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.

Remembering Jayne Cortez

Some years ago I was asked to introduce Jayne Cortez's poetry reading at the University of Maine.  Below are the words I offered on that occasion:




"At a certain moment in history when Aime Cesaire started to decolonize his neolonial head
and free his image by dealing with the world from the idea of negritude
when young Aime Cesaire said forget Paris and returned to look into the future by diving inside
 the past of his native land . . .
At that moment of no compromise his poetry became poetry unique to poetry"

In the small hours of April, before a crowd that did not know how to crowd, these words brought comfort –

That afternoon, as I sat in a room at Georgetown University, poet Rod Smith had come quietly up to me pushing his cell phone towards me – without my glasses on, I had no idea what he was trying to tell me, but then, as he pointed to the display on  his phone, it came into focus . . . the screen bore the news that Aime Cesaire had died –

We passed the phone to poet Eugene Redmond, who made the announcement to the stunned crowd gathered at the conference, a conference dedicated to the arts in the Civil Rights era – What could any of us say?  We all, poets and activists alike, carried Cesaire inside our very language – on our tongues --

That night, the first poet on the evening program was Jayne Cortez – with no preliminaries, she began quietly reciting her poem of tribute to Cesaire – a poem that itself grows out of a moment of no compromise – a moment when what is needed more than ever is a poetry unique to poetry –
This has always been Jayne Cortez’s way – from MOUTH ON PAPER to JAZZ FAN LOOKS BACK, from COAGULATIONS to SOMEWHERE IN ADVANCE OF NOWHERE – The titles of her brilliant recordings might almost serve as a manifesto for any artist determined on a course of self-sufficiency: MAINTAIN CONTROL, UNSUBMISSIVE BLUES, TAKING THE BLUES BACK HOME – or, if you’re of a philosophic bent, BORDERS OF DISORDERLY TIME

No one told her to do this – No one could tell her how to do this – There were only the brave examples of those disorderly orders of predecession: Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Nicolas Guillen, Big Mama Thornton –     poets who recognized what Cortez remarks in one poem: “Everybody wants to be famous - Nobody needs it.”
In the afterlife of the word, it is not fame that feeds us – it is the name that comes to the tip of our tongue, borne up on the waves of our history –
At a certain moment, when neither the politics nor the poetry of custom could bear us up any longer, Jayne Cortez returned to look into the future and found that THE BEAUTIFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN, found her way to THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK, found her way to flying home, to bumblebee and Big Mama, found her way to no compromise – won her primary –

A BRAND NEW BEGGAR - a brand new book

Coming in days from STEERAGE PRESS --A new book of poetry from A.L. Nielsen.

Comments on earlier poetry by Nielsen;

The poems of A.L.Nielsen are self-organizing networks. It
is Brancusi's duty to make skinny sculptures; it is mine,
& a pleasant one, to introduce A.L. Nielsen. We have
been silent partners for a decade in a scheme to
overthrow mainstream discourse & undermine
exemplary sentences.
     David Bromige

The poetry of Aldon Nielsen is marked by rare insight, which penetrates the invisible moments of our daily peregrinations.

     Will Alexander

The sentence can be such a wonder when it’s not in service. As smart and unpredictable as an escaped slave. 

       Fred Wah

CHRISTMAS WITH JOHN ASHBERY

Just in time for the holidays, here is a new book from John Ashbery. For some reason the blurbs and table of contents are in an extra large font. Ashbery is 85 and I need reading glasses, so maybe Ecco Press, also aging, was thinking of our eyes. In any event, QUICK QUESTION makes a great stocking stuffer.

from "Puff Piece"

And when I pulled it out of my pocket I thought surely
all this has been done before. And my smirched muse
answered, wholly in secret: What are apron strings
for?

A BRAND NEW BEGGAR

Coming Soon from STEERAGE PRESS -

A BRAND NEW BEGGAR

poems by A.L. Nielsen


 
"A. L. Nielsen is at it again, lighting fireworks under language and capturing the explosions on paper.  These poems' short, deeply enjambed lines will work your brains as much as your eyes.  Using every sonic trick in the book -- including assonance, consonance, and insistent rhythms -- Nielsen stitches together places from Ghana to Nebraska, people from C.L.R. James to Lady Day, and moments from his childhood through his capacious present.  Readers of his earlier books will recognize the wicked wit he often turns on politics and culture and will warm to the less familiar (but characteristically wordplay-ful) love poems he includes.  Here is a poet who knows what he can do with the genre, and does it -- well."

                                                                                Evie Shockley

A NEW BOOK FROM TRACY MORRIS

Manuel Brito continues his exemplary series of books with RHYME SCHEME by Tracy Morris.

This book appeared magically in my mail box; I had not known it was even in the works.  I think this beautiful little volume may be the first hardback from Zasterle Editions.  And it includes a CD, whose label reproduces the striking cover art by Diedra Harris-Kelley.

Manuel will be updating his web site with information about the book soon, and you will be able to get it before too long from SPD, so watch those spaces.






MEDUSA OBLONGATA DRED

sinewy sass snakeskin slink seamless spine
routed--out her head. helix exlixers, elicit, fine

ripple through time, so striking, blindin',
dem men turn to stone when dey admirin'.

LOCOMOTRIX

One of the publishing events of the year was the publication of the selected poetry and prose of Amelia Rosselli by University of Chicago Press.  This book, the first substantial collection of Rosselli's work in English, is translated and introduced by Jennfier Scappettone, who has an ear for the English of Rosselli's music.




Science fiction follies
valorous illnesses

impediments to write
totality to describe

will to write
will to survive

will to impede
tyranny.







Find the book by clicking here.

STEERAGE PRESS

Throughout his life, William Carlos Williams was an enthusiastic supporter of small presses, not only out of gratitude at the role they had played in the evolution of his own work as a publishing poet, but because he knew that was where you looked to find the most exciting new developments in literature, developments that would subsequently be promoted by the larger and more established presses.

Thanks to Kass Fleisher and Joe Amato, themselves two of our finest contemporary writers, we now have new works appearing from their freshly christened Steerage Press.  The series starts off with Joe's own Big Man with a Shovel, and has continued with a collection of poetry from Chris Pusateri, whose title hits on the same musical obsessions that haunt me, and a striking new novel from Michael Joyce.  Joyce's book carries a preface written by Stuart Moulthrop, who I knew a bit when he was an undergraduate at George Washington University before he went on to study at Yale and become known as an early practitioner of what we now term digital humanities.   (Back when I knew Stuart, I was a participant in The Association for Computers in the Humanities -- but back then I also wrote a lot of code.)

You can order these books from Amazon in either hard copy or Kindle editions. For more about Steerage, visit their web site by clicking here.  And watch this blog for an announcement soon regarding the next Steerage Press book.

MODERNISM STUDIES - LAS VEGAS

"Listen to the birds sing."  We gathered under the sign of Bugsy Siegel to talk about spectacle, though the final key note speaker informed us with assurance that the age of spectacle had been replaced by the performance image.  Guess the stilt-walking women were a sort of confirmation of that.  I did in fact see a wedding performed by an Elvis Impersonator.

Not enough poetry this year, at least when compared to last year's conference in Buffalo.  Still, a fine set of sessions, including the discussions of Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp and Gil Scott-Heron I got to participate in, thanks to Michael Coyle.