Denise Low, 2007-2009 Ks. Poet Laureate

Readorama: Tuning into Midwestern literary voices - KansasCity.com

2012-01-27T17:38:00.000-06:00

Readorama: Tuning into Midwestern literary voices - KansasCity.com

Kansas City Star Interviews Denise Low--Midwestern Voice and Natural Theologies

2012-01-27T17:34:00.000-06:00

Here is the beginning of the article about what makes the Midwestern voice unique: "What makes modern writing Midwestern? No one, says Denise Low, has done what she’s done: try to define a Middle Western voice in contemporary literature. In her new book “Natural Theologies: Essays About Literature of the New Middle West,” Low attempts not so much to map the region’s boundaries but list the characteristics of those writers working within them. In 12 essays, Low compiles several manifestations." See more of Brian Burnes' article at the Kansas City Star:http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3393726/readorama-tuning-into-midwestern.html

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3393726/readorama-tuning-into-midwestern.html#storylink=cpy

Jo McDougall's Memoir Daddy's Money: Drama Elaborated by Fancy Style

2012-01-25T17:06:00.000-06:00

I could argue that the best prose writers begin as poets, but exceptions would come to mind. Nonetheless, I will say that the best prose writers have a poet's ear for language. Jo McDougall is an established poet who has honed her style from early days with BookMark Press to more recent books from the University of Arkansas Press and Autumn House Press. This first book of prose subtitled "A Memoir of Farm and Family," is out recently from the University of Arkansas Press. McDougall is a lyrical storyteller, with entertaining passages like this:
"When I was about fifteen, Mother insisted I take voice lessons from Gay's aunt Frances. It was rumored Frances had lost her fiance in the war, although no one in that house ever spoke of it. I was immensely undertalented in the singing department, but Miss Frances persevered. Recently I heard an old recording of Mario Lanza singing 'Be My Love,' and Miss Frances's upright piano, the sheet music, and Frances herself--tall, slim, with shoulder-length, curly brown hair--rose before me. I was back in that sweet, disheveled house that smelled of clabbered milk, singing as Frances played 'O Promise Me' or anything by Sigmund Romberg, my mind full of romantic visions, my voice improving not a mite" (71).
The self-deprecating wit, the richly described scenes, and the characters all stay with me.The paragraph is beautifully built, leading up to the final word "mite." It evokes biblical language and hyperbole. It emphasizes the profound lack of talent she had as a youngster, juxtaposed with the tall pile of romantic yearning. Beautiful. "Clabbered" is such a perfect word here, evoking rural wholesomeness, past times, cloying aromas. What a poet. I had trouble putting down this book. Hear McDougall read from it in her own inimitable voice Friday, Jan. 27, 7 pm, at Lawrence's Raven Bookstore, with Al Ortolani, a fine poet from the southeast corner of Kansas called the Little Balkans. This is not to be missed.
http://www.uapress.com/titles/sp11/mcdougall.html

National Book Critics Circle Poetry Finalists are mostly from independent or university presses

2012-01-25T10:47:00.000-06:00

Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions)
Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions)
Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press)
Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)

This list shows further de-centralization of the publishing industry, with poetry, which is not at the top of the money pyramid, showing which presses are committed to this oldest artform. The NBCC writer Barbara Hoffert writes on the NBCC blog that all these poets demonstrate "a mastery of form while advancing their art." This is a good summary of judging guidelines, proficiency, but something beyond the expected. And poetry is about form more than other genres, not only subject matter. Winners will be announced March 8 in New York.

Julie Buchsbaum To Read at Raven Bookstore

2012-01-20T19:18:00.002-06:00

Julie Buchsbaum is a 2011 National Poetry Series Award winner for her forthcoming book The Apothecary's Heir (Penguin). She will be reading at the Big Tent –Raven Books series Thursday night Jan. 26, 7 pm—not to be missed. I first met her at the University of Kansas when she was presenting research techniques to a class of mine, pro bono, in her role as KU Humanities Librarian. She was witty, able to calibrate to a wide range of Indigenous students, and clear. I got to know her further in the Ronald Johnson study group last summer in Topeka/Lawrence. She has an amazing clarity, as this poem shows:

Flutes in Tunisia

The purple mosque casts
a shadow of green
quite far from where we are
or want to be.

Telephone wires
encircle a pole
like electrocuted snakes.
Still we are drawing the pall

over a love
short-circuited long ago.
We should admit that now
we’ll never know

why flutes in Tunisia
do not sound the same
as they sound here,
though arsonous flames

consume as quickly
leaves that look like they
were dipped in blood.
As if there were a way

to attune a man’s
sleeping tympanum
to thunder and the pules
of wind while from

a fragrant monticule
where once his sultan frowned,
he observes the cloistered
circle of a sleeping town

and lights that fibrillate dimly
in the skin of night.
Even his minions were
unnerved by fright

as waves collapsed at the prow
like torn fans
and corsairs hooted
on the Mediterranean.

I admire the images in this and the way they are pulled into a skein of syntax, always the tension held exactly right. The long comparison of failed love to a variety of sinister images is unforgettable.

Buchsbaum also is the author of the poetry collections Slowly, Slowly, Horses (Ausable Press, 2001), and A Little Night Comes (Del Sol Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Iowa Review, Verse, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, and Harvard Review. Her degrees are an MFA from Iowa Writers Workshop, Masters of Library & Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh, and PhD in Literature from the University of Missouri. She is the Humanities Librarian for English, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of Kansas.

A New Mayan Calendar + Numbers Poem by Stephen Bunch

2012-01-18T09:42:00.000-06:00

This Lawrence writer continues to engage my attention with his wit and finesse. I see mathematics interpenetrating every aspect of my day, and he riffs on this. Thanks to him for writing this and for granting permission to print it here. Stephen Bunch 's new chapbook Preparing To Leave is reviewed at this website, with purchase information from the press:
http://www.thelivesyoutouch.com/touchjournal/Publications/Bunch.html

A Mayan epoch, cards

in a deck, weeks

in a year, the atomic

weight of chromium,

not the “Korean chrome”

on the straight-eight

Pontiac, not the atomic

weight on Eniwetok,

while Nixon played

Checkers. Eisenhower's

first, Lucy's first, no

lynchings for the first

time since 1882,

but shortly Boeing's

bombers excavating Vietnam,

back to the stone age, ivories

pounded, all the white

notes, shaking that love

shack, baby, the hexagram

that directs, "Keep still, no

blame," shuffle and deal.

Edward Dorn - "Inspection" and Commentary by David Mortiz

2012-01-16T14:04:00.000-06:00

After viewing this video, David Moritz wrote on Facebook (reprinted with permission):

David Moritz

I remember one chat with Ed.. sitting on floor of brother John's house.. In those days, I liked to ask people the type of question that would tell me something about their psychological makeup. I asked Ed the old "if you were on a desert is...land and could only have one book, which one would you choose?" Ed answered, without any hesitation, "Don Quixote". Ok.. ummm i was puzzled.. so, not being an intellectual, i asked "Why that book?" to which he answered "its long". Now, i realize Don Quixote is considered a part of the foundation of western literature, and I'll even confess to having admired a windmill or two, but at over 900 pages, i have always suspected he was thinking of its practical use in managing one's toilet.. I also asked him if there was anything he feared in dying and he told me he was concerned that the mortician would pull out all the gold from his teeth.. this was when i decided his choice in books was not one born of intellectual concern. :) But, then, I was not a student at the time of the reunion, just a traveler so I wasn't seeking any great revelations, just some pleasant conversation to go along with the alcohol. I liked talking with Ed... my talks with him were always entertaining.. his mind explored the universe.. and he had a unique view of the world around him which included.. everything: i once heard him give an impromtu dissertation on the literature of a "number of people allowed in this building" document that was hanging in the hallway of a multi-room dwelling - even those formal government lines of text had a rhythm and breath he found interesting. This was 40 years ago, and i was bored with this world then.. and as silly as this event was to me at the time, it impressed me and I don't think i have ever excluded anything from my observation of the world around me since then.. seriously, Ed was seeing poetry in a place I doubt anyone else would ever chance to look for it..."

WILLIAM STAFFORD CELEBRATIONS GROW NATIONALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY

2012-01-13T10:00:00.000-06:00

Photo c. by Steven Hind of Hutchinson

You can make William Stafford's birthday a personal poetry holiday with your own readings of his work, or you can meet friends and share poems, prose and memories. Stafford inspired many of use to respect words, land, community, history, and libraries. He followed his own path, as a conscientious objector (his mother was from a pacifist church) and as a writer. We remember him in Kansas.The Oregon group Friends of William Stafford maintains a website (and fine organization) with all known William Stafford birthday commemorations. The FWS website explains: "January Birthday Celebrations continue to expand around the world with new venues for 2012. Each event is hosted locally and always features well known poets. Readings include favorite William Stafford poems, followed by original poetry or stories inspired by the work of Mr. Stafford. Very often, readers share personal anecdotes about their friendships or encounters with Mr. Stafford. These events are inspirational and invigorating to all those who love poetry and poets. We encourage you to attend one of these Birthday Celebrations and experience how uplifting they can be." http://www.williamstafford.org/pages/regbday12.html Shelf Awareness (subscribe via info@shelf-awareness.com for this free newsletter) has a piece on Stafford's birthday featured, by Robert Gray, called "Poetry, Community & William Stafford's Birthday." It begins:
"Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.
It has been a snowless winter here in upstate New York, but this morning six inches cover the ground and big flakes are falling as I consider the opening lines of "Report from a Far Place" by the late William Stafford, whose birthday is next Tuesday.Stafford has, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, become my winter poet." Gray goes on to say he is rereading The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1998), which has a generous selection of Stafford's opus. Those who want to understand his Kansas connections can read the selections and essays in Kansas Poems of William Stafford (Woodley 2010). I think it is accurate to say that Stafford is a winter poet, one who looks into the dark nights and describes the infinity beyond the physical world. Denise Low

William Stafford's Birthday Is Jan. 17: Some Thoughts on “At the Breaks Near the River,”

2012-01-08T16:07:00.000-06:00

A celebration of the life and work of William Stafford will take place at the Hutchinson Art Center, 405 N. Washington, Hutchinson, KS on Tuesday, January 17^th, at 7:00 pm. For more information contact: Mark Rassette, Hutchinson/Reno Arts and Humanities Council, 620-662-1280, hrah@cox.net . Other groups in Oregon and Kansas will hold celebrations. Here are some thoughts of mine on Stafford's success as a skilled poet, no matter what geography he inhabits:

William Stafford succeeded nationally because his skilled poems, so place-centered, transcended place. He leapt before Robert Bly explained “leaping” poetry as "a jump from an object soaked in unconscious substance to an object or idea soaked in conscious psychic substance." This is the essence of Stafford’s verse, its movement from outer to inner sightedness, and back out again, but with a twist. He uses extreme personifications, with the same method as John Donne’s metaphors. According to Donne, two lovers are hands of a compass. According to Stafford, time can wave backwards. Stafford re-creates the world into a dimension with multiple timelines. The poem “At the Breaks Near the River,” in this volume, follows Stafford’s individualized formula of leaps among places, times, and imagined realities:
         Autumn some year will discover again
         that gesture of the flattened grass, wild
         on the Cimarron hills when a storm
         out of northern New Mexico raided
         Cheyenne country to hunt for rusty armor
         left by Coronado, and my father sifting his
         fingers in that loose ground of the Indian
         campsite said, “Oh, Bill, to know
         everything! Look—the whole world is alive,
         waving together toward history!”
Cimarron River hills are a definite place in southwest Kansas, in the path of New Mexico winds, yet the entire poem transposes to an imagined, conditional mood—something that could happen— by use of the indefinite “some year.” Time moves from seasonal cycles to historic ones to the poem’s eternal present—and again to a past-perfect (that which started in the past and ended in the past) future: “the whole world” of Cheyenne dominance and Coronado’s excursions remains “alive” and “waving” in this future. The trick of the poem is the last line, where instead of looking backwards at history, the narrator and the father see history as a future memory of the present. This is an invented verb tense. Perspectives pivot like this within all of Stafford’s language scrims.Yet another Staffordean trick is the unlikely personification of the intangible “Autumn,” which will “discover again . . . .” The poem reinforces the father’s assertion that “the whole world is alive.” Such animism not only concerns the natural world, but also the fluid elements of the entire cosmos. The moral of this short verse is: “Look.” These brief lines are an example of the kind of “looking” that Stafford’s “father” urges. (from Kansas Poems of William Stafford, 2nd ed., edited by Denise Low, Woodley Memorial Press, 2010)

How to get books reviewed! Try this Midge Raymond link.

2012-01-02T10:04:00.000-06:00

Midge Raymond

I recently found a good piece about how to get reviews of that great American novel you just wrote, or even reviews of a book of poetry. The key is to know your niche. Who is your audience, and what do they read? The other virtue is patience. The long-term goal is to expand readership, not get rich quick, and this takes time. My first review was for the Women's Studies department of Kansas State University, of a feminist book. Maybe the review sold books, maybe not, but it did inform the target audience about a new book. It expanded the readership. News stands have a zillion magazines calibrated for every interest. You can explore that resource, as long as news stands exist--they are quickly becoming obsolete. Googling your niche, like "poetry review blog," can bring up many resources. The online world is essential, including links to your own webpage and other social media. I hesitate to make my personal social media into a self-promotion machine (there are some terrible examples of this out there), but I do use them to announce and link reviews. My own webpage, which is pretty static, is an archive of good news about my writing, and I hope it is useful when an editor or reading curator asks for a biography or introduction to my work. This article by Midge Raymond has many good suggestions:

http://www.ashlandcreekpress.com/blog/2011/11/28/tips-for-authors-on-getting-or-not-getting-reviews/

DIANE GLANCY BOOK ABOUT WINTER & FAITH IS AVAILABLE

2011-12-18T09:05:00.000-06:00

New book by Diane Glancy Now It Is Snowing Inside a Psalm. This book of short reflective essays shares a winter journal of doubts as well as triumphs. This skilled writer’s personal response to the Hebrew text gives new perspectives on language and its role as a tool of faith. This will help readers through the dark snowy days ahead. She writes:

“It has been a hard winter. The snow seems to get into everything, even the Psalms. There are gray mornings I need to plug into the Word for the will to get up and work at my projects for the day. There are energy pockets in the Bible, especially the book of Psalms. I have been through the Psalms many times over the years. What new could there be left? Yet they always stoke the will, and I am able to do what is needed. This winter, I opened the Psalms for another familiar journey, but soon found them not familiar at all. They became a new journey on the same road. There were variations in the landscape of language, and new insights. I found resilience in the dreariness of a long winter. I also discovered little disruptions in the Psalms that matched the disruptions I felt in my own interior landscape. The little clumps of words I read fit the clump of circumstances I faced. The Psalms became cross-word puzzles of a sort as I looked between two different translations— King James Version and the New Revised Standard Version. This winter, I walked through the snow with the Psalms as a map. Even the gray clouds changed each day. Month after month, there was snow and cold, and cold and snow, yet I walked the changing terrain in the Psalms. My sister-in-law told me about a newspaper photograph last summer at the Lake of the Ozarks. It was of ticks with their little arms upraised in the grass, waiting for someone to pass along so they could latch onto them. That is the way I felt as I read the Psalms. They held to me, not to take life from me, but to give it.”
http://www.mammothpublications.com/catalog1.0.html Distributed by Mammoth or buy the Kindle edition. Order through mammothpubs@hotmail.com
*Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College in St. Paul. Among her 30+ books are: The Reason for Crows, a novel of Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk converted to Christianity; Pushing the Bear, a novel of the 1838-39 Cherokee Trail of Tears; a collection of essays, The Dream of a Broken Field; and new poetry, Stories of the Driven World. In 2010, she made her first independent film, The Dome of Heaven. She has been the recipient of many awards including National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, a Minnesota Book Award, an Oklahoma Book Award, and an American Book Award. Her website is www.dianeglancy.com .

2011 TOP 12 BOOKS OF POETRY & MORE!

2011-12-11T11:04:00.004-06:00

I've read the 10 best NY Times book list, the local paper Lawrence Journal World's best 2011 list, and no poetry is included. I'm listing my own 2011 poetry favorites, based on books I have received this year. I'm including a few anthologies and related prose books. I know I am excluding some wonderful books, but mostly I don't have access to them. I have champagne tastes in poetry and a Kool-Aid budget. I will be nominating some of these for the National Book Critics Circle awards, as a member (see their website for more information about nomination processes by board members and also members-at-large). I do regular reviews of poetry for print and electronic media as well as this blog--please send books if you would like to be considered in 2012.

