National Book Awards Nominations for Poetry Announced:

*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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 - )

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.

____________________________________________

©2010 Denise Low AAPP 46 ©2008 “Brief Under Water” by Cyrus Console © Paula Prisacaru photo

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

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