A BENEFIT for VERNA PRESS
(publisher Peter Anderson)
Thursday May 29, 2008 at 8:00 p.m.
followed by OPEN MIC
Admission is Free
with poetry readings by
Joseph Bienvenu, David
Rowe, and Thaddeus Conti
Including a Silent Auction of Drawings,
Photographs, Broadsides and Books
the Release of
Joseph Bienvenunew
book from Verna Press Pool Hall Quartet***
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 |
David Rowe has ROWEd crew
in prep school, worked in a
salmon ROwE house up in Alaska,
lived (lord knows) on skid ROWe,
and currently knows his way
around the ROWE brand jukeboxes
of New Orleans. His work has
appeared in such literary
journals as Exquisite Corpse,
North American Review,
YAWP: a Journal of Poetry & Art, and
Burning Bush (Ireland). |
|
Jospeh Bienvenu lives in
New Orleans and teaches English
and Latin at a local high
school. He is the creator and
editor of the online literary
magazine
Mustachioed, and his poetry
has appeared in many online and
print publications, including
Cranky, the Tiny,
H_ngm_n, Gutcult,
The Hat, Glitterpony
and Can We Have Our Ball Back.
He is currently working on a
translation of Catullus's poems,
some of which have appeared in a
recent issue of Fascicle.
His chapbook Pool Hall
Quartet is forthcoming from
Verna Press. |
 |
 |
Peter Anderson
operates
Verna Press out of his
studio and performance space
"The Beauty Shop" in New
Orleans. He is a native of
Santa Fe, New Mexico and a
graduate of the University
of New Mexico. He is a poet
and a letter press printer.
He served as an apprentice
at Red Dragonfly Press under
the poet and printer Scott
King.
www.vernapress.com |
|
Thaddeus Conti:
Gender: Male Status:
Engaged Age: 32 Sign:
Scorpio City: NEW
ORLEANS Thaddeus
Conti has 4 friends. He
is also a poet and
muralist. His drawings
are currently on display
at the Fuel Cafe gallery
on Magazine Street. His
poetry and art have been
featured in various
places including the
online literary magazine
Mustachioed and
YAWP: a Journal of
Art & Poetry. |
 |
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April 3 --
Poetry Readings with Visiting Poets:
Kristin Prevallet, Tonya Foster,
Tisa Bryant and Marjorie Kanter |
Kristin
Prevallet
Third Mind: Creative writing through Visual Art
/
Scratch Sides
was born in
Denver and has lived in New York (City and
State) for the past 15 years. She attended the
University of Colorado and the University at
Buffalo. She was an editor of the magazine apex
of the M and has edited several books, including
Fire Brackled Bones: A Helen Adam Source-book
(forthcoming, National Poetry Foundation, Spring
'06). Along with Bob Holman, Anne Waldman, and
Alan Gilbert she founded Study Abroad on the
Bowery: A Certificate Program in Applied Poetics
at the Bowery Poetry Club. She is the author of
two full-length collections of poetry:
Perturbation, My Sister (First Intensity, 1998)
and Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and
Image-Text Projects (Skanky Possum, 2003). She
teaches at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac
School of Disembodied Poetics, Bard College, and
The New School and has given lectures and
readings throughout the United States and
Europe.
Tonya
Foster
Third Mind: Creative writing through Visual Art
/
After All This Times
is the
author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have
been published in a variety of journals from
Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities
Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in
High Court (Belladonna Press) and co-editor of
Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art.
She is currently completing a cross-genre piece
on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre
piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance.
She teaches at Cooper Union and Bard College.
Tisa
Bryant
Born on an
Arizona air force base during the Viet Nam War,
bussed as as a working-class child to affluent
schools during Boston’s notorious
school-desegregation era, poet, writer and
radical cineaste Tisa Bryant makes work that
often traverses the boundaries of genre, culture
and history. Just as her chapbook, Tzimmes (A+Bend
Press, 2000) collages concerns of breast cancer,
Barbados genealogy research and a film by Yvonne
Rainer, her new book, Unexplained Presence (Leon
Works, 2007), is
a collection of original, hybrid essays that
remix narratives from Eurocentric film,
literature and visual arts and zoom in on the
black presences operating within them. Her work
has appeared in a number of places, including
The Believer, 1913: A Journal of Forms,
Sustainable Aircraft, XCP: Cross-Cultural
Poetics, and with the paintings of visual artist Laylah Ali. She has also served as a juror for
the San Francisco International Film Arts
Foundation, and Frameline’s Gay & Lesbian Film
Festival. Tisa is currently working on a fiction
that meditates on identity, visual culture and
the lost films of auteur Justine Cable. She
teaches at St. John’s University, Queens, lives
in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and is a founding
editor/publisher of the hardcover annual, The
Encyclopedia Project.
