Archive for March, 2011

Keats letter fetches $153K

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

An 1820 love letter from John Keats to Fanny Brawne went for  £96,000 (about $153,000) at an auction in London this week. In the letter, Keats refers to himself as a “poor prisoner” because his battle with tuberculosis has prevented him from being able to consummate the relationship. He died of the disease in February 1821.

The City of London Corporation, with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, bought the letter and plans to display it at Keats House, the Regency villa in Hampstead where Keats lived from 1818-1820. “Ode to a Nightingale” was written in the garden at this home, according to the BBC.

In the letter, Keats tells Fanny Brawne, “I shall Kiss your name and mine where your Lips have been – Lips! why should a poor prisoner as I am talk about such things.”

Here is a picture of the letter:

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Tonight: NBCC to salute small presses

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

The National Book Critics Circle will celebrate Small Press Month at the NYU Bookstore with a panel discussion moderated by Library Journal’s Barbara Hoffert at 6:00 p.m. tonight. The bookstore is located at 726 Broadway. The public may call (212) 998-4667 for additional information.

Moderated by NBCC board member Barbara Hoffert, Editor of Library
Journal’s “Prepub Alert” feature, the panel will discuss the unique
challenges that face the critics who review small-press books. Joining Ms.
Hoffert will be John Reed, NBCC board member and Book Review Editor of The
Brooklyn Rail, plus freelance critics, small-press supporters, and NBCC
members Tim W. Brown, John Madera, and John Deming.

One important issue the panel will confront is the declining number of
newspaper and magazine pages devoted to reviewing books generally and
small-press books in particular. Helping to fill this void is the
burgeoning number of online review outlets, as well as intellectual and
academic journals, both new and old, that are striving to keep the
small-press tradition alive. The panelists are critics, essayists,
editors, novelists, and poets who are dedicated to preserving the small
press and to keeping the critical conversation going among writers,
critics, and readers.

Small Press Month is a nationwide celebration highlighting the valuable
work produced by independent publishers. Held annually in March, Small
Press Month raises awareness about the need for broader venues of literary
expression, showcasing some of the most diverse, exciting, and significant
voices being published today.

PARTICIPANTS
Barbara Hoffert (moderator) is Editor of Library Journal’s popular “Prepub
Alert” feature, which previews major book releases four months in advance
of publication. She was president of the National Book Critics Circle for
three years, having been a board member for six years, and she was chair
of the Materials Selection Committee of the RUSA (Reference and User
Services Association) division of the American Library Association. In
2006, she won ALA-RUSA’s Louis Shores’ Greenwood Publishing Group award
for excellence in reviewing.

John Reed has seen his work published in Art in America, Open City,
Artnet, Artforum, Paper Magazine, New York Press, Time Out New York, BOMB
Magazine, Playboy, and elsewhere. He’s the author of the novels A Still
Small Voice (Delacorte), The Whole (MTV/Simon & Schuster), Snowball’s
Chance (Roof), All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare
(Penguin/Plume), and the recent Tales of Woe (MTV Press). A member of the
NBCC board, he is an Associate Creative Writing Professor at New School
University and the Book Review Editor of The Brooklyn Rail.

Tim W. Brown is the author of four novels, Deconstruction Acres, Left of
the Loop, Walking Man, and Second Acts (which won the 2010 London Book
Festival Award for General Fiction). His reviews have appeared in Rain
Taxi Review of Books, Small Press Review, The Bloomsbury Review, American
Book Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and numerous other journals. From
2004-2009, he served on the board of the Small Press Center, and he is a
member of the National Book Critics Circle, specializing in reviewing
small-press publications. He earns his living as a writer at Bloomberg
LP.

John Madera edits the blog Big Other, a forum on contemporary writing and
culture, and the journal The Chapbook Review. A member of the National
Book Critics Circle, he is published widely in print and online, most
recently in The Brooklyn Rail, The Collagist, The Believer, Opium
Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and The Prairie Journal: A Magazine
of Canadian Literature, and forthcoming in The Review of Contemporary
Fiction. He is editing a collection of essays on the craft of writing.

John Deming is Editor in Chief of Coldfront Magazine, which covers
contemporary poetry and lyricism. He is a member of the National Book
Critics Circle, and his own poems and reviews have appeared in Boston
Review, Verse Daily, The Best American Poetry blog, POOL, American Poetry
Journal and elsewhere. Since its inception in 2006, Coldfront has made a
special effort to cover work published by small presses and has published
reviews of more than 400 small-press books.

