Poetry Gift Guide 2011

THE POETRY GIFT GUIDE 2011

It’s that time again. I just watched the last leaf fall from the sugar maple in my backyard, so I know it’s time to start thinking about holiday gifts again. For me, and for so many like me, there could be no better gift than a book of poetry. Unfortunately, those who don’t read poetry themselves rarely know which book of poems to get for those who do, as can be evidenced by the Leonard Nimoy, Susan Polis Schultz, Jewel, and Treasured Verse books -- roughly the equivalent of holiday fruitcake -- on my shelves at home (please forgive me if you’re reading this and gave me one of those in the past). To help out those who know poetry-lovers but are not poetry-lovers themselves, every year I do a column suggesting certain titles from the year as ideal gift selections. I usually focus on the local and state level since there are other sources for broader selections.

This year I have two main recommendations. My favorite book of poems from 2011 is the very inexpensive anthology The Best of Poetry Hickory ($5, available at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory). Yes, I am the Founder of Poetry Hickory, but I would want this book more than any other from this year even if I weren’t. This anthology contains numerous poems that are my personal favorites of some of my favorite poets -- poems that I believe will be further anthologized and read for years to come. Robert Abbate’s “Ecco Homo,” Rhett Trull’s “The End of the Hour,” Tony Abbott’s “Blood Red of Late October,” Richard Allen Taylor’s “Playing Catch,” Ron Moran’s “A Blessing,” and others in this collection are among the best poems I’ve read in the last decade.

The single author collection of poetry I deem to be the best from this year is John Lane’s Abandoned Quarry: New & Selected Poems (Mercer University Press). Lane is widely known as an environmental writer, and these poems will not disappoint the reader looking for such work, but as they encompass Lane’s career they also dynamically explore the nature of humanity and the development of the individual. I have said of this collection that “among the thousands of books of poems I own, there is not a single one I will more often take from the shelf to reread.”

Now, for my many poet-friends whose new books I didn’t name in my two primary recommendations, please note that I also didn’t include my own new book, Something Knows the Moment (available at Taste Full Beans or through Main Street Rag), which I like a great deal but don’t feel measures up to the anthology or Lane’s collection. In the event your poetry lover already owns those two books, and mine, here are some others from this year that I strongly recommend:
If Words Could Save Us, by Tony Abbott (Lorimer Press);
Spill, by Malaika King Albrecht (Main Street Rag);
How Language Is Lost, by Celisa Steele (Emrys Press);
The Jane Poems, by Ron Moran (Clemson University Press); and
An Innocent in the House of the Dead, by Joanna Catherine Scott (Main Street Rag).

If you need additional choices, check out the available titles on the websites for NC presses like Main Street Rag, Lorimer Press, Press 53, and Jacar Press.

NC Writers' Network Fall Conference Open for Registration

NC Writers’ Network Fall Conference Open for Registration

One of NC’s largest annual writers’ events, the NC Writers’ Network Fall Conference, is now open for registration. The conference will take place this year November 18 through 20 at the Double Tree Hilton in Asheville, just a block from the entrance to Biltmore Estate.

The keynote address of this year’s conference will be given Friday night by award-winning novelist Silas House. Another highlight will be Saturday night’s performance by Asheville Poetry Review Founding Editor Keith Flynn and his band The Holy Men.

Master classes in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction will be offered by Sebastian Matthews, Tommy Hays, and Tony Abbott. Five workshop sessions, including 18 workshops in all spread across Saturday and Sunday, will feature instruction in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama from such well-known writers as Asheville’s Katherine Soniat and Holly Iglesias, Appalachian State professor Joseph Bathanti, novelist Ellyn Bache, nature writer George Ellison, and poets Scott Owens and Nancy Simpson.

A Marketing Mart with publishers and booksellers, Laura Hope-Gill, Nicki Leone, Stacy Hope Jones, and Laine Cunningham, will provide writers with an opportunity to create or refine an effective plan to pitch, promote, and sell their current, upcoming, or proposed books. Thirty-minute critique sessions with Bache, Cunningham, Rosemary Royston, or Jan Parker will provide in-depth literary critiques of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. And the Manuscript Mart will allow authors to pitch their manuscripts and get feedback from publishers, editors, and agents from Algonquin Books, Press 53, FinePrint Literary Management, John F. Blair Publishers, or Judith Ehrlich Literary Management.

