CARAZA, GLANCY, AND GOLDBERG featured at the Mammoth 2015 AWP Reading April 11, Book Fair Stage 1, 10:30 a.m.

Save the date! Thanks to Mammoth Publications authors XANATH CARAZA, DIANE GLANCY AND CARYN MIRRIAM-GOLDBERG. They will be featured at Mammoth’s AWP 2015 reading, Minneapolis Conference! April 11, Saturday, in Minneapolis, 10:30 a.m. We will have a great reading from Mammoth authors Xanath Caraza, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, and Diane Glancy, including the new book Syllables of Wind / Silabas de viento by Xanath Caraza. This is the largest literary book fair in North America. A one-day pass for all Sat. programming is $40, a bargain. See AWP 2015 on FB for details https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/overview

Cheryl Olsen of WE WANTED TO BE WRITERS presents comments and excerpts from Denise Low's MELANGE BLOCK

Excerpt from MELANGE BLOCK by Denise Low on We Wanted To Be Writers Blog --Three poems are "Lost," "Parallax," "Sedimentation: Alligator Juniper." Thank you to WeWanted2BeWriters--and check out all the resources on their website for writers and lovers of writing. And I continue to be grateful for Red Mountain Press (please purchase from them directly if you can, no middleman deduction) and Susan Gardner and Devon Ross, RMP co-publishers.

Jonathan Mayhew Wheelbarrow Poem

Wheelbarrow

 

20,000 wheelbarrows would fit inside your poem

20,000 red wheelbarrows, blue wheelbarrows, green wheelbarrows

 

But would your poem fit in a wheelbarrow?

How many of them would fit inside one green wheelbarrow? 

 

This is a parody of The William Carlos Williams (1883-19630) "The Red Wheelbarrow" poem--see it at http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/red-wheelbarrow  "Wheelbarrow" was written on the occasion of the book launch of Melange Block by Denise Low at the Raven Bookstore, June 26, 2014.

Jonathan Mayhew, PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford in 1988, has taught at the University of Kansas since 1996. He is the author of: Claudio Rodríguez and the Language of Poetic Vision (Bucknell, 1990), The Poetics of Self-Consciousness: Twentieth Century Spanish Poetry (Bucknell, 1994), Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch, (Chicago, 2009), and The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980-2000 (Liverpool, 2009). His blog Bemsha Swing comments upon the poetry scene. Mayhew is currently working on a book with the title What Lorca Knew: Fragments of a Late Modernity, and a volume of original poetry, Mayhew’s Mood.

SOUTHERN POET CHARLES WRIGHT IS THE NEW U.S. POET LAUREATE

Photo by Holly Wright

Charles Wright's poetry collections include Country Music, Black Zodiac, Chickamauga, Bye-and-Bye: Selected Later Poems, Sestets, and Caribou. His prizes include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennesee in 1935, he currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.Highly respected poet Charles Wright is a poet's poet. He attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, was inspired by Ezra Pound and Dante, and has a solid reputation. He is from Tennessee originally, and taught at the University of Virginia until retirement. Craig Morgan Teicher describes the use of time in Wrights work for NPR:
"Time in his poems seems to speed up and slow down alternately, to expand and contract, wavelike. The line dividing the personal from the public is as thin and permeable as the one that divides the present from the past, as in these lines from "Poem Almost Wholly in My Own Manner" from 1997's Black Zodiac:

In Moorhead, Mississippi,
         my mother sheltered her life out
In Leland, a few miles down US 82,
             unfretted and unaware,
Layered between history and a three-line lament
About to be brought forth
          on the wrong side of the tracks
All over the state and the Deep South.
We all know what happened next,
              blues and jazz and rhythm-and-blues
Then rock-and-roll, then sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll, lick by lick
Blowing the lanterns out—and everything else—along the levees ..."

