CLA 2013 in short

It took two days and two airlines to get me to Lexington, KY, for this year's meeting of the College Language Association. US Air, having cancelled my flight, handed me off to Delta, who cancelled my flight and then put me in a cab for the two hour drive to Harrisburg, where, back to US Air, I finally got onto a plane.  I arrived a mere five hours after my panel.  (I had better luck years ago when I drove from DC to Lexington through the snow for a wedding.) At any rate, with my late arrival Tony Bolden and I didn't have time to compare sartorial notes and thus appeared wearing the same jacket.  I did make it in time to chair a lively panel and to hear some quite good papers.  I was sorry to have missed poet Tony Medina's keynote at the Langston Hughes Society luncheon, which everybody tells me was a high point of the conference. PSU grad students Susan Weeber, Earl Brooks and Laura Vrana attracted many favorable comments for the papers they presented, one of which I actually got to hear. My colleagues Lovalerie King, Shirley Moody Turner and Iyun Osagie also presented, making Penn State one of the larger contingents at CLA, along with Howard and Kansas. I had a rewarding, though foreshortened, time; maybe next year I'll actually get to present my paper.  Speaking of which, next year's CLA will be in New Orleans.  You really want to be there -- 

A BRAND NEW BEGGAR at Penn Sound

You can now listen to or download the Saint Marks Poetry Project reading from the Penn Sound web site, Just click here to get carried away.

New Collection of Essays from Will Alexander

Even that small, fervent band of readers who have been with Will Alexander from the beginning will be taken aback by the breath-taking breadth of this collection. From Angeleno cimmerian fish to Johnny Sekka, Alexander's sheer range of address constantly presents readers with the new, circulating in new language. "Could one say," asks Alexander, "that one enters into an intensity of recognition," and we recognize exactly the intensity that greets us in these pages. Forget tattoos; come here for the emblazoned ontogenic.

Available soon from Essay Press and Small Press Distribution.  Tell 'em the future sent you.

A BRAND NEW BEGGAR on the streets of New York

 "Taxicab, Taxicab, give me a ride.
   I'm going to Brooklyn or the Lower East Side."
                        --Bunky and Jake

 Monday afternoon the snow started falling in New York, but that didn't stop the poetry on Loisaida. The Saint Marks Poetry Project hosted a reading featuring Evie Shockley and your estimable beggar that evening.  Before the reading, we met up with Stephane for a great dinner at a tiny cafe named FRANK.  And thanks to Stephane for the photographs of me you see here. Afterwards, the heroic remnant found their way through the slush to Laura Hinton's apartment where we all warmed ourselves over the neon heat of Third Avenue.

Next morning, your beggar found a quarter on the floor of Penn Station, which nobody in the vicinity was willing to claim.  Thanks for the change, New York.

[P.S. -- For those of you who don't remember Bunky and Jake, here's a shot of them in the Village.]

SONIA SANCHEZ VISITS PENN STATE

This past week, Sonia Sanchez was in residence at Penn State.  The high point of the week was Wednesday night's concert performance, which opened with a series of recitations by PSU students.  Then Ronnie Burrage's group took the stage.  During their first number, the stage nearly took them.  A large flat fell on the empty chair that was waiting for Sanchez to sit in it.  As it went over, it snagged a light tower, and the next thing we knew a large set of speakers was leaning precariously towards the audience as well.  Thanks to attentive and fleet-footed audience members, no equipment was lost.  Seeing students and members of the community straining to hold up the leaning tower of lights, I did think of the Iwo Jima memorial, and I did think of Sisyphus, but mostly I thought it was a good thing they were so nimble. Everything was returned to order (though the flat was retired for the night out of concern for Sanchez's safety).  Through it all, the band never missed a beat.  After the first selection, Sonia Sanchez joined the musicians and dancers on stage to read her poetry, accompanied by new arrangements of music Burrage had created just for the occasion. The band that Burrage assembled for the night included Rasul Siddik, who had come all the way from Paris, and Rene Mclean, carrying on the tradition of his father, Jackie.

