Poet Spotlight: Emily Warn

August 15th's Rush Hour Concert features poems inspired by Bach's Two-Part Inventions. As a special treat, we are posting some of the poems that will be read during the concert. For insight into the process that led to this groundbreaking concert in partnership with The Poetry Foundation, please read our Artistic Director's earlier post.

Emily Warn is the author of The Leaf Path, The Novice Insomniac, and the forthcoming 22 Kits of Creation, all from Copper Canyon Press, and two chapbooks The Book of Esther and Highway Suite. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely, including in The Kenyon Review, Poetry East, Mississippi Mud, The Bloomsbury Review, The Seattle Times, Parabola, and the Seattle Weekly. She is currently the Editor of PoetryFoundation.org.

Invention 3

This chat
between piano and two hands,
this minute
and thirteen-second invention,
is no
polite high tea banter,
no back
and forth with studied pause.
This is
constant finger-jabbing
interruptions
of flow that becomes the flow
just as
two buses leapfrog and lurch
to stop
at Huron, careening to be
the lucky one
who skips past Dearborn
to Lake Shore
where they can speed down a single lane,
in unison
while we stare off,
mirrors to
the measureless horizon line
between lake and sky