David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 206

If you read only one collection by Galway Kinnell, make it this one -- you will want to read more.

A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I remember as well as one can after 43 years when Galway Kinnell gave a poetry reading at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was stunned, not just by his reading, but more by the poetry. I went immediately to the Centicore Bookstore and bought what they had available at the time, I think Body Rags.

This collection affirms in my mind that he wrote some of the finest verse during the last half of the 20th Century. In "The Bear" he reveals the unity of all being even as he vividly and grimly describes the awfulness of the way of tracking and killing a bear from the inside out.

In "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" he bares the tender love of a father who sees hope and mortality in the growth of a child.

He writes passionate love poems that feel the bones beneath his lover's face. He weaves himself into nature and nature into his flesh. And his language is real, unadorned eloquence:

"In the human heart
There sleeps a green worm
That has spun the heart about itself,
And that shall dream itself black wings
One day to break free into the black sky."

or again::

"In the forest I discover a flower.
The invisible life of the thing
Goes up in flames that are invisible,
Like cellophane burning in the sunlight.
It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing."

If you only read one collection by Kinnell, this is a great one. But I guarantee it will leave you want to read more.

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Poetry should be made to be read aloud

My friend and fellow poet, Allan Peterson, and I have an ongoing friendly debate. He says he writes to be viewed on a page and read with the eyes. I have no objection to that as far as it goes. But my prejudice is to write also for the voice and the ear.

It is, as I say, a friendly debate, only about emphasis. Allan's poetry often lives well on the tongue. See, for example, "Placemat":

http://www.allanpeterson.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=54:placemat&catid=34:poetry&Itemid=37

Lance Mannion makes the case for hearing the "poetry" in his playfully serious online article, "Why we need poetry: How William Wordsworth and I saved a marriage":

"You can understand the themes, know the history, be able to put it all in a critical, literary, and biographical context, but if you never really hear it, if you don’t know and love the sound of it, you've missed the point.

"You've missed the poetry."

http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2015/02/wordsworth-saves-a-marriage.html

You don't have to go as far as Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas, in whom sometimes sound overcomes sense. But poetry began in the dark around fires, in incantations accompanied by drum, breath, and grunts of Amen. It's soul and gut lies in that tradition, as the best Hip Hop artists know and demonstrate.

Don't miss the poetry in poetry. Let it live from the chest and ribs, off the tongue, and into the wind and ears.

I am one of two guest authors at the John Fox. Jr. Literary Festival - March 18, 2015

RELEASE
3441 Mountain Empire Road
Big Stone Gap, VA 24219
(276) 523-7466
www.meccfoundation.org

MECC Foundation to Host 39th Annual John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival & Lonesome Pine Short-Story and Poetry Contests

Big Stone Gap, VA -- The MECC Foundation is pleased to announce the 39th annual John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival, featuring guest authors Donald Davis and Dr. David Sam, on Wednesday, March 18th at 10 a.m. in the Goodloe Center of Phillips-Taylor Hall. The festival will feature readings and discussion with the authors.

The MECC Foundation will also host the 28th Annual Lonesome Pine Short Story Contest and the 11th Annual Lonesome Pine Poetry Contest, in partnership with Lonesome Pine Arts & Crafts, Inc. Individuals interested in obtaining contest guidelines should contact the MECC Foundation Office at (276) 523-7466. Contest rules are also available on the MECC website (www.mecc.edu) and the MECC Foundation website (www.meccfoundation.org). Short stories and poems in the adult, high school (grades 9 through 12), and middle school (grades 5 through 8) categories must be submitted to the MECC Foundation office by Monday, February 23rd at 4:30 p.m. Contest winners will be announced during the Literary Festival on March 18th, and cash prizes will be awarded.

Donald Davis was born in Western North Carolina, a Southern Appalachian mountain world rich in stories. He grew up absorbed in the gentle fairy tales, simple and silly Jack tales, scary mountain lore, ancient Welsh and Scottish folktales, and – most importantly – nourishing true-to-life stories of his own neighbors and kin. Davis remembers, “I discovered that in a story I could safely dream any dream, hope any hope, go anywhere I pleased, fight any foe, win or lose, love or die. My stories created a safe experimental learning place.” For Donald Davis, storytelling is a way of giving and living life. He invites each listener to come along, to pull deep inside for one’s own stories, to personally share and co-create the common experiences that celebrate the creative spirit. Mr. Davis is a graduate of Davidson College and Duke University Divinity School, and is a retired Methodist minister. He has served as Chair of the National Storytelling Association Board of Directors, and as a featured teller at the Smithsonian Institution, the World’s Fair, and festivals and concerts throughout the United States and the world. He is a prolific author and producer of books and tapes of his work, including Tales from a Free-Range Childhood (2011). He also teaches workshops and storytelling courses and guest hosts the National Public Radio program “Good Evening.”

