Harrington, Harris, and Irby to read Nov. 12, 4:30 pm, Spencer Museum of Art

Don't miss this return engagement by three University of Kansas scholars and professors: Joseph Harrington, Billy Joe Harris, and Kennth Irby

POETRY PRESSES AND LITERARY MAGAZINES

At the Ks. Authors Club Conference, I was asked about publishing outlets for poets and literary writers. Here are a few area presses and journals:

BKMK Press, Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City, 5101 Rockhill Rd. KC MO 65110
Cave Hollow Press PO Drawer J, Warrensburg, MO 64093
Green Tower Press & The Laurel Review English Dept., NW Missouri State University, 800 University Dr. Maryville MO 64468
Helicon 9 Editions, 3607 Pennsylvania Ave, KS MO 64111
Mammoth Publications, 1916 Stratford Rd., Lawrence KS 66044
Mid-American Press PO Box 575 Warrensburg MO 64093
Southeast Missouri State University Press and Big Muddy Journal, MS 2650, One University Plaza, Cape Girardeau MO 63701
Time Being Books, 10411 Clayton Rd. Suites 201-203, St. Louis Mo. 63131
Truman State Univ. Press, TSUP Bldg, 100 E Norman St., Kirksville MO 63501
Woodley Memorial Press, Washburn University, Topeka KS 66111
University of Missouri Press, 2910 LeMone Blvd., Columbia, MO 65201

Coal City Review, English Dept., University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045
The Mid-America Poetry Review P.O. Box 575, Warrensburg, MO 64093-0575.O. Box 575,
Flint Hills Review Empria State Univ., 1200 Commercial, Emporia KS 66801
Midwest Quarterly 406B Russ Hall, Pittsburg State U., Pittsburg KS 66762
The Missouri Review, 357 McReynolds Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211
Natural Bridge Journal, English Dept. U of Missouri-St. Louis 1 University Blvd, St. Louis MO 63121
New Letters, U of Missouri-Kansas City 5101 Rockhill Rd., Kansas City Mo 64110

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #40: BENJAMIN S. LERNER (1979 - )

Ben Lerner, from Topeka, pursued academic study of poetry at Brown University. His writing is grounded in the 21st century—with all its nesting boxes of realities and simulations. In one poem he writes about a man watching himself on TV: “He watches the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV.” The occurrence of wordplay like this unifies Lerner’s writings. Lerner creates highly populated mappings of urban throughways. These include quick trackings of lifetime trajectories, like Ronald Reagan’s biography, for example. Such a person’s identity in this poetry-scape is reduced to an icon—the movie star president—and so human experience is easily commodified. Lerner told a Jacket magazine interviewer that he is concerned with “commercialization of public space and speech.”

Another of Lerner’s concerns is extended poems with variations on a theme, such as his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures. This interest extends to prose poem sections of Angle of Yaw, a 2007 Kansas Notable Book. Here, Lerner also shows interest in technologically expanded sight. The term “angle of yaw” is a physics term for the tiny sideways shiftings of an object like a bullet or airplane as it moves forward through its line of travel. This only can be observed from perspective of great distance, possible through optical aids. The poet, then, becomes a voyeur with infinite personal interactions to sort. He lives in not the classical age of art nor the modern nor postmodern. His is a land of fast, flattened social interactions, a hyper-industrial age where any human experience, not just labor, can be sold on E-bay.

This prose poem objectively classifies contemporary art forms. Like a wheel stuck in snow, the narrator defines art in relationship to its public context. The poem progresses from static images, painting and sculpture, to more dynamic ones. The dictionary-like tone reinforces the theme of art’s removal from spiritual experience.

From ANGLE OF YAW

If it hangs from the wall, it's a painting. If it rests on the floor, it's a sculpture. If it's very big or very small, it's conceptual. If it forms part of the wall, if it forms part of the floor, it's architecture. If you have to buy a ticket, it's modern. If you are already inside it and you have to pay to get out of it, it's more modern. If you can be inside it without paying, it's a trap. If it moves, it's outmoded. If you have to look up, it's religious. If you have to look down, it's realistic. If it's been sold, it's site-specific. If, in order to see it, you have to pass through a metal detector, it's public.

