GABRIELA TABIOS POLLOCK: R.I.P.

With grief, I interrupt our regular programming to share the devastating news that our family dog Gabriela died unexpectedly this morning from a massive heart attack.  There was no foretelling.  She was healthy, happy and at the time she passed was just finished playing happily with our other dog Achilles.  During their play, she suddenly just dropped to the floor.  We tried to resuscitate her even as we rushed her to the vet's.  Please share in some of our happy memories of Gabriela, from her first day in our family when she promptly engaged Achilles in a game of tug-o-war to what had been her present-day beauty:

(she always let Achilles drive)

"I FORGOT HOW BEAUTY DISLOCATES"

is another poem from my manuscript AMNESIA: SOMEBODY'S MEMOIR, and the latest poem from the MDR Poetry Generator to find a home.  Thanks to Halvard Johnson, editor of ON BARCELONA where this poem appears:

     I FORGOT HOW BEAUTY DISLOCATES

AMONG 100,000 POETS FOR CHANGE!

So grateful to have been part of 100,000 Poets for Change yesterday. We raised funds and brought attention to a local program to help kids exposed to domestic violence, as well as the plight of survivors from Typhoon Haiyan! The venue last night was my favorite for a poetry reading--an art gallery! Wonderful to meet the folks at Slack Collective Art Studios and Gallery. Great to meet Janet Stickmon who presented words as music to a painter Angeli Lata who made a work of art and finished it during her reading! As well as dancer Emee LaRose--what I love: multi-genre! The evening was elevated by the lovely, earnest words of the Open Mic poets. I didn't even have to touch the tamales to have a great time! Not to mention having successfully recruited Sheila Bare, into participating in the Open Mic of what was her first poetry reading, as both attendant and participant -- always a delight to see a the birth of a new poet!

MORE INFO with pics at the Verses Typhoon Yolanda book blog.  Here was the painting finished on stage to the music of Janet's poetry reading:

Here also were the movingly earnest community organizers:

As it is said: It's all good...!

SMOOOCHES!

Just received and now checking printer proofs!  This has always been one of my favorite parts of the book production process.  You get the first sense of bookiness in your hands...!

P. INMAN: "THE MOST RADICAL WRITER OF THE LAST FORTY YEARS,"

according to a book description on the back cover of P. Inman's collected poems

WRITTEN
1976-2013

"The most radical."  I'd love for someone to take this on.

A 727-page book.  Professionally conceived (I mean that positively).  Craig Dworkin's Introduction is interesting.

So who would like to receive this brick (to know me is to know I adore poetry bricks) by reviewing it for Galatea Resurrects?  I can think of three regular GR reviewers up to the task (and you all read this blog) -- will I get a hit?

Actually, many of you are more than capable.  If you have the time and desire.

I'd take it on but I'm currently writing a 727,000-page book so am a bit pressed for time.  But if you have the time and desire, I'd be delighted to hear from you.  GalateaTen@aol.com

Meanwhile, it looks like this:

I am generally untouched by any "most ___" description.  But what does move me is the commitment and ambition in a poet that would come to be manifested by such a poetry brick.  Respect.

(There are other compelling poetry titles deserving review HERE.)

IT'S TIME FOR EURYDICE'S POINT OF VIEW!

Y'all might be interested in my latest love letter to "Dear Son" which has a special focus on a poetry and art book, EURYDICE'S SONG.  Poems by William Borden and monotypes by Douglas Kinsey.  What's interesting about this project, as Borden notes, is that most variations of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth have been from Orpheus' point of view.  He remedies that ... and does so powerfully as befits a feminist message.  Besides, it's amusing to begin that love letter with

Dear Son,  

Yesterday, I frittered away more of your inheritance by adding three more books to our library...

Amusement and more HERE.

P.S.  Actually, it's possible that my comment on the book's Amazon page may be my first Amazon review!  Or, certainly the only one I can ever remember doing -- that's how much I love this book!

"THE IDEAL BOOKSHELF"

Latest installment at the Family Library -- I thought I'd just cite a coffee table book but then it veered onto Poetry and my son's homework.  HERE.

REVIEW AND BASK IN THE SUN'S WARMTH!

Review copies continue to arrive for Galatea Resurrects!  May I repeat my offer for a free copy of my forthcoming book, SUN STIGMATA, if you review for the next issue (deadline is Nov. 10).

Speaking of books, here's the rest of my latest Relished W(h)ines update of recently imbibed books and wines.  As ever, please note that in the Publications section, if you see an asterisk before the title, that means a review copy is available for GalateaResurrects!  More info on that HERE. 

