D.A. Powell Wins NBCC Award for USELESS LANDSCAPE, OR A GUIDE FOR BOYS

The second time’s a charm for D.A. Powell (D. is for Douglas, in case you wondered). National Book Critics Circle announced Feb. 28, 2013 that he won their annual poetry award for his fifth collection, from Graywolf Press. NBCC nominated him for Chronic, also from Graywolf, in 2009. Congrats to Graywolf, an independent literary press that keeps the twin cities on the map as a haven for writers.

 Powell told Andrew Rahal in Nashville Review that the new book’s title comes from an Antonio Carlos Jobim song title “Useless Landscape.” However, that seemed too “dreary,” by itself. As the collection developed, he added a second theme relating to Boy Scout guides. This second strain, Powell says, is “wry, erotic poems.” Tension between gloom and joie de vivre create lay lines through the book. One of the guidebook poems is “Little Boy Blue”; Thomas Gainsborough’s 18^th century image of a foppish boy arises from the title. The fourteen-line poem begins:

He finds himself inside the Sunrise Mall,

but not at Waldenbooks. He seeks no solitude.
His second great awakening has started,
subdued interstices between kiosks and stores;
the proximity of skimming eyes, or studious eyes
that read him like a copy of Leaves of Grass….

This collapses time frames, with both Whitman’s epic work and mall culture combined into one event. Homosexual eroticism is hinted at as a “great awakening” and an interstitial occurrence “between kiosks and stores.”  Yet this mall is no safe haven. The narrator warns the young man of predators with calculating “eyes,” and he cautions the young man, as part of the guidance project of the title: “Don’t meet those eyes.”  Lest the lyric become overly pedantic, the poet ends with imagery: “The arcade’s packed with Pac-Man players in a jiff. / Gobble the cherries. Gobble that consecrated ghost.” The poem ranges from Whitman’s presence to arcade games to real dangers. Powell folds the familiar inside out to create a variation on the love sonnet. Carl Phillips writes of Powell’s recent work how it unites tradition with the present: “Mr. Powell recognizes in the contemporary the latest manifestations of a much older tradition: namely, what it is to be human.” This depth creates layers of verbal play.

 Powell further told Rahal that in this new book he incorporates less experiment with form; instead, the long line interests him:  ““I’m writing in fairly straightforward sentences and using traditional punctuation and capitalization. I’ve done a few things that are formally new for me in this collection.” He also works with variants of old forms, like this rebuilt sonnet.

Powell is the author of four other collections of poetry: Tea, Lunch, Cocktails, and Chronic. The Writing University writes of Powell’s earlier books that the focus : “revolves around the lives of the people he knew that were affected by the AIDS epidemic by defining them in the context of the places they went and the people they knew. “ His first three books are a trilogy, with experimentation with long lines; his rationale, he writes, is: “by pulling the line longer, stretching it into a longer breath, I was giving a bit more life to some people who had very short lives.”  Useless Landscapes, or a Guide for Boys experiments with forms and an overarching, book-long interplay between sexuality and mortality.

 © Denise Low 2013

D.A. Powell lives in San Francisco and teaches at the University of San Francisco. Powell’s M.F.A. in Poetry is from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa, and his BA and M.A. are from Sonoma State University in Santa Rosa, California. With T.J. DiFrancesco, he edits Lo-Ball; he also contributes to the Poetry Foundation website. Powell collaborated with poet David Trinidad in the work of prose By Myself: An Autobiography.

Powell has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop and New England College, as well as serving as Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University. Powell’s honors include recognition from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener Foundation. Awards for his poetry come from Pushcart Prize, the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Prize from Claremont University for Chronic.

“The Great Unrest” poem by D.A. Powell  from the Occupied Writings site  http://occupywriters.com/works/by-d-a-powell

 Nashville Review interview by Andrew Rahal: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/english/nashvillereview/archives/2360

 Boston Review comments by  Carl Phillips: “I admire these poems immensely, for their deftness with craft, their originality of vision, their ability to fuse old and new without devolving to gimmick—and for a dignity as jazzily inventive as it is sheer.” http://bostonreview.net/BR26.5/powell.html

 The Writing University website article with quotations from Powell: http://www.writinguniversity.org/writers/da-powell

 

JOHN BERRY PUBLISHES "ARTIFACTS" CHAPBOOK

John Berry breaks conventions with his original publication Artifacts (Benicia, California, 2012). This self-published book has photographs by Tora Williamson-Berry, and the most striking aspect is the full-color cover with no title information. This leaves focus completely on the photograph of a weathered boat under two trees. It is stranded among blue sky, mountains, and yellowed grass; no longer does it travel the ocean. No question this is about human-made “artifacts” within a framework of time and elements.

