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LATE BREAKING NEWS … Call for Papers; Poetry Course with Robert Pinsky; Call for Submissions

THE ASSOCIATION OF LITERARY SCHOLARS, CRITICS AND WRITERS: Call for Papers
for its 20th conference: October 27-30, 2016 at The Catholic University of America Washington, DC
The Program Committee for the 2016 Conference:
John Briggs, University of California-Riverside
Lee Oser, College of the Holy Cross
Ernest Suarez, Catholic University
Rosanna Warren, University of Chicago
Please note: everybody who participates must be a current member of the ALSCW. We encourage participation by creative writers as well as scholars and critics. The 2016 introductory membership rate for new members, graduate students, and retirees is $50. Renewals are $100. Visit our website at alscw.org for detailed information. Proposals of 300 words and a C.V. should be sent as email attachments to Ernest Suarez at <suarez@cua.edu> on or before May 1, 2016. DETAILS HERE

Robert Pinsky (b. 1940), American poet, essayist, literary critic and translator. Photo c Jarod C Bennedict under CC BY SA e.0
Robert Pinsky (b. 1940), American poet, essayist, literary critic and translator. Photo c Jarod C Bennedict under CC BY SA 3.0

THE ART OF POETRY ONLINE COURSE WITH ROBERT PINKSY: “In conjunction with Boston University and edX, Robert Pinsky is teaching a free, six-week online poetry course, which launched on March 29, 2016 [but it looks like you can still register and catch up.]. The class covers a wide range of material, from classics by Ben Jonson and Emily Dickinson to work by contemporary poets such as Elise Partridge and Yusef Komunyakaa. According to Pinsky, “this course is based on the conviction that the more you know about an art, the more pleasure you will find in it.” (Poetry Foundation DETAILS HERE

THE GALWAY REVIEW is open for submissions in English or Irish from anywhere in the world. DETAILS HERE

THE POET BY DAY: Submit your event, book launch and other announcements at least fourteen days in advance to thepoetbyday@gmail.com. Publication is subject to editorial discretion.

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THE SUNDAY POESY: Opportunities, Events and other News and Information

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EVENTS

ERIK LARSON, known for his nonfiction narrative works such as The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts, will speak at the University of Wyoming on April 20 at 1:30 p.m. His talk is free and open to the public. College of Education auditorium, University of Wyoming, 1000 E. University Ave., Laramie, Phone: 307-766-3279

SAN FRANCISCO WRITE OF WAY FESTIVAL “brings together over thirty independent Bay Area literary organizations and reading series, as well as creative writing courses and communities at SFAI. The eight-hour, day-long event includes readings, performances, panel presentations, a bazaar, and creative writing workshops. Write of Way is committed to featuring emerging voices, writing on the margins, and celebrating the Bay Area’s richly diverse literary community. The event is spearheaded by SFAI English Department faculty and staff, paying homage to SFAI’s rich legacy of collaboration between artists and writers. This event is free and open to the public.” DATE Saturday, April 23 from 2 p.m. – 10 p.m.

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TUPELO PRESS WRITING CONFERENCE, Truchas, New Mexico.  Promoted as “a no-nonsense, intensive workshop conceived and presented by three of the most experienced poets and editors in the nation: Jeffrey Levine , poet, Editor-in-Chief and founding Publisher of Tupelo Press, Mark Doty, prize-winning poet, and Veronica Golos , award-winning curator, teacher, and poet.” DETAILS HERE

SAVANNAH BOOK FESTIVAL February 16-19, 2017, keep watching their site for details.  Here’s a video of the 2015 event, which gives you some idea of the goings on.

If you are viewing this post from an email, it is likely you’ll have to click through to watch the video.