As always numerous exhibitor tables will give participants the chance to chat with publishers, literary journals, support organizations, and other friends of writers.

Registration material and more information on the conference faculty can be found at www.ncwriters.org. All workshops and classes have limited capacity, and the conference is typically attended by several hundred participants, so early registration is important.

A Gathering of Poets

A Gathering of Poets, April 9, Community Arts Cafe in Winston-Salem. This looks like a poetry event not to be missed. 4 workshops with people like Fred Chappell, Kay Byer, Debra Kaufman and Joseph Mills! Here is the link: http://www.press53.com/GatheringofPoets2011.html


SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 8 AM - 6 PM
SPECIAL OPEN MIC EVENING, 7:30-9:30 PM, FEATURING A CAPPELLA POETRY BY FLEUR-DE-LISA
Held at The Community Arts Café, Fourth & Spruce, Winston-Salem, NC

SCHEDULE AND WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS

Check-in & Continental Breakfast: 8 - 9 a.m.

First Morning Workshop Block: 9 - 10:15 a.m.
These workshops will be offered again during the First Afternoon Workshop Block: 1:30 - 2:45 p.m.

Debra Kaufman: Polishing the Lines (Limited to 30 poets)
We write poetry to discover something about ourselves and our world, and to share what we learn with readers. We will look closely at how to strengthen our poems by focusing on the ways precise imagery and musicality in our lines reveal a poem’s intended meaning. We will explore ways to refine our images and enhance our musical
phrasing to better reveal to ourselves and our readers the deeper truths inside our poems. Please bring a poem you would like to work on.

Alex Grant: Compression in Poetry (Limited to 30 poets)
This workshop focuses on practical, tangible methods and techniques to help you strip down and polish your poems. We will focus on specifics, before reading and discussing poems which exemplify this approach, then working on your own poems. Participants will take away practical, understandable methods they can immediately
apply to both new poems and work under revision.

Joseph Mills: What’s in a Name? (Limited to 30 Poets)
Margaret Mitchell considered naming her story Tomorrow Is Another Day and Tote the Weary Load. F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested Under the Red White and Blue and The High Bouncing Lover to his publisher. None of these phrases has entered popular culture; instead we have Gone with the Wind and The Great Gatsby. Titles are not simply handy ways to catalogue works; they can be crucial elements. Without the title “Station in a Metro,” the reader would have little idea what Ezra Pound’s poem was about. In this workshop, we’ll consider the importance of a variety of titles from books, paintings, poems, and songs, and we’ll explore ways to develop intriguing, effective titles for our own work.

Terri Kirby Erickson: Marketing Yourself and Your Work (Limited to 30 Poets)
Google "Terri Kirby Erickson" and you will find her everywhere, from her personal blog, to online lit mags and book blogs. In 2010, her poetry collection, Telling Tales of Dusk, reached #23 on the Poetry Foundation's list of Contemporary Best Sellers thanks to the endorsement of nationally syndicated columnist Sharon Randall in her column entitled, “Best Reads.” No matter where you are in your writing process, it’s never too early to start selling yourself and your work. The difference between being an unknown poet and a widely read poet is effective
marketing. In this workshop, we’ll examine various methods and strategies to get you and your poetry noticed by readers, editors and publishers.


Second Morning Workshop Block: 10:30 - 11:45 a.m.
These workshops will be offered again during the Second Afternoon Workshop Block: 3:00 - 4:15 p.m.

Fred Chappell: Master Workshop (Limited to 30 Poets)

Kathryn Stripling Byer: Studio-style Master Class (Limited to 50 Poets)
In this studio-style master class, former North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer will select poems written by four poets in attendance to read and discuss in a studio-style forum with the four selected poets and then everyone in attendance. Attendees may submit one poem for consideration no later than March 15. Ms. Byer will select four poems for discussion, to be announced at the beginning of the master class.

