Mark Terrill - The Salvador-Dalai-Lama Express

Recently Received or Acquired

Mark Terrill

The Salvador-Dalai-Lama Express

Main Street Rag, 2009 

Charlotte, North Carolina

The Inspired Word Monday Reading Series Presents: Chase, Froman, Ollen, Parrish, Sherrard, Rees, Shmailo and Van Denburg

The Inspired Word: Passionate Readings of Poetry & Prose

MC/Host: Marron Cox

Location: Tierra Sana Restaurant
http://www.tierrasana.com/
100-17 Queens Blvd & 67th Road
Forest Hills, Queens
New York City

Time: 7:00-10 pm (though you're welcome to stay until closing time!)

Free wine tasting! Free appetizers! Awesome ambience and food! A great collection of writers and their work!

Performer Bios:

Joel Chace has published poetry and prose poetry in print and electronic magazines such as 6ix, Tomorrow, Lost and Found Times, Coracle, xStream, Three Candles, 2River View, Joey & the Black Boots, Recursive Angel, and Veer. He has published more than a dozen print and electronic collections. Just out from BlazeVox Books is CLEANING THE MIRROR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, and from Paper Kite Press is MATTER NO MATTER, another full-length collection. Just out from Country Valley Press is SCAFFOLD, the first part of an ongoing poetic sequence, and "(b)its," from Meritage Press. For many years, Chace has been Poetry Editor for the experimental electronic magazine 5_Trope.

Becky Froman is a wayward performer and a graduate student at The New School for Media Studies and Film. She obtained her Bachelors Degree from the University of Maryland, College Park in Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies, with a minor in Music Performance. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and hopes to one day have assets. She loves her tattoo and hates anything in bulk.

Sinje Ollen is a writer, knitwear designer, sculptor, and former actress. She has acted on Broadway, performed in the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival , appeared in experimental theater productions in New York and Europe, and starred in "The Tourist", a docudrama which aired at Lincoln Center, at MoMA, and on PBS. Sinje’s knitwear designs have been featured in the Fashioning Brooklyn show at the Brooklyn Library, and on the cover of the New York Sun. Her blog http://www.knityoursocksoff.blogspot.com features an ongoing series of Sinje’s reviews of New York yarn shops. She is also rewriting (hopefully for the last time) a memoir about her German family’s Nazi past.

82nd Airborne Paratrooper (98-01), Naropa alumni (02-06) and Long Island University M.F.A.(06) candidate, Gary Parrish co-edited with Leann Bifoss, Poems From Penny Lane (farfalla press 03) an all inclusive anthology featuring over 70 poets chronicling 20 years of poetry in and around Naropa University. He co-curated the year long Bowery Broadside Reading Series 07 featuring original artwork by George Schneeman at the BPC in New York City. He is the 2006 Pedro Pietri Memorial Prize recipient, awarded by The Bowery Arts and Sciences, LTD and The Ester Hynamen Award winner for poetry given by Long Island University (08). Gary's poetry and commentary can be found in Pinstripe Fedora, Big Bridge, Trans-Mountain Poetry, The American Drivel Review, Downtown Brooklyn, Four-Quarter Review, Puppy Flowers and Bombay Gin among others. The Meek, a long poem was published in the Italian Journal, Ludwig (Torino Poesia Press 08). Gary is a co-founder and editor for Farfalla Press, McMillan, and Parrish located in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn where he lives. 

Aja Mujinga Sherrard is a multi-cultural, multi-racial wanderer, daughter, artist and student who fell into spoken word by the inspiration of her peers and influence of artists like Saul Williams and Ella Fitzgerald.

For the last six years, Lorraine Rees lived in the rolling mountains of central Virginia where she trained horses and worked as a consultant for fine dining restaurants. She published her first book, Contents Under Pressure, in September of 2007. Lorraine currently resides in Manhattan and looks forward to publishing her second book, The Goodbye Zoo, in 2009.

Larissa Shmailo translated the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by A. Kruchenych; a DVD of the original English-language production is part of the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Hirschhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institute, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art. She also contributed translations to the recent anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry published by Dalkey Archive Press. Her poetry CDs, The No-Net World (SongCrew 2006) and Exorcism (2008) with music by Bobby Perfect are frequently heard on radio and Internet broadcasts. Her latest chapbook is A Cure for Suicide (Cervena Barva Press 2008). Larissa’s full-length collection of poetry, In Paran, will be published by BlazeVox Books in May, 2009. Larissa lives happily on the upper West Side of Manhattan. 

Carrie VanDenburg has been writing poetry since the 8th grade. She has been an editor of and been published in two college creative writing journals: Revisions and She's Aloud and was involved in creative writing groups in her undergraduate colleges. Currently, she spends most of her energy in graduate school studying social work but hopes to someday combine her love of creative writing with her love of helping people. Carrie lives in Flatbush Brooklyn with her roommate and two cats.

By subway, take the local R or V to 67th Avenue stop (and it's right there between 67th Road and 67th Avenue along Queens Boulevard).

