WILLIALM KLOEFKORN,1932-2011

Bill Kloefkorn was one of the great storytellers of the poets from my home state. He attended Emporia State University for both his BA and MA in English; Emporia is my hometown, and I saw him at several events. I listened spellbound as he told stories and kept the audience of English teachers and librarians laughing. He was a great entertainer. Most of his career was in Nebraska, but the humor is about the same north of the border.He was a solid guy, generous, and fun. Born in 1932, he had one foot in the 19^th century and another in the 21^st. His writing memorializes the rural life, which is changing as city folk buy country houses for retreats and as family farms are sold to corporations. He references values connected to natural laws, and he critiques the pettiness of human frailties in the face of the larger truths, as in this 2004 poem, where he still remembers the awe of his father’s authority: 

I Stand Alone at the Foot 

I Stand alone at the foot

Of my father’s grave
Trembling to tell:
The door to the granary is open,
Sir,
And someone lost the bucket
To the well.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Here are some links:

http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2007/11/william-c-kloefkorn-1932.html

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/50ec1ca074094d259a6537640d133715/NE--Obit-Nebraska-Poet/

An April 9, 2011 feature in the Lincoln paper
http://journalstar.com/entertainment/arts-and-culture/books/article_c6444e65-1a16-5a76-88d8-6e3e67dbed61.html
A school was just named for him: http://www.nebrwesleyan.edu/press-and-media/news/16316  
Some poems:
http://rinabeana.com/poemoftheday/index.php/category/william-kloefkorn/  
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2009/11/18

Marilyn L. Taylor reads from state poet laureates anthology for Milwaukee Public Radio

Hear 2009-2010 Wisconsin Poet Laureate read from the anthology An Endless Skyway (Ice Cube Press 2011) and her own work at this site. Marily's website is : http://www.mlt-poet.com . Her book of poetry is GOING WRONG: Poems (Parallel Press, 2009) available at www.Amazon.com An Endless Skyway is available at www.icecubepress.com, and Ted Kooser, former US poet laureate, says this: “Each poet adds a unique style to the anthology and a unique slant on what it means to write … this book is made for everyone to roam and ramble within. Open these pages and enjoy the journey.” An Endless Skyway: Poetry from the State Poets Laureate is an exciting anthology that brings together the poetry of thirty-eight State Poets Laureate from across the United States. It is a collection that explores the poetry of places, but at the same time offers a glimpse into the poetry of our whole land. Edited by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Marilyn L. Taylor, Walter Bargen, and Denise Low. Thanks to Steve Sempken, indepdendent publisher of Ice Cube Press! Thanks to photographer Jerry Sipe.
http://www.wuwm.com/programs/lake_effect/le_sgmt.php?segmentid=7492

National Book Critics Circle link for calendar

Chicago begins its Publishers Row book events next week, then June 8 see the Future of the Book NBCC panel in Kansas City--Johnson County Resource Library. June 22 is another NBCC panel at NYU bookstore: With: Literary agents Julie Just & Betsy Lerner; O Magazine book editor Sara Nelson; Brooklyn Rail editor John Reed ; NY Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus; author David Goodwillie & Scribner’s editor Paul Whitlach. Moderated by Susan Shapiro.  http://bookcritics.org/calendar/

National Book Critics Circle Event in KC June 8, 7 pm

Join 4 members of the NBCC for a lively discussion of the future of the book in American Culture. by 2020, will the printed version still be going strong? Or will it have largely succumbed to electronic texts, audiobook downloads, and videos downloads? The event takes place at the Johnson County Central Resource Library 9875 West 87th Street
Overland Park, KS 66212.

Panelists include Denise Low, Mark Luce and Steve Weinberg, with moderator John Mark Eberhart. For information contact John Mark Eberhart at 913-826-4408

Kathryn Kysar, St. Paul poet, will read at Big Tent, Lawrence 7pm May 19

Kathryn Kysar will be reading in Kansas this week--Thurs. May 19, 7 pm the Raven Bookstore, 7th & Mass. in Lawrence, and Fri. May 20, 7 pm at the East Douglas Watermark Bookstore in Wichita. Her new book Pretend the World is from Holy Cow!Press in Minnesota. For more information, contact Jim Perlman
http://www.holycowpress.org/ Kysar's work augments reality with plausible voices from the intangible world. The interplay between real and unreal creates the tension, as in this poem from before incarnation:
Dream Poem



Mother, Father,
I have everything at bedtime:
a net of flowers,
a clock, a full little belly,
bed clothes made of candy wrappers,
petal wet darkness.
I am sleeping in the spirit gardens,
in these waters, quick and hot.
Will you wake me?

