JACOB SCHEIER, THURSDAY NOV.26 @ 7:30 PM, BRYAN PRINCE, BOOKSELLER
Jacob Scheier is a poet and journalist from Toronto, currently residing in New York City. His debut poetry collection, "More to Keep us Warm" (ECW Press, 2007) won the 2008 Governor General’s Award. The book was also named amongst 2008’s “best in verse” by The Winnipeg Free Press. His poems have appeared in several periodicals, including Descant and Geist. As well, he is a regular contributor to the Toronto alternative weekly, NOW and the progressive NYC newspaper The Indypendent. Jacob is also the former head editor of existere, York University’s journal of art and literature. He graduated from York in 2008 with an honors BA in Humanities. Below are samples of his poetry:Postcard from Brooklyn
I am strangely not in love with anyone these days,
except the Brooklyn Bridge.
The way it holds the Manhattan skyline.
But I can already see how this will end.
How I will grow tired of its steep incline
and absent-minded tourists
wandering into the bicycle path.
And then the weather will turn cold.
But that all happens later.
For now it is the early edges of fall,
leaves still green, while the air narrows,
is slightly crisp, almost grazing
the hairs on my arm like a passing stranger.
It is although the air were forced into intimacy
by the brevity of daylight.
But when it starts becoming dark at 4 PM
this closeness, I know, will turn to a felt distance,
like someone drawing your attention
to their lack of intimacy.
But that happens later.
These days I am still walking at a cathedral pace
beneath the branches bending across the avenues,
nearly touching, and yes,
the brownstones like rows of lived in chapels,
like a pop-up picture book I could have had as a child,
but didn't. How Brooklyn makes me nostalgic for the moment
I am walking inside of.
These late afternoons filled with a kind of loneliness
that makes me feel distinctly myself, and an awareness
of how rare that is.
In Prism International, Summer 2009
A Love Poem
I know how I change in Kafka-esque ways,
when I get what I long for. So, I am pretty alright
with keeping our romance as is,
the exchange of letters and poems, a coffee once a year—
the subtle flirtations that may all be in my head,
or that you weave, like a web in the night,
in the minds of nearly every man you talk to.
I am okay with that, since I am in love,
most of all, with the way we fall in love.
The burial ceremony of old skins
and sound judgment. Glorious—
how unplantonist I feel at the thought of you
drying your hair. And I do not write this
with any delusions of it showing you something
you cannot already see. Poetry can’t
substitute for the absurd currency of attraction
the way someone winces when they sneeze
or stirs their coffee.
I write now from the place of good love poems,
the ones that have no intent;
seek to change nothing,
and live alongside the prayers of desperate secularists,
formed simply and only,
because there is nothing else left to do.
posted by HAMMERED OUT @ 5:37 PM
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