Denise Low & Paul Hotvedt & Josh Kendall Multimedia Project 3 VOICES

FINE ARTS MULTI-MEDIA CELEBRATION & BOOK LAUNCH

Come and join us at the Lawrence Arts Center, 7 pm. Thursday, Dec. 4th for a release party for the fine arts edition and DVD of Three Voices, a collaboration of painter Paul Hotvedt, poet Denise Low, and videographer Josh Kendall. For video preview, see: http://paulhotvedt.com/cgi-bin/p/awtp-home.cgi?d=paul-hotvedt

On Dec. 4, Denise Low will be reading selected works, with Josh Conner and Brandon McCune providing the music. Hotvedt's paintings will be on display. Copies of 3 Voices will be available.

This multimedia package includes Denise Low's responses to landscape images by Paul Hotvedt. Text includes prose poems and an accompanying essay about creative dialogue between memory and landscape. Hotvedt's images include digitized images, cards, and videographic interpretations. Included in the DVD are paintings, readings, and interviews with Hotvedt and Low about the creative process. Packaging is by Deb Dillon, and music by Josh Conner and Brandon McCune.

Advance copies are available for sale on Paul Hotvedt's website: http://paulhotvedt.com/cgi-bin/p/awtp-home.cgi?d=paul-hotvedt .

New York Times Election Day Poems Are Available

Mary Jo Bang, John Ashbery, and others wrote poems for Election Day, published in this morning's paper. Here is one link. Here's to occasional poems. And best to all on this first day of a new phase for our Union.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/opinion/05mehigan.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #24

JAMES O. McCRARY (1941 - )

James McCrary celebrates recent publication of his collected chapbooks All That (Moscow, Idaho: ManyPenny Press). He first came to Lawrence in 1965 and mostly has lived in Kansas since, except for short spans on the coasts. In the sixties he was an active poet associated with Ed Dorn, David Ignatow, Ken Irby, and John Moritz, with publications in Grist magazine. In 1990 he began teaching poetry at the Lawrence Arts Center and curated several reading series, including the Poetry Slam. He also worked with Burroughs Communications.

McCrary writes a minimalist verse that follows thought so closely that it becomes an abstraction. His writings have much in common with abstract paintings. John Fowler writes of this poet that “The simplicity of language, the sparseness of the word on the page, the way a few words stretched my mind across big spaces, all this is here.” McCrary’s years in Kansas have marked his language, as poet Charlie Plymell notes that this poet’s resembles “a Kansan who doesn't want to waste any words.” This minimal approach creates emphasis.

McCrary’s writings are like gesture drawings of artists, where ink outlines horizons and encloses balloons of space. The first line of this poem sets up the philosophical framework, questions about “out there.” Then the words suggest the very basics of thunderclouds gathering: clouds, movement, “electric,” “a bit of wet,” and then more movement. Then the narrator compares weather to thought, which is “there” and “here” at once or “t(here)”.

7/25/91

Thinking about out there
the clouds gather
push east and south
to here
where hopefully they will
do what they do
covering both sun and land
with the mass of them.

some electric
some noise
a bit of wet
then move on toward the
easy hills of west missouri
or simply dissipate and
reflect above the kansas river
where the loss is obvious

not much else is t(here)

Education: Jim McCrary received a BA in English (1987) and an MA in Creative Writing (1989), under David Bromige. Both degrees are from California State University-Sonoma. Career: The poet has five books of poetry: Coon Creek (Cottonwood Books, 1970), Edible Pets, (Tansy Books, 1987), West of Mass (Tansy Books, 1991), and All That (ManyPenny Books, 2008) http://www.lulu.com/content/4363355 . He has published a half dozen chapbooks. He has published in over 100 magazines, anthologies, and online venues, including Exquisite Corpse, Caliban, and First Intensity. He edited his own ‘zine Smelt Money, print-version blog. He received a Phoenix Award. ____________________________________________________________________________________________© 2008 Denise Low, AAPP 24 © 1994 James McCrary, “7/25/91, Poems of the Place”

Guest Poem by Stephen Bunch:

Epistemological Inferences from Science Fiction Movies

The official spoken language of the universe is English,
and the official written language is Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Deep space explosions and telepathy require no subtitles.
All creatures known and unknown possess mouths.
The rule of sequels obtains, even in parallel universes,
and gravity gives rise to reason, weightlessness to panic.
Despite our investment in it, the moon sheds little light.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #23

ELIZABETH CAROLINE DODD (1962 - )


Elizabeth Dodd has lived in Kansas since 1989, when she became an English professor at Kansas State University. She publishes poetry and personal essays, and the natural world appears vividly in all her writings. She also publishes commentary on nature topics that are related to ecological issues, or ecocriticism. This is an emerging field of study in American belles lettres, one that has genesis in the 1930s writings of Nebraska author Loren Eiseley. The Flint Hills area of Manhattan often inspires her prose and verse, and from these she moves to human concerns.

