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On this 150th anniversary of Cavafy, there will be seminars, readings and papers written in the poets honor. The University of Michigan will be hosting the event A DATE WITH CAVAFY open to the public, at the Hatcher Library on April 29th Cavafy’s double anniversary. The C.P. CAVAFY FORUM has posted many contemporary papers on the art and life of the poet. A DATE WITH CAVAFY; pdf file and poster “Cavafy had a knack for discovering in old annuals, tombstones and other less heralded detritus, the material out of which poetry grew.” –Avi Sharon (from the introduction to his translation of Cavafy’s Selected Poems.) Cavafy also gave voice to the erotic, especially the suppressed longings of homoerotic desire… His greatest and still underappreciated contribution, however, is in helping us grasp the place of art in life. .. Cavafy’s aesthetic outlook heartened him to disrupt the apparent consistency of life with the inconsistency of literature. Rather than serving as an escape hatch, poetry allowed him to understand the world as a tension between the fictional and the actual. And in this tension he saw the possibility both of social critique and empathic connection with others.” – Cavafy’s Century by Gregory Jusdanis Waiting for the Barbarians What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything happening in the senate? Because the barbarians are coming today. Why did our emperor get up so early, Because the barbarians are coming today Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today Because the barbarians are coming today Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual Because the barbarians are coming today Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion? Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? [Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard] “In this cunning, amusing poem, with its punch line that never wears out, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy penetrates deep into the nature of political life. The atmosphere of civic pride and civic hypocrisy, the mingled air of awe and contempt toward governmental institutions, rings not the bell of cliché but many eerie tintinnabulations: the gongs and chimes of public life, the distinct sounds of what we say, what we know we mean and what we don’t know we mean.” --Robert Pinsky
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| Posted in: Author/artist interviews and lectures, Poetry, world lit | No Comments » |
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This event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase at the event. Please call Book Beat (248) 968-1190 for more information or to reserve copies of the books. Editors Joan Dobbie and Grace Beeler, both Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors, responding to Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza massacre, issued a call for poetry. The ad, first posted in Poets & Writers read, “Are you Jewish or Palestinian? Of Palestinian or Jewish heritage? Please submit poetry for an anthology that strives for understanding in these troubled times. All points of view wanted in the belief that poetry can create understanding and understanding can dull hatred.” “. . . The story of Israel / Palestine is ugly, tragic, human. But the book you hold in your hands exists to remind you that the story is not finished. . . .” —Alicia Ostriker “There is, perhaps, an imagination that can transform the violent world we live in. Poetry holds this possibility. If language itself may efface or serve to reproduce narratives that diminish or that normalize oppression, where is the difference? Might poetry open to a telling that is full; might it be a place of witness, for meeting of self and other? In it, may a lone reader find (what you may call) courage or solidarity, humanity; or recognize in the creative act proof of resilience? Or, shall we share Mahmoud Darwish’s stance, that “Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.” You may find the poems gathered here to be invitation. Or you might understand this anthology as response to a call for poetic imagination.” -from the introduction by Christi Kramer Edward Morin co-edited Before There is Nowhere to Stand (BTINTS) and has a poem and four co-translated poems in it. His poems have been published in Hudson Review, New Letters, and Ploughshares. Collections of his poems include Labor Day at Walden Pond and The Dust of Our City. His co-translations of Greek, Chinese, and Arabic poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Poetry Miscellany, Banipal, and Connotation Press. He edited and co-translated another anthology, The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry since the Cultural Revolution (U. of Hawaii Press). He taught English at Wayne State U. and College for Creative Studies. J. (Joe) Weintraub, who has a poem in BTINTS, has published fiction, essays, poetry, and translations in Massachusetts Review, The New Criterion, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The MacGuffin, The Chicago Reader, and The Seattle Weekly. He is a network playwright at Chicago Dramatists and has had one-act plays produced by the Theatre-Studio in New York City; Summer Place Theatre in Naperville, IL; Theatre One in Middleboro, MA, American Blues Theatre, and Second City (Chicago). He has received Illinois Arts Council Awards for creative writing and the Barrington Arts Council’s John P. McGrath Memorial Prize for Fiction. George Khoury has a co-translated poem in BTINTS. A Nakba survivor from Birzeit, Palestine, he attended high schools in Jordan and Egypt, then emigrated to the U.S. and earned a degree in engineering from the U. of Detroit and an MBA from Central Michigan U. He has translated many technical manuals for heavy machinery and autos from English to classical Arabic. He edited the collected poems in Arabic of Diab Rabie, last of a group of five great Diaspora poets which included Gibran Kahlil Gibran, Michael Naimeh, and Elie Abu-Madi. The volume is entitled Shetharat El-Rabie (The Birzeit Society, 2010).
Charles Novacek spent his youth defending his neighbors, his family, and his country, first from the Nazi atrocities of World War II and then from the Soviet oppression of the ensuing Cold War. Charles was eleven years old when his father and uncle recruited him into the Czech Resistance. Antonin Novacek not only taught his son to survive in the wild, but also prepared him for wartime: how to resist pain, hunger, and fear and to trust no one. His assignments included delivering messages to soldiers parachuting behind enemy lines and hiding them in caves he equipped for their shelter. As a young man, Charles was captured and jailed by the Communists and rescued by an underground resistance network. In too much danger to remain in Czechoslovakia, he staged a daring escape only to land in a miserable displaced persons camp. His will to live prevailed once again, and Charles eventually married and built a successful life in America. “Border Crossings is the well-told and dramatic story of a young man whose comfortable life is abruptly transformed by the savagery of World War II. Forced to rely on primal instincts and his familiarity with the rugged highlands of Moravia, Charles Novacek casts his lot first with the anti-Hitler Underground and then with the resistance to the Nazis’ Communist successors. “My recollections pain me,” he writes, “still, they have made me who I am.” Novacek’s experience as a Hungarian-speaking Czecho-Slovak patriot demonstrates the folly of petty nationalism and the resilience of human decency and love.” - Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State “Border Crossingshelps fill the lack of personal accounts of resistance movements amidst a voluminous array of World War II literature. This compelling memoir, written through the eyes of young Charles, shows how circumstances required him to become a shrewd hero. In his opposition first toward Nazism and then Communism, Charles Novacek’s personal story illustrates why people sacrifice themselves and their families for an ideal. Intimate, intense, fascinating!” - Christina Vella, coauthor of The Hitler Kiss |
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| Posted in: Author signings, Author/artist interviews and lectures, Book Signings, Poetry, Politics | No Comments » |
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Bill Harris‘ latest book Booker T. & Them: A Blues, is a “bio-poem” considering the lives of several African Americans who sought to be men that mattered in a racist America, including Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter, George Washington Carver, and Jack Johnson, as he traces their effects on history and each other. “The genius of Bill Harris has never been more evident than in Booker T & Them. This book is such a tightly woven fabric of history, biography, poetry, drama, song, