Center for Book Arts

Great reading. Great, great reading. Details -- and pix -- to come.

In the meantime, if you have a chapbook manuscript, you should submit it to the Center's annual chapbook contest. They produce beautiful handmade letterpress chapbooks. I got to look at some of the past years' winners' and judges' chapbooks and they really are works of art.

Here are the details:

The Center for Book Arts’ 2010 POETRY CHAPBOOK COMPETITION
The Center for Book Arts invites submissions to its annual Poetry Chapbook Competition by December 1, 2009. The winning manuscript will be chosen in April 2010 and will be awarded with the publication of a beautifully designed, letterpress-printed, limited-edition chapbook printed and bound by artists at the Center for Book Arts. The edition is limited to one-hundred signed and numbered copies, ten of which are reserved for the author and the remainder of which will be offered for sale through the Center. The winning poet will also receive a cash award of $500, and a $500 honorarium for a reading, to be held at the Center in the fall of 2010. This year’s judges will be Terrance Hayes & Sharon Dolin.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Please submit a collection or sequence of original poems or a single long poem not to exceed five- hundred lines or twenty-four pages (no translations). The cover page should contain, on a single detachable page, the manuscript title, and author’s name, along with address, phone number, and email. The author’s name should not appear anywhere else. A second title page should be provided without the author’s name or other identification. Please provide a table of contents and a separate acknowledgements page containing prior magazine or anthology publication of individual poems. Please note that the five-hundred lines or twenty-four page limit does not include the cover page, title pages, table of contents, or acknowledgements pages. Manuscripts should be bound with a simple spring clip.

NOTE: Poems may have appeared in journals or anthologies but not as part of a book-length collection. Reading Fee: Please send a $25 check payable to The Center for Book Arts.
Please Include: A #10 self-addressed stamped envelope for notification of the winner. Manuscripts will not be returned.

Deadline: Manuscripts must be postmarked no later than December 1, 2009.

ABOUT THE JUDGES
Terrance Hayes is the author of Wind in a Box (Penguin 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin 2002) and Muscular Music (Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Classics, 2005 and Tia Chucha Press, 1999). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series award, a Pushcart Prize, two Best American Poetry selections, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His poems have appeared in a range of journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and Tin House. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family.

Sharon Dolin’s fourth poetry book, Burn and Dodge, won the AWP 2007 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2008. Her other books include Realm of the Possible (Four Way Books, 2004), Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), and Heart Work (1995). She currently teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. Her poems have appeared in dozens of journals including Barrow Street, The Kenyon Review, New American Writing, Court Green, and The New Republic.

Send Entries to:2010 CHAPBOOK COMPETITION The Center for Book Arts 28 West 27th St., 3rd Floor New York, NY 10001(212) 481-0295 or visit www.centerforbookarts.org.

See You There?

If you're in NYC tomorrow night and looking to hear two kick-ass poets and possibly enjoy some wine and cheese, I hope you'll swing by the Center for Book Arts at 6:30 p.m.

Center for Book Arts - Broadside Reading Series

Presents

Poets Chase Twichell & Leslie Harrison

Introduced by Matthew Thorburn

Wednesday, Nov. 18, 6:30 pm

28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor

Suggested admission for all readings: $5 members / $10 non-members.

A reception accompanies each reading. A limited-edition letterpress broadside of work by each poet is produced by an artist at the Center.

Chase Twichell. Leslie Harrison. Poetry will be in the house.

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By the way, I noticed that it was just over two years ago that I mentioned how fun it would be to host a reading at CBA.

Note for two years from now: it sure would be fun to win a Whiting Award!

Poetry for Economists

Let's peek into the pages of my favorite "newspaper" for some poetry news...

Whatever people think of Mr Blair, making him president would have signalled that the EU wanted a spokesman with direct access to world leaders. Mr Blair’s apparent demise as a candidate (British officials loyally insist he still has a chance, once EU leaders ponder the unpalatable alternatives) signals the opposite. So does the rise of such alternative frontrunners as the Dutch or Luxembourgeois prime ministers, or the current darling of the corridors, Herman Van Rompuy, a clever, Haiku-writing ascetic who is prime minister of Belgium.

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And here, translated a la Google, are P.M. Van Rompuy's haiku!

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IROM CHANU SHARMILA, 37, a poet and aspirant suicide, was this week unable to attend a cultural festival held in her honour in Imphal, capital of India’s north-eastern state of Manipur. She was in hospital, being force-fed lentil soup through a tube inserted into her nose.

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And this is my kind of special issue: Indiana Review puts out the call for submissions for a special blue-themed issue. Not the blues, necessarily, but blue.

I'd know just what to send, except I already published this poem here.

From the Fiction Shelf

In the past week, I read back to back -- and without consciously planning this -- two novels centered around a death or disappearance. One you've surely heard of, and one probably not: Unending Nora by Julie Shigekuni and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Each of these books maps the fallout from these losses and shows us the holes left in the lives of the dead/missing characters' family and friends, though in very different ways.


In The Lovely Bones, the narrator, ninth grader Susie Salmon, is raped and killed in the book's opening pages. She then narrates the novel from (for the most part) heaven. This creates, in a very weird way, a kind of happy ending/uplifting narrative for the reader, since as much as Susie is dead to the family and friends she leaves behind on earth, for the reader she is alive in the telling of her story -- both what happens on earth without her and what she experiences in her afterlife.

Having a dead narrator is an excellent conceit -- one you might also recall from the movie American Beauty, among other places. At first, I thought the book would be a kind of supernatural catch-the-killer chase story, led by Susie's younger sister. I was looking forward to that, but this thread gets let go after a while and never really gets picked up again. The lead detective here, even if it is the 1970s, seems too disconnected from the police in any other city or state, and unable to do much to crack the case.

Then later in the book, a sort of magical realism sets in -- just briefly, though -- and while it has been set up with hints and nods earlier in the book, it still felt a little out of place here to me. But I read this book in two days -- in airports and on airplanes, traveling home from a visit to Michigan -- and recommend it for just such purposes. This is what I think of as smart popular fiction, like Ann Patchett's Bel Canto: beach or airplane reading for English majors.

Having wanted to read this book for years, I finally did after seeing a preview for the upcoming movie adapatation. This was news to me, but The Philadelphia Inquirer ran pictures of the location shoot last year.

Unending Nora, in contrast, offers no such uplifting narrative or comforting views of any afterlife. In this novel, the title character, thirty-something Nora Yano, suddenly goes from drifting through her life to running off the rails, by way of a strange ailment and an ill-fated romance, among other things, and then one day just disappears. Gone. Without a trace.

This woman who seemed an odd, unremarkable third-wheel to her two close friends, brainy Melissa and beautiful Caroline -- and more or less inexplicable to her parents and even her church pastor -- turns out (once gone) to have been the center of gravity around which these and other lives revolved. As the novel shows how life goes on, more or less, for each of the other characters, we see again and again how this missing woman was once the key to meaning in their lives.

With the multiple, overlapping narratives of these and other characters, this novel gives you the density and scope of real lives -- and, like real life, offers little comfort and not much in the way of tidy resolutions.

I'll have more to say, in print, about Unending Nora, so for now I'll just recommend it very highly. (Shigekuni's two previous novels are on my "To Read" list now too.) This fine novel was just published by Red Hen Press and is available in all the usual places. Please check it out.

Get Your Free Sample

I feel like the guy handing out free samples of cheese at the market, but what the heck...

You can now read the opening couple pages of Disappears in the Rain on the Parlor City website. Just scroll down. (DITR is a long poem, with about five stanzas per page, so the dashed lines show you the page breaks.)

Then scroll back up for the guidelines for this year's -- the second annual -- chapbook competition, aka the Stephen Dunn Prize. The folks at Parlor City produce really sharp-looking chapbooks -- perfect-bound, with full-color covers. Really they look more like skinny books than what you probably picture when you hear the word "chapbook."

Softly, As in A Morning Sunrise

Stuart Greenhouse gives Disappears in the Rain a big thumbs up too. How about you?

And I'm right there with him about the amazing Kate Greenstreet, whose blog I still miss and whose The Last 4 Things is top of my bookbuying list. And Ana's book I'm looking forward to, too.

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I wrote a poem yesterday for an old friend's 60th birthday. It was fun to write something fun -- rhyming couplets, inside jokes, a punchliney ending. I'll be delivering it this weekend.

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This article isn't new, but it's new to me: Howard Norman follows Basho's trail in Narrow Road to A Far Province, for Nat'l Geographic.

Check it out. There are some wonderful photos in there by Michael Yamashita.

November To-Do List...

Clay Matthews takes Disappears in the Rain out for a spin. The verdict? "If you read the book, wonderful things will happen to you, I promise."

If you're on the fence, I hope these kinds words will push you over. I have a handful of copies left at the moment. You know what to do. I hope you'll do it.

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I have three events in NYC in November. If you're around, it'd be great to see you at any or all of these...

November 11 -- 7 p.m.
Reading at the Old Made in Williamsburg

Probably the most unusual place for poetry I've read in... I'll be reading at this vintage store with poet Meghan Punschke and fiction writer Meakin Armstrong. This reading of art-related work takes place in connection with a show of paintings, "Duets: Compositions by Joseph Ellis and Essye Klempner," also on display in the store.

441 Metropolitan Avenue
G train to Metropolitan Avenue; L to Lorimer or Bedford
www.oldmadestuff.com


November 18 -- 6:30 p.m.
Broadside Reading Series at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan

I'll be hosting this event -- a reading by two of my favorite poets, Chase Twichell and Leslie Harrison. Chase is the author of half a dozen acclaimed poetry collections. Leslie's first book, Displacement, was published this year. A wine and cheese reception will follow the reading. And a $10 suggested donation gets you a signed letterpress broadside of one of the poets' poems.

28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor
N or R train to 28th and Broadway; 1 or 9 to 28th and 7th Ave.
http://www.centerforbookarts.org/


November 22 -- 4:40 p.m.
Reading at the 440 Gallery in Park Slope

I'll be reading in this storefront gallery with prose writer Helen Benedict and two other writers TBA. Last time I read here, W. and I found a great burger place nearby for dinner afterwards.

440 6th Ave. (between 9th and 10th Sts.)
F train to 7th Ave.
http://www.440gallery.com/

This one's for all you University of Michigan alums out there.

"And that's true too!": Professor Ralph Williams lectures on Shakespeare, New York City, October 2009

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My old buddy Buddhaweiser and I met up at the Hilton -- home of AWP NYC! -- bright and early last Sunday for a day-long program called One Day University. It's a series of lectures by top professors from around the country on a wide range of topics.

For instance, Andrew Delbanco, of Columbia University and NYRB fame, spoke on Melville and why Moby Dick is the greatest American novel. And a very smart guy (whose name I unfortunately didn't write down) gave an interesting talk on the great successes of Apple, Google and Pixar -- and the unique business cultures behind them.

But we were there to see one man: Professor Ralph Williams, he of the big hand gestures and endless memory for literature. Between us, Buddhaweiser and I took something like six or seven courses with "Old Williams" during our undergrad days, including (for me) his Shakespeare course. English 367, I think it was.

At OneDayU, Williams (who just recently retired from Umich) lectured on Shakespeare and "why he still matters." In a brisk 50 minutes, he squeezed in numerous anecdotes, references to probably 10 plays and several of the sonnets, dramatic quotations from the same, and even managed to get through all five -- yes, you bet he had them just like always -- of his "rubrics" for the lecture.

A few highlights...

Williams talked about Shakespeare's rich language, how many words he introduced into English (either from other languages or making them up), the now common phrases that originated with him ("All's Well that Ends Well," et al.) and how Shakespeare is, as another critic put it, "the rain forest of the English language."

He also discussed the brilliance and depth of Shakespeare's moral imagination. That is, the risks and the genius that go into creating such convincing, relatable, realistic portraits of evil as Iago or Richard III.

And how in Shakespeare so much can turn on a tiny action or inaction: for instance, a character not reading a letter, or someone misunderstanding of what someone else was implying, with deadly consequences.

In terms of pure and sweet nostalgia, I was happy to see Williams act out certain lines from King Lear, such as Gloucester's plaintive "And that's true too!" which I remember from his lectures circa 1995. And to see the hands -- even bigger than I remembered; he might have been a grand stride pianist! -- in action. And so glad he still -- as always -- began by counting off his rubrics for us, to give a lay of the land in terms of where we were headed.

At 68, he is still spry and lively on the stage, as much actor as literary scholar, with that vast memory of lines and scenes at the ready for instant recall. It was a pretty sweet time.

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Another highlight of the day was Vanderbilt professor Michael Rose lecturing -- which really entailed singing, yelling, dancing around, joking and sweating profusely -- on the surprising connections between The Beatles and Beethoven. Specifically he talked about Paul McCartney's "Hey Jude" and the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

If you're ever on the Vanderbilt campus, you really ought to crash one of his lectures.