This poem, "Lyric,” begins with a question of faith. Bishop George Berkeley questioned materialism when he asked “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?" Here, Dodd’s scattering of “broken” bark and branches across snow create a “grammar” of affirmation. She includes the speaker of the poem—“I turn sideways”—as another natural element, not a dominator of wilderness. The poet’s “hillside” consists of unseen realities, including song, the essence of lyrical poetry. Her verse transcends matter, and her answer to Bishop Berkeley is “Yes.” Poetry is a sixth sense.

(Unfortunately, the original spacing will not translate to this page.)

LYRIC

It doesn’t matter
whether
a tree falls
or doesn’t on this hillside.
I am here
in this buoyant silence
lifting from snow cover.
There is no story to tell
about cause and effect,
no one to pull
the stiff sheet of grammar
over a scattered pattern
of bark and branches
broken on the snow.
I turn sideways
and the wind slips among us,
so many vertical,
dark shapes.

Education: Elizabeth Dodd received a B.A. in English and French from Ohio University in 1983; an M.F.A. in poetry from Indiana University in 1986; and a Ph.D. in American and British Literature from Indiana University in 1989.Career: Dodd has p two books of poetry: Archetypal Light (University of Nevada Press, 2001) and Like Memory, Caverns (New York University Press, 1992, Elmer Holmes Bobst Award). Her books of essays and criticism are In the Mind’s Eye: Essays Across the Animate World (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), Prospect: Journeys & Landscapes (University of Utah Press, 2003, William Rockhill Nelson Award), and The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet (University of Missouri Press, 1992.)______________________________________________________________________________________© 2008 Denise Low, AAPP 23 © 1992 Elizabeth Dodd “Lyric” (New York University Press).

National Book Foundation Announces Nominations

Nominations for the National Book Award in Poetry are:

Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)

These are all established poets with salutory previous book publications--no surprises like Troy Jollimore, for example. Also note that the majority of these poets are published by academic or small literary presses. I encourage apprentice poets to find these books, read them, and look at the poets' strategies as they re-create the world with tracks on paper.

Occasional Poem for Judge Tacha

(This is adapted with permission from Daniel Low's blog Consumer Goods & Retail Industry Litigation Blog)

On Oct. 3, 2008, in Lawrence, Kansas, the 26th Annual Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award was presented to Tenth Circuit Judge Deanell Reece Tacha.

Speakers at the award ceremony included Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Judge Carolyn King of the Fifth Circuit, Chief Judge Robert Henry of the Tenth Circuit, Judge John Lungstrum of the District of Kansas, Judge Sarah Barker of the Southern District of Indiana, John Tacha, and Daniel Low.

The Devitt Award honors Article III judges whose careers have been exemplary. Judge Tacha has been a judge on the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals since 1985, served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, chaired the Judicial Division of the ABA, chaired the U.S. Judicial Conference Committee on the Judicial Brach, was President of the American Inns of Court, chaired the Appellate Judges Conference, was a member of the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, was president of the Kansas University Alumni Association, and has been active in numerous other professional, civic, philanthropic, and cultural organizations.

During the ceremony, Daniel Low remarked on how inspirational Judge Tacha was, and he read a poem written in honor of the occasion by Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low:

For a Kansas Judge

Central Plains wind stops for no woman
nor beast—not the cattle nor the sparrows.
Sometimes it carries straight-line rain
and sometimes glistening prisms of mist.
Pawnees and Spanish fought in the winds
and Cheyennes and American soldiers.
West winds blew through council fires
and brick court houses on town squares.
Gravity tugs the wind into whorls, never
easing its grip. These laws do not vary.
Each community learns the same lessons:
how sun returns after winter, how kindness
fosters survival, how the stories circle,
how law holds even the sky in order.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT: JUDITH ROITMAN (1945 - )

Dear Poetry Friends,

Welcome to autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” and here is a poem about falling leaves, but it is not like Keat’s “Ode to Autumn” nor anything else. Judith Roitman writes about the passage of time, a traditional end-of-year concern, but she is an original. She experiments with how language can mirror consciousness. Images appear, and also fragments of thoughts, but this very American poetic form of experimental verse does not connect dots in expected ways.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Judith Roitman has lived in Lawrence since 1978. Besides being active as a poet, she is professor of mathematics at the University of Kansas. She is Guiding Teacher at the Southwind Zen Center and an active member of the Jewish community in Lawrence. These multiple roles inform her writing. In addition, she is a voice among poets like Ron Silliman who comment on contemporary experience of poetics (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/). Clarity of vision is a hallmark of her writing, but the logic is unreliable, as chaos theory shows how random events are the rule, not the exception.
“As a Leaf” is a poem about the motion of falling leaves, perhaps set in the autumn season. Here, focus is on each image as it occurs, and not the expected connections among them. Readers must fill in stories, if there are any. This poem is also about perception itself, as real images are copied on our retinas (“Copy to copy”) and “transformed” into human experience. I also find this poem to be about poetry itself, which is like “turning the wrong corner” and finding new ways to perceive reality. A lyrical image is “suspended wasp motion” as time itself continues to move forward like heartbeats and like the slow, floating wasp’s flight. The ending thought, about the tension between immobility and action, resolves with the “& so on” of continuing creation as our galaxy continues to spread outward across the blue sky. This kind of poetry asks the reader to participate fully.

