ENGL 131: Intro to Poetry Writing : Items From The Orchard

Poetry. Art. A BOOK OF GLYPHS is a facsimile, color reproduction of legendary author, musician and Fugs founder Ed Sanders' first book-length work of glyphs, which he created in Florence, Italy in 2008, using colored pencils and a small sketchbook. Though each piece stands on its own, collectively the 72 glyphs convey, with characteristic humility and humor, many of the themes explored by Sanders over his long and diverse career, including history, myth, activism and pacifism. The glyph—"a drawing that is charged with literary, emotional, historical or mythic and poetic intensity"—has been a dimension of Sanders' poetry since 1962; he cites Zen rock gardens, the markings on Egyptian tombs and the typographic designs in John Cage's writings as influences in the development of the form. Sanders' name for the original notebook is "Smile-Book of Grace-Joy," which aptly describes the range of concerns explored in this important and joyful work.

Poetry. African American Studies. Music. UNCLE TOM, AMERICA'S FAVORITE NEGRO, IS DEAD. Championing the tenderest of homicidal tendencies, a penchant for mercy killings and redemptive rites of passage, A JAZZ FUNERAL FOR UNCLE TOM is exactly what it announces it is, a book as dynamic and eternal event wherein a feminine voice leads her band of improvisers in a procession of joyous interrogation and forgiveness. This ritual is simultaneously a purging of any cowardly impulses in the speaker and in the culture she addresses and speaks as, and a releasing or banishing of unfit archetypes, readying the landscape for fresh forces by torching the weakest links in the prevailing mythos. This book looks at the current state of the double and triple consciousness blackness in the West demands and situates its varied states and registers as chorus, as music, and call and response. In this way the book performs and reinvents a ritual, the Jazz Funeral, while offering a new perspective on letting go and rebirth cycles, a new path from bereavement to reprieve. Self-actualization is not only inevitable but fun in the context of A JAZZ FUNERAL FOR UNCLE TOM. We learn how he got over, how she got over, how a song of innocence turns into a mandate for the total renewal of the souls of black folk, and therefore of everyone--and we are given a songbook that assists in the releasing modes of existence we have outgrown, and lets us enjoy the process.

Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. JOY OF MISSING OUT is starlite verse on death and independence for the dreamers, dropouts, rebels and the neuroatypical. A confession and sublimation of breakdowns personal and systemic, JOY OF MISSING OUT paints a playful and unflinching portrait of the ups and downs of city survival and queer romance. Simultaneously it deploys online slang and high lyrical registers, morphs the sad girl into Baba Yaga, drops truth bombs on art and politics, and puts the sin into sincerity. Even as it engineers the death of its speaker, JOY OF MISSING OUT is a paradoxically joyous litany of her endurance and a boost-plea to stay in a messed-up world and say it out loud. This anthem is best read at night or dawn when no one's around for a Like or a kiss. "Ana Bozičević invents a new language of 21st century displacement: a displacement that occurs not just in space and in time but in heart, vision and mind.The poems in JOY OF MISSING OUT range from Croatian farm fields and embroidered dresses to life spent online, emoji, chain stores and drugs. Always: emotion. No filter, she writes. Bozičević is a master of the startling lyric: her poems transport, but they can also kick dirt in your face in the last line. Her casual poems are formidably informed and, also, great." --Chris Kraus

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. "This book is a record of my thinking and feeling during my mid-to-late-twenties. Like any record, it is incomplete and imperfect--I do not always identify with the speakers of these poems, even as I recognize their speech (and sometimes, their desires) as my own. I think of this collection as a bildungsroman of sorts: the story of a young poet coming to know, belatedly and with difficulty, the insufficiencies of the self as a subject and the lyric as a mode."--Jameson Fitzpatrick

Sommer Browning's third poetry collection At birth we are given a role--it is our name. GOOD ACTORS is a side-eyed illumination of the artist as self-help guru, oracle, and sage, but more importantly as mother, lover, and friend. Part psychological experiment, part conceptual art piece, part screenplay, GOOD ACTORS is 100% a joyful celebration of language and life. And because it is Sommer, the book is hilarious, melancholy, and existential. Poetry. Women's Studies. Art. Hybrid.