Marjorie
Kanter
I displace the air as I walk
Born in
Cincinnati, Ohio in 1943, Ms. Kanter has resided
in Spain since 1986, both in Madrid and Tarifa,
with extended stays in Morocco and the Dominican
Republic. Ms. Kanter brings to her creative
writing her extensive experience as a Bilingual
Speech and Language Pathologist, and her
experiences and introspections while living in
different cultures. Ms. Kanter’s first book of
short literary pieces/poems was published in
2004 by Ediciones La Espiral Escrita. Her latest
book, I Displace the Air as I Walk (Ediciones La
Espiral Escrita 2006) is a collection of short
stories culled from her journals over the past
18 years through her travels.
* *
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 |
MARCH 27—A
Poetry Reading by California Poet
Laureate AL YOUNG
An exclusive limited edition
BROADSIDE poem (signed & numbered)
by Al Young has been commissioned to
celebrate this occasion; and will be
available for sale at the event. The
broadside is designed & produced by
printmaker Peter Anderson for
Trembling Pillow Press. |
Books by Al Young
Something about the Blues
(Book and CD) /
Coastal Night and Inland Afternoons
Al Young
Born May
31, 1939 at Ocean Springs, Mississippi on the
Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Al Young grew up in the
rural South of villages and small towns, and in
urban, industrial Detroit. From 1957-1960 he
attended the University of Michigan, where he
co-edited Generation, the campus literary
magazine. In 1961 he emigrated to the San
Francisco Bay Area. Settling at first in
Berkeley, he held a variety of colorful jobs
(folksinger, lab aide, disk jockey, medical
photographer, clerk typist, employment
counselor) before graduating with honors from
U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Spanish. His
marriage in 1963 to technical writer and editor
Arline Young was blessed with one child: their
son Michael, born in 1971. From 1969-1976 he was
Edward B. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at
Stanford near Palo Alto, where he lived and
worked for three decades. In the Y2K year 2000
he returned to Berkeley, where he continues to
freelance.
Young has
taught poetry, fiction writing and American
literature at U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Santa Cruz,
U.C. Davis, Bowling Green State University,
Foothill College, the Colorado College, Rice
University, the University of Washington, the
University of Michigan, the University of
Arkansas, San José State University, where he
was appointed the 2002 Lurie Distinguished
Professor of Creative Writing, and Charles
University in the Czech Republic under the
auspices of the Prague Summer Programs. In the
spring of 2003 he taught poetry at Davidson
College (Davidson, NC), where he was McGee
Professor in Writing. In the fall of 2003, as
the first Coffey Visiting Professor of Creative
Writing at Appalachian State University in
Boone, NC, he taught a poetry workshop. From
2003-2006 he served on the faculty of Cave
Canem’s summer workshop retreats for African
American poets.
His honors
include Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the
PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction,
the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, two American
Book Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, two New York
Times Notable Book of the year citations, an
Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowship, the
Stephen Henderson Achievement Award for Poetry,
Radio Pacifica’s KPFA Peace Prize, the Glenna
Luschei Distinguished Poetry Fellowship, and the
Richard Wright Award for Excellence in
Literature. Young’s many books include novels,
collections of poetry, essays, memoirs and
anthologies. His work has appeared in Paris
Review, Ploughshares, Essence, the New York
Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant
Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature,
Chelsea, Rolling Stone, Gathering of the Tribes,
the Norton Anthology of African American
Literature, and the Oxford Anthology of African
American Literature.
In the
1970’s he wrote film scripts for producer Joseph
Strick, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard
Pryor. In the 1980’s and 90’s, as a cultural
ambassador for the United States Information
Agency, he traveled throughout South Asia,
Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian West
Bank. In 2001 he traveled to the Persian Gulf to
lecture on American and African American
literature and culture in Kuwait and in Bahrain
for the U.S. Department of State. Subsequent
lecture tours took him to Southern Italy in
2004, and to Italy in 2005. His poetry and prose
have been translated into Italian, Spanish,
Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish,
Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, Urdu,
Korean, and other languages. Blending story,
recitation and song, Young often performs with
musicians. In 2005, Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger appointed him Poet Laureate of
California. Al Young's website is here: http://alyoung.org/
* *
* * *
Stagger
Lee & Billy
* *
* * *
In the coming weeks (Feb thru April), 17 Poets!
Literary & Performance Series showcases
several extraordinary talents each Thursday
evening including: California Poet Laureate AL
YOUNG (March 27), San Francisco lesbian poet
extraordinaire MICHELLE TEA (Feb 28), renowned
poetry giants BILL BERKSON, PHILIP GOOD and
BERNADETTE MAYER (March 5 & 6), New York City
poet-activists KRISTIN PREVALLET and TONYA
FOSTER (Apr 3); as well as hometown virtuoso
word masters poet VALENTINE PIERCE (Feb 14),
Nigerian poet NIYI OSUNDARE (Apr 10), Exquisite
Corpse editor & poet ANDREI CODRESCU (Apr 17),
Lavender Ink publisher & poet BILL LAVENDER (Mar
20), and the legendary musings of Irish Channel
born poet KIP CAIRO (Feb 21).
Stay
Tuned!!!
This year's schedule also includes an amazing
line-up of video/documentary screenings
including: EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA of the 1920’s and
30’s (featuring Anémic Cinéma by Marcel Duchamp,
Emak-Bakia by Man Ray, Ghosts Before Breakfast
by Hans Richter), TWENTY TO LIFE: The Life &
Times of John Sinclair, a feature-length film by
Steve Gebhardt, THE OUTSIDERS OF NEW ORLEANS:
LOUJON PRESS directed by Wayne Ewing, TOOTIE'S
LAST SUIT directed by Lisa Katzman, and
THELONIOUS MONK: Straight, No Chaser directed by
Charlotte Zwerin
* *
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|
"To Utter Is to Alter" 60th Birthday Celebration for Poet NIYI
OSUNDARE"
Thursday,
April 5, 2007 at 8:00 p.m.
|
 |
Books by Niyi
Osundare
Songs of the Marketplace (2006)
/
The Word is an Egg
(2005) /
Pages from the Book of the Sun (2002) /
Two Plays (2006)
Thread in the Loom: Essays (2002) /
The State Visit (2002) /
Midlife (2005) /
Moonsongs (1988) /
The Eyes of the Earth (2007)
* *
* * *
Many people of the New Orleans community will
gather to honor poet Niyi Osundare in
celebration of his 60th birthday, including
short presentations by
Jerry W.
Ward Jr., Dave Brinks, Bill Lavender,
Mona Lisa
Saloy, Rodger Kamenetz, Gina
Ferrara, Michael Ford, Brett Evans and Kysha
Brown.
Traditional African Songs performed by Zion
Trinity vocalist Sula / Rhythm & Percussion
performed by Eric B of Bamboula 2000
Commissioned portrait of
Niyi Osundare by painter Joshua Walsh
Niyi
Osundare, who was born in Nigeria in 1947 and is
currently a professor of English literature at
the University of New Orleans, is considered the
greatest living Nigerian poet.
He has
always been a vehement champion of the right to
free speech and is a strong believer in the
power of words, saying, "to utter is to alter".
Osundare is renowned for his commitment to
socially relevant art and artistic activism and
has written several open letters to the
President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, whom
Osundare has often publicly criticised.
Osundare
believes that there is no choice for the African
poet but to be political:
"You cannot
keep quiet about the situation in the kind of
countries we find ourselves in, in Africa. When
you wake up and there is no running water, when
you have a massive power outage for days and
nights, no food on the table, no hospital for
the sick, no peace of mind; when the image of
the ruler you see everywhere is that of a
dictator with a gun in his hand; and, on the
international level, when you live in a world in
which your continent is consigned to the margin,
a world in which the colour of your skin is a
constant disadvantage, everywhere you go - then
there is no other way than to write about this,
in an attempt to change the situation for the
better."
In 1997, he
accepted a teaching and research post at the
University of New Orleans.
Osundare is
one of Africa's finest literary scholars. He is
the author of many books of poetry, plays and
essays. He has received the Commonwealth Poetry
Prize, the Association of Nigerian Authors'
Prize and the Noma Award for Publishing in
Africa, as well as the Fonlon/Nichols award for
"excellence in literary creativity combined with
significant contributions to Human Rights in
Africa". His works have been translated into
half a dozen languages.
followed by Open Mic
/ Admission is FREE / For more information, go
to:
http://www.17poets.com
The GOLD MINE
SALOON is located at 701 DAUPHINE in the FRENCH
QUARTER (at the corner of Dauphine & St. Peter).
Doors Open at
7:00pm featuring new paintings by Rebeccah Crow,
Michael Fedor, Jim Sohr, Pati D'Amico, William
Warren.
* * * *
*
Brenda
Marie Osbey
Thursday, March 8, 8:00 p.m.
 |
Brenda Marie Osbey, Louisiana's Poet
Laureate ,will give a reading this
Thursday, March 8 at 8:00 p.m. at The
Gold Mine, 701 Dauphine St. in the
historic French Quarter. Ms. Osbey is
the author of four volumes of poems,
Ceremony for Minneconjoux (Callaloo
Poetry Series, 1983, rptd., University
Press of Virginia 1985),
In These Houses (Wesleyan
University Press, 1988),
Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous
Woman (Story Line Press, 1991)
and
All Saints: New & Selected Poems
(LSU Press, 1997), winner of the
American Book Award. Her essays on New
Orleans appear in The American Voice,
The Georgia Review and
Creative Nonfiction. Brenda Marie
Osbey is a native of New Orleans, where
she lives and works as a full-time
writer, and is currently Louisiana's
celebrated poet laureate. |
Brenda Marie Osbey received the B.A. from Dillard
University, the M.A. from the University of
Kentucky, and also attended the Université Paul
Valéry at Montpélliér, France. She has taught French
and English at Dillard University in New Orleans,
African American and Third World literatures at the
University of California at Los Angeles, African
American literature and creative writing at Loyola
University, and was visiting writer-in-residence at
Tulane University.
|
Madhouses
1.
