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A Journal of Contemporary Arts |
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| Vol. 11, No.1 |
Copyright © 2006 Expansive Poetry & Music Online | Jan. 2006 |
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Welcome to Expansive Poetry & Music Online's first issue of 2006. We've been away for months and apologize to regular readers for our absence. We have several items this issue, including poetry by sculptor, architect and painter Michael Curtis, a review of Richard Moore's new book by Jan Schreiber, and a poem by the Webmaster. At the Dahesh Museum on March 16th, there will be a panel discussion of whether or not great stories can still be conducted in verse. Poe, of course, said that storytelling belonged in novels and plays, with which a variety of poets in the 150 years since Poe's manifesto have ignored, including E.A. Robinson, Philip Larkin, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost, not to mention Dick Allen, Frederick Feirstein, Tony Harrison, Louis MacNeice, Randall Jarrell and Frederick Turner. The panel will be presented by James Cooper's American Arts Quarterly, a publication from the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. The Webmaster will moderate. Panelists are likely to include Frederick Turner, Dick Allen, and several others. Details, such as time and address, will follow soon. Expansive Poetry & Music Online's erratic appearances for the past seven months are regrettable, and, one hopes, over. New issues will be appearing on a more regular basis. They are likely to concentrate more on poetry than on reviews and essays. The archives, now substantially rebuilt, will remain online. The poetry journal Pivot, moved into CD-ROM format several years ago, will suspend publication after the next issue. The publisher will concentrate on Pivot Press books. The next issue should be released in six to eight weeks. Julia Budenz's Carmina Carmentis is enroute to the printer's and should be out in two months. Watch this space and the store. The Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center will soon have a major new Web site, quite apart from their regular site. Covering esthetics, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music, it will be directed not only at presentation of exemplary work and reviews, but on discussion. Watch for the link on page one, and in the links section. Readers who find it difficult to believe that a scientist can cross the frontier of the arts might want to look at the work of Robin Fox, an anthropologist of note (Kinship & Marriage; The Red Lamp of Incest; The Tory Islanders; The Search for Society, Participant Observer, among many others), whose Passionate Mind is a foray into a poetic explication of anthropological discoveries and ideas. "The work combines prose and poetry to comment with wit, humor, learning, and insight on the human condition...a brilliant achievement...."-- Ashley Montagu. The books can be found by going through robinfoxbooks.com or searched for on alibris.com. Joseph S. Salemi's full-length collection, Masquerade, is now for sale in the EP&M Online Bookstore. "With rare techical finesse in a myriad of verse forms, Joseph S. Salemi's magnificently Swiftian satire scourges blatherskites from warmongers to trendy poets...." J.B. Sisson "In this book of stinging satirical poems, Joseph S. Salemi, writing in the tradition of Martial, Swift, and Bierce, gives us the lowdown on what he calls 'this therapeutic, feelgood age.'" Jared Carter "In Joseph S. Salemi's poems, we hear again the authentic voice of satire as it comes down to us thorugh the ages, from Jeremiah, Aristophanes, Catullus, and Juvenal, to Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Mencken...." Frederick Turner In more news about Joseph S. Salemi, he has been named "Featured Poet" in two different poetry journals this year. Light Quarterly and Italian Americana have essays on his work and a selection of his recent poetry. John Gery, who taught at the University of New Orleans, reports that he and his family are safe, and are likely to relocate to North Carolina. Frederick Turner's new On The Field of Life, On The Battlefield of Truth, a remarkable long poem taking an intense and personal look at mortality, is in the EP&M Online Bookstore. Turner, whose Prayers of Dallas, a dramatic sequence, was recently performed to accolades in Dallas before a considerable audience, is the author of the epics Genesis, The Return, Ballad of the Good Cowboy and The New World. In addition to his poetry, Turner was a co-founder of the Expansive Poetry movement, is a novelist, a commentator on philosophy, science, art and society, a regular columnist for the outstanding American Arts Quarterly, and a professor at the University of Texas. Get the hardback version of Richard Wilbur's Collected Poems, released just recently, a beautifully produced book for a marvelous poet. Edward Zuk reviews him in this issue of EP&M Online All that's missing are complete versions of the brilliant translations of French plays, probably the best acting scripts for Moliére in English. Wilbur, unlike a few noted translators of French, not only tries but succeeds in conveying a considerable sense of the original's art, including its structure, rhyme scheme, and meter. Don't miss Sybil Kollar's new Water Speaking To Stone from Pivot Press, now in the EP&M Online Bookstore. In a haunting and varied collection, Sybil Kollar reconciles worlds and histories born in half-light, elemental, sensual, mysterious, almost