An extra-terrestrial visits earth and assumes human appearance. He is “curiously drawn to the Americans” yet, is unable to penetrate the essence of who they are. He finds that American literature helps him better understand them. Weaving together, music, visual imagery, story, and song, Here, Among the Americans… is a spoken word journalistic exploration into the modern poetic voice of this country—a voice, at this time in our history, needs so much to listen to.
Works by Robert Hayden, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emma Lazarus, Kent Forman, & Regie Gibson. Music by Guy Mendilow and Mazz Swift
Join us for a reading of poetry by NEPC members with new books!
Until further notice, all events will be online; this series is free and open to the public.
Members will receive the zoom link information in a newsletter; please email info@nepoetryclub.org if you are not a member.
Bios for New Poetry Reading, March 14, 2021
Linda Haviland Conte is the author of Seldom Purely (Ibbetson Street Press, 2020) and Slow As A Poem (Ibbetson Street Press, 2002). Her work also appears in several anthologies and magazines. She was a panelist at the Massachusetts and New Hampshire Poetry Festivals (2017). Linda is Treasurer and Membership Coordinator for The New England Poetry Club. Seldom Purely is available at Lulu, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.
People can message her through my website (lindaconte.net) to order my chapbook Slow As A Poem.
Timothy Gager is the author of sixteen books of fiction and poetry. His latest, an Amazon #1 Best Seller, Poems of 2020,is his ninth of poetry. Timothy hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 2001 to 2018, and as a virtual series starting in 2020. Timothy was the co-founder of The Somerville News Writers Festival. He has had over 600 works of fiction and poetry published, of which seventeen have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work also has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology, and has been read on National Public Radio.
Eleanor Kedney is the author of the full-length collection Between the Earth and Sky (C&R Press, 2020) and the chapbook The Offering (Liquid Light Press, 2016). Between the Earth and Sky is a 2020 Best Book Award Finalist in Poetry (American Book Fest). Her work has appeared in Miramar Poetry Journal,New Ohio Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, Sliver of Stone, and other journals, and anthologies. Her poem “Bubbles Blown through a Wand” won the 2019 riverSedge Poetry Prize (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley). “A Park Bench in Prague” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Fjords Review. Kedney is the founder of the Tucson branch of the New York-based Writers Studio, and served as the director for ten years. She lives in Stonington, Connecticut and Tucson, Arizona. Learn more at eleanorkedney.com.
To purchase Between the Earth and Sky please visit C&R Press: C&R Press or email Eleanor Kedney at eleanorkedney@yahoo.com for a signed copy.
Please spread the word! The NEPC is accepting submissions for the Victor Howes Prize in Poetry. This is for undergraduate English majors studying in New England and comes with a $1000 prize and a reading (virtual this year) at the Longfellow House in Cambridge.
Join us for a reading of poetry by NEPC members with new books!
This event is free and open to the public. It will take place on Zoom; the link will be sent out via the newsletter or you can email info@nepoetryclub.org.
READER BIOS:
Krikor Der Hohannesian’s poems have appeared in over 175 literary journals including South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Louisiana Literature, Connecticut Review, Comstock Review and Natural Bridge. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, author of two chapbooks, Ghosts and Whispers(Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Refuge in the Shadows (Cervena Barva Press, 2013), as well as a full-length book, First Generation (Dos Madres Press, 2020). Ghosts and Whispers was a finalist for the Mass Book awards poetry category in 2011.
Anyone wishing to purchase a copy of his latest collection, First Generation, can do so by e-mailing him at krikorndh@verizon.net or, alternatively by telephone: 781-488-3933.
Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. A Boston native, her poems have been displayed in City Hall and featured by Mass Poetry aboard the red line subway. Her poems have recently appeared in Saranac Review, Poet Lore and Sugar House Review. She works as an advocate for the homeless in Cambridge, and teaches in the PoemWorks community. Her website is alexisivypoet.com
Barbara Thomas grew up in the Last Green Valley. She earned a Masters Degree from Boston University in Education and taught English and Reading in the public schools for 35 years.
Barbara is an active member of The New England Poetry Club, the Greek Institute, and Glenbrook, an environmental writing group in New Hampshire. She was a Joiner Center participant for ten years and received the Jeff Mayle Award. Her most recent book is The Last Green Valley, Cedar Grove Press, 2019. Other publications are a chapbook, Seduced Sighs of Trees, Cloudkeeper Press, 2007, and her poems have appeared in the Paterson Literary Review, Fiele-Festa, Lalitamba, andinseveral of the Bagel BardsAnthologies,among others. Her recent book, The Last Green Valley, can be purchased on Amazon ( $19.00) from Cherry Grove Collections: The Art of the Lyric; cherry-grove.com/barbara_thomas.html.
Sign-up for the open mic in the chat box before the reading begins; each participant will read ONE poem (no longer than a page). Limit 12 readers.
This session will offer an introduction to literary translation for writers; working on the basis that flexibility and skill in English are the most important requirements for participants. You need not know or have studied a foreign language. We will explore the fundamental questions of translation.
Bio
Danielle Legros Georges is a writer, translator, academic, and author of several books of poetry including The Dear Remote Nearness of You, winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motten book prize. She directs the Lesley University MFA program in Creative Writing. Her awards include fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Foundation, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. In 2015 she was appointed Boston’s second Poet Laureate. Her most recent work is a book of translations from the French, Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert, published by Subpress Collective in 2021.
