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.
Paul Nemser’s new book A Thousand Curves, which is forthcoming in spring, 2021, won the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press. The poems in A Thousand Curves find inspiration from nature, travel, mysticism, memory. Time is understood in glimpses—raindrops, tides changing, splashes of a waterfall. Sometimes the background leaps out of the foreground. Bugs grind leaves, a line from a rock song repeats and repeats. Here are ecstasies and nightmares, mysteries and clarities of daily life, fateful steps, chance encounters, donkeys braying, one nightingale calling, reflections off an office building’s floor-to-ceiling window. These glimpses can become a poem overnight or take decades to finish. In time the poems come together as a book that moves among traces of these myriad conversations. The internal speaks with the external. Permanence speaks with change. Ultimately the book is about the twists and turns that life takes over a lifetime, the record of a journey with a thousand curves.
“Paul Nemser’s A Thousand Curves contains many thousand brilliances—of language, of content, of perception—with each line indisputably in service to a larger wondering (Before this world,/we passed through clouds of others). Wild with insight and passion, these poems posit the marriage of body to world, flesh to thing, and exhibit an affinity for the beauty in the ordinary (Breathe in like screws turned in olive wood./Sigh out like milk-happy foals.) Most of all, these poems are visions from a grounded mystic, a speaker conversant with both the real and the mysterious, love and loss, this side of life and the other, and to experience the scope of this skill and ambition is thrilling. An immense and memorable achievement.”
–Joan Houlihan
“The particular pleasure of reading Paul Nemser’s poems emerges slowly, the reader paying close attention to the use of words, to the sophistication of form, until—suddenly—a cymbal crash that goes straight to the heart. We make our way, as Nemser writes in ‘After the Calm,’ ‘in weaves/of raspberries that thorn across fences fallen to gaps.’ Woven together are myths, impressions both internal and external, memories, and images. The greatest pleasure, though, at least for me, comes with the surprise of the line that shoots straight at and into us; and so, with clear eyes, we delight in, from ‘Morning After,’ ‘My pale, my pearl, my onions in a pan.’ Every one of Paul Nemser’s poems has its own surprises and its own rewards. Certainly, they engage the intellect, but time after time they open the heart.”
—Margery Irvine
About Paul Nemser
Paul Nemser grew up in Portland, Oregon, where he fell in love with poetry while reading in the storage room in back of his family’s tool store. He received an AB from Harvard College where he studied with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts where he studied with Stanley Kunitz and many others. He also received a JD from Boston University School of Law. His love of reading and writing poetry has continued throughout his life. Beside his new book, A Thousand Curves (Red Mountain Press, 2021), his book Taurus won the 2011 New American Poetry Prize from New American Press, and his chapbook Tales Of The Tetragrammaton (2014) was published by Mayapple Press. His poems appear widely in magazines, including AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, London Review of Books, The Missouri Review, and Plume. He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Harborside, Maine.
We are saddened by the news of the death of NEPC Golden Rose poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
“Ferlinghetti began his career at a revolutionary time in arts and music. In 1994, he still believed art could make a difference. “I really believe that art is capable of the total transformation of the world, and of life itself,” he said. “And nothing less is really acceptable. So I mean if art is going to have any excuse for — beyond being a leisure-class plaything — it has to transform life itself.”
Through more than half a century of writing and publishing, Lawrence Ferlinghetti did.” (from NPR)
Poet and author Lawrence Ferlinghetti, pictured above in 1960, was born on March 24, 1919.
I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day watching the pocket pool players making the minestrone scene wolfing the macaronis and I have read somewhere the Meaning of Existence yet have forgotten just exactly where. But I am the man And I’ll be there. And I may cause the lips of those who are asleep to speak. And I may make my notebooks into sheaves of grass. And I may write my own eponymous epitaph instructing the horsemen to pass.
Helen Marie Casey’s new poetry chapbook, “You Kept Your Secrets”, is available from Finishing Line Press. Susan Edwards Richmond has written of the book: “In this deeply affecting collection, Helen Marie Casey chronicles the aftermath—and persistence—of loss in the absence of a beloved child. “What do we become when we cease to be/who we were?” the poet asks, a question that resonates for subject, author, and reader alike. These poems both celebrate a brief life, “you/young boy, hawk-like, spreading/your sweatered wings wide” and map the ever-widening circles of pain and joy.”