Education: Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, where he graduated from Topeka High School in 1997. At Brown University he earned a BA in Political Theory (2001) and an MFA in Poetry (2003).
Career: Lerner has published two books of poetry from Copper Canyon Press: The Lichtenberg Figures (2004, Hayden Carruth Prize) and Angle of Yaw (2006), which was nominated for a National Book Award. He has taught at California College of the Arts, Oakland, and now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh writing program. Since 2003, he has co-published No: A Journal of the Arts, a semiannual magazine of poetry, art and criticism. He also edits poetry for Critical Quarterly.

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©2009 Denise Low AAPP 40 ©2006 Ben Lerner Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon)

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT # 39: DONALD WARREN LEVERING (1949 - )

Don Levering grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and for many years has lived in Santa Fe. His poetry braids together myth and the natural world, but unevenly. His poems are questions more than answers. As guest poet for the online Academy of American Poets forum, he described writing verse: “To straddle and ride the two-headed horse of poetry: one wants rhythm, the other compression.” This suggests the tension in his writing—the ongoing rhythm is studded with medallions of lightning-quick stories. His collaged images seem familiar, but he arranges them into illogical sequences.

The poem “Spider” suggests the urban myth of a person, perhaps someone like yourself, waking up with a spider in your mouth. It also suggests the Southwestern Indigenous people’s Spider Woman, who spins cosmic stories into realities. Just as this image of the “divine spider” becomes substantial, the poet turns you, or himself, into a marionette puppet tangled in strings pulled by an unseen puppeteer. The narrator is a helpless victim of a divorce, and then a victim of a larger web. The word “marrying” becomes another way of saying “entrapping.” The last part of the poem is a paradox, an unexpected twist. The shadows and dust and spider’s spinning all continue despite personal tragedy. The narrator focuses on the spider’s legs, mouth, and ability to spin silk—and he himself becomes spider-like, the “joyful” singer of this poem.

SPIDER To make a joyful sound, just let the divine spider climb out of your mouth and go about its business tying knots around your life. So you’re a marionette, you still can feel yourself dancing no matter who’s pulling the strings. Even as your divorce decree is signed, the spider goes on marrying you to corners of household dust. Eight legs, a ravenous mouth, and the yen to spin silk in shadows.Who wouldn’t sing?

Education: Don Levering was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. He received a BA in English (Baker University, 1971); studied at the University of Kansas and Lewis and Clark College; and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green University (1978).
Career: Levering’s full-length books of poetry are Outcroppings From Navajoland (Navajo Community College Press 1985), Horsetail (Woodley Memorial Press 2003), and Whose Body (Sunstone Press 2007). He has published poems in five chapbooks and many anthologies and journals. Levering was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in poetry, a finalist for the John Ciardi Prize, and won first place in the Quest for Peace Writing Contest.
________________________________________________________________________________©2009 Denise Low AAPP 39 ©2008 Donald Levering “Spider” in Whose Body (Sunstone Press)

William S. Burroughs Remembered Video

On Aug. 2 the Bourgeois Pig in Lawrence hosted a memorial reading for the 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch's publication. The 1950s legal battle over censorship changed the course of United States publication freedoms. Some of the people who knew Burroughs best were at the Aug. 2 reading, including James Grauerholz and Wayne Propst. Wayne played a loop of his home movies of William; some of his artworks were on display; Susie Ashline and Dalton Howard played; and some commemorative vodka & colas were drunk. Diane W. Pinegar shared her photos, and Wayne Propst and T.F. Pecore Weso consented to some interviews.

I recorded some of this event, and, with the help of Carol Burns of Ironwood Films, made a 22 min. version. There is a clip posted at: http://deniselow.wordpress.com/video-projects/ . Copies of the entire project are available through mammothpubs@hotmail.com or at Quimby's in Chicago; Raven & Oread in Lawrence.

