Chris Mason’s most recent books and chapbooks include Something Something Morning (Blabbermouth, 2020), Some of the Methods of Performing Poetry Employed in and Around Baltimore from the Late 60’s to the Early Teens by Poets in Their Late Teens to Early 60’s (Primary Writing, 2019), and Hum Who Hiccup (Narrow House, 2011). He is a member of 3 bands: The Tinklers, Coocoo Rockin Time, and Old Songs. The Old Songs group translates archaic Greek poetry and puts it to music. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Ann.
Amy Gerstler is a writer living in Los Angeles. Index of Women, a book of her poems, will be published in April by Penguin Random House. She is currently collaborating with Steve Gunderson on a musical play.
CORNELIUS EADY’s poetry collections include: Victims of theLatest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize; and Hardheaded Weather (Putnam, 2008). He is co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation. [For more poems by and information on Cornelius Eady, click here.]
Maureen Owen, former editor and chief of Telephone Magazine and Telephone Books, is the author of Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her title American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE(Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She has taught at Naropa University, both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program, in Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and edited Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night through 19 issues. Her newest title Edges of Wateris available from Chax Press. She has most recently had work in Blazing Stadium, Positive Magnets, Posit, and The Denver Quarterly. Click herefor her Poets on the Road Tour with Barbara Henning. She can be found reading her work on the PennSound website.
(L-R) Jim Jarmusch, Ron Padgett, and Adam Driver attend the New York Special Screening of Amazon Studios and Bleecker Street's "Paterson" at Landmark Sunshine Theater on December 15, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Paul Bruinooge/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
Anne Harding Woodworth’s seventh book of poetry, Trouble (Turning Point, 2020), includes her persona cycle, “Hannah Alive,” which became a one-woman play in verse that was a finalist at the Adirondack Shakespeare Co. festival in Essex, New York. Harding Woodworth’s poetry, reviews, and essays appear in anthologies and journals, both in print and online, such as Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, Women & Language, Crannog, Gargoyle, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. She is a co-chair of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a member of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.
John Yau has published many books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. He has a book of poems, Genghis Chan on Drums, forthcoming from Omnidawn, and a monograph on the Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong, from Lund Humphries (both fall 2021). He is the publisher of Black Square Editions, and his reviews of art and poetry appear regularly in the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He lives in New York City and teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University). [For more information on, and work by, John Yau, click here.]
I’m not the painter here. I leave that to you, but blue is the color of my father’s camping cup, left tonight on the Formica counter. This pen I am writing with. and the beaded moccasins and belt I danced in before my mother died. My grandmother had made these for her as a child— spelling out in blue beads on blue beads each of our names, our collective history in an invisible pattern only we would recognize. Not the blue of Montana sky either, not that at all, but the pulse of lake water lapping at your ankles, the temperature rising as a storm gathers on the plains. The push and pull of forgiveness. I’m already thinking of leaving again. Did I tell you this? How can I speak of this wind, how it has no color, no sense, no guilt. It makes me feel even more lonely than I would ever let on. I’m guessing you figured this much already. (We will never stop missing them, will we, the parent each of us has lost.) I’ll be honest, I have no idea what I would see in the paintings if I were to visit you. I like to think there would be some kind of end to the blue, a visual end to what is never adequate: blue flame, blue bead, blue ovary, blue lung. See how easily we fail? How can we believe that our secrets are in good hands— yours resting at the bottom of Flathead Lake, mine held in a small leather suitcase beneath the stairs. I have not worn those moccasins or that belt for over six years now. We should both be ashamed. Look at us. Look, as the grey fog settles into your streets outside, how the near-white canvases wait. You almost didn’t notice again. Just like I almost didn’t notice the wind dying down for evening. So yes, let’s call it Montana blue, the vanishing point: Maybe this is the real reason I have never learned to trust in color. How can you take back the kind of blue you’ve been dreaming of—trust it will make something unhappen— if it is the same blue you’re made of?