these women mean business
burn their hair only on the ends
and spit tobacco
in the reverends hedges
they call themselves
mothers
and wear bare feet in public
daring fathers and brothers
to come down on the banqette
and i have seen them dancing
along the interstate in mid-january
we call them madhouses
but it is only that we fear
i know their secrets
only through having learned them
the hardest way
my name is felicity
i live inside the city
i am telling only
as much as you can bear
2.
the bahalia women are coming
from round st. james
carrying the bamba-root
in their hands
believe on those hands
and they will see you through seasons
of drought and flood
believe on these hands
and you will cross the grandy-water
3.
journey with me and see what i see
first you hear the leaves
past silence
hitting the ground
moving along the streets
with an undercurrent of rhythm
moving to your bloodbeat
and the sounds of your hands
reaching
reaching up
4.
just before you see them
there is their confounded
jingling
the sound of those root ends
against their tambourines
but no one really hears them coming
just the thud of those bare feet
against the broken surfaces
of the banqette
the low rumbling of song
and then bahalia
bahalia
and yet
you can never say you hear them
it is like that
their coming
5.
it is not tonight i will find the path
i am ready, damballah
but the way is barred
a slender woman in red skirts
tignon and golden hoops through her ears
young and smooth
and jerking to the sound
of old blood
and thin-skinned men
walking on th graves of the old ones
i am ready, oh spirit
but the way is dark
6.
and like rising from a dream
they are gone
and like a vision they never leave you
standing in my sidelight
you can see them
women so far gone
that their walking is dance
madhouses so grey
against the other houses and churches
that you pretend for now
you do not see them
and never did
but when you make the final journey
and stand at the crossing
seeking the barred footing
it was i who first showed you
and remember my name
it was felicity who told you
how to exit one madhouse
and enter the
other.
http://www.osbey.com/id7.html |
|
The Head of
Louis Congo Weeps
By Brenda Marie Osbey
olurun bon die mystere
here am i at the crossroads of death
and life
i look out across a standing water
to the land of the dead--mpemba-
where I can not enter whole
and weep:
o mbanza kongo
where are you now?
i look and look
but i do not see
o mbanza kongo
i search but i can not find out
the streets of my ancestors
nor any relative to receive me
o holy mountain
high ground of my striving
source of every drop of blood upon
my severed hands
what is to become of me
wasting in some petit farmer's field
severed
rotting
burnt almost to ash
o sacred mountain
is this the doing of my two hands
and where are they now
olurun bon die mystere
how am i fallen
now that my
head is mounted on high?
from
All Saints: New & Selected Poems |
Amazon
Review of
All Saints: New & Selected Poems (LSU
Press, 1997)
"you might
say i have / this peculiar fascination / with
the dead," admits Brenda Marie Osbey in All
Saints, her American Book Award-winning
collection of poems. As a New Orleans native
speaking through historical Creole characters,
she celebrates the ways the dead maintain a
living presence in New Orleans, whether in their
above-ground tombs, in religious hoodoo ancestor
worship, or in bricks from an old slave factory
in the Treme fauborg—a New Orleans usage for
"neighborhood," as Osbey's extensive glossary
explains. The glossary, like Eliot's notes on
"The Wasteland," stands as an interesting
document itself; using it isn't necessary to
understand the poem, however. Spoken by
characters from throughout New Orleans history,
the poems understandably vary in tone and
appeal.
Osbey's
style is accessible. Idiosyncrasies such as the
absence of capital letters fade into the
background once a reader tunes in to the poems'
compelling dramatic situations: a desperate
dialogue with Coffin Street's prophetic Mother
Catherine, a prayer from San Malo for his maroon
colony, an heartfelt open letter about the
evening news to singer Nina Simone. Like
Jonathan Swift's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" and
other formal verse satires, Osbey's poems stack
their grievances and observations on top of each
other until, near the end, the tone breaks and
she utters terribly moving truths—"the night is
a bastard gleaming"—before cooling down. Osbey's
book details family relationships, community
life, and the struggle for redemption.
This struggle is laid bare in "The Head of Luis
Congo," a sequential poem about the beheading of
Congo, a free black man hired in 1726 as keeper
of the road along Bayou St. John, a route
favored by escaping slaves. The poem's interplay
between confession and braggadocio is a
testament to Osbey's skill as a storyteller; the
reader damns and pities Congo simultaneously.
The book's title refers to the New Orleans
custom of whitewashing tombs on All Saints' Day,
and at her best, Osbey gives us a chance to
observe how life and death intertwine.
—Edward Skoog
* * * *
*
17
Poets Reading Series at the GOLD MINE SALOON
featuring Lee
Meitzen Grue and Chuck Perkins
Thursday, March 1, 8:00 p.m.
|
Poet
Lee Meitzen Grue was part of The Quorum
Club, the legendary coffee house on edge of
the French Quarter during the sixties. There
she began doing jazz and poetry together at
that time, along with flute player Eluard
Burt. The recently available
CD Live! On Frenchmen Street is a
representative collection of her many great
collaborations between poetry and jazz.