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Opportunity Knocks

QUALL BELL MAGAZINE “is a place for real and unreal stories. We accept submissions in art, writing, and multimedia, including creative, journalistic, and (semi-)scholarly work.” The magazine also publishes poetry and submissions are open at this writing. DETAILS HERE

YUAN YANG Journal of Hong Kong and International Writing “is a literary journal hosted by the School of English at The University of Hong Kong. Each year it offers a collection of stories, poems, creative nonfiction, or plays by writers in Hong Kong and throughout the world. The journal has a special focus on the work of young and emerging writings in Hong Kong.” DETAILS HERE

GALAXY: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, DEADLINE for the May issue is April 30 DETAILS HERE

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THE BeZINE (HERE) theme for the May issue is Books that Changed Our Lives. Submit one paragraph on a book that changed your life and why to bardogroup@gmail.com DEADLINE May 10, 2015.

THE BALTIMORE REVIEW, which showcases Baltimore as a literary hub of diverse writers and promotes the work of both emerging and established writers is currently accepting submissions of poetry through May 31.  The next reading period will be August 1 through November 30.  DETAILS HERE

YES! POETRY publishes quartertly and features three poets in each issue. Submissions are open at this writing. DETAILS HERE

TRANSLATION

Opportunity Knocks

poesimaskinefritSCRIPT “is on the lookout for someone interested in translating the work of poet/artist Robert Corydon from Danish to English. If you or someone you know is interested, please post a message below or email script@studiohyperset.com. SCRIPT Facebook Page appears to serve as it’s website.

PUBLICATION

THE CREATIVE NEXUS™ weekend edition is out for your reading pleasure HERE. A community paper for progressive Artists, Artisans, Musicians and Writers to interact, share and promote each other’s laudable work, for the betterment of all. Roger Allen Baut (Chasing Tao) is publisher

THE BeZINE April issue was published on the 15th and celebrates interNational Poetry Month.  Good reading HERE. Featured poets include (in no special order): Michael Castro, Michael Rothenburg, Michael Dickel, Myra Schneider, Silva Merjanian, Imen Benyoub, Terri Muuss, Liliana Negoi, Sharon Frye, Carolyn O’Connell, Aprilia Zank, gary lundy, Sandra Tyler, Rueben Woolley, Donna Kuhn, Ilya Sumanto and Jamie Dedes.

COMPETITION

Opportunity Knocks

SECOND LIGHT OPEN POETRY COMPETITION for Long and Short Poems for Women! “Second Light is a very generous and encouraging organisation. Here’s a chance for longer poems, with magazine publication and a London reading as well as the prizes! Entry by post or email – and I [Alison Blackenbury] will read all entries.” Closing date 31 August. DETAILS HERE

THE POET BY DAY SUNDAY POESY

Submit your event, book launch and other announcements at least fourteen days in advance to thepoetbyday@gmail.com. Publication is subject to editorial discretion.

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MAXINE HONG KINGSTON, “Joy and beauty and delight!” … I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940), Chinese-American atuhor, educator and activist
Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940), Chinese-American author, story-teller, poet, educator and activist

“Keep this day. Save this moment;
Save each scrap of moment; write it down.
Save this moment. And this one. And this.”  

Randolph College announced last month that Maxine Hong Kingston would be the sixth recipient of the college’s Pearl S. Buck Award. The ceremony will be held on April 20.

Pearl Buck and Ms. Kingston share the distinction of shining a light on Chinese culture. For Pearl Buck it was the Chinese people in their homeland and for Maxine Hong Kingston it is Chinese-Americans. Both are known for their activism and for their memoirs and fictions, Pearl Buck more for the later than the former I think.

What these women also have in common is poetry. Pearl Buck’s slender collection, Words of Love (John Day, Co., 1974), was published posthumously. Ms. Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) was the fruit of coming to terms with turning sixty-five.

As part of the two-week-long celebrations of my own birthday (61st) in 2011, the CitySon Philosopher took me to dinner one night at Cafe Barrone in Menlo Park, California. Afterward we went next door to Kepler’s Books – a favorite among family and friends, the local independent –  to hear Maxine Hong Kingston talk about what was then her new book. She is a “neighbor,” living only a few miles away in Stanford.

“Story gives form and pleasure to the chaos that’s life. By the end of the story, we have found understanding, meaning, revelation, resolution, reconciliations.” 

The book is a memoir in free verse, a long poem in effect like the old-country tradition of writing a poem on a scroll. Flowing.

“Am I pretty at 65?
What does old look like?”

