Check out Craig Morgan Teicher’s wonderful review of Bin Ramke’s Theory Of Mind: New & Selected Poems 1978-2008 at the BOSTON REVIEW.
&
check out Kacy Muir’s review of Rimbaud’s The Illuminations, translated by Donald Revell, at the WEEKENDER.
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02/04/09
The Garden of Poetry at Mrs. Dalloway’s
Reviewer: Sarah Louise Green
Reviews Editor: Meg Hurtado
Photographs bought to you by: Robert Andrew Perez, Jr.
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THE SCOOP
Location: Mrs. Dalloway’s 2904 College Ave., Berkeley, CA
Curator: Mary Fox
Mrs Dalloway’s Contact Person: Mary Fox
Parking/Transportation: Unless you have the strange & good fortune of finding a spot on College, your best bet is to turn left on Russell and left again into the small lot that the bookstore shares with some of the neighboring restaurants and shops.
The Run of Things: Come early to browse. The bookstore has a carefully curated poetry selection as well as robust offerings of biography, gardening, and other sorts of books. The crowd trickles in, but there will likely be no seats left as the reading begins.
Is There a Blog? Yes. You can find the schedule of readings and other events on their website.
Upcoming Poetry Readings: Marc Elihu Hofstadter and Stephen Kessler will read Friday, 2/5/2010 at 7:30 p.m.
Poems from and photos of each of the readers will be featured within this review.
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There is no place quite like Mrs. Dalloway’s, partly due to the thoughtful selection of both plants and books overseen by longtime friends and store founders Marion Abbott and Ann Leyhe. The space is charming and provides much fodder for those interested in either literary or garden arts. And though Mrs. Dalloway’s isn’t the largest bookstore in the area, its quality is superb. One need look no further than the events hosted by the store from garden demonstrations to literary readings by well-respected local figures, such as Matthew Zapruder, D.A. Powell, and Graham Foust. Mary Fox, who curates the series and introduced the poets, won me over quickly by offering me a bundle of poems from the most recent Poem In Your Pocket celebration, which the bookstore marked by offering free poems by Bay Area poets. After getting acquainted with both Mary and the readers, the audience settled into our seats for a magnificent evening of poetry.
The title poem of Cheryl Dumesnil’s book, In Praise of Falling, serves as a fitting guide to the first part of the evening—begin with details, fraught with potential hazards, and move toward the intimate. After a moment of recognizing the incomprehensible tragedy in Haiti, we were plunged into a world both familiar and menacing as “a guy in his yard burning leaves, a spark / from a gas-powered mower, that Old Crow bottle // smashed in a field, finally finding its flame” (“It’s Not Armageddon”). As the poem says, it’s not Armageddon; it’s not even catastrophe—these poems take the world as their tinderbox. Everything has the power to incite as well as the power to consume. And the book wrangles with this mercurial existence with a praise that is anything but haphazard and keenly aware of the dangers within.
Cheryl did such a wonderful job explaining the structure of the book clearly and thoroughly as well as reading the poems with a measured pacing, so as to let the listener turn over her collections of details once more. The poems often take places as their titles, but even when they are unspecific, they are relentlessly located in the quotidian: “nickels falling in the slot machine’s mouth”, “rusted-out laundry wringer”, “snapped bike chain, / crumpled sock, fifty-gallon drum // shot through with .22 holes” (“Bernal Heights” and “A Soldier’s Home, Hughes, Arkansas, 1970”). While common, these characters are invested with the possibility of transformation, such as a fish turning into a comet or the chevrons on a uniform taking off like birds—here, falling becomes flight.
How fitting since, as Cheryl explained, the book begins with poems of lifting up; then, it moves to coming-of-age, identity, and love. And as she moved closer to the end of her reading (and the book), the emotional stakes of the poems shot up (not like birds, but like fireworks), and Cheryl correspondingly grew more reticent between poems; earlier, she had been generous with information concerning the poems’ origins or with anecdotes related to her writing and the writing life in general. As an audience member, her gradual (and subtle) retraction heightened the intensity of the experience—we all leaned in closer for more and more of the speaker in front of us. And as we immersed ourselves, by listening, in the dilapidated, rural scene of “Getting It Right This Time”, we found the speaker waiting for us, as she had been all along:
Getting It Right This Time – Cheryl Dumesnil
If we ever meet, wordless,
staccato of December rain
hammering the metal overhang,
may the person I am then
press my tired hand to your
rounded belly, trace a finger
around the equator I mapped
our first night, orbiting
from navel back to navel
call you mine. If it ever
happens like that, if some
post-apocalyptic day we’re made
strangers by too much buried
hurt, may the person you are then
remember that hobos paint,
with their wet fingers, barely visible
signs on dusty farmhouse doors.
