. And she was right. The cloud did look like a cliff floating low above the cliff. And in that, the cloud was a cliff. Because what is a cliff if not something that looks like a cliff? And this nun’s cliff, a cliff set free finally from its valley, after a million years or more, like the splintered breath of a sick planet. The cliff, she thought, is going nowhere and everywhere at once. “I want to be on it,” she said, weeping now. It looked like it was being held on a string. She thought of the last time she was so properly held, when she felt as light as this cliff, in the arms of her mother, and how her mother leaned down to kiss her bright red child-ears and said, “You feel like nothing.”

This is a fragment from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons called "Apple." I chose this fragment as a kind of conversation piece with the poem that I just read, "The Cliff Floats Low." It's a way of kind of showing my own obsessions with words and what we can do with them when we allow those sounds that they make to override the meanings that they make. So when I say words like "cliff" over and over and over again until it starts to lose meaning, it's because I love reading poems like this from Gertrude Stein.

"Apple"

Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please. A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use.

Alan May: 05:21

You just heard Zachary Schomburg read his poems “More About Gravity” and “The Cow” from his book Pulver Maar, and “The Cliff Floats Low” from his latest book, Fjords vol. 2. He followed by reading “Apple” from the book Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. Schomburg was kind enough to record these poems for us at his home in Portland, Oregon. Zachary Schomburg is a poet, painter, and a publisher for a small independent poetry press called Octopus books. He earned a BA from the College of the Ozarks and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. He is the author of six books of poems including, most recently, Fjords vol. 2, published by Black Ocean in twenty twenty-one and a novel, Mammother, published by Featherproof Books in twenty seventeen. Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in eighteen seventy-four. She attended Radcliffe College and Johns Hopkins Medical School. In nineteen oh three, she moved to Paris where she eventually began writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She became an influential figure in the worlds of art and literature, and her home became a gathering place for artists and writers like Henri Matisse, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Max Jacob. She died near Paris in July of nineteen forty-six. You can find books by Zachary Schomburg and Gertrude Stein in our online catalog. Also, look for links in the show notes. Please join us next time for The Beat.