 Berry’s text, within, is a baker’s dozen poems, and another six photographs complete this publication. The book is 32 pages on glossy-finish paper--a true collector's item as well as strongly stated artwork.

 

The verse shows a lot of variety, yet the theme of history recurs in myriad ways. “All the Way Down” starts at the surface, a “Tel,” but below are a “Byzantine Church,” a “Roman mosaic floor,” and “Iron Age fort,” and finally a Bronze Age floor littered with “shards.” But below this, yet another layer:

 A storyteller

Tells children how this world balances on Turtle’s back.

When they ask what Turtle stands on,

The answer is,

Another turtle,

And under him?

Another.

It’s just turtles all the way down.

 The recursive looping of history is continuous theme, especially seen in  “Veterans Day 2012,” where one generation fights the war between the states, next the Spanish American War, the next the Great War, then World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and finally the Middle Eastern wars. Like the layers of artifacts in “All the Way Down,” this is a layered continuum; this sequence also has its artifacts, as Grandfather Logan tells about his own grandfather: “So, my cousin and I, / We stole grandpa’s Confederate Cavalry saber.” Mementos of war also are artifacts. Human intervention within natural processes is the continuing statement of the entire book. The photographs of nature create a counterpoint to poems like "Colonization Reflection."

 Berry and Williamson-Berry create a high-quality, striking chapbook of both photographs and verse.

+++++++++++

John Berry is a Choctaw, Cherokee, and Scots-Irish poet, stomp dancer, and librarian. He received his MLS from the University of Missouri-Columbia and MA and BA from California State University in Fullerton. He is the past president of the American Indian Library Association. His poetry and writing are published widely in print and on the web. He is Native American Studies librarian for University of California-Berkelely's Ethnic Studies Library.

36 State Poets Laureate Write THE WORLD KEEPS TURNING TO LIGHT

Poets laureate of the United States have no formal connection, yet they continue to find ways to meet. Fall of 2011, a gaggle of state poets laureate met in Lawrence, Kansas, at a conference organized by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. She then edited this national collection of poems that contribute to a renga, or “linked poem.” The Academy of American Poets defines the form:

“Renga, meaning "linked poem," began over seven hundred years ago in Japan to encourage the collaborative composition of poems. Poets worked in pairs or small groups, taking turns composing the alternating three-line and two-line stanzas. Linked together, renga were often hundreds of lines long.”

This group renga contains 36 parts, each by a different state poet laureate or former poet laureate. The title comes from Katharine Coles: “…Loving the view/Is still a luxury. The moon rises./The world keeps turning into light.” Here is the laureate of Alaska Peggy Shumaker’s section, used with permission

Blue light has slipped back

between paper birches, bold
shadows returning.

Long days of long, dark season
without scent. Nearly over.

Moose scoop thigh-deep snow

off bent-flat willows. So still
this river of ice

creaky and stiff, soon to break.

Liquid again, river song.

 Samuel Green, of Washington, wrote this for his last image before Shumaker: “At dusk crows return/from the day’s unconcern, flakes/of pepper spilled on/ grey sky.” He continues to conclude his section, but note how the sky and light and darkness continued from Green’s section into Shumaker’s. After Shumaker’s section the next poet, Kathleen Flenniken, picks up the word “scoop” for her section, as she describes “Children in floppy coats prepare/to be scooped up and lugged home.” A mountain is in this section, continuing the theme of natural settings.

J. Kates describes the book and its form this way: “Every poem is a conversation with other poems, some more explicitly than others. This version of the Japanese conversational tradition, the renga, rings with the give-and-take of three dozen lively voices, laureates, in the best sense of the word, using their verse to commemorate and celebrate in our name.”