Lee is
also the founder of the New Orleans Poetry
Forum and editor of The New Laurel Review. Her
work has been published in numerous
journals, magazines & anthologies throughout
the states and abroad, including an
interview in Brilliant Corners: A Journal
of Jazz and Literature. |
 |
Today Lee is one of
the great mentors for poets in the New Orleans
community, helping to promote and produce art events
celebrating many disciplines, and by encouraging bold
experimentation and collaboration between
artists throughout the community with her workshops.
Lee's collections
include French Quarter Poems,
In the Sweet Balance of the
Flesh (Plain View Press),
Goodbye Silver, Silver Cloud
(Plain View Press), and Three Poets in New Orleans
(Xavier Review Press). She has received an NEA grant for
fiction and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize, and is a
Senior Editor with Knopf.
In addition, Lee presents her work
regularly as a visiting writer at college programs
throughout the states, and performs internationally.
Lee Meitzen Grue Tribute
Booker:
Black Night Keep on Falling Turbinton:
The African Cowboy at Charlie B's
Young Men in Wheelchairs
* * * *
*
 |
Chuck Perkins
Chuck
Perkins' poetry comes from the heart. Part
charisma, part street, part working man's
voice, part everyman reaching for the stars,
Perkins' voice signifies American history in
the making with fresh memories won from the
civil rights movement, and hopes still to be
fulfilled as America grows into its future.
Perkins
is a native of New Orleans, a former U.S.
Marine, and was at one time a transplantee
to the industrial north of Illinois and
Wisconsin where he began raising his young
family. But he also kept strong ties to New
Orleans, and eventually returned there,
bringing his family to live near his blood
relatives. |
Long a favorite of audiences at
Chicago's renowned Green Mill Lounge, Perkins has
consistently been featured at equally respected poetry
venues across the city and the region. He even MC'd the
1999 National Poetry Slams at the Chicago Theater before
thousands of guests.
Perkins' engagement with poetry was
not at first by design. Perkins shares a particular,
important quality with other performance poets in his
generation: the passion to discover, learn, improve, and
come back better than before. He has taken the path from
open mic to the open road, and he's won the path.
http://voices.e-poets.net/PerkinsC/home.shtml
http://voices.e-poets.net/PerkinsC/poem-NewOrleans.shtml
* * * *
*
John Gery
John Gery was born in Reading,
Pennsylvania, USA, in 1953, and grew up in Lititz,
Pennsylvania. He earned degrees from Princeton
University, the University of Chicago, and Stanford
University. His four published collections of poetry
include Charlemagne: A Song of Gestures (Plumbers Ink,
1983), which received the Plumbers Ink Poetry Award; The
Enemies of Leisure (Story Line, 1995), honored by
Publishers Weekly as a “Best Book of 1995” and awarded a
1995-96 Critics Choice Award from the San Francisco
Review of Books and Today’s First Edition television
series; American Ghost: Selected Poems (Raska Skola,
1999; Cross-Cultural, 1999), a bilingual English-Serbian
collection translated by Biljana D. Obradovic, which
received the European Award of the Circle Franz Kafka in
Prague; and Davenport’s Version (Portals Press, 2003), a
book-length narrative poem about the Civil War in New
Orleans. Gery’s fifth volume of poetry, A Gallery of
Ghosts, is forthcoming from Story Line Press. He has
also published two chapbooks, The Burning of New Orleans
(Amelia, 1988), winner of the Charles William Duke Long
Poem Award, and Three Poems (LeStat, 1989).
Gery’s other books
include his major critical study, Nuclear Annihilation
and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness
(University Press of Florida, 1996), and For the House
of Torkom (Cross-Cultural Communications, 1999),
co-translated with Vahe Baladouni, a bilingual volume of
the prose poems of Armenian poet Hmayyag Shems.
Gery’s poetry,
criticism, and reviews have appeared in journals
throughout the country, including American Literature,
Callaloo, CEA Critic, Chicago Review, Contemporary
Literature, George Washington Review, Kenyon Review, The
Iowa Review, Louisiana Literature, New Orleans Review,
New Virginia Review, Notre Dame Review, Paris Review,
Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, South Central Review,
Southwest Review, and Verse. His poems and prose have
been translated into Serbian, Romanian, Chinese, Farsi,
and Bengali. For his work, he has received, among other
awards, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts, an Artist Fellowship from the
Louisiana Division of the Arts, two Deep South Writers
Poetry Awards, a Wesleyan University Summer Poetry
Fellowship, and the Academy of American Poets Poetry
Award. In Spring 2006, he was a Research Fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study at the University of
Minnesota, and for Spring 2007 he received a Fulbright
Fellowship to the Faculty of Philology, University of
Belgrade (Serbia).
A Research
Professor of English at the University of New Orleans,
Gery has also taught at Stanford, San Jose State, and
the University of Iowa, and he has twice been a Poet in
Residence at Bucknell University. Since 1990 he has
served as the founding Director of the Ezra Pound Center
for Literature at Brunnenburg, Italy. Currently, he is
compiling a collection of poetry, Have at You Now!, and
his critical projects involve American poetry at the
turn of the twenty-first century, parody, and cultural
identity. He is also writing a walking guide to Ezra
Pound’s Venice.
