Denise Low Postings

Beloved IAIA Prof Arthur Sze Named 2025-26 U.S. Poet Laureate

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:05:00 -0500

The Library of Congress announced the appointment of Arthur Sze as the nation’s 25th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2025-2026 on Sept. 15. The winner of the Library’s 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, Sze will begin his laureateship with a reading of his work on Thursday, Oct. 9, in the Library’s historic Coolidge Auditorium, and free tickets will be available on loc.gov starting Sept. 18. During his term as Poet Laureate, Sze, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, plans to have a special focus on translating poetry originally written in other languages.

“Last fall the Library of Congress honored Arthur Sze with our Bobbitt Prize, for lifetime achievement in poetry; this fall we are thrilled to bring him back to the Library as the nation’s poet laureate,” said Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Randolph Newlen. “His poetry is distinctly American in its focus on the landscapes of the Southwest, where he has lived for many years, as well as in its great formal innovation. Like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Sze forges something new from a range of traditions and influences – and the result is a poetry that moves freely throughout time and space.”

A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2012–2017) and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sze joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including Ada Limón, who recently completed a two-year second term, as well as Joy Harjo, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, Charles Wright, Natasha Trethewey, Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass and Rita Dove.

“What an amazing honor to be named the 25^th Poet Laureate of the United States. As the son of Chinese immigrants, and as a sophomore who decided to leave MIT to pursue a dream of becoming a poet, I never would have guessed that so many decades later I would receive this recognition,” Sze said. “It’s a recognition that belongs to teachers, librarians, editors, poets, readers – everyone who works tirelessly on behalf of poetry. As laureate I feel a great responsibility to promote the ways poetry, especially poetry in translation, can impact our daily lives. We live in such a fast-paced world: poetry helps us slow down, deepen our attention, connect and live more fully.”

Arthur Sze was born in New York City in 1950 to Chinese immigrants. He is the author of 12 poetry collections, most recently “Into the Hush” (2025), as well as the prose collection “The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems” (2025). His other poetry collections include “The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems” (2021), which received a 2024 Science and Literature Award from the National Book Foundation; “Sight Lines” (2019), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; “Compass Rose” (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; “The Ginkgo Light” (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; “The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998” (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and “Archipelago “(1995), selected for an American Book Award. Sze has also published an expanded collection of Chinese poetry translations, “The Silk Dragon II” (2024).

In addition to the Bobbitt Prize, Sze’s honors include the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from Yale University, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Howard Foundation, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. from the U.S. Library of Congress website loc.gov/poetry Photo: Steven Miller

About the Laureateship The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry position has existed since 1937, when Archer M. Huntington endowed the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. Since then, many of the nation’s most eminent poets have served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and, after the passage of Public Law 99-194 (Dec. 20, 1985), as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry — a position which the law states “is equivalent to that of Poet Laureate of the United States.” During his or her term, the Poet Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry. The Library keeps to a minimum the specific duties required of the Poet Laureate, who opens the literary season in the fall and closes it in the spring. In recent years, laureates have initiated poetry projects that broaden the audiences for poetry. The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on site and online.

Denise Low Interviews Maryfrances Wagner, Former Mo. Poet Laureate

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Thu, 3 Apr 2025 14:19:00 -0500

Maryfrances Wagner, former Missouri Poet Laureate, continues to share a poetry of inter-generational

dialogue—among her family in books like Dioramas (Mammoth Publications) and The Immigrants’ New Camera. Her new poetry book, Backstories (Spartan Press), relates poignant narratives about a teacher and her students, based on the poet’s experience. These snapshot poems (see an example below) are intense vignettes that wrap character, emotion, and compassion into unforgettable lyrical form. This is a poet at the height of her powers. I conducted an email interview with her March, 2025.

Denise Low: I love the title Backstories—so evocative. What do you intend with the title?

Maryfrances Wagner: I think all teachers encounter students with inappropriate behavior in one way or another—from sassy backtalk, to never having supplies, to saying something inappropriate to another student, to not doing homework and talking about it with distain, to fights and more serious infractions. There are also the ones who sit quietly and never participate or turn work in but seem to stew in some sort of self-destruction. I found over time that all these students always had a backstory, a reason why they acted inappropriately to school rules. I was always quite moved by how some students had to live and survive, and it made me realize a good deal about my own false assumptions. The shock of what I discovered made me want to tell their stories because I don’t think most people realize what many young people experience in daily life. I did change names and details to disguise the real people, but the stories are true.

Denise Low: Please tell me about this new book’s structure. There are four sections, and all poems relate to your career as an English teacher. How did you choose poems and their order?

Maryfrances Wagner: The first section of the book includes early teaching experiences as well as poems not told as monologues. The next section tries to lighten things up a bit with some humor. I’m speaking in generalities here, but many sophomores are still innocent and naïve even if their lives may be awful. They ask unexpected questions or give answers that show how limited their experience is and how lacking their knowledge is, and I realized many of them didn’t understand metaphor, idioms, satire, irony or context. They took things so literally, and often their understanding of a word’s meaning was way off. Still, there was a charm about that innocence, and sometimes their remarks were funny, so I started writing them down. The third section is made up of student monologues. As I mention in the book, when students committed some kind of infraction, I didn’t agree with the school district’s step system— the first time is a warning, the second is a day of in-school suspension, the third three days of in-school suspension, and after that out of school suspension. I didn’t think the solution to a discipline problem, unless it was something like a serious fight, was to take a student out of class, so I asked the principals if I could offer my students detention instead, and they said if I was willing to stay with them for the detention, it was okay with them. I usually stayed after school for a while each day to finalize lessons or plan for the next day, so it was an easy thing for me to do. Sometimes the students came in and simply spent the thirty minutes doing their homework, but many of them started talking to me, and although they didn’t always realize what they were revealing, they were giving me their backstory, an insight into their lives. The Detention Suite captures those stories. I taught creative writing fiction and creative writing poetry as well, and often in those classes, where I created more of a family environment, students told their stories in what they wrote. I worked some of those into monologues as well. I could have easily written fifty more monologues, but I thought I’d given a representational idea of their lives. The final section closes out the years of my teaching, and the final poems are close to when I retired. I also managed to parody some teaching methods forced upon teachers like the Madeline Hunter Model as well as the jargon principals bring to meetings all teachers basically dread attending. So much educational jargon is reduced to letters.

Denise Low: As Missouri state Poet Laureate, you have had many public appearances—and performances of your poems. Have you shifted your writing to be more performative? Or not? Have there been other influences of being Poet Laureate?

Maryfrances Wagner: Those are two big questions. I’d say yes to the first one. Often my public appearances were around people who didn’t read and write poetry, and some were fairly sure they didn’t like it, so I tried to make everything I said and did accessible. I dodged reading some poems that had layered meanings and perhaps more difficult to understand if they didn’t regularly read poetry, like the poem “Chapter By Chapter,” and I stuck with poems I knew they would at least understand if not find their own way into them, the goal of being a poet for me. I want everyone to find their way in, their own story in mine. The monologues work well this way because I can assume the voices of the students or my mother or my aunt, who were often funny. As to the second question, I’d say that being Poet Laureate was one of the best experiences of my life. Not so much that I touched other people’s lives but that they touched mine. I felt zeal so many times when something connected with them or when they told me how a poem meant so much. I taught many workshops during that time, and they reminded me of what I loved most about teaching—that moment when that lightbulb goes off and a student has a realization or when someone realizes he can do what he didn’t think he could. I love those moments as I am sure all teachers do.

Denise Low: I appreciate the story in each poem and also the lyrical intensity. You use both narrative and lyrical techniques. How do you go about composing your poems, and how do you edit them—what characteristics do you emphasize as you finalize a poem?

Maryfrances Wagner: Several people have called me a storyteller in poetry, but I don’t really think of myself as only a storyteller. Yes, I am telling stories in this book as well as others, but I’m still mostly writing a literary poem. I think most of my poems have a narrative thread, but they do blend the lyric and narrative together. One of my professors once commented on that and said I was joining two forms, but I didn’t think that was a bad thing.

What I am writing about governs how I write the poem. In the cases of the monologues, I have always kept journals, and I used to write in them more faithfully. I always had a journal with me at school, and during those detentions, when students started telling their stories, I started writing down what they said. When I composed those poems, it was like channeling them, and I could hear them all over in my head. At other times I think about an idea I want to get across, a point I want to make, and I build imagery and metaphor that do the work to get that point across. That’s the general way I write, but as I am sure all writers have experienced, sometimes starting a poem without knowing where it’s going helps me see the truth of how I feel about something, and thus, it becomes an enlightening experience for me. As for editing, let’s say the rough drafting is the joy part, getting words on paper, those moments of hanging out with the Muse, but then revision becomes the hard part—making those words better. I revise over and over, changing images or metaphors that I think are less apt, and I keep honing and shaping so that those images tell the story and show what I want to say. My professors always hammered “show not tell,” so I learned not to tell anything. Sometimes that may be at the cost of not being as clear if people can’t stack up meaning that way, but it’s what I do. I look at it over and over for days. Sometimes I change a word. Sometimes I cut a stanza. Sometimes I rearrange the poem, change an image, add and cut. A poem can take weeks or months to come to fruition. From there, I often share a poem with someone to see their response. I envy people who sit down and in one day have a finished poem. I’ve never done that. When I started this book, I wasn’t writing any of the poems as monologues, but when I looked back at my journals and saw where I had written down Brandon Langford’s story (not his real name) almost as he told it, I decided that letting the students tell their own stories was going to be more powerful because there was a deeper layer, a deeper story going on, so I went with many of them that way, but I disguised some things and changed some details so no one would know who I was talking about.

Denise Low: You include your own collages in the book, made of word-art, typography, and images. How do you intent them to interact with the poems?

