Here is the description of a 6-hour workshop I'm giving in Asheville on Saturday 1/28:
From Inspiration to Publication: Poetry and the Writing Process with Scott Owens
Beginning and experienced poets will learn new methods of writing, revising and publishing poetry. Class discussion will focus on the writing process, from generative strategies to the revision process and beyond. Participants may bring up to 3 poems to the class for review. Owens is the author of 10 collections of poetry, and editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review. He is Vice President of the Poetry Council of N.C., and Founder of “Poetry Hickory”.
Meets Saturday, 10-4 pm. $75/$70 members.
I still need a couple more participants. Please help spread the news for me.
Register at http://www.twwoa.org/
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Ekphrastic Opportunity
GET YOUR POEM ON FOR A GOOD CAUSE
Hickory area writers and would-be writers are again invited to participate in this year’s Aroma of Art Fundraiser to benefit ALFA (AIDS Leadership Foothills-area Alliance), the Flynn Home of Hickory, and the Women’s Resource Center.
Aroma of Art consists of a month-long exhibit of works of art donated by local artists and auctioned off at the event’s Grand Finale on March 1 from 5:30 to 8:30 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse on the lower floor of the Hickory Furniture Mart. Poets can participate by writing poems based on or inspired by the donated works of art which will be on display at the Furniture Mart beginning February 2. A Kick-Off Party will be held that day from 6 to 8 at the Mart.
To be eligible, poems must be submitted to CVCC creative writing instructor and Founder of Poetry Hickory, Scott Owens, no later than 5:00 PM, February 14. Poems can be submitted by email to asowens1@yahoo.com or dropped off at Taste Full Beans in downtown Hickory. Poems must fit on one side of a 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper, and the submission should include the writer’s name, email address, and phone number, as well as the work of art on which the poem is based.
Entries will be judged by a panel of local writers. Up to 10 poems will be selected to be framed and hung as part of the exhibit for the rest of the month. Of those, 3 will be selected to be read aloud by the authors at the Grand Finale. Selected poems may also be published in a local newspaper. At the Grand Finale, the poems selected for display will be presented along with the matching work of art to the winning bidder.
Hickory area writers and would-be writers are again invited to participate in this year’s Aroma of Art Fundraiser to benefit ALFA (AIDS Leadership Foothills-area Alliance), the Flynn Home of Hickory, and the Women’s Resource Center.
Aroma of Art consists of a month-long exhibit of works of art donated by local artists and auctioned off at the event’s Grand Finale on March 1 from 5:30 to 8:30 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse on the lower floor of the Hickory Furniture Mart. Poets can participate by writing poems based on or inspired by the donated works of art which will be on display at the Furniture Mart beginning February 2. A Kick-Off Party will be held that day from 6 to 8 at the Mart.
To be eligible, poems must be submitted to CVCC creative writing instructor and Founder of Poetry Hickory, Scott Owens, no later than 5:00 PM, February 14. Poems can be submitted by email to asowens1@yahoo.com or dropped off at Taste Full Beans in downtown Hickory. Poems must fit on one side of a 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper, and the submission should include the writer’s name, email address, and phone number, as well as the work of art on which the poem is based.
Entries will be judged by a panel of local writers. Up to 10 poems will be selected to be framed and hung as part of the exhibit for the rest of the month. Of those, 3 will be selected to be read aloud by the authors at the Grand Finale. Selected poems may also be published in a local newspaper. At the Grand Finale, the poems selected for display will be presented along with the matching work of art to the winning bidder.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Collaboration with Clayton Joe Young
Okay, so I lied. Two posts ago, I said I would have two new books out in 2012. I didn't know at the time that Clayton Joe Young was going to produce a book featuring his photos and my poems which will be on exhibit at the Bethlehem Branch of the Alexander County Library throughout February and March (reception from 5:30 - 7:00 on Feb 2) as part of "The Bethlehem Branch Library Exhibiting Artists Series", sponsored by the Bethlehem Friends of the Library and the Bethlehem Community Development Association.
But he did. And now the book is already out. And it's beautiful -- thanks in large part to Joe's photos. It is 62 pages long and features 29 of Joe's photos and 25 of my poems (13 of which are brand spanking new). It is called Country Roads: Travels Through Rural North Carolina. It would make a great gift or collectors' item. And is just a wonderful thing to look at. I, for one, can't stop staring at some of these photos.
It is also expensive (at least by my "poor poet's" standards). Which is why I've only ordered 10 paperbacks and 10 hardcovers to sell. I did get Joe to sign each copy, and I've signed them as well. If you'd like one, I would be glad to mail it out to you (my postage is a lot cheaper than the press's, and the ones you could get from them wouldn't be signed).