Negative Capability Press published the print version of the entire renga Jan., 2013. They are at 36 Ridgelawn  Dr. East, Mobile, AL 36608. Publisher is Alabama poet laureate Sue B. Walker. http://negativecapabilitypress.squarespace.com/

The entire online version of this book is at The America: Now and Here cross-country tour site http://americanowandhere.org/the-tour/state-poet-laureates-the-world-keeps-turning-to-light/

The books is for sale on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Keeps-Turning-Light/dp/0942544803

Great Link for How-to Book Publishing Updated Info

Be sure to scroll down through this rehash of a recent conference by practicing editors, writers, publishers, and publicists. There are changing times, and no one is sure where the biz will end up.

http://publishingperspectives.com/2013/02/ether-for-authors-book-campground/#1

Grant Jenkins's Smart Pain and Beauty in NUMBERS

Grant Matthew Jenkins makes digital and animated poetry (  http://turbulence.org/spotlight/tulsita/    ) as well as print-based artifacts. His previous books are a collaboration with Cheryl Pallant, Morphs (Cracked Slab, 2009), and his own Joy of God and Other Series (Blackbird, 2003). His Ph.D. in theory and poetics is from Notre Dame.

Yes, he is a smart, innovative writer. That does not take away from the passion embedded in his neo-archaeological pieces in the chapbook Numbers (Tulsa: Living Arts Press, 2012). He litters pages with suggestion. I cull the clues for familiar shards and match them to my own losses. I see white spaces among the lines— voids that will remain when time erases my presence.

Titles in the chapbook suggest slippage of forms: “Three Misreadings”; “Monochrome #4,” omitting numbers 1-3; “Ten Ways To Write a Sonnet,” which subverts the idea that a “sonnet” is a known formula; and “Five Easy Pieces,” which is not composed of easy pieces at all: This final section inverts the second half of the poem, so it is upside down on the page (I remember a toggle somewhere in word that flips text). The bottom half of the poem does not exactly mirror the top half, but rather is a Kantian incongruence like matched but opposing mittens.

“Monochrome #4” begins with loss: “Just count out / the hours of aching” (section 1). It continues with grieving for the paradoxical, as in “your yes a goodbye” (section 2) and “how much they loved her / til she died” (section 3). Sharp images add to the sense of incompletion, as in the “blue haze of crystal vases” of the  first section, with its sound-facets of zee (and near- zee) echoing against each other, as well as the visual  “blue” overlay on glass. The work is its own slab of reality. From Monochrome #4:

1.

Just count out

 the hours of aching

 dedication to the mission of

distraction, the blue haze of crystal vases

 

with wax

flowers held in

the embassies of waiting

rooms where scarves choke

the oak coat

tree in the name of theology

The Holloway Series in Poetry - Kenneth Irby

Lyn Hejinian introduces Kenneth Irby reading--featured on the Ron Silliman Poetry Blog and YouTube. Irby begins reading about 22 minutes into this tape. Kenneth Irby was born in 1936 in Bowie, Texas and raised in Fort Scott, in Kansas. He served in the U.S. Army and holds degrees from Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches English at the University of Kansas. He has published nineteen poetry books, including The Flower of Having Passed Through Paradise in a Dream, Kansas-New Mexico, To Max Douglas, Orexis, Call Steps: Plains, Camps, Situations, Consistories, and Ridge to Ridge among other titles. Jed Rasula wrote, "Irby's origins in Kansas, much traced in his work (and unfortunately often the only thing people know him for), is given such a clear realization in the early books that that locality persists largely because of the poetry's achievement of it as land (re)gained in vision." Rasula goes further: "Irby's continental grasp yields not geography (to allay the fears of those who suspect him of writing 'dull geography') but 'a world shared not just of references but possibilities/to excitement.'" In 2010 he was a co-winner of the Shelley Memorial Award.

Denise Low Reviews Natasha Trethewey, Mary Oliver, Louise Gluck and Rain Gomez

My poetry column "On Poetry" for the Kansas City Star is posted online today: “Collections by four female poets touch on cultural identity, nature and myth” I was inspired by the success of women writers, including new books by Natasha Trethewey (U.S. Poet Laureate), Mary Oliver (why does she keep selling so well!), Louise Gluck (mythic lyricist) and Rain Gomez (Creole-Choctaw cook and poet). The review begins: “The beginning of 2013 brings 'best-of' lists and also a celebration of women’s achievements as writers. The year’s first issue of Poets & Writers magazine notes women as winners of 56 percent of 2012 book prizes. Recent books show how poetry is indeed women’s work and how they excel.” Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/01/18/4016097/a-chorus-of-female-voices.html#storylink=cpy  

