Monday, June 15, 2009
This Week at No Tell
Adriana Grant is with a pat melting: pepper-topped, slippery this week at No Tell Motel.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Hugh Behm-Steinberg Reading on Saturday, June 27
with K. Lorraine Graham and Amaranth Borsuk
Saturday, June 27 2009 at 4:00pm
Location: The Poetic Research Bureau, 3702 San Fernando Blvd, Glendale, CA 91206
Doors open at 4:00pm
Reading starts at 4:30pm
$5 donation requested
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields.
Saturday, June 27 2009 at 4:00pm
Location: The Poetic Research Bureau, 3702 San Fernando Blvd, Glendale, CA 91206
Doors open at 4:00pm
Reading starts at 4:30pm
$5 donation requested
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
This Week at No Tell
Nicole Steinberg goes into a deep nail-polishing trance this week at No Tell Motel.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Recommended Summer Reading - Adam Deutsch (Encore)
During May and June, No Tells is featuring "Recommended Summer Reading" selections by No Tell contributors.
Adam Deutsch's recommendations:
Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda, (Bulfinch Press)
This is a pretty quintessential title for those who are looking to be reminded of the magic of compressed language and the wonderfully simple WCW "no ideas but in things" lesson we might sometimes forget. This particular edition has the original spanish on the left, translation by Ken Krabbenhoft on the right, and even if you don't know spanish, reading it aloud simply for the sound is fantastic.
Search Party: Collected Poems by William Matthews (Mariner Books)
Some of his earlier titles are not easy to find, and this is a pretty solid selection--though the selected from his first book removes a pretty sad layer that changes everything. The best part of Matthews, for me, is his ability to surrender the attachment to his own identity, and dive into the fears: "Irony, self-accusation,/ someone else's suffering./ The search is that of art."
Sublimation Point by Jason Schneiderman (Four Way Books)
Masterfully one of the most inclusive books of poetry of recent years. The voice of the poems is honest, compassionate, unhidden. The poems are from study and intellect, but the allusions don't show-boat or bully the reader. It's a book I return to at least twice a year, and it feels new every time.
Funny by Jennifer Michael Hecht (University of Wisconsin Press)
This is great because it's not what you expect. It's not a book of joke-poems, cheap gag, or easy trick. The book is full of long, brave, confident poems with excellent timing and grace. It comes from a philosophy--which you'll get on the tail end because Hecht's Funny includes an essay at the back, which is a gift. It's a bonus track that enriches the whole album.
The Shout by Simon Armitage (Harcourt)
If nothing else, read the first poem, "The Shout." This book was the British poet's debut in the U.S.. I'll be reading it this summer because it's one of those books I've been trying to finish for years. Every time I try, I get caught in the lines of a piece, and have to linger a while to take it in. Some books just can't be done in one sitting--and they're usually magnificent.
* * *
Adam Deutsch lives in San Diego, CA. Some poems have appeared with Juked, Caffeine Destiny, Slurve, Anti-, No Tell Motel, and Gander Press Review. He is an Editor at Cooper Dillon Books and can be found at adamdeutsch.blogspot.com.
Adam Deutsch's recommendations:
Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda, (Bulfinch Press)
This is a pretty quintessential title for those who are looking to be reminded of the magic of compressed language and the wonderfully simple WCW "no ideas but in things" lesson we might sometimes forget. This particular edition has the original spanish on the left, translation by Ken Krabbenhoft on the right, and even if you don't know spanish, reading it aloud simply for the sound is fantastic.
Search Party: Collected Poems by William Matthews (Mariner Books)
Some of his earlier titles are not easy to find, and this is a pretty solid selection--though the selected from his first book removes a pretty sad layer that changes everything. The best part of Matthews, for me, is his ability to surrender the attachment to his own identity, and dive into the fears: "Irony, self-accusation,/ someone else's suffering./ The search is that of art."
Sublimation Point by Jason Schneiderman (Four Way Books)
Masterfully one of the most inclusive books of poetry of recent years. The voice of the poems is honest, compassionate, unhidden. The poems are from study and intellect, but the allusions don't show-boat or bully the reader. It's a book I return to at least twice a year, and it feels new every time.
Funny by Jennifer Michael Hecht (University of Wisconsin Press)
This is great because it's not what you expect. It's not a book of joke-poems, cheap gag, or easy trick. The book is full of long, brave, confident poems with excellent timing and grace. It comes from a philosophy--which you'll get on the tail end because Hecht's Funny includes an essay at the back, which is a gift. It's a bonus track that enriches the whole album.