Paperbacks are $29.95; Hardcovers are $41.95. Add $4 for shipping and handling. Call me at 828-234-4266 to work out details, or mail a check to Scott Owens, 838 4th Ave. Dr. NW, Hickory, NC 28601, or I can give you paypal info if you want to go that route.
Here is a sample poem just to whet your appetite:
Without Affectation
What would you call it,
this color of the natural world,
brown leaves and dirt,
khaki-almost-blonde straw,
gray trunks of trees,
occasional green of moss and cedar,
all blended under winter's fast-moving,
blue-gray sky --
a muted impressionism --
charcoal, sepia, ochre,
memory, regret, contemplation --
a color your eyes try to filter out.
Or, you can preview the entire book at http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2850653.
I hope to see you at the reception, and let me know if I can send you a book beforehand.
But he did. And now the book is already out. And it's beautiful -- thanks in large part to Joe's photos. It is 62 pages long and features 29 of Joe's photos and 25 of my poems (13 of which are brand spanking new). It is called Country Roads: Travels Through Rural North Carolina. It would make a great gift or collectors' item. And is just a wonderful thing to look at. I, for one, can't stop staring at some of these photos.
It is also expensive (at least by my "poor poet's" standards). Which is why I've only ordered 10 paperbacks and 10 hardcovers to sell. I did get Joe to sign each copy, and I've signed them as well. If you'd like one, I would be glad to mail it out to you (my postage is a lot cheaper than the press's, and the ones you could get from them wouldn't be signed).
Paperbacks are $29.95; Hardcovers are $41.95. Add $4 for shipping and handling. Call me at 828-234-4266 to work out details, or mail a check to Scott Owens, 838 4th Ave. Dr. NW, Hickory, NC 28601, or I can give you paypal info if you want to go that route.
Here is a sample poem just to whet your appetite:
Without Affectation
What would you call it,
this color of the natural world,
brown leaves and dirt,
khaki-almost-blonde straw,
gray trunks of trees,
occasional green of moss and cedar,
all blended under winter's fast-moving,
blue-gray sky --
a muted impressionism --
charcoal, sepia, ochre,
memory, regret, contemplation --
a color your eyes try to filter out.
Or, you can preview the entire book at http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2850653.
I hope to see you at the reception, and let me know if I can send you a book beforehand.
Friday, December 2, 2011
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.
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.
Two New Books in 2012
I will have two new collections of poetry published in 2012. For One Who Knows How to Own Land, a collection of poems about growing up in rural South Carolina, was runner-up in the Future Cycle Press Book Competition and will be published by Future Cycle in March. Shadows Trail Them Home is a full-length version of the earlier collaboration with Pris Campbell, The Nature of Attraction. Shadows Trail Them Home more than doubles the size of Norman and Sara's story and creates what poet and critic Ron Moran calls a novel in poems. Shadows Trail Them Home will be published by Clemson University Press in October.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Review of Celisa Steele's "How Language Is Lost"
Review
by Scott Owens
HOW LANGUAGE IS LOST
Celisa Steele
Emrys Press, 2011
ISBN: 9780977351640
Sometimes funny, sometimes profound, the poems in Celisa Steele's debut collection, How Language Is Lost, are always full of surprises. Who, after all, would expect a villanelle on the words we use for men and women ("Consider the Chickens and Other Lessons on Sex and Sin"), or a prose poem on the creation of a national grammar police ("Sin Tax on Syntax Passes House by Narrow Margin"), or a metaphysical conceit that ends in either post-dinner or post-coital satiety ("She Loves the Sushi Chef Whose Name She Does Not Know"), or an ode comparing ping¬-pong to poetry: "most like a poem / this onomatopoetic game / with its spondaic name"?
Just as these poems demonstrate that Steele is comfortable and effective in both formal and free verse, they also demonstrate that she is equally comfortable with either humor or seriousness. In fact, she masterfully exhibits an insightful understanding of the coexistence of humor and gravity in many of the same situations, making it clear that vital truth often exists in the most mundane of human experiences, even those we primarily think of as funny. Such is the case in one of my favorite of these poems, "Al Considers the Fucking Holy Spirit," where the surprising (given the topic of consideration) profanity of the speaker belies the profundity of his thinking:
You got to go at it slant . . .
. . . It's like cursive, or some shit –
no block letters, can't be too plain or obvious,
got to trust your instincts,
your sub-fucking-conscious.
While this poem apparently deals with the quest for religious faith, the same lines could be written about poetry or love or luck. Anything worthwhile will always be somewhat ineffable.