David Anthony Sam was born and spent his early childhood in McKeesport, PA, a coal and steel suburb of Pittsburgh. Later, his family relocated with his father’s factory to Belleville, MI, a far suburb of Detroit. These childhood homes afforded him many opportunities to explore railroad tracks, woods, lakes, and rural farm fields. These adventures influenced his poetry as well as his sense of the holistic ecology of all things. A grandchild of immigrants and first-generation college student, Sam is a graduate of Eastern Michigan University and Michigan State University. He has taught creative writing, English literature, and composition at EMU, Marygrove College, Oakland Community College, and Pensacola State College. Dr. Sam has written poetry for forty years, and has two published collections, including Memories in Clay, Dreams of Wolves (2014). He has also been published in Carbon Culture Review, The Crucible, The Flagler Review, The Write Place at the Write Time, The Summerset Review, The Birds We Pile Loosely, and Literature Today. He currently serves as the President of Germanna Community College.

The John Fox, Jr. Festival will be followed by a reservation-only luncheon with the featured speakers at the John Fox, Jr. Museum in Big Stone Gap. Tickets for the luncheon are $23 per person and reservations can be made by calling the MECC Foundation office at (276) 523-7466. For more information on the MECC Foundation, please visit our website at www.meccfoundation.org.

Worth reading---but the politically topical poems are weaker than the rest

Still to Mow by Maxine Kumin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to give this collection a higher rating than a 3, but the middle section particularly and other politically polemical poems were not of the usual quality I expect of Maxine Kumin. Then again, you have such terribly poignant lines as:

"We try to live gracefully
and at peace with our imagined deaths but in truth we go forward
stumbling, afraid of the dark,
of the cold, and of the great overwhelming
loneliness of being last."

in describing a long marriage with both elderly and nearing their ends.

I recommend reading for the best of the poems. The more topical can be skipped or scanned.

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Another Fine Volume by Maxine Kumin

The Long Marriage: Poems by Maxine Kumin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Maxine Kumin has long been a favorite of mine for her steady eye on what it means to be human in a natural world. She is honest and yet hopeful about human relationships in the face of cruelty and death. In these poems she studies the headlines and brings disasters into her kitchen and garden even as she heals from her own injuries. Her death nearly a year ago is still a great loss.

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Beautiful and Evocative

Flying At Night: Poems 1965-1985 by Ted Kooser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"like the thin gray scarves
of immigrants
standing in line,
hands in their pockets,
cold fingers
pinching the lint
of their stories"

Thus Ted Kooser interweaves metaphor within metaphor, image within image, in this fine selection of poetry from 20 years of writing. His writing is lucid and simple, but beautiful and evocative. There are no sour notes, no tones of presumption or artificial distancing through obfuscation here.

"The dog gets stiffly up
and limps away, seeking a quiet spot
at the heart of the house. Outside,
in silence, with diamonds in his fur,
the winter night curls round the legs of the trees,
sleepily blinking snowflakes from his lashes."

Mortality hovers over every poem, but its bittersweet knowledge brings forth poetry worth spending time with.

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An eye-opening look into the poetry being written by contemporary writers in Arabic

The Gateway to Modern Arabic Poetry the English Version by Munir Mezyed
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an eye-opening look into the poetry being written by contemporary writers in Arabic from throughout the Middle East and the diaspora. The translation is workmanlike, but occasionally stilted. The formatting, whether for the Nook or in PDF, leaves much to be desired. Nonetheless, I recommend reading this translation. It helps us peer into verse that is not primarily Anglo-American and to hear the voices of men and women directly instead of as warped though the news outlets.

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A quietly brilliant collection.

Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A quietly brilliant collection.

Ted Kooser's Delights & Shadows is one of those rare volumes where I wish I had written nearly every poem within. With few exceptions, each poem has just the right imagery and just the right, quiet word to explode like a milkweed pod into a fertility of grace and meaning.

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Aesthetics

In our art and literature, we have confused the shock of the new with the new having to shock.

Talked to sleep,

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wish I admired Lockwood's collection, I really do. There are some poems that come close to successful, and one ("The Rape Joke") which really hits home. Too many poems seem please with little dirty jokes or attempts at humor. "List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers" "The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple" and "The Descent of the Dunk" all come close. Too often I feel that what strives to be free and experimental is just undisciplined and needing rewriting.

The main conceit that nations and landscapes are treated as if human bodies and beings, and vice verse, just doesn't work here for me.

Perhaps it is just me. But I really wanted to admire this collection. But as Lockwood might write, "Naaaaaaah."

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