Maryfrances Wagner: I love to collage. The collages in this book are not indicative of the collages I usually create. Making a collage for me is like the opposite of writing a poem. It’s like a meditation. I shut my conscious side down and let the subconscious express itself. It gives, and I put it down. I don’t think about it. The collages in this book are intentional. One group of them depicts the literature we read. The first one depicts Lord of the Flies, a book I sometimes taught in Sophomore English. It’s a book I think is vitally important in showing how a democracy only works as long as people agree to follow the laws set down, but envy, greed, and fear can undo what could have been a well-functioning democratic society. It’s a lesson that never grows old and is even more relevant right now. Another collage does the same thing with Julius Caesar, a play most sophomores read, and it has many of the same messages. A third is around A Separate Peace, a novel I sometimes taught my sophomores, and it’s a rite of passage book. Some of the collages are words: one is a collection of all the slang intensifiers students have used over the years, another is the different kinds of learning techniques teachers are expected to use until a new way comes along. It doesn’t matter if a teacher believes a different method works better. We all have to change whether we philosophically agree or not. The third category of collages shows students interacting with education, hoping for a future, not sure what we are teaching them will pay off.

Denise Low: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Maryfrances Wagner: It took me a while to put these stories to paper, and then years after that to collect them into a book. I wondered if I had the right to tell the stories. I think what I learned about my students and myself was as important and vital as anything I ever taught them. They made me a better and more compassionate person. Their lives made me care deeply, and I thought others needed to hear their stories. Even though most of us know that not all things are equal and not everyone gets the American Dream, I think more of us know inequity exists philosophically, by what we read, by what others tell us, but removed from being involved with that inequity firsthand. In their daily life they don’t see how others live. I think being in the trenches with the truth of how some things are has a much greater impact, one I wish more of us experienced.

Chuck

What are we? Humans? Animals? Savages?

William Golding – Lord of the Flies

On the first day of my first class in a tiny room,

Chuck takes a seat so close he taps my desk.

Every day a Polo, dress pants, buttery loafers.

When he looks up, he flashes perfect teeth. He

stares, makes me squirm, but does his work. He’s

18. I’m 21. He doesn’t treat me as his teacher

ready to discuss Lord of the Flies. Behind his silky

voice and Gucci shoes, I see his mean. He instigates

fights and whacks small boys, particularly Juan—

thick horned-rims, buck teeth, chunky—Piggy if he

stepped from the book, and he likes order, logic.

He asks questions, ponders why Jack craves the kill.

The day after spring break, Juan asks for a restroom pass.

A minute later, Chuck dips his face close to mine and asks

to call his mother to bring his lab notes for 4^th hour.

You probably wonder how I fell for that. I let him go.

I heard the story after an ambulance took Juan away.

Chuck slammed the bathroom door into Juan’s face over

and over until his glasses fell off his broken nose

and cheekbone. Then he plunged Juan’s head

into the toilet. By the time the gurney arrived, Juan

was unconscious. Chuck earned his last credits

on Homebound. Juan’s parents moved to Texas.

A door had opened into a new darkness. Students

bumped along as that year loomed shadowy

under the care of counselors. A quiet spring

of staring into space. A time of weighing.

Rumors traveled like vapor, like stories of the beast.

We lived in the flicker, the tick. Too many stained

dreams. Too many thoughts about sharpening a stick.

Maryfrances Wagner’s latest books are The Immigrants’ New Camera, Solving for X, and Backstories. Her book Red Silk won the Thorpe Menn Book Award and an reissue won second place in the Eric Hoffer awards for literary legacy and finalist for poetry. Co-editor of I-70 Review, she also serves as President of The Writers Place and chair of the programming committee. She was Missouri 2020 Individual Artist of the Year and served as the 6^th Missouri Poet Laureate 2021-2023. She is the daughter of four Italian immigrant grandparents.

From Denise Low: See you at the Associated Writers & Writing Programs Conference March 27-30!

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 11:12:00 -0500

DENISE LOW INTERVIEWS DAVE SETER, SONOMA COUNTY POET LAUREATE

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:01:00 -0600

Dave Setter is a rare poet who combines training as a scientist and a poet. As the new Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, a region about as big as Rhode Island, he presents readings and workshops in Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, and we have plans for an event in Healdsburg. His well-received book Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections, 2021) shows his original voice, shaded by the odic tradition of classical Greek-influenced poets, with narrative threads that remind me of the best West-influenced storytelling. Mammoth Publications is honored to present a chapbook (28 pages) of his new works, Somewhere West of the Mississippi.

DL: What are the main themes in your new book of poetry Somewhere West of the Mississippi (Mammoth Publications, 2025)?

DS: I explore the myth of the American West versus the reality of the American West; the abuse, and resilience, of the natural world; and the hope that the human species may play a part in healing nature while healing our collective soul.

DL: How does this new chapbook differ from your earlier books?

DS: While the ecological focus is similar to that of my full-length collection (Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections 2021), in this book I offer a more unfiltered view of the mine reclamation projects I led as a government official. There was a definite silencing of science during certain periods of our recent history, which led to fear of retribution for speaking out in public. I have also included a few experimental poems in this collection which explore topics difficult to relate in a purely narrative form. For example, I envision inhabiting a soybean plant killed by pesticide drift, wondering what it would be like to die a slow death.

DL: How does the title represent the book?

DS: This chapbook and my earlier chapbook (Night Duty) are both titled as subtle references to our movie culture. Many of the poems are documentary in nature. Night Duty is composed of film noir-style poems. Somewhere West of the Mississippi is composed of poems intended to create a sweeping vista of human experience in the American West within the context of its ecology. I wish the chapbook had an accompanying soundtrack, which is always a feature of the American Western.

DL: I love that, as soundtracks accompany us in so many contexts, since invention of ear buds! You have a background in science—how does that affect your writing?

DS: The language of my poems is, in many places, scientific. When I use scientific terms I try to place them in a context that makes them understandable to the general reader without “dumbing down” the science. I’m also uniquely positioned to offer a rare view into the inner workings of how environmental cleanups happen, their successes and limitations.

DL: The poems remain lyrical and balance facts well. You have been appointed Poet Laureate of Sonoma County. What do you plan to accomplish with this community honor?

DS: Because I self-identify as a poet of the ecology, or eco-poet, in the second half of my two-year term I intend to craft a series of nature writing workshops. Those workshops will be based on 17^th Century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō's concept of Zōka (the transformative power of nature). But for the first half, I have decided to challenge myself as well as other Sonoma County poets to write documentary poetry. Documentary poetry has no formal, fixed, definition, but generally calls attention to some injustice witnessed or heard of by the poet. One of the keys to writing a good documentary poem is to research facts about the injustice to add dimension to the poem.

DL: I appreciate your focus outside your ego while still using your experience and expertise. Anything else you would like to add?

DS: I want to thank Mammoth Publications for believing in this project. As Sonoma County Poet Laureate, I wanted to work with a small publisher in Sonoma County. Mammoth is that and more, a small publisher located in Healdsburg, California, with a compelling catalogue of impactful literature.

What My Uncle Is Trying to Say

Photos are silent but something’s said

the way his fur hat tilts down

and jacket hangs open even though

bare trees say cold and the windshield

of the Ford LTD publishes an icy scrawl.

Experts can tell the model year by the grille.

The license plate says Minnesota.

Crystals on the plate and on the lakes,

crystals in the air, ready to fall.

With low pressure snow will arrive

on the doorstep. Open the door.

This photograph is nothing.

He will charge inside like a ghost.

DAVE SETER, Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2024-2026, is a poet, nature writer, reviewer, and essayist. He
authored the poetry collections Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections, 2021) and Night Duty (Main Street Rag, 2010). Educated as a civil engineer, he writes about social and environmental issues, including the intersections of the built world and natural world. His poems have won the KNOCK Ecolit Prize and received third place in the William Matthews competition. He is the recipient of two Pushcart nominations. His poetry book reviews have appeared in Cider Press Review, Poetry Flash, and Tupelo Quarterly. He is also studying Lithuanian and has translated poems by contemporary Lithuanian poets into English and published them in literary journals. He has been an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and has served on the Board of Directors of Marin Poetry Center. Seter earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California.

A Quick Guide to the NBCC Poetry Longlist 2024

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0600

For the first time, National Book Critics Circle is sharing its long lists for their annual awards,

Kenze Allen

including poetry. This year’s stellar works show the range and depth of United States poetry at this time in history. Please share with me these exciting works by reading about them and supporting the individuals and their presses by purchasing copies. I have some personal and quoted notes to share:

An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang (Copper Canyon): Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang was born in New Jersey. She earned her MFA and PhD from the University of Virginia and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. Other books are The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017). Her lines are taut, dramatic, progressions through multiple timelines. Her press writes, "Poems navigate wounds opened by explorations of family and generational trauma, and draw on the author’s experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation.”

Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen (Tin House): An Indigenous Nations Poets fellow of the first year, Kenzie’s debut book combines historical texts and lyric works to create response to her Haudenosaunee descendancy. She creates new forms to hold together the histories, maps, and emotions. Not to be missed. From her press: “Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.”

Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf (Nightboat): This native Iowan now lives in the Rockies. During Covid, he resided in Michigan, and, according to his press, “a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation.” His stand as a queer poet informs the works of change and chance.

A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye by V. Penelope Pelizzon (University of Pittsburgh): Global travel informs this book of lyrics and the odd-side role of the commentator/poet on journeys outside “normal.”

Instructions for the Lovers by Dawn Lundy Martin (Nightboat): This poet and essayist has established credentials plus is a professor at Bard. Her press describes the book: “Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system.”

The Palace of Forty Pillars by Armen Davoudian (Tin House). Another Tin House entry to the list Armen’s work is based on Iranian architecture. From his website: “In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars, but reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of the book’s twenty poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, the image of a lost home.” I had a chance to talk with him about the book last spring, and I immediately thought of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—how we create structures in our personal and collective narratives. He is working on a Ph.D. at Stanford, and he is a poet I am following for his vision, for his connection of personal to collective destinies.

Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): This veteran poet has been a north star for over a generation. He has won the Pulitzer and written 17 books. His works demands respect for their solid and lyrical energy.

