Jay Carson, Pittsburgh poet

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Hello Poetry Lovers,

For those of you who read this blog regularly, it will be no surprise to hear that much of Pittsburgh poetry in the summer happens at Hemingway's Cafe, on Forbes Ave. in Oakland. The Summer Reading Series has been around for years, run very well by impressario Jimmy Cvetic. In the last few years Jimmy has acquired a colleague, Joan Bauer, who has added her own dash of panache to the proceedings. Joan's idea has been to feature poets in groups of three or four, thereby affording the public the opportunity to hear a greater number of voices than heretofore, and it's worked very well--the more poets, the more poetry afficianados---audiences have grown in size.

Thanks Jimmy and Joan, for another wonderful season---which continues on Tuesday evenings at 8 pm through the month of July, the last one an extravaganza of a dozen or more poets on July 26---all free and open to the public.

Here is an exerpt from a poem by Jay Carson, poet and RMU professor, read last week at Hemingway's:

White Hot Justice

Everybody said my father

was a fine attorney

and he floated me through this childhood.

He worked hard to be mostly

fair with all of us, but left a sense

of the imperfection of  justice,

I suggest that what you think is

is equity is really the Lone Ranger.

... 

When she said, What do you want, honey?

her shock of strawberry hair

floating over those marmalade words,

I couldn’t tell her...

I was afraid,

more than the razor fight

downstairs; than the police

who had already threatened jail;

than the tales of brain-rotting syphilis.

But I thought and held up.

...

In a dream I wear a wig

the color of my ghostly skin

and pound a mahogany gavel.

I say unaccountably,

take her to my nursery.

My father stands up

from the jury box,

his eyes now perfectly sure,

Stop this endless show.