The rest of the week saw Sanchez in a whirl of class visits, lectures and readings. She went to the recently reopened Webster's Book Store for a poetry reading.  Friday she sat with grad students and faculty from English and Philosophy to share part of her life story and think out loud about how she wrote such works as Does Your House Have Lions. (The title is a question Rahsaan Roland Kirk asked her when she told him she'd bought a house.) She gave a final lecture last night.  I was asked to walk the band members over to the hotel for dinner afterwards, and several of them paused to take the obligatory photos of themselves with the Nittany Lion.  Nothing quite like seeing a sax player from Saint Louis mounting and riding the Nittany Lion --but then, in all these years the lion has yet to eat any visitors.

MICHAEL NEW on A BRAND NEW BEGGAR

Michael New's INSTRUMENTAL VOICES site recently posted a commentary on A Brand New Beggar.

Click here to visit the site, and check out his post on Sarah Webster Fabio while you're there.

LOUISVILLE 2013

Back once more to the University of Louisville and the conference formerly known as the Twentieth Century Literature Conference.  It was almost as if I had never left my own campus, as there are two Penn State PhDs on the faculty there, and, in addition to our usual large contingent of panelists, two of this year's keynoters were Penn State faculty.  During the party at Alan Golding's house after the conference, someone asked me why our department is so cool.  Hey, we've got more of that in State College. (Another reason all of you should come to our conference on African American and Caribbean poetry in October.) First up was Jayne Marcus, who I hadn't seen in decades, who shared letters she had received from Adrienne Rich.

 Meet the New Gnostics, not just like the Old Gnostics. "The earliest origins of Gnosticism are obscure and still disputed." So says Wikipedia, keeper of the arcane, with good reason. Still, some great poetry coming from these guys.

 But I wasn't there just to engage the mystical in the company of my Penn State colleagues.  The poetry keynote this year was Joan Retallack, a dear friend from my D.C. days. (Though I won't, as I've been doing on FaceBook, post a Google Street photo of her former domicile here.)  Joan and I both published our first books with SOS Press (Sultan of Swat), founded and edited in D.C. by Hugh Walthall and Richard Flynn. -- I hadn't seen her since the Maine conference on American Poetry of the 70s.  Wonderful as always to talk with her across the days of the conference, and to hear some of her more recent work at the reading.

My own presentation this year was a return to the works of Russell Atkins, centering on the Cleveland Poets' Manifesto and the three chapbooks by Atkins under the title Objects.  What I presented was drawn from an essay for an edited collection featuring Atkins's works and commentaries on his art.  Watch this space for further news of that volume as it develops.

A BRAND NEW BEGGAR -- More Ways to get the Book

A Brand New Beggar is now available from SPD Books, the one place where you can also order it for your class.  While you're there, check out the other fine Steerage Press books by Amato, Joyce and Pusateri.:

http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780983632665/default.aspx



It appears that the book is now also available from Barnes and Noble:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/a-brand-new-beggar?store=allproducts&keyword=a+brand+new+beggar


And, of course, you can always get it from the Amazonian mother ship:

http://www.amazon.com/Brand-New-Beggar-L-Nielsen/dp/0983632669/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361284244&sr=1-1&keywords=a+brand+new+beggar


Amazon is also the only place where you can get the endless enjambment e-book version, for ONLY 99 cents!! Read it on your ipad, your desktop, your Mac Air, your cell phone, even your Kindle -- 


http://www.amazon.com/A-Brand-New-Beggar-ebook/dp/B00B3L3R64/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1361284244&sr=1-1


[photo by Howard Rambsy]

NEW FROM BURNING DECK

Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop's Burning Deck Press has for decades now been a reliable source for European poetry that might not otherwise find its way to our shores. Their latest volume in the series is by Viennese poet Anja Utler:

engulf -- enkindle


The book has been translated by Kurt Beals, currently pursuing a PhD in German at Berkeley.








 
from "enkindle: fourfold

fourfold as though: at the throat -- to stop, stiffen --
the lips were lopped off in their swing, as if: scraped out
bleed -- skinned -- or else: shrivel up
stunted, seem sere as if they were
not: fit for each other as if: nothing
were moving a shudder long 



You can order the book here from SPD Books.