Sturge Town by Kwame Dawes (W. W. Norton): Kwame contributes to his communities by editing the African series of poetry for the University of Nebraska Press. This book returns to his native Jamaica, to one of the free towns founded after emancipation in Jamaica. Postcolonial life. Music traditions and visual art poems are threaded among the themes.

Wrong Norma by Anne Carson (New Directions): Anne’s works are always perfectly balanced, inventive, and wise play with the language. About these prose poems the poet writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”

Yard Show by Janice N. Harrington (BOA): Originally a librarian, Janice Harrington turned to poetry in the 1990s. She writes about the Southern origins of her family and Black Americans in the Midwest. Critic Johnny Payne writes of this book: “As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”

PRE-ELECTION JITTERS: CALM DOWN WITH A HORATIAN ODE

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Sat, 2 Nov 2024 09:46:00 -0500

Art Beck (Dennis Dybeck) has given me permission to reprint his excellent translation of this ode by Horace. This might help us keep perspective as we await the momentous election. Art's latest book of essays A Treacherous Art, about translating poetry, is highly recommended! In this ode, I like how he renders "Carpe Diem" at the end.

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

Horace, Odes Book I, 11

Leuci - please, bright mind - don’t ask -

we’re not supposed to know

how it’s going to end - not me,

not you. Don’t listen to fortunetellers.

Believe me, it’s better

to take whatever comes,

as it comes. Whether there’s more,

godwilling, whether this is our last winter

shattering the Etruscan Sea on those crumbling

rocks across: be wise.

Decant the wine, trim your endless

yearnings to fit the short hours.

While we’re talking, jealous time’s

running out - on us. Grab today. Believe

as little as possible in tomorrow.

translated by Art Beck

Univ. of Az. Press Publishes Denise Low: House of Grace, House of Blood

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 13:54:00 -0500

I'm happy to announce this week's publication of House of Grace, House of Blood from the University of Arizona Press, which explores intersections of archival artifacts and the personal, with focus on an incident of Indigenous genocide. The book responds to a rich archive: oral and written accounts, maps, dances, and archaeology about the Gnadenhutten, Ohio, massacre of Indigenous people by renegade Revolutionary soldiers. Benjamin Franklin commented on this tragedy as well as the Shawnee leader Tecumseh. The book's arc follows a sequence of consequences, including deforestation, diaspora of Delawares, restoration, stereotyping, and continuance of traditions and spirituality. Please contact the press for desk and review copies. Please note these appearance opportunities:

Oct. 19, Sat., Washington DC, Politics & Prose, reading with Christian Teresi and Jason Schneiderman, 6 pm, 1324 4th Street NE, Washington, D.C. 20002, (202) 544-4452 http://ww.politics-prose.com/poetry-panel

Nov. 12, Wed. , San Francisco, Bird & Beckett bookstore, Denise Low and Kim Shuck 7 pm., free https://birdbeckett.com/

Nov. 14, Thurs. Santa Rosa Arts Center, Speakeasy Reading Series, Denise Low, open mic following, 7 pm, 312 South A St., Santa Rosa, music-Jeff Nathanson free, https://santarosaartscenter.org/index.php/speakeasy-2-2/
Nov. 15, Fri., Healdsburg, The 222-Paul Mahder Gallery, Denise Low and Lucille Lang Day, Indigenous Thanksgiving Traditions – The 222, 7 pm, 222 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg CA, $20

Nov. 17, Sun., Sebastopol, Wom-ba meeting 1 pm

Dec. 1, Sun. Berkeley, Poetry Flash, Denise Low and Lucille Lang Day, 3 pm Art House Gallery & Cultural Center (to be confirmed), 2905 Shattuck Avenue, refreshments, free (poetryflash.org).

March 29, Sat., Los Angeles AWP conference, Denise Low Bookfair Reading with Scarlet Tanager Press, 1:45 p.m.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Justice is out of the purview of poetry, unfortunately. Otherwise, the ancestors of the ninety-six Lenapes killed by rogue Pennsylvania militia men in 1782 might read this collection and find some much deserved peace.”—FOREWORD Reviews

“House of Grace, House of Blood is a masterpiece of both documentary poetry and Indigenous storytelling. Denise Low’s exploration of history, memory, genealogy, and identity acknowledges the complexity of her bloodlines and the possibility of healing. Throughout, her poems become ‘portals for hearing pleas / and scriptures.’”—Craig Santos Perez, author of From Unincorporated Territory [åmot] and National Book Award winner

“Denise Low’s House of Grace, House of Blood chronicles the epigenetic expression of generational trauma left by the massacre of ninety-six Lenape Christian relatives inside a church in 1782. However, these poems also suggest epigenetic expressions of ancestral healing and reconciliation with living within contradictions, a powerful Indigenous inheritance that will leave you dancing in joyous resistance.”—Edgar Gabriel Silex, author of Acts of Love

Biography: Former Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low is author of House of Grace, House of Blood, from the University of Arizona Press’s Sun Tracks poetry series (Oct. 2024). Her other books include the memoir The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival (University of Nebraska Press), Jigsaw Puzzling: Essays (Meadowlark Press, Coffin Award), and Casino Bestiary: Poems (Spartan Press). Low is a founding board member of the national Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) and past board member and president of Associated Writers and Writing Programs. She has been visiting professor at the University of Kansas and University of Richmond. She taught at Haskell Indian Nations University 27 years, where she founded the creative writing program. She and her husband Thomas Weso founded Mammoth Publications, an independent press that specializes in Indigenous American and literary works. www.deniselow.net

More praise:

“House of Grace, House of Blood moves far beyond the personal narrative to create an experience that clearly identifies the blade edge that is so-called American history, and invites the reader to consider how exclusion and connection hone it.”—Mihku Paul, author of 20th Century PowWow Playland

“This account of the violence of ignorance and the heartbreak of broken trust is all too frequent—and all too frequently silenced, ignored, miswritten, or forgotten in our collective societal reckoning with the truth of our nation’s founding. And yet what Low seeks in House of Grace, House of Blood, what we who are compelled to bear witness in our verse seek in the telling, in the remembering, is a way forward through healing. The facts speak for themselves. The poet speaks for the dead—and those yet living.”—Abigail Chabitnoy, author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful

“With documentary and lyric intensity, Low claims poetry itself as memorial in her extraordinary new book.”—Hadara Bar-Nadav, author of The Animal Is Chemical

“The versatile and talented Denise Low ventures into documentary poetry in House of Grace, House of Blood with astonishing results. Through personal reflection, memories, imagined stories, chants, and collages of primary texts, she pieces together the story of one of the most heinous crimes against Indigenous people in North America. For Low, there are more questions than answers. These poems cinch the connections between religious and nationalist fervor, racial capitalism, and Indigenous survivance.”—Joseph Harrington, author of Disapparitions

National Book Critics Circle Announces Poetry Finalists

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 11:12:00 -0600

The award for best book of poetry published in 2023 will be selected from this short list, March, 2024 in NYC:

Saskia Hamilton, All Souls (Graywolf Press)

Kim Hyesoon, Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi (New Directions)

Romeo Oriogun, The Gathering of Bastards (University of Nebraska Press)

Robyn Schiff, Information Desk (Penguin Books)

Charif Shanahan, Trace Evidence (Tin House)

Examining Life: Denise Low Interviews Robert Stewart

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 20:49:00 -0500

Higher: Poems, Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2023 Prize Americana, $15.00

I have known Bob Stewart as a friend and extraordinary editor for years. I admire his precision and store of knowledge about poetics, apparent in his editorial expertise during his tenure with New Letters and in his new book, Higher: Poems, winner of Prize Americana, which has precision in its execution and heart in its content. Stewart balances between narrative and song as he creates ballads about moments of heroism in everyday life. These are nourishing, sustaining poems, like this:

Stopping in the Road for a Turtle by Robert Stewart

Don’t hiss at me. Andre Dubus

rescued that brother and sister

on a highway in Haverville, so let me

here on 55^th Street in Crestwood,

6:20 a.m., stop and help you over

to the shrubs.

Box turtles I had

as a kid seemed mostly interior,

but you—neck out, jaw wrenching

like an opera singer’s—have less

turtleness

than serpent;

how heroic of us both, then,

with the pace of such progress,

to trust the car-full universe, when all

Andre Dubus meant to do was act

according to his nature, tough guy.

It crippled him

on that road, father of many

characters, and each always seemed

stranded outside a bar, or even home,

listening to some grieving soprano

on the radio. Sing, then turtle, hiss

your given voice. (89)

Denise Low: First, congratulations on winning the Prize Americana for this new book! In its offerings, I notice some folder poems as well as recent. How did you put this collection together?

Robert Stewart: The poems in Higher tend toward a public voice, I believe. I have been concerned lately with the presence in my writing of generativity, as Erik Erikson termed concern for future generations. That is my hope for the book, in any case. Some of what seem to be older poems in Higher might have just been percolating in my brain for years upon years and could be fairly recent. Others are older but did not fit previous books. Before my previous book Working Class (2018), I had not had a full-length book of poems for 30 years, even though I published essays and poems in journals. I can still hear my friend and mentor David Ray say, “These things [poems and stories] don’t go out of date.” I subscribe to that principle.

My process is simply to keep writing and trust the process. “The good stuff and the bad stuff,” Marvin Bell has said, “are all part of the stuff.” I looked at what I thought was the good stuff and began to think I had a book on my hands; so, as one does with poems, I tried to conceive of an order for them. That process is mysterious, even spooky to me; but once I got the first two or three lined up, I was on my way.

Denise Low: Titles of your other books of poetry are also simple, such as Working Class (Stephen Austin, 2017) and Plumbers (BkMk, 1988, 2^nd edition 2017). What significance do you intend with the title? And I find a pun, “hire,” for Higher, which ties in with the previous two titles.