Equally ineffable, or perhaps irreducible to any sort of simple statement, is the sense throughout these poems of the presence of loss and the importance of language in our daily lives. The brilliant title poem, for example, tells us of the indigenous Argentinean Abipon people who, succumbing to European/Christian influences and diseases "gave way to farming, kneeling in naves" and discovered "their own shamans couldn't shape shift anymore." And when the last speaker of the Abipon language lies dying, no one understands "her articulation of the world to come, / the world lost." Thus, Steele demonstrates that the tragedy of the death of a language, of lost words, is the loss of a perspective, the loss of an expression of an understanding of the world, which is finally what any language consists of.
The lost language this speaker mourns, however, is not just language of the cultural or anthropological sort. It is also the language that is lost when one loses a loved one, and the wasted or terminated opportunities for further meaningful emotional exchange that accompany such loss. This sort of lost language is addressed in "Emily Confesses, to the Pedicurist," in which the speaker, asked to cut her mother's nails, "quit", "failed. At the end, / just knelt beside her chair, too tired to pretend." And the sense of loss is further addressed in "Elegy for a Scarf Borrowed from a Mother Now Dead and Left on a Trolley Car in Budapest at Christmastime" and in "I Bought a New Car the Year My Mother Died."
Celisa Steele has indeed made a wonderful debut. These poems possess all of the qualities a reader could hope for in a book of poems: lyricism, humor, compression, depth of feeling and meaning, memorable imagery, precise language, and perhaps most importantly, one surprise after another. A very enjoyable read that leaves the reader wanting more.
by Scott Owens
HOW LANGUAGE IS LOST
Celisa Steele
Emrys Press, 2011
ISBN: 9780977351640
Sometimes funny, sometimes profound, the poems in Celisa Steele's debut collection, How Language Is Lost, are always full of surprises. Who, after all, would expect a villanelle on the words we use for men and women ("Consider the Chickens and Other Lessons on Sex and Sin"), or a prose poem on the creation of a national grammar police ("Sin Tax on Syntax Passes House by Narrow Margin"), or a metaphysical conceit that ends in either post-dinner or post-coital satiety ("She Loves the Sushi Chef Whose Name She Does Not Know"), or an ode comparing ping¬-pong to poetry: "most like a poem / this onomatopoetic game / with its spondaic name"?
Just as these poems demonstrate that Steele is comfortable and effective in both formal and free verse, they also demonstrate that she is equally comfortable with either humor or seriousness. In fact, she masterfully exhibits an insightful understanding of the coexistence of humor and gravity in many of the same situations, making it clear that vital truth often exists in the most mundane of human experiences, even those we primarily think of as funny. Such is the case in one of my favorite of these poems, "Al Considers the Fucking Holy Spirit," where the surprising (given the topic of consideration) profanity of the speaker belies the profundity of his thinking:
You got to go at it slant . . .
. . . It's like cursive, or some shit –
no block letters, can't be too plain or obvious,
got to trust your instincts,
your sub-fucking-conscious.
While this poem apparently deals with the quest for religious faith, the same lines could be written about poetry or love or luck. Anything worthwhile will always be somewhat ineffable.
Equally ineffable, or perhaps irreducible to any sort of simple statement, is the sense throughout these poems of the presence of loss and the importance of language in our daily lives. The brilliant title poem, for example, tells us of the indigenous Argentinean Abipon people who, succumbing to European/Christian influences and diseases "gave way to farming, kneeling in naves" and discovered "their own shamans couldn't shape shift anymore." And when the last speaker of the Abipon language lies dying, no one understands "her articulation of the world to come, / the world lost." Thus, Steele demonstrates that the tragedy of the death of a language, of lost words, is the loss of a perspective, the loss of an expression of an understanding of the world, which is finally what any language consists of.
The lost language this speaker mourns, however, is not just language of the cultural or anthropological sort. It is also the language that is lost when one loses a loved one, and the wasted or terminated opportunities for further meaningful emotional exchange that accompany such loss. This sort of lost language is addressed in "Emily Confesses, to the Pedicurist," in which the speaker, asked to cut her mother's nails, "quit", "failed. At the end, / just knelt beside her chair, too tired to pretend." And the sense of loss is further addressed in "Elegy for a Scarf Borrowed from a Mother Now Dead and Left on a Trolley Car in Budapest at Christmastime" and in "I Bought a New Car the Year My Mother Died."
Celisa Steele has indeed made a wonderful debut. These poems possess all of the qualities a reader could hope for in a book of poems: lyricism, humor, compression, depth of feeling and meaning, memorable imagery, precise language, and perhaps most importantly, one surprise after another. A very enjoyable read that leaves the reader wanting more.
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