Can't Miss It: Tuesday

Poets in particular seem to struggle with a bipolar mind, as discussed in Touched with Fire. But perhaps that visibility is just because they're poets, and inclined to make terrific material out of any experience. The new poetry anthology from Eastern Washington University, Living in Storms, shows no let-up to the harsh weather:

Schramm has collected more than a hundred poems by some four-score contemporary poets whose lives have been affected in various ways by bipolar disorder....

The specificities of experience contained in these and succeeding poems help to illuminate the bumpy emotional terrain of this widespread and often unfairly stereotyped condition. These poems range from the precarious peaks of ecstasy to the nearly unfathomable depths of despair.

Or so says the Olympian. You can hear for yourself at Open Books' reading:

Two of the contributors, Linda Bierds and Suzanne Paola, will be on hand to read, and Schramm will offer some words about the topic and his selection process.

An example of depression's hold is found in Diana Chang's "A Dead Heart," -- "It is stony, / empty as a frame of light. // I try to breathe around it / but I am its house. // In my eyes / an unmoving world. // It is close to nothing. / I am too much."

And mania's seduction finds, in Peter Cooley's "Returning from the Shopping Center to the Suburbs," a driver who shuts his eyes and takes his hands off the wheel, forcing an on-coming car to swerve off the road, the poem closing, "I'm going to live forever, listener, / not that you asked. And while we're at it, / how do you get through your life?"

Ah, they'll fuck you up, poets. They don't mean to, but they do. (Okay, they probably do mean to. Oughta be banned, like asbestos.)

7:30pm // Open Books, Wallingford // FREE