–from Press Release

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VIDEO: Birds, LLC poets in Brooklyn

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Below you will find our video coverage of the The January 28 installment of the Stain of Poetry Reading Series featuring Birds, LLC poets. Video coverage by DJ Dolack features Dan Boehl, Sommer Browning, Emily Pettit, Steven Karl, Justin Marks, Christie Ann Reynolds, Sampson Starkweather and Chris Tonelli.

Birds, LLC is an independent poetry press based out of Austin, Minneapolis, New York, and Raleigh. The January reading was held in part to celebrate the release of two new titles, Sommer Browning’s Either Way I’m Celebrating and Dan Boehl’s The Kings of the F**king Sea, with images by Jonathan Marshall.

Video filmed and edited by DJ Dolack. (Watch it in HD!)

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Rookery

Monday, March 28th, 2011

by Traci Brimhall
Southern Illinois University Press 2010
Reviewed by C.J. Opperthauser

7

“it sings for no reason”

Traci Brimhall’s strong debut collection, Rookery, is littered with images of birds. A gorgeous line about a bird or birds or something having to do with birds–a dead chickadee found on a porch, an owl frightened by a person’s nightmare–inevitably finds its way into the fabric of almost every poem. These recurring bird images, though sometimes fleeting and often quite minor, suggest both a connection with nature and a realistic view regarding the flighty, temporary aspects of emotion and love. The birds, then, imply a larger devotion: finding the eternal in the fleeting.

This means a significant amount of focus on tensions that result from love and sex. Brimhall consistently establishes such tension with simple conflict, but also with vivid, precise, often haunting details. The very end of “Chastity Belt Lesson” reads: “He kisses the back of her neck and makes a joke. / She clears her throat, slides her knife through a tomato.” The last line, while a simple image, is powerful in conveying withheld emotions. The guts and ooze and redness of a sliced tomato during a tense moment between two people rattles the senses and the nervous system. There is violence in that seemingly innocent scene. Anger.

Throughout Rookery, Brimhall exposes both a tenderness and dirtiness in sex, as well as the greed and hunger that it can elicit. Here are four lines from “To the Tall Stranger Who Kept His Hands in His Pockets, Fourteen Years Later”:

Maybe you wanted to teach me the wind’s easy reach
of my thighs. Or maybe you needed me to know

you could crush me to the corkscrew hairs
on your chest, if you wanted to, you could hold me.

Sex in these lines is both delicate and animalistic. Key words promote this–needed, crush, corkscrew, hold. Yet the image of wind on skin is soft. It’s compelling, even rational, to think of sex as both of these seemingly incompatible qualities. Sex is both fleeting and eternal–“if you wanted to, you could hold me.” These poems are very carefully crafted to handle competing ideologies.

So Brimhall takes unexpected whacks at God and religious ideation when she has the chance, but also approaches devotion with care and grace; the world can be holy if specific conceptions of God are delusional. In “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse,” use of the word “Hallelujah” is mostly ironic, but more than a little sincere: “The saguaros swell with rain. / Hallelujah. The mysteciti’s heart is big enough to crawl / through and it sings for no reason, hallelujah.” The poet includes praise for male seahorses carrying their young and for avocados clinging to trees. It is as if Brimhall understands impassioned devotion and wishes to worship, instead, the simple, the overlooked, the soon to depart but eternally real–which is not a new devotion in poetry, but one handled here with deftness and intellect.

*

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Lerner is first American to win German award

Sunday, March 27th, 2011

Ben Lerner has won 2011 Preis für International Poesie der Stadt Münster, an award the city of Münster, Germany bestows every two years to the best volume of poetry translated into German. This is the first time an American has earned this distinction.

Lerner’s first book, The Lichtenberg Figures (Copper Canyon, 2004), was translated by Steffen Pop and later released by Germany’s Luxbooks under the title Die Lichtenbergfiguren. A cycle of 52 sonnets, the book was published in 2004 after winning the 2003 Hayden Carruth Award.

Lerner wrote Angle of Yaw (Cooper Canyon 2006) when, under a Fulbright fellowship, he traveled to Spain in 2003. Several literary critics consider Angle of Yaw one of the most important poetry books of the decade. He is also the author of another critically acclaimed volume, Mean Free Path (Copper Canyon 2010).