* *
* * *
Biljana Obradovic
Originally from
Yugoslavia, Biljana Obradovic has lived in Greece, and
India besides the US. She has a BA in English Language
and Literature from Belgrade University, an M.F.A. in
Creative Writing, Poetry from Virginia Commonwealth
University, and a Ph.D. in English with a creative
dissertation from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Her first
collection of poems, Frozen Embraces, a bilingual
edition (Belgrade, Center of Emigrants from Serbia,
1997), won the Rastko Petrovic Award for the Best Book
of 1998. Her second collection of poetry is entitled Le
Riche Monde, a bilingual edition (Belgrade, Raška Škola,
1999).
Obradovic’s poems
also appear in Three Poets in New Orleans (New Orleans,
Xavier Review Press, January 2000). In addition to her
own poetry, her other works include a Serbian
translation of John Gery's American Ghosts: Selected
Poems, a bilingual edition (Belgrade, Raška Škola,
1999), Fives: Fifty Poems by Serbian and American Poets,
A Bilingual Anthology, as editor and translator
(Co-published by Contact Line, Belgrade, Yugoslavia and
Cross-Cultural Communications, Merrick, NY, Summer
2002), and forthcoming a selection of poems by Stanley
Kunitz into Serbian, The Long Boat as editor and
translator (Co-published by Association of Writers of
Serbia, Belgrade, Yugoslavia and Cross-Cultural
Communications, Merrick, NY, fall 2003).
Obradovic’s work
has appeared in such magazines as Poetry East,
Bloomsbury Review, Prairie Schooner, The Plum Review and
Knjizevne Novine. She reviews books for World Literature
Today and others. She received the Masaryk Academy of
Arts Medal for Artistic Achievements, October 20, 2000,
Prague, Czech Republic.
She is a Member of
the Association of Writers of Serbia and Assistant
Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana,
in New Orleans. Her current project includes a book of
translations into English of Desanka Maksimovic's poetry
and her own manuscript of poems entitled Little
Disruptions.
http://www.xula.edu/english/NEAXULAWRITERS.html
http://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/georgetonian/030304/news1.html
* *
* * *
P r o f e s s o r A R T U R O
My Name is New
Orleans
a poet and fiction writer from New
Orleans, is a Spoken Word artist, educator, performer,
editor and speechwriter who received a Master of Arts
degree in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and a
B.A. degree in English/Journalism from the Sate
University of New York-College at New Paltz. Pfister,
one of the original Broadside poets of the 1960s, has
collaborated on a medley of projects with a melange of
artists including painters, musicians, photographers,
dancers, singers, fire eaters, waiters, cab drivers, and
other members of the Great Miscellaneous. --Thursday, November 9, 8:00PM (Doors Open @ 7:00pm)
* *
* * *
|
Moira Crone,
novelist & short story writer
THURSDAY, SEPT 21, 2006, 8:00PM
Moira Crone
was raised in the tobacco country of Eastern North
Carolina and received degrees from Smith College and the
Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her works include story
collections
Dream State, and
The Winnebago Mysteries, as well as a novel,
A Period of Confinement. |
 |
Her fiction has been
published in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle,
Boston Sunday Globe, and Image, and has
been selected among the “Year's Best” four times for
inclusion in New Stories From The South, from Algonquin.
She has received fellowships from
the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mary Ingraham
Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College at Harvard, and
the Louisiana Board of Regents. She won the Pirate's
Alley Faulkner Society Short Story Prize in 1992, and
the Faulkner/Wisdom Award for Novella in 2004. Her book
What Gets Into Us is due out in 2006. Her short
novel, The Ice Garden, was featured in the Spring
2006 edition of Triquarterly. The former director of the
creative writing program at Louisiana State University
in Baton Rouge, she has taught at LSU for twenty years.
She lives in New Orleans, is married to author Rodger
Kamenetz, and is the mother of two daughters, Anya and
Kezia Kamenetz.
In What Gets Into Us, the
new collection of short stories by Moira Crone, a
curious child discovers that some believe "the gods who
made this world didn’t make it right, and they are
terribly sorry about it." A nine-year-old girl is the
only one who realizes that her mother's mental illness
has put the family’s survival at stake. A shy African
American woman confronts evil directly in a terrifying
act of love. A teenage orphan replaces a wayward son in
a privileged but unhappy family. A young carpenter
decides that if his baby is going to be born right, he
will have to commit a crime, and build the world anew.
Crone has the lyric touch of a poet
and the visionary spirit of a mystic, conjuring images
that are both disturbing and startlingly beautiful
– Phoebe Kate Foster
* * * * * * *
17 Poets Reading Series at the
GOLD MINE SALOON
featuring
JERRY W. WARD, Jr.
poet, essayist,
editor THURSDAY, SEPT 14,
2006, 8:00PM (Doors Open @ 7:00pm)
|
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr., author of
Trouble
the Water: 250 years of African-American Poetry, is one of New Orleans' most celebrated poets. He
is a distinguished professor of English and African
American World Studies at Dillard University. He is
widely regarded as one of the leading experts on Richard
Wright. Since returning to New Orleans after the storm,
Dr. Ward has resumed work on two pre-Katrina projects:
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia and the Cambridge
History of African American Literature. Recent projects
include The Katrina Papers: a journal of visions,
epiphanies, trauma & recovery. |
 |
Selections from THE KATRINA PAPERS by Jerry W. Ward,
Jr.