Remember an inverted triangle
with two dots above it says
this one will give you water,
two lines cut across an oval
means this one will take you in.
At this point in the reading, Cheryl Dumesnil ceded the mic to Robin Ekiss, who commenced with the poem featured below:
The Question of My Mother
The question of my mother is on the table.
The dark box of her mind is also there,
the garden of everywhere
we used to walk together.
Among the things the body doesn’t know,
it is the dark box I return to most:
fallopian city ingrained in memory,
ghost-orchid egg in the arboretum,
hinged lid forever bending back and forth—
open to me, then closed
like the petals of the paper-white narcissus.
What would it take to make a city in me?
Dark arterial streets, neglected ovary
hard as an acorn hidden in its dark box
on the table: Mother, I am
out of my mind, spilling everywhere.
The nautilus-like movement of this particular poem, winding closer and closer to the body, was a perfect transition into Robin Ekiss’s reading of her debut volume, The Mansion of Happiness. The title of her book, as she informed the audience, is taken from a nineteenth century morality board game and hints at the once-novel treasures found within this Wunderkammer. While easy it’s to delight in the dolls, miniatures, and other curiosities, the poems (especially the opening poems) involve the speaker explicitly—“I was raised in the company of dolls” (“Preface”)—and often uncomfortably. Robin spoke freely about how many of the poems draw on her childhood experiences of growing up with a mother who was a miniaturist, but just as swiftly addressed the fact that many of the poems explore maternal experience—a thing which, at the time these poems were written, she had no direct knowledge of.
A gentle tension evolved between the details she claimed as autobiographical or outright explained (“the garden of everywhere” was seen on a billboard for the Stanford Shopping Center) and the details that were left a bit more vague or clearly related to other figures in the poem. This, in turn, created a pleasant game for the listener whose goal was not heaven, but rather, an understanding of the poet-at-hand, which may perhaps be a taller order. From the “nested” relationship of mother and daughter (“Genealogy”) to the menagerie of characters presented in the latter half of the book—Thomas Edison, René Descartes, Houdini, and the Android Clarinetist, to name a few—the listener had a variety of sources for both pleasure and wonder at his or her disposal.
In addition to the inherent vibrancy of the poems, Robin interwove engaging anecdotes about Descartes’ doll, Francine, who was like a surrogate daughter to him; about visiting the largest collection of nineteenth-century automatons in France; about the “Dickson Experimental Sound Film”. When the conversation turned to the Musée Mécanique, which was formerly housed under the Cliff House near the old Sutro Baths and Playland-at-the-Beach, the audience became extremely animated. A back-and-forth exchange between an audience member and Robin culminated in Robin performing an unforgettable (and likely accurate) impression of “Laffing Sal”, which had everyone in stitches. My friends and I were laughing so hard that we completely missed the photo opportunity, but here is another:
A wonderful time was had by all. I encourage you to check out both Cheryl and Robin’s books, if you haven’t already, and pay a visit to Mrs. Dalloway’s for browsing or for the next poetry reading on February 5th. All of them will be well worth your time!
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02/04/09
Aaron Shurin reading at University Press Books, Berkeley 2/17
Posted by omnidawnblog under .Leave a Comment
Wedensday, February 17, 6:00-7:30
Join author Aaron Shurin for a reading from his book of poetry, Involuntary Lyrics.
UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS
2430 Bancroft Way
Berkeley, CA 94704
ph: (510) 548-0585
02/04/09
Friday, March 5, 2010Poetry reading by Alan Bernheimer, The Spoonlight Institute (Adventures in Poetry/Zephyr Press 10/2009), and Stephanie Young. Picture Palace (ingirumimusnocteet comsumimurigni 8/2008), Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts, 2904 College Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510-704-8222, wwwmrsdalloways.com)
Bay Area poet Alan Bernheimer was born and raised in New York City and graduated in 1970 from Yale University where he studied with New York poets Ted Berrigan, Peter Schjeldahl, and Bill Berkson. In 1976 he moved to San Francisco and spent time with other young writers such as Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten—a group who would soon become known as the San Francisco Language Poets. Bernheimer also wrote and performed for Poets Theater and produced and hosted In the American Tree, a radio program of new writing by poets on KPFA. The Spoonlight Institute includes new and brief selections from his first two books, Billionesque (Figures 01/1999) and the play Particle Arms, produced by the San Francisco Poets Theater in the early ‘80s.