2011 Denise Low DOZEN BEST BOOKS OF POETRY, alphabetical order

Water Puppets by Quan Barry (Perihelion), winner of the 2010 AWP Donald Hall poetry award. I picked this up at the public library and loved the language. http://poems.com/feature.php?date=15255
Mackinac Suite by James J. Bogan, Jr. (The Full Court Press). This writer always takes me with him on his trips.
Preparing to Leave by Stephen Bunch (The Lives You Touch Press) http://thelivesyoutouch.com/touchjournal/Publications/Bunch.html
Things Come On: An Amneoir by Joseph Harrington (Wesleyan University Press). This book changed how I think about language and about memory. Julia Kristeva writes about how poets lead innovation by word tinkering. This book is amazing. http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2011/03/review-of-things-come-on-amneoir-by.html
Domande Personali by William J. Harris (Leconte). Italian bilingual edition that sings, sings. http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2011/04/wm-j-harris-publishes-domande.html
Glamour by Jonathan Holden (Mammoth Publications). Jonathan is such a good poet that he can make math and science lyrical. He's 1st poet laureate of Kansas. http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2011/03/mammoth-publications-presents-glamour.html
Carry Catastrophe by Megan Kaminski's (Grey Book Press) . This poet is a comer. Watch for her full-length book coming from Coconut Books. http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2011/01/so-many-good-new-books-like-megan.html
Pretend the World by Kathryn Kysar (Holy Cow! Press). This Minneapolis poet shines even in the crowded heaves of the Minnesota arts scene. http://www.kathrynkysar.com/page1/page2/PretendWorld.html
PoDoom by Jim McCrary (Hank’s Original Loose Gravel Press). McCrary hones social critique to a high art. http://wwwresistingpoetry.blogspot.com/2011/03/re-coming-soon.html
Rain Comes Riding by William Sheldon (Mammoth Publications). This Great Plains poet combines Goldbarthian awareness of syntax with compelling narratives of place. http://deniselow.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-10-27T10:27:00-05:00&max-results=7
The Afterlives of Trees by Wyatt Townley (Woodley). Terrific images ornament all the poems. http://wyatttownley.com/the-afterlives-of-trees.html
Ship of Fool by William Trowbridge (Red Hen). Smart, funny, sad. First rate poetry and a handbook of poetic form. http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2011/12/favorite-book-of-2011-william.html

POETRY ANTHOLOGIES
Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Hedge Coke (University of Arizona Press)
Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems, edited by Caryn Mirriam Goldberg. You will be surprised how many poets of merit come from this crossroads state. http://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com/readings/
The Best American Poetry 2011 guest edited by Kevin Young, series editor David Lehman (Scribner). Topeka poet Kevin Young continues to excel in curating as well as his own writing—see also his own Dear Darkness (Knopf 2008).
An Endless Skyway: Poetry From the State Poets Laureate edited by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Marilyn L. Taylor, Denise Low and Walter Bargen (Ice Cube Books). 38 or so states have poets laureate. Here’s a sampling of some of the diversity, beautifully produced by Iowa’s Ice Cube Books. http://www.icecubepress.com/2011-books/an-endless-skyway
The Penguin Anthology of 20^th Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove (Penguin). Thank you to courageous Rita Dove for shifting the center of gravity to include more real gritty American life in these selections.
PROSE ABOUT POETRY
Robert Duncan: The H.D. Book, edited and with an Introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman (University of California Press). Amazing discussion of how poetry enters our lives through memorable people and events. Thank you to Ken Irby for this gift!
Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr (Harper). Orr is always provocative if not always right.
Also a word for: Natural Theologies: Essays About Literature of the New Middle West by Denise Low. I appreciate Greg Kuzma and Nebraska's The Backwaters Press for taking a gamble on this first book about contemporary grasslands literature. http://www.thebackwaterspress.org/our-authors/denise-low/

Travis Hedge Coke reads from U. of Az. Press anthology of Indigenous poets SING

2011-12-08T09:50:00.000-06:00

Here is a video of Travis reading at Haskell Indian Nations University, Dec. 7, 2011:

Allison Hedge Coke and Travis Hedge Coke read from new anthology at Haskell Indian Nations University

2011-12-08T09:39:00.000-06:00

Allison Hedge Coke displays SING

Travis Hedge Coke takes photo of Allison.

Joshua Falleaf in Poetry Wriitng class

Allison and Travis read from the new anthology of Indigenous North and South American poetry Sing, from University of Arizona Press: http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2299.htm . Joshua Falleaf, Haskell instructor of the Poetry Writing class, hosted them.

UTNE READER moves to Topeka!

2011-12-06T10:18:00.000-06:00

Topeka is becoming a hipper & hipper place. Great poets and writers there, now this:

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/tv/135063933.html

American Life in Poetry: "Two Gates," by Denise Low

2011-12-05T19:17:00.000-06:00

Ted Kooser, the Poetry Foundation, and the Library of Congress sponsor this weekly poetry column, and a pdf version is available for download at this site. Thanks to Ted Kooser for the thoughtful introductory comment.

http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/columns/350.html

A Favorite Book of 2011: William Trowbridge's SHIP OF FOOL

2011-12-04T10:31:00.000-06:00

As the year ends, I remember Bill Trowbridge's reading from his new book Ship of Fool (Raven Bookstore's Big Tent series, April 28) as one of the best I have ever seen: he read quality work, all unified by a theme. He had just the right balance of poem to discussion of the poem, and the right balance of funny and serious. He connected with the audience so well. Trowbridge is a master sleight-of-hand, who plays on his readers' sympathies as well as Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, and the correct response is laughter and tears at once. Yes, every poem is about Fool, and by the time the book ends, the archetype Fool has been a film noir star, parted from his money, wise, and a prom goer. Here the Fool has his holiday, April's Fools Day, with a catalogue of bad practical jokes. I follow this poem, pulled into its momentum, and don't notice its sleekness. His final, original image of Fool lost in space stays with me for days. Trowbridge is so good.
THE RIGHT STUFF

On Fool’s birthday, April 1, people play
jokes on him all day long. “April Fool!”
his wife and kids hoot as the pancakes explode.
“Gotcha again!” quips the gang at work
when he sits down in the Limburger cheese.
His mom and dad, though dead, always call to ask
if he has Prince Albert in a can. “Well, let him out!”
they shriek, not waiting for an answer.

By ﬁve o’clock, Fool feels like a space walker
cut loose from the mother ship. The radio
in his head chatters nonsense as he ﬂoats
end over end. “You are my sunshine,”
he sings sotto voce, “my only sunshine.”

(ﬁrst published in The Gettysburg Review)

Look for William Trowbridge's poem "Rental Tux," Jan. 9, 2012,in An American Life in Poetry, a syndicated newspaper & e-column published by the partnership of The Poetry Foundation, Ted Kooser, and The Library of Congress.

Trowbridge, an Omaha native, has a Ph..D. in English from Vanderbilt University. He teaches in the University of Nebraska low residency MFA program. He was Distinguished University Professor at Northwest Missouri State, where he was an associate editor of The Laurel Review. He lives in Lee's Summit, Missouri with his wife Sue. Ship of Fool is from Red Hen Press. Other books are The Complete Book of Kong (Southeast Missouri State University Press), Enter Dark Stranger, Flicker, and Paradise (Uall from niversity of Arkansas Press). His website is www.williamtrowbridge.com

Zingara Poet Interviews Denise Low for Poet Laureate Series

2011-11-30T07:57:00.001-06:00

Lisa Hase posted a lengthy interview and the poem "Pocahontas: A Portrait" on her creativity coaching blog. The Interview includes this excerpt.

How does poetry bring or add meaning to your life?

"First, I became involved with poetry so young, that it is hard to tease out how it, among other experiences, add meaning to my life. It’s a spiritual practice—I do believe that learning the discipline of language is one of many paths to enlightenment. It requires engagement with reality, not neuroses. Observation and reflection are the polarity, and syntax the means along the way. So poetry keeps me connected to immediate experience, and it makes historic tradition collapse into the present moment. We use ancient words, and each use reinvigorates them. I cannot imagine my life without poetry. " For more of the interview, see: http://zingarapoet.net/2011/11/29/interview-with-kansas-poet-laureate-denise-low/

My poem "Two Gates" posted on Poetry Foundation site

2011-11-24T10:24:00.000-06:00

Poetry Foundation link to "Two Gates" by Denise Low, front page for a few more days

Francisco Aragon reads "Walt Whitman," after Ruben Dario, in Spanish and English

2011-11-21T12:54:00.006-06:00

The American Literary Translators Association hosted Francisco Aragon and Fred Arroyo for a reading at the New Letters and BookMark offices Nov. 19, 2011. This recording is from Francisco's reading from his new book Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, Kansas City.Here is his biographical information from the Poetry Foundation website: "Poet, translator, essayist, editor, and San Francisco native Francisco Aragón studied Spanish at the University of California at Berkeley and New York University. He earned an MA from the University of California at Davis and an MFA from the University of Notre Dame.Aragón’s multi-genre book Glow of Our Sweat (2010) includes poems, translations, and an essay. His translations appear in Federico García Lorca’s Selected Verse: A Bilingual Edition (1996). The editor of Bilingual Press’s Canto Cosas poetry book series and the anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007)." Aragon's poetry appears in Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (2001) and Mariposa: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (2008). Aragon is a 2008-2011 national board member of the Association of Writers &Writing Programs. At the University of Notre Dame, Aragón directs Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies, and edits for Momotombo Press, which he founded. Francisco studied and lived in Spain also.

Diane Glancy's film Dome of Heaven Is an Authentic View of Great Plains Life, Both Cherokee and Anglo

2011-11-19T11:26:00.001-06:00

A private showing of this terrific film Nov. 18, 2011 was a highlight of the American Literary Translators Association conference in Kansas City. Diane Glancy is best known for books of poetry and prose relating to her Cherokee heritage, and this film does continue her explication of contemporary American Indian concerns. Cherokee characters are central to the film, but also this film gives an authentic portrait of small town life on the Great Plains. The film (and novel) Winter’s Bone tells truth through fiction regarding the Ozarks, and Cedar Rapids portrays upper Midwest life. Dome of Heaven has equal authenticity and quality. Glancy, who lives in Kansas City, was not present because she was attending the Los Angeles Skins Film Festival to present the film.

Small Great Plains towns often include Native populations as well as descendants of European settlers. I grew up in small town Kansas grasslands, not far geographically nor culturally from Vici, Oklahoma, the setting, in a family of mixed backgrounds. The film is shot on location, and local people participated as actors, extras, and musicians. I recognized the café, school, court, church and bar, and always the sky. The film is based on Glancy’s book Flutie, about her experiences as a visiting writer in Vici public schools. She wrote a script from the book at a Sundance Native American Screenwriting workshop. For more on the making of the film, see Glancy’s website www.dianeglancy.com.

The story revolves around a Cherokee veteran (Wes Studi, a subtle and strong performance) of World War II and his German war bride (Sylvia Kofler, a Kansas City writer and perfect fit). Their two children are Flutie (Thirza Defoe) and Franklin (Noah Watts). Franklin works with his father in a local garage as an apprentice mechanic; although he is bright, he has dropped out of high school. His sister Flutie wants to go to college, but she is morbidly afraid of speaking in front of people. She must overcome this phobia in order to pass high school and attend college. There are romances, arguments, tragedies, two marriages (Franklin's) and hope. The Greek myth of Philomela is another layer of the plotline. Well placed ambient shots of the area, including Southwest Oklahoma State campus, create the sense of the land being a character as well.

I viewed the film with a group of academics—people whose critical faculties are sharpened by decades of grading student papers and critiquing literature. Not an easy audience. Yet there was not a dry eye by the end of the movie. I heard others comment about the well crafted dialogue, the use of silence as counterpoint to the panoramic views of the plains, the acting, the pacing, the musical score, and more. Country western is on most radio stations in that region, and the Randall family of Vici has listened well. Their ballads complement the script. Through a Looking Glass of Lawrence, Kansa, filmed and edited the movie, and their skill is apparent. I appreciated seeing the film with outsiders, because I was lost in the film’s verisimilitude. Dome of Heaven especially captures the humor. Glancy incorporates the overlapping Cherokee and rural humor, which is understated, self-deprecating, instructive, and inventive. A neighbor sees the father Mr. Moses driving a tractor down a road followed by a ten-year-old driving a truck (early driving is commonplace), but the kid’s head cannot be seen. The neighbor deduces that Mr. Moses is training the truck to follow. One of Flutie’s suitors creeps into her bedroom late after a night of drinking beer at the Cedar Shack. His hasty morning retreat, under the eyes of father and brother, is a classic.

Glancy brings skills of a trained writer to her script. After receive a graduate degree at the University of Iowa, she has published about 30 books of fiction, poetry, non-fiction prose, and drama. Among her awards are two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Minnesota Book Award, an Oklahoma Book Award, an American Book Award, and the 2011 Best Native American Film at the Trail Dance Independent Film Festival (Duncan, Oklahoma). Her most recent poetry is Stories from the Driven World (Mammoth 2010). A new collection of nonfiction, The Dream of a Broken Field (University of Nebraska Press 2011). For a clip, see:
http://www.laskinsfest.com/films/dome.heaven

Nikky Finney wins 2011 National Book Award for Poetry

2011-11-17T07:53:00.001-06:00

Poetry winner of the National Book Award is Nikky Finney for Head Off & Split, from TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press. My friend Damaris Hill had been telling me to read Nikky Finney for a couple years, and so I did. Her work is tough and strong. The poem “Sign Language, “ from The World is Round (Innerlight Publishing, 2003), shows the vivid, visceral images she uses—here, the image of two hearts torn out of two lovers’ chests. She addresses the reader directly—no safe distances here—with “tell me what is the difference.” This is unforgettable.

SIGN LANGUAGE
For the man who jumped out in front of the woman with his
arm raised like a machete screaming Abomination! as she
walked the streets of San Francisco holding her lover’s hand
for the first time in public.

There is a woman who goes to sleep
every night wishing she had broken
your sternum reached up inside your
chest momentarily borrowing your
heart to hold before your screaming
face and with her other hand still
clutching her lover’s broke next into
her own sternum plucking next her
own heart dangling them both there
sterling silver sign language for you
tell me what is the difference.
Finney is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky and lives in Lexington. She’s also on the faculty at Cave Canem, the writer’s center for African-American poets, and a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets. She was born in Conway, S.C. an educated at Talladega College and Atlanta University. Writes Walter Mosely, “She has flung me into an afterbirth of stars and made my stiff bones as loose as jelly.” Caribbean poet Lorna Goodison notes, Finney “calls us to consider and value again the blessings found in community, the strong bonds of family and the transcendent and inexplicable ways of the spirit.” Her narrative poems include characters as diverse as Jacques Cousteau and Saartjie Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), young women defined by violence and old women killing time in a thrift store.

Excerpt from Natural Theologies introduction: defining the West

2011-11-11T06:41:00.000-06:00

This book of critical essays about contemporary literature of the American grasslands region begins with an essay that defines the region, and then introduces settler and Indigenous writers with themes of frontier, settlement, people, and nature.
"The landmass known as the West or Middle West or Grasslands or Great and Lesser Plains is an area first conceived by European Americans as a frontier zone. Subsequent histories and American Indian perspectives complicate representations of this region, as contemporary and recent 20^th century writers rework themes of history, settlement, personal identity, and theology. Despite the complexities, these writers return to a fundamental truth unaltered by any human constructions: the natural world persists as the defining characteristic of the region."

Nov. 2011 National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass mentions Natural Theologies along with other NBCC member news

2011-11-10T07:48:00.001-06:00

NBCC notes publication of my new book of personal critical essays about contemporary grasslands writers: "Former Kansas poet laureate Denise Low has published a collection of her review-articles and other prose, Natural Theologies: Essays about Literature of the New Middle West from The Backwaters Press. . . ." and more on the NBCC blogmember news summary.The link to The Backwaters Press is http://www.thebackwaterspress.org/new-releases/. Thanks to editor/publisher Greg Kosmicki! He's great to work with. Paul Hotvedt did the cover art--an amazing artist collected by museums & universities for teaching techniques-- http://paulhotvedt.com/. More on my writing is at www.deniselow.com

Natural Theologies: Essays about Literature of the New Middle West, is the first critical study of contemporary Mid-Plains literature. Denise Low, former Kansas poet laureate, shows how the region’s writers inherit a Frontier legacy from Indigenous and American settler communities. Myths continue to provide framework for fiction writers and poets, as well as nature and the rich community life. Not all of the region is rural. Cities like Minneapolis, Omaha, and Kansas City, have presence in the literature—but in context of the great acreage around them. This innovative book defines the region’s character while at the same time illuminating a panoramic past. Indigenous peoples and their philosophies add to this unique look at the Mid-continent’s literary culture. Writers whose work comes to Low’s attention include: William Stafford, Louise Erdrich, Langston Hughes, Ted Kooser, Robert Day, David Ray, Heid Erdrich, Jo McDougall, William Kloefkorn, Adrian C. Louis, Joseph Marshall III, Thomas Fox Averill, Linda Hasselstrom, Diane Glancy, and other Mid-Plains writers .