Hoa Nguyen - Hecate Lochia

Recently Received or Acquired

Hoa Nguyen - Hecate Lochia

Hot Whiskey Press, 2009

Cover Art by Philip Trussell

1000 copies made

Tom Clark interviewed by Gary Parrish, April 2009

Tom Clark and a stone fence in Vence, France, 25 July 1966

1

 

Sadly, this year we mark a decade without the poet Ed Dorn. Can you share with us your feelings or remembrances of him and his work, time spent together. Perhaps comment on Way More West: New & Selected Poems, edited by Michael Rothenberg, Penguin Books.

 

He is sorely missed.

 

The feelings and remembrances are present always.

 

A bit of the early history of this friendship is discussed in TC interview

 

The final chapter of the book written after Ed passed away is here: Edward Dorn: A World of Difference (Epilogue: The Last Range)

 

For those not familiar with the basic facts of his life and work, a short obituary essay: Edward Dorn obit (2000)

 

Latterly it has come to seem that one's subjectivities tell little about the objective truth of what exactly makes up the lives of others.  Whereof one is uncertain one ought not to speak. 

 

One thing that can be said objectively is that these are four of the poems from my own work that Ed was generous enough to favor--and they have been posted in his memory:

 

Following Rivers into the Night

 

All I want to do...

 

Grasses

 

Earthshine

 

2

 

During the course of this interview baseball anomaly Mark  "The Bird" Fidrych passed away on his farm in Massachusetts. Fidrych, known for his surreal approach to pitching often talking to the ball and presenting himself to the pitchers mound was an instant fan favorite for the Detroit Tigers. Interesting that after the '76 season you both would collaborate on Fidrych’s autobiography, No Big Deal. Could you speak about that time preparing the manuscript with Fidrych and the atmosphere in America during the bicentennial?

 

There was a certain patriotic need for symbolic figuration at the time.   In the course of the 1976 season the outfielder Rick Monday, then of the Chicago Cubs, "rescued" an American flag which had been "disrespected" by a drunken fan invading the turf at Wrigley Field.   Much was made of it.   But the glorification of Monday's act was as nothing compared with the true and real cultural phenomenon created by Fidrych, whose innocence, intensity, vulnerability and infectious joy in life had a deeper reach, entering the American psyche not through the cheap pimping and hypolatry which are the sustenance of celebrity media, but through an actual possibility of fan identification with someone who was not an image construction but a living, feeling being (and those feelings were unselfconsciously exposed and immediately apparent).  There has been nothing like it since, and one doubts there ever will be.

 

Fidrych did not enrich himself.  The very sad ensuing seasons of injury and failure brought self-doubt, pain and bitterness into the story, but Mark then proved himself superior to these disappointments and worked earnestly to make a living and a home for himself and his family in a way with which, again, the common person could identify. 

 

Singing the praises of humans once they are gone is always too little and too late, but one tries:

 

No Big Deal: Mark Fidrych

 

3

 

New College of California, a bright spot on the landscape of the Mission District in SF for poets and thinkers alike has closed its doors as of '08. Can you speak with us about your time in residency there, 1987 to '08? What will you miss most? New Stars on the Horizon.

 

The school did provide a haven for many who for one reason or another couldn't manage to fit into conventional academia.  I suppose I was one of those misfits.  Let's not gild the lily here.  For all my nutty love of scholarship, the business end of academia has always seemed to me to represent a bullet in the heart of whatever poetry is.

 

It should perhaps be explained that over the nearly thirty years of my connection with New College the only class I conducted at the Mission District campus--well, the mortuary--was a writing workshop I offered as an adjunct instructor in 1978.  When in the following decade I returned as what was dwarf-grandly called Core Faculty in Poetics, I began teaching my classes at home in Berkeley.

 

Most of those classes were historical, with concentration on specific periods and single poets.  There were three courses in particular which I taught every other year for two decades or so, and to these three courses I directed a good deal of preparation and research.

 

The method was to inscribe poems and lecture notes, together with drawings, cartoons, and other forms of eye-candy (anything to keep students from nodding off) on large (48" by 36") sheets (actually the verso sides of the architectural plans for a Kaiser Hospital in Fresno--I had found them in somebody's recycling bin).  The sheets, actually more like large scrolls, were then affixed to a large painted styrofoam easel so that, during lectures, students would be able to stare at it, a form of attention hopefully quite a bit more pleasant than staring at their teacher and quite a bit more useful to their intellectual growth than staring out the window.

 

Then again, now that one thinks of it, staring out the window into the microworlds of the middle-tier branch structures  of a century-old redwood might well have proved more pleasant and instructive than either of the abovementioned options--and indeed some students did opt for this.

 

Those three courses alluded to above were:  Poetry of Ezra Pound; Lyric Poetry of the English Renaissance (Wyatt, Donne, Jonson, Campion, Herrick, Marvell); and This Living Hand: Poetry of John Keats.

