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Morton Marcus will read with
Gary Young
at Johnson House
on November 4th, 2003 at 7 p.m.
In 2003 Morton Marcus’s
collected verse poems, Bear Prints, is scheduled to
be published by Creative Arts Book Company. His work will
also appear in two important anthologies, Poets Against
The War and No Boundaries: Prose Poems By 24 American
Poets. Those publications mark the 79th and 80th
anthologies in which his poetry has been published. |
New work is scheduled to appear in The Denver Quarterly, Hanging
Loose, Hotel Amerika, Sentence, Natural Bridge, and
Caesura (San Jose Poetry Center). The latter magazine
will feature him in its Fall 2003 issue.
Morton Marcus has published nine volumes of poetry and one
novel, including The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages
From A Scrapbook of Immigrants (Coffee House), When
People Could Fly (Hanging Loose), and most recently
Moments Without Names: New & Selected Prose Poems (White
Pine Press, 2002) and Shouting Down The Silence: Verse
Poems 1988-2001 (Creative Arts Books, 2002). Marcus has
had more than 400 poems in literary journals, and his work
can be found in over 80 anthologies in the United States,
Europe and Australia.
He has also read and taught workshops in dozens of colleges
throughout the country, including several campuses of The
University of California and State Universities of New York,
Notre Dame, Lewis & Clark (Oregon), and Columbia. In 1999,
he was named Santa Cruz County Artist of The Year. The
March/April 2001 issue of The Bloomsbury Review carried a
long interview with him, and the 2002 issue of Red
Wheelbarrow featured his work and another long interview. A
film critic as well as poet, Marcus is the co-host of the
West Coast TV program CinemaScene. He lives in Santa Cruz,
California, and has been co-host of KUSP radio’s Poetry
Show, one of the oldest poetry shows on American radio, for
sixteen years.
Morton Marcus'
Homepage |
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WHAT HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT TODAY
What have you thought about today?
You must ask yourself that question
at some point in each revolution
the Earth, your planet, makes around the sun.
That is, what have you thought about
in the last 24 hours, in the last 1,464 minutes,
in the last 87, 840 seconds?
If you sleep eight hours every night
that leaves you 16 hours, or 960 minutes,
or 57,660 seconds to think about something.
I believe that if you think about something
every 24 hours, if you think about it
with your liver, your lungs, your large
and small intestines—if you think about it
with your whole being—then you will not lose hope.
I’m not talking about just any thought,
like whether you’ve left the stove on
or if you took the one white and two red pills,
but something that will make your heart
lurch for a moment like the engine of a car
that for thirty years has been wearing
a shroud of cobwebs in the garage—something
that will make your mind start clicking
like a clock on the living-room mantle
that hasn’t worked in a decade or two.
So, what have you thought about today?
What idea has brought alarm to your eyes
as if they were two weights tied to a corpse
that’s been dropped overboard on a dark night?
What thought caused a smile to stretch on your lips
as if it had just woken from a long sleep—
the same kind of smile that was on the lips
of the princess after the kiss woke her:
you know, the smile that began just before
she opened her eyes to behold,
wonder of wonders, the whole world,
brimming with its 24 hours, smiling at her.
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