M.L. Smoker is a member of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana. She currently serves as co-poet laureate for the state of Montana, alongside her longtime friend, Melissa Kwasny. ◙ She holds an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Fellowship. In 2019 she was recognized as an alumna of the year by the University. ◙ Her first collection of poems, Another Attempt at Rescue, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2005. In 2009 she co-edited an anthology of human rights poetry with Melissa Kwasny entitled, I Go to the Ruined Place. She received a regional Emmy award for her work as a writer/consultant on the PBS documentary Indian Relay. ◙ She served as the Director of Indian Education for the state of Montana for almost ten years. In 2015 she was named the Indian Educator of the Year by the National Indian Education Association and was appointed to the National Advisory Council on Indian Education by President Barack Obama. She currently works at Education Northwest as a practice expert in Indian Education. [For more on M.L. Smoker, click here.]
Born in 1944, Geoffrey Young grew up in San Diego. After a Fulbright year in Paris, he worked at La Galerie Sonnabend for a spell. In 1982 he moved from Berkeley to Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Over a thirty-year period, his small press, The Figures, published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction. ◙ Recent books of his poetry and drawing include Pivot (2020), and Asides (2020). The trilogy: Alibi (2019), Sauce (2018), and Sight Unseen (2018) exist in small editions. ◙ For twenty-seven years he directed the Geoffrey Young Gallery, which closed as of Christmas, 2018. Over the years Young has written catalog essays for more than a dozen artists. [For more on Geoffrey Young, click here.]
Beth Baruch Joselow is the author of numerous books and chapbooks, including Excontemporary (Red Hen/ Story Line) and Begin at Once (Chax Press). Her poems have appeared in dozens of magazines and in several anthologies. Joselow has collaborated on artists’ books with visual artists in the U.S. and Ukraine. Born in Baltimore, Joselow spent most of her adult life in Washington DC, where for many years she was on the faculty of the Corcoran College of Art + Design. She now lives in Lewes, Delaware, and works as a psychotherapist. [For a recent interview, click here.]
Eamonn Wall is a native of Co. Wexford, Ireland, who has lived in the US since 1982: in Wisconsin, New York City, Nebraska, and for the past twenty years in St. Louis. His books of poetry and prose include Junction City: New and Selected Poems 1990-2015 (Salmon Poetry, 2015); From the Sin-e Café to the Black Hills (University of Wisconsin Press. 2000); Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (Notre Dame, 2011). Current projects include a new collection of poetry and a new book of essays on contemporary writing. He works in international education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Grace Cavalieri is Maryland's tenth poet laureate. She founded "The Poet and the Poem" for public radio, now from the Library of Congress, celebrating 44 years on-air. Her latest books are Showboat (2019), which centers on her 25 years as a Navy wife, and What The Psychic Said (2020, both books from Goss 183 Pub.). Her latest play is "Quilting The Sun," Theater for the New City, NYC, 2019. She was married for 60 years to the late sculptor, Kenneth Flynn. They had four children. Grace lives in Annapolis, Maryland.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of ten books of poems, most recently The Sky Contains the Plans, published by Wave Books. His book-length poem The Others won the 2017 Believer Book Award. His book A Green Light was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. “News of the Dead Pope” is from his first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, which won the National Poetry Series and was published by W.W. Norton in 1995. He attended universities in Ann Arbor, Dublin, and Iowa City, and then moved to Brooklyn, and that is where you will find him from now on. [For more information on, and poems by, Matt Rohrer, click here.]
It was thirty years ago today that Tim Dlugos died at age forty of AIDS. Tim was a poet of enormous talent and creative energy. He was beloved by many, myself included. His warmth, humor, and congeniality made him very easy to like. When his friend David Trinidad brought out Tim's collected poems (A Fast Life) in 2001, I was impressed by how much great work Tim had produced in his short life. Like so many others, I still miss him and, as the poem below demonstrates, still dream about him.
The Next Best Thing
I am having lunch in the humongous
cafeteria at my workplace. I’m not sure
what my job is, but the cafeteria is packed.
I scan the room and see that my best friend,
Michael David Lally, is sitting alone ten or so
tables across from me. So I go to join him.
But just as I start heading his way, he bolts up
from his chair and scoots off to another table
where Conway Twitty is also having lunch.
Conway is alone and looks like a successful
businessman. He has glasses and wears a suit.