See more at http://www.npr.org/2014/06/13/321586882/charles-wright-the-contemplative-poet-laureate


Late Selected Poems by Charles Wright

The New York Times reports how James Billington, the librarian of Congress, selected Wright:

"... as he read through the work of a dozen or so finalists, he kept coming back to Mr. Wright’s haunting poems, many of them gathered in a Dante-esque cycle of three trilogies known informally as “The Appalachian Book of the Dead.” His “combination of literary elegance and genuine humility — it’s just the rare alchemy of a great poet,” Dr. Billington said." The poet started out by reading Faulkner, not poets: "In high school, he devoured all the books of William Faulkner —  his mother had once dated one of Faulkner’s brothers — and as a student at Davidson College in North Carolina, he tried to write fiction, only to discover that he was, as he later put it, the rare Southerner who couldn’t tell a story." Wright could, however, write a poem. See more at

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/books/charles-wright-named-americas-poet-laureate.html?ref=arts&utm_source=Week+of+June+23%3A+Members+in+the+News&utm_campaign=June+16%2F23%2C+2014%3A+Critical+Notes+Roundup&utm_medium=email&_r=0

 

The Poetry Editor and Poetry: Poetry Review: Mélange Block by Denise Low

The Poetry Editor and Poetry: Poetry Review: Mélange Block by Denise Low: Published by Red Mountain Press, the new poetry book Mélange Block introduced me to the work of poet Denise Low, whose 20 books of award-w...

Donald Levering Considers What the Wealthy Subtract from Earth's Balance

Donald Levering leads an examined life. He considers all networks among beings, economies, languages, genders. By accident of birth, he grew up in one of the wealthiest countries, although not from wealth. He writes from an informed viewpoint, and his voice is essential. He does not dodge the tough questions.

In Levering's work, we enter the lives of desperate exiles, including war victims. His "War Taxes" begins
"We are herded into the junior high school gym,
ordered to roll up our sleeves
to donate blood to the giant
who is leaking oil...."
Levering understands that all of us suffer together, not separated by geography or circumstance. He can laugh, as he describes the flight of the man who leads whooping cranes along a "lost migration route." The reduced condition of the few dozen remaining whooping cranes, however, is not forgotten. Always, his writing is vivid, unforgettable. I've been reading his work since the 1980s. He keeps getting sharper, more focused. This is a great book with a huge lens. You will see more clearly after reading it. Order his book from Red Mountain Press to provide the most profit for the independent press Red Mountain.

Donald Levering Biography: Born in Kansas City, Donald Warren Levering was educated at Baker University (B. A.), The University of Kansas, Lewis and Clark College, and Bowling Green State University. At Bowling Green, he was a Devine Memorial Fellow in Poetry before receiving a M. F. A. in Creative Writing. He has worked as a groundskeeper in Oregon, teacher in the Diné (Navajo) Nation, and human services administrator in New Mexico. He was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in poetry, winner of the Quest for Peace Writing Contest in rhetoric, and an Academy of American Poets Featured Poet in the Online Forum.  In 2012, he was a prizewinner in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition and took third place in the Hackney Award, as well as placing as a finalist for the Jane Kenyon Award. A species conservation volunteer and human rights activist, he is the father of a son and daughter and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with the artist Jane Shoenfeld.Donald's most recent collections are The Number of Names, Sunstone Press (2012) and Sweeping the Skylight, Finishing Line Press (2012) and Algonquins Planted Salmon, Red Mountain Press (2012). His latest book is The Water Leveling With Us, Red Mountain Press (2014). For more perspectives on his new book, see reviews at these links.  

http://vacpoetry.org/journal/the-water-leveling-with-us/ 

http://www.sundresspublications.com/stirring/archives/v16/e2/levering.htm

© 2014. All posts copyright Denise Low. Excerpts of 50 words or fewer may be excerpted if accompanied with the link back to the original post on Denise Low Postings.

 
 

 

MAMMOTH PUBLICATIONS REPORTS ITS NEWS: New Books, Reading Success, Author News

MAMMOTH WRITING NEWS, MAY, 2014

* NEW WEBSITE: www.mammothpublicatoins.net Mammoth was due for an update, and the new site has better navigation and organization. Please visit and comment. 

*MAMMOTH PUBLICATIONS on FACEBOOK. Please type our name into your Facebook search bar, and hit “Like.” Then you will get regular updates through Facebook.

