Department of English
Josh Weiner is the author of two books, The World's Room and From the Book of Giants. He has won the Whiting Award and the Rome Prize. His poems appear in The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Slate, Threepenny Review and elsewhere. The poetry editor of Tikkun, Weiner is an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Read and listen to Josh Weiner read "Trampoline" at Slate.
Read "Nursery Rhyme" at AGNI.
Sophie Kerr Room, Wednesday, November 15, 4:30 p.m.
Joshua Weiner looks up from signing books after the reading.
Joshua Weiner signs a book for the beamish Julie Converse '08.
Joshua Weiner and WC's Professor Peter Campion pose for the camera.
Joshua Weiner, signing books.
Bobbby Bangert '08 looks on while Joshua Weiner signs his book.
Praise for Josh Weiner
Joshua Weiner "possesses a sure knowledge of how to find the poem's nerve. His poems delight in experience--the world is a fact for him, not a linguistic hypothesis. The pleasure a reader takes in his many-vectored engagement with his materials is for me one of the sure signs of his talent's oddball originality. That he doesn't quite fit anywhere is as much an aesthetic credo as it is a stance toward experience."
From "Emerging Poet: On Joshua Weiner" by Tom Sleigh, published at Poetry.org
"If his is a poetry of self-discovery, the self-discovery arises in the company of others who for good or ill compel us to imagine how we could be otherwise than as we are."
From The Boston Review's "Poet's Sampler: Joshua Weiner" by Alan Shapiro.
Poems and audio from Josh Weiner's reading:
Cricket
Cricket says
you know cricket by my rubbing
and cricket knows you by a like tune,
vain lovers, playing games
of sweet moan to seal the hour.
Watch cricket
leap across your ugly tile floor
and play to your boot
as it misses once again.
I'm cricket, blacker than coffee
and tobacco juice, my song
more bitter, more buzz
if you'd only quit your typing
and shut up a minute.
Cricket says
your lips confuse the issue,
cricket's long antennae pick it all up,
cricket knows where cricket is.
Cricket burrows with forelegs,
chews your paper. Cricket says
stop straining for effect.
Cricket loves a napper in the grass.
Cricket is never wretched.
In a room of smoke
cricket can breathe.
Cricket sings outside
your sealed room of stone.
Kennedy Center
Young boy of the Wushu
takes his turn in the demo
outdoors, tin knives trailing
bright scarves that cut clean
figures through air, the beat
of ten drums sending him gyro-
scoping, arms like chopper blades
spinning before they lift-so
even a boy younger than he
appreciates the stern concentration
gathering as he prepares
legs to kick higher than
his head snapping back
to lead the body that way in
the counter thrust. Five? Six?
A warrior-dancer tracing
nature of cobra and mongoose
in quick calligraphy of cloth.
Opposition in flight. Complements
finding space along
a single axis: Beijing
in Washington unfurling
a seam between art
and war in this bright chilly
memorial plaza running
from the Shaolin Temple
to a high brow "exchange"-
(Is that David Carradine
serenely walking the sill
above Rock Creek Parkway?)
Thus, Grasshopper, hold in the mind
the life-size terra-cotta
warriors of First Emperor Qin,
two of eight thousand
upstairs encased in glass
ready to meet the enemy
on the eternal march to Heaven;
but it's not Heaven, only
two levels higher than street
that the army copters
serving as V.P.-escort
angle along the river,
open doors framing the soldiers,
goggles and guns looking back
at us eye to eye, calculating
the shot between us, only
one instant in the new migration.
And our house too has its new
hero of his story, who wakes
from dream and gathers light-saber,
pirate knife, and jeweled rapier
to make the journey from mountain
peak to peaceful valley
where he lays his weapons
at the foot of our bed before
burrowing between us, first
light thin as a transparent
seam between here and there,
us and them; while
the great metal bird,
having heard the call,
touches ground behind
concrete ramparts
that nest permanently now
on the busy downtown streets
in the evitable yet already opened
next theater of operations.