Robert Stewart: I confessed recently (joked) to an audience that I didn’t realize I’d have to spell the book title Higher every time I spoke in public. I have tried to keep titles fairly clean in general, and a little slant. Many poetry book titles seem to me kind of pretentious. I won’t quote them here, but poetry book titles sometimes make me think of an essay by Robert Hass, where he was being self-critical of an image he’d created; he imagined what the master Basho would say of him: “Hass, you have a weakness for trying to say something unusual.”

When the book came out, the poet Albert Goldbarth wrote to welcome me into the club of one-word book titles—with his Selfish and others—but, as you note, I already had another book with a one-word title, Plumbers. The manuscript of that book originally was called What It Takes to Be a Plumber. The editor and poet Dan Jaffe talked me out of it, saying it was too wordy. I told a group of friends at a party hosted by Gloria Vando and Bill Hickok that I could not come up with a less wordy title for that book; then David Ray spoke up and said, “Why don’t you just call it Plumbers?” Perfect. I learned that simplicity can be illusive.

I chose Higher as a title because I was struck by the concept of aspiration, and, indeed, the book includes a fair number of calls to elevation—which does not mean to avert our eyes from reality; it means the opposite. My practice to seek some ascendant chord is really a structural necessity, I think. A good poem won’t strike just one note. It offers the reader contrast, tension, and fuller experience. I’m not saying that my poems do all that, but that’s the hope.

Denise Low: You reference Christian spiritual practice directly and indirectly in these poems—brave in a time when religious affiliation is not usually addressed in contemporary poetry, which is mostly secular. I’m thinking of “Dog in Church,” “Piranha, Christmas Day,” “Late for Mass,” and the opening poem of the book, “In the Back Pews on Easter at St. Ann’s in Prairie Village, & Simultaneously St. Elizabeth’s in Waldo, St. Frances & Doubtless Our Lady of Sorrows, Midtown.” This last, which begins, “Babies being carried out to howl / in the lobby…,” reminds me of my childhood stints in pews of the Congregational Church of Emporia, Kansas. Babies were always squalling in the vestibule as a background accompaniment to the choir and sermon, and I wondered what that signified. Anyway, what choices are you making when you include this aspect of your life?

Robert Stewart: I once felt sheepish about using religious references in my poems, partly because I don’t see myself as devout or clear-headed. However, I try to live in wonder. The Catholic tradition has been integral to my life, and I am, therefore, both respectful of that tradition and angry toward it when the Church fails. In one poem, for example, I expect the priest “to apologize to us all.” In the poem you mention about babies in church, I try to turn what had been an annoyance—babies screaming during Mass—into what I think is something playful and sacred. These things exist, and I am sustained by some truly great writers who write about religious practice, such as Brian Doyle, Mary Gordon, Sharon Olds, Marilynne Robinson, Marie Ponsot. I am just now reading essays by Czeslaw Milosz, as he examines his own life as a Catholic. I am not alone. The key word there is to “examine.” I tend to eschew ideologies, but many of my “higher” values have been shaped by a religious education.

Denise Low: I appreciate the authenticity of your writing and its integrity, seen in a poem like “My Father’s Haunt,” where you go into your father’s old bar in St. Louis. The familiar repartee with “men in overalls” shows your comfort with working class background. My own father wore overalls to work on the railroad, so this struck a note. Thank you for your honesty. How has this background affected your writing?

Robert Stewart: My grandfather was a plumber. My father was a plumber and later an executive in the plumbers and pipefitters union. One of my brothers and a nephew still work with the tools. I worked, as well, as a ditch digger and in the sewers of St. Louis, so I do feel at home with those working people. Moreover, what they do is profoundly honorable, in my view. When my first book, Plumber, came out, I left a stack of about ten with my father, who lived across state from me in St. Louis. The next time I visited, he said to bring more copies. “What are you doing with them?” I asked. He was taking them to the union hall and selling them. I have to say, I felt incredibly moved by that. One never gets over certain early experiences. Just this September 2023, I published an essay called “The Hole” in Italian Americana (I am the grandson of Sicilian Immigrants), which is about my work in manholes, excavations, ditches, and other forms of going down into the earth, its dangers and culture. You asked earlier about titles, and I will add the two-word title of my 2018 book of poems, Working Class. That kind of generality normally would put me off; but I had played around with other titles, all fancy poetic images, cute, clever, and I decided, no; I want to just say something direct in the title and let the poems complicate the matter. That’s also what I hope for Higher.

Denise Low: Anything else you would like to add?

Robert Stewart: A young woman student once asked Maxine Kumin how Kumin could tell if a student had potential to succeed as a poet. What do you look for? the student asked. Kumin answered, without hesitation, “Does she or he like to to play with words," Kumin answered, without hesitation. I happened to be present for the exchange, and I never forgot it. I included a coda to Higher, which is a quote from William Blake, “Energy is eternal delight.” One of my criteria to measure how a poem would hold up includes how the language kind of dances, despite the seriousness of the content.

Denise Low: Bob, thank you for affirming here and in your new book how Socrates’ statement is true eternally: The unexamined life is not worth living.

Robert Stewart is the former editor of New Letters magazine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he was also editor of New Letters on the Air, a nationally syndicated literary radio program, and BkMk Press. At UMKC he taught poetry writing, magazine writing, and magazine editing. His books of essays include Outside Language (finalist for a PEN America award) and The Narrow Gate: Writing, Art & Values. He has won a National Magazine Award for Editorial Achievement in the Essay category, from the American Society of Magazine Editors. His books include Plumbers (poems, BkMk Press), and others. Poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Mangrove, Stand, Notre Dame Review, The Literary Review and other magazines. Anthology editorships include Spud Songs: An Anthology of Potato Poems (with Gloria Vando, benefit for hunger relief), and Decade: Modern American Poets (with Trish Reeves) and Voices From the Interior. He also is co-editor of the collection New American Essays (with Conger Beasley Jr., New Letters/BkMk Press)

Interview and reading from New Letters On the Air, audio.

Three poems from Higher published in The Montreal Review

BOOK DESCRIPTION OF HIGHER: POEMS: “The poems in Higher are at once direct and resonant, celebratory of the natural world and of spiritual aspirations. Rising from a working-class, blue-collar sensibility, these pieces range from a short work about using a sledgehammer on a street crew to a multi-part longer work about animals in changing nature. These lyric poems include subtle metrics and enough narrative to drive events, often with elegiac references to a military vet friend, a brother, a Sicilian grandmother, and literary heroes. Their focus ultimately returns to hope and care for children, often with no small amount of humor. This collection – from the winner of a National Magazine Award and Prize Americana – attests to our ability to pay attention, to detail what we see and what we hear, and, as such, aspire to joy.”

Michael Harty Publishes TWENTY STORIES: POEMS about a Tall Texas Building and More!

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Mon, 3 Jul 2023 10:52:00 -0500

Michael Harty is a successful Kansas City area poet with roots in Lubbock, Texas. His new Twenty Stories: Poems centers on the tallest building in Lubbock, twenty-stories high. The pun on stories as heights and as narratives works well in the collection. I also grew up in a town with one tall building, a singular vertical in a flat grasslands town. In Emporia, Kansas, it was the Broadview Tower. In William Stafford’s Kansas, it was the building where the “elevator man” Gideon worked. Because of the large scale, there is a cinematic quality that reminds me of Muriel Rukeyser’s work. The visual point of view shifts around as well as the narration, the social contexts, and the natural environment. The poems are well written, accessible yet complicated by undercurrents, irony, and recurring themes.

Denise Low: First, congratulations on this original, provocative book! What is your background as a poet? I know you win sonnet contests and publish regularly. What has been your way into this practice?

Mike Harty: I always had writerly ambitions, but I gave up my undergraduate English major when I started thinking seriously about how I was going to earn a living. Psychology was a good choice for me, but I did continue to dabble in more creative writing alongside my clinical practice and some writing for professional journals. A turning point came when I wrote a memorial poem for my mother-in-law, a dear person; people were touched by that poem and encouraged me to do more. That encouragement helped me to get past my reluctance to “come out” as a poet, and I started to write more consistently, attend workshops and classes, and submit to journals. (As you know, classes I took with you were an important part of the process.) It’s true that the sonnet form has an appeal for me, and that sonnet competitions are a place where I’ve had some success. I like the challenge of combining expressiveness with concision, which all poetry requires but which in a sonnet needs to be contained within a (more or less) fixed structure. The poems in Twenty Stories, though, are very different from that, with what seems to me a more rambling, narrative quality.

Denise Low: When I read Twenty Stories, I think of William Stafford’s “Serving with Gideon,” the poem where the “elevator man" must drink from a paper cup and where “old boys who ran the town” were generous to their own kind. He miniaturizes the small-town culture with a few images, and you miniaturize the scale of Lubbock, Texas by taking readers to a twenty-story-high view of the town. Was Stafford ever an influence on you? Who are some other influences?

Mike Harty: Stafford is one of the poets I most admire, for what seems to me his marvelously inventive language that still remains grounded in real life. I will insert here a sonnet I wrote about him.

On Reading William Stafford’s Collection by Michael Harty

The cover opens like a neighbor’s door;

you welcome me, and speak to me in tones

both generous and kind. A voice like home,

yet wise, prophetic almost; you abhor

pretension, yet you touch the very core

of human secrets, poem after poem.

You write of small-town parks, of nights alone,

walks by the river; boots your father wore,

farm animals and trees – a vision wide

as prairie, yet returning in the end

to ordinary life, the shifting tides

that hold and toss us all. The words you’ve penned

are like a voice from someone at my side:

“See, this is how things are. Join me, my friend.”

It’s hard to identify specific influences beyond just mentioning poets I’ve admired at different times: Frost, W.S. Merwin, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Manning, plenty of others. I think also growing up in the presence of the King James Bible has had a lasting influence, via the majesty of its language and its connection with the most important questions. And rock-and-roll is in there too, the sense of liberation through sound and rhythm.

Denise Low: Wonderful poem—you capture his tone and settings so well, and your simple and effective, “…yet returning in the end / to ordinary life, the shifting tides / that hold and toss us all.” Exactly. In your poems, I love the narratives you create in your poems, yet they are still lyrical. In your opinion, why are these poems and not short stories or flash fiction?