Wm. J. Harris publishes Domande Personali/Personal Questions

Leconte Editions has published an Italian bilingual edition of Billy Joe Harris's chapbook of poetry, translated by Nicola Manuppelli. The poems, as I read them in English, are koans--brief mind twisters that stay with me for days. The poet creates knife-sharp images with no extraneous verbage. The poem "No Delicate Flowers or Wild Geese" goes like this:
Our parting was not
Like a Chinese poem.
There were no
Delicate flowers or wild geese.
No chestnut horses.
No brush painted mountains.
No grace.

This shows the homage to Asian forms as well as the adaptation to American experience. With minimal words, Harris evokes the genres of early Chinese poetry-and-painting. He also evokes the contrast between the real and the ideal. The carefully chosen emblems of flowers, geese, and "chestnut horses" suggests the range of romantic passions--the sweetness as well as vigor. The last line is the oblique reversal--also a negation, but also a generalization about human qualities that carries with it the connotation of insult: "No grace." This is a lover having the last word. This is a definitive negation of the lovers' previous joys. 
  The entire book is without inhibition. He writes of bestiality, racism, poignant romance, procrastination. He covers a lot of ground in nine brief poems. The title poem is oblique and ironic and smart. Personal questions --and sometimes questions can be but thinly veiled aggressions--are answered here by the poet with his own edge. This sampling of poems whets my appetite for more. A new-and-collected poems volume is in the works. For a video of Harris's poem "Practical Concerns," see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBhBVO-f_G4. the book is available at the Raven Bookstore, 7th and Mass., Lawrence KS 66044. Harris teaches English and creative writing at the University of Kansas. he has published Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (Ithaca House 1974), In My Own Dark Way (Ithaca House 1977) and The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (University of Missouri Press 1985).
    
 

Jonathan Holden reads at Dusty Bookshelf, Manhattan 7:30 April 14

Don't miss Jonathan Holden reading from his new book Thurs. April 14. Dusty Bookshelf is at 700 N Manhattan Ave Manhattan, KS 66502. Phone is 785.539.2839 manhattan@thedustybookshelf.com for questions. He will read from a new book of poems, Glamour, from Mammoth Publications, 82 pp., $12.00. http://www.mammothpublications.com/
“Jonathan Holden is one of our most intelligent poets…. It is not always easy to be both brilliant and generous of spirit. It is our good fortune that Holden wears his learning lightly and with such unaffected grace and charm.”—Ted Kooser

Louis Copt Speech supporting Ks. Arts Commission, under attack by Gov. Brownback, who wants to privatize it under handpicked board of trustees. Copt says: "Arts funding did not create the budget crisis" "Now is the time to increase arts funding" (remember the WPA anyone?) and more

MAMMOTH PUBLICATIONS presents GLAMOUR: POEMS by Jonathan Holden

Mammoth has just released advance copies of Glamour: Poems, a new book of poetry by Kansas State professor and poet extraordinaire Jonathan Holden. He overlays arts, photography, math, and the human life cycle. His poem "Ur-Calculus" begins:

Back then, "Calculus"
was a scary college word,
and yet we studied it
from the back seat, we studied
the rates at which
the roadside trees went striding
past the hazy
farther trees, the hazier
a tree the farther off
it stood.
The ghostliest,
far across the fields,
hardly moved at all. A line
of spectators, they'd turn
as if to watch
us pass
before fog erased them.