AS A LEAF

Copy to copy as a leaf falls transformer to transformed
light on glass moving as hands denied & flight

suspended from wings but without looking
all things against blue the blue room blue house

we find it this way every so often turning the wrong corner
the right one filling up all gone against blue

covered within light the heart the sign of it steady
the wire angling up into vision

things ready to fall
& others spinning up suspended wasp motion

within derelict acts & clarity of motion
stillness within motion & so on.


Education: Judith Roitman graduated from Bayside High School in New York City (1962); Sarah Lawrence College with a BA in English (1966); University of California-Berkeley (1974).
Career: This poet has published poems various journals, including First Intensity, Black Spring, Locus Point (on the web), Bird Dog, and Wakarusa Wetlands in Word & Image (Lawrence: Imagination and Place, 2005). She has published these chapbooks, or books under 50 pages: The Stress of Meaning: Variations on a Line by Susan Howe (Morris, Minn.: Standing Stones Press, 1997); Diamond Notebooks (Buffalo, New York: Nominative Press Collective, 1998); Slippge (Elmwood, Conn.: Potes and Poets Press, 1999); and No Face: New and Selected Poems (Lawrence, First Intensity 2008).

_________________________________________________________________________

© 2008 Denise Low, AAPP 22 © 2008 Judith Roitman “As a Leaf” (Lawrence: First Intensity)

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #21

BRIAN DALDORPH (1958 - )

Brian Daldorph came to the University of Kansas English Department almost 20 years ago and has become a permanent resident of Kansas. He contributes to Kansas belles lettres in many ways: he writes; he organizes readings; and he is a writing class instructor at the Douglas County Jail—featured in Poet’s Market 2008. He advocates for writers by publishing Coal City Review, a nationally recognized literary magazine. Daldorph’s writing is marked by his awareness of social justice. He often uses the form of a dramatic monologue, where he assumes the voice of another character, to get inside human experience. In this way he is able to energize historic works.
“Last Word” is from Daldorph’s new book of sonnets. Readers may be surprised at how this does not follow the pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet, yet some of the lines do rhyme; there are fourteen lines; and the ending is an unexpected reversal. This is a contemporary sonnet—it still has a lyric, emotional focus, yet it uses the sonnet form as a guideline, not a straitjacket. One of the enduring qualities of the sonnet form is its length, which sustains thought as long as most of us can concentrate. It fits the human mind like the length of a breath is gauged to our lung capacities.
The speaker of this dramatic monologue is a writer. He believes God is counting his words, like breaths, from birth to death. As he writes late at night, he listens to night music of train whistles and “Yardbird,” nickname for Charlie Parker. For The speaker here, these evoke thoughts of mortality. He may think that he will live forever, but in this poem he imagines his end—a single significant word. This prompts readers to ask the same question.

LAST WORD

God knows the number of words I’ll write.
God knows my first word
and He’s been keeping score since then,
even when I’m up past midnight
listening to night trains and Yardbird,
trying to hold onto my heavy black pen.
Sometimes I think I could write forever,
just sit at my desk and not move
beyond the twitching of my hand. I’d not need a lover.
Words would be my picture-framed love.
Eventually there’d be only my last word left
to write. Perhaps I’d think about it for days,
stretched out on my death bed.
What should it be? Rain? Sea? Alone? Amaze?

Education: Brian Daldorph was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire, England. He received a BA at the University of Kent (1983); MA at Illinois State University (1985) and Ph.D. in English at the University of Illinois (1990). His dissertation topic was the poetry of W.S. Merwin.
Career: This poet has taught English at the University of Kansas since 1990. He also has taught in Japan, Senegal, and England. His books are The Holocaust and Hiroshima: Poems (Mid-America, 1997); Outcasts (Mid-America, 2000); Senegal Blues (219 Press, 2004); and From the Inside Out: Sonnets (Woodley, 2008). He publishes and edits Coal City Review.____________________________________________________________ © 2008 Denise Low, AAPP 21 © 2008 Brian Daldorph “Last Word” in From the Inside Out (Woodley)

Ted Kooser Comments on Kloefkorn's Alvin Turner Book

I first knew of Ted Kooser, former U.S. poet laureate, as an editor of Midwestern poetry books in the 1970s. He labored at this task for years with his Windflower Press, and in the process, he energized many poets, including Nebraska's state poet Bill Kloefkorn (born and raised in Kansas). I came to know Kooser's fine, mysterious poetry soon after he visited the University of Kansas for a reading in about 1978. This first book by Kloefkorn went into numerous printings, and it was a legendary small press bestseller of the day.

Below, we have been discussing the publication history of Kloefkorn's breakthrough book, and here is some clarification from Kooser in a recent email, reprinted with permission:

"If the date on the Windflower edition of Alvin Turner is 1974, that's when I did the first printing. I wouldn't have changed the original year when I did subsequent printings. Unfortunately, all my papers about Windflower have been sent to the university library, which will eventually have all my things on deposit. I think that the Roadapple edition had been out of print and unavailable for quite a while when Bill asked me, or I proposed, to take it on. But this is a long time ago and my memory is fuzzy.
"Best, Ted"