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. California Studies. Film. SAVAGE PAGEANT recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood's show animals up until its closure in 1969. In it, Stark explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence. With a hybrid, documentary poetics, SAVAGE PAGEANT reveals how we attempt to narrate and control geographical space and how ghosts (remainders, the sketch, unfinished stories) collapse the tidy corners of our collective, accumulative histories.

Poetry. R E D is an erasure of Bram Stoker's Dracula. A long poem in 27 chapters, R E D excavates from Stoker's text an original narrative of violence, sexual abuse, power dynamics, vengeance, and feminist rage while wrestling with the complexities of gender, transition, and monsterhood.

Winner of the second 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, Erica Bernheim's The Mimic Sea is a whirling dervish of a book, its poems set spinning by the speaker's search for the perfect velocity, for a music rocket?fueled by the graffiti of this world in which only total coverage will suffice, a verbal opiate for the desiring consciousness. And Bernheim achieves this coverage, and more. A passion for knowing is transmuted by the blur of the universe (and all the stuff in it) made manifest in these poems, that "One Thing," the thread of existing, or co-existing, as continuous light, as consciousness ablaze with myriad forms that, by the time we finish this book, feel forged into a singular passion of being.

Winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, Bill Rasmovicz's second full-length book of poems, Gross Ardor, focuses on a faith in the alchemy of the imagination. The book is post-apocalyptic in tone, but its incantatory rhythms and perceptual particularities, as they unfold line by line, create a continuously vibrant sense of the phenomenological, the subconscious as a loosely associative narrative that feels, one might say, breathed into existence. It is a visionary and transformative work in which the musicality of language becomes inseparable from the thinking that creates it, and the reader merges with this ongoing depiction of whatever might be said to constitute the world, a voice so urgent and fluid we become one with the book's central guiding consciousness. Gross Ardor is a truly mesmerizing performance. Where have all the alchemists gone? We need them, writes Bill Rasmovicz in "The Mastery of Moving On." Yet Bill Rasmovicz is himself an alchemist, turning the leaden stuff of urban life into the gold of consciousness. Ruthlessly quotidian but not taxed by the commonplace, Gross Ardor is a book of poems whose dry heat burns from every page. ?Natasha Sajé With a nearly archaeological enthusiasm for the layeredness of language, perception, and memory, Bill Rasmovicz's Gross Ardor excavates the groove canals, pulls up the faceplates, lets the depth-charges blossom. These poems have surprise-fight in them. They have guts. They erupt. They go the surgical distance all along the horizon and even out beyond it implying you in everything making way for a soul, then walking you through it. ?Matt Hart Perhaps Gross Ardor is what happens in a world bent on repeating the same thoughts, same horrors, and the same old consumer driven, if not to madness, then despondent and aghast enough to insure madness is always nearby, well within earshot, and not quietly saying what it would say. Gross Ardor goes out there beautifully insisting no, that was just one of our favorite sons trying to be divisive again. "When studied long enough, all things acquire human form ... HAIL, AMERICA, VICTORIOUS! ... You were the animal they warned you about." ?Peter Richards