The Shout by Simon Armitage (Harcourt)
If nothing else, read the first poem, "The Shout." This book was the British poet's debut in the U.S.. I'll be reading it this summer because it's one of those books I've been trying to finish for years. Every time I try, I get caught in the lines of a piece, and have to linger a while to take it in. Some books just can't be done in one sitting--and they're usually magnificent.
* * *
Adam Deutsch lives in San Diego, CA. Some poems have appeared with Juked, Caffeine Destiny, Slurve, Anti-, No Tell Motel, and Gander Press Review. He is an Editor at Cooper Dillon Books and can be found at adamdeutsch.blogspot.com.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Recommended Summer Reading - Martha Silano
During May and June, No Tells is featuring "Recommended Summer Reading" selections by No Tell contributors.
Martha Silano's recommendations:
What Sound Does It Make by Erin Malone (Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Series)
Malone does motherhood like no one else. These are poems you don’t read just once. Even if you finish this book and put it on your shelf, Malone’s words will stay in your head: “He was thirteen moons. Beetles’ shells cracked / under his feet”; “We left Rome burning/ Paris buried in the snow”; “I’m not a traitor. / I want you there/ & here . . . I made you. Go.” Musical, with daring images, Malone presents, word by crafted word, all the complexity and nuance of what it means to be a mother in the 21st century.
Memory and Heaven by Christopher Howell (Eastern Washington University Press)
If you don’t know Howell’s work, no time like right now. Ghosts float in and out of these poems—not to mention werewolves and Jesus. Here, Howell is at his water spider, long-division-bride best—asking questions seven lines long, rooting around in the world like some alien scientist . His poems are weird/surreal, yet his down-to-earth exclamations of terror and hopelessness keep these poems firmly rooted in human experience. His voice is humble, unassuming, and miraculous. It’s no surprise that when Jesus shows up, he won’t say how he parted water. Instead, he just sits there at the bar sipping “wine then water then wine.”
The Tunnel: Selected Poems by Russell Edson (Field Poetry Series)
Every poet worth his or her pet ape should know Edson’s poems. Why? Because he is the father of James Tate. If you’re not acquainted with Edson’s “test tube full of sheep,” in which the speaker “wonders if they could be used as a substitute for rice, sort of wooly rice . . .” you are in for a treat. I thought I’d grow tired of his absurdity and wackiness, his subtle profundities, but I haven’t yet.
Lip by Kathy Fagan (Eastern Washington University Press)
Fagan’s got a finely tuned ear and a nose for images. At a recent reading, she told her audience she thinks of herself as the most formal of free verse poets. She started writing pantoums, she said, because she liked the word pantoum and all the words it rhymes with. She’s got pantoum fever, this woman. Between the two covers of this book you’ll find “Pantoon Pantoum,” “Go to Your Room Pantoum,” and “Womb to Tomb Pantoum.” She finishes the book with a stunning homage to the roadside crucifix, reminding “The highway is a public place and we, // a people dying for a sign . . . This crap from Wal-Mart could outlast us all, / which in our grief is no small com- / fort, since death lasts so much longer, and has no form.”
Big American Trip by Christian Peet (Shearsman Books)
Having tried and failed to write a postcard poem a day last August, I especially admire Peet’s ability to not only fill a book with them, but to take the postcard epistolary form to a refreshing incantatory level. One of my favorites, is addressed (literally, of course, as is each poem is handwritten, stamped, and written on a printed postcard) to the Recreation Vehicle Association in Fairfax, Virginia: “The drive is steel & tar & oil & gas & coffee / The drive is under the weather as under the law / The drive is beyond me / The drive is heartland into stone.” I envy you, Christian.
teahouse of the almighty by Patricia Smith (Coffee House Press) National Poetry Series Winner
I know most of you probably already are familiar with Smith’s work, know why Tom Lux calls her “a buzz saw of a poet,” but in case you haven’t come across her poems, let me share my reaction to the first poem of this book, “Building Nicole’s Mama.” I was at the hairdresser’s, and while my salon-ist went to “mix color,” I starting crying and couldn’t stop. Funny, now that I look back at the poem to find the words “Angry, jubilant, weeping poets—we are all / saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight.” It was as if Smith had given me permission to cry for the last twenty years—for every drive-by shooting, every crack-mom or dad who succumbed a little too much, for every kid left without a mom or dad. And to cry, too, for the dogged spirit of those like Smith, who keep on keeping, helping little Nicole, who has asked the speaker “for the words to build her mother again.”