Mike Harty: I’m glad you find the poems lyrical, as I usually feel I work to make them that way; my revising process often seems to move from something more prosy and expository to (hopefully) something more evocative and layered. I’m not at all sure of the dividing line between, say, prose poem and flash fiction: I think of the poem more in terms of the illumination of a brief moment and the fiction as having more of a timeline and a story arc, but I also think that doesn’t really hold, even in my own poems. Maybe the reliance on images versus description is another point of difference, but again far from absolute. Probably the truth is that the substance of many poems would be suitable as well for a short (even long) fiction; I think in this book that’s true of the poems about the shoeshine man and the bootlegger, for example.

Denise Low: Boundaries of genres are shifting, indeed, and I think you clarify the difference between prose poems and flash fiction well. Story is implicit in any poem, more submerged in the 21^st century maybe than any other time in history. You work as a psychoanalyst, where you must hear many stories. Who are your influences in that field? Jung? And how has that work fed your creative writings?

Mike Harty: I recently looked through my accumulated poems with the question in mind of which ones visibly drew on my psychoanalytic work. I found surprisingly few. Occasionally there was a character, or a situation drawn from that experience, but I came away thinking the main influence was something less obvious but more pervasive, more in the nature of a habit of mind or an outlook on life. It has to do with recognizing complexity (especially in people’s motives), resisting quick answers, being willing to face unpleasant truths without giving in to pessimism, finding beauty without denying ugliness. Those are the aspirations, anyhow. As a psychoanalyst I’ve never been much of a Jungian, as I tend to shy away from approaches that seem overly mystical. I have, however, moved away from the more strictly Freudian orientation of my early career into what would be called a more “object-relational” approach. Probably the theorist I’ve found most influential is Donald Winnicott, a British analyst who started out as a pediatrician and had a lot of fruitful ideas about mothers and babies.

Denise Low: What are you working on next? What are some upcoming publications? Where can readers find your videos or audio readings online?

Mike Harty: I do have another chapbook coming out any time now (from Finishing Line

Press); its title is “Real Country”, and the poems deal with the world of a farm kid, which I both was and wasn’t. (My family lived on a small farm, and I went to a country school, but my father’s work as well as our church affiliation were in town.) Aside from that, there are a couple of projects that are in some stage of development. One is a modified crown of sonnets (nine

poems rather than the standard seven) portraying a baseball team (a poem for each position). I don’t know where I’ll go with that one. The other “project” is less organized, and I come back to it intermittently; it consists of poems that imagine the later life of characters in old rock-and-roll songs (“Maybelline”, “Long Tall Sally”, “Slow Walkin’ Jones”). Generally, though, I’ve found it tougher to write lately, I think mainly because political/societal issues, as well as the pandemic, have claimed so much attention. Many thanks for this opportunity. I’m not at all good at having an on-line presence, but I’m glad to hear from any readers who don’t want to deal with Amazon. They can email me at mharty2[at]kc.rr.com.

Twenty Stories: Poems by Michael Harty. $17.00. Twenty Stories – Kelsay Books 978-1639803095

Michael Harty is a Kansas City poet now, but his Texas boyhood is a continuing influence in his work. A second influence is his long career as a practicing psychoanalyst, which fosters an appreciation for the conflicts, struggles, and complexities of human life. His poems often have appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar, as well as in other periodicals including New Letters, The Lyric, Measure, I-70 Review, Coal City Review, and others. Among his honors and recognitions are several Pushcart nominations as well as awards in a number of sonnet competitions – the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, the Nebraska Shakespeare sonnet competition, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award contest – and in the New Letters Poetry Contest and the Rattle Magazine Ekphrastic Challenge. His first chapbook, The Statue Game, appeared in 2015; both Twenty Stories and Real Country are appearing in 2023. More about Michael Harty: Interview, Johnson County Library Meet the Author: Michael Harty | Johnson County Library (jocolibrary.org) . Mike Harty poem, 2016 in Denise Low Postings Denise Low Postings: Michael Harty, poet, reads April 17 from THE STATUE GAME

Zoom Replay: San Francisco's Bird & Beckett! Denise Low, Art Beck, Art Goodtimes--June 8, 2023

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Sat, 20 May 2023 20:25:00 -0500

Here is the link for the replay on the Bird & Beckett YouTube channel.

June 8, 2023- 7 pm, Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate emerita, has won a Red Mountain Press award, NEH grants, and other recognition for her writings and research. She was president of the Associated Writing Programs board and is a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her memoir The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival is from the University of Nebraska Press. She has articles and reviews in Unpapered: Native Writers on Identity; PostIndian Aesthetics; and Marsh Hawk Press’s Chapter One series. She has a close relationship to jackalopes and sighted Bigfoot with her husband.

Art Beck’s Opera Omnia Luxorius, a Duet for Sitar and Trombone won the 2013 Northern California Book Award for poetry in translation. His Mea Roma, a “meditative sampling” of Martial epigrams was a runner up in the American Literary Translators Association 2018 Cliff Becker Book Prize. His Etudes, a Rilke Recital was a finalist in the 2021 NCBA. He will be reading from his 2022 volume, Angel Rain, Poems 1977-2020.

Art Goodtimes retired in 2016 after five terms as Colorado’s only Green Party county commissioner. He co-directs the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds poetry project, is poetry editor for Fungi Magazine , and co-hosts the Sage Green Journal online anthology. He founded the Institute’s Prospect Basin Fen Project and its Ute Reconciliation and Indigenous Peoples Day projects and remains on their advisory boards. His poetry books include As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press) and Looking South to Lone Cone (Western Eye Press). He was co-editor of the anthology MycoEpithalamia: Mushroom Wedding Poems (Fungi Press). Art’s latest book is Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems (Lithic Press, Fruita, CO, 2019). A widower and a grandpa, Art lives alone on Wrights Mesa near Norwood. His oldest daughter Iris Willow and his granddaughter

BIRD & BECKETT EVENTS (google.com) Bird & Beckett 653 Chenery Street San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood. 415-586-3733 www.birdbeckett.com birdbeckett@yahoo.com

Cynthia Cruz wins the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 10:52:00 -0500

NBCC Poetry Prize winner Cynthia Cruz writes poetry and essays. Her poem “The Undersong” (2016) states an aspect of her poetics as it begins,

“But whose voice will enter/ and what will I do/ with that brutal but beautiful music.” It continues,

In the city, from my hotel window

I can see the elements and trace.

Structures constructed to protect the mind

and the gorgeous culture of the body.

In the park nearby, at dusk.

With plastic transistor radio

and magnetic apparatus,

so small they fit into the palm

of my hand.

The first-person narrator grieves—for what is not clear, beyond a generalized ennui within urban disconnections. The “hotel window” viewpoint is one of a homeless person, even if the perch in a hotel is temporary. The music, like poetry itself, strives to “protect the mind” as it appeals to the corporeal senses. All of the moment is a self-contained vignette, fitting “into the palm/ of my hand.” Yet it also opens out into a shared condition, an “Undersong” that most may not hear as its sadness plays below conscious awareness. This concise lyric has its own music as it creates unexpected pangs in the listener/reader--myself.

Cruz grew up in Northern California, a major influence, she explains in an interview with Paul Rowe: “I grew up in a small town in rural Northern California—there were hawks, rabbits, snakes. We had animals and acres and I spent most of my girlhood outdoors chasing these creatures. In the long driveway were cars and the carcasses of cars, engines and pieces. So, there’s that—that landscape shaped me, made me who I am.” In her interview with she continues to explain her early experiences as invisible to those middle class readers without a similar background (of poverty, working class culture) but omnipresent, as “an interior or a flight to an externalized interior: someplace away from the slick and sleek exteriors of the Neoliberal city and suburbs and all that these places require” (interview with Paul Rowe, Minor Literature[s]).

Denise Low, 2023

Cynthia Cruz won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry with Hotel Oblivion (Four Way Books, 2022). She is the author of four other collections of poetry, including three with Four Way Books: How the End Begins (2016), Wunderkammer (2014), The Glimmering Room; and Ruin (Alice James, 2006). She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines, including the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, BOMB, and the Boston Review. She is the editor of an anthology of Latina poetry, Other Musics: New Latina Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). She also publishes essays: Disquieting: Essays on Silence, critical essays exploring silence as a form of resistance (Book*hug, 2019) and The Melancholia of Class (Repeater Books, 2021). Cruz has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. Cruz grew up in Northern California, where she earned her BA at Mills College. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in writing and an MFA in Art Criticism & Writing from the School of Visual Arts. Cruz is currently pursuing a PhD in German Studies at Rutgers University. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Four Way Books: Four Way Books » Cynthia Cruz Author Page

Poem Hunter: Cynthia Cruz Poems - Poems by Cynthia Cruz (poemhunter.com)

Poetry Foundation bio, poems, prose: Cynthia Cruz | Poetry Foundation

Video reading of “Silence”: Cynthia Cruz reads “Silencer” - Ours Poetica | Poetry Foundation

Academy of American Poets: About Cynthia Cruz | Academy of American Poets

William J. Harris, an Ad Astra poet, is featured in Poetry (Feb. 2023)

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 12:54:00 -0600

A poem from this blog, published May 21, 2010, is among poems by friend, scholar, and poet Billy Joe Harris in a portfolio of lyrics in the Feb. issue of Poetry. I have always had the highest regard for Billy as a poet and as a person. Some of his generosity of character shines through in the Poetry interview that accompanies the portfolio. He was an essential member of the Poetini group that met regularly with Ken Irby, Judith Roitman, Stan Lombardo, Susan Harris, Joe Harrington, Jonathan Mayhew, Beth Reiber, Barnie Warf. Below is a reprint of that May 21 post, also available in the print anthology I published with the Washburn University Center for Kansas Studies, To the Stars: Kansas Poets of the Ad Astra Poetry Project. (Another poem, "Practical Concerns" by William J. Harris is also on this blog, Nov. 13, 2010). Denise Low, Feb. 24, 2023.