Rilkean in the spare evocations of stone, lock, forest, road and stars that throw down their shadows and dream light before us. Illuminated particulars of childhood and sometimes menacing landscapes insinuate themselves in memory won't let go. This elegant book deserves a wide audience.. —Colette Inez Daniel Fernandez's Flight Number is in the EP&M Online Bookstore. Flight Numbers is the work of a rich and skeptical mind. Among its recurring themes are history, classical mythology, contemporary urban life, and nature. —Alfred Dorn Composer Stefania DeKenessey is on a new CD, Never Broken, with baritone Christopheren Nomura singing her Autumn Elegy. It is available from cdbaby.com for a modest price. It was produced by Center Stage Record. She has a string quartet being presented at Symphony Space on Thursday evening, June 9th in New York City. Check their Web site for tickets. Choriambs, Tanya Angell Allen's blog and discussion page on contemporary poetry, keeps growing. You should pay a visit. We have heard reliable rumors that Edige City Review No. 20 will be out soon. If you can't wait, Edge City Review No. 19 is available from Terence Ponick in Virginia. It's packed with poetry including Frederick Feirstein's sequence The Unholy Dark, and a new section of Gallery of Ethopaths from Joseph S. Salemi. Reviews include Leslie Monsour's look at Dana Gioia's Interrogations at Noon and Jan Schreiber's look at Robert Darling's So Far. There is a fine article by Tanya Angell Allen on the poetry of Marilyn Nelson. Don't miss it. You can order a copy at www.edge-city.com Arthur Mortensen's A Disiciple After The Fact, a novel in verse, has been released by Kaba Press. You can purchase it in the EP&M Online Bookstore. Robert Darling's book So Far, poet's first full-length book, but his fourth collection, has been described by Timothy Steele: "Compassion is the distinguishing characteristic of this fine collection. His verse deals movingly with people in the midst of painful personal changes, and now and then, as in 'Gargoyle' and 'John Hoyle,' it modulates into serious and observant satire." X.J. Kennedy observes that "Darling has written some of the outstanding metrical poetry of our time. His poems have an innate elegance; at the same time they convey deep feeling -- a lyric poet able to sound his own depths!" Said Rhina Espaillat, "This is a collection that enriches the reader by reminding him of what language can do." Expansive Poetry & Music Online is pleased to present So Far in our EP&M Online Bookstore. NewBohemia, Rene Gruss's fine Web site on contemnporary arts, has closed down. If it is still in the Links section, you will find yourself on a farewell page that will forward you to Rene Gruss's music site. Wade Newman's Poisoned Apples, highly recommended by Frederick Turner, Kelly Cherry and Jack Butler, is available from Pivot Press for shoppers in the EP&M Online Bookstore. You may also find So Far by Robert Darling, as well as Pivot. Somers Rocks Press's noteworthy chapbook series, including poets Alan Sullivan, Robert Darling, Sybil Kollar, Len Krisak, Michael Palma, Caroline Raphael, William Carlson, James DiMartini, Lisa Barnett, Norman Kraeft, Gerald Sullivan, Alfred Dorn and the Webmaster, is available in the bookstore. SRP is not currently publishing new work. Books on prosody: All The Fun's In How You Say a Thing, Timothy Steele; New Book of Forms, Louis Turco (or its successor from Oxford by the same author, if it has finally been printed); Missing Measures, Timothy Steele; Handbook of Prosody, Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum (library or used book); Rhyme's Reason, John Hollander; Poetry Handbook, Babette Deutsch (library or used book, flawed, according to Dr. Dorn, only in its definition of a villanelle). For library or used-book searches, Steele's bibliography in Missing Measures is very worthwhile. These are not books on literary theory, but on prosodic practice. For a look at the way figurative language was codified and used in Elizabethan times, you could do worse than Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language, by Sister Miriam Joseph, CSC, a brilliant analysis which includes as an appendix a reconstructed Tudor rhetoricians' textbook on composition and reading (library or used book). An exciting re-release is Sister Miriam's The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, reprinted Paul Dry Books. Rather than give simple definitions, Sister Miriam illuminates each figure with a speech from one of Shakespeare's plays or with lines from the sonnets. The Shapiro & Beum book has limited treatment of this subject, as does Turco's. There is also the hypertext version of English Versification: 1570-1980, by T.V.F. Brogan, a monumental bibliographic review of writing on versification, but expect to wait when trying to get on. Be sure and look for the beautiful Day Before from Dick Allen, the remarkable Starry Messenger, a long poem about Galileo, from George Keithley, as well as other releases from J.D. Reeve, Charles Martin, Michael Palma, Richard Wilbur, Gail White, Mark Jarman, A.E. Stallings, Suzanne Noguere, Richard Moore, Rhina Espaillat, Len Krisak, A.D. Hope (Halstead's edition of Selected Poems), John Barr, Paul Lake, David Mason, Bruce Meyer and Frederick Turner. Tom Carper has a wonderful new collection, reviewed here last summer. |
| From Luther Fox: "The last time New Orleans had a flood like this, Huey Long overthrew the entire Louisiana political establishment." |
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