Ms. Kingston immediately addressed the  issues of aging, both in her presentation and in the book itself. She talked about being superstitious and thinking that as long as she has things to write “I keep living…” She told of the origins of the title: Thoreau. It’s a line from Walden that, she says, also hangs framed over her desk.

She explained the Chinese custom of “writing poems back” and told of her dad who would write poems to her in the margins of her books. She was at that time translating these for publication, though that was never her dad’s intention. Or so I would infer. She encouraged us to write our own poems in the margins of her book.

Ms. Kingston stood in front of us, like a fragile little bird, reading excerpts from the book, delightful to hear in her voice. She is ten years older than me but we’ve lived through the same events and movements: civil rights, women’s rights, Vietnam, Iraq … and so on. She too is the child of immigrants. She sounds like a Buddhist, has the Buddhist sensibility: respect for life, for silence, for present moment.

When Ms. Kingston finished her presentation and Q & A, my son excused himself and kindly went to buy two copies for us. We stood in line with other guests, waiting for Ms. Kingston to sign our books. Every moment spent attending to writers of good conscience, talking about books and writing, is precious…even more this one, because I was with my son and the writer happened to be one with whom I share values, gender, and the context of time. She also is a mother with one child, a son.

Finally it was our turn: Ms. Kingston sat tiny and cheerful with pen in hand. She greeted us just as cordially as she had each reader throughout the long night. She wrote my name in bold sprawling black letters followed by “Joy and beauty and delight” and then signed her full name with “Hong” in hanzi (Chinese characters).

I wrote in my journal that night that “as long as we have cherished children, valued friends, conscientious authors and quality books, we have everything. Life is indeed joy and beauty and delight.”

As far as the book goes: The charm of I Love a Broad Margin to My Life is its gentle meandering. It made me think of the way books meandered before the modern preference for brevity and before computers and word processing and the ease technology brings to rewrites, cuts, and tight line-by-line editing … and perhaps needless to say, before life was so tightly packed with activity, rush and noise.

In her promising opening, Ms. Kingston is bemused in her self-awareness as she examines questions of aging, appearance, and vanity. As the book moves on, she blends nonfiction with fiction, a few references and viewpoints from characters that people her novels.

This long poetic memoir is a backward look at a time some might enjoy revisiting and others might want to learn about through the memory of one who was there. One of its strengths is the contemplation of life by a dedicated activist whose creative work helps the reader understand. I enjoyed the book, got value out of it; but I did feel rather like Ms. Kingston was putting on the unaccustomed robes of a poet and didn’t feel quite at home with this form.  Unlike other poetry books on my shelves, I suspect I’ll never pull it out for another read.

© 2016, essay and photograph of Ms. Kingston at Kepler’s Books on February 22, 2011, Jamie Dedes;  All rights reserved

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THE BeZine, Apr. 2016, Vol.2/Issue 7; Celebrating Poetry Month, Table of Contents with Links

15 April 2016
Poetry Month

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

I. The Burial of the Dead

APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten.
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.…

A tidal wave of poetry, perhaps.

Michael Dickel, Contributing Editor

While Eliot declares the cruelty of April, April also happens to be National Poetry Month in the United States and Canada. In our online, social media world, it has become an international celebration of poetry as well. To join in this celebration, we in the Bardo Group Beguines dedicate the April issue each year to poetry. Many of us who write regularly for The BeZine are poets, and we usually include poetry. So, for us, it is a happy celebration—nothing cruel about it!

And what a wide-ranging celebration we offer in the 2016 National Poetry Month The BeZine issue! W. B. Yeats is oft quoted as saying, “What can be explained is not poetry.” So I won’t explain. I will tell you that Terri Muuss’ poem, “Thirteen Levels of Heaven,” takes you far and wide in a few grains of sand. “The Other Woman,” Imen Benyoub’s heart-wrenching poem, is not who you think—but in the current global storm of conflict and national political climate, indeed, she is Other. Michael Rothenberg’s “Poem for Mitko” personalizes the news we hear by imagining its impact on our mutual friend, Macedonian poet Mitko Gogov.