Valerie Nieman: Every Picture Tells a Poem (Limited to 30 Poets)
Ekphrasis is a marriage of imaginations, that of the visual artist and the writer. In this poetry workshop, Valerie Nieman will discuss noted works, such as poems by Rilke, Auden, and Fred Chappell, and will take advantage of the Community Arts Café’s Gallery of the Arts to lead writing exercises using contemporary art as the source for new poems.


Other Important Times and Events

Lunch Break: 11:45 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. (Buffet lunch provided)

Faculty Reading With Special Guest Poet Isabel Zuber: 4:30 - 5:30 p.m.

Closing Remarks: 5:30 - 6 p.m.

Dinner on Your Own: 6-7:30 p.m.

Open Mic Reading with A Cappella Poetry by Fleur-de-Lisa: 7:30 - 9:30 p.m.
($5 cover, Free to Gathering of Poets Attendees.) Poets wishing to read must place his or her name in a bowl. Readers will be determined by a drawing at two different times during the evening. If the poet called is not present, another name will be drawn. Sixteen poets will be selected to read during this event. Each poet will have three minutes to read, and this will be strictly enforced to be fair to all poets.

Registration:
To register, visit the registration page.
Check box to select your desired workshops.
If workshop is full, you may check the "waitlist" box and you will be placed on the waitlist in the order you signed up.
Waitlists will be cleared if space becomes available.

Press 53 reserves the right to make last-minute changes due to cancelations by faculty. If a cancelation by faculty occurs, we will do our best to replace the workshop with an equally beneficial workshop, but no guarantees can be made.

To Register, click here.

Questions can be emailed to Kevin Watson at kevin@press53.com or by calling Kevin at 336-414-5599.

Review of Joseph Bathanti's "Land of Amnesia"

Building on Ruin: Song of the South

Review
Land of Amnesia, by Joseph Bathanti
Press 53, 2009 (ISBN: 9780981628073)
83 pages, $12

Those of us who were born and raised in the South and who have paused on occasion to reflect on the trajectory of the South have never doubted the existence of either resurrection or reincarnation. We’ve been quite comfortable with the apparent contradictions of the Phoenix myth and the questionable logic of generations who, if Schliemann got it right at Troy, build again and again atop and from ruin. Joseph Bathanti is not, in fact, a native son, but he has lived here long enough and worked long enough amid those masters of renaissance and redefinition, prisoners, orphans, and community college students, to recognize the persistence of the pattern on personal, political and social levels.

The truth is, nothing ever dies completely here. Historically, the South in its apparent resistance to change has been resistant primarily to governance, but one law the South has perfectly abided is the law of conservation. This is the truth Bathanti explores, exploits, and lays bare in his wonderful new collection of poems Land of Amnesia. Bathanti’s appreciation for the stubborn resilience of Southern ways in the broadest understanding of that concept is apparent in the title poem where the speaker states: “at the end / I’d beg to cross one last time / the Rocky River into Anson County.” It is here that he imagines “The old bay, Star, dead two decades, / canters in the pasture” and that he declares “It is here, my best beloved, / we’ll build on ruin.” It is again apparent in “How to Bury a Dog” where we’re given multiple images of the duplicity of persistence and transformation that has marked the history of the South:

You won’t cuss through three feet
until you spark off a shelf

of sediment rock that’s been making
since the Yadkin lived here.

Resist the temptation
to wrap him in cerements.

Face him east.
Let the earth do its work.

Bathanti is engaged in these poems in the craft of preservation, of saving moments, ideas, impressions, and he is particularly good at it because he clearly loves not only the world he preserves but also the tools of his craft: words. These poems are so carefully and precisely written, each word the exact right word, that the reader feels they could not have been written any other way and gladly returns to them again and again to enjoy yet another connotation and the resultant implication, perhaps the same reasons we dwell so long on the particulars of history. This precision of image and word choice is illustrated in the poem “Running a Group Home,” where the reader is struck by the chilling poignancy of the proximity of a group home with certain other elements of the Southern economy:

We’d stagger naked out of bed
and go to our only window,
look out over Roosevelt Boulevard.
On the other side was a dyeing
and finishing plant; then beyond it--
. . . . . . . . . .
the Union County Prison Camp.

