October 2, 2013

Dan Albergotti

A BRIEF HISTORY OF POETRY

All day the man threw the stick for the dog.
All day the dog brought it back. The beetles
crawled on the branches of small trees, and clouds
drifted along without being noticed.
The man threw the stick. The dog brought it back.

The trilobites scuttled along the floors
of the oceans, the crocodiles crawled out
of the rivers to sun, the mastodons
died off, and the cheetahs stalked the gazelles.
All day the man threw the stick for the dog.

The Phoenicians contrived an alphabet,
and Sophocles wrote some plays. The Romans
raped and pillaged and crucified. The Huns
did what they could to leave a mark themselves.
The man threw the stick. The dog brought it back.

A splinter got lodged in the flesh, a mote
got stuck in an eye, and some angels danced
on the head of a pin. Some babies died
of malnutrition on this golden earth.
All day the man threw the stick for the dog.

A crowd gathered to watch the dog and man
play their game. But the dog and man saw it
as work. They knew everything was at stake.
With each throw the man sent the stick farther.
The man threw the stick. The dog brought it back.

The atom was split, an ant moved a grain
of sand seven yards, and the Khmer Rouge
rose and fell. And somewhere along the way
the dog disappeared, and only the stick
returned to the man. A moment’s magic.

from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
Tribute to Southern Poets

__________

Dan Albergotti (South Carolina): “They just seemed like lines of type on a page at first. And then John Keats was in the room with me. He was still in the ground in Rome, but he was in the room with me too, holding out his living hand, palm up. How could I refuse such an invitation to transcend?”

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April 20, 2009

Review by Kerry Krouse

THE BOATLOADS
by Dan Albergotti

BOA Editions, Ltd
250 N. Goodman St, Suite 306
Rochester, NY 14607
ISBN 978-1-934414-03-3
2008, 96 pp., $16.00
www.boaeditions.org

We like for things to be orderly—for our houses to shine and our gardens to be weedless. We want the world to be as easy and knowable as the predictably designed houses and neatly ordered streets in new subdivisions. But to read Dan Albergotti’s collection of poems, The Boatloads, winner of 2007 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, you have to leave the comfort of the subdivision and stand at the uncomfortable borders where worlds meet: the ancient burial ground that sleeps below the shopping mall, the sidewalk shared by the faithful and the homeless, the streets lined with fruit trees but also gutters. The poems of The Boatloads live in this intersection where antiquity intersects modernity, where the sacred intersects the profane, where faith collides with truth.

Perhaps it is our nature to view the world as a hierarchy. Even a child is aware of his rank—he is less powerful than all those he must answer to: parents, teachers, and even older children, but he may rule over all those with less power or size than his own. The problem with this hierarchy is that it lets us become too comfortable with our own position, our own power, making it easier and easier turn away from all those below us. Albergotti topples the hierarchy; he names each part of it a world and sets it in motion. All the worlds then—the gods, the humans, the animals, the earth’s elements, the dead—exist along side each other—each with surprisingly similar concerns. Albergotti’s poems interrogate the betweeness of things, the strange reflex of each order of the world to turn away from the last.

In each of these worlds, the author is our guide. He pulls back curtains Continue reading

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