Denise Low:Reading from Ghost Stories: Prairie Lights Bookstore Reading, with Kathryn Kysar, June 2011

2011-11-08T20:23:00.000-06:00

http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/u?/vwu,3070

Caryn Mirriam Goldberg's poem in honor of Ken Irby--Link

2011-11-07T18:45:00.000-06:00

Good article on docupoetry by Joseph Harrington

2011-11-06T18:27:00.000-06:00

Joe defines “docupoetry” as verse that " (1) contains quotations from or reproductions of documents or statements not produced by the poet and (2) relates historical narratives, whether macro or micro, human or natural. " See the full article at the Jacket2 website
http://jacket2.org/article/docupoetry-and-archive-desire

Saralyn Reece Hardy supports reinstatement of a public Kansas Arts Commission

2011-11-06T08:13:00.001-06:00

The Kansas legislature voted to reinstate the state funding for the Kansas Arts Commission, after Gov. Brownback eliminated it. The Kansans who oppose public access and funding for the arts are Brownback and the Koch brothers. Saralyn Reece Hardy explains financial and community concerns in this article, reprinted with permision. Denise Low
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
RESTORE THE KANSAS ARTS COMMISSION by Saralyn Reece Hardy

The Kansas Arts Commission has closed its doors. Kansas has become the only state in the nation to eliminate public funding for the arts. Public funding is premised on one intrinsic rule: Art is for everyone, and our culture belongs to all. Public funding is about equal access. Public funding ensures that Kansas museums, concerts, dance and theater events are open to all Kansans, not just to those who can afford the price of admission or enjoy private access. Public funding is crucial in expanding audiences beyond elite circles. Public funding ensures that people across Kansas can build strong cultural communities in places large and small, rural and urban: Goodland, Hays, Fort Scott, Concordia, Salina, Lincoln, Greensburg, Wichita, Lucas, Lawrence and Kansas City.
Let’s not forget what the arts look like in Kansas. Art in Kansas is and has always been of the grassroots, nurtured by values, reflecting the unrelenting work ethic of its people, and exploring a common landscape that runs beyond our vast horizon. Every community in Kansas can point to local examples of how artists – musicians, visual artists, writers, actors, dancers — have helped shape the shared language of our state. Thriving arts communities are an integral part of Kansas’ independent, democratic nature.
On one hand, art is not about the money. Still, the financial impact of eliminating public funding for the Kansas Arts Commission is clear: The state cut a budget of $689,000 in funds that had yielded an investment of $1.3 million in federal funds, creating jobs statewide and supporting arts all over the state. All of those dollars, those jobs, those opportunities, are now gone.
In my career in the Kansas arts, and also as a steward for national public arts funding, I have experienced firsthand how powerful public support can be in stimulating philanthropic contributions among communities, artists, private business and foundations. In turn, these public-private partnerships have the power to draw national and international recognition for local arts programs and a reputation for innovation to the entire area. A renovated arts facility may owe its presence to a generous private donor, but sustaining its future often requires a public source. Foundations award prestigious challenge grants to arts organizations, but matching funds often depend on an arts infrastructure supported by city and state grants.
The Kansas Arts Commission once made it possible for generations of children in our state’s communities to experience a rich selection of arts opportunities, but now the organization and its network lie fallow, and Kansas children are the poorer for it. All of our residents deserve opportunities to develop creative and critical minds, capable of imagination and innovation, the same resourceful qualities that characterize us as Kansans.
If Kansas is to contribute to a national currency of ideas, then the state must invest in arts and education for our residents. Cultural capital and economic capital are not separate; they go hand in hand. If we shortchange our children and communities on one count, we will shortchange them on the other. For the sake of future generations of Kansans, public funding for the arts must be reinstated in the blueprint for the state.
Ultimately, art is not about money: Art is about innovation and improvisation, authenticity and insight. Art means exercising individual freedoms in conversation with a community. Public funding is about access and opportunity — investing in the marvelous diversity of human expression, sharing those perspectives among us all, and making us stronger as a people.
— Saralyn Reece Hardy has worked in the arts in Salina, Washington, D.C., and now Lawrence.

Matt Porubsky Reading with Eric McHenry, Denise Low, Bill Sheldon, Brian Daldorph

2011-11-04T11:30:00.000-05:00

& Kevin Rabas, Dennis Etzel Jr,Jason Wesco, Mary Stone Dockery and Jeff Tigchelaar
Reading Friday, November 4th 5:30-7ish pm to celebrate the new book by Matt, at Blue Panet Cafe Nov. 4, Topeka
Blue Planet Café

The Three Times in My Life when I’ve Read William Stafford’s ‘Key of C – An Interlude For Marvin’ from Kansas Poems

We were on the road between our homes
speaking only of each other, instances and secrets.
You read to me on the way,
your voice elliptical in turns
and surroundings of stanzas and statements.
I saw the poem first through your voice:
all of them telling their futures,
their secrets to come to hold them fast to time.
I had to cry for their fates.
It seemed like our moment was in theirs,
the uncertainty of our timelines placed to sight.
She was born sometime later.
I had forgotten the poem as time travelled us
toward embraces of three.
I stumbled upon it and was stopped like a short breath.
I saw the poem through the both of you,
close by on the bed, in your light and sighing
moment of arms and nothing but that.
I had to cry for you and them
in the gathered instant of gathered fortune,
knowing how tightly you would always hold her.
The sun shined setting through
the windshield of the locomotive.
The air-conditioning and my shaded safety-glasses glinted it away.
I found the book of poems in my bag and read the poem again.
I was sure of my emotions in my surroundings of reflecting steel,
ballast black from loose oil and a co-worker stranger beside me.
But still, behind my glasses I had to cry for the poem.
The gentle giving. The gentle giving.
I put the book away and turned from the stranger,
bent to reach for a bottle of water from the ice bucket,
not offering one to him.
The poem swirled into me as cold water.

Matthew Porubsky’s first book of poetry, voyeur poems, published by Coal City Press, was the winner of the Kansas Authors Club Nelson Poetry Book Award in 2006. His second book of poetry, Fire Mobile (The Pregnancy Sonnets,) is from Woodley Memorial Press. He lives in Topeka where he works as a freight conductor for the Union Pacific Railroad.!
Links to articles about Fire Mobile (The Pregnancy Sonnets):
http://carynmirriamgoldberg.wordpress.com/tag/matt-porubsky/
http://www.lawrence.com/news/2011/oct/07/mans-eye-view-poet-matthew-porubsky-releases-colle/

Billy Joe Harris reads "I and the Motel Room" by Nicola Manupelli and his own poem "A Guy in a Black SUV."

2011-11-02T12:50:00.002-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPSkEmC6kdE

WAYNE PROPST ON WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS' CREATIVE PROCESS

2011-10-30T15:26:00.000-05:00

For more from Wayne on his time with WSB, click this link http://deniselow.wordpress.com/video-projects/

WILLIAM BURROUGHS AUTOGRAPHED SOFTBALL NOT FOR SALE

2011-10-29T14:17:00.002-05:00

Wayne Propst, erstwhile companion and employee of William S. Burroughs, displayed his autographed softball Oct. 28, 2011, at an art event in Lawrence, Kansas. The old man, according to Propst, thought this was a baseball--he was not much of an aficionado of the sport. This is really a softball, inscribed: "for Wayne Propst and many years of friendship William S. Burroughs December 5, 1996." Wayne says it is the only baseball Burroughs ever signed, and it would fetch thousands at auction. Wayne had other fine art and collectible objects in his shopping cart (which he bought at the junk yard for $3): a turkey baster/artificial inseminator; shoes left over from one of his Shoe Flings; plastic gun, mounted; samples of his plastic baby head art; "Fluffy," a mummified cat; a severed golf iron--about a 3, I'd say. The portability of his display helps him cover all of downtown Lawrence art events with ease. He also uses the cart to carry tools at Lou's Farm, his land north of Lawrence, where Burroughs often visited. I remember parties there when Burroughs, then frail, was helped through the yard by James Grauerholz, Pat Elliott, David Ohle, and other companions. No one ever played baseball at these events. I remember McCormick's vodka was involved. Photos here show interest from an art consumer plus the milieu of Hobbs Loft during the Final Fridays Lawrence Art Party. The rhythm & blues band was very tasty. Unfortunately, too many arts fans are also baseball fans and spent the evening watching St. Louis Cardinals win the final game of the world series, rather than bidding on the Burroughs baseball. Burroughs was born in St. Louis and is buried there--perhaps his ka or spirit had some interest in the series. Probably not. Also, here is the WSB autograph on theWikipedia site, in case you wondered.

SCHEDULE: THE EBERHARDT COLLOQUIUM IN HONOR OF THE WRITING OF KENNETH IRBY

2011-10-27T10:27:00.001-05:00

Saturday, November 5, 2011 Alderson Auditorium, Kansas Union

9:30-9:45 am Welcome, William J. Harris, KU, Master of Ceremonies
9:45-10:15 Joe Harrington, KU, “Kansas &/or Oz, in the Poems of Kenneth Irby and Ronald Johnson”
10:15-11:15 Poetry Readings by The Eberhardt Poets: Lyn Hejinian, Pierre Joris, Ben Friedlander, Denise Low & Joe Harrington
11:15-12:00 Group Book Signing
12:00-1:30 Lunch
1:30-2:00 Denise Low, Haskell Indian Nations Univ., “Sensory Type/Topographies: Ken Irby’s Atlas to the World”
2:00-2:30 Ben Friedlander, University of Maine, “The Walk to the Paradise Garden”
2:45-3:15 Pierre Joris, SUNY-Albany, “Irby’s Very Own North Atlantic Turbine”
3:15- 3:45 Lyn Hejinian, UC-Berkeley, “We Might Say Poetry”
4:00-4:30 Roundtable Discussion
4:30-5:00 Poetry Reading by Kenneth Irby

Mammoth Publications releases Bill Sheldon's RAIN COMES RIDING

2011-10-23T13:48:00.001-05:00

Idyll

The dog’s ashes work their way
deeper into the garden’s soil.
This season I walk alone,
The dirt road winding
Into darkening sky.
The horses no longer
come when called, and the wind
keens, “Winter is coming on.”
The rising moon rattles the dry grass,
and below, the dead
continue their long work.

To order email mammothpubs@hotmail.com $12 postpaid. RAIN COMES RIDING details poet William Sheldon’s passion for the Great Plains. People loom against the horizon—his family, neighbors, runaways, working men, and also the people who lived in this place before, whose scattered flint tools remain still unchanged. He is a poet who embraces fully the contradictions of simulated realities existing, fragmented, in a timeless universe of flint and bluestem grass. Sheldon is a skilled, smart writer who has much to tell his readers about how to live with good conscience. This second book of the poet shows him creating a new genre of ballad. William Sheldon lives in Hutchinson, Ks., where he teaches. His book Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley), was named a 2002 Kansas City Star’s Noteworthy Book. He has an MFA from Wichita St. Univ.

Many poets of estimable value are called to mind by Bill Sheldon’s book: Kansas poets certainly (William Stafford, Steven Hind, Harley Elliot, Denise Low), and other-state poets with a knowing eye for the land, from the severe poems of Robinson Jeffers, to the more clement naturalism of Mary Oliver, to the savvy, stringent explorations of Wendell Berry. How can one read Sheldon’s “Red” and not think of the poems of Phil Levine, their similar understanding of manual labor and the lives invested in that work? I could go on in this vein, but… Sheldon is finally a practitioner of his own voice and vision—albeit one that takes its place happily in a community of other poets—and Rain Comes Riding, steeped in history and family, in an intimacy of place and sometimes a wry sense of humor, is the rich record of a career in which the world and the word have been lovingly wedded.” Albert Goldbarth, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award

First Draft: Denise Low essay on Ken Irby's Poetry

2011-10-15T18:46:00.004-05:00

Sensory Type/Topographies: Ken Irby's Atlas to the World

Poetry icon Kenneth Irby creates texts of sensory topographies—and so he has changed the technology of the page. I remember his long-time publisher John Moritz of Tansy Press fussing about Irby’s long lines and the gap-toothed spacings and typography and original illustrations—all the ways Irby pushed the limitations of paper, ink, and bindings. This was decades ago, and I still see John grumbling as he midwived some of the most remarkable writing of our time. This has not gone unrecognized. The Poetry Society of America selected Irby as a co-recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award in 2010. This establishes him as a major poet among other winners—Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, to mention a few. Irby also won the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, a Fulbright Fellowship, and other honors. His collected poems, The Intent On (from North Atlantic Press) covers the years 1962 to 2006. The square-ish, dense tome is weighty until opened. Then dynamic axes of words rise from inert materials to assemble, within readers’ visionary faculties, myriad revelations of consciousness....

This is the start of a presentation I'm working on for the Nov. 5 celebration of Kenneth Irby (see events).

More details from the press release: KU faculty member Kenneth Irby turns 75 this year. In the tradition of other events acknowledging major figures in contemporary poetry, such as the May 7, 2011 celebration of Robert Kelly in New York City and that of Amiri Baraka in Newark, New Jersey in 2009, the Eberhardt Colloquium at the University of Kansas this year is in his honor and celebrates his astonishing oeuvre. Both national and local scholars and poets will examine Irby’s life and work through lectures and panels; poetry readings will celebrate his contribution to American Literature. The day will conclude with a poetry reading by Irby himself. Featured speakers and presentations include: Lyn Hejinian, UC-Berkeley, “We Might Say Poetry” Pierre Joris, SUNY-Albany, “Irby’s Very Own North Atlantic Turbine” Ben Friedlander, University of Maine, “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” Denise Low, Haskell Indian Nations University, “Sensory Typ/Topographies: Ken Irby’s Atlas to the World” Joe Harrington, University of Kansas, “Kansas &/or Oz, in the Poems of Kenneth Irby and Ronald Johnson.” The colloquium is sponsored by the Department of English, The Hall Center for the Humanities, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the Spencer Museum of Art. An issue of the online journal Jacket 2 will be devoted to the proceedings, as well as including other solicited essays, letters, and critical remembrances. The issue will be edited by William J. Harris and by Kyle Waugh, co-editor of Irby’s collected poems, The Intent On. This event is free and open to the public. For further information, contact William J. Harris (wjh8@ku.edu).

ERIC MCHENRY: Celebrating ANOTHER POET FROM TOPEKA

2011-10-09T13:03:00.003-05:00

A year ago I visited Kramer’s Books in D.C., and I perused the poetry section. The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (Ohio University Press, 2009) appealed to my browser’s appetite. As I expected, I did not know any names on the cover. I paged through the book, and this poem jumped out:

REBUILDING YEAR

After Beloit I went back to the paper
and wrote arts features for eight dollars an hour,
and lived in the Gem Building, on the block between
Topeka High with its Gothic tower
and the disheveled Statehouse with its green
dome of oxidizing copper.

I was sorry that I had no view
of old First National. Something obscured it
from my inset balcony. I heard it
imploding, though, like Kansas Avenue
clearing its throat, and saw the gaudy brown
dust-edifice that went up when it came down.

Friday nights I walked to High’s home games
and sat high in the bleachers,
and tried to look like a self-knowing new
student, and tried not to see my teachers,
and picked out players with familiar names
and told them what to do.

Eric McHenry. Never heard of him, and Topeka is 20 miles upriver from my home. This is how I met 5^th generation Topekan McHenry. In his biography, I learned that after college at Beloit and Boston University—and a stint in Seattle—McHenry returned to Washburn University to teach. Kevin Young, Ben Lerner, Cyrus Console, Gary Jackson, Amy Fleury, and Ed Skoog are among his Topeka peers who are publishing with national presses. Must be something in that riverwater. See this Lawrence Journal World link to Topeka poet Matthew Porubsky’s new book Fire Mobile: Sonnets (Woodley Memorial Press): http://www2.ljworld.com/events/2011/oct/10/53152/

As I read “Rebuilding Year,” I identified with the scenery and the life—I’ve written for a newspaper in Kansas, and I know the low-wages and long hours wrestling with concise syntax. But McHenry’s sentences are not Hemingway’s direct lines. He has a fascination for recursive wording—the way Topeka High repeats simply as “High” in this poem is just one example. He doubles back on himself often in other poems as well. Sounds revolve also, like the rhymes in the first stanza: “paper,” “dollars,” “hour,” “tower,” and “copper.” He is one of the few Americans to rhyme as effortlessly as the English poets. Nothing feels forced, and the sounds reinforce the theme of return.

