Stuart Dybek Reads Poetry Amongst the Art
Windy City (from Streets) At night, wind rippled saxophones that hung like windchimes in pawnshop windows, hooting through each horn so that the streets seemed haunted not by night hawks but by doves
Night of Voyeurs (from Knuckles) It's more than silhouettes tonight, every window in the city lit, shades lifted, curtains open .... So much nakedness! And the streets empty except for newsboys moving through shadows, leafless trees snatching underclothes out of wind, the El clattering above the roofs like a strip of blue movie.
Autobiography (from Streets) There were autobiographies at every corner, legends, litanies, manifestos, memoirs in forgotten tongues, h a silent hiss in every t’anks, Autobiographies, but no history, and by the clang of evening Angelus the babble condensed into a drone murmured behind a jukebox sax tailing from an open bar.The confluence of words, imagery and sound is present in Dybek’s expressiveness and in his writing, both in his poetry and his marvelous short stories. (The Coast of Chicago (1990), I Sailed With Magellan (2003) and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980). His two new books are Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories and Paper Lanterns: Love Stories, both published in 2014. I recommend my favorite stories. “Chopin in Winter” from Coast and “Blood Soup” from Childhood. Oh, and “Orchids” from Magellan, in which Stosh and Katman, and sometimes Angel, confess their dreams and explore the city beyond their own neighborhood. Dybek is a second-generation Polish-American and grew up in Pilsen and Little Village during the time when they were predominantly Polish and Czech (Bohemian). He taught for 30 years at Western Michigan University and is now Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University. Photos by Nancy Bishop, except where noted.
Nancy S Bishop
Nancy S. Bishop is publisher and Stages editor of Third Coast Review. She’s a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and a 2014 Fellow of the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. You can read her personal writing on pop culture at nancybishopsjournal.com, and follow her on Twitter @nsbishop. She also writes about film, books, art, architecture and design.