AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #40: BENJAMIN S. LERNER (1979 - )

Ben Lerner, from Topeka, pursued academic study of poetry at Brown University. His writing is grounded in the 21st century—with all its nesting boxes of realities and simulations. In one poem he writes about a man watching himself on TV: “He watches the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV.” The occurrence of wordplay like this unifies Lerner’s writings. Lerner creates highly populated mappings of urban throughways. These include quick trackings of lifetime trajectories, like Ronald Reagan’s biography, for example. Such a person’s identity in this poetry-scape is reduced to an icon—the movie star president—and so human experience is easily commodified. Lerner told a Jacket magazine interviewer that he is concerned with “commercialization of public space and speech.”

Another of Lerner’s concerns is extended poems with variations on a theme, such as his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures. This interest extends to prose poem sections of Angle of Yaw, a 2007 Kansas Notable Book. Here, Lerner also shows interest in technologically expanded sight. The term “angle of yaw” is a physics term for the tiny sideways shiftings of an object like a bullet or airplane as it moves forward through its line of travel. This only can be observed from perspective of great distance, possible through optical aids. The poet, then, becomes a voyeur with infinite personal interactions to sort. He lives in not the classical age of art nor the modern nor postmodern. His is a land of fast, flattened social interactions, a hyper-industrial age where any human experience, not just labor, can be sold on E-bay.

This prose poem objectively classifies contemporary art forms. Like a wheel stuck in snow, the narrator defines art in relationship to its public context. The poem progresses from static images, painting and sculpture, to more dynamic ones. The dictionary-like tone reinforces the theme of art’s removal from spiritual experience.

From ANGLE OF YAW

If it hangs from the wall, it's a painting. If it rests on the floor, it's a sculpture. If it's very big or very small, it's conceptual. If it forms part of the wall, if it forms part of the floor, it's architecture. If you have to buy a ticket, it's modern. If you are already inside it and you have to pay to get out of it, it's more modern. If you can be inside it without paying, it's a trap. If it moves, it's outmoded. If you have to look up, it's religious. If you have to look down, it's realistic. If it's been sold, it's site-specific. If, in order to see it, you have to pass through a metal detector, it's public.

Education: Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, where he graduated from Topeka High School in 1997. At Brown University he earned a BA in Political Theory (2001) and an MFA in Poetry (2003).
Career: Lerner has published two books of poetry from Copper Canyon Press: The Lichtenberg Figures (2004, Hayden Carruth Prize) and Angle of Yaw (2006), which was nominated for a National Book Award. He has taught at California College of the Arts, Oakland, and now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh writing program. Since 2003, he has co-published No: A Journal of the Arts, a semiannual magazine of poetry, art and criticism. He also edits poetry for Critical Quarterly.

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©2009 Denise Low AAPP 40 ©2006 Ben Lerner Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon)

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT # 39: DONALD WARREN LEVERING (1949 - )

Don Levering grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and for many years has lived in Santa Fe. His poetry braids together myth and the natural world, but unevenly. His poems are questions more than answers. As guest poet for the online Academy of American Poets forum, he described writing verse: “To straddle and ride the two-headed horse of poetry: one wants rhythm, the other compression.” This suggests the tension in his writing—the ongoing rhythm is studded with medallions of lightning-quick stories. His collaged images seem familiar, but he arranges them into illogical sequences.

The poem “Spider” suggests the urban myth of a person, perhaps someone like yourself, waking up with a spider in your mouth. It also suggests the Southwestern Indigenous people’s Spider Woman, who spins cosmic stories into realities. Just as this image of the “divine spider” becomes substantial, the poet turns you, or himself, into a marionette puppet tangled in strings pulled by an unseen puppeteer. The narrator is a helpless victim of a divorce, and then a victim of a larger web. The word “marrying” becomes another way of saying “entrapping.” The last part of the poem is a paradox, an unexpected twist. The shadows and dust and spider’s spinning all continue despite personal tragedy. The narrator focuses on the spider’s legs, mouth, and ability to spin silk—and he himself becomes spider-like, the “joyful” singer of this poem.