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Billy Joe Harris, University of Kansas professor emeritus, spent a sabbatical year studying poets and painters, including artist Giorgio Morandi. He admires Morandi for “muted colors and radically reduced subject matter.” He employs this approach to his own verse. His work suggests narratives, but in such concise form that cultural referents may be minimal. In the poem “Sympathetic Magpies,” the Chinese origin of the legend is secondary to the universal concept of bridges. Further, the stanzas’ own parallel lines suggest intervals of bridge girders. Love creates a bridge between mortal and immortal beings, and the interplay between heaven and earth are universal. The memorable magic here is the bridge made of magpies. The poem has parable-like directness, with love that can defy the decrees of heaven. Like bridges, romance between a young weaver and herder can be set in most times and places. The Milky Way itself is another kind of bridge. Then Harris shifts to present time, inviting readers to also become part of legends through the poem. With a few simple images—lovers, Heaven, and bridges—the poet creates a story, briefly outlined yet complete like a Morandi painting. Harris said of the painter: “His quiet visual drama tells you that you need no more than these few objects to tell the human story.” This also applies to “Sympathetic Magpies.”

SYMPATHETIC MAGPIES by William J. Harris
There is an old Chinese legend
About a weaving girl and a cowherd
Falling in love and being punished
By Heaven because she was celestial
And he was a mere mortal

Heaven only allowed them to meet
Once a year
On the seventh day
Of the seventh month

The magpies were so sympathetic
Each year
On that day
They made themselves
Into a bridge
Stretching across the Milky Way
So the lovers could kiss

Poems are sympathetic magpies
Bridges between lovers
Bridges between selves
Bridges between worlds

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Education: Harris received a BA in English (Central State University 1968), MA in Creative Writing (Stanford 1971), and PhD in English and American Literature (Stanford 1974).

Career: William J. Harris is an emeritus professor of American literature, African American literature, creative writing, and jazz studies. He taught at the University of Kansas, Pennsylvania State University, and Cornell University, among other universities. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. This poet and critic’s books include: Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (Ithaca House 1974), In My Own Dark Way (Ithaca House 1977) and Personal Questions (Leconte Publishers, Rome, 2010). He has published in over fifty anthologies. He is the author of the critical work The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka (University of Missouri Press 1985) and editor of The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991, second edition, 2000).

Tom Weso Paintings and Denise Low Poems: A Dialogue

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 20:17:00 -0600

Thanks to folks associated with Numero Cinq! This is from 2014, and it brings back fond memories. The poems ended up in Melange Block, Red Mountain Press. Click link for full chapbook.

In The Direction Of North: Poems & Paintings --- Denise Low & Thomas Pecore Weso | Numéro Cinq (numerocinqmagazine.com)

Cold

A family burns chairs, clothes, and axes
but nothing stops the silent killer.
Neighbors find them frozen in bed.

Another year trees explode.
Crows fall from trees.
Lakota winter counts show a black-ink crow.
Ben Kindle writes, “K’agi’ o’ta c’uwi’tat’api.”
Crows, they freeze to death.

This enemy seeps through sills and door jambs.
Chimney flues fill with its wrath.

North is its direction.
Nothing stops it from reaching
through flesh to the center of bone.

FREE SHIPPING for JIGSAW PUZZLING by Denise Low and more

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 11:52:00 -0600

Please check out the free shipping offer on top of other discounts for Jigsaw Puzzling and my other out-of-stock books. Fast delivery. www.deniselow.net "

The 15 essays in this book document the pestilence that impacted our entire world. Low also explores the pop culture of jigsaw puzzlers while reflecting on art, geography, history, and more. She considers mosaics, reassembled pottery shards, play as rehearsal for life, and more.

Denise Low reviews a first book by Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 20:55:00 -0600

A Light To Do Shellwork By, by Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez. (Scarlet Tanager Press. $18.00. ISBN

9781734531350 2022). This California Indigenous author, of Islander and Coastal Chumash people and an enrolled O’odham member, publishes her first full-length collection of poetry. This elder’s book is an important link among generations. The poems celebrate and renew family spiritual practices, as in the poem “The Fox Paw and Coyote Blessing.” It describes the narrator’s conversation with her departed grandmother:

. . . The morning of my Giveaway

at the Sunrise Ceremony

sprinkling tobacco to the east

of the ceremonial ring

I prayed to my Papago Pima gramma

who died a few years back but is

alive somewhere . . . . (p. 35).

The narrator knows the grandmother is “alive somewhere,” and the poem adds another dimension to that reality. Another intergenerational work is “The Red Shawl,” a dramatic poem that works well on the page. Valoyce-Sanchez has faith the readers will receive her words as living testaments. Her generosity of spirit pervades the poems.

I am honored to have been asked to write the foreword to this important book, which includes these comments about the title: “Especially moving in A Light to Do Shellwork By are the poems about the narrator’s father, in his nineties, as he finds his way through blindness and memories. Respect for this man’s life embodies the respect for all the cultural traditions. His [Chumash] people have survived over five-hundred years of contact with settlers from the west and the east. Prayers, songs, dances, and poems are among the techniques of survival, for a people and for the individuals. Gratitude to Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez for this magnificent gift” (ix-xi). A stanza from the title poem “A Light To Do Shellwork By,” tells about the day the poet’s father died, :

The ocean sang in my father’s hands

abalone pendants shimmered rainbows

from the ears of pretty girls

and shellwork dotted driftwood carvings

cowrie shells, cone shells, volute shells

red, black, white, blue, brown, green shells

the life they once held

sacred

old stories etched on

the lifeline of my father’s palm . . . . (p. 61)

The verse includes culturally based topics as well as recent political issues, such as tribal terminations by the federal government. California Indigenous peoples suffered some of the worst persecutions and violence from settlers. A Light To Do Shellwork By is a healing work that looks forward without forgetting the past.

Biography: GEORGIANA VALOYCE-SANCHEZ, author of A Light To Do Shellwork By: Poems (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2022), is a descendant of Islander and Coastal Chumash Peoples from her father’s lineage, and O’odham (Akimel and Tohono) from her mother’s lineage. She is currently an enrolled member of The Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation and chair of the Chumash Women’s Elders Council for the Wishtoyo Foundation. She taught many different classes for the American Indian Studies Program at California State University, Long Beach, including two classes she designed: “World Genocides: An American Indian Perspective,” with graduate student Anna Nazarian-Peters, and “Conduits of California Indian Cultures: Art, Music, Dance and Storytelling.” She retired from CSULB in 2014, after twenty-seven years. She was a board member for many years at the California Indian Storytelling Association, and she continues to be an advocate for California Indian languages and sacred sites. Her poem “I Saw My Father Today” is on display at the Embarcadero Muni/BART station as one of twelve poems cast in bronze and placed prominently in San Francisco.

Praise for A Light To Do Shellwork By

"This long-awaited book of poetry by Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez is a beautiful masterwork on how to take care of the light of knowledge given to her by family, by the lands and the waters. Each poem is as delicate and precise as a carved shell. Each shell-poem reminds us of the original purpose of poetry, to function as blessing songs, as memory holders, or observations for what is humbly important but might go unseen unless given a place to live in a poem. These poems will take you to the ocean’s edge and allow you to listen deeply to the blue deep. They will take you to the desert and sing into you the shimmer of rain feeding the generous expanse of sunlight. With this collection of poetry, you will make it home."

— Joy Harjo (Muscogee Creek Nation), 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate

“An illustration of intimate family history that’s a testament to the continuity of Indigenous life and poetics in California.” Kirkus Review

Meadowlark Books Publishes Denise Low's Book of Essays Jigsaw Puzzling

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 12:44:00 -0600

JIGSAW PUZZLING: ESSAYS IN A TIME OF PESTILENCE by Denise Low, Meadowlark Press. Games/Essay/Memoir

The 15 essays in this book explore the pop culture of jigsaw puzzlers while reflecting on art, geography, history, and more. Denise Low considers mosaics, reassembled pottery shards, play as rehearsal for life, and more. She quotes other literary jigsaw authors like Susan Sontag, Gaston Bachelard, Margaret Drabble and poets James Merrill and Dick Allen. “I never underestimate the power of a single puzzle piece. It fits within a whole, like each moment of my unfolding life story.” —Denise Low

Online discount 20% off. Click on this link: PAYPAL LINK Also available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and the publisher’s page Meadowlark Books. Paperback, retail $20. 122 pages, ISBN 978-1956578263, 6.2 ounces, 5.98 x 0.28 x 9.02 inches.

PRAISE FOR Jigsaw Puzzling

What is a sane, reasonable response to an insane, unreasonable Pandemic? Unlike some of us who lurched into bread baking, home renovation, or exploring the life of the hermit, Denise Low instead challenged a world of logic and symmetry by setting out to master the domain of the jigsaw puzzle. This is a realm of surety: logic within defined boundaries. Solving a puzzle demands concentration and leads to a higher contemplation of morality and ethics, as well. Denise Low has brilliantly accomplished this unfolding of the simple into the multifarious with insight and charm. —Sandy McIntosh, author of Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual

Obsessions never fail to get my attention, especially when they concern things I completely overlook. Jigsaw Puzzling is a dive down unsuspected rabbit holes of jigsaw culture and plague history, lessons in art, geography, and much more. If you know Denise Low’s books–I do, I’ve read them all–you know her as a sharp, droll observer of the natural world, including the world of human nature. Her quiet, poetic voice leads a reader into hidden rooms filled with surprises, striking notes that resonate deeply with the world we live in. A wonderful read with or without a pandemic! –Jim Gilkeson, author of Three Lost Worlds: A Memoir.

