Mary Biddinger's Blog, page 16

Issue #7 of Barn Owl Review

This year it's the purple issue. I mean, we are kind of running out of colors. I've always been fascinated with posts or billboards covered in torn flyers, especially after seeing one aflame on the campus of U of Michigan in 1992. I think this cover (HUGE thanks to Amy Freels) is an interesting statement on the nature of collage in poems. I could look at this all day. We'll be peddling it at AWP Seattle in a few weeks. 

Sky report 1/16/14

Maybe I'm being optimistic here, but things seem to be looking up. Even though it's cold, and there's still quite a bit of winter left. Something about that sky says: go.

Some snowflakes

Sometimes you have to make a little silent film. 

Today's postcard.

You may be wondering what a Wednesday morning in mid-January looks like in Akron, OH. Here's the answer. PS: Sometimes there's snow, but just a few errant flakes today. 

What's new? Time is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt

We'll be taking this hot item to Seattle, but why wait?  Time is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt is now here. This collection was edited by John Gallaher and Laura Boss, and it's brought to you by the University of Akron Press. There's also a fabulous introduction by Robert Archambeau. Here's the scoop! 
Michael Benedikt (1935–2007), who has been occasionally grouped with the New York School poets, as well as James Tate and Russell Edson, published five books of poetry in his lifetime, and edited several anthologies, including the influential The Prose Poem (1976) and The Poetry of Surrealism (1974). This collection brings together for the first time work from all five of those long out-of-print volumes—along with work from his five unpublished manuscripts, which were nearly destroyed after his death. Finally, this once widely published and influential voice is back in print, and a fuller understanding of the development of American surrealism and the prose poem in the 1960s and 1970s is possible. Also, the more expansive work that he began in 1980, which investigated the line between the lyric and prose narrative, is finally getting the book presentation it deserves. A lifelong New Yorker, Benedikt was at various times an associate editor with Art News and Art International, managing editor of Locus Solus, and poetry editor of the Paris Review. Benedikt also taught at institutions such as Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, Vassar, and Boston University.
Get your copy here! 

Howdy, Spring semester 2014.

Here's a Tuesday morning snapshot of Akron, OH in honor of the new semester. Two poetry workshops to teach, lots of advising and editorial work to do, and no snow as of right now. I like typing 2014. I like classes that start on 1/14/14. 

A Sunny Place with Adequate Water

Super excited to share the cover of my newest poetry collection, A Sunny Place with Adequate Water , forthcoming in May 2014 from Black Lawrence Press. Cover art is by the tremendously talented Mark Brabant. Here's the scoop! 
In her third full-length collection, A Sunny Place with Adequate Water, Mary Biddinger untangles past from present, through poems preoccupied with gentrification, imaginary coin-operated machinery, and an uncanny doubling of good and wicked selves. As "Some Dead Magic" testifies, "Even streetlamps couldn't help themselves. // Where could they possibly lead us? There wasn't / any magic left in the world, only stray newspapers." The poems of this book hope that history will somehow provide insight for our current moment, while acknowledging the necessary transformation of desire over time. Part nostalgia recast as seductive angst, part pastoral (and anti-pastoral), these poems explore small town legends in a landscape of longing, displacement, looming disaster, and unexpected joy.
A little surreal, a little nostalgic, Mary Biddinger's remarkable new collection describes the challenge of growing up a nascent artist in a sometimes resistant, but always-clamorous neighborhood. The speaker evolves from a girl who reverses herself "until there wasn't anything left" into someone who wants to live in the burn, and each poem invokes both the visible and invisible mechanisms that uphold a small town. I'm as moved by this book's incisive take on personal history as I was by James Tate's Lost Pilot. --Carmen Giménez Smith
These poems proceed by way of declaration & juxtaposition, through keen sight & keener insight.  Which is another way of saying that Mary Biddinger sees things & sees through things equally, not privileging one vision over the other. What we have here is our regular old world made richer & more insidious, a place where "the punishments were just as lavish as the draperies," a home we get to see as if for the first time. --Nate Pritts

Meg & Mary & KATE tomorrow in Akron, OH

Wicked excited to be reading with Meg Johnson and Kate Greenstreet tomorrow evening in Akron. Hope to see you local folks there! Reading is in the ultra-kitschy confines of Quaker Square. It's going to be great.

The Road, Hitting

August arrives.

Have taken a wee hiatus, but now the weeks are countable, and I'm accountable (ha!).

Many things remain on my to-do list, but I did do this, and I am very happy.