SPIDER To make a joyful sound, just let the divine spider climb out of your mouth and go about its business tying knots around your life. So you’re a marionette, you still can feel yourself dancing no matter who’s pulling the strings. Even as your divorce decree is signed, the spider goes on marrying you to corners of household dust. Eight legs, a ravenous mouth, and the yen to spin silk in shadows.Who wouldn’t sing?

Education: Don Levering was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. He received a BA in English (Baker University, 1971); studied at the University of Kansas and Lewis and Clark College; and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green University (1978).
Career: Levering’s full-length books of poetry are Outcroppings From Navajoland (Navajo Community College Press 1985), Horsetail (Woodley Memorial Press 2003), and Whose Body (Sunstone Press 2007). He has published poems in five chapbooks and many anthologies and journals. Levering was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in poetry, a finalist for the John Ciardi Prize, and won first place in the Quest for Peace Writing Contest.
________________________________________________________________________________©2009 Denise Low AAPP 39 ©2008 Donald Levering “Spider” in Whose Body (Sunstone Press)

William S. Burroughs Remembered Video

On Aug. 2 the Bourgeois Pig in Lawrence hosted a memorial reading for the 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch's publication. The 1950s legal battle over censorship changed the course of United States publication freedoms. Some of the people who knew Burroughs best were at the Aug. 2 reading, including James Grauerholz and Wayne Propst. Wayne played a loop of his home movies of William; some of his artworks were on display; Susie Ashline and Dalton Howard played; and some commemorative vodka & colas were drunk. Diane W. Pinegar shared her photos, and Wayne Propst and T.F. Pecore Weso consented to some interviews.

I recorded some of this event, and, with the help of Carol Burns of Ironwood Films, made a 22 min. version. There is a clip posted at: http://deniselow.wordpress.com/video-projects/ . Copies of the entire project are available through mammothpubs@hotmail.com or at Quimby's in Chicago; Raven & Oread in Lawrence.

I also recommend Wayne Propst's footage at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il3317LLbwY and Yony Leyser's trailer for "William S. Burroughs: A Man Within"at http://www.burroughsthemovie.com/ . In person, Burroughs was brilliant, in conversation working out ideas with axes going multiple directions. If one were a friend, he had exquisite, sensitive manners. All of our lives are different because of him.

Small Literary Press Mammoth Publications Rolls Out New Titles

My husband Thomas Weso, and I have a small press, Mammoth Publications, which is presenting a number of book events this fall:

1. Aug. 30 Sunday 4 pm Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, poet laureate of Kansas, performs poems and songs from her new book/CD LANDED, with co-lyricist and outstanding musician Kelley Hunt, at the Lawrence Public Library. Dinner on your own afterwards at Local Burger.

2. Sept. 4 We Should Have Come by Water: Poems by Robert Day, a fine press (handset type on fine paper) chapbook with prints by Kathy Jankus (representend by the Strecker-Nelson Gallery in Manhattan), limited edition! Signing party details to be announced). Robert Day received his MFA in poetry, but is better known as a prose writer. This is his first publication of poetry.

3. The White-Skin Deer: Hoopa Stories (signing & reading in Oct.) by Elizabeth Schultz

4. We are reprinting E. Donald Two-Rivers’ 2003 book Powwows, Fat Cats, & Other Indian Tales, late August

5. And we also will be publishing the collection of Ad Astra Poetry Project electronic broadsides, a Kansas poetry anthology with commentary by Denise Low, in cooperation with Washburn’s Center for Kansas Studies.

Advance copies of these books are available through www.mammothpublications.com or in Lawrence: the Raven Bookstore and Oread Bookstore.