A native of Topeka, KA, he studied at Brown University where he obtained a BA in Political Science and a MFA in Creative Writing. Currently a Howard Foundation fellow, Lerner edits and reviews poetry for the British journal Critical Quarterly. The award ceremony will be held in early April 2011.

Previous winners of the biennial award since 1993 were Andrea Zanzotto, Inger Christensen, Zbigniew Herbert, Gellu Naum, Hugo Claus, Miodrag Pavlovic, Daniel Banulescu, Tomaz Salamun, and Caius Dobrescu.

The jury was comprised of Johan P. Tammen, Cornelia Jentzsch, Wendela Beate Vilhjalmsson, Norbert Wehr, Urs Allemann, and Michael Braun.

–Press Release

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NYC: Shearsman Books celebrates 30 years

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Shearsman Books celebrated its 30th anniversary this past Saturday evening at the Bowery Poetry Club. Thirteen Shearsman poets read from their collections: Joseph Bradshaw, Richard Deming, Shira Dentz, George Economou, Anne Gorrick, Michael Heller, Nancy Kuhl, Jill Magi, Maryrose Larkin, Deborah Meadows,  Elena Rivera, Mercedes Roffé, and Mark Weiss.

Shearsman is one of the UK’s most significant poetry publishers, and is noted both in the U.S. and abroad for its large numbers of first-book and experimental American authors of exceptional quality. Producing some 60 books a year, with many titles by American poets and translations in English that give voice to poets writing in Spanish, German, French, Galician, Norwegian, Turkish and more, Shearsman is committed to creating a global audience. This event exemplified the diversity and high quality of recent American titles in the publisher’s catalog.

Shira Dentz introduced the event, and gave homage to Tony Frazer, the editor at Shearsman, as did several other readers. She said that he was not only a consistently refreshing delight of an editor, but also uncommonly unwavering when it comes to his aesthetic vision, or politics.

Explaining the origin of the press’s name, Shira read the first part of Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar.”

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

Stevens’s poem expresses the originality that I heard in each reader’s work and that sums up Shearsman’s sensibility. Some highlights that stood out for me were George Economou’s Greek comedy and tragedy, Shira Dentz’s idiosyncratic and supple poems, Jill Magi’s fresh and witty seriousness, Deborah Meadow’s socio-political engagement, collaborative performances by Joseph Bradshaw et al, Anne Gorrick and echoing partner, Richard Deming’s bold and passionate lyrics, Maryrose Larkin’s lyric metaphysics, Nancy Kuhl’s syntactical play, Michael Heller’s prophetic intensity, Mark Weiss’s harkening of a Ginsbergian bardic tradition, Elena Rivera’s sinuous presence, and Mercedes Roffé’s surreal poems based on Remedios Varo’s surreal paintings.  Speaking of painting, each voice was a vibrant color of its own, and this evening was a feast of colors.

—Yerra Sugarman

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Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

Michael Schiavo at Verse Daily

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Browning & Svalina at The Poetry Project

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Brett Price curated what many referred to as a homecoming for Sommer Browning and Mathias Svalina on Friday, March 11 at The Poetry Project.

While living in Brooklyn, Browning was an integral part of the poetry world by curating and hosting Pete’s Candy Store, serving as one of the poetry editors for The Portable Boog City Reader and an editor (along with Tony Mancus) of Flying Guillotine Press, which she still edits.

During Svalina’s tenure in Brooklyn, he co-curated Yardmeter Editions Reading Series, served as poetry editor for Boog City and co-edited (with Zach Schomburg) Octopus Books and magazine. He still edits both. Since Svalina’s departure, this was his first return to New York, and Browning’s second. Attendees brought wine and beer, and even a bottle of absinthe made an appearance, with Brandon Downing working the sugar spoon to perfection.

A little after 10:30, the lights dimmed and the readings began.  Below are the set-lists for Browning and then Svalina.

Sommer Browning took the stage and distributed postcards which contain a cartoon drawing of a person playing  guitar. She said the card was her first poem, titled, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Here’s what followed:

1. Sideshow
2. Death Defying
3. When Christopher Died
4. Either Way I’m Celebrating
5. It Isn’t Dead Just Different
6. the comic on page 88 of her book, Either Way I’m Celebrating
7. I’m Sorry I Ate That (title of another comic from the book)
8. Acts of Misinterpreted Surrender
9. A Kind of Chosen Birthday with No Known Pianist
10. The Movies
11. Alive with a finger (comic)
12. Still life
13. The Opposite of Love
14.The Meat from the Dream the Heart Knows
15. Feel Better

At this point Browning attempted to leave the stage, but the audience wasn’t having it and begged for an encore. She read two more poems.