Lucille Lang Day, Wampanoag-descent poet, writes bold beauty

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Sun, 6 Nov 2022 21:32:00 -0600

LUCILLE LANG DAY

The talented, generous writer Lucille Lang Day is author most recently of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place (Blue Light Press: First World Publishing, 2020). She contributes to the literary community in so many ways. First, she is publisher of Scarlet Tanager Press, an independent press that publishes Indigenous and other writers. She edits anthologies, including Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California (co-edited with Kurt Schweigman, Scarlet Tanager) and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (co-edited with Ruth Nolan. She organizes readings, supports Scarlet Tanager authors at the Associated Writing Programs conference, and appears at events. In addition to her support for others, her own poetry is dynamite. The title poem of her latest book Birds of San Pancho begins:

A great kiskadee sits on the casa wall

belting its exuberant song above

the dusty, cobblestone street. The bird

is masked like a raccoon, its breast

yellow as the butterflies that flit

amid hibiscus and bougainvillea. . . .

The poet describes the scene with bold brushstrokes, unafraid of interpretive adjectives like “exuberant” and a vivid comparison of a bird’s head markings to a raccoon’s mask. She is in control of syntax as she effortlessly progresses through the poem. Her balance of description and reflection keeps the poem interesting as it builds to its ending point:

Later, at the lagoon, a great blue heron,

a little blue heron, a green heron,

a night heron, two great egrets, eight

snowy egrets and twenty cattle egrets

gather while brown pelicans dive

for fish and the sun’s bright disk sinks

into the sea. When it disappears,

the egrets rise in groups and pairs

to settle in two coconut palms

for the night. Oh, to sit up there too—

safe, having eaten my fill—with

folded wings, watching over creation.

Focus is on the birds and nature’s patterns, not the poet’s life and ego—until the very end when the poet enters into the moment to share, not to overwhelm the entire poem. Her “Vincent’s Bedroom at Arles” is a perfect double ekphrastic poem—about the painting and about the physical room itself—and then it turns out the Arles citizenry recreated this room because the original was destroyed during World War II. This gives Day occasion to ponder intersections of fiction and reality on many levels, made (seemingly) effortless in her poet’s spell. “At Lake Tahoe” is another well calibrated poem about the poet’s Wampanoag ancestry set side-by-side with California Indigenous people of this place, the Washoes. It ends:

Yet in summer Washoes still do the Pine Nut Dance

and Wampanoags do the Grass Dance to keep the world

in balance and remind us that the Earth is living, every

rock is sacred, and every tree and salmon has a soul. (79)

Day is able to tie two coasts together in this ending—the Massachusetts Wampanoags and the California Washoes. This understanding of unities is one of the pleasures of the collection. Day has a science Ph.D., and also M.F.A. in creative writing. She puts these two perspectives to good use in her writing. It is precise, complete, and transformative.

Interview with SF Review of Books Zara's Blog (zararaabblog.blogspot.com)

Poem by Lucille Lang dYetay, Valpraiso, “Birds of San Pancho”

Poem by Lucille Lang Day Poetry Foundation, “Tooth Painter,”

Video of Lucille Lang Day Berkeley Public Library poetry reading,

Video of Lucille Lang Day “How to Publish a Memoir,”

Lucille Lang Day is the author of seven full-length poetry collections and four poetry chapbooks. Her latest collection is Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place (Blue Light Press, 2020). She has also edited the anthology Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery, and she coedited Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California. Other publications are two children’s books and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and eleven Pushcart Prize nominations. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University, an MA in zoology, and a Ph.D. in science/mathematics education from the University of California at Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California. She is of Wampanoag, British, and Swiss/German descent. www.lucillelangday.com

Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, won the Editor’s Choice Red Mountain Press Poetry Award for Shadow Light. Other publications are memoirs The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (U. of Nebraska Press,) and Jigsaw Puzzling: Essays in a Time of Pestilence (Meadowlark, Sept. 2022); Wing (Red Mountain, Hefner Heitz Award finalist); Casino Bestiary (Spartan); and Jackalope (fiction, Red Mountain). She is co-author of Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors (U. of Nebraska Press, Ks. Notable Book). Her PhD in literature and creative writing is from the University of Kansas, and her MFA is from Wichita State. At Haskell Indian Nations University, she founded the creative writing program. She teaches for Baker University’s School of Professional and Graduate Studies. Board memberships include Indigenous Native Poets (In-Na-Po) and Associated Writers and Writing Programs (past president and contributing editor). Her heritage includes British Isles, German, and Lenape/Munsee (Delaware). She lives in California’s Sonoma County.www.deniselow.net

Denise Low: The Ethics of Endorsements and Book Reviews

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 13:22:00 -0500

Years ago I began book reviewing for the Kansas City Star and for literary journals. When I signed a contract as a freelancer for the KC Star, I learned the importance of ethics for this respected newspaper, which has won Pulitzers. Informally, as editor of the Cottonwood Review and then on the board of Bob Woodley Memorial Press (until I published a book with them). The ethics were obvious and not complicated: do not review or endorse any publication where there is a conflict of interest. Conflict of interest especially involves exchange of money.

These days, after print-on-demand has made self-publishing an industry, these ethics are not always apparent. Some important review venues sell reviews, like Kirkus Review Indie, where reviews cost about $500. Kirkus has been a long-time, respected publication, and its main company still is. This side-gig company is a moneymaker that exploits vanity authors. I avoid Kirkus completely now. This is old school; the basic rules of book reviewing are these:

Do not review books by family members, employers, employees, and others with whom you have a close personal relationship.
Do not review books for which you have received money for any part of the publication process--proofing, copyediting, design, promotional work.
Do not review books you have not read.
Do not write promotional reviews under a pseudonym.
Do not do anything sketchy, as your name as an ethical person is important in this business.
Selling review copies is considered unethical.

Ethical practices for endorsements (blurbs) are a bit more relaxed, as often people blurb for friends and for students. However, once money exchanges hand for any part of the writing-editing-publishing-promotion process, you may not endorse nor review the publication. Do not use any text for a blurb or other promotion without permission. A famous poet once wrote me a great compliment about a book in a letter, and she was insulted when I asked to use it as a blurb. Her reaction has stayed with me!

This is a first post about this issue, but a situation arose where the conflict-of-issue was clear, and the other party had never learned of the ethics of writing reviews and endorsements.

Annie Newcomber interviews J. Kahn

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Sun, 7 Aug 2022 16:29:00 -0500

Kansas City has a lively arts scene, including literary arts, and one of the most compelling voices is that of

Jemshen Khan. Poet Annie Newcomer interviews him about his recent book at Flapper Press Poetry Cafe. He tells about his mission in writing poetry: Resistance writing, especially, is a path of one's own making. Devoting writing energy to beliefs that run contrary to established interests is a step toward a specific type of freedom, waking a few readers from the trance of mainstream propaganda." His chapbook Speech in an Age of Certainty is available from Finishing Line Press. The interview also has a preview of his next book, The Popol Vuh: An Illustrated Epic, based on a Mayan creation narrative. I interviewed him also for this blog, Denise Low Interviews Jemshed Khan. Khan is a poet working from his experience donating medical assistance to Guatemalan people, his experience as an immigrant, and his experience as a person of conscience. Please enjoy his humanity and grace in this interview, and thanks to Newcomer for bringing this to the literary community! Her chapbook Comets: Relationships That Wander is from Finishing Line Press. Viva Kansas City!

Poetry Unbound discovers blood messages in Denise Low's poetry

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 16:14:00 -0500

I so appreciate the close reading of my poem "Walking with My Delaware Grandfather" in

their Poetry Unbound series. Their commentator Pádraig Ó Tuama says, "This poem has a deep knowledge about what it means for your own body to bear witness to your past, to your generations past. The grandfather in this poem is one of the four generations being evoked, because we hear of Denise, we hear of her mother, of her grandfather, and that man’s mother, also. And he’s walking, and he doesn’t seem unsettled, but he seems to be looking for a home to be found in the body and life and experiences of his granddaughter. And an invitation from this is to consider, what are the ways within my past generations are looking for a home, maybe a resolution, maybe an opportunity for change, maybe an opportunity for defiance, maybe an opportunity to say: 'I’m still here'?" Read or listen to the poem here:

Denise Low — Walking with My Delaware Grandfather | The On Being Project

DENISE LOW interviews Twin Cities writer KATHRYN KYSAR

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Tue, 10 May 2022 21:46:00 -0500

Kathryn Kysar is the author of the poetry books Dark Lake and Pretend the World, and she edited Riding Shotgun: Women Write about Their Mothers. We attended graduate school together at Wichita State University, one of the oldest MFA programs in the country, and we have remained friends. Kysar writes passionately and cares passionately about participating in literary communities. She founded the creative writing program at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, and she has been active as a board member of major literary organizations (AWP, Rain Taxi) as a behind-the-scenes booster. She’s recently published poetry in The Mollyhouse and Sleet (forthcoming). Links to recent poems are “After You Leave” in Voicemail Poems; “Photograph: Little League Practice” in The Under Review; “Lake Superior: Three Scenes of Summer” in About Place Journal. This email interview takes place May 10, 2022.

Denise Low: You are one of the most socially committed people I know. How does this affect your choices in writing?

Kathryn Kysar: I am in a constant state of growth and self-correction in my struggle with internalized racism. I am a product of our patriarchal capitalist society that is based on genocide and slavery, and I continue to learn about this history and how my privilege warps my perceptions. I am currently writing a travelogue about a driving trip I took with my son last summer that examines our family’s settler colonialist past and the false stories conveyed through the generations.

DL: Writing about your second book of poetry Pretend the World (Holy Cow! Press), Rigoberto González writes, “Kysar's ability to politicize parenting and gender offer a gripping but blunt way of seeing the lives we create, the wars we wage, the things we consume, and the connections we make without overbearing sentimentality or righteousness.” (Poetry Foundation). How has being a parent informed your writing subject matter and your writing process?

KK: Gender inequities continue to be a central focus of my writing. As the parent of a transgender child, I have closely witnessed the horrors of transphobia and the deep harm of daily microaggressions. Is the personal political? Of course. Our lives, including the act of raising children, take place within our racist, sexist, and classist society. To ignore the context of within which we parent would be ignoring these truths. One function of poetry is to unveil the truth, to say the unsaid, hopefully “without overbearing sentimentality or righteousness.”

