John Mark Eberhart's New Book Recognized on National Book Critics Circle Blog

Jeffrey Ann Goudie begins her comment about Eberhart's new book:

"In the poetry category, John Mark Eberhart's "Broken Time," Mid-America Press. The second collection from Kansas City Star Books Editor Eberhart sends a love letter to music and musicians . . . ." See this link to continue:

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/05/nbcc-good-reads-3-long-tail-john-mark.html

Riding Shotgun: Women Write about Their Mothers interview on KCUR

Please join Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Judith Roitman, and myself as we read literary works about our mothers--from more of a cubist perspective than narrative. This is 3 p.m. Sun May 11 at the Writers Place in Kansas City.

I'll read from a personal essay recently published in a collection Riding Shotgun, with 20 other fine Midwest writers, including Jonis Agee, Heid Erdrich, Diane Glancy, Sunsan Power, Wang Ping--edited by Kathryn Kysar. Copies of Riding Shotgun, which is a best seller in the twin cities again this week, will be available for sale at a discount.

Angela Elam interviewed me about poet laureate-ness and this anthology on KCUR Friday.

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kcur/arts.artsmain?action=viewArticle&sid=11&id=1274689&pid=77

Ralph Salisbury on Jazz in the Midwest

I received this commentary on the Pete Fairchild poem below from compadre Ralph Salisbury, who has a new book out, Blind Pumper at the Well (SALT, 2008). Denise Low

My first ny publication was a photo I took of Duke Ellington, published in Downbeat magazine. The Duke couldn't get a hotel room in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and the college I attended had to make space for his entire band in the basement of our dormitory--where they improvized until about four in the morning. Great experience for me, just out of the segregated air force and looking for ways to perfect the world.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #15

B.F. (Pete) FAIRCHILD (1942 - )

One of the most successful poets from Kansas is B.H. Fairchild. He grew up in Liberal, Kansas, the far southwestern edge of the state. Early mapmakers once labeled this region the Great American Desert. His poetry evokes the isolated small-town landscape, including Main Street buildings and the wild edges of town. He also conjures the emotional landscape of those who dream and survive the arid Great Plains. Here, a literary imagination is not a frill, but rather a tool of endurance. Fairchild mythologizes Kansas by enlarging it in his personal memory. Also, he shows how European traditions lie alongside those of mid-continent America. He is a complex American poet.

Fairchild’s “desert” is a busy crossroads. In another poem, “The Big Bands: Liberal, Kansas, the Summer of 1955,” the poet explains how swing bands toured the region after their popularity faded elsewhere. The poem “Hearing Parker the First Time,” about Charlie Parker, shows how radio airwaves also cross this flyover region. In the poem, “Eleusinian mysteries” are ecstatic Greek rites. Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young are saxophone players with ties to Kansas and Kansas City. And “Ornithology” is the title of one of Parker’s albums (he was known as Bird). This poem is an homage to jazz as understood by a poet who first learned to play the saxophone and then the instrument of American language.

HEARING PARKER THE FIRST TIME

The blue notes spiraling up from the transistor radio
tuned to WNOE, New Orleans, lifted me out of bed
in Seward County, Kansas, where the plains wind riffed
telephone wires in tones less strange than the bird songs

of Charlie Parker. I played high school tenor sax the way,
I thought, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young might have
if they were, like me, untalented and white, but Ornithology
came winding up from the dark delta of blues and Dixieland

into my room on the treeless and hymn-ridden high plains
like a dust devil spinning me into the Eleusinian mysteries
of the jazz gods though later I would learn that his long
apprenticeship in Kansas City and an eremite’s devotion

to the hard rule of craft gave him the hands that held
the reins of the white horse that carried him to New York
and 52nd Street, farther from wheat fields and dry creek beds
than I would ever travel, and then carried him away.

Education: B.H. Fairchild, born in Houston, attended Liberal, Kansas, public schools and the University of Kansas (M.A., English 1968). His Ph.D. is from University of Tulsa (1973).
Career: Fairchild’s books of poetry are Early Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (National Book Critics Circle Award, Norton 2003); Local Knowledge (Quarterly Review of Literature 1991); The Art of the Lathe (Alice James 1998); and The Arrival of the Future (Swallow’s Tale 1985). He taught at California State University-San Bernardino from 1976 to 2005. He has won numerous awards.
_______________________________________________________________________ © 2008 Denise Low, AAPP15. © 2003 B.H. Fairchild, “Hearing Parker the First Time” in Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, W.W. Norton. © 2007 Denise Low, photograph.

Poem by Stephen Bunch As We Await Buddha's Birthday May 12

A Christmas Gift

This Buddha’s hand has eighteen fingers but

still lost its grip,

bright yellow and arthritic looking, wrapped

in tissue paper, boxed and shipped,

redolent of citrus but its flesh

already rotting far

from its Bodhi, beneath

this Occidental tree,

reaching out as if to say,

“Take. Eat.”

Dennis Bosley's Account of the Wm. Stafford Poetry Rendezvous

My thanks to Dennis Bosley for his permission to reprint his account of the Stafford gathering April 12 at the Flying W Ranch, in the Fint Hills:

"Forty of us, mostly Kansans, attended the segment of the William Stafford Rendezvous, Saturday, April 12, at the bunkhouse at the Flying W Ranch, in the western part of Chase County, in the Flint Hills. Several Kansas Poets, led by Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate, gave accounts of how William Stafford has influenced the course of their careers. She noted how poetry is not a frill, but integral to our survival. Harley Elliott talked about how considering one of Stafford's poems made him close the book. Lots of themes were flying around--Kansas, the reverent way, according to Kim, that William Stafford pronounced 'Cow,' when he said, 'Cow Creek.'

"For those of us Kansans to hear, [Kim Stafford said]: 'It was very important for him to come back to Kansas, not for, about my Father, but about Kansas'; 'Early in the morning he was remembering Kansas.' It was a gentle wake up call: 'Your way of seeing things will be a sort of salvation.'

"Kim said that our gathering may have been characterized by William Stafford as 'This is a little all right.'

"We are making plans to meet again, maybe next year, and continue."

Flint Hills Poem by H.C. Palmer

In the Tall Grass of a Landing Zone



The pup scents for the far
drop from the covey rise

so I fetch the last bird
down. Shot at close range

the little hen has come
apart. Her feathers,

wet with her blood,
cling to my fingers.


I probe for the femoral artery
where fragments

of his jungle fatigues
penetrate through the wound.

After it’s over,
and for a long time,

I pick at my fingers---
threads in congealed blood.


On my knees, beside the creek
I wash her feathers away.