George Witte's Blog, page 6

New poem "The Details" in This Broken Shore

I'm proud to have my poem "The Details" in the new issue of This Broken Shore, which is filled with contributions of poetry and prose by New Jersey authors. Please consider ordering a copy:

https://www.amazon.com/This-Broken-Sh...

New book What Editors Do

For anyone who writes, reads, is considering a career, or simply wants to know more about publishing, I highly recommend What Editors Do, just published by the University of Chicago Press and edited by my friend and former colleague Peter Ginna.

The book contains essays by editors of many different skills, on the entire range of books: academic, textbook, and general interest, fiction and nonfiction, adult and children's, copyediting, line editing, commissioning and acquiring, working with authors, and much more.

I'm proud that my essay on line editing, "This Needs Just a Little Work," appears in the book.

What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing

New poem featured in Nimrod summer issue

Nimrod has released its Summer 2017 theme issue, "Leaving Home, Finding Home," and I'm delighted to have my poem "As Is" included and linked on the issue's website:

https://nimrod.utulsa.edu/archive/lea...

Please consider reading all of the linked pieces and, perhaps, supporting Nimrod by ordering the issue or making a donation.

BooksNJ 2017 festival, June 11

I'm delighted to be part of the BooksNJ 2017 festival, a wonderful event hosted on the grounds of the Paramus Public Library from 1-5 on Sunday, June 11.
http://www.booksnj.org/

Readings, panels, professional writers talking about their craft in all areas (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young adult and children's illustrated books), and a few thousand excited readers.

What better way to spend a nice Sunday afternoon? (And yes, if it rains, they have tents.)

Hope to see you there!

New poems in Hollins Critic, Slant, and Poetry Northwest

I'm delighted to have poems in three journals this month:

"If I Were You" in Slant: http://uca.edu/english/slant-a-journa...

"Open Casket in Poetry Northwest: http://www.poetrynw.org/issue-cover/w...

and

"Nightlight" in Hollins Critic: https://www.hollins.edu/who-we-are/ne...

Please consider ordering copies or even subscribing to one of these fine journals.

James Applewhite for National Poetry Month

James Applewhite was my teacher and mentor, a wise and patient guide who helped me find a voice of my own. I can't express how important he was to me, a young poet making my way in secret, outside any writing class or peer readers--on fire with reading and learning as I went.

I value so many things in his poems, in particular the tensile strength and compact momentum of his lines. I remember noticing as a young writer that many of his poems attained a chewy density and were memorable where other poems were forgettable.


Here's a signature poem:


Barbecue Service

I have sought the elusive aroma
Around outlying cornfields, turned corners
Near the site of a Civil War surrender.
The transformation may take place
At a pit no wider than a grave,
Behind a single family’s barn.
These weathered ministers
Preside with the simplest of elements:
Vinegar and pepper, split pig and fire.
Underneath a glistening mountain in air,
Something is converted to a savor: the pig.
Flesh purified by far atmosphere.
Like the slick-sided sensation from last summer,
A fish pulled quick from a creek
By a boy. Like breasts in a motel
With whiskey and twilight
Become a blue smoke in memory.
This smolder draws the soul of our longing.

I want to see all the old home folks,
Ones who may not last another year.
We will rock on porches like chapels
And not say anything, their faces
Impenetrable as different barks of trees.
After the brother who drank has been buried,
The graveplot stunned by sun
In the woods,
We men still living pass the bottle.
We barbecue pigs.
The tin-roofed sheds with embers
Are smoking their blue sacrifice
Across Carolina.

Selected Poems

William Stafford poem for National Poetry Month

This month, April 2017, I'm going to post some poems by favorite poets--those I've returned to, again and again. Here's one by William Stafford:

After Arguing against the Contention That Art Must Come from Discontent

By William E. Stafford


Whispering to each handhold, “I'll be back,”
I go up the cliff in the dark. One place
I loosen a rock and listen a long time
till it hits, faint in the gulf, but the rush
of the torrent almost drowns it out, and the wind—
I almost forgot the wind: it tears at your side
or it waits and then buffets; you sag outward. . . .

I remember they said it would be hard. I scramble
by luck into a little pocket out of
the wind and begin to beat on the stones
with my scratched numb hands, rocking back and forth
in silent laughter there in the dark—
“Made it again!” Oh how I love this climb!
—the whispering to stones, the drag, the weight
as your muscles crack and ease on, working
right. They are back there, discontent,
waiting to be driven forth. I pound
on the earth, riding the earth past the stars:
“Made it again! Made it again!”


William Stafford

Google Play review for The River of Kings by Taylor Brown

Google Play just ran this review of Taylor Brown's The River of Kings:

https://play.google.com/books/article...

I hope it will lead many people to discover this wonderful novel and its author.

The River of Kings

NPR interview with Steven Hatch, author of Inferno

Steven Hatch is a doctor who worked in Liberia at the height of the Ebola outbreak. His book Inferno is a powerful work of witness, not only about Ebola and the team of Liberian nationals who fought with Dr. Hatch side by side, patient by patient, to slow the outbreak, but also about the larger history that made the epidemic inevitable. Here's an NPR interview with Dr. Hatch:

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/05/5186061...

Inferno: A Doctor's Ebola Story

New poem published in Poetry Northwest

Delighted to have "The Hatch" featured on Poetry Northwest's site as poem of the week:

http://www.poetrynw.org/george-witte-...

Great photograph by Moholy-Nagy to accompany it; last year I spent a very rewarding afternoon at the Guggenheim Museum's retrospective of his work in design, painting, photography, and other media, and have his essay "Production Reproduction" on my reading list.

The forthcoming print edition of Poetry Northwest will include another poem, "Open Casket." Thank you to the editors for publishing these poems.