This workshop and discussion concerns the making of the serial poem. The focus falls on discontinuity and possibilities for coherence. One particularly difficult example is John Ashbury’s “The Skaters” remains relevant. [“The Skaters” is available at Microsoft Word – Ashbery_Skaters.docx (text-works.org); both text and audio are available at both text and audio: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ashbery/the_skaters.php]
“The Skaters” often appears to make sense locally, inviting the reader to expect to make global sense of the poem. Instead, one encounters an intractable flux of verbal “found objects,” shifting styles and registers, teasing literary allusions and echoes, fragmentary narrative episodes and descriptive scenes. How is one to negotiate or manage such flux? Critics tend to select “key” lines or passages, treating these as interpretative centers or “nodes” around which to organize the heterogeneous materials of the poem. (How (Not) to Read Postmodernist Long Poems: The Case of Ashbery’s“ The Skaters.” Brian McHale, Poetics Today (2000) 21 (3): 561–590. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-21-3-561
The driving force behind a series composed of discontinuous elements is often rhythm, not explanation. In “The Skaters” there are thematic clusters related to childhood or entropy, but Ashbury is not building a stick house. Integrity of construction matters not so much does rhythm and its vicissitudes. Ashbury’s central poetic act is to frustrate form, making meaning difficult or impossible to discover. The willful meaningless of the series in JA’s practice has often been discussed. “It is madness to explain” he warns us.
This a lesson that I learned from Antonio Gamoneda, a Spanish poet whom I translate. He advised me not to explain, instead my job was to capture the music, to allow it to be heard or come across. JA ‘s music finds novelty in discontinuity. It is not a new practice though the shock of novelty in his case may verge on the extreme. Like many readers I have sought to unravel the inscrutable sources that underlie such utter discontinuity. For me, the source of poetic novelty lies in a blending of documentary, that is objective elements, camera work perhaps, and imaginary or fantastic elements, perhaps surreal impulses that cast their unverifiable or fictional shadows, necessary, moments that engage shadows or abysses. How does one end such a series? Cascade or torrents of energy my break into lulling discontinuities. The final image is never enough. “The Skaters” takes 42 minutes to read. Between images understood as facts, the energy of interpolated fictions are often generative of possible meanings. Fiction is then a form of making that is poetry. One that provides context and techniques of abruption. Such poetics may be differentiated from prosody and governs what might be called the very rhythms of the series. The introduction of unexpected but novel elements often requires fictive bridges. That may also have been Wallace Stevens’s conviction. “The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it.” No explanation possible. Here are some lines from a short poem, “To be continued” from Kate Colby’s The Arrangements (2018): “Shrill light from snow / yellows in the window // a frizzle of dead / baby’s breath.” Discontinuous images that do and do not resolve in “I can’t exist / any/more.” It’s always difficult to find a resting place in a poem composed of discontinuous elements. Participants will discuss how the concepts advanced in this note are true of their work or of the work of a poet they admire. I
BIO: Donald Wellman, poet, editor, and translator, his recent book of poetry are Crossing Mexico and Essay Poems (Dos Madres: Loveland OH). Other books from Dos Madre include The Cranberry Island Series and A North Atlantic Wall. Roman Exercises is from Talisman. Prolog Pages was issued by Ahadada ; Fields (Light and Dust). For several years, he edited O.ARS, a series of anthologies, devoted to topics bearing on postmodern poetics. Books of poetry in translation include Emilio Prados, Enclosed Garden, (Lavender Ink / Diálogos); Antonio Gamoneda, Description of the Lie (Talisman) and Gravestones, (UNO Press). His translation of Roberto Echavarren’s The Espresso Between Sleep and Wakefulness is from Cardboard House. His translation of Echavarren’s The Virgin Mountain is from Lavender Ink. A translation of Néstor Perlongher’s Cadavers is from Cardboard House. Recent critical work includes Albiach / Celan: Reading Across Languages. His Expressivity in Modern Poetry from Fairleigh Dickinson.
New York’s Yiddish-speaking Lower East Side was the scene of intense literary, theatrical, cultural and political activity in the early Twentieth Century. If you were “on the Right”, that meant you were Socialist. If you were “on the Left”, that meant you were Communist. It’s an America that’s hard to remember. The Yiddish newspapers were full of literature and poetry. I’ve read an estimate that Moyshe-Leyb Halpern was read by a million people a week. A poet. In America.
I’ll talk a little bit about Yiddish, a little bit about Yiddish literature. I’ll read some poems, mostly in translation, but occasionally along with the originals. I’ll bemoan the perils of translation. I’ll show some of my artwork inspired by these poems. I’ll recommend some books.
This event will take place on Zoom; the link will be sent out in the member newsletter a day or two before the event. If you’re not a member yet, please consider joining–it’s easy! https://nepoetryclub.org/membership/
This will be a generative workshop for NEPC members based on a technique I’ve been using for 20 years that I learned from my mentor and dear friend, Babara Helfgott Hyett. Many (most?) of my poems begin as free-writes generated during a weekly (now virtual) session with poet-friends.Come with whatever notebook or journal you like to write in, a pen or pencil, and three phrases, sentence fragments, or sentences you’d like to use as prompts. These can come from any source: an encyclopedia entry, a single line of a poem (please use the full line), a Victorian novel you picked up at the library sale and have never read. Pick lines that are open ended and evocative. Some lines I’ve used recently: “Tell yourself, maybe it’s true. Maybe your name was . . .” (Nick Flynn); “I missed the storms that stopped there” (Carl Phillips); “and break forever– (unknown); “Are they born knowing?” (The How and Why Program: Little Questions that Lead to Great Discoveries, copyright 1947). We will take turns providing prompts, writing for an amount of time that will likely surprise you, and reading what we’ve written back to one another.
Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti; and in numerous anthologies. She’s been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.Members can email info@nepoetryclub.org for the link. *If you’re not a member, joining is easy! https://nepoetryclub.org/membership/