 

For those whose lives are sufficiently empty to allow space for such pursuits, reproductions of eight of the twenty-nine Keats sheets--or "Deep Keats Scrolls" as Bill Berkson has dubbed them--can be found here:

 

Ode on a Grecian Urn 3/15/09

Ode on a Grecian Urn

 

Ode on Melancholy 3/15/09

Ode on Melancholy

 

Eve of St. Agnes 3/15/09

Eve of St. Agnes

 

Isabella 3/15/

Isabella

 

Byron on Keats  3/15/09

Byron on Keats

 

Want of an Object  3/15/09

Want of an Object

 

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer  3/15/09

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

 

Negative Capability  3/15/09

Negative Capability

 

I have listed the scrolls in reverse chronological order, with the entry-pieces at the bottom.  Anyone who wishes may click the links, then click again to enlarge, and presto--a New College Poetics degree!

 

And by the by, Gary, anybody who thinks a New College degree is not something to die for should consider the data in this recent article:

 

The Dark Prince

 

 

4

 

Wow, give me a day to research this and I'll send a new question.

 

Research like that can ruin your dreams, Gary, I wouldn't recommend it.

 

 

5

 

Did/Do you know Kaushal Niroula?

 

Gary, you have just made my day by reminding me of one happy fact to take away from my New College career.  The answer is no. 

 

 

 

Matthew Knudsen and Lily Scarborough

Reed Bye - Border Theme

Recently Received or Acquired

Reed Bye - Border Theme

1981, Z Press Productions 

Edited by Kenward Elmslie

Book designed by Freeman Keith

Made in a edition of 500 copies

Lunenburg, Vermont

Robert Creeley - Mother's Voice

Recently Received or Acquired

Robert Creeley - Mother's Voice

Am Here Books/Immediate Editions

Cover and Drawings by Tom Clark

Published in 1981

Anselm Hollo - Curious Dada

Recently Received or Acquired

Anselm Hollo - Curious Dada

White Pine Press, 1978

Buffalo, NY

For George Mattingly

& Lucy Farber

Gerry Mulligan & Big Scream 47

Recently Received or Acquired, Big Scream 47
Winter-Spring 08-09, Big Scream/Nada Press, Edited by David Cope,
Contributors: Anne Waldman, Jim Cohn, Bob Rosenthal, Audre Puchalski, Katrina Kalisz, Leslea Newman, David Cope, Maura Cavell, Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark, Donna Emerson, Kelley White, Jane Cope, Eva-Maria Sher, G.F. Koreck, Marc Olmsted, Alan Catlin, Katherine Marty, Peter Marti......This issue completes the 35th year of continous publication.

Gerry Mulligan #0, Edited by Ben Tripp.
Printed at Bard College, January 2009. Cover Art by Ray Graflin.
Contributors: Tom Savage, Emily Greenley, Andre Schiavelli, Elizabeth McDaniel, Samuel Greenberg, Ted Greenwald, John Weiners, Wade Savitt, Columbina Zamponi, Sylvia Gorelick, Clark Coolidge, Rodger Van Voorhees, Lydia Davis, Gerad Argeros, Bill Berkson, Robert Elstein, David Perry, Charles North, Trevor Winkfield, Anselm Hollo, Aaron Simon, Maria Tananyan, Andrew Dieck, Duncan McNaughton, Marcella Durand, Ange Mlinko, Kit Robinson, April Koester, Elizabeth Bryant, Omar Husain, Jennifer Kietzman, Laura Hunt, Ann Stephenson, Florence Kindel, Alex Hampshire, Cassandra Pantuso, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

Review of Blue Rain Morning by Jamey Jones

New from Fell Swoop Press (New Orleans) and Jamey Jones comes a beautiful mimeo, Blue Rain Morning. Jones crafts in this small chapbook (26 pages) some of the best poems I've read this year, whole hearted, rich and accessible. The text, as precise an identification of what poetry can represent after the millennium, after WCW, after Mayer, after and away from Ryan. Jones composes himself to his environment with a confidence that the world is set well and grounded in his ear and eye. Check out this first stanza of Swoon as an example:

Swoon

for Cayne Miceli

Because the light falls,

Littering the surfaces, crevices,

Nooks, crannies, corners and

Hidden spaces.

It falls to the floor, reaching

For the darkest layers, composting

Leaves, rolly pollies, worms, and

Inner-earth.

It reaches towards the hearth,

The heart, the legendary

Center, core.

Find this book, walk out through your neighborhood and read slow on a bench in Central Park or on Bourbon Street while enjoying a Handgrenade or Hurricane. Read it, to your grandmother or lover as the pots boil with fresh greens and slices of delicate meat. Read it, in heaven where the copies are many and the poems stand side by side written into the clouds.

Paul Blackburn: Brooklyn - Manhattan Transit

Recently Received or Acquired

Paul Blackburn
Brooklyn - Manhattan Transit
a bouquet for Flatbush
Totem Press - New York, 1960
Cover photo by Leroy McLucas