I also recommend Wayne Propst's footage at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il3317LLbwY and Yony Leyser's trailer for "William S. Burroughs: A Man Within"at http://www.burroughsthemovie.com/ . In person, Burroughs was brilliant, in conversation working out ideas with axes going multiple directions. If one were a friend, he had exquisite, sensitive manners. All of our lives are different because of him.

Small Literary Press Mammoth Publications Rolls Out New Titles

My husband Thomas Weso, and I have a small press, Mammoth Publications, which is presenting a number of book events this fall:

1. Aug. 30 Sunday 4 pm Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, poet laureate of Kansas, performs poems and songs from her new book/CD LANDED, with co-lyricist and outstanding musician Kelley Hunt, at the Lawrence Public Library. Dinner on your own afterwards at Local Burger.

2. Sept. 4 We Should Have Come by Water: Poems by Robert Day, a fine press (handset type on fine paper) chapbook with prints by Kathy Jankus (representend by the Strecker-Nelson Gallery in Manhattan), limited edition! Signing party details to be announced). Robert Day received his MFA in poetry, but is better known as a prose writer. This is his first publication of poetry.

3. The White-Skin Deer: Hoopa Stories (signing & reading in Oct.) by Elizabeth Schultz

4. We are reprinting E. Donald Two-Rivers’ 2003 book Powwows, Fat Cats, & Other Indian Tales, late August

5. And we also will be publishing the collection of Ad Astra Poetry Project electronic broadsides, a Kansas poetry anthology with commentary by Denise Low, in cooperation with Washburn’s Center for Kansas Studies.

Advance copies of these books are available through www.mammothpublications.com or in Lawrence: the Raven Bookstore and Oread Bookstore.

Denise Low, former Ks. Poet Laureate

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT # 38: SERINA ALLISON HEARN (1957 - )

Allison Hearn has been an active member of the poetry scene in Northeast Kansas for the last decade. She brings a traveler’s experience to her writing, as she was born in Trinidad and is descended from Portuguese, Italian, African, British, and Chinese families. Besides her original home in Trinidad, she has lived in London, New York, Toronto, Princeton, and, since 1996, Lawrence. Her formal training is in art and design.

Hearn has written intermittently since she was a girl, she told a Lawrence Journal World reporter (2002), and she relates to the Kansas landscape because of its embodiment of time: "Kansas is the floor of an ancient sea." In her writings, she lives amidst sea stones, family stories, and Victorian houses, which she restores for a living. In “Yearly Restoration,” an Ad Astra Poetry Contest winner, she delights in the names of commercial house paints: “Morning Mist,” “Electric-Pink,” “Evocative Sunlight,” and “”Frosted-Hawthorn.” These are her present-day layerings of experience over an 1850s frame house. So she participates in history, as she heals damage to “kicked-in doors.” This renewal becomes its own shade, “Good-As-New.” The narrator suggests the “frat-boy parties” that recently ended and other stories, but this is a lyrical poem about sealing in the present, as though it could last through all years.

YEARLY RESTORATIONI bought a bucket of Morning-Mistand painted the windows open.Electric-Pink that splattered the floorwas patiently scraped with razor and ragsuntil the oak grain shone.Evocative-Sunlight in multiple layershid the bruise marks on the walls.Two emergency blankets of Ivory-Coasttenderly covered, mended, kicked-in-doors.Frosted-Hawthorn soothed in cross stitch brush strokesgraffiti etchings from drunken KU frat-boy parties.The painted Victorian,built by 1850s Lawrence-Kansas pioneersstood, patiently, waiting for its wounds to heal.Next morning I brought a gallonof Good-As-Newand sealed the front porch done.

Education: Allison Hearn was born and raised in Trinidad, where she graduated from high school. She attended St Martin's School of Art, London.
Career: Hearn has published poems in journals such as Coal City Review, I-70 and others. She published Dreaming the Bronze Girl (Mid-America Press 2002), a Kansas City Star Notable Book, and a second book is ready for publication. She has worked as a writer, illustrator, and fashion designer in Trinidad and London. She writes poetry and renovates Victorian houses in Lawrence.
________________________________________________________________________________©2009 Denise Low AAPP 38 ©2009 Serina Allison Hearn “Atlas of My Birth” ©2008 Denise Low, photo