Stephanie Young’s books of poetry are Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 2008) and Telling the Future Off (Tougher Disguises, 2005). She edited Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and is co-founder and managing editor of the website Deep Oakland. Stephanie lives and works in Oakland.
01/31/09
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color first a thousand kids
first a thousand kids’ energy musing in late dark theatres of lonely houses
her leg leans heavy my arm draped casually on her thigh not a day goes by
without my considering her love of opera and some writers are terrific
to remember clean my garage books full of O’Hara a soothsayer of long nights
his poems quotidian like wrinkled lawns source of lavender lights
stage lights silky bedding not a day goes by sleepers in the window
layers of sand white boards smooth leaves construction parking
a long goodnight barbecue where some man asked if she was from Thailand
I want to tell her before I was born millions of crickets I offered a glass
of water and she put it under her chair with the takeout we’re watching
strange bodies on the stage inflatable shapes costumed phrases
energetic silky colors like orange and appearances will not go on to say
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an incorrigible dirigible: recent poetics
the friction of the storm the stolen moments hidden forbidden
a titantic of language sinking under its own dancing weight
gravity and gravity a delicious serious delusion of language that pulls you
out of tension a conflict erase erasure/
are you sure of nothing I can name like boxes of performance or perfection
the voice of stone in the stuttering anxiety and nervousness
so that I am juxtaposition the shifting progressive degeration of ritual desire
where poetry takes us in an objective field that projects a snapshot language
of narrative
collage words’ demolition demonstration illustrate innovate tactical rhythm
a portrait and texture of the moment
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About the Author
Tobey Kaplan, a poet originally from New York City, with degrees from Syracuse and San Francisco State Universities, has been teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years. An active member of California Poets in the Schools and Associated Writing Programs, Ms. Kaplan has given readings, workshops and presentations throughout the country regarding creative process, literacy and social change. She has been recently hired by the Washoe Tribe to coordinate a range of educational services and identify career building programs for the Native American community in Alameda Country.
Ms. Kaplan has received grants from the California Arts Council, 1979-1982 to serve as poet in residence at community mental health centers, and has also taught creative writing as an adult education instructor at Pleasant Hill Adult School. She has also worked for Contra Costa County Schools as an instructor in the jails, and for Project Second Chance as the detention facilities tutor coordinator. Her honors include: being named Dorland Mountain Colony Fellow, honorable mention Crazyhorse poetry prize 2008 and Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, as well as being the recipient of a Bay Area Award (New Langton Arts, 1996). Among her publications are: Across the Great Divide ( Androgyne, 1995). Her poems are contained in numerous literary anthologies. As an adjunct faculty member, Tobey Kaplan currently teaches creative writing, literature, humanities, reading and composition at several East Bay community colleges.
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01/29/09
check out Andrew Wessels’ review of Michelle Taransky’s Barn Burned, Then–winner of the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize.
01/19/09
01/15/09
University Press Books invites you to join Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover for a celebration of their book
Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin
Wednesday, 3 February 2010, 6:00 – 7:30 PM
More than his famous contemporaries, Goethe and Schiller, it is Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet of incessant change and transformation, who today stands as the major poet of his age – and whose visionary work has remained a plum line that helps us fathom the complexities (the beauty and the terror, the “inside real and the outside real,” as the poet Edward Dorn put it) of our own age. In their elegant & fluid translations of this excellent and exhaustive selection of poems, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff capture the work’s extreme contemporaneity, what they themselves have called “the drama of Hölderlin’s consciousness, the beauty of his lyrics, and the largeness of his vision.”
– Pierre Joris
To the groundbreaking Hölderlin translations of Michael Hamburger and Richard Sieburth one must now add the sumptuous new versions by two gifted poets, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff. This is a book to be treasured.
– John Ashbery
Paul Hoover has published eleven books of poetry and is editor of a leading poetry anthology, Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994). He is Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University and curates the First Friday Poetry Series at the de Young Museum of San Francisco.
Maxine Chernoff is Professor and Chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. She is the author of six books of fiction and nine books of poetry. Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff co-edit the widely admired literary annual, New American Writing.
UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS
2430 BANCROFT WAY (between Telegraph & Dana), BERKELEY
01/11/09
Friday, February 5, 2010
Poetry reading by Marc Elihu Hofstadter, Luck (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2008), and Stephen Kessler, who will read from his own poetry and from his newest volume of translation Desolation of the Chimera: Last Poems by Luis Cernuda (White Pine Press, 2009), Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts, 2904 College Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 p.m. (510-704-8222, www.mrsdalloways.com)
Marc Elihu Hofstadter is the author of Luck (Scarlet Tanager, 2008), Visions: Paintings Seen Through the Optic of Poetry (Scarlet Tanager, 2001). and Shark’s Tooth (Regent Press, 2006). His poetry, translations, and critical articles have appeared widely in literary magazines.
Stephen Kessler is a poet, translator, essayist and editor. His writings have appeared in books, anthologies, magazines and newspapers across the United States since the late 1960s. He is the author of eight books and chapbooks of original poetry and more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction in translation. He is a contributing editor of Poetry Flash and the editor of The Redwood Coast Review.
01/05/09
The Sadness Of Penmanship
by Sandra Stone
Another day’s climate. Tympani on the glass, an amazement of notes cascading. Javelins are my rain, little assassins that pierce the flesh. Someone’s nominal neighbor is inscribing his lawn with arabesques. His machine makes crabbed swipes across the sheer face of it, its steep incline, his shirt quirkily cadenced, his pasty white gut inching out of his belt at every shove, then collapsing in a fold at his waist as his arm subsides. The sight makes me shiver as if my skin had gone amok. There are other examples of hackles and encryption: snowflakes, thumbprints, hair; the calendar, its implicit boxes, one after one. Today, there is sadness in the mower’s preoccupation with the slate he inscribes, the angle of momentum at which rain impacts on a juncture. A wake of rivulets plash at the mower’s boot. The master’s canine arrives at the upstart gravel, a kind of rapture for paws. To someone watching at the scrim, rain is a mordant rebuke—graffiti with a perishable reed. The mortal blade of the mower makes text for a perennial field, calligraphy of the greens. If I were a proprietor of grass, a swashbuckler with scythe, I would have fields crying out for rain, outcry from burrows and habitats, on account of the cuts and the wanting.
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Found glass negative c. 1850 – 1870
I’ve named her Flora. She came of age at the time Darwin was published. Also, Lewis Carroll. I’ve invented a fictional bio for her–a Victorian intellectual interested in evolution, the mating habits of animals, an invisible world so seductive she had to sneak out of the house dressed as her brother in order to purchase books forbidden to women. A suite of poems followed which drew the attention of the Dana Award committee. (See further about Flora in body of letter.) I’ve called the image, “Even the Prettiest Shoe Makes a Sorry Hat”. Erudite Flora is institutionalized for curiosity plus caper. Caprice. Brio. Photographers who’ve seen the image think Flora would look better developed. I like the apparitional quality of the negative … and think her haunting.
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Musing: visual imagery as much as the reservoir of words: a fly on a swag, sash, sill; shadow gazette, the Gazetteer of Zero, The Mechanic of Cold; cambric shade of a yellow that helped lamplight in the parlor; architectural words: jamb, dado, column (as in the arid de Chirico), knob, hinge, door, stair, banister, cellar, attic; water words, estuary, cove, inlet, bay, river, sea; weather words, names of rain, wind, snow; land words, ravine, gully, bluff, glade; dust in a mote, sun smiting the mirroring back of water, that lectern; the concrete chairs of Scott Burton; the golden throne at Gnossos ….
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Bio:
Sandra Stone is 2007 winner of the Dana Award in Poetry. Poems never submitted to a periodical were selected in the CSU annual poetry manuscript competition. Cocktails with Breughel at the Museum Café, 1997, pb/hc. 2nd printing 1997. 1998, Café named winner of (Oregon) Literary Arts Book Award judged by Agha Shahid Ali. Other work, past, and soon, in New Republic, International Poetry Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly. Four anthologies, two fellowships: Literary Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts: playwriting, short fiction. “Rimbaud’s Preoccupation with the Fly” will appear in the Winter 2009 issue of The Hudson Review. A suite comprised of a baker’s dozen, “An Exultation of Blue” will be featured in the Spring 2010 issue of Midwest Quarterly. Current: collaboration with a composer on libretto for comic opera, “PoOf”, a frivolity. “The Sadness of Penmanship” is from a collection of philosophical brevities, A Populace of Mirrors. In Stone’s working life, she is an assemblagist, and conceptual artist commissioned by architectural teams to research literary text to create narrative and metaphor for public interiors and the landscape.
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