* * *
Martha Silano is the author of Blue Positive and What the Truth Tastes Like. Her as-yet unpublished collection, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, was a 2008 finalist for the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her work is just out (or soon to be out) in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and The Best American Poetry 2009. Martha has been published in over a dozen anthologies, including Not for Mother’s Only (Fence Books), American Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon) and The Working Poet: Seventy-Five Exercises in Poetry Writing, forthcoming from Autumn House Press. She teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA. She blogs at http://bluepositive.blogspot.com.
Martha Silano's recommendations:
What Sound Does It Make by Erin Malone (Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Series)
Malone does motherhood like no one else. These are poems you don’t read just once. Even if you finish this book and put it on your shelf, Malone’s words will stay in your head: “He was thirteen moons. Beetles’ shells cracked / under his feet”; “We left Rome burning/ Paris buried in the snow”; “I’m not a traitor. / I want you there/ & here . . . I made you. Go.” Musical, with daring images, Malone presents, word by crafted word, all the complexity and nuance of what it means to be a mother in the 21st century.
Memory and Heaven by Christopher Howell (Eastern Washington University Press)
If you don’t know Howell’s work, no time like right now. Ghosts float in and out of these poems—not to mention werewolves and Jesus. Here, Howell is at his water spider, long-division-bride best—asking questions seven lines long, rooting around in the world like some alien scientist . His poems are weird/surreal, yet his down-to-earth exclamations of terror and hopelessness keep these poems firmly rooted in human experience. His voice is humble, unassuming, and miraculous. It’s no surprise that when Jesus shows up, he won’t say how he parted water. Instead, he just sits there at the bar sipping “wine then water then wine.”
The Tunnel: Selected Poems by Russell Edson (Field Poetry Series)
Every poet worth his or her pet ape should know Edson’s poems. Why? Because he is the father of James Tate. If you’re not acquainted with Edson’s “test tube full of sheep,” in which the speaker “wonders if they could be used as a substitute for rice, sort of wooly rice . . .” you are in for a treat. I thought I’d grow tired of his absurdity and wackiness, his subtle profundities, but I haven’t yet.
Lip by Kathy Fagan (Eastern Washington University Press)
Fagan’s got a finely tuned ear and a nose for images. At a recent reading, she told her audience she thinks of herself as the most formal of free verse poets. She started writing pantoums, she said, because she liked the word pantoum and all the words it rhymes with. She’s got pantoum fever, this woman. Between the two covers of this book you’ll find “Pantoon Pantoum,” “Go to Your Room Pantoum,” and “Womb to Tomb Pantoum.” She finishes the book with a stunning homage to the roadside crucifix, reminding “The highway is a public place and we, // a people dying for a sign . . . This crap from Wal-Mart could outlast us all, / which in our grief is no small com- / fort, since death lasts so much longer, and has no form.”
Big American Trip by Christian Peet (Shearsman Books)
Having tried and failed to write a postcard poem a day last August, I especially admire Peet’s ability to not only fill a book with them, but to take the postcard epistolary form to a refreshing incantatory level. One of my favorites, is addressed (literally, of course, as is each poem is handwritten, stamped, and written on a printed postcard) to the Recreation Vehicle Association in Fairfax, Virginia: “The drive is steel & tar & oil & gas & coffee / The drive is under the weather as under the law / The drive is beyond me / The drive is heartland into stone.” I envy you, Christian.
teahouse of the almighty by Patricia Smith (Coffee House Press) National Poetry Series Winner
I know most of you probably already are familiar with Smith’s work, know why Tom Lux calls her “a buzz saw of a poet,” but in case you haven’t come across her poems, let me share my reaction to the first poem of this book, “Building Nicole’s Mama.” I was at the hairdresser’s, and while my salon-ist went to “mix color,” I starting crying and couldn’t stop. Funny, now that I look back at the poem to find the words “Angry, jubilant, weeping poets—we are all / saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight.” It was as if Smith had given me permission to cry for the last twenty years—for every drive-by shooting, every crack-mom or dad who succumbed a little too much, for every kid left without a mom or dad. And to cry, too, for the dogged spirit of those like Smith, who keep on keeping, helping little Nicole, who has asked the speaker “for the words to build her mother again.”
* * *
Martha Silano is the author of Blue Positive and What the Truth Tastes Like. Her as-yet unpublished collection, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, was a 2008 finalist for the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her work is just out (or soon to be out) in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and The Best American Poetry 2009. Martha has been published in over a dozen anthologies, including Not for Mother’s Only (Fence Books), American Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon) and The Working Poet: Seventy-Five Exercises in Poetry Writing, forthcoming from Autumn House Press. She teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA. She blogs at http://bluepositive.blogspot.com.
Monday, June 1, 2009
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