Denise Low, former Ks. Poet Laureate

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT # 38: SERINA ALLISON HEARN (1957 - )

Allison Hearn has been an active member of the poetry scene in Northeast Kansas for the last decade. She brings a traveler’s experience to her writing, as she was born in Trinidad and is descended from Portuguese, Italian, African, British, and Chinese families. Besides her original home in Trinidad, she has lived in London, New York, Toronto, Princeton, and, since 1996, Lawrence. Her formal training is in art and design.

Hearn has written intermittently since she was a girl, she told a Lawrence Journal World reporter (2002), and she relates to the Kansas landscape because of its embodiment of time: "Kansas is the floor of an ancient sea." In her writings, she lives amidst sea stones, family stories, and Victorian houses, which she restores for a living. In “Yearly Restoration,” an Ad Astra Poetry Contest winner, she delights in the names of commercial house paints: “Morning Mist,” “Electric-Pink,” “Evocative Sunlight,” and “”Frosted-Hawthorn.” These are her present-day layerings of experience over an 1850s frame house. So she participates in history, as she heals damage to “kicked-in doors.” This renewal becomes its own shade, “Good-As-New.” The narrator suggests the “frat-boy parties” that recently ended and other stories, but this is a lyrical poem about sealing in the present, as though it could last through all years.

YEARLY RESTORATIONI bought a bucket of Morning-Mistand painted the windows open.Electric-Pink that splattered the floorwas patiently scraped with razor and ragsuntil the oak grain shone.Evocative-Sunlight in multiple layershid the bruise marks on the walls.Two emergency blankets of Ivory-Coasttenderly covered, mended, kicked-in-doors.Frosted-Hawthorn soothed in cross stitch brush strokesgraffiti etchings from drunken KU frat-boy parties.The painted Victorian,built by 1850s Lawrence-Kansas pioneersstood, patiently, waiting for its wounds to heal.Next morning I brought a gallonof Good-As-Newand sealed the front porch done.

Education: Allison Hearn was born and raised in Trinidad, where she graduated from high school. She attended St Martin's School of Art, London.
Career: Hearn has published poems in journals such as Coal City Review, I-70 and others. She published Dreaming the Bronze Girl (Mid-America Press 2002), a Kansas City Star Notable Book, and a second book is ready for publication. She has worked as a writer, illustrator, and fashion designer in Trinidad and London. She writes poetry and renovates Victorian houses in Lawrence.
________________________________________________________________________________©2009 Denise Low AAPP 38 ©2009 Serina Allison Hearn “Atlas of My Birth” ©2008 Denise Low, photo

Poetry in July: Not Just an April Kind of Thing

Dear Poetry Friends,
Yes, life continues after one has been a poet laureate. Governor Parkinson was gracious enough this last month to award me a certificate for being poet laureate, and I had my photo taken with him. I also had a chance to stop by the Kansas Center for the book, located in the Capitol building, and visit with Roy Bird, its director.

I also read poetry 12 months a year, not just in April. So here is another great Kansas poet: Victor Contoski. He was one of the first poets on my blog, but I never did a formal broadside of his work.

Congratulations to Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, who can be reached through the Kansas Arts Commission website. And Jonathan Holden’s DVD of shoptalk is available now (through the KAC), with wonderful documentation of him reading and discussing poetry.

Best,
Denise Low

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT # 37: VICTOR CONTOSKI (1936 - )

My first college teacher of poetry was Victor Contoski, a professor at the University of Kansas. He encouraged his students unconditionally; he insisted we purchase copies of literary magazines and imagine ourselves in their pages; and he encouraged us to learn how to write reviews. Contoski also taught his students to read Midwestern writers closely, especially William Stafford, Robert Bly, and Ted Kooser. He was greatly influenced by his Polish wife’s experiences during the war and his own experiences teaching in Poland during the Cold War as a Fulbright scholar. A gallows humor underlies the outlook of survivors, and this humor seeps through Contoski’s works.