September 30, 2005
Life is a wave.
You move up. You move sideways and down. It is about
motion. You rush and ebb, flow and flood and ebb again
and repeat the variations. Accounting for your lifetime
persuades you to descend into the mathematics of
nonsense. How many seconds have you been alive without
counting the aliveness in your mother’s womb?
There are 3600
seconds in one hour. And 86,400 seconds in one day.
Ignore leap years and time adjustments, and you find a
year is made up of 31,536,000 seconds. One decade is
315,360,000 seconds. At age 60, you had endured and
prevailed for 18,921,600,000 seconds. The cells in your
body are keenly aware of this magnitude. They complain
of pain and shriveling. The cells in the skin family
have it worst of all. They are constantly losing
neighbors and relatives at a faster rate than their
sisters and brothers below the surface.
Perhaps something
similar happens to the sea, to the portions that have to
deal with sunlight and wind and the portions that
commune only with themselves in the cold that light
never visits or violates. And here’s the killer. It
took Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita and
18,984,672,000 seconds for you to discover a fact that
is at once fantastic and quintessentially untrue. Such
games does the mind in misery play.
* * * * * * *
***followed by OPEN MIC***
NOTE: B.Y.O.M. ( Bring Your Own
Meat ) -- As part of a "new" tradition Dave B will
have the B-B-Q Grill going from 7:00 - 8:00pm, so bring
your own steaks, sausages, fish, or
whatever favorite edibles you like, and he'll cook 'em
to order!
The GOLD MINE SALOON is located at
701 DAUPHINE STREET (at the corner of Dauphine & St.
Peter) in the FRENCH QUARTER.
For more information please call
504-586-0745, or go to:
http://www.17poets.com/.
DOORS OPEN AT 7:00PM featuring new
Art installations. Admission is FREE.
"It's events like these that cement
New Orleans' position as the literary center - not just
of the South - but of the universe. No Matter what
Oxford thinks. - Chris Rose, Times-Picayune
* * * * * * *
 |
A brilliant line-up of poets &
artists
are scheduled to appear Thursday, August 31,
2006
at the Gold Mine Saloon at 7:00PM to
celebrate
the publication of Trembling Pillow Press'
third issue of YAWP: A Journal of Poetry & Art
(YAWP Magazine) |
Some of the many
poets & painters participating are: ANDREI CODRESCU,
JERRY W. WARD Jr.,
NIYI OSUNDARE, RODGER KAMENETZ,
LEE MEITZEN GRUE, BILL LAVENDER, GINA FERRARA, JONATHAN
KLINE, PAUL CHASSE, MEGAN BURNS, DAVE BRINKS, MOOSE
JACKSON, DANIEL KERWICK, JAMES NOLAN, ANDY YOUNG,
THADDEUS CONTI, SANDRA JOHNSON, MICHAEL FEDOR, WILLIAM
WARREN, PATI D'AMICO, ROMANO ZAMPRIOLI.
FREE ADMISSION
Party begins at 7:00pm
The Gold Mine Saloon is located in
the French Quarter, 701 Dauphine St. (corner of Dauphine
& St. Peter).
IMPORTANT: If you can, please bring
a special dish to contribute to the POT LUCK!
The party also
features COMPLIMENTARY MESSAGES & HOOKAHS!
Latest Issue of YAWP: a Journal of
Poetry & Art "Who's Your Dada?" can be purchased at the
party / special $5.00.
"It's events like these that cement
New Orleans' position as the literary center - not just
of the South - but of the universe. No Matter what
Oxford thinks. - Chris Rose, The Times-Picayune
* * * * * * *
A n d r e i C O D R E S C U
Andrei Codrescu is an award winning poet, translator,
editor of Exquisite Corpse, best-selling novelist,
correspondent for both NPR and ABC News' Nightline, and
MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana
State University in Baton Rouge. His numerous books
include Wakefield (Algonquin, 2004) and It Was Today
(Coffee House, 2003).
"This transplanted Transylvanian with the bateau-mouche
moustache always manages to create a craving for the
subversive—something that is much needed in these days
of 'friendly fascism.'" — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
* * * * * * *
N i y i O S U N D A R E
Internationally-acclaimed poet,
playwright, essayist and professor, Niyi Osundare
(University of New Orleans) has won numerous awards for
his work and is a leading scholar of poetics in Nigeria.
A believer in poetry-as-performance, he draws audience
participation and often accompanies his verse with
music. Some of his many books include: A Thread in the
Loom: Essays on African Literature and Culture, Pages
from the Book of the Sun: New and Selected Poems, The
Word is an Egg and Horses of Memory.