*MAMMOTH READING APRIL 29, 2014, KU STUDENT UNION Jayhawk Ink Bookstore at KU was the site of a Mammoth author reunion and reading. Denise Low opened the event and described how E. Donald Two-Rivers’s book Powwow, Fatcats, and Other Indian Tales was the first Mammoth book in 2003. This was in association with Woodley Memorial Press, where Low was a board member at the time. Then Mammoth became independent, and LANGSTON HUGHES IN LAWRENCE, co-authored by Low and Tom Weso, was the next project. Tom Weso read from the Langston Hughes book and also his new food memoir.
 Barry Barnes, author of WE SLEEP IN A BURNING HOUSE, recited poems from his book and announced his participation in the International Cajun and Zydeco Festival in the Netherlands, the next day, with the Ernest James Zydeco Band. His photos on Facebook are amazing. Elizabeth Schultz read from WHITE-SKIN DEER: HOOPA STORIES, based on 1950s stories told to her by Hoopa elders.
Stephen Meats arrived from Pittsburg State University and read from DARK DOVE DESCENDING, his 2013 poetry and fiction book. Mammoth has just reissued a new edition of his book LOOKING FOR THE PALE EAGLE.

Global Green proprietors Julie Unruh and Oliver Hall showed their books, VEGETABLE GARDEN and GETTYSBURG ADDRESS, respectively, and read from them. Global Green is one of several groups that Mammoth cooperates with by counsel and other publication support. Thanks to them for a generous donation.

 Xánath Caraza finished the event with readings from her first book, CONJURO. Caraza’s awards include Number one Author of the 2013 Top Ten “New” Latino Authors to Watch (and Read) by LatinoStories.com. The International Latino Book Awards 2013 recognized CONJURO for Second Place: Best First Book Written in Spanish; Award Winning Finalist, Multicultural Fiction; and Honorable mention, Best First Book Written in Spanish, Mariposa Award. She has published two more books, What the Tide Brings In (Mouthfeel Press) and Noche de Colibríes: Ekphrastic Poems (2014) if from Pandora Lobo Estepario Press. Mammoth will publish another book of poetry in 2015. Mammoth is honored to be her first book publisher. Lisa Eitner of Jayhawk Ink facilitated the project and provided publicity. This is the second event for Mammoth sponsored by the KU bookstore, and we appreciate the support.

*MAMMOTH ASSOCIATE’S PROGRAM Mammoth has been able to advise several community groups and individuals involved with publishing. Mammoth associates include Global Green Publications, Parcel literary journal, A Kansas Bestiary and its authors, and more.  Look for “Published in association with Mammoth Publications” for this cooperative venture. Congratulations to Global Green Productions for their books VEGETABLE GARDEN, GETTYSBURG ADDRESS, and MLK. JR., MEMORIAL, words by Martin Luther King, Sculpture by Lei Yixin, and Photography by Oliver Hall. The book has been nominated for a Coretta Scott King Book Award. Global Green presented Mammoth Publications with the first copy of the book. We sincerely thank them.
MAMMOTH ANGELS APPEAR! If you have ever wondered what wooly mammoth angels looks like, they are not giant pachyderms with large wings. They are more subtle and appear in human form to us mortals. Two such angels have asked for our catalogue list and then bought every single book. That income has helped us pay for the next book set-up costs. We are not a non-profit, which helps us keep our independence. We appreciate the support of angels and all ordinary folk who buy our books, review them on media, give us encouragement, and otherwise act as angels.
NEW MAMMOTH BOOKS  Robert Day’s TALK TO STRANGERS AND STOP ON BY: Essays on William Stafford and Other Folk of the American High Plains, with an Introduction by Scott Bontz, was published just in time for the Washburn University William Stafford conference, March 30, 2014. Thank you to The Land Institute for a grant to help fund this publication. http://mammothpublications.net/writers-a-to-l/robert-p-day-we-should-have-come-by-water/
Stephen Meats has updated his 1994 collection of poetry LOOKING FOR THE PALE EAGLE and added interviews, revision notes, and a “Letter to a Young Poet.” http://mammothpublications.net/writers-m-to-z/meats-stephen-prose-and-poetry/
Caleb Puckett is the newest Mammoth author, and I hope to meet him one day soon! His FATE LINES / DESIRE LINES is poetry moving among histories and digital media. His experimental poetry satisfies the mind and makes emotional connections. http://mammothpublications.net/writers-m-to-z/puckett-caleb-fate-lines-desire-lines/
NEWS FROM MAMMOTH AUTHORS   Elizabeth Schultz has a new book of poetry, The SAUNTERING EYE, from FutureCycle Press. Join her and Mammoth friends when she reads from it at the Raven Bookstore May 22, Thursday, 7 pm.  Denise Low has a new book of poetry, her first since the award-winning Ghost Stories of the New West (Woodley 2010). MÉLANGE BLOCK (Red Mountain Press), blends Low’s ancestries with history and landscape to create aggregate-like poems. http://redmountainpress.us/melange-block-by-denise-low/ Readings are Santa Fe, June 15, 2:30 pm, op cit bookstore; June 25, Lawrence, Raven bookstore, 7 pm.  Xánath Caraza started a new international poetry project called “US Latino Poets en español.” This online poetry column is published monthly and is a collaboration between the Smithsonian Latino Virtual Museum and Periódico de Poesía. She will be traveling summer 2014 and presenting readings in Spain, Portugal, and El Salvador.  Stephen Meats is working with another Mammoth author, William Sheldon, in preparing a book of interviews with Kansas writers. Mammoth will publish the book in 2015.  Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is working on three forthcoming books: Poem on the Range: A Poet Laureate's Love Song to Kansas (Coal City Press), Caryn's memoir about the political and geographic journey of her poet laureate years, will be out this summer; Chasing Weather: Tornadoes, Tempests, and Thunderous Skies in Word and Image (Ice Cube Press), her collaboration with weather photographer and storm chaser Stephen Locke, is being released in September; and Transformative Language Arts in Action, the anthology she's co-editing with Ruth Farmer, will be out toward the end of 2014.  Lana Wirt Myers reports she is retiring from her job with the Harvey County Historical Society spring of 2014. She has plans for another book. Her Mammoth book PRAIRIE RHYTHMS: THE LIFE AND POETRY OF MAY WILLIAMS WARD received a Kansas Notable Book recognition from the state library and Kansas Center for the book. 