The jolt of the poem is the great implosion scene, which sounds like a street “clearing its throat” and also creates an after image of debris, a “dust-edifice.” This is the Tarot card the Tower, with permanence upset by sudden explosion, parallel to the shift from childhood to adulthood. Reality changes quickly and with odd echoes. The “rebuilding” of the title is both a literal architecture and archetypal coming-of-age story, where loss is a natural extension of the process. The renewal of the town and the football team also is the renewal of this man’s psyche. The narrator, the solitary fan in the bleachers, becomes an apprentice poet producing this soliloquy—a t once part of and separate from the crowd. He chooses the lonely seat, the one with a view, and creates conversation with characters who seem familiar, but all the rules have changed. He play-acts being the authority figure as he rehearses for adulthood.

All of McHenry’s poems have wistful twists at the end. His book Potscrubber Lullabies (The Waywiser Press, 2006) includes poems that mostly reconcile loss with commitment to survival, and the tension sometimes creates understated humor. The unstated theme is hope. Like a good Kansan, McHenry is self-deprecating, and his own follies are what keep him humble. He tells wrenching tales, all with prickling awareness. In “Vanguard” he reaches across the years and speaks with the father of the jazz tenor saxophone, Coleman Hawkins, another Topekan:

VANGUARD

Here’s what I remember: Coleman Hawkins
and I are sitting at a mahogany table
in the Village Vanguard, quietly talking.
He’s finished a set in which he was unable
to summon even one unbroken tone
from the bell of his once-clarion saxophone.
But now that’s over and he feels all right.
He’s smoking because he’s wanted to all night,
drinking cloudy cognac from a tumbler
and coughing ferociously; his voice is weaker
than his cough; he’s barely audible, mumbling
to me because he knows I’m from Topeka.
He says, “That’s where I learned to tongue my horn.”
I know, and that’s the only thing I hear.
It’s 1969; in half a year
he’ll be dead. In three years I’ll be born.

This is a ghost story, and the narrator keeps his secret to the end. He invests in imagination. He honors the amazing Hawk while simultaneously expressing compassion for the jazzman’s suffering. No word is more than three syllables, and most are two or one—a way to sustain emphasis. McHenry has a plainspoken vocabulary, like many Midwesterners (Stafford, Wright, Bly), which he uses to construct syntactical mazes that lead to genuine amazement.

See more about McHenry at these sites:
“I Don't Want to Live on the Moon,” essay by Eric McHenry for Richard Hugo House, 2009:
http://hugohouse.org/content/eric-mchenry-i-dont-want-live-moon
Kansas literature map page on Eric McHenry
http://www.washburn.edu/reference/cks/mapping/mchenry/index.html#biography
Washburn University faculty bio
http://www.washburn.edu/cas/english/Faculty/mchenry.html

“Rebuilding Year” and “Vanguard” © Eric McHenry. Poems reprinted with permission of the poet

http://www.kansastopblogs.com

2011-09-30T12:00:00.000-05:00

http://www.kansastopblogs.com/

Kansas Book Festival Sept. 24 Features Lana Myers, Cheryl Unruh, Eric McHenry, Denise Low

2011-09-29T18:31:00.000-05:00

Lana Myers, author of May Williams Ward biography Prairie Rhythms and Denise Low, author of Ghost Stories of the New West (Woodley 2010). Kansas awards 15 Notable awards to all genres of books published in Kansas or by Kansas authors. The Ks. Center for the Book and Ks. State Library gave the awards at the Ks. Bk. Festival.

Eric McHenry (Topeka), Denise Low (Lawrence), Cheryl Unruh (Emporia), and Lana Myers (Newton) participate in a panel at the Ks. Bk. Festival at Topeka. Cheryl Unruh also won a Notable Book recognition for her book of short essays Flyover Country.

Link to poems and info on Joy Harjo!

2011-09-21T18:04:00.000-05:00

World Poetry Portfolio Editor Sudeep Sen has a lengthy bio note plus a portfolio of Joy Harjo poems: http://www.molossus.co/worldpoetryportfolio/world-poetry-portfolio-36-joy-harjo/

New works by Joy Harjo are forthcoming: Soul Talk, Song Language, a book of essays, columns, interviews and photographs from Wesleyan University Press; Crazy Brave, a memoir from W.W. Norton; a one-woman show at the Public Theater in New York and her next play, a musical hybrid: I Think I Love You, An All Night Round Dance is being commissioned by the Public Theater.

MARY SWANDER: Video of her short story "How I Got My Dog"

2011-06-29T18:02:00.000-05:00

Mary Swander is Poet Laureate of Iowa, and she has a dog. Don't mis her reading of this intercultural exchange between her (or someone who could be like her) and Amish neighbors. I first learned about Swander's work when I reviewed her classic long poem Driving the Body Back (Alfred Knopf) in the Kansas City Star when it was published in the 1980s.It was a compelling family drama in verse about taking a body back to the home farm for burial. She continues to reflect on the universal and particular experiences of rural people. I met her through Thomas Fox Averill, a fiction writer from nearby Topeka. They attended the Iowa Wrtiers Workshop together. Swander's memoirs are Desert Pilgrim (Viking) and Out of This World (Viking). Her awards are: Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for the Literary Arts, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and the Nation-Discovery Award.Her recent books of poetry and prose are from Ice Cube Press and Turning Point. She is a radio commentator and teaches at Iowa State. I was lucky to meet up with her during summer travels recently, and here is a photo and link to the reading. Enjoy!

WILLIALM KLOEFKORN,1932-2011

2011-05-29T19:03:00.001-05:00

Bill Kloefkorn was one of the great storytellers of the poets from my home state. He attended Emporia State University for both his BA and MA in English; Emporia is my hometown, and I saw him at several events. I listened spellbound as he told stories and kept the audience of English teachers and librarians laughing. He was a great entertainer. Most of his career was in Nebraska, but the humor is about the same north of the border.He was a solid guy, generous, and fun. Born in 1932, he had one foot in the 19^th century and another in the 21^st. His writing memorializes the rural life, which is changing as city folk buy country houses for retreats and as family farms are sold to corporations. He references values connected to natural laws, and he critiques the pettiness of human frailties in the face of the larger truths, as in this 2004 poem, where he still remembers the awe of his father’s authority:

I Stand Alone at the Foot

I Stand alone at the foot

Of my father’s grave
Trembling to tell:
The door to the granary is open,
Sir,
And someone lost the bucket
To the well.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Here are some links:

http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2007/11/william-c-kloefkorn-1932.html

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/50ec1ca074094d259a6537640d133715/NE--Obit-Nebraska-Poet/

An April 9, 2011 feature in the Lincoln paper
http://journalstar.com/entertainment/arts-and-culture/books/article_c6444e65-1a16-5a76-88d8-6e3e67dbed61.html
A school was just named for him: http://www.nebrwesleyan.edu/press-and-media/news/16316
Some poems:
http://rinabeana.com/poemoftheday/index.php/category/william-kloefkorn/
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2009/11/18

Marilyn L. Taylor reads from state poet laureates anthology for Milwaukee Public Radio

2011-05-29T18:04:00.000-05:00

Hear 2009-2010 Wisconsin Poet Laureate read from the anthology An Endless Skyway (Ice Cube Press 2011) and her own work at this site. Marily's website is : http://www.mlt-poet.com . Her book of poetry is GOING WRONG: Poems (Parallel Press, 2009) available at www.Amazon.com An Endless Skyway is available at www.icecubepress.com, and Ted Kooser, former US poet laureate, says this: “Each poet adds a unique style to the anthology and a unique slant on what it means to write … this book is made for everyone to roam and ramble within. Open these pages and enjoy the journey.” An Endless Skyway: Poetry from the State Poets Laureate is an exciting anthology that brings together the poetry of thirty-eight State Poets Laureate from across the United States. It is a collection that explores the poetry of places, but at the same time offers a glimpse into the poetry of our whole land. Edited by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Marilyn L. Taylor, Walter Bargen, and Denise Low. Thanks to Steve Sempken, indepdendent publisher of Ice Cube Press! Thanks to photographer Jerry Sipe.
http://www.wuwm.com/programs/lake_effect/le_sgmt.php?segmentid=7492

National Book Critics Circle link for calendar

2011-05-29T17:33:00.001-05:00

Chicago begins its Publishers Row book events next week, then June 8 see the Future of the Book NBCC panel in Kansas City--Johnson County Resource Library. June 22 is another NBCC panel at NYU bookstore: With: Literary agents Julie Just & Betsy Lerner; O Magazine book editor Sara Nelson; Brooklyn Rail editor John Reed ; NY Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus; author David Goodwillie & Scribner’s editor Paul Whitlach. Moderated by Susan Shapiro. http://bookcritics.org/calendar/

National Book Critics Circle Event in KC June 8, 7 pm

2011-05-23T10:35:00.001-05:00

Join 4 members of the NBCC for a lively discussion of the future of the book in American Culture. by 2020, will the printed version still be going strong? Or will it have largely succumbed to electronic texts, audiobook downloads, and videos downloads? The event takes place at the Johnson County Central Resource Library 9875 West 87th Street
Overland Park, KS 66212.

Panelists include Denise Low, Mark Luce and Steve Weinberg, with moderator John Mark Eberhart. For information contact John Mark Eberhart at 913-826-4408

Kathryn Kysar, St. Paul poet, will read at Big Tent, Lawrence 7pm May 19

2011-05-16T16:00:00.000-05:00

Kathryn Kysar will be reading in Kansas this week--Thurs. May 19, 7 pm the Raven Bookstore, 7th & Mass. in Lawrence, and Fri. May 20, 7 pm at the East Douglas Watermark Bookstore in Wichita. Her new book Pretend the World is from Holy Cow!Press in Minnesota. For more information, contact Jim Perlman
http://www.holycowpress.org/ Kysar's work augments reality with plausible voices from the intangible world. The interplay between real and unreal creates the tension, as in this poem from before incarnation:
Dream Poem

Mother, Father,
I have everything at bedtime:
a net of flowers,
a clock, a full little belly,
bed clothes made of candy wrappers,
petal wet darkness.
I am sleeping in the spirit gardens,
in these waters, quick and hot.
Will you wake me?

Wm. J. Harris publishes Domande Personali/Personal Questions

2011-04-26T08:38:00.000-05:00

Leconte Editions has published an Italian bilingual edition of Billy Joe Harris's chapbook of poetry, translated by Nicola Manuppelli. The poems, as I read them in English, are koans--brief mind twisters that stay with me for days. The poet creates knife-sharp images with no extraneous verbage. The poem "No Delicate Flowers or Wild Geese" goes like this:
Our parting was not
Like a Chinese poem.
There were no
Delicate flowers or wild geese.
No chestnut horses.
No brush painted mountains.
No grace.

This shows the homage to Asian forms as well as the adaptation to American experience. With minimal words, Harris evokes the genres of early Chinese poetry-and-painting. He also evokes the contrast between the real and the ideal. The carefully chosen emblems of flowers, geese, and "chestnut horses" suggests the range of romantic passions--the sweetness as well as vigor. The last line is the oblique reversal--also a negation, but also a generalization about human qualities that carries with it the connotation of insult: "No grace." This is a lover having the last word. This is a definitive negation of the lovers' previous joys.
The entire book is without inhibition. He writes of bestiality, racism, poignant romance, procrastination. He covers a lot of ground in nine brief poems. The title poem is oblique and ironic and smart. Personal questions --and sometimes questions can be but thinly veiled aggressions--are answered here by the poet with his own edge. This sampling of poems whets my appetite for more. A new-and-collected poems volume is in the works. For a video of Harris's poem "Practical Concerns," see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBhBVO-f_G4. the book is available at the Raven Bookstore, 7th and Mass., Lawrence KS 66044. Harris teaches English and creative writing at the University of Kansas. he has published Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (Ithaca House 1974), In My Own Dark Way (Ithaca House 1977) and The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (University of Missouri Press 1985).

Jonathan Holden reads at Dusty Bookshelf, Manhattan 7:30 April 14

2011-04-13T19:50:00.000-05:00

Don't miss Jonathan Holden reading from his new book Thurs. April 14. Dusty Bookshelf is at 700 N Manhattan Ave Manhattan, KS 66502. Phone is 785.539.2839 manhattan@thedustybookshelf.com for questions. He will read from a new book of poems, Glamour, from Mammoth Publications, 82 pp., $12.00. http://www.mammothpublications.com/
“Jonathan Holden is one of our most intelligent poets…. It is not always easy to be both brilliant and generous of spirit. It is our good fortune that Holden wears his learning lightly and with such unaffected grace and charm.”—Ted Kooser

Louis Copt Speech supporting Ks. Arts Commission, under attack by Gov. Brownback, who wants to privatize it under handpicked board of trustees. Copt says: "Arts funding did not create the budget crisis" "Now is the time to increase arts funding" (remember the WPA anyone?) and more

2011-03-05T21:20:00.000-06:00

MAMMOTH PUBLICATIONS presents GLAMOUR: POEMS by Jonathan Holden

2011-03-05T20:06:00.000-06:00

Mammoth has just released advance copies of Glamour: Poems, a new book of poetry by Kansas State professor and poet extraordinaire Jonathan Holden. He overlays arts, photography, math, and the human life cycle. His poem "Ur-Calculus" begins:

Back then, "Calculus"
was a scary college word,
and yet we studied it
from the back seat, we studied
the rates at which
the roadside trees went striding
past the hazy
farther trees, the hazier
a tree the farther off
it stood.
The ghostliest,
far across the fields,
hardly moved at all. A line
of spectators, they'd turn
as if to watch
us pass
before fog erased them.

This resonates with H.L. Hix's philosophical etudes in verse--a conjunction of disciplines.
Jonathan Holden’s poetry travels as far as words can go. He arcs backward to the Roman verse tradition in his poem “Ars Poetica,” which recalls Ovid, and he anticipates the future in “Fahrenheit 451.” He comments on the pastoral in “Cirrus,” and he examines contemporary culture in poems about artists Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. Mathematics is another of Holden’s fluencies. He uses this meta-language in poems about his physicist father. Like many poets, Holden celebrates youth and observes the decline of age, and he celebrates love. In sum, he maps the possible range of human consciousness.
We need Holden’s wisdom. His voice is kindly and, as Ted Kooser once noted, “unaffected.” He describes in his memoirs how he grew up in a household of geniuses—his father, a research physicist for Bell Telephone labs, entertained Nobel Prize winners often; his twin brother is a long-time film and music critic for the New York Times. Holden has written how he learned to recognize brilliant people, but further, this book shows how he himself is a genius poet.
Ultimately, Holden teaches us how to live richly. In “Hunting for Morels” he concludes:

Then the earth offers itself
to us anyway, all
its tender thumbs, the other
half of our words,
and we take whatever we see.

This superb wordsmith also understands how language names the cosmos inexactly, with slippage between discrete experiences and more generalized labels of words. He seizes the opportunity to not only articulate experience, but also, in that interstitial space, to glamourize—grief, love, history, and beauty.
Holden is an omnivore, capturing in his nets all the variegated experience of the 21st century. To his credit, he is not a cynic. He illustrates how moments of grace and sin exist simultaneously in an equation, not canceling each other out. In accepting oppositions and contradictions, Holden advocates a calculated optimism.

Glamour is available through mammothpubs@hotmail.com, Amazon or Barnes & Noble, Ingrams, and Kindle version is nearing completion. It is available at Watermark Books in Wichita and Strecker-Nelson Gallery in Manhattan--for now. Cover illustration by Thomas Weso of Mammoth Publications-- http://www.tomweso.com/ and more on Holden at http://www.jonathanholden.com/
Denise Low

Review of Things Come On: An Amneoir by Joseph Harrington

2011-03-03T08:52:00.000-06:00

Things Come On: An Amneoir by Joe Harrington is one of an emerging group of creative works that maps the interplay between media and human consciousness. Sherman Alexie’s short story “Any Little Hurricane” is an example of a story told by a young boy about an out-of-control party that resembles hurricane formation on the weather channel. Reality and TV images of a category-four storm mix into one narrative. Similarly, Harrington recounts the story of his mother’s battle with breast cancer in the context of the Watergate Scandal, which was the news event at the time of his mother’s death. His mother died the day Nixon resigned. He combines the words “amnesia” and “memoir” to create his subtitle “An Amneoir.” This suggests the slippage of electronic and remembered realities.