What these three featured poems have in common is their ability to take the intimate, the personal, the real moments of every day life, and reflect in and from them larger issues of humanity and life. Each describes very specific, personal scenes. According to Joy Harjo, “It’s possible to understand the world from studying a leaf.” And all of these poems open our eyes wide to the world. Sharon Olds tells an interviewer about poets she admires: “Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine.” And so are the spirits and visions of the authors gathered here.

“It may also be the case that any genuine work of art generates new work,” Donald Barthelme tells us in a Paris Review interview. As you read the poems, essays, interviews, and reviews in this month’s issue, I imagine that they will generate new art for you. Whether the art of living, the art of knowing others, or “the Arts,” you will want to do more of it after reading what we offer this month.

Last year, the Second Light Network of Women Poets (SLN) collaborated with The BeZine during April to present poetry from the SLN. In this year’s issue, you can read more about the network in “SECOND LIGHT NETWORK, showcasing the ambitious poetry of ambitious women.”  Jamie Dedes’ essay “POET, TEACHER, INSPIRATION: Dilys Wood and the Latter-day Saphos” also sheds light on Dilys Wood, founder of the SLN. This year, in my dual roles of contributing editor here at The BeZine and associate editor at The Woven Tale Press, I have served as liaison in a new collaboration. The works specifically from the collaboration appear in their own section in the table of contents below.

However, the whole issue represents collaboration—not only between the two publications, but between all of the writers. We work together, as a community. In putting this all together with Jamie Dedes and my Bardo Group Beguines and Woven Tale Press colleagues, I came to realize how many of the poets here I know personally—separately from these two publications. We all come from an organic online writing community. By organic, I mean through no organized effort or special social website.

After years of knowing Michael Rothenberg through email and Facebook, I only finally met him in person this past summer. Terri Muuss and I met at Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, also years ago, where her husband, Matt Pasca (who also has appeared in The BeZine), Adeena Karasick, and I performed one lovely evening. All four of us keep in touch through Facebook now. I met gary lundy a long time ago and have spent time together, including road trips and as roommates for a few months. However, most of our friendship has been sustained and maintained by email and online connections—dating back to before any of us had heard of Facebook. UK poet Reuven Woolley, Romanian poet Liliana Negoi, Natasha Head, as well as Jamie Dedes and the rest of the Bardo Group Beguines, I only know “virtually.” Until a few months ago, the same was true for The Woven Tale Press publisher and editor-in-chief, Sandra Tyler.

Today, the world of poetry, as with everything else, has transformed under the influences of technology and social media. Last year, I spoke to a graduate-student seminar about social media, poetry, and the latest wave of “democratization of poetry.” That discussion evolved into the foreword of The Art of Being Human, Vol. 14, which you can read in this issue as “(Social) Media(ted) (Democratic) Poetry.”

I won’t try to count how many waves of “democratic” trends in poetry have washed up on the beach. A couple of centuries ago, poets were concerned “just anybody” might write poetry, and they didn’t think that was such a good idea. Some probably still don’t. Free verse and the Beats in the mid-Twentieth Century have been associated with the idea, for better or worse, depending on who made the association.

Today, poetry slams usually involve actual voting, as do many online sites. Self-publishing has become easy and cheap, so anyone could have a book who wants to, now. As a result of all of this, editors—such as those putting together a special poetry issue—serve much more as curators than as the gate-keepers of old. So, we may be in one of the greatest ever waves of “democratic” poetry.

A tidal wave of poetry, perhaps.

Don’t worry. While it will wash over you and change you, you won’t drown. Enjoy the poetry, writing about poetry, and other work presented here for your celebratory pleasure!

“There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school.”
― Sharon Olds

Table of Contents

Featured

POEMS

ESSAYS, INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS

WOVEN TALE PRESS COLLABORATION

SECOND LIGHT NETWORK

IMG_9671CONNECT WITH US

Beguine Again, Spirtual Community and Practice

Facebook, The Bardo Group Beguines

Twitter, The Bardo Group Beguines

Access to the biographies of our core team contributing writers and guest writers is in the blogroll to your left along with archived issues of The BeZine, our Mission Statement and Submission Guidelines.