PUBLICATIONS 

BY THE HOURS: SELECTED POEMS EARLY & UNCOLLECTED by Eric Hoffman (Fabulous. Hoffman is one of those poets whose works truly deserve to be better known.  Compelled a Galatea Resurrects review when I wasn’t feeling like reviewing anybody—that compelling.  LinkedInPoetry Recommendation (LPR) #135) 

THE AMERICAN EYE, poems by Eric Hoffman (what I say above)

THE WAY WE LIVE by Burt Kimmelman (fabulous. LPR #136)

THE COUNTRY I REMEMBER by David Mason (wonderful. LPR #137)

HANDIWORK, poems by Amaranth Borsuk (intelligent and pleasurable. LPR #138)

*  THE COMPLETE DARK SHADOWS (OF MY CHILDHOOD, BOOK 1), poems by Tony Triglio (pleasingly inventive)

STONEPICKER & THE BOOK OF MIRRORS, poems by Frieda Hughes (many moments of magnificence)

*  WHEN YOU BIT, poems by Adam Fieled (wonderful!)

*  SLOWER THAN STARS, poems by Steve Mueske (praise-worthy)

*  A STRANGER’S TABLE, poems by Anne Brooke (lovely)

NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND by Aime Cesaire, Trans and edited by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith

ANOTHER AMERICA / OTRA AMERICA, poems by Barbara Kingsolver with Spanish translations by Rebeca Cartes

*  THE RED HANDKERCHIEF AND OTHER POEMS by Daniel Shapiro

*  THE LOW POURING STARS, poems by George J. Farrah

PRESENTATION PIECE, poems by Marilyn Hacker

THE BOOK OF HOURS, poems by Frieda Hughes

NOTHING MORE TO LOSE, poems by Najwan Darwish, Trans. by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

NOTEBOOKS OF A CHILE VERDE SMUGGLER, poetry/memoir by Juan Felipe Herrera

*  EXPECT DELAYS, poems by Bill Berkson

AGAINST THE EVIDENCE: SELECTED POEMS 1934-1994 by David Ignatow

*  NOUVEAU’S MIDNIGHT SUN: TRANSCRIPTIONS FROM GOLGONOOZA AND BEYOND, Edited by John Thomas Allen

*  THINGS I MUST HAVE KNOWN, poems by A.B. Spellman

*  PETRARCH COLLECTED, poems by Tim Atkins

A FORM OF OPTIMISM, poems by Roy Jacobstein

CONSTANCE, poems by Jane Kenyon

APOSTROPHE, poems by Elizabeth Robinson

GLITCH, poems by Gwen Muren

THE ODE AT THE GATE OF THE GATHERING, poem by John Wilkinson

SONG FROM A WASPSHIRE LAD, poem by Fabian Macpherson

TWO POEMS by Robert Rehder

GIMME YOUR HANDS, poem by Sara Crangle

*  IN BOTH HANDS, poems by Joannie Stangeland

SOMETHING PERMANENT, photographs by Walker Evans and poetry by Cynthia Rylant

CRATER Reading Series poetry chaps/pamphlets (U.K.)

ELEVEN ELEVEN: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART (CCAC), Faculty Editor Hugh Behm-Steinberg

THE MARSH HAWK PRESS REVIEW 

HOUSE ORGAN, No. 88 Fall 2014, Editor Kenneth Warren

PICASSO AND TRUTH: FROM CUBISM TO GUERNICA, art monograph by T.J. Clark

THIS IS WHAT FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE by various authors collected by The Sitting Room (Santa Rosa)

MORTIFICATION: WRITERS’ STORIES OF THEIR PUBLIC SHAME, Edited by Robin Robertson

GROWING A FARMER: HOW I LEARNED TO LIVE OFF THE LAND, memoir by Kurt Timmermeister

ONE WOMAN FARM: MY LIFE SHARED WITH SHEEP, PIGS, CHICKENS, GOATS AND A FINE FIDDLE, memoir by Jenna Woginrich

DIARY OF AN EARLY AMERICAN BOY: NOAH BLAKE, 1805, illustrated and fictionalized biography by Eric Sloane

THE LONGEST NIGHT, novel by Kara Braden

WINES

Champagne Launois

2011 Long Meadow Ranch sauvignon blanc

2011 Rombauer port

2005 Trevor Jones

2012(?) Ramet chardonnay Russian River

2001 Valdicava Brunello di Montalcino

2011 Alvear Pedro Ximenez

2004 Colin Chassagne Montrachet

2012 Italian—look at wine cellar

Grahams Six Grapes port

THE FAMILY LIBRARY

Started a new blog to deconstruct the family library for love letters to our son.  Not sure he'll appreciate it yet, since the concept begins, "Dear Son, We are spending your inheritance on books.  We are at about 7,000 volumes now ..."  But it amuses his parents...