I have seen this same love of words, this same careful, precise phrasing recently in several books from Press 53, specifically those by Linda Annas Ferguson, Joseph Mills, and Terri Kirby Erickson. It is an admirable talent on the part of editors Kevin Watson and Tom Lombardo to recognize and encourage such sublimity among the poets they publish.

The not-so-secret message in this book, and perhaps in all of the recent Press 53 releases, is that in the quest for “the improbability . . . / that legs with hearts to prompt them / may keep lurching, decade upon decade, / chaplet upon chaplet, toward salvation” (“Running”), memory is vital, for as long there is memory, there is the chance to build on the past, and clearly as long as Bathanti is writing, we can defy “the great sorrow of forgetting” (“The Sorrow of Forgetting”) and circumvent the land of amnesia. Bathanti clearly shows in these poems that you don’t have to be from the South to know what to make of a ruined thing, but it helps to spend some time there.

Give Poetry

Musings for November 26

Give Poetry

Thursday was Thanksgiving, so that means we have officially entered the Christmas season, the season, among other things, of shopping and giving. This year, why not do something a little different? Why not, instead of giving the usual mass-produced, slickly-marketed, everyone-has-to-have-one, pre-wrapped, department store or Amazon.com, soon-to-be-forgotten or consumed gift, give something unique, personal, and long-lasting? Why not give poetry? After all, how many bottles of wine, how many desktop trinkets, how many boxes of gourmet popcorn or Godiva chocolates does one person need (okay there is really no limit on that last one)?

North Carolina is a great place to give poetry. Lately, it seems North Carolina is a hotbed for poets, with more new books and more successful small presses popping up every day. But you won’t find most of these books in Barnes and Noble or on Amazon, and even if you did, buying them there would depersonalize the process a bit. It would be so much better to buy them directly from the author (most of whom have websites of their own) or the small press that has worked so hard to give the poet a chance to be read. So, here is a rundown on some of the best books of poetry published in NC this year and where you can find them.

Main Street Rag has quickly become the busiest publisher of poetry in NC. Visiting the press’s website at www.mainstreetrag.com will give you access to a host of excellent work by poets you could easily meet by attending a local reading. My favorite recent MSR offerings include Paul Hostovsky’s Bending the Notes, Pat Riviere-Seel’s The Serial Killer’s Daughter, Irene Honeycutt’s Before the Light Changes, and Sara Claytor’s Howling on Red Dirt Roads.

Another rapidly growing local press is Press 53 (www.press53.com). My favorites from this Winston-Salem press include Linda Annas Ferguson’s Dirt Sandwich, Joseph Bathanti’s Land of Amnesia, and Joseph Mills’ Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for variety, for poetry by multiple authors rather than one, you might order Bay Leaves, the Poetry Council of North Carolina awards anthology, available at http://www.oldmp.com/poetrycouncilofnc/, or Pine Song, the North Carolina Poetry Society’s awards anthology, from http://www.sleepycreek.org/poetry/. Or you could purchase a subscription to any of the numerous literary journals produced in NC: Iodine Poetry Journal, Tar River Poetry, Cavewall, or Main Street Rag, just to name a few.

Finally, if you’re buying a gift for someone you know is interested in writing poetry, consider a gift membership in one of the statewide organizations that support writers through networking, conferences, and newsletters highlighting opportunities for development, publication and sharing. Or make a charitable donation in the name of your gift-recipient to one of these organizations. The North Carolina Writers Network and the North Carolina Poetry Society are both well-established, non-profit agencies whose purpose is to help writers and readers in the state connect.

Review of Terry Kirby Erickson's "Telling Tales of Dusk"

Review (First Published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)
Telling Tales of Dusk
by Terri Kirby Erickson
Press 53 (2009) 107 pages, $12.00
ISBN: 9780982441633, Poetry

What do a Ferris wheel, a motel sign, a roadside diner, and a bay window have in common? In the poetry of Terri Kirby Erickson, they are all sources of light, literal means and transformative symbols of salvation in the poems “County Fair,” “Star Lite Motel,” “Betty’s Roadside Diner,” and “Saving Grace,” respectively.