     Harrington creates various strands of images and narratives that continue through the story in a way that reignites the experience of a boy’s loss of his mother. To read this book is to become engaged. Another way to understand the book is to see it as a graphic novel that has broken out of the linear-cell comic book/graphic novel format. “Mixed media” is not a term that specifically can describe the cloud of photographs, typeface variants, medical records, interviews, TV transcripts, diagrams, scanned letters, newspaper clippings, graphs, and more. Yet Harrington maintains control, so the movement from diagnosis to loss is gripping.
     The book guides the reader into a consciousness where distance is impossible. Watergate language of cover-up blends with medical language of cover-up. The half-truths told to patients by doctors of the mid-20th century overlap those told by the government under Nixon. The implication is these half-truths continue to be told. Public language interacts with the very core of human identity—language—and implications are as profound as those in Aristotle’s Athens.
     This is not a grim book. It is exploratory: tentative and sure at the same time, suggestive and definitive. It is, in short, fine poetry of a new cast order. Here is a sequence that illustrates the intermixing of personal and public realities in the mind of the young narrator. The two quotations are from Watergate testimony of Sam Ervin (first) and Gordon Liddy’s secretary Sally J. Harmony (second).

Scandal

Q: So you would have been ten, when your mother was diagnosed? What did you know and when did you know it?
   “. . . whisked away under cover of darkness and forced to submit to an ordeal cloaked in secrecy . . .”
(mugging squads, kidnapping teams, prostitutes, electronic surveillance, intercepted aircraft communications, espionage, shredding)
   “I did know absolutely nothing”

Harrington also authored Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, which examines poetry in newspapers and other public exchanges. (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2002) and poetry chapbook Earth Day Suite (Chicago: Beard of Bees Press, 2010). Poems are published in Hotel Amerika, Otoliths, Fact-Simile, and Tarpaulin Sky, among others. He is a Pushcart Prize Nominee (2011), Hall Center for the Humanities Fellow (2010 and 2000), and Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands (2005). -

Tom Averill's KPR Oleander Commentary on Ks. Arts Commission Economics & Arts

2011-02-19T11:38:00.000-06:00

Check out this link to Averill's latest Wm. Jennings Bryan Oleader commentary on the Kansas need for culture, beauty, and the arts. The Ks Arts Commission supports Kansas! On the Kansas Public Radio site under "news" and "commentaries." Don't miss it!

http://kansaspublicradio.org/newsstory.php?itemID=27096

So Many Good New Books, like Megan Kaminski's CARRY CATASTROPHE

2011-01-22T21:22:00.000-06:00

Grey Book Press put out a chapbook of Megan Kaminski's at the end of 2010. Here is a page:
     Come lay eyes on the last trace of dusk
     sing ceratinty and flight paths
     line purple coasts
                        some nights to sleep
     bodies wrapped in gulf streams gauze
     circle hair and cheek list ships against mountains
     range limits should soft

Boundary between body and the cosmos dissolves, so the gulf stream is a personal genie. Landscape folds, like cuestas, have no distance from skin. The point of view is 20,000 feet up, within "flight paths." Flight is a miracle, and this poem shows how. More information at http://www.greybookpress.com/

Denise Low Reads from her newest book of poetry (Ghost Stories of the Ne...

2010-12-27T09:05:00.000-06:00

Review: Douglas County Jail Blues published by Coal City Review (Oct. 2010)

2010-11-28T16:33:00.000-06:00

Brian Daldorph, editor of this collection of poems by inmates at the Douglas County Correctional Facility (Lawrence, Ks.), presents a decade of writings from his and Michael Caron's writing class. The collection is raw and honest. The images are like bricks--indeed a strength of the group of writings is the original, confrontational descriptions. Voices of the twenty-plus writers collect in these pages and narrate a counter-reality of American failure and anguish. Mike Caron writes about the project: "Words on paper can be an effective alternative to smashing fists in concrete walls or screaming obscenities." Caron has it right--these poems are immediate and necessary. This is where poetry resides, in the incarnation/incarceration of spirit within walls of flesh.
The blues, referenced in the title, are a strict musical form, 8 bars; the prisoners use regular forms as often as free verse. The editor's touch is light, so authenticity is preserved. At the same time, this is a group of poems with evidence of thoughtful revision/reflection. Here is one that shows the kind of punch many of these word-bombs create:

Danegrus Dane: Confession of a Killer
It's like this, I tried everything
but nothin' worked, everywhere I
looked they had me surrounded
where the shadows lurk. What I don't
understand is why every time I look out
the window I'm the guy standin' there
holding that big silenced Desert Eagle
with the laser sights & teflon-rubber grip.
I'm the one comin' to get me & all I got:
the gold bars, the diamonds & all that
blood money. So much money like you've
never seen. So much more blood. I guess the
best way 2 kill a killer is 2 send another;
I guess that's why they sent me,
the most dangerus of 'em all. Good, at least
it'll be quick, at least
I don't think I'll let me suffer.

In Lawrence at the Raven Bookstore and Jayhawk Ink. To order, send $10 check or money order to Brian Daldorph, Coal City Review, English Department, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS, 66045.

Nearly Unbearable Grace: The Poetry of Joy Harjo

2010-11-28T15:31:00.001-06:00

Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance

2010-11-28T15:29:00.001-06:00

THE FIELD OF PLAY by Steve Heller

2010-11-23T08:40:00.000-06:00

Steve Heller is director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program, Antioch University Los Angeles. Please acknowledge Steve Heller as author in reproductions of any part of this tribute.

This past Saturday the football teams of Northwestern University and University of Illinois met on a neutral field in Chicago. Northwestern’s record stood at 7-3 overall, but only 3-3 in the Big Ten. The Wildcats had already qualified for a post-season bowl game but were out of contention for the conference championship. Illinois stood at a mediocre 5-5, needing at least one more victory in order to meet the minimum NCAA eligibility for post-season play. The game has already been played, the outcome decided. But this story is not about who won and who lost.

The game was played at Wrigley Field, which from 1921 to 1970 was the home of the NFL’s Chicago Bears. Wrigley is much better known, of course, as the historic home of baseball’s loveable losers, the Chicago Cubs, whose last World Series Championship came in 1908. Despite the Cubs’ century of frustration, Wrigley Field has a rich baseball history. Hall of Famers Gabby Harnett, Hack Wilson, Ferguson Jenkins, Ryne Sandberg, and Mr. Cub himself, Ernie Banks, all played there. But this story isn’t about baseball either.

Wrigley Field is known for its classic jewel box shape, ivy-covered outfield walls, and its home runs when the wind is blowing out. Ernie Banks called Wrigley “the friendly confines.” Because of Wrigley’s size and shape, the football layout for Chicago Bears games was north-to-south, accommodating the full dimensions of a football field, plus barely adequate room beyond each sideline and end zone. However, because the Cubs had subsequently added seats along the first and third base lines, the layout for the Northwestern-Illinois game had to be east-to-west. As a result, the southeast corner of the east end zone nearly abutted the right field wall. Despite heavy padding on the wall, Big Ten officials determined that the east end zone was unsafe for players. A decision was therefore made to have every offensive play run toward the west end zone, thus requiring teams to trade sides of the field with each change of possession. The special ground rule had implications for game strategy, of course—but this story isn’t about strategy or even sports. It has something to do with safety, but mostly it’s about something bigger than that.

When I heard the game between Northwestern and Illinois would be played at Wrigley Field, my first thought was: What would Phil Heldrich think about this?

Aaaa, it’s gonna be a flea circus, I imagined Phil crabbing in a flat nasal tone, dismissing the whole notion with a toss of his right hand. They’ll bounce off right field like pinballs (forgive my mixed metaphor). Every time somebody scores, the zebras will have to duck.

Phil had grown up in Chicago, “a beer’s throw from Wrigley,” as he put it. Despite what I already knew he would think about the reconfiguration of the park for a single college football game, I wanted to ask him: Would you go to the game anyway?

Go? His eyes would flash, shoulders stiffen. Of course I’d go to the game!

Of course he would have. Phil Heldrich was my student in the MA in English Program at Kansas State University. The day he first walked into my office in Denison Hall (since demolished) back in the fall of 1991, neither of us could have predicted the future that lay before him.

“I think I need to withdraw from the program” were his first words to me, before he’d even settled into a chair.
“Well, that seems a little rash,” I said, or something like that. “Classes haven’t even started yet. What’s the problem?”
“I don’t really like literature,” Phil admitted with a grimace. “I mean, I’ve read literary books, but they’re not really about anything.”
“Well, that could be a problem, because literature is about everything. Who do you like to read?”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Stephen King.”
I shrugged. “That’s a place to start.”
Phil squinted at me like I was a bug in his soup. “See, the thing is . . . I thought this was going to be a creative writing program. You know, workshops, agents, editors, how to get published, that sort of thing.”
“We have creative writing workshops; you’re enrolled in one.”
“Yeah, but you have to take all this lit too. I don’t know if I can stand it.”

I reached for the nearest bookshelf and grabbed a copy of The Great Gatsby.
He shook his head vigorously. “I’ve read it already.”
“Read it again,” I said, pressing the book into his hands. “Not for class, just for yourself. And when you read it, I want you to think about these things . . .”

Please understand: No magical transformation occurred here. The conversion of Phil Heldrich from cynical consumer of popular literature to dedicated literary artist and devoted teacher took a long time and involved at least two English departments. And it was never complete. “Good writing is good writing,” Phil liked to say. For years, he served as Chair of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association, leading efforts to examine all aspects of the many cultures that inform our lives. But somewhere along the way, Phil definitely drank the literary cool aid. He overcame his previous lack of serious reading, the initial skepticism of many faculty (including me), and, most of all, his own negative view of the literary life. Over a period of years, Phil became, in his own way, a man of letters. He completed not only his MA at Kansas State but a PhD in English at Oklahoma State University. He joined the English faculty of Emporia State University, and co-directed the Creative Writing Program with Amy Sage Webb. He won numerous awards for research and teaching, and eventually moved on to become Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington in Tacoma.

Phil studied fiction with me, but he wrote and published in almost all genres, including literary criticism. His book of poems, Good Friday, won the X. J. Kennedy Prize, judged by Kennedy himself. His book of essays, Out Here in the Out There: Essays in a Region of Superlatives, won the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Creative Nonfiction. He published individual stories, poems, essays, and critical articles far too numerous to mention. He became, in short, an accomplished literary artist. In my 30+ years of teaching, he is also the student who progressed the most, the writer who did the most with what he had.

By now you’ve probably guessed that Phil is no longer with us. On November 11, 2010, nine days before Northwestern played Illinois at Wrigley Field, Phil died of complications related to spinal cancer. He was 45 years old. He battled the cancer for more than two years, but kept that battle secret from most of his friends and colleagues, including me. When the news was finally leaked to me by a former colleague, I attempted to contact Phil. But I was too late. Not long after I’d begun to wonder what he would think about the upcoming football game at Wrigley, I learned he was dead.

One of things I had the privilege of observing Phil learn was the power of irony. Like Housman’s athlete who died young, Phil’s renown did not outrun him. He was productive to the very end, teaching classes and writing stories, poems, and articles until his body simply would not allow it. He remained on the field, playing as hard and as well as he could, regardless of obstacles, until the field itself crumbled around him. He is survived by his wife Christine, his daughter Alexendra, and by many hundreds of friends and former students who admired him. He is, and will remain, a model for everyone who dreams of becoming a writer. Today I call upon all my students, past and present—as well as readers and writers of literature everywhere—to read Phil Heldrich and to reflect on the examples of his life and art. The field Phil learned to play in was indeed friendly—and, I believe his life and work teach us, unconfined. #

Another tribute is at: http://singasimplesong.wordpress.com/
Comment from E. Washington University: http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/news/remembering-ias-faculty-member-philip-heldrich

WRITING NEWS: EVENTS NOV. 30-DEC. 4, 2010

2010-11-20T08:08:00.002-06:00

Nov. 30 Reading by Kevin Rabas and Cheryl Unruh, Lawrence Public Library and co-sponsored by The Raven Book Store. Poet and jazz musician Kevin Rabas co-directs the creative writing program at Emporia State University and is co-editor of Flint Hills Review. His second book of poetry, Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano, was chosen as a 2009 Kansas Notable Book. Award-winning author Unruh’s essays on subjects that Kansans know and love—nature and landscape, weather, seasons, small towns and fond memories of childhood—have been collected into a book, also titled Flyover People. If you too appreciate “life on the ground in a rectangular state,” you will enjoy this book. Unruh is originally from Pawnee Rock, graduated from KU, and now lives in Emporia.
Dec. 1 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde panel, Johnson County Library, KC, 9875 87th St., 7pm with Robert Butler, film critic for KC Star; Jennifer Phegley, University of Missouri-Kansas City; Robert Trussell, theater critic for KC Star; and Ann Volin, Rockhurst University. Moderator John Mark Eberhart
Dec. 2 Holiday Big Tent Reading Megan Kaminski (poet), Kelsey Murrell (playwright), Kevin Frost (playwright), Alexis Smith (poet). 7 pm at the Raven Bookstore. See: www.ravenbookstore.com/
DEC. 3 Dec. 3 Imagination & Place anthology release and reading, Writer's Place in Kansas City, 7 pm Independent arts group since 1999 presents third anthology: Imagination & Place: Seasonings. The theme is spices of life in relation to place. These spices may be herbal or chemical; they may evoke time and cycles. www.imaginationandplace.org & www.writersplace.org

DEC. 4 Poetry reading by Serina Hearn & Denise Low. 6 pm. Contact deniselow9@hotmail.com for details. Hearn and Low release new books by Woodley Memorial Press of Washburn University. Hearn’s Atlas of Our Birth, a KC Star Notable Book, is her second book. Low’ Ghost Stories of the New West gathers poetry about heritage and frontier history. Here is a poem by Serina Allison Hearn:

ANGEL

I found her impaled
In midnight’s grey bandages
of mortality,
a garden
pitchfork emerges
from her head,
carpenter nails pounded in deep
paralyze her wings, arms;
and a saw blade -
that miracle of technology
forty-fives below the heart:
keeps her from singing the world anew
as the great Roman road of progress
continues to pave over the memories
of the fallen; their ancient wisdom,
customs, landscapes shattered,
a butterfly, under the hammer
of construction.

Yony Leyser's Burroughs movie premieres in NYC and gets a prime NY Times Review

2010-11-17T08:24:00.001-06:00

New York Times critic Stephen Holden gives a two-page review of this independent film, ending with comments about Burroughs's time in Lawrence: "Late in life Burroughs softened somewhat, recalls James Grauerholz, his companion and executor of his estate. They moved to Lawrence, Kan., where Burroughs, an avid gun fetishist, took up visual art and produced 'shotgun paintings,' made by shooting a can of spray paint placed in front of a plywood board." The film opens Nov. 17 at the IFC in NYC. (Holden, by the way, is the twin brother of Kansas 1st poet laureate Jonathan Holden.)
The review gives highlights of the interviews with Ginsberg, John Waters, Patti Smith, and other famous friends, but when you see the movie itself, the footage is amazing. Tom Pescio and Wayne Propst are two Lawrence friends of Burroughs who recorded his shooting trips, his friendly meals, and visits from personages who stopped by the house on Learnard St.
Congratulations to Yony Leyser, the filmmaker, who started this project when he was a journalism student at the University of Kansas. Holden says of Leyser's film that "While burnishing the Burroughs mystique, 'A Man Within' assiduously tries to humanize an author whom it is all too easy to view as an avenging nihilist, a black hole of icy misanthropic contempt." Those who knew Burroughs later in life saw a softer man than this, with genuine sensitivity to others, especially his cats. He enjoyed conversation and had a brilliant intellect.
My husband Tom Weso and I attended a fund-raising early viewing of a first cut in Chicago, where it was evident Yony had support of the narrator, Peter Weller and many others. Yony has persevered, and the film is opening across the country this fall. It plays in Lawrence Dec. 4 at Liberty Hall. Other screenings are:
25-Nov Los Angeles, CA Downtown Independent

10-Dec Dallas, TX Texas Theater
13-Dec Albuquerque, NM The Guild
13-Dec Greensboro, NC Circus Cinema
17-Dec Eugene, OR Bijou Art Cinema
Jan-ToBeAnnounced-Chicago, IL Music Box Theater
TBA-Boston, MA
TBA-San Francisco, CA

William J. Harris poem "Practical Concerns": Print and U-Tube Link

2010-11-13T09:07:00.000-06:00

William J. Harris

PRACTICAL CONCERNS

From a distance, I watch
a man digging a hole with a machine.
I go closer.
The hole is deep and narrow.

I ask the ditchdigger if I may climb down
and ask the bird a question.
He says, why sure.

It's nice and cool in the ditch.
The bird and I talk about singing.
Very little about technique.