I can’t imagine why he is in our cafeteria,
but he and Michael seem to be in an instant
intense conversation and I don’t feel that I should
interrupt them. Their faces are only an inch apart.
Then I am in front of the Childe Harold, a great
bar in Dupont Circle that went out of business
some time back. I’m sitting on the little brick
wall in front waiting for Tim Dlugos. We’re
having lunch together. I haven’t seen him since
he died and am hoping I won’t have trouble
recognizing him. But along he comes, looking
older but good. He has very long hair, mostly gray,
and he’s clutching a briefcase from which papers
seem to be tumbling. It’s so good to see him again.
Bernard Welt happens along. I want to invite him
to join us for lunch, but I also feel selfish about
seeing Tim. We have so much to catch up on.
So I don’t invite Bernie, and feel a little guilty about it.
I am trying to call him Bernard rather than Bernie,
Here is a Tim Dlugos post I wrote for this site in 2008. There's a good bit of information online about Tim, including sites that offer examples of his work. This DC site is especially good. Tim's greatest poem is, arguably, "G-9," which can be found here.
In June 2021, The Word Works Press will publish Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry. Meg is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; a heroic crown, The Ice Storm, published as chapbook in 2020; and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology (Natasha Tretheway, guest editor). She lives in New Hampshire and directs the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Massachusetts.
Charles Bernstein is the author of Near/Miss and Pitch of Poetry. ROOF recently published The Course, a collaboration with Ted Greenwald. University of New Mexico Press has published a facsimile reprint L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, a volume of related letters, as well as the late 1970s collaboration Legend. He lives in Brooklyn. [For more information on, and poems by, Charles Bernstein, see the Poetry Foundation.]
I remember Ahmos Zu-Bolton II as a charismatic and gifted poet. He occasionally took part in the Mass Transit readings in Washington DC's Dupont Circle in the early 1970s, which was when I met him. A poet, playwright, Vietnam War veteran, and tireless promoter of African-American writers, Zu-Bolton was born on 21 October 1935 in Mississippi and grew up in Louisiana. He founded Hoo-Doo, a magazine devoted to African-American activism and arts, and, with E. Ethelbert Miller, edited the 1975 anthology Synergy D.C. His poetry collections include A Niggered Amen (1975), Ain’t No Spring Chicken (1998), and 1946 (2002). He died at age 69 on 8 March 2005, at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. See Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s excellent post on Zu-Bolton; Doug Lang’s 2007 blog on Zu-Bolton offers links to more information, plus brief remembrances by Michael Lally and Beth Joselow; see also Grace Cavalieri’s perceptive essay on Zu-Bolton’s work in Beltway Poetry Quarterly.
Joan Retallack's BOSCH'D (Fables, Moral Tales & Other Awkward Constructions), in which this poem appears, came out from Litmus Press on April Fools Day, 2020. She feels it's impossible to dispute the aptness of that date given local and global circumstances at the time. Retallack is the author of The Poethical Wager (University of California Press)and Procedural Elegies—Western Civ Cont'd (Roof Books) among many other volumes of poetry and essays. Her Gertrude Stein: Selections (California) and conversations with John Cage (MUSICAGE, Wesleyan) examine the humor and gravitas of idiosyncratic aesthetics that became, respectively, so widely influential. Prior to BOSCH'D, Litmus Press published Retallack’s The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times— 2018 textual/visual continuation of an event she organized at MoMA in collaboration with Adam Pendleton. In all her work, Retallack combines socio-political inquiry with linguistic, visual, performative experiments in what she considers "poethical wagers.”
Michael Donaghy was born in the Bronx to Irish immigrant parents. In his thirties, he settled in the UK, where he became a well-known and highly regarded poet. Also an accomplished flute and whistle player, he was an active part of London’s traditional Irish music scene. His sudden death at age 50 was a great loss to both the literary and traditional music communities. Fintan O’Toole’s piece for the Irish Times examines Donaghy’s “elastic identity.” Donaghy’s wife, Maddy Paxman, published a book in 2014 about their life together. See also The Guardian and the Poetry Foundation for more on Donaghy's life and work. See the Session for information on his life in Irish music. To hear him play, see this clip:
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
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