MAMMOTH AUTHORS AND ALLIES, PLEASE LET US KNOW YOUR NEWS, AND WE’LL POST IT IN OUR NEXT NEWSLETTER.

 

Israel Wasserstein writes "How It Is for Eyeless Things in Caves" and more in prize-winning book.

Israel Wasserstein of Washburn University will read from his book This Ecstasy They Call Damnation and new works April 24, Thurs., at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, 7 p.m., with Joseph Harrington. He is a life-long Kansan, and that mythos/landscape enters his work in diction as well as topics. In an interview with Miranda Ericsson, he says, “I think open landscape, and wide spaces under a sky that seems to go on forever, are always there in my poetry, even poems that don’t have anything directly to do with landscape.” In this poem, he seeks the inverse of sky, deep cave topography. Rather than sight, touch becomes the primary touch. For a sky person, this is a phantasmagoria

How It Is for Eyeless Things in Caves

Maybe they wander in, foraging deep down
for food or seeking shelter, and they get lost far
beneath the surface. Or they decide
they like it in the dampness
of the earth, where predators venture
rarely, and sunlight does not scorch
them.
        Slowly they forget
the things they saw above, the harsh light
receding into memory,
into carefully forgotten dreams.
Then they lose sight itself
and creep along, cold as stone.
Their children are born
        knowing nothing else.

Wasserstein says of his new work, in his interview for Ericsson and the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library: “A lot of what I have is more explicitly autobiographical than much of what I’ve done previously. And there are a series of poems in the voices of villains, especially horror movie villains. I’ve long loved persona poems, and I’m engaged with pop culture and interested in marginalized voices, and I think these poems allow me to explore all of that at once.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Israel Wasserstein received his BA in English from Washburn University, and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. He is currently a Lecturer in English at Washburn University. . His work has been published in Flint Hills Review, Red Mesa Review, Border, seveneightfive, Senses, Fickle Muses, Inscape, and others. He has also contributed work to the anthologies Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems, A Face to Meet the Faces, and Earthships. His poetry collection, This Ecstasy They Call Damnation, was published in 2012 and received a Kansas Notable Book Award.

MAMMOTH PUBLICATIONS READING 29 APRIL, TUES., 5:30 pm, K.U. Student Union

Join Mammoth authors and publishers for a celebration of Mammoth’s 10^th anniversary with readings by Xánath Caraza and Global Green partners Julie Unruh and Oliver Hall. Denise Low and Tom Weso, co-publishers of Mammoth and K.U. graduates, will read from Mammoth books. Refreshments will complete this end-of-the-workday event.  Other Mammoth authors will be introduced, including Stephen Meats.

Stanley Lombardo Translates Vergil's Tenth Eclogue: "Love Conquers All"

Stanley Lombardo retires from the University of Kansas in May. Last month, Valentine's Day to be exact, he presented part of Vergil's tenth Eclogue as part of the celebration of his time at KU, since 1976. This is the complete Eclogue X, reprinted with his permission.