Louis Copt filmed Harris’s poem “Practical Concerns”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBhBVO-f_G4

Selected Publications of Wm. J. Harris: The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (1985), Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (1974), and In My Own Dark Way (1977).

Kansas Univ. Associate Professor Harris has also published poetry in fifty anthologies, and some of the more recent work appears in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004) and Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans (2006). He is the editor or co-editor of The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1991, 2000), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of African American Literary Tradition (1997) and a double issue of The African American Review on Amiri Baraka (Summer/Fall 2003).

For more on painter and film maker Louis Copt:
http://www.louiscopt.com/
http://www.louiscopt.com/video.html

2010-11-11T14:21:00.000-06:00

****Denise Low and Catherine Anderson read Friday, Nov. 12, 8 pm The Writers Place of Kansas City. Low will read from her new book Ghost Stories of the New West: From Einstein’s Brain to Geronimo’s Boots.

****Woodley Memorial Press of Washburn University publishes Ghost Stories of the New West, by Denise Low. Prose and poetry about disembodied spirits who still inhabit the frontier. Low, 2007-2009 Kansas Poet Laureate, is an award-winning writer with a sense of history and deep geography. Available at the Raven, Jayhawk Ink, and Prairie Lights, as well as Amazon.com. ISBN 978-0-9817334-9-4

For the Maiden Aunts and Bachelor Uncles

For an uncle called Big Miller
killed by Lenape Indians in Ohio.
For Lenape uncles killed by Big Miller.

For Cherokee aunts killed by Jackson’s soldiers.
For soldiers drowned by Water Monsters—
the antlered giant fish in deep rivers.

For the cowboy Edwin who died of typhoid.
He lost his chance to gamble, brawl, sin,
and be redeemed.

For the nameless toddler great-uncle
who tipped the boiling coffee pot
and scalded himself to death.

For Great-Aunt Annie who passed
amid a great rush of breath
taking also her sister’s Christian faith.

For those dead from snakebite, pox,
frostbite, horse kick, stampede, cholera
gunshot, grass fire, and bad water.

For their sunken burials on grassy hillsides.
Dawn sunlight erases chiseled names
and embellishments of marble wild roses.

LANGSTON HUGHES WRITING CONTEST DEADLINE IS DEC. 10, 2010

2010-11-09T07:50:00.000-06:00

The Lawrence Arts Center and the Raven Book Store announce their sponsorships of the 2011 Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award. Two awards of $500 each will be given annually, one in the area of poetry and one in the area of fiction.

APPLICATION DEADLINE IS DECEMBER 10, 2010 All manuscripts will be submitted electronically, via email. Please submit the materials according to SUBMISSION GUIDELINES as an attachment to the following email address: lhsubmissions@lawrenceartscenter.org. See details at http://www.lawrenceartscenter.org/Storypages/2010/Langston-Hughes-Award.html

Writer Eligibility:
• Writers of poetry or fiction
• Writers currently living in Douglas County and who have lived here for one year prior to submission of materials
• Writers who are 21 years old or older
• Writers who have published a book-length volume of poetry or fiction are not eligible. (Self-published works are exempted.)
• Previous winners are not eligible.

Selection: Selection will be based on artistic quality as presented in materials submitted and will be made by a committee of outstanding regional writers. The committee reserves the right to issue no awards.Sponsors of the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award: The Raven Bookstore and The Lawrence Arts Center.

Growing up in Lawrence prepared Langston Hughes (1902-1967) to understand the difficulties of a racist society as well as the complexities of life itself. He responded by writing in diverse genres--poetry, fiction, drama, memoir, travel narrative--and in diverse styles, drawing on the rich culture of African Americans and the many voices of American democracy. His writing reflected this diversity--shifting from the psychological and political to the lyrical, the tragic, the humorous, crossing literary boundaries, always experimental, always seeking to express a clearer, more memorable vision of the reality he experienced. The Langston Hughes Award seeks to encourage and support poets and writers who, today, are continuing to present their life experiences creatively through poetry, stories, and non-fiction prose. Surprise us. Move us. Help us see ourselves and our lives in new ways.

Mother as Metaphor Panel: My British/German/Delaware/Mother, Myself

2010-11-08T08:17:00.000-06:00

Here is an excerpt from the great panel Kathryn Kysar, Shannon Olson, Morgan Grayce Willow & I presented at the Iowa City Conference "Nonfiction NOW." Great conference, and thanks to the organizers.
...Native thought, as I understand it, is this: Metaphor is very close to, almost identical with, reality. “The Earth is a mother” is a literal, not figurative, sentence. Every day, water and food—grains, fruits, and meats—go through my system. I breathe. I am the same substance as the earth, and I undergo the same processes as any other aspect of this creation. Leslie Marmon Silko writes about this literalness of the Earth’s matrix: “The dead become dust, and in this becoming they are once more joined with the Mother. The ancient Pueblo people called the earth the Mother Creator of all things in this world. Her sister, the Corn Mother, occasionally merges with her because all succulent green life rises out of the depths of the earth….A rock shares this fate with us and with animals and plants as well” (Yellow Woman and a Beauty of Spirit 27). The emergence of new life from old is a real, fundamental law of our planet.
A second understanding from Native philosophers is that visible and invisible experiences are one. So the present and the afterlife; this world and the world of spirit; physical reality and imagined reality—all these have equal valence.
And another is: time is exists in its own incomprehensible dimension, without being sorted into past, present, and future linear grammar.
And finally, a fourth thought from Native tradition: transformation is continuing motion—seasons, personal identities, social movements, global trends. Nothing is static. This may be the fundamental theme in all Native literature.
All these descriptions from Native writers describe my personal experiences with my mother more closely than any other worldview. First: Metaphor is more an elaboration of reality than a parallel shadow. The British literature idea of metaphor that I learned in graduate school collapses, as I look at literal creative energy in a more encompassing way.
I literally began life as my mother. I was a tiny bead of her reproductive body tissue, an egg, deep within her torso, where I grew. I was born out of her body, and for months did not understand myself as separate. My immature brain could only perceive my body as an extension of hers. Indeed, that separation of bodies and consciousness has not been complete. I look very much like my mother, except for coloring. In many ways, I am still my mother. I speak her dialect of American English, my mother tongue; I have her body type; I cook her recipes—and indeed use some of her pans, spoons, and jars; and in my garden are her sage, lemon balm, mint, daylilies, and iris—offspring of her plants from forty years ago. Of course I have struggled with this overlap in our identities. Of course I have had different education and life experiences. Yet at my core, pieces of me are still my mother, in a very literal sense. Some of these are not immediately perceptible. . . .

READING AT THE WRITERS PLACE: CATHERINE ANDERSON & DENISE LOW

2010-11-03T07:41:00.000-05:00

Friday, November 12, 2010, 8:00 PM Riverfront Reading: Catherine Anderson and Denise Low

Catherine Anderson is the author of two poetry collections, The Work of Hands and In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books). Denise Low, 2007-2009 Kansas Poet Laureate, has published 20 books of poetry and essays. She is a board member of the Associated Writers & Writing Programs, and has taught creative writing at Haskell Indian Nations University, the University of Kansas, and the University of Richmond.

Mario Vargas Llosa wins 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature

2010-10-14T06:38:00.001-05:00

The web has relatively little information about this Spanish-speaking Peruvian writer whose major works extend before web-time. He was born in 1936 and began publishing major works in his thirties. His opus of novels, poetry, drama, criticism, journalism, and essays have earned him the Spanish literature Cervantes prize.
The Nobel committee cited writer Mario Vargos Llosa's work for its: "cartography of structures of power" and "trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."
PBS interviewed UCLA professor Efrain Kristal about Vargas Llosa's work. Kristal described his career: "He's one of the master storytellers of the 20th century. He is also a master of literary technique who was able to take folk approaches to shifting temporal and spatial planes to a new level. He was first famous for writing three very strong novels in the 1960s in which he explored the corrosive impact of corruption on individuals, on communities and on society at large. And then in the 1970s there was a turning point in his career. He began to turn to humor, to irony, to a literary technique in which he alternated literary registers and was very concerned about the theme of the fanatic." http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2010/10/conversation-the-life-and-work-of-nobel-prize-winner-mario-vargas-llosa.html
Vargas Llosa's non-fiction prose, Contra viento y marea (three volumes: 1983, 1986, and 1990), has been edited and translated by John King as the book Making Waves (http://www.amazon.com/Making-Waves-Mario-Vargas-Llosa/dp/0140275568 )

National Book Awards Nominations for Poetry Announced:

2010-10-13T13:34:00.000-05:00

*Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)
*Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Viking Penguin)
*James Richardson, By the Numbers (Copper Canyon Press)
*C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon Press)
*Monica Youn, Ignatz (Four Way Books)

Cherokee Teachings Tonight at the Lawrence Public Library

2010-10-05T07:52:00.000-05:00

Author Pamela Dawes Tambornino reads at the Lawrence Public Library auditorium tonight, Oct. 5, 7 pm. She will sign copies of her new book, Maggie's Story: Teachings of a Cherokee Healer. The book contains a series of vignettes and remembrances of times spent with her grandmother and lessons learned during the course of daily activities. Books will be available for purchase. Here is how one chapter begins:

My grandmother was a special woman, not just because she was a healer, but because she knew the stories and ways of the Nation. Many nights we would lie on a blanket outside and look at the stars. These were special times. She would point at the big dipper and talk about the story behind it, and then in the same breath would talk about how stars began in the sky – the old stories of the elders.

SUMMERSET REVIEW poems by Denise Low and Commentary Contest: 50 dollars for 50 words

2010-09-23T11:59:00.000-05:00

Here are the first lines of two of the poems Summerset Rev. was gracious enough to publish. See their site for the full poems. Also note their contest for commentary about any piece published in their online/print journal.

PHOTOGRAPHY
After a photograph by Terry Evans
"Great blue heron, Texas, 1922"

Its neck recurves
like a ladle handle
bends into its breast:
a still-life arabesque….

A SKULK OF FOXES

Like the cherm or charm of finches, so the skulk of foxes
confounds the twilight. Step-sidling, their auburn pelts shift
into shadows. Like cats they stalk mice. Lanky legs turn black.
Vertically slit eyes catch last yellow sunlight and hold it steady….

From Summerset Review's announcement page:
“Each quarter, we award $50 & complimentary print issue to one or more readers who submit the best feedback on pieces appearing in the current issue of The Summerset Review. The goals of this unique contest are to promote the awareness and visibility of literary magazines in our world and culture, and to get continued assurance that we have indeed connected with our readers." Deadline December 1, 2010. Comments must pertain to material in SR be over 50 words. They "are particularly interested in how the material affected you; what impact it had, what memory it stirred, what idea it precipitated." Email your feedback to editor@summersetreview.org.” A second interactive Summerset Review program is: “Readers and reading groups are invited to discuss the topics below relating to some of the material presented in this issue. Send answers to editor@summersetreview.org and you will be eligible for a complimentary copy of Volume Two of The Summerset Review. All questions must be answered and received by December 1, 2010.”

"Concrete Particulars" by Sally McNall: Sample Poem from WHERE ONCE

2010-09-07T13:47:00.000-05:00

Main Street Rag Publishing Company (www.mainstreetrag.com) is publishing my friend Sally McNall’s book ( Where Once ) as part of its Poetry Book Award selections. The book is scheduled for release November 8 and will sell for $14, but you can get it now for $9 + shipping by placing an Advance Discount order at
MSR Online Bookstore's Coming Soon Page: http://www.mainstreetrag.com/SMcNall.html
or, if you are more inclined to pay by check, they are $12.50 each including tax and shipping. Mail to Main Street Rag. Here is a sample poem:

CONCRETE PARTICULARS

for A

Yes, but in this book of horrors you refuse,
this documentation of systematic, categorical death,
writer and reader must step back, if only a step,
or tenderness could not touch the dead, as it must.

Remember the green eyes of the Afghani girl
on the magazine cover, at the beginning,
and how when they found her again,
well before the end, she was already old.
Remember the picture on the Internet?
We never saw her in the midst of life,
remember? So what do we have to go on
but the effort of thought in the unmapped darkness?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Sally Allen McNall has written and taught in Oregon, Arizona, Kansas (thirteen years), New Zealand, Ohio, and California. She was invited to be a member of Denise Low’s writing group in 1981, and began publishing poems regularly in 1985, when her youngest child left the house. She has published steadily since then in a wide variety of journals and magazines, off and online. Her chapbook, How to Behave at the Zoo and Other Lessons, was a winner of the State Street Press (Brockport, NY) competition in 1997, and her first book manuscript, Rescue, won the Backwaters Press Prize (Lincoln, Nebraska) in 1999. A chapbook, Trying to Write a Poem without the Word Blood in It, came out in 2005 from PWJ Publishing. Her new book is called Where Once. You will see sample poems and comments if you go to Main Street Rage and follow the above directions, or click on her Author’s page.

Oct. 7 Celebrate Dead Poets Remembrance Day

2010-08-28T11:21:00.000-05:00

1st Annual Dead Poets Remembrance Day, Nationwide Poetry Readings at the Gravesites of American Poets, October 7th, 2010. http://deadpoes.org/DiaDead.html
The holiday Dead Poets Remembrance Day will be held in locations around the nation October 7th. Fittingly, October 7th is the day that Edgar Allan Poe died. “We are launching this tour in order to encourage groups of people in every state to get together on October 7th to honor our dead poets by reading at their graves,” said Walter Skold, the founder of the Dead Poets Society of America. Among the reading sites are the graves of some of the most and least-well known poets in the US, including Robert Lowell, Donald Justice, James Whitcomb Riley, Lydia Sigourney, John Trumball, Henry Timrod, Abram Ryan, and Sarah Whitman. Denise Low, the former poet laureate of Kansas, is number 18 on the list of state poets laureate who are endorsing the celebration of Dead Poets Remembrance Day.

Great Bend, Kansas, Poetry Rendezvous: Take a Trip Sept. 17-19

2010-08-28T11:12:00.000-05:00

I attended this a couple years ago, and it was memorable: great company, great poetry, great food. Great Bend has pure Great Plains air and many people who really care about literature. September 17-18-19, Poetry Rendezvous XXIII, A continuing tradition of the Art of Metaphor. Words crafted for listening, causing thought, exciting emotions. This year they are featuring "Everypoet." Come join the poets, wordsmiths and friends at the Barton Arts Gallery, 1401 Main St., Great Bend. E-mail editor@chironreview.com for more info about the Rendezvous or lodging, restaurants and airports. Contact George Martin or Michael Hathaway, editor of Chiron, 522 E. South Ave. , St. John, KS 67576-2212.

"Summer" by Michael Poage

2010-08-08T10:06:00.000-05:00

For most people this is
the final destination, only
a few continue on. The cat

spends all of each scorching day
in the empty bathtub. The dog
stretches out in front of

the fan and his fur moves
like a field of wheat in the summer
breeze. I lead a group of student

writers at the medresa through Berry’s,
“The Peace of Wild Things.” I ask:
What does ‘forethought of

grief’ mean? A young woman,
head covered, replies that to
her it is the anticipation

of something sad or a mishap.
Another student says, like falling
in love. Only a few continue on.

Call for Poems: Kansas History's "Kansas at 150" Special Issue

2010-08-04T06:24:00.000-05:00

Deadline: November 1, 2010 In commemoration of Kansas's sesquicentennial in 2011, the magazine Kansas History will offer its readers a special "Kansas at 150" issue next spring. The essays in this issue will explore the theme of historical or collective memory as it relates to the identity and imagery of Kansas and/or the plains. To open this special issue the editors of Kansas History will select and publish the poem they feel best speaks to the issue's theme.

Submission Guidelines: Submit up to five (5) poems that explore the theme of Kansas and/or plains identity and imagery through historical or collective memory, either:

• by attaching a Word or RTF file to mtubbsloya@kshs.org. Identify your submission in the email subject line as "Poetry Submission": plus your full name;
• or by post, along with a self addressed stamped envelope, to:

Kansas Historical Society Attn: Kansas History, 6425 SW 6th Street, Topeka, KS 66615

Include your name, address, and email address on each page submitted by email or post. Cover letters are accepted but not necessary.

Simultaneous submissions will be accepted if they are identified as such and with the understanding that the author will notify Kansas History of acceptance elsewhere at the earliest possibly opportunity. We will not accept previously published material.

Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains, issued quarterly by the Kansas Historical Society, Inc., publishes new research on Kansas and central plains history and offers interesting, well-illustrated articles that appeal to both the serious student and the general reader.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT # 45: CYRUS CONSOLE (1977 - )

2010-07-28T13:58:00.000-05:00

Cyrus Console grew up in Topeka and currently studies creative writing in the University of Kansas doctoral program. He has worked as a metal worker and waiter as well as part-time instructor. His poetry returns to some of the oldest Anglo Saxon poetic traditions—delight in wordplay and riddles. He creates Rubik cubes made of his own subsets of vocabularies. Interlocking phrases suggest new structures, and readers enlarge their own vision by following Console’s playful, inventive constructions.

In this selection from Brief Under Water, whose title refers to Kafka’s Brief an den Vater (Letter to His Father), Console connects mathematical progressions on language. He labels each section of this long sequence of prose poems with binary-based numbers. This poem (40 in the decimal system) appears to begin with a salutation, “dear Dad,” informing him of a strong wind that rocked the “television antenna.” The last sentence is like a bookend to that suggested narrative—the narrator ends the story with a box kit broken in that same wind. Shifts in perspective, specifically elevation, continue throughout. Also, each sentence builds on the one before, with words repeated and shifted into different parts of speech. The word “wind” (breeze) twists (or winds, with a long “i”) throughout the poem’s beginning. The original connection of the two meanings of “wind” converge. At the end of this prose poem, “broke” is a verb with connotations referencing weather, cover, and sun emerging from clouds. Then Console ends with both words in the final: “windbreak.”

Brief Under Water: 100111

Dear dear, I put down, dear Dad, the great television antenna swayed in the wind. The meadow moved in long swathes under the wind. The wind swept the meadow around the cedars, as they were moss-grown rocks in a river of dry grass. In the wind the boys made a handsome tableau, their hair slanting vigorously from under their caps. The thick steel guys stood waves in the wind. Close by the anchors the wind came in towering chords. The wind fluted in the mouths of the gaping boys. Dead bees blew in the wind. Rain filled the sky. The rain pelted the rainwater, sheeting the meadow in incident light. The boys slowed at the line of trees. They walked into the trees. The trees surrounded the boys. The boys disappeared into the trees. The weather broke. The boys broke cover. The clouds broke up and the sun broke through. The box kite lay broken in a windbreak.
____________

Education: Cyrus Console graduated from Topeka High School and attended the University of Kansas, where he received a BS in Organismal Biology (2000). He attended Bard College for the MFA in Writing (2004). He works on a PhD in the University of Kansas English Department.

Career: Console’s book Brief Under Water (Burning Deck 2008) is a collection of prose poems. His recent chapbook is The Song Cave (2009). He has won the Ana Damjanov Poetry Prize; Fund for Poetry Award; Victor Contoski Poetry Prize; and William Herbert Carruth Poetry Prize. He has published in Boston Review, No: A Journal of the Arts, Critical Quarterly, and Lana Turner. Recent readings include the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, Big Tent series in Lawrence, and the Holloway Series at University of California, Berkeley.

____________________________________________

W.S. Merwin is new U.S. Poet Laureate

2010-07-06T14:49:00.000-05:00

WS Merwin has been a Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, Pulitzer Prize winner, translator, memoirist, and poet for over 50 years. As a young man he won a scholarship to Princeton, and after graduation he lived in Europe, which provided him opportunities for translation. He moved to Hawaii in the early 1980s, where he studied Buddhism and restored logged-over forest. He has remained connected to the momentum of US poetics through his prolific writings and tours. I remember meeting him in the early 1980s, when he read with vigor. No one in the audience dozed. I think of Merwin as a poet of conscience. He also has the ability to use the lyric form to wrench his reader emotionally. He sets up oppositions well, as in the beginning stanza of On the Subject of Poetry:

I not understand the world, Father.

By the millpond at the end of the garden

There is a man who slouches listening

To the wheel revolving in the stream, only

There is no wheel there to revolve.

This excerpt also shows how he prompts readers to look beyond the literal to the negative spaces in the picture. Merwin has a politeness in her diction, always, but never is he slack. For the rest of the poem and more on Merwin, see: the Academy of American Poets site: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/123

Reading tonight at the Raven Bookstore will feature new edition of Kansas Poems of William Stafford

2010-06-24T15:32:00.000-05:00

KANSAS POEMS OF WILLIAM STAFFORD:
POEMS, ESSAYS & INTERVIEWS

Edited by Denise Low

Commentary by Thomas Fox Averill, Kirsten Bosnak, Robert Day, Steven Hind, Jonathan Holden, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Denise Low, Al Ortolani, Linda Rodriguez, Ralph Salisbury, William Sheldon, Kim Stafford, Robert Stewart, Ingrid Wendt and Fred Whitehead

______________________________________________
Publication Date: August 1, 2010
ISBN 978-0-9817334-6-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010925068
Perfect-bound paper edition, 210 pages, $15.00
Woodley Memorial Press, Washburn University Topeka, KS 66621

(785) 670-1445 http://www.washburn.ed/reference/woodley-press/
________________________________________________
Woodley Memorial Press reissues an expanded edition of the 1990 Kansas Poems of William Stafford. Stafford, a National Book Award winner, wrote directly and indirectly about his home region throughout his life. The original edition collected many poems about the Great Plains region not published in book form. New essays, memories, poems, and interviews expand the range of the original book. They show the lasting influence of this beloved teacher and writer. Commentary by his son Kim Stafford and fellow writers show how his influence continues to inspire readers and poets everywhere.
____________________________________
Kim Stafford: You see his devotion to hometown, to friendship, to ideas, to peacemaking, sense of place.

Robert Day: I was Bill Stafford's student because I learned from him about writing and life: Do it all and do it all now.

Steven Hind: William Stafford’s words are both good poetry and good medicine, antidote to the poisons of self-aggrandizement and its blurring of perception. He is a tonic for the mind.

Jonathan Holden: Wiry, elfin, with the face of a fox, Stafford was curious about everything around him, absolutely alert.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg: Stafford guides me as a writer when it comes to his quiet turns of language, his spare and precise images, his direct and earnest voice, but mostly he guides me as a human.

Denise Low: Stafford was a revolutionary decades before the Civil Rights movement. He committed himself to activist writings.

Poet Leslie Scalapino Dies May 31, 2010

2010-06-01T07:59:00.000-05:00

Poet Leslie Scalapino has died. This prominent poet founded O Books, which published such authors as Ted Berrigan, Robert Grenier, Fanny Howe, Tom Raworth, Norma Cole, Will Alexander, Alice Notley, Norman Fischer, Laura Moriarty, Michael McClure, Judith Goldman and many others. Scalapino was a poet, playwright, editor, publisher, and teacher. She taught in the MFA program at Bard College, Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts in San Francisco, San Francisco State University, UC San Diego, and the Naropa Institute. She received an MA from University of California-Berkeley.

There will be a memorial event for Scalapino at St. Mark’s Poetry Project on Monday, June 21st. Arrangements are being made for a Zen Buddhist funeral. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to: Poets in Need, PO Box 5411, Berkeley, CA 94705; Reed College for the Leslie Scalapino Scholarship, 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR 97202-8199; The AYCO Charitable Foundation, PO Box 15203, Albany, NY 12212-5203 for the Leslie Scalapino-O Books Fund; or to a charitable organization of their choice.

from “walking person who has sky flowing–by one who beside is as if"

walking person who has sky flowing–by one who beside is as if

being backward by walking in life of people? but of one being 'defense-

less' by the huge–is elating which is time.

'I was by a bigger bird - inside' - walking

walking by (someone with the sky flowing) disturbed by being–

by it– . . . .

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT # 46: WILLIAM JOSEPH HARRIS (1942 - )

2010-05-21T08:27:00.000-05:00

Billy Joe Harris, University of Kansas professor, spent a sabbatical year studying poets and painters, including artist Giorgio Morandi. He admires Morandi for “muted colors and radically reduced subject matter.” He employs this approach to his own verse. His work suggests narratives, but in such concise form that cultural referents may be minimal.

In the poem “Sympathetic Magpies,” the Chinese origin of the legend is secondary to the universal concept of bridges. Further, the stanzas’ own parallel lines suggest intervals of bridge girders. Love creates a bridge between mortal and immortal beings, and the interplay between heaven and earth are universal. The memorable magic here is the bridge made of magpies. The poem has parable-like directness, with love that can defy the decrees of heaven. Like bridges, romance between a young weaver and herder can be set in most times and places. The Milky Way itself is another kind of bridge. Then Harris shifts to present time, inviting readers to also become part of legends through the poem. With a few simple images—lovers, Heaven, and bridges—the poet creates a story, briefly outlined yet complete like a Morandi painting. Harris said of the painter: “His quiet visual drama tells you that you need no more than these few objects to tell the human story.” This also applies to “Sympathetic Magpies.”

SYMPATHETIC MAGPIES

There is an old Chinese legend
About a weaving girl and a cowherd
Falling in love and being punished
By Heaven because she was celestial
And he was a mere mortal

Heaven only allowed them to meet
Once a year
On the seventh day
Of the seventh month

The magpies were so sympathetic
Each year
On that day
They made themselves
Into a bridge
Stretching across the Milky Way
So the lovers could kiss

Poems are sympathetic magpies
Bridges between lovers
Bridges between selves
Bridges between worlds

*****************************
Education: Harris received a BA in English (Central State University 1968), MA in Creative Writing (Stanford 1971), and PhD in English and American Literature (Stanford 1974).

Career: This poet and critic’s books are: Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (Ithaca House 1974), In My Own Dark Way (Ithaca House 1977) and Personal Questions (Leconte Publishers, Rome, 2010). He has published in over fifty anthologies. He is the author of the critical work The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka (University of Missouri Press 1985) and editor of The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991, second edition, 2000).

_________________________________________________________________________________

©2010 Denise Low AAPP 46 ©2009 “Sympathetic Magic” by William J. Harris

Robert Day's Committee to Save the World: Selected Nonliterary Nonfiction

2010-05-16T10:06:00.002-05:00

If you have not yet read Robert Day's Committee to Save the World, with introduction by The Land Institute's Wes Jackson, do find a copy. Leo Oliva published it through Western Books (PO Box 1, Woodston KS 67675). This is one of the most engaging, honest, and funny descriptions of life between the Platte and Red Rivers; beween the Kaw and Sand Creek. Most essays are previously published in places like the Washington Post, New Letters, and Smithsonian. Day has one of the most engaging voices in contemporary belles lettres. He recounts the failed movie attempts to capture this part of the country in his essays about The Last Cattle Drive, his seminal novel--if you haven't read it, it eerily resembles Urban Cowboy. No accident. He also explains phenomena like Carrie Nation and genius-poet William Stafford from Hutchinson. He gives a participant-informer's insights into the culture of High Plains inhabitants, in contrast to Ian Frazier, who writes from a few summer tours of the place. Day grew up in small-town Kansas and still has a place in Luddell. He is cosmopolitan and local at once. It's a great combination. Wes Jackson writes: "Bob Day is a man of letters. But he is also a reincarnation of Don Quixote, Straight Arrow, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger and Tom Mix." Color illustrations by Kathy Jankus Day embellish the book.

HACKED INTO! I am not a Canadian Pharmacy Company!

2010-04-18T12:54:00.000-05:00

Please disregard emails from my email account that encourage you to by personal products for men.

GARY SNYDER PREPARES FOR AWP READING APRIL 9

2010-04-11T21:18:00.001-05:00

Anna Wiese is one of the poets celebrating Poet Robert Dana's career

2010-04-03T12:14:00.000-05:00

Anna Wiese and John Rosecrance, friends of Robert Dana, were among those who shared poems and memories with a filled auditorium at the University of Iowa on 27 March 2010. Wiese read "Elegy for a Hometown," about Dana's recent visit to his Massachusetts hometown after many decades. John Rosecrance, who swam daily with Dana for years, recalls his conversations with Dana. He also read "Selling the Earth and Everything on It," about a shared city commission meeting.
     After the memorial reading, on March 28, services were held at Cornell College, with music, readings, and words of remembrance by Leslie H. Garner (Cornell College preseident), Tom Lynner, Dan Kellams, Eric Houts, Ben Miller, Hugh Lifson, Jan Sellen McGrane, Don Morrill, Lori Dana, and Rick Campbell.
     Robert Dana was poet laureate of Iowa (2004-2008) and the recipient of NEA fellowships and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. He was one of the first graduates from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. He was a veteran of World War II. He revived and edited the North American Review, and he published two dozen books of poetry and prose. As a teacher, poet, and conniseur of good living, he inspired friends in Iowa, Florida, South Carolina, and all the Associated Writers and Writing Program conferences he attended.
     His devotion to his wife Peg was one of the first comments I heard about him, and he celebrated this partnership as long as I knew him. He is survived by three children. A beautiful gray cat ("eleven pounds of smoke"), along with the rest of his family and spirit, remain in many poems.
     Publication information about Dana's New & Selected Poems is available at the anhinga press website. Photos in this series are by Denise Low, except the photo of Denise Low by Kathryn Kysar.

Dick Terrill reads at the Memorial Reading in Celebration of Robert Dana's New & Selected Poems

2010-04-03T11:52:00.001-05:00

Dick Terrill reads "Spindrift" from The Morning of the Red Admirals (2004).

Nicholas Kogon and Tom Lynner read Robert Dana Poems, 27 March 2010

2010-04-03T11:45:00.000-05:00

Nicholas Kogon, friend of Robert Dana, reads "After After," by Robert Dana. Tom Lynner, co-founder of the Des Moines Poetry Festival, reads "3:10. July. 2009." in place of Ingrid Wendt, who could not attend the event.

David Hamilton shows the author photograph from Robert Dana's New & Selected Poems 1955 to 2010

2010-04-03T11:37:00.000-05:00

Robert Dana (1929-2010) wears a flashy red turtleneck in one of these last photographs of the beloved poet. 16 poets read selections from his book to a large audience in Iowa City, University of Iowa campus. (Photo by Denise Low)

Iowa Friends and Poets Jay Johnson & Jim McKean Read Robert Dana Poems

2010-04-03T11:32:00.000-05:00

Denise Low and Keith Ratzlaff Read Robert Dana Poems, Iowa City, 27 March 2010

2010-04-03T11:29:00.000-05:00

Karl Ratzlaff looks at the audience at the Robert Dana (1929-2010) memorial reading from his new book of selected poems. Denise Low ends the reading with "Lines Written Below Eagle Cliff," a new poem from Dana's New & Selected Poems 1955 to 2010 (Anhinga Press)

Rick Ryan MCs the Memorial Reading in Celebration of Robert Dana's New & Selected Poems

2010-04-03T11:22:00.000-05:00

Marvin Bell & Lisa Birnbaum at the Memorial Reading in Celebration of Robert Dana's New & Selected Poems 1955-2010

2010-04-03T11:01:00.000-05:00

Marvin Bell reads "No. 19 Summer in a Small Town" from Robert Dana's book In a Fugitive Season (1979) at the memorial reading in Iowa City March 27, 2010. Lisa Birnbaum reads "How Pure a Thing is Joy" from What I Think I Know.

Rick Campbell at the Memorial Reading in Celebration of Robert Dana's New & Selected Poems 1955-2010

2010-04-03T10:53:00.001-05:00

Rick Campbell, publisher of Anhinga Press, reads "Horses" from Robert Dana's book Starting Out for the Difficult World (1987) in Iowa City, March 27, 2010.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT # 44: KATHLEEN JOHNSON (1959 - )

2010-03-22T08:55:00.000-05:00

KATHLEEN JOHNSON (1959 - )

Dear Poetry Affectionados,

Congratulations to Kathleen Johnson, who has won the only 2009 recognition for a poetry book. from the Kansas Center for the Book in its annual awards, Notable Book List. The Kansas Center for the Book, a state affiliate of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, features an annual list of 15 top Kansas books. It is a non-profit, tax-exempt program of the Kansas State Library. For more information, see http://www.kcfb.info/notable/

The KCFB said this about Johnson’s prize-winning book: “A book of poetry so hot it could only be named ‘Burn.’ Kansas poet Kathleen Johnson’s collection ranges from life on the frontier to memories at her parent’s home to tornados.” It is also a very literary book, with rich descriptions and wonderful use of language.

This Woodley Memorial Press (Washburn University) book is available at http://www.washburn.edu/reference/woodley-press/Reviews/burn.htm. It is also available through online book companies. Johnson is also featured in To the Stars, Poets of the Ad Astra Poetry Project ( http://http://www.mammothpublications.com/ ), the publication associated with this series on online poetry publications.

All best,

Denise Low, 2007-2009 Kansas Poet Laureate

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Kathleen Johnson has loved Kansas poetry for decades. This has led her to read widely, pursue an MFA, and also to write reviews of regional and national poets. She wrote insightful, thorough reviews for the Kansas City Star for fifteen years. Now she edits the New Mexico Review in her new home of Santa Fe. Another aspect of her poetic skill set is her background in visual arts, with art history as an undergraduate major.