And perhaps salvation is what poetry is all about, redeeming the finer details of life by imbuing them with the value of memory, finding meaning in what we might otherwise all too easily deem meaningless. As Williams helped us realize just how much did depend upon a red wheelbarrow, Erickson finds meaning in how “Queen Anne’s lace dandies up a ditch” (“Queen Anne’s Lace”), in how an old woman’s moaning is like the wind “when it whips / around a house, rattling windows, / searching for cracks,” (“Assisted Living”) searching, in other words, for ways in, much the same way this woman searches for her way into another world, one of peace, reunion, and clarity.

The speaker of that poem in her unforgettable search for what is inexplicably missing from her world is only the first of a number of remarkable portraits gathered in this collection. There is also the lonely man in “The Speckled Trout Café,” the illiterate preacher who builds his sermons on the scripture read to him by his less faithful wife “the words warmed / by her breath and scattered into his / brain like dandelion seeds” in “Papa Never Learned to Read,” and the blues guitarist in “Delta Blues” who, the speaker comments, “should roll a stone / over hurt that deep, but” instead lifts “it up like Lazarus for anybody / lucky enough to listen.”

These portraits and simple symbols of salvation add up to a memorable second collection of work on their own, but the reader should be careful not to be fooled by the apparent simplicity of these poems, for just as still waters run deepest, the greatest revelations are often expressed in the fewest words. I, for one, am a fan of understatement, something often achieved in poetry through the metaphysical, poems which, as Dickinson encouraged, “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In “Smoke and Mirrors,” for example, Erickson doesn’t spell out her warning of how a teleological obsession with the prize indiscriminately dissolves all else from our focus, good and bad, superfluous and necessary. Instead she shows only how the call of a longed-for boy affects the perception of a young girl: “The boy / I was talking to dissolved, tablet-like, / in the watered down scenery of the things / that were not you.” Similarly, in “Daisy Chain,” she presents the image of four little girls “daisy chained” to their mother to illustrate “belonging so / palpable, it beat like heart / on the pavement.”

Just as these poems are satisfying in their surface-level imagery but tricky in their larger or deeper implications, so too is the book as a whole. There are plenty of poems that seem trivial, merely descriptive, but taken together, they are subtly effective, quietly teaching the reader to reach deeper into the everyday image to recognize and value significance. In other words, they lull you into such comfort that when you finally begin to cry while reading “Blue Hydrangeas,” you realize the poems have taught you the empathy needed to feel this deeply for someone you’ve never known and that you’re not crying just for the speaker of this poem, who reminds us that as long as we are able to love anything our capacity to love ourselves remains, but for all the speakers of all the poems and the wonderfully vital world in which they live, the same world you realize in which you live.

Review of Linda Annas Ferguson's "Dirt Sandwich"

Review (First Published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)
Dirt Sandwich
by Linda Annas Ferguson
Press 53 (2009) 81 pages, $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-9824416-6-4, Poetry

For poets, every word is a first word, still full of the power and freshness of creation as they struggle without the tools of logic or reason to “put it right.” In her poem “Breech Birth,” Linda Annas Ferguson captures that sense of urgent discovery in the lines, “I had a hard time getting the beginning right, / . . . no measure / for what is true . . . / an abrupt breath rushing / into me . . . filling / my body with a sudden urge to cry.” She repeats the sentiment in “The First Word,” a poem about Adam’s love of words:

He strained to fill his tongue with every thought,
unable to identify the pleasure, raw
with newness and power, mouth parting--
their genesis and tone feeling true.

Such is the reverie of Ferguson’s fifth collection of poetry, Dirt Sandwich, newly out from Press 53. In one poem after another in this collection, Ferguson embraces (a frequently repeated word in these poems) the power of words as a means of embracing life. In “Genesis,” we hear again of the vitality of language for Adam:

Words lived in his bones,
touched his tongue, still wild,
a slow burning freedom
inside every sound.

How he longed for more words
to love, thought they could save
him from the wet falling sky,
from red flaming sunsets,
from all that hadn’t come yet.

Whether it is Adam speaking or a woman reflecting on her own audacity in the act of embracing language and all its potential as a child, the theme of language as a tool of exploration and knowledge is the same, as in these lines from “Innocence:”

When I was three, I could write
my name, scrawled it on doors,
walls, furniture, floors.