Of course, there are hidden conceptual layers -- like, we need a way to keep track of the books mushrooming throughout the house.  Like the hubby doesn't know what I acquire and vice versa.  Like, I want to continue teaching the value of books to our son.  Et al.  To wit:

THE CHATELAINE'S FAMILY LIBRARY

I'm just a frustrated librarian ...

THE SUN IS OFFICIALLY OUT!

My beloved Marsh Hawk Press has put up the book page for SUN STIGMATA -- it says it will be released in December but I hope to get my own copies in October or November.  It's hardcover, thus pricey for some of you at $24 -- I'm sensitive to that.  So while I certainly would be appreciative if you bought it at full retail, here are three other ways to get a copy:

1) do a review for the next issue of Galatea Resurrects.  Deadline is Nov. 10.  Information on that HERE.

2) tell me this month you'd like a copy and I'll share my author discount with you so that you can acquire it at 50% off; email me if you'd like to avail yourself of this opportunity.

3) Any book editor or an editor of a literary journal that's previously published my poems can get a comp copy if you are interested, as my thanks for your past support.  Email me your address if you'd like to avail yourself of this opportunity.

Poetry--it ain't retail and I'm not a mall.
Love,
Eileen
GalateaTen@aol.com

(P.S.  Well, poetry can be anything so I suppose it could be retail.  And I'm sick so I could be a mall....but this is a different story for another day...)

BIRTHDAY BOOKSTORE HOUR

Today is the day I've long known as my birthday (the hidden story a different story).  So, today, I gave my beleaguered, multi-tasking self the gift of time, in this case, one hour.  I went to one of my favorite bookstores, Main Street Books in St. Helena.  It's a mostly-used bookstore in the space of a closet.  Poetry takes up two shelves.  But since poetry takes up 1-2 shelves in bookstores ten times or more the size of Main Street Books, that's a commitment.  My gift to moiself was to peruse every book on the two poetry shelves (shown above) and acquire those whose poems clamored for my poetry library.

It's a good constraint--a way to look at poets whose names I might have glossed over in the past because I didn't know their work or, ahem, because I'd heard of their work.

As I hoped, I surprised myself. I ended up with five books.  I'd heard of Jane Kenyon and David Ignatow, of course, but wouldn't have gone out of my way to explore their works -- or at least the two books carried by the bookstore -- were it not for my directive to myself.  The other three poets were not known previously to me.  So, here are the five books:

AGAINST THE EVIDENCE: SELECTED POEMS 1934-1994 by David Ignatow

A FORM OF OPTIMISM by Roy Jacobstein

CONSTANCE: POEMS by Jane Kenyon

THE COUNTRY I REMEMBER by David Mason

SOMETHING PERMANENT, photographs by Walker Evans and poetry by Cynthia Rylant

A very satisfying conclusion to my birthday hour.  Plus it helped me support an indie bookstore, always a good apple to bite.

While there (and often at bookstores), though, I couldn't help but tsk-tsk over the commercial state of poetry.  Today, I discovered this anthology, POEMS THAT MAKE MEN CRY, Editors Anthony and Ben Holden.  The inner flap cover refers first to that statement, "Real men don't cry" and takes off from there for its conceptual premise.  Interesting that the color of the text is in gold -- as in, these poems are valuable for being able to make men cry?

The shot of the back cover below reveals some of the participants--John Ashbery to Stanley Tucci...:

I want to react along the lines of, Hey, it's benign and if it's another way to grab a reader into poetry, why not?  But my initial reaction was actually more like: At least it's not based on the poet's age being under 30 or whatever age threshold (with the variation of thustly being "new") -- oh so many anthologies from such a lazy-ass premise, that one...

DE-ORDER THE ORDER

Cubist poetics.

I'd finished the writing of the poems in AMNESIA: Somebody's Memoir.  The next step was to determine the order of the poems in the manuscript.  Back in the day, the question would be another source of cogitation.  But as befits moi "cubist poetics," here's how I ordered the poems by basing said order on randomness.

There are 27 poems in the manuscript so I wrote numbers on a page and cut them up to prepare for the slips of the paper that would be drawn randomly out of a hat, like so:

Then, I couldn't find a hat.  So I shuffled the slips of paper and then just closed my eyes and had one hand hold the papers while the other hand plucked pieces at random to place on the dining table, like so below -- this is also when I realized I decided to choose the order of the poems in this manner, not because of some cerebal ars poetica but because my arse is just lazy:

There you have it.  The order of poems is finalized.  And the manuscript is done.