1. “Notes About Art Pepper”
2. “Officer and Gentleman”

After a brief intermission, Svalina took the stage and read poems from his book, destruction myth, as well as a series of new poems about spells. He opened his reading by reading a poem for and by Bill Cassidy who passed away earlier in the year.  More on Cassidy here and here. Here’s the rest of Svalina’s set-list:

1. “Creation Myth”
2. -first line, “In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird”
3. ” ” -first line, “In the beginning there was a book”
4. ” ” -first line, ” He set the first fire as a joke”
5. ” ” -first line, ” In the beginning there was a pen that drew itself into existence & then drew all the”
6. A Spell Against a Dropping of Things
7. A Spell Against Distances
8. A Spell Against Sickness

from “Creation Myth”

1. first line, ” In the beginning there was a big puddle of honey”
2. Sickness is my Meat
3. first line, “In the beginning I was a little thing in the center of a star.”
4. A Spell Against Unlocked Door
5. A Spell Against Human Fraility
6. The Hypothesis of Death
7. first line, “In the beginning the registar”
8. first line, ” In the beginning everything I said exploded.”
9. first line, “My mother & father are both chemists.”
10. A Spell Against Ownership
11. Destruction Myth

*

-steven karl

photos & video Hitomi Yoshio

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Ruefle wins William Carlos Williams Award

Monday, March 21st, 2011

Mary Ruefle has won the Poetry Society of America’s 2011 William Carlos Williams Award for her Selected Poems (reviewed here by Jennifer H. Fortin). The prize is given annually to an outstanding book of poetry. Other finalists included Timothy Donnelly for The Cloud Corporation, Kathleen Graber for The Eternal City, and Ange Mlinko for Shoulder Season. You can read about all four books in our Top 30 Poetry Books of 2010 and 2010 Year in Review.

Both Ruefle’s and Donnelly’s books were published by Wave Books in 2010. Graber’s book was published by Princeton University Press, and Mlinko’s was published by Coffee House Press.

In a citation on the PSA Web site, Rodney Jones writes, “What a civil, undomesticable, and heartening poet is Mary Ruefle:  fond of experiment, but just as pleased to write of tilapia or county fairs; always novel, but never pandering to a mode; refusing neither the absurd nor the sublime.  Any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence.  For more than thirty years, she has freshened American poetry by humbly glorifying both the inner life and the outward experience.  Her Selected Poems, like the work of William Carlos Williams, is a testimony not only to the power of artfulness, but to human empathy.”

More coverage of Mary Ruefle:

Jennifer H. Fortin reviews Selected Poems

Melinda Wilson reviews The Most of It

Matt Hart reviews Indeed I Was Please With the World

John Deming reviews A Little White Shadow

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Lambda winners to be announced tonight

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

The 2011 Lambda Literary Award winners will be announced tonight. According to the Lambda Web site, “books from major mainstream publishers and from academic presses, from both long-established and brand new LGBT publishers, and even from emerging publish-on-demand technologies, make up the 114 finalists for the “Lammys.”  The finalists were selected from a record number of nominations.” Here are the finalists:

Lesbian Poetry

The Inquisition Yours, by Jen Currin  (Coach House Books)
Money for Sunsets, by Elizabeth J. Colen  (Steel Toe Books)
The Nights Also, by Anna Swanson  (Tightrope Books)
The Sensual World Re-Emerges, by Eleanor Lerman (Sarabande Books)
White Shirt, by Laurie MacFayden  (Frontenac House)

Gay Poetry

darkacre, by Greg Hewett  (Coffee House Press)
Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems, by James Schuyler  (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Pleasure, by Brian Teare  (Ahsahta Press)
The Salt Ecstasies: Poems, by James L. White  (Graywolf Press)
“then, we were still living”, by Michael Klein  (GenPop Books)

According to its Web site, Lambda Literary Foundation’s mission “nurtures, celebrates, and preserves LGBT literature through programs that honor excellence, promote visibility and encourage development of emerging writers.”

-steven karl

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