Richard Blanco Resources and Photograph

Richard Blanco, photo c. by Xanath Caraza

Poets especially are awaiting the poetry moment during the presidential inauguration Monday, Jan. 21, which is also Martin Luther King's birthday. Those who are familiar with Richard Blanco, his poetry, and his commitment to his art know that it will be outstanding. Since the announcement Jan. 8 that he would be the chosen poet, many links are now available. Also, Xanath Cáraza invited him to Kansas City for The Writers Place, Letras Latinas, and UMKC events. Thanks to her for this great photo. Here is the link to that visit and other Richard Blanco links:

Xánath Caraza recaps University of Missouri-Kansas City visit by Richard Blanco and Fred Arroyo 9.17.12. Both writers talk about code switching. Great photographs of the event and reading.

http://latinopoetryreview.blogspot.com/2012_09_01_archive.html

Richard Blanco’s own website begins with this anecdote: “. . . a woman once asked me to share something about myself that no one would know directly from reading my bio or my work. Somewhat embarrassed, I told the audience about my poetry dance -- a little Michael Jackson-inspired shtick I do around the house in my pajamas when I am high from a good-poem day.”  http://www.richard-blanco.com/ 

PBS News Hour Interview  1.18.13. 5 min. Richard Blanco speaks about the challenge of examining his own work in preparation for writing the occasional inauguration poem. He reads the poem “Betting on America,” about the Miss America pageant on TV when he was a kid. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2013/01/friday-on-the-newshour-inaugural-poet-richard-blanco.html

Bill Moyers blog, article, interview, a YouTube version of “Betting on America.” http://billmoyers.com/2013/01/11/richard-blanco-announced-as-inaugural-poet/

New York Times announcement , Jan. 8, 2013, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, which begins: “From the moment Barack Obama burst onto the political scene, the poet Richard Blanco, son of Cuban exiles, says he felt ‘a spiritual connection’ with the man who would become the nation’s 44th president.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/books/richard-blanco-2013-inaugural-poet.html?_r=0

Poetry Foundation website has bio, sample poems, photo. Also, there is an interview, “Richard Blanco on Being Chosen as the Nation's Fifth Inaugural Poet," by Ruth Graham. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/245312   Inaugural 'sle

To the People

 

 

"BIG THING" Blog Entry for Denise Low Is Literary Essays Book

MariJo Moore invited me to join a blog chain 2013 & THE NEXT BIG THING - a series of interviews with authors about what they’ve been working on. I understand it has been going since October! Here is the link to her blog: http://marijomoore.blogspot.com/   Here is my own latest book, not yet a year old: Natural Theologies: Essays about Literature of the New Middle West (ISBN 978-1-935218-22-7. 185 pages, $20.00)  http://www.thebackwaterspress.org/our-authors/denise-low/    I hope to promote it in 2013.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Middle West and Great Plains writers continue a “frontier” legacy with topics of nature, weather, the relationships among Native and European settler writers, urban-rural dialectic, and community life.
What genre does your book fall under?
Non-Fiction, critical essays.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
This is like some studies of ethnic literatures, but this is the first book that considers literature of this region.
Who is the publisher?
The Backwaters Press in Omaha, published by Greg Kozmicki. He has done so much as an independent literary publisher.  He is an unsung hero, and a fine poet himself. Working with Kozmicki and his copy editor were a gorocess.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I realized other regions of the country celebrate their literature, but in the plains and prairies, writers do not have the same recognition.
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
I have been grateful for some wonderful reviews from the Kansas City Star, the Manhattan Mercury, and others. A reviewer for  American Indian Library wrote: “This is the first book of critical essays about contemporary Midwestern writers. Denise Low, of Delaware and Cherokee heritage, foregrounds Native writers, including Louise Erdrich, Heid Erdrich, Diane Glancy, Joseph Marshall III, and Adrian C. Louis. The four sections of Natural Theologies are about history, settlements in the Plains, Midwestern people and their character, and nature. The author considers not only the legacy of “frontier,” but also the enduring narratives of settler/Native interactions.”
Where did the idea come from for the book?
As a young writer, I learned that writing is a dialogue with books. I began reviewing books after my M.A. in literature as a way to expand my writing practice. This book includes expanded essays on books that have influenced me.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I really don’t think this book will be made into a movie, but I really think N. Scott Momaday is very cinematic. I’d like to see a movie about his writings. He has influenced many Native and Southwest/plains writers, especially because of his insistence that the oral tradition as a valid literary genre.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I had some ideas and a few drafts, but I spent one summer drafting this, working intensively every day, and then another year editing it.
And to keep 2013 THE NEXT BIG THING going, here is another wonderful writer, Lisa Hase,  and her next big thing: http://zingarapoet.net/author/zingarapoet/ 

