Clayton Eshleman

Jerome Rothenberg

Monica Youn   Mark Wunderlich   Raymond McDaniel

Clayton Eshleman

Reading, Friday, April 8 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm

Conversations With Poets,  Saturday, April 9, 2011 at 10:30am

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1935, Clayton Eshleman earned a BA in philosophy and an MA in creative writing, both from Indiana University. The author of more than sixty books, his collections of poetry include: Reciprocal Distillations (Hot Whiskey Press, 2007), An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (2006), and Archaic Design (Black Widow Press, 2007).

He has also published books of essays, prose, and interviews, including Companion Spider (Wesleyan, 2002), Antiphonal Swing: Selected Prose, 1962-1987 (1989) and Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship (1989). His most recent publications are Anticline (Black Widow Press, 2010), and a translation of Bernard Bador’s  Curdled Skulls (Black Widow, 2011). Cotranslations of Bei Dao’s Endure (Black Widow) and Aime Cesaire’s Solar Throat Slashed (Wesleyan U Press) will be published this May.

Eshleman’s awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1979 National Book Award, several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and several research fellowships from Eastern Michigan University. He is Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University.

 [From Poets.org]

Jerome Rothenberg

Reading & Conversation, Friday, April 15 · 7:00pm – 8:30pm

Jerome Rothenberg’s publishing career began in the late 1950s as a translator of German poetry, first for Hudson Review and then for City Lights Books. Founding Hawk’s Well Press in 1959, Rothenberg used it as a venue to publish collections by some of the up-and-coming poets of the era, including Diane Wakoski and Robert Kelly.

Rothenberg is widely and highly respected as a consummate anthologist and poetic theorist as well as a poet. In the massive 1,700-page, two-volume Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, edited with Pierre Joris, Rothenberg presents what Hacsi Horvath of Whole Earth considered “a brilliant kaleidoscope of writing unstuck in time, both in English and in fine translation, from numerous archaic/modern/postmodern voices.” Monaghan praises the editors for providing “the kind of critical guidance so sweeping a collection requires.” The first volume, From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude, covers the period from 1900 through World War II. The second volume, From Postwar to Millennium, encompasses the remainder of the twentieth century.

 Writing in Vort, Kenneth Rexroth described Rothenberg and his poetry in the following way: “Jerome Rothenberg is one of the truly contemporary American poets who has returned U.S. poetry to the mainstream of international modern literature. At the same time, he is a true autochthon. Only here and now could have produced him—a swinging orgy of Martin Buber, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and Sitting Bull. No one writing poetry today has dug deeper into the roots of poetry.”  [From The Poetry Foundation]

Monica Youn

Reading, Friday, April 22 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm

Conversations With Poets,  Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 10:30am

Monica Youn’s first collection Barter was published by Graywolf Press in 2003, and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Tin House and forthcoming in Cue: A Journal of Prose Poetry. Awards include the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. She works as a media and entertainment lawyer in Manhattan. Her second collection Ignatz, a series of poems loosely based on the mouse character from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip of the 1920s-30s, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2010. Photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey. [From The PoetryFoundation]

Ignatz, Fourway Books 2010

Monica Youn’s book, Ignatz, combines the sensibilities of a painter and a grammarian. Qualified further, hers is the sensibility of an abstract painter, who distills in gesture and stroke, the force of her subject. Ignatz derives from George Herriman’s comic strip which chronicles an absurd love-hate relationship between Krazy Kat and his beloved, Ignatz. Krazy Kat pines for and chases after Ignatz; Ignatz returns these fawning affections by throwing bricks at Krazy Kat’s head. Youn’s treatment of this dynamic—a collection of masterful love lyrics—is a concept fascinating enough, but it is the work of the language in these poems that dissolve notions of novelty and play and find their way into the more expansive realm of the sublime. Reading these poems, one finds their senses sharpened, weirdly and synaesthetically, as if in a fever. From “Ignatz Oasis,” the anxiety of the afflicted over his beloved’s abscence takes on hue, muscle, gesture and sound.  Even that word “fist”, hissed through gritted teeth, enacts a ratcheting of nerves:

When you have left me
the sky drains of color

like the skin
of a tightening fist

Barter, Graywolf Press 2003

Youn’s first book Barter, while not guided by a single conceit, sustains the same kind of focus and composure. The book begins with “Drawing for Absolute Beginners” and Youn abstracts and interprets the guidelines for proportions in figure drawing into keyhole glimpses of the violent and erotic. “Polaroid” is another permutation of this abstraction, where the act of seeing enacts a kind of emotional “macro” function; its four sections zoom in on the four quadrants of a polaroid picture and stages a psychic melodrama for each. Even more remarkable is the restraint and density of these terse couplets. From section “1. Left”:

Flashbulb magnolia
on the lean

brown thigh:
light makes

a peeled thing,

In both collections, intensity is tuned by Youn’s sense of syntactical control, her lyrical composure, and the clear, confident strokes of her distinctively visual verses.

Mark Wunderlich

Reading, Friday, April 22 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm

Conversations With Poets,  Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 10:30am

Mark Wunderlich’s collections of poetry include The Anchorage (1999), winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and Voluntary Servitude (2004).