DL: Collaboration is one of the ways you work with community. I remember for Pretend the World that you collaborated with visual artists to create a show of artworks that responded to individual poems. What was that like for you, to see your poems re-envisioned in another genre? What other collaborations have you been involved in recently?

KK: Thanks for asking about collaboration! The visual art shows that accompanied Pretend the World were astounding to me. I was in awe that my humble poems could trigger such engaging and varied pieces. I invited five artists who work in different mediums to respond to the poems in the book with their artwork. Some pieces, like Jan Elftmann’s sculptural white horse, referenced a single line in a poem. Philip Noyed’s “Dresses Everywhere” is a hanging globe of little dresses that echoed an entire poem as well as the book’s title. The show was presented in several galleries, and Jes Lee’s poetry videos are available on YouTube. It was a joyously fun project. I am currently writing poems in response to a series of Angela Spencer’s tarot card paintings, and we have upcoming shows scheduled for 2022-2023. My last big project was a collaborative recording of the poems from Pretend the World. I invited guest poets, musicians, and singers to record a poem. One of the happiest moments of my life was sitting in the studio sound booth and hearing how others understood and expressed my work so eloquently.

DL: In an interview for Write On Door County (2017), you wrote: “I deeply enjoy collaborative creation across the arts: I have had several shows with visual artists, written poems to pre-recorded music, and regularly perform with an improvisational poetry/music group called the Sonoglyph Collective. A sample Sonoglyph performance is “Escape from Paradise Iowa.” The musicians in this group are dynamite! What have you learned from this project?

KK: Since our graduation reading when I read my poems accompanied by a musician, I have been striving to take poetry off the page. The Sonoglyph Collective is an improvisational jazz/poetry group featuring four poets and three musicians: Sean Egan on clarinet, Jonathan Townsend on drums, Aaron Kerr on bass, with poets Lynette Rein-Grandell, Hawona Sullivan Janzen, Ibe Kaba, and myself. We blend the spoken word with music in improvisational ways. Our performances bring my poetry into the bliss of making meaningful sound with others. I have always been deeply connected with music—I worked in the music business for five years before starting my present job—and had always longed to be in a band. There is a connection, a creative energy, in the process of musical performance that I do not gain any other way.

DL: I notice you have video poems on YouTube, “Hand Sisters” and “Love Poem.” In addition to poetry, you have written essays and travel writing. What are some of your current writing projects?

KK: I am always, of course, writing poems, but my recent focus has been writing creative nonfiction. My lyric essays are constructed much like poems and weave dense imagery with insights and observations, often about the past. You can read some of my recent CNF work in Slag Glass City and The Mollyhouse.

DL: Is there anything else you would like to add?

KK: Thanks so much for this conversation!

Kathryn Kysar is the author of two books of poetry, Dark Lake and Pretend the World, and she edited the anthology Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tofte Lake Center, and the Oberholtzer Foundation. Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as To Sing Along the Way and Good Poems, American Places. Kysar has served on the board of directors for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and Rain Taxi Review. She is the founder of the creative writing program at Anoka-Ramsey Community College and offers manuscript consultations through The Loft Literary Center. Twitter: @darklake Instagram: @Pretendtheworld

DaMaris B. Hill brings power to BREATH BETTER SPEND: Living Black Girlhood

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 13:57:00 -0500

Be prepared to rage, sing, cry, and learn from this new hybrid collection Breath Better Spent (Bloomsbury) from one of the most powerful voices in the USA today. Dr. Damaris B. Hill writes about unspeakable atrocities as in "Kamille 'Cupcake' McKinney," a Black child stolen at a birthday party, and the complicity of local law enforcement, ending with "judge slapping his knees has a pocket full/ of opiates and promises for the young girl/ kneeling under his dinner napkin" (p. 87). Hill pulls together stories of Black womanhood, from the opening inscription to Zora Neale Hurston to Whitney Houston to Aretha Franklin ("What You Talkin' Bout") to her own younger self. The result is a book-length tour-de-force. This book deserves a wide audience, especially in times when the Senate hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson expose the blatant racism of some of the highest USA elected representatives. Thank you, Dr. Hill, for this testament to strength.

DaMaris B. Hill, PhD, is the author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, an NAACP Image Award Finalist; The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland; and a collection of poetry, \Vi-ze-bel\ \Teks-chers\(Visible Textures). As with her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. An Associate professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky and a former service member of the United States Air Force, she lives in Kentucky. www.damarishill.com Advertising & Promotions0 TOC0

KIM TEDROW WRITES POEM after DENISE LOW'S "TWO GATES"

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 19:15:00 -0500

Thanks to Kim Tedrow of Lincoln, Nebraska for her modeling a poem after my "Two Gates." This is part of her 30-day commitment to write a poem a day for Tupelo Press's 30/30 Project, a fundraiser: "Each month, volunteer poets run the equivalent of a "poetry marathon," writing 30 poems in 30 days, while the rest of us sponsor and encourage them every step of the way.

Here is my poem:

TWO GATES by DENISE LOW

I look through glass and see a young woman
of twenty, washing dishes, and the window
turns into a painting. She is myself thirty years ago.
She holds the same blue bowls and brass teapot
I still own. I see her outline against lamplight;
she knows only her side of the pane. The porch
where I stand is empty. Sunlight fades. I hear
water run in the sink as she lowers her head,
blind to the future. She does not imagine I exist.

I step forward for a better look and she dissolves
into lumber and paint. A gate I passed through
to the next life loses shape. Once more I stand
squared into the present, among maple trees
and scissor-tailed birds, in a garden, almost
a mother to that faint, distant woman.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55185/two-gates

And here is Kim Tedrow's poem "after" this one: Zoom Meeting / Kim Tedrow

after Denise Low

I look at myself on the screen

and I see myself at twenty,
hair straight and long, parted
down the middle for the first time
since before I knew myself,
except now I’m paying attention.
I see her loneliness as a quarry
from which she mines men
to whom she is disposable.
She wakes in someone’s home
and leaves without her shoes
so as not to wake him.
She wants to be a secret.
Her apartment overlooks a lot
where musicians park by the bar.
Later she goes there to dance.
Gladiolas grow next to the stairs.
Her father stops by
when she is not there
and tucks a picture of himself
into the door frame. She writes
“I could not bear to lose him.”
I see her and bring her back
to myself. She does not want to come
here–she cannot imagine the life
we live now–alone and happy.
In the meeting when it’s my turn
I speak up, I make myself known.

https://www.tupelopress.org/the-30-30-project-march-2022/

Kim Tedrow works as a Science Writer in Lincoln, Nebraska. She has a Master of Arts in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She’s been published in Prairie Schooner and several anthologies, including Nasty Women Poets: an Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane. She lives in a cute little granny house with three cats.

Denise Low comments on William Stafford's "Listening"

deniselow@gmail.com (Denise Low) — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 16:55:00 -0600

Remarks presented at the Watkins Museum celebration of William Stafford's birthday, January 15,

I am so honored to have known William Stafford, born January 17, 1914, at the beginning of my writing life. His person and his poetry influenced me to strive for reflective engagement with natural and human surroundings. He uses poetry for play, for surprises in language, for folding the outside patterns of nature into my inner life, comingling the two. He fit his poetics to align with the unique grasslands ecology of the region where he grew up, from Liberal to Hutchinson to Lawrence—where he received his BA and MA. The sparse landscape of horizontals with gentle angles of ridges creates a backdrop where any vertical, like a watermill or steeple or horse, becomes dramatic. Human experience is set against an enormous sweep of sky.

The most important aspect of Stafford’s poetics is his humility, which gives him the ability to step aside from the role of master over the wilderness, which was the biblical tradition. Instead, he took the pose of one who listens and learns, as in this favorite of mine, which suggests his Indigenous background: https://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2014/06/william-stafford-listening.html

Listening by William Stafford:

My father could hear a little animal step,

or a moth in the dark against the screen,

and every far sound called the listening out

into places where the rest of us had never been.

More spoke to him from the soft wild night

than came to our porch for us on the wind;

we would watch him look up and his face go keen

till the walls of the world flared, widened.

My father heard so much that we still stand

inviting the quiet by turning the face,

waiting for a time when something in the night

will touch us too from that other place.

He mixes the human and natural worlds, with the “moth in the dark against the screen” and the portal between the two realms, the “porch.” The porch becomes the interface between mortality and immortality.

A second point about Stafford’s poetics: his discussion of ethics. “Traveling Through the Dark” is the most well-known example of this, where he pauses and could “hear the wilderness listen.” He reverses the role of judge and makes readers aware that their actions, like his, have moral consequences. And finally, the language is subtle, like the landscape, with deep images that continue to build layers throughout the years. The dead deer by the side of the rode is singular and memorable. Not many details appear in the verse, and the image of the deer is the point, not the poet’s acrobatic use of vocabulary and rhetorical devices. Here is the poem “Traveling Through the Dark by Willilam Stafford: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42775/traveling-through-the-dark

My poem responds to “Listening.”

Variations on Keening by Denise Low

We would watch him look up and his face go keen. William Stafford

My father’s face goes keen. Cicadas drone as

darkness walls us in. His eyes are echoes

on fire. He speaks kennings. His wise eyes

turn blue fire. His prophet’s sight pierces night

with keen perception. Agate rings lie buried

in river mud. His eyes see their spirals.

A sunfish rouges under a keen-bladed knife.

Sequin scales flake. Its eyes darken into a stare

beyond ken. I keen. My father’s twin-star eyes

gaze equally into and out of the dark.

Wings (Red Mountain Press, 2021)

My play on “ken” and “keen” emphasizes my wonder at the same cosmos that Stafford knew in the grasslands of Kansas. I conflate him with my father, born a few moths after Stafford and twenty miles away. Stafford is my poetic father. His example of self-effacement, images, and focus on a few key words—these I try to follow. www.deniselow.net