When Mama took my crayons,
I fingered it in the cold sweat
of windowpanes, paused to dot
the “I,” an eyehole to the moon.

**************************

I can hear my mother’s “Don’t--

touch,” as I poked
at splintering fissures of frost
on the other side of the window--

and all that enchanted me
about the broken.

As these last lines suggest, the poet’s love of the world is not limited to all that we normally think of as good. Rather, she has a more even-handed curiosity about and appreciation of all experience, all that life has to offer, all that living uncovers. Seamlessly, the next poem, “Topless Dancer,” begins her stubborn exploration of the forbidden and the tragic:

She embraces her own body,
cups a glitter-laden breast,
a golden moon. Dance
is the way she speaks,
embodies what she can’t say.

Such juxtaposition of the mythic, the individual and the personal from one poem to the next, or even within the same poem, is characteristic of the collection and illustrates the correctness of Jung’s concept of archetypes and the reason Confessionalism still works in poetry. This practice of relating the individual to the mythic, the personal to the universal as a means of deepening one’s experience of life, granting greater meaning to the seemingly insignificant details of our days, and revealing the still-relevant humanity behind the sometimes all-too-distant stories that represent us as a species is again made clear in “Rainbows Are Real:”

Once I saw a rainbow while flying,
looking down from the sky, not an arc,
but a complete circle, the plane’s silhouette
in the center. Pilots call it a “glory.”

I wonder if this was the way one first appeared
to God, His magnified shadow hovering
over muddy land and multitudes of dead bodies.

And so it continues throughout the book, each poem teaching us to reach deeper into the joys, the sorrows, and the mere details of life to find meaning, to understand that pressed between birth and death is the stuff of life “alive with dying” (“The Origin of Entropy”), the stuff of our very own dirt sandwich and to remember, in the words of poet Galway Kinnell ,that there is “still time, / for one who can groan / to sing, / for one who can sing to be healed.” It is a story everyone knows but few pause to contemplate. Thank you, Linda Annas Ferguson, for helping us be aware that we live.

NC Writers' Network HIts the Beach for 2009 Fall Conference

Musings for October 29

North Carolina Writers’ Network Hits the Beach for 2009 Fall Conference

More than 300 writers, editors, and literary agents will descend upon Wrightsville Beach November 20-22 for the annual North Carolina Writers’ Network Fall Conference, one of the country’s largest conferences dedicated to the art and business of writing. Those in attendance, however, won’t all be professionals in the book business. Sure, bestselling novelist Cassandra King will be there but so will high school and college students interested in writing and so will non-writing fans of Ms. King and the other writers giving workshops, readings, and seminars. In short, the conference is open to anyone.

The conference will be held at the Holiday Inn SunSpree Resort in Wrightsville Beach, and registration is now open at the Network’s website, www.ncwriters.org. In all, more than 30 writers and editors, including such notables as Anthony Abbott, Ellyn Bache, Philip Gerard, Marianne Gingher, Peter Makuck, and Mark Smith-Soto, will lead workshops, master classes, and panel discussions on topics ranging from finding the form in free verse to how to write how to books. There will also be seminars on screenwriting, food writing, using dialect, and selling one’s work to agents and editors. There will be opportunities for developing writers to work one-on-one with book professionals through the Manuscript Mart and Critique Service features of the conference. Ben George, editor of UNCW’s literary journal Ecotone will share tips on submitting to literary magazines; Emily Smith, director of The Publishing Laboratory at UNCW, will teach a workshop on designing covers for books; and Alice Osborn will show you how to use Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Linkedin, YouTube and other social media to promote your writing.

Agents and editors at the conference will include representatives from The Steinberg Agency, John F. Blair Publishers, University of North Carolina Press, Novello Festival Press, and Press 53. Additionally, dozens of authors and presses will have their sometimes hard to find books available for purchase and signing by the authors, and a variety of literary and arts organizations will have informative exhibits about the programs they make available for the NC arts community.

And, of course, there will be the beach and the beautiful mix of old and new, tradition and innovation that is Wilmington, NC. Where better to find inspiration and motivation than in a room full of writers soaking up the perfect blend of nature and culture?