His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. He has also been awarded the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His poetry has been featured in numerous anthologies, including The New Young American Poets (2000, ed. Kevin Prufer), and Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (2000, ed. Timothy Liu).

Wunderlich has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College, San Francisco State University, and Bennington College. He lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley. [From The Poetry Foundation]

Mark Wunderlich’s poetry possesses the grace of one who knows, at the marrow and at nerve’s fray, what fragile animals people are. In his first book The Anchorage, vulnerability wears a rhapsodic restlessness, and even a kind of bravado, where, as in “From A Vacant House”, lines like yet the heart persists, doesn’t it, with its dark urges, liquid wish? assert that, gleaned from love, desire can be its own transcendance; the body, a faith.

Voluntary Servitude, Wunderlich’s second collection, explores another facet of human vulnerability. Its language, while at every level remains as gorgeously wrought and vivid as his first book, accomplishes a roughness and urgency borne from a darker place. This darkness goes beyond the book’s themes of domination and servitude; its dark is the rich murk of earth and the starless pitch of a dead buck’s eye, the black cowhide of a harness; it is both sheen and shadow cast by the flank of a horse’s neck. The first poems of these two books each propose an idea of beginning and they present an interesting comparison: where the earlier fashions self, rebuilt or perhaps risen from what’s broken down to “dust and skeleton”, the second pushes out, unbidden and certain from soil, an amarylis that  “crescendos toward the light.” In both, the work is nothing less than transformative.

Raymond McDaniel

Reading, Friday, April 22 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm

Conversations With Poets,  Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 10:30am

Raymond McDaniel’s first book, Murder (a Violet) (2004), won the National Poetry Series competition, and his latest collection, Saltwater Empire (2008), offers provocative insights into a post-Katrina New Orleans and the surrounding South. “Assault to Abjury” paints just one of these haunting portraits; in a review of the collection, poet and critic Stephen Burt writes, “From the title onward these poems often look out, into the mouth of the Gulf, along an ecosystem more water than land, whose treasures and threats are more than we can handle.”

When asked in an interview whether poetry can create change in the world, McDaniel responded, “Poetry is never going to directly induce that level of change (nor should it, lest it become indistinguishable from those authorities it ought to upset), but it can remind people, and teach them to realize in practice, that things can be made—literally made—different, and differently.” McDaniel is also well known for his lively poetry reviews on The Constant Critic website. [From The Poetry Foundation]

Raymond McDaniel’s Murder [A Violet] fashions its unlikely heroine—an assassin—out of fragments. The surgical precision with which McDaniel carves this martial landscape and its inhabitants does not effect a distant and steely coolness, but evokes instead what is viscerally intimate; you sense that the blood is still warm on the blade. From “First Spring”:

if the man endeavoring to flee has limbs that unfold
like the most febrile of flowers

then the trees themselves
do not seem to move at all
too slow to change or judge what whispers around them

which may explain why she sent the steel through his throat
and saw it as silver stamen

as shine

The book’s protagonist comprises a moral question (the assassin is also the penitent), which troubles as much as deepens the aesthetic pleasure one derives from McDaniel’s crystalline verse. He allows a reader to involve or implicate herself by creating a story that conjures our empathy through ambivalence—in the poem “base”, the assassin’s soldier “sisters” conjecture: perhaps she is beast as rhythm is a beast and we are confronted with the question of what redemption might look like for our heroine, what exactly are we called upon to forgive. The book begins with a preface offering a beautiful idea—“the principle of holographic memory”—to explain its lack of pagination. The result is a story in verse, that upon reading and re-reading, becomes a kind of metamorhping origami puzzle-box, always folding and unfolding into new creatures and crocuses.

In Saltwater Empire, Raymond McDaniel writes weather and water. He invokes ghosts, and wrings what’s sweat and real from the soaked sheet; he seeds swamp with microphones and captures—through the lushness and stereophonic shimmer of verbal music—home. 

From Saltwater Empire, “Assault to Abjury”:

This animation was created by Allison Alexander Westbrook IV, and McDaniel reads. From Poetry Everywhere, in association with The Poetry Foundation.

Assault to Abjury

by Raymond McDaniel

Rain commenced, and wind did.

A crippled ship slid ashore.

Our swimmer’s limbs went heavy.

The sand had been flattened.

The primary dune, the secondary dune, both leveled.

The maritime forest, extracted.

Every yard of the shore was shocked with jellyfish.

The blue pillow of the man o’ war empty in the afterlight.

The treads of the jellyfish, spent.

Disaster weirdly neatened the beach.

We cultivated the debris field.

Castaway trash, our treasure.

Jewel box, spoon ring, sack of rock candy.

A bicycle exoskeleton without wheels, grasshopper green.

Our dead ten speed.

We rested in red mangrove and sheltered in sheets.

Our bruises blushed backwards, our blisters did.

is it true is it true

God help us we tried to stay shattered but we just got better.

We grew adept, we caught the fish as they fled.

We skinned the fish, our knife clicked like an edict.

We were harmed, and then we healed.