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.

NEW FROM BRENDA MARIE OSBEY

 Just out from Time Being Books in St. Louis.

from "Qu'on Arrive Enfin (a tale in-progress)"

 

1

and so we arrive at last in our native land —
the earth itself marked by slavery.
up there, in the open air, the stink, the hot funk of hot blood
the rowdy rebel-niggers of the past.
funny, no?
how we always return to this —
the city, the life
that slavery built,
tales altogether invented
as told by historians, founding fathers, the church.
but we are sick and tired of lies, dirty tricks and fraud,
we are sick of tales and of historians
sick of indigo, tobacco, rice and rum
we are sick of king-cotton and sugar cane
sick of it all
and can only wish hard-hard-hard
that the lakes, the bayous, swamps large and small
will have swallowed it all
flooded
erased it all.

ORDER IT HERE.

A BRAND NEW BEGGAR - Now Available from Steerage Press

A Brand New Beggar is now available for order from Amazon, where you can also find a Kindle edition.

Click here for further info. 

The book will also be available from Small Press Distributing soon. 

Silence of the Iambs

Every now

            and again

I take my I

            out

For a walk and a rinse

I is a mother

            So say

                        My neighbors

In an obligatory

            Obligato

Of call and remorse

I tell them to

            Put it where

                        The pod don’t play

As the whether

            Or not balloons

                        Tear loose

From their subsidies

I hear voices

            From the other’s side

As if someone were

            Reading a poem

click to navigate to Steerage Press for more fine books by contemporary authors:

REDISCOVERED PLAY BY C.L.R. JAMES PUBLISHED

Long legendary throughout the diaspora, the first version of C. L. R. James's play about Toussaint Louverture finally emerges from the archives. This play is the production that united James with his friend Paul Robeson on the London stage. It was an extraordinary event at the time—witness the contemporary reviews added to this publication—and it is no less extraordinary today. In addition to reviews, this edition also reprints valuable early statements from James and Robeson. It is a singular, one might even say Olympian, volume with much to teach us all.

Click here to find it on Amazon.

VIVIAN L. NIELSEN

VIVIAN L. NIELSEN

FEBRUARY 23, 1926 - JANUARY 4, 2013

MLA 2013

There was no off-site poetry reading during MLA's visit to Boston this year -- Hope somebody in Chicago will take it on for next year -- But we had a wonderful time all the same -- In addition to poetry division business, I was there to present another paper on the late Gil Scott-Heron on a panel with Carter Mathes and Margo Natalie Crawford, chaired by Anna Everett. My colleague Michael Berube was MLA president this year, drumming up support for the humanities and giving his usual witty performance in his address.  The MLA staff did their always exemplary job of herding professors and making a success out of such a disparate gathering.  Additional photos here from Richard Flynn, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper and Laura Moriarty, who I thank heartily.