This resonates with H.L. Hix's philosophical etudes in verse--a conjunction of disciplines.
Jonathan Holden’s poetry travels as far as words can go. He arcs backward to the Roman verse tradition in his poem “Ars Poetica,” which recalls Ovid, and he anticipates the future in “Fahrenheit 451.” He comments on the pastoral in “Cirrus,” and he examines contemporary culture in poems about artists Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. Mathematics is another of Holden’s fluencies. He uses this meta-language in poems about his physicist father. Like many poets, Holden celebrates youth and observes the decline of age, and he celebrates love. In sum, he maps the possible range of human consciousness.
We need Holden’s wisdom. His voice is kindly and, as Ted Kooser once noted, “unaffected.” He describes in his memoirs how he grew up in a household of geniuses—his father, a research physicist for Bell Telephone labs, entertained Nobel Prize winners often; his twin brother is a long-time film and music critic for the New York Times. Holden has written how he learned to recognize brilliant people, but further, this book shows how he himself is a genius poet.
Ultimately, Holden teaches us how to live richly. In “Hunting for Morels” he concludes:

Then the earth offers itself
to us anyway, all
its tender thumbs, the other
half of our words,
and we take whatever we see.

This superb wordsmith also understands how language names the cosmos inexactly, with slippage between discrete experiences and more generalized labels of words. He seizes the opportunity to not only articulate experience, but also, in that interstitial space, to glamourize—grief, love, history, and beauty.
Holden is an omnivore, capturing in his nets all the variegated experience of the 21st century. To his credit, he is not a cynic. He illustrates how moments of grace and sin exist simultaneously in an equation, not canceling each other out. In accepting oppositions and contradictions, Holden advocates a calculated optimism.

Glamour is available through mammothpubs@hotmail.com, Amazon or Barnes & Noble, Ingrams, and Kindle version is nearing completion. It is available at Watermark Books in Wichita and Strecker-Nelson Gallery in Manhattan--for now. Cover illustration by Thomas Weso of Mammoth Publications-- http://www.tomweso.com/ and more on Holden at http://www.jonathanholden.com/
Denise Low

Review of Things Come On: An Amneoir by Joseph Harrington

Things Come On: An Amneoir by Joe Harrington is one of an emerging group of creative works that maps the interplay between media and human consciousness. Sherman Alexie’s short story “Any Little Hurricane” is an example of a story told by a young boy about an out-of-control party that resembles hurricane formation on the weather channel. Reality and TV images of a category-four storm mix into one narrative. Similarly, Harrington recounts the story of his mother’s battle with breast cancer in the context of the Watergate Scandal, which was the news event at the time of his mother’s death. His mother died the day Nixon resigned. He combines the words “amnesia” and “memoir” to create his subtitle “An Amneoir.” This suggests the slippage of electronic and remembered realities.

     Harrington creates various strands of images and narratives that continue through the story in a way that reignites the experience of a boy’s loss of his mother. To read this book is to become engaged. Another way to understand the book is to see it as a graphic novel that has broken out of the linear-cell comic book/graphic novel format. “Mixed media” is not a term that specifically can describe the cloud of photographs, typeface variants, medical records, interviews, TV transcripts, diagrams, scanned letters, newspaper clippings, graphs, and more. Yet Harrington maintains control, so the movement from diagnosis to loss is gripping.
     The book guides the reader into a consciousness where distance is impossible. Watergate language of cover-up blends with medical language of cover-up. The half-truths told to patients by doctors of the mid-20th century overlap those told by the government under Nixon. The implication is these half-truths continue to be told. Public language interacts with the very core of human identity—language—and implications are as profound as those in Aristotle’s Athens.
     This is not a grim book. It is exploratory: tentative and sure at the same time, suggestive and definitive. It is, in short, fine poetry of a new cast order. Here is a sequence that illustrates the intermixing of personal and public realities in the mind of the young narrator. The two quotations are from Watergate testimony of Sam Ervin (first) and Gordon Liddy’s secretary Sally J. Harmony (second).

Scandal

Q: So you would have been ten, when your mother was diagnosed? What did you know and when did you know it?
   “. . . whisked away under cover of darkness and forced to submit to an ordeal cloaked in secrecy . . .”
(mugging squads, kidnapping teams, prostitutes, electronic surveillance, intercepted aircraft communications, espionage, shredding)
   “I did know absolutely nothing”

Harrington also authored Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, which examines poetry in newspapers and other public exchanges. (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2002) and poetry chapbook Earth Day Suite (Chicago: Beard of Bees Press, 2010). Poems are published in Hotel Amerika, Otoliths, Fact-Simile, and Tarpaulin Sky, among others. He is a Pushcart Prize Nominee (2011), Hall Center for the Humanities Fellow (2010 and 2000), and Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands (2005). -