A book publisher awaits its receipt ...  Lucky book publisher.

***

P.S. Each title begins with the number depicting the order in which it was written.  With the rearrangement, the titles will show the random order of numbering.  Amnesia can mean foregoing the logical count/order to the universe...

THE MARSH HAWK REVIEW

I guest-edited the Fall issue of The Marsh Hawk Review, and it's just been released and is available HERE.  You are invited to read!

Featured poets are

Harriet Zinnes


Jean Vengua

Susan Terris

Eileen R. Tabios

Felino A. Soriano

Barry Schwabsky


Susan M. Schultz

Michael Rerick

Marthe Reed

Paul Pines


Sheila E. Murphy

Daniel Morris


Stephen Paul Miller

Meredith Lewis

Michael Leong


Eric Hoffman


Anne Gorrick

Joanna Fuhrman

Donna Fleischer

Thomas Fink

Thomas Fink and Maya Diablo Mason

Brian Clements


John Bloomberg-Rissman and Anne Gorrick


William Allegrezza

OVER WHERE STALACTITES FORM A CHANDELIER

"The book amounts to a powerful (and polyvocal) meditation on orphanhood, adoption, parenthood, education, the poetics of language acquisition, and multiple authorship.  It’s both lyrically intense and structurally adventurous."

That's Michael Leong on 147 MILLION ORPHANS.  His full engagement is HERE.

The review also occasioned me to explore his site of stalactites.  and I stumbled across his "News that Stays Newz, or How I Spent Bad Poetry Day.”  His article meanders into his spending time with the hay(na)ku...and I was amused (and gratified) to see him call it "like the tip of an Oulipian 'snowball'"!  As Michael is familiar with and has created wonderful works from constraint-based writing, I was cheered to read such -- thank you, Michael Leong!  (And click on links, Peeps -- the articles are interesting!)

SUBMISSIONS CALL: "POETS ON MORTIFICATION"

What new thing can one say about the mortified poet?  That's redundant, I know. To be a poet is to be mortified ... but among many other things.  All this is to say, John Bloomberg-Rissman and I are co-editing a new project--please do go to

http://poetsonmortification.blogspot.com/2014/09/poets-on-mortification-call-for-sharing.html

for our Call to Share Stories on How, When, With Whom and/or With What You were mortified!

PORT LIGHT by WILLLIAM ALLEGREZZA

When William Allegrezza participated in my fundraising "Hay(na)ku for Haiti" a few years back,  poet-critic-curmudgeon Jim McCrary said about the series, "Small, concise, full of life, something to read and read again. To soak up."  And now I'm pleased to report that Bill has expanded the poems to come out with only the sixth single-author hay(na)ku collection, PORT LIGHT!  (Reviewers should feel free to contact me; am looking for at least one review for Galatea Resurrects!).  Here's official info: 

ISBN No. is 978-0-9826493-6-7

Release Date: Fall 2014

Currently Available for $10.50 from Lulu.com http://www.lulu.com/shop/william-allegrezza/port-light-a-haynaku-collection/paperback/product-21781993.html

Also available direct from the publisher (MeritagePress@aol.com) and soon from Amazon.com

About the Book:

Port Light: A Hay(na)ku Collection brings together hay(na)kus that have been written over a number of years.  The pieces vary greatly in terms of content from the personal lyric to poems that push at language’s communicative limits.  The occasions of the poems are also diverse.  “Through Having Been” was written as a reaction to storm devastation in Haiti, but many of the poems are daily poems responding to family or friends.  Allegrezza has written in the hay(na)ku format for almost ten years, but Port Light is his first book to collect and attempt to show a similarity between the pieces. 

Bio:

William Allegrezza edits Moria Books and Moss Trill and teaches at Indiana University Northwest. He has previously published many poetry books, including still. walk, In the Weaver’s Valley, Ladders in July, Fragile Replacements, Collective Instant, Aquinas and the Mississippi (with Garin Cycholl), Covering Over, and Densities, Apparitions; three anthologies, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, The Alteration of Silence: Recent Chilean Poetry, and La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente; seven chapbooks, including Sonoluminescence (co-written with Simone Muench) and Filament Sense; and many poetry reviews, articles, and poems. He founded and curated series A, a reading series in Chicago, from 2006-2010. In addition, he occasionally posts his thoughts at P-Ramblings.