SHARON OLDS, 2013 PULITZER PRIZE WINNER, WEAVES TIME INTO MEMORY WREATHS

Sharon Olds, one of the most lyrically intense writers of contemporary poetry, has won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 112 pages, Sept. 12, 2012). She tells of domestic life in stories that weave in and out of time frames. The recent book is about the course of a divorce. Previous books are about her birth family and children as well as her former husband.

The poem “I Go Back to May 1937,” about Olds’s parents,  (The Gold Cell, 1987), begins within a photograph’s edges in a well lit pose:

"I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody. . . ."

 

This view of her parents, before her conception, presents frozen portraits of two young people with an unformed future ahead of them. The “wrought-iron gate” is still ajar, although its presence makes it clear that confinement is pending; this is another frame in the photograph. Its “sword-tips” are ominous. The young man and woman, before parenthood, are tabula rasa, without knowledge of the oncoming pain. The poet enters into the photograph with them, with awareness of their future, and completes their story before it begins. Future and past collapse together, and the narrator creates a present moment:

" . . . .  I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it. "

 

She erases time sequence and creates a present moment in which volition is possible. Her resolution is articulation—a great trust in the invisible readers outside the frame of the poem. Her poems create memory wreaths, like the floral arrangements woven from family members' lockets of hair. She takes the past and creates mementos of the present.

 Her prize-winning book Stag’s Leap continues to narrate personal relationships. Publishers Weekly begins its review: “Known for her unadorned, emotionally direct, sometimes sexually explicit free verse, Olds has amassed a large and loyal following over 30-odd years and 10 books. In her new collection every poem speaks to the collapse of a 30-year marriage, precipitated by the ex-husband’s affair. Hence the memorable title: “The drawing on the label of our favorite red wine/ looks like my husband, casting himself off a/ cliff in his fervor to get free of me” (17 Sept. 2012).

 Carol Duffy, poet laureate of the United Kingdom, writes of Stag’s Leap: “There is a grace and chivalry in her grief that marks her out as being a world-class poet. I always say that poetry is the music of being human, and in this book she is really singing. Her journey from grief to healing is so beautifully executed.” Stag’s Leap also won the T.S. Eliot prize. There is a grace and chivalry in her grief that marks her out as being a world-class poet. I always say that poetry is the music of being human, and in this book she is really singing. Her journey from grief to healing is so beautifully executed.”There is a grace and chivalry in her grief that marks her out as being a world-class poet. I always say that poetry is the music of being human, and in this book she is really singing. Her journey from grief to healing is so beautifully executed.”There is a grace and chivalry in her grief that marks her out as being a world-class poet. I always say that poetry is the music of being human, and in this book she is really singing. Her journey from grief to healing is so beautifully executed.”

 

Bio: SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford and Columbia universities. Her first book, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Father was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and The Unswept Room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and is one of the founders of NYU's writing workshops for residents of Goldwater Hospital, and for veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Academy of American Poets page: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/205

Amazon.com has a selection of poems from Stag’s Leap: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0375712259

Poetry Foundation link: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sharon-olds

 

 

Re-poeting the Frontier: Edward Dorn, Diane Hueter Warner, Karen Holmberg, and dg nanouk okpik

I'm grateful to the Kansas City Star for their support of literature, including my "On Poetry" column. Here is the

start of the recent "Western Edges" review, working east to west. This is one of the few American reviews of Illinois/Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn's Collected Works, which was published in England at the end of last year. He spent a semester at Ks. University in 1969, and I was lucky to audit his class and see him around town. He had a huge influence on many of us. Buddy-poet Steve Bunch has been reminding me of that year: Robert Bly, Robert Duncan, and Galway Kinnell were visiting readers. I thought this was normal. Diane Hueter Warner is another fine poet, who spent some time at KU also. Karen Holmberg attended Mizzou. Dg nanouk okpik is a newcomer, and wow, she's amazing. Here is a start, but please go to the KC Star page for the full review.

"The Western frontier appears on the earliest European maps, with sea serpents encircling Terra Incognita. American poets continue to renew myths of exotic territories just beyond the pale of civilization. Publication of Edward Dorn’s “Collected Poems” showcases his seminal revision of the literary West. Books by Diane Hueter Warner of Texas, Karen Holmberg of Oregon and Dg Nanouk Okpik, an Alaskan native, locate ever more remote distances of Western borderlands.Dorn’s thousand-page volume collects all his published and unpublished verse from 1964 to 2009, when he died. In total, the work documents the poet’s reconfiguration of the American West. Although he knew British poetics well, he located his explorations in New Mexico and surrounding regions.

Dorn is a fortuneteller. His epic “Gunslinger,” written between 1968 and 1975, opens in Mesilla, where the frontier exists today among Spanish, English, Apache and other Native language-speaking populations. Even the title “Gunslinger” is prophetic, as the current debate continues to highlight guns as essential parts of the American experience.Dorn’s slick hero would be as comfortable on YouTube as on the pages of this book. . . ."
To read the rest of the review:
http://www.kansascity.com/2013/04/04/4161333/four-writers-explore-the-western.html?storylink=twt

HEID ERDRICH POETRY VIDEOS ARE ONLINE MPR

Ojibwa poet, writer, scholar, and activist Heid Erdrich has translated her poetry to video. These are the best I've seen, because of the greater depth. Vincent Moniz is part of the project, and the wonderful Mn. grants support this exploration.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/state-of-the-arts/archive/2013/03/poet-heid-erdrich-finds-herself-pre-occupied.shtml

Her biography and upcoming events from her website heiderdrich.com :

"Heid E. Erdrich is author of four poetry collections, most recently Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems. She is Ojibwe from the Turtle Mountain Band in North Dakota. A long-time college professor, Heid is now an independent scholar and a frequent visiting writer at educational and cultural institutions across the country. In Minnesota, Heid often works with galleries to present exhibits focused on Native American visual art and she directs Wiigwaas Press an Ojibwe language publisher. A recipient of awards from The Loft Literary Center, the Archibald Bush Foundation and elsewhere, Heid has four times been nominated for the Minnesota Book Award which she won in 2009 for her book National Monuments. She is a 2012-13 Minnesota State Arts Board grant recipient."

Upcoming Readings & Events

MARCH

30th-Screening poem films at The Loft/Open Book, 7:00-9:00

with Minnesota State Arts Board Grantees 2012-2013

APRIL

4th-Reading at SubText in St. Paul, 7:00

11th-Screening poem films and discussion with Ed Bok Lee

as a guest of Co-Kisser at the Central Library in Minneapolis

20th-Appearing with her THREE SISTERS

to benefit Red Door Gallery in Wahpeton, ND

The Writers Place: DENISE LOW POETRY WORKSHOPS: GOING FOR THE BEST

I'm excited to be starting this Writers Place class! Last chance to sign up for --Poetry Workshop with Denise Low. THURSDAYS, MARCH 28, APRIL 4, 11, & 18, 2013, 6–8 p.m.A four-session study of the genres of poetry – sonnet, prose, narrative – with a focus on discussion, writing, and sharing of works. http://www.writersplace.org/workshops/

AWP Members: Please vote in the critical Associated Writers and Writing Programs Elections!

http://literarycitizenship.com/2013/03/02/can-i-get-100-awp-members-to-vote-in-this-election/ Cathy Day's blog gives great details!

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