 

Vergil, Tenth Eclogue

One final effort: grant me, Arethusa.

one last poem for Gallus, something that
his Lycoris can read too, a few lines,
Goddess, and may your water stay sweet,
pure in the brine all the way to Sicily.

             We can start now—

our lyrics the love that twists Gallus’ guts—
while the goats crop saplings off at the root,
            a song that is heard:

 the woods will echo our every word.

 

                        Where were you, Naiads,

phantom swimmers in the rock pools,
when Gallus lay dying of love? Not on any
of the holy mountains, dancing on no ridge,
chanting no dirge.
Yet the laurels wept, the tamarisks.
Whole pine forests in Arcadia, Wolf Mountain’s
cold rocks shed tears for Gallus, lying
at a cliff’s foot, circled by sheep—there is no shame

in this, it is a noble tradition for poets,

even golden Adonis once tended sheep.
 
The cowboys came, and the swineherd, dragging,
soaked with winter acorn mash, puzzling it out:

 “What is this love, Gallus?”

                                                 Apollo came:
 
“Insanity. Your precious Lycoris is tramping
after somebody else up north in some army camp.”
 
The Forest God came, wearing a wildflower crown,
shaking huge calla lilies.
                                        Great Pan came,
Arcadia’s God stained blood-red with elderberry juice—
we saw him ourselves in broad daylight.
 

“Won’t you ever stop? Love doesn’t care about this,

Love never has his fill of tears, any more than grass
ever has enough water, bees clover, never enough
leaf-buds for goats, never enough.”
                                                             And Gallus:
 
“But you Arcadians will sing—only you
Arcadians really know how to sing—and my bones
will vibrate in tune with your mountains,
a reed-flute marking the notes, my loves.
If I could have been one of you, a shepherd,
a vine-pruner, had Leaf as a love, a passion
for Amyntas—so Amyntas is dark, violets
are black too, and hyacinths—resting
in the willows. Leaf plaiting, singing Amyntas…
 

Lycoris!  There are cold springs here,

soft meadows, woods,
we could spend eternity here together.
Instead, War,
insane Love traps me behind enemy lines,
and you, I don’t want to believe it,
far from home, facing Rhine winters, Alpine snows

 Don’t let the cold hurt you, your soft feet on the ice!

 
I’ll go,
         retune my fancy poems to an oatstraw flute
                        modulate them to Sicilian song
off to the woods
                 caves, wild animals, suffer that,
carve my love on tender trees
       and as the trees grow my love will grow.
traverse Maenalus with the forest-spirit women
            hunt wild boars
set the hounds on in any kind of cold
in virgin forests
            I can see myself now, shooting
Cretan arrows from a Parthian bow  
                                                echoing woods…

 Who am I kidding?  As if there were some cure

for this madness, as if human ills
                               could teach that God mercy.

Forget the wood-nymphs, forget poetry too,

woods dissolve, our suffering can’t change Him,
not even if we crouched all winter through storms,
drank ice-slush from the Hebrus, herded flocks
in Ethiopia, the sun high in Cancer,
bark parched on high elms, dying in heat

 Love conquers all, we too should yield to Love.”

 
That will be enough, Goddesses,
        for your poet to have sung
as he sits weaving a small basket
out of slender hibiscus.
                                     Pierians,
make it count with Gallus,
Gallus, whose love grows in me hourly,
like an alder shooting up green in early spring.

 We can end now.

            Shade is bad for the voice
shade’s bad for the juniper,
      shade hurts the crops.

 Go home, little goats, you’re stuffed

and the Evening Star is out.
                                             Go, little goats.

 

©2014 Stanley Lombardo, translation

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stanley Lombardo retires in May, 2014, from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, where he is Professor of Classics. His translations include Homer’s Iliad (recipient of the Byron Caldwell Book Award) and Odyssey, Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogeny (recipient of a National Translation Center Award), and Poems and Fragments of Sappho. He is known for performance as well as translation and has given dramatic readings from his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey on campuses throughout the United States, at the Smithsonian Institution and the Chicago Poetry Center, and on National Public Radio and C-SPAN. Recordings of the Iliad and Odyssey are available from Parmenides Publishing. He is also a Zen Master, and the guiding teacher of Zen Centers in Arkansas and Indiana. He is editor and co-editor of three of Zen Master Seung Sahn’s books (Bone of Space, Only Don't Know, and Ten Gates).