Lately I spend a lot of time trying to locate the geography of the work. I believe the writing is someplace. While always true, facts of location are always temporary. And while current events seem to confirm this point for me over and over, somehow I still go out to try and find the line. Whether this is a problem with poetry or a problem with me matters less, I think, than the mistake of not feeling how much wildness is naturally occurring wherever it is the search for the poem takes me.
I should have tattooed on me somewhere a line from Wendy's Birds of Los Angeles: "I am addicted to places..."
]]>
Here's the description direct from The Lighthouse: What does it take to get published in literary journals? Hear directly from editors at three distinguished journals: as they walk you along the path of a successful submission.
]]>]]>But the relationship that works for the sponsor doesn't always make sense to the consumer, observed University of Colorado Denver poet and professor Jake Adam York.
"The people who think basketball and office products belong together, and football and insurance should coexist, they aren't living in the same world we're living in," said York. "If we had a buyer, we'd surely become the Coors University of Colorado, and that would help us out with our financial responsibilities, I'm sure.
"But it feels intrusive when people feel like they can put down a couple million dollars in exchange for their name on something."
But to return, I'd have to start again, new, fresh—succeed in some of the work I always intended to do, try some new things, but most importantly of all return to the real work of the site and the blog, to transmit something again, but this time with whole new kinds of static.
So here it is, 2010, and you, reader, whoever you are: a return and a renewal, with more changes ahead, but certainly a stable and active web presence again.
]]>Here is the official press release for the event:
2010 Series Kicks Off with Poets Jake Adam York and Kathleen Graber
RICHMOND, VA - The Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Blackbird/New Virginia Review, the Library of Virginia and Chop Suey Books present the first installment in the 2010 Fresh Ink literary series on Wednesday, March 3. The on-going series of readings by emerging authors continues with a chapbook festival and a fiction reading later in the year. Poets Jake Adam York and Kathleen Graber read from their work beginning at 6 p.m. at the Library of Virginia. The reading is free and open to the public.
Jake Adam York is the author of three books of poems: Murder Ballads (2005); A Murmuration of Starlings (2008); and Persons Unknown (2010), forthcoming in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry as an editor's selection. His work has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize and has placed in numerous competitions. York's poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals. His work of poetic history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, was published by Routledge in 2005. York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students. York is also a contributing editor for Shenandoah, a former editor of the online journal storySouth, and a founding editor of the electronic journal Thicket.
Kathleen Graber's first collection of poetry, Correspondence, was the winner of the 2005 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She was the 2007 Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton University and the 2008 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar. She is a member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, and her new collection of poems, The Eternal City, is forthcoming this summer from Princeton University Press. Poems from the new book are forthcoming this spring in Blackbird, The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, and AGNI.
Fresh Ink is supported in part by the Carole Weinstein Endowment for Creative Writing at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.
A poster anyone...?
The book is called Persons Unknown, and it will gather recent poems you may have seen (or may yet see) in The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review (Summer 2009 & Fall 2009), Shenandoah, Blackbird, and the new Northwest Review, as well as some other material that has yet to be journalized.
It's designed to fit inside A Murmuration of Starlings, with its two sections to be wrapped around "Tuck," the central poem in Murmuration. Basically, this book collects the material I would have put in the place of "Tuck" if I hadn't placed Murmuration and had been working on it for the last two years.
This is more than a little bit of a relief, though now I'm addressing the more mechanical aspects of getting the manuscript ready for publication, including, of course, the copyediting, but more harrowing, the selection of possible cover images and the completion of the marketing questionnaire, which asks, among other things, for one to describe "Key Customer Features & Benefits," in the face of which I am momentarily paralyzed, aphasic.
That moment, in which the more artisinal and spiritual relationship to the work has to harmonize with the language and concern of capital and production is an interesting one that actually expands my knowledge of my own work. When I am asked to "touch on the basic points in simple language" or to "provide a synopsis of your book as you would describe it to a colleague who is unfamiliar with you or your work," I have a new challenge, which forgets both the more minute and technical aspects I obsess over daily and the larger poetic/social/personal commitments that keep me at the writing table. I'm projected into a very different, alien space, in which I realize quickly I don't quite have the right vocabulary to reach someone who may not already be disposed to read this material, and that I have to develop that vocabulary.
I was in a sophomore literature classroom at the University of Wyoming yesterday, thanks to the curiosity and generosity of Harvey Hix (H. L. Hix), and there I dealt with that same problem, how to discuss some complex artistic issues and personal questions with an audience comprised primarily of non-specialists who also don't yet have a large body of extensible knowledge, and there I had one of those ecstatic moments when I'm doing something and also watching myself do something, saying something and also listening to myself saying something --- and I was hyperaware of those moments when I edged into a more intellectual vocabulary (in which I required by also reveled in it), and the moments when I compensated by swinging back into contemporary vernacular. It was a two-state solution: in the absence of a real synthetic solution, I present the poles of the dialectic.
I don't know if this is possible in the marketing questionnaire or the jacket copy, but I'm oscillating, and thinking a bit jealously about those authors I have met who seem particularly adept at discussing their work in more direct or non-academic terms, and I need to get there, but I don't live in that neighborhood. Or I have to find a way to be more bi-locational, bi-coastal, bi-polar.
All this, of course, in the middle of going through the address book and e-mail box to discover information of possible reviewers or people who could blurb the book or consider adopting it for courses --- which basically boils one's life and contacts down to a 10-page document, providing another goad for "getting out more," and the like.
I am grateful for ideas, advice, &c., anyone has. Meanwhile, put a pin in your calendar for November 2010 and put this title on your Christmas list: Persons Unknown.]]>