One of my own delights in poetry is visual images, and Johnson describes colors especially well. In “End of August,” I enjoy the cat’s “sapphire eyes,” but the poet expands the image further to include “sharp points” and “all twilight.” These detail the eyes as faceted, like a jewel, and dark, dark blue, like the evening sky. Other words that evoke colors are moon, sunflower, yellow, bluebirds, goldfinches, and black-eyed susans. This is a good poem for students of poetry to read, because of the use of specifics—the plants are ragweed, candelaria, sunflowers, mulberry, and black-eyed Susans to emphasize season and well as sensual presence. This also illustrates how poets research specificity when writing. Good poets do as much fact checking as journalists. Exactly what birds, animals, and plants herald the end of summer. This is more than fine description and revival of a scene. The last line transforms details into a theme: survival.

End of August

Tonight, while the half-moon hides

its dark side,

the Siamese tom stretches

black velvet paws,

claws splayed toward a dream:

he hunts, sapphire eyes

focused to sharp points,

all twilight

concentrated in his gaze.

Stealthy as a shadow, he curves

Through a creek-bank jungle

Of giant ragweed, candelaria,

sunflower stalks.

Yellow mulberry leaves litter the lawn.

From low branches,

bluebirds dive for insects.

Goldfinches search for seeds

in black-eyed Susans.

Baby cottontails munch in tall grass.

Quick eyes everywhere.

Education: Kathleen Johnson graduated from Olathe High School and attended the University of Kansas for a BFA in Art History (1985) and an MFA in Creative Writing (2008).

Career: Johnson’s first book Burn (Woodley 2009) was a 2009 Kansas Notable Book. As a freelance book critic specializing in poetry, she published more than sixty book reviews in The Kansas City Star (2002-2009). Her New Mexico Poetry Review website is: http://newmexicopoetryreview.com/

_________________________________________________________________________________

Rae Armantrout Wins National Book Critic's Circle Award for 2009

2010-03-11T19:57:00.000-06:00

The NBCC just announced this evening that Rae Armantrout's Versed (Wesleyan University Press). She is professor at UC-San Diego

From the Book:

while all the while
the sea breaks
and rolls, painlessly, under.

If we’re not copying it,
we’re lonely.

Is this the knowledge
that demands to be
passed down?

Time is made from swatches
of heaven and hell.

If we’re not killing it,
we’re hungry.

—from “Simple”

Rod Smith & Mel Nichols to read 7 pm Fri. 2/26 at 803 Mass.

2010-02-26T07:54:00.000-06:00

803 Massachusetts Street, at Wonder Fair, above/below the old Casbah Market

Rod Smith is the author of Deed, Music or Honesty, Poèmes de l'araignée (France), The Good House, Protective Immediacy, and In Memory of My Theories. A CD of his readings, Fear the Sky, came out from Narrow House Recordings in 2005. Smith's work has appeared in a whole bunch of magazines and anthologies. He is editor and publisher of Edge Books, which has established an international reputation for publishing the finest in innovative writing. Smith is also editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, for the University of California Press. He is currently a Visiting Professor in Poetry at The Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Mel Nichol’s most recent books are Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon (Edge Books, 2009) and Bicycle Day (Slack Buddha, 2008). She teaches at George Mason University.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT # 44: JEANINE HATHAWAY (1945 - )

2010-02-17T09:08:00.000-06:00

Jeanine Hathaway teaches writing and literature at Wichita State University. Originally from Chicago, she settled in Wichita over thirty years ago. In her writings, she explores the intersections between knowledge and belief. She was a Dominican nun as a young woman, and this experience informs her work. Keen observation grounds her poems, which create situations for exploration of faith.
“Reconnaissance,” a title that is also a synonym for exploration, focuses on a woman who could be a neighbor “across the street.” I suspect she could also be a guise of the poet herself. Scenes in Hathaway’s poetry could be set in Wichita, but they are made more general, to fit experience of any reader. The woman forays into dark morning, a time that should be sunrise, but instead she is immersed in a sightless darkness that reveals only self. The woman is like a fish, awake yet submerged in watery depths. Her heartbeat centers her own “atmosphere,” again in a pre-dawn and pre-creation setting. Yet in this dark place, she finds two things: body and grace. These create the paradox of incarnation.

RECONNAISSANCE

Before dawn, before the first
hushed light causes her children
to stir, the woman across the street
rises, every morning, extending
her life backwards into night
as a fish sated at the surface
will dive deeper and darker
until even sight is a memory
floating off.

She is alert now, aware of
herself as out of proportion,
mirrored through water;
expansive, most reflective
and faithful, and still
surrounded, governed
by the immense heartbeat
of her own atmosphere,
the unsettling grace of morning
and her cold feet.

Education: Jeanine Hathaway earned a BA in English (Siena Heights College, 1970) and an MFA in Poetry (Bowling Green State University, 1973).
Career: This poet published The Self as Constellation: Poems (University of North Texas Press, 2002, 2001 Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry). Her prose includes an autobiographical novel, Motherhouse (Hyperion, 1992) and monthly personal essays for The Wichita Times. She published in numerous DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, The Greensboro Review, River Styx, The Ohio Review, and The Best Spiritual Writing. Hathaway is a professor at Wichita State University and received the Wichita State University Regents' Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1993.
_________________________________________________________________________________
©2010 Denise Low AAPP 44 ©2002 Jeanine Hathaway “Reconnaissance,” in The Self as Constellation (University of North Texas Press).

Stan Lombardo Mesmerizes Raven Bookstore Patrons

2010-02-13T10:02:00.000-06:00

Stanley Lombardo continues to publish readable translations of classical literature. His Iliad and Odyssey are vivid translations that emphasize dramatic storytelling. Ronald Myers descrbes his translation style as “minimalist and colloquial.” As a translator, Lombardo becomes the element of Mercury—a perfect catalyst who transforms one language to another, without drawing attention to himself. He returns these works to performance origins.

Lombardo performed selections from Dante’s Inferno at the Raven Bookstore (www.ravenbookstore.com ) Feb. 12 to a packed house. No one made a sound for the hour-long presentation, and the corner street musician’s saxophone was distant accompaniment. Lombardo punctuated the reading with a hand drum for ending points—unobtrusive emphasis. Also, he kept an almost subliminal beat as he voiced the lines. He spoke the beginnings in Italian, and then switched to English.

Here, from the net, is his opening:

Midway through the journey of our life
I found myself within a dark wood,
for the straight way had now been lost.
Ah, how hard it is to describe that wood,
a wilderness so gnarled and rough
the very thought of it brings back my fear.
Death itself is hardly more bitter;
but to tell of the good that I found there
I will speak of the other things I saw.

I cannot say just how I entered that wood,
so full of sleep was I at the point
when I abandoned the road that runs true.
But when I reached the foot of a hill
That rose up at the end of the valley
Where fear had pierced me through to the heart,
I lifted my eyes and saw its shoulders
already bathed in the light of that planet
that leads us straight along every path.
This calmed a little the lake of my heart
that had surged with terror all through the night
that I had just spent so piteously.

Ordering information: Dante. Inferno. Translated by Stanley Lombardo. Introduction by Steven Botterill. Notes by Anthony Oldcorn. 512 pp. Hackett Publishing Co. P.O. Box 44937, Indianapolis, IN 46244-0937. Audio versions are also available.
http://www.hackettpublishing.com/detail.php?_d=eMXuRY7o2I1J2VbXRha507TNjvh9K5FtWBa5d8Stwqc%3D

Lombardo has lived in Lawrence since 1976. He joined the University of Kansas Classics Department after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Texas-Austin. He has been an administrator—chair of the Classics Department and Director of the University of Kansas Honors Program. He is a serious practitioner of billiards and Kuan Um School of Zen Buddhism.

Iowa Poet Robert Dana Dies Feb. 6, 2010

2010-02-07T09:20:00.000-06:00

I first met RP when he was a visiting writer at Wichita State University, early 1980s, through G. Barnes,a great promoter of the arts. He said I had to meet this guy, and we found him at an after-class party at a student's apartment. He was fun, witty, smart, and happy. I wanted to be like him, so I continued to read poetry.

He also read at the University of Kansas at the same time, and it was memorable. He discussed the works of Richard Hugo and his recent death. He read a delightful found poem from a camping catalogue about the pleasures of zipping together sleeping bags. Not long after, I attended my first Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, and over the years of those reading-eating-chatting-dancing fests, I joined Dinners with Dana. Usually I would fast and save my per diem for the one ultimate meal at a restaurant he pre-selected. He was a personage, and I have warm memories of him from our meetings. He was generous and threw great parties for his AWP friends. Wife Peg's parents live in Lawrence, so I had the chance to meet them occasionally at the Eldridge for drinks. These are cherished memories.

Most of all, though, when I heard he had died, I regretted he will write no more poetry. My first thought was this loss.

I'll reprint part of a review I wrote about his 2004 book The Morning of the Red Admirals (Anahinga Press), to illustrate my appreciation for his work (the full review is at http://www.kcstar.com/ ):

"Robert Dana’s fifteenth book of poems is iconoclastic. “Part of the poet’s task was to break the rules of language, to free it from the burdens of its history, thus acknowledging that history and revivifying it,” he writes in Ploughshares (1991). That paradox lies at the heart of his own poetics. He chooses words with full awareness of their etymology and then realigns them into present-time currency. He procreates poems with fossilized words, as in “Garden Fable”:
Aristoxenus, the Hedonist,
watered his lettuce with wine
and honey, knowing the difference
between nothing and something
is not just something, but some-
thing special . . . . (19)
The transformation of the commonplace into ecstatic, koan moments of understanding— “something special”—through word spells is the gift of this poet. How wonderful to revive the name of this nearly forgotten Greek author who wrote about excesses of Persian kings (in Bíos Archyta). Dana goes on to include related classical words such as “conundrum” and “sluicing,” alongside Anglo-Saxon, fist-like words like “sodden,” “gutters,” “scrape,” “pelts” and “drays.” And perhaps this mixture of measured Latinate terms amongst the workaday old English is what makes another level of paradox in American English poetics, the tension between the civilized and the blunt. Finally, after the word duels, at the end of the poem we are in Iowa, the storm vanished, the sun forming a “sheen.” All poems resolve in transformed solids of this world."

ROBERT DANA LINKS TO INTERVIEWS, READINGS, VIDEOS

2010-02-07T09:16:00.000-06:00

Cornell college page with video
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://news.cornellcollege.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/dana-300x240.jpg&imgrefurl=http://news.cornellcollege.edu/2009/04/20/an-evening-with-robert-dana/&usg=__SIDYpVptM4EST2XcXOv4k9x5izA=&h=240&w=300&sz=22&hl=en&start=7&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=e7SKOJDAOcFZjM:&tbnh=93&tbnw=116&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522Robert%2BDana%2522%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26um%3D1

Prairie Lights Bookstore readings
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/vwu&CISOPTR=806&CISOBOX=1&REC=2

http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/vwu&CISOPTR=1271&CISOBOX=1&REC=20

Weber Studies interview with Guy Wade Lebeda
http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20D%20Vol.%2021.2-25.2/Vol.%2022.3/Lebeda%20Dana%20Con.htm

Boundoff MP3 file of reading
http://boundoff.com/?page_id=12

Anhinga Press website and book ordering information
http://www.anhinga.org/books/poet_info.cfm?poet_name=Robert%20Dana

Order 30 min. reading/interview with New Letters on the Air, July 2008 or 1980
http://www.newletters.org/ontheair_orders.asp

Joseph P. Wood and Clancy Martin read in Lawrence Jan. 23

2010-01-24T20:16:00.000-06:00

Clancy Martin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His first novel, How to Sell, was released in May from Firar, Straus, & Giroux, and will be translated into five languages. His fiction also has appeared in journals such as NOON, 5_Trope, and Parakeet. He has authored, translated, edited several books on 'existential' philosophy. He lives somewhere near Kansas City with his wife, three daughters, and 4 toy poodles.

He read 3 narratives, both fictive and memoir, although the verisimilitude was such that all sounded equally plausible. He writes about family life with precision--not always pretty, but always compelling. He took me back to the intensity of parenting, the primal, critical times when someone's life was in my hands.

Joseph P. Wood is the author of the forthcoming collection of poems, I & We (CW Books), and of five chapbooks, including the forthcoming Gutter Catholic Love Song (Mitzvah Chaps), Urgency (Cannibal Books) and A Severing (Cinematheque Press). New poems can be found in BOMB, Boston Review, Cannibal, Hotel Amerika, Poetry London, Sycamore Review, Verse, among others. He teaches at the University of Alabama, co-edits Slash Pine Press, and coordinates the Slash Pine Poetry Festival.

Wood started out as a normal guy but shifted into overdrive for a performance stabilized by rocking and regular intakes of breath. He started with a story about his Italian grandfather, a roofer, who fell into a vat of hot tar & died at age 35. This and references to culture were embedded within sheets of images and syntax. It created its own web, and it is hard to pull out single pieces to describe.

Pamela Alexander's SLOW FIRE is a poetry find.

2010-01-18T09:26:00.000-06:00

At my local used bookstore last week, Dusty Bookstore, I found a 2007 copy of Pamela Alexander's latest book of poetry, her fourth (Ausable Press). Her name seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place her. The biography on the back cover says she won the Yale Younger Poets prize and was nominated for a Pulitzer. She now teaches at Oberlin. The "glamour shot" author's photo was not glamorous: It shows her in a parka and headband on a mountain--pretty disguised. But the poetry was not camouflaged. It was stunning, like the first stanza of "What the Trail Says":

First, prepositions. Up, alongside,
under. Then noun: rock,
tree. Lizard.

Sentences take time. (p. 30)

I also like her ability to take my mind on a carnival ride with just a few phrases, like the first line of "Sonoran": "Sky tilts, the south enlarges." She also has one of the best jazz poems I've ever seen, "Couple at the Club," which begins:

The bass goes it alone. The bass goes
by subway. The trumpet shines and swerves,
yellow taxi breaking from the light.

There is more. This poet has been biding her time, spending time in Ontario as well as Ohio, and developing her own voice at her own pace--four books in 25 years. This is a poet.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #43: ROBERT DAY (1941 - )

2010-01-11T10:27:00.000-06:00

Robert Day is best known as a masterful prose writer. His novel Last Cattle Drive is a classic of contemporary American frontier literature. Less well known is the fact that Day received his M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas in poetry writing. The grace of his style indicates serious study of language. Whether he writes essays, articles, novellas, or poetry, he understands aesthetics of style—balance, invention, and timing.

In “Teal Hunting with Two Old Uncles,” season and place are clear. The poem’s speaker has an easy assurance, inviting readers into his low-key drama. The young narrator contrasts with older uncles, as he performs the heavy work of sodding the duck blind. The early autumn day reflects the uncles’ mellow old age concerns of storytelling and casual drinking. For them, their weapon of choice is a “rolled up” magazine. They create their own oral history compendium, a parallel to the magazine, as the young hunter goes about business. Years later, like the uncles, the narrator remembers exactly what he shot on that trip, the “Blue wings” and “Cinnamon.” With his uncles, he becomes like “old hunting dogs loaded with dreams,” not so concerned with the hunt for meat as for the distillation of memories into fine narratives.

TEAL HUNTING WITH TWO OLD UNCLES
September’s never cold enough for ducks and whiskey.

I shoot in Tee-shirt and moccasins

as green wings hustle from pond to pond

in the yellow morning.

My uncles miss chances, drinking
on the bench deep in the blind

swapping stories about Cheyenne Bottoms

and Snow Geese bigger than the moon.

In the afternoon I work shirtless, laying

strips of sod on the blind’s roof,

careful as my mother tiling her kitchen counter.

My uncles sit on campstools whacking at wasps

with rolled up Ducks Unlimited.

That evening I shot two limits: Blue wings

came in low over the decoys. I dropped

a lone Cinnamon at sundown. My uncles

napped on their bench, twitching.

Like old hunting dogs loaded with dreams.

______________________________________

Education: Robert Day received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in English (University of Kansas 1964, 1966) and M.F.A (University of Arkansas-Fayetteville 1970). Career: Day has published We Should Have Come by Water (Mammoth 2009), The Committee to Save the World (Western Books 2009), Speaking French in Kansas (Cottonwood Press 1989), and The Last Cattle Drive (Putnam 1977). He taught at Fort Hays State University, Washington College in Chestertown, Iowa Writers Workshop, University of Kansas, and Montaigne College, The University of Bordeaux.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
©2010 Denise Low AAPP 43 ©2010 Robert Day “Teal Hunting with Two Old Uncles”