"One hasn’t become a writer until
one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit
has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an
obsession. It has to be something as organic,
physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping
or eating." — Niyi Osundare
* * * * * * *
R o d g e r K A M E N E T Z
Rodger Kamenetz is a poet, essayist, and thinker who is
internationally known for his work in Jewish-Buddhist
dialogue. He is professor of literature and director of
the Jewish Studies Program at Louisiana State
University. He is the author of eight books, including
The Jew in the Lotus, The Missing Jew: New and Selected
Poems, and Stalking Elijah which won the National Jewish
Book Award for 1997 in the category of Jewish Thought.
He has written for The New York Times and Moment
Magazine.
"Kamenetz is a master at infusing seemingly plain words
with resonance and depth, with subtle textures and
playful ironies, and he is wonderfully open to a whole
gamut of human emotions, from the sublime to the soiled
and abject." — P. David Hornik
* * * * * * *
17 Poets Reading
Series at the GOLD MINE SALOON
THURSDAY, AUG 24,
2006, 8:00PM featuring poets DANIEL KERWICK
Daniel Kerwick is a
playwright, a poet, and also editor of SYMPATICO PRESS,
which produces one-of-a-kind books celebrating the great
works of New Orleans artists and poets. Danny has
traveled extensively, giving readings, lectures and
presentations on "Undergound Publishing," "The Role of
Community in the Avante-Garde," and "Contemporary
Poetics: Symbiosis of the Word & Its Practitioner." Mr.
Kerwick's own work has been published in journals
throughout the country. Most recently his work will be
featured in the upcoming issue of YAWP: a Journal of
Poetry and Art, Issue 3 "Who's Your Dada?"
The excerpt below is from YAWP: a
Journal of Poetry & Art, Issue 2 "The Bohemeth Cometh"
April 2005, electronically transmitted with
permission from Trembling Pillow Press.
| Hazard Study
books piled perpendicular
beneath
wooly mammoth atlas
a river runs north thru glacial spittoon
does leather armchair unearthed
come with tobacco stained scholar
the speculation is golden
on given
days
the
striations betray
happy hour ruminations
but today
man
hieroglyphic
graffiti
statistical
evidence
of static
the smoke plumes a shill
try the
widows peak
an empty
reservoir
the deserted crosswalk
is it a
crime to think
history is
bulls whip
and lambs wool
contemplate
the man and woman
in a
composite
she says not
he wanders
in a gene pool
full of jello and dead carp
there are ignition changes to consider
books
shelves tumble
intuition takes over
the blank
page
a line
scattered
is this |
The GOLD MINE SALOON is located at
701 DAUPHINE STREET (at the corner of Dauphine & St.
Peter) in the FRENCH QUARTER. For more information
please call 504-586-0745, or go to:
www.17Poets.com.DOORS OPEN AT 7:00PM
featuring new Art installations. Admission is FREE.
* * * * * * *
17 Poets! Reading Series at the GOLD MINE
SALOON
THURSDAY, JULY 20, 2006, 8:00PM,
featured poet Gordon Walmsley
|
Gordon Walmsley is a New
Orleanian who currently lives in Copenhagen, is in New
Orleans to conduct a series of "Poetry Heals" workshops
for the general public.
Walmsley was born (1949) and raised
in New Orleans. He was graduated from Princeton
University (German Literature) and has lived for the
past twenty or so years in Copenhagen, with his Danish
wife of many years. He returns regularly to New Orleans.
|
 |
Mr. Walmsley was deeply moved by his
last visit to New Orleans a few weeks after Hurricane
Katrina and vowed to return "to help in the way I can,
by giving poetry workshops as a way of working through
the Katrina experience. You might call them Poetry Heals
Workshops". Walmsley is the author of four books
of poems.
His poems have appeared in various
international journals, most recently in the Sarajevo
magazine Album (in Serbo-Croatian). A fifth
collection of poems, entitled Touchstones,
a Journey Through Poems in Xenophobic Times, will be
published next year by the distinguished Irish publisher
of poetry Salmon Publishing.
In addition to writing poetry
Walmsley has recently edited and translated (from
Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) Fire and Ice,
an Anthology of Nine Poets from Scandinavia and the
North. He is a member of the Danish Writers of Poetry
and Fiction. A Selection of his poetry appears below.
Apocalypse
New Orleans, awash in broken melodies,
Bucktown's levee nearly did you in, the lake
bleeding-in to reveal you. Thus you have
become
apocalyptic, for apocalypse means
laying bare what was hidden.
And as in any apocalypse
a mirror is held up
to every single one of us.
I imagine sharks coming in for the dead
or an alligator's eyes
bobbing the waters of Bayou St. John.
All that was hidden
rising to the surface. Scrutiny
from the Cotswolds
to the China Sea.
And what in you is brought to light
may change this stumbling nation.
We who were born of you always knew
there was a beast sleeping heavily below.
We could sometimes hear it breathing at
night
or sense its faint smell when the wind was
wrong.
We knew too, only the lake's blood could
rouse it
and free us from its dreaming
so that then we could be led
to the intimate place of mirrors. |
Source:
www.wordsandmusic.org/ Walmsley.html |