The poems in Precarious are profound and rewarding. Allan Peterson's poetry is truly prismatic, suggesting a complex mind philosophically engaged with a rich world, a world in which we can only come to know our interior selves through interaction with a glimmering, constantly shifting, ungraspable reality. "The brain," he writes, "has a sense of itself / the mind, and the mind / has a sense of itself, the soul / and the soul sees itself / in others...." Witty, filled with intensity of music, image and intelligence, this is Allan Peterson at his very best. ?Kevin Prufer Allan Peterson is the kind of poet that makes me want to call in sick from the office so I can stay home all day reading his work, he makes me want to shoplift copies of his books to give to friends, he's the kind of poet I would perjure myself for. In short I would lie, steal, and cheat if it meant having Allan Peterson's poetry in the world." ?Matthew Dickman "Who speaks for the body? We do," says Allan Peterson in this luminous, tumbling collection. In it, he also speaks for the mind, writing into the exploratory spaces where thing connects to idea, where self attaches to other, where line leads to line. The poems in Precarious are hardly likely to topple, but rather they assemble layered evidences of attention, of attending. "The weed field had been / readying its many damp handkerchiefs," writes Peterson, and his poems are also records of the mind's meander, the slipperiness of thought unfurling, as when he explains, "we look at one thing to describe another." In these poems we watch ourselves watching. With Peterson, we find that the common is not alike each time and therefore misnamed, that thought leads to thought, line to line, and that the exceptions are numinous, as we sing our way to the unexplored interior. Precarious is startling, and visionary. ?Tess Taylor Allan Peterson, in Precarious, his fifth full-length collection of poems, refuses the easy path of a consoling clarity, opting instead for a difficulty that more accurately reveals the blurred perspective of one human being's singular fixity from his place in Nature. What there is to see or know shifts, hardens into focus, then flies away into the collapsing moment when the eye misperceives or the mind suddenly remembers or misremembers... or comes to rest on a centering image or idea. It is challenging poetry and yet there isn't a trace of cynicism in this work. Like a modern day Cezanne, Allan Peterson writes poems that slowly clarify via the subconscious, moving by increments into focus in the conscious mind. The attention to detail functions as a mosaic that coalesces into a whole by poem's end, and we are but a fragment of the world depicted, and yet, like Peterson, we are also actively engaged in this splintering into wholeness."?David Dodd Lee

Poetry. Quiet, introspective, and darkly comedic, Nate Pritts' DECOHERENCE gathers strength like a giant wave. Pritts' syntax declares an argument for his style that calls up Frank O'Hara in its blend of playfulness with the slow machinations of the speaker's psyche. At some moments elegant, lyrical, and seamless; at others limping and broken, DECOHERENCE nevertheless swims along purposefully across leaps and omissions, navigating both tension and ease in a series of emotional risks. "Reading Nate Pritts' new collection DECOHERENCE, I am reminded of the phrase 'do you see what I am saying?' Although the images in the poems vary, light is one element that runs throughout: 'Everything, it seems, is just waves of light' and 'I know that the only gift we can give to someone else / is context for all this light' and 'In morning light we are finally / cleansed of happening.' In fact, the final word is, literally, light. Enter these stanzas with Nate and see what he's saying. Be illuminated by DECOHERENCE."--Kimiko Hahn

We Are Nothing and So Can You is a book-length poem for the long 21st century to come, a poem of revolts past, present, and future. In alternating passages of rhapsodic verse and speculative prose, Bernes plots the dynamic movement of history, both irreversible and recursive, moving forward directly and by twists and turns, in sentences and lines, standing still and hurtling toward the abyss. This is an epic for an age without heroes save collective heroes, leaping from the occupied plazas and rioting cities of the aughts and teens to futures alternately desolate & full of promise.

Ghost Of is a mourning song, not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space.

Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize Selected by Peter Gizzi Free Verse Editions, edited by Jon Thompson What happens when a poet tries to filter the untranslatable from another language? The rush of unknowing, decoding the wind, the body becomes an antenna. Following behind Jack Spicer's After Lorca and swinging its ovaries, Laura Wetherington's second book uses the concept of translation to create original poems from the work of writers like Liliane Giraudon, Marie Étienne, Dominique Fourcade, and Jean-Marie Gleize. These poems run through a liminal linguistic space where meaning, mishearing, and dreams collide, sometimes midsentence, where they hinge into song: "My man animal took shape in a shadow, / climbed over an obstacle, / became the void." Interstitial love letters to queer writers process a miscarriage, the most recent election, and queer puppy love. This is a book of yearning-for a foreign tongue, for a body growing inside the body, and for a form of communication that can capture feeling. There is a constant textual drama in the address and voice of Laura Wetherington's heady poems; a mirror staged. With monologues, letters, lyrics, and prose she performs a writing through to a new ground of sensation and thinking. Call it the present. The music is gorgeous and the sound is captivating. Parallel Resting Places is a wonderful book and a welcome addition to a tradition that troubles tradition. -Peter Gizzi Laura Wetherington's first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance, was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. She published a chapbook with Bateau Press, chosen by Arielle Greenberg for the Keel Hybrid Competition. Her work appears in Narrative, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, FENCE, and VOLT, among others, and in three anthologies, The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books), Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books), and 60 Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse). Laura's essays and book reviews have been published in Kenyon Review, The Volta, Hyperallergic, Full Stop, Jacket2, and The University of Arizona Poetry Center's 1508. A teacher in SNU Tahoe's MFA Program and at Amsterdam University College, Laura's also the poetry editor at Baobab Press.

"Words are squeezed into usage that had no right to be there--nouns, verbs, who cares what they once were? There is something illuminating at the core of this book, something bright and burning we can carry with us wherever we go."--James Tate These poems pair electrical circuit diagrams with prose poems and create an artful labyrinth of science, intellectual landscapes, and urban scenes. The founding editor of Bateau Press and the author of The City from Nome, James Grinwis lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and children.

Occupy Whiteness is a collection of hybrid erasure poems from inaugural Dallas Poet Laureate and multi-world slam competition winner Joaquín Zihuatanejo. Starting from long-form works of literature by straight, white men, Joaquín Zihuatanejo occupies their pages, erasing words and sections, leaving only his poetry behind -- the white space that remains becoming colonized Brown verse.Occupy Whiteness is an act of rebellion that reclaims spaces and highlights a history of erasure of Brown life. An unflinching look at the present day, the collection is haunted and blessed by the image of ancestors who braved the river and desert to travel into border states for the opportunity of freedom. These are poems meant to agitate and create unease, to make the reader realize that neither their author nor the immigrant children he describes are Other. Through poems and interspersed photography from the border, Zihuatanejo poignantly depicts this equally beautiful and brutal place we call home.

An intense "marvelous and fateful game," Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements brings to the page a six-month blogosphere collaboration between Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins and American poet Jeffery Beam, depicting a Hero's journey through death, resurrection, psychological and spiritual trials, and revelations into redemptive vision. Originating loosely in an ancient Welsh folk tradition and the death of the painter's father, painter and poet marry their impressive powers of myth and dream into individual but sympathetically resonant designs--inward landscapes wrought startlingly real--at turns plain and flamboyant, poignant and joyful. "The grace of these paintings and poems is in their wildness," fashioned ultimately by Hicks-Jenkins' and Beam's compassionate confrontation with dark forces, reviving forgotten knowing and healing powers, as pilgrim/hero meets Horse/Man, thus "patching up some almighty fear in the fabric of heaven" and the searching self. Features twenty-one full color illustrations, sixteen poems, and illuminating essays by Sarah Parvin, Mary-Ann Constantine, and Claire Pickard. Book design by J.C. Mlozanowski.

Falling Backwards Into Mirrors is a book that merges poetry and memoir. At the same time, it is a collection grounded in the body, naked and spare, wounded and wonderful. Through vivid, sensual images that evoke feeling, the speaker embraces the naked architecture of her own flesh and bones. In moments of give and take, this healing journey echoes the kind of deep explorations once undertaken by Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath. After a fall from a boat, water, distortions of light, and the blur of close reflection inspire the speaker to question the consistency of her own surface. She is hamstrung, literally and figuratively. She can't stand unsupported. She can't walk. She can't sit. While supine for long stretches of time, her mirror becomes a vehicle for metaphor, for seeing, for reflecting, and refracting. Falling Backwards into Mirrors begins with a sudden trauma and moves forward as the surface of the speaker's skin becomes like vellum, and landscape and love, family and community are grafted to hope.