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RICHARD BLANCO REVELS IN MEMORY, STORY, LYRICISM

Photo by Denise Low 2012

The choice of Richard Blanco as 2013 presidential inauguration poet illustrates the deep field of fine poets in America today. Blanco has three books out, all from university presses, not major publishers. University of Pittsburgh Press published Looking for The Gulf Motel (2012), and he toured recently reading from this book. One stop was Kansas City’s The Writer’s Place on Sept. 16 where I saw him (and bought his book). He was reading with fiction writer Fred Arroyo, and that Sunday afternoon readings was a highlight of the autumn.

His second book, Directions to The Beach of the Dead (Camino del Sol) from the University of Arizona Press (2005), won the PEN/Beyond Margins Aware; and City of a Hundred Fires (Cienfuegos) won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (1995).

Blanco engages his readers with his intimate voice. Ripples of memory wash through narratives, along with familiar scenery and images. The result is an apparently effortless voice-over that could narrate a biographical documentary. The vivid writing simulates a cinematic mode. Here is the first stanza of his recent book’s title poem:

 LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL

Marco Island, Florida

 There should be nothing here I don't remember . . .

 The Gulf Motel with mermaid lampposts
and ship's wheel in the lobby should still be
rising out of the sand like a cake decoration.
My brother and I should still be pretending
we don't know our parents, embarrassing us
as they roll the luggage cart past the front desk
loaded with our scruffy suitcases, two-dozen
loaves of Cuban bread, brown bags bulging
with enough mangos to last the entire week,
our espresso pot, the pressure cooker--and
a pork roast reeking garlic through the lobby.
All because we can't afford to eat out, not even
on vacation, only two hours from our home
in Miami, but far enough away to be thrilled
by whiter sands on the west coast of Florida,
where I should still be for the first time watching
the sun set instead of rise over the ocean. . . .

 The poem continues for four stanzas with the refrain “There should be nothing here I don’t remember.” Blanco uses the conditional mood “should” throughout the poem, which works well in Spanish but usually not so well in English. He translates this effectively, so that by the end of the poem, his memories are both present and past: “I want to find The Gulf Motel exactly as it was/and pretend for a moment, nothing is lost.” Blanco successfully melds his two cultures (his parents are Cuban) as well as his two languages.

Paradox is one of the major themes in this poet’s works. “The Name I Wanted” is an autobiographical monologue about his choice of the name “Richard” over “Ricardo”: “Ricardo De Jesus Blanco, I dub thee myself/Sir Richard Jesus White.”

He also navigates his queer identity in “Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother.” He learns from her “You can’t wear cologne or puka shells/and I better not catch you in clogs.” Rules of conventional masculine behavior are clear in the mind of his abuela, but she loves him in her own way: “you will not look like a goddamn queer,/ I’ve seen you . . . / even if you are one.” His grandmother accepts his orientation in her own way, as she accepts the Miss America contest in “Betting on America”: Grandmother plays the bookie in that family scenario. In “Thicker Than Country,” he revels in the contradictions of “A Cuban like me living in Maine?”

He told New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg about the conservatism of Cuban culture: “’It’s trying to understand how I fit between negotiating the world, between being mainstream gay and being Cuban gay.’”

Blanco is multi-talented—he has an engineering degree as well as an M.F.A. in poetry from Florida International University. Blanco’s website is:  http://www.richard-blanco.com/  Here is an NPR interview/reading with Blanco: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1038124 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151316800518419&set=a.168455698418.118948.575073418&type=1&relevant_count=1&ref=nf#!/photo.php?fbid=10151316800518419&set=a.168455698418.118948.575073418&type=1&permPage=1