Contoski writes haunting, vivid and unsettling poems about rain, stars, frontier history, and myths. “Sunset” occurs during a somber time of day. Its setting, the Western frontier, is a backdrop for Spanish horsemen, nursery rhymes, and western cowboy heroes who die. Finally, the European folklore figure Jack enters into the grasslands landscape, reincarnated as a Wild Man figure, and now as comfortable with a cottonwood tree as a beanstalk. And the final victor is nature itself, the constantly moving sun.

SUNSET

Since long before the white man
rode out onto the prairies
the sun has been going down.
A towering cottonwood sways in the breeze
rocking rocking the cradle in its branches.
The hero’s eyes turn glassy.
His hand waves vaguely
toward something in his breast
as his knees buckle.
The giant coming down the beanstalk
feels it start to sway beneath him.
He looks down and sees Jack
with a silly grin and a hatchet
looming suddenly larger and larger
as the sun over Kansas
goes down and down and out.

Education: Victor Contoski received a BA in Ancient Greek and MA in English (University of Minneapolis); and a PhD in American literature (University of Wisconsin 1969). 1961-1964 he lived in Poland, as a Fulbright professor. As a professor at KU from 1969 to 2009 he won the HOPE award.
Career: Contoski’s books are Astronomers, Madonnas, and Prophesies (Northeast/Juniper Books, 1972); Broken Treaties (New Rivers 1973); Names (New Rivers Press 1979); A Kansas Sequence (Tellus/Cottonwood Review Press 1983); Midwestern Buildings (Cottonwood Press 1997) and Homecoming (New Rivers Press 2000).

Poets Laureate with Kansas Flowers 1 July 2009, photo by artist Lisa Grossman

Kansas Poet Laureate Position Passes to Caryn Mirriam Goldberg July 1 as Rick Mitchell Provides the Sunflower

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #36: DENISE LEA (DOTSON) LOW (1949 - )

As a fifth-generation Kansan, Denise Low writes verse that references the history and environmental concerns of this region. She grew up at the edge of Emporia, where the Flint Hills and town meet. Early experiences were with wildlife, grasslands plants, weather, and home gardens of the area. She learned to plant tomatoes every summer, and nothing store-boughten can compare to their flavor. From William Allen White, William Stafford, and William S. Burroughs, she
learned the variety of Midwestern experiences and the idioms of those literary traditions.

Like Stafford, Low is conscious of time as another dimension, which has its own cycles, more recursive than linear. Transformation, rather than static grief, characterizes this elegy to her mother. A “columbarium” is a cemetery for people who have been cremated. The poem is a study in contrasts: cold and sun; brick and ash; organic and mineral; sky and earth; animate and inanimate; grief and joy. These oppositions constantly shift.

COLUMBARIUM GARDEN


Cold sun brings this mourning season to an end,
one year since my mother’s death. Last winter thaw
my brother shoveled clay-dirt, she called it “gumbo,”
over powdery substance the crematorium sent us,
not her, but fine, lightened granules—all else
rendered into invisible elements. That handful
from the pouch, un-boxed, was tucked into plotted soil,
the churchyard columbarium, under a brass plaque
and brick retaining wall, as semblance of permanence.
Now my mother is a garden—lilies and chrysanthemums
feeding from that slight, dampened, decomposing ash.
Her voice stilled. One ruddy robin in the grass, dipping.

Education: Denise Low earned BA and MA degrees in English (University of Kansas 1971, 1974) and an MFA in Creative Writing from Wichita State University (1984). In 1997 she completed a PhD at the University of Kansas in English.
Career: Low has taught and been an administrator at Haskell Indian Nations University for 25 years. She also has been Visiting Professor at the University of Richmond and KU. She has written and edited more than 20 books of poetry and prose. From 2007-2009 she served as Kansas Poet Laureate. She is on the national board of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs. Her awards include NEH, Lannan, KAC, and Poetry Society of America recognition.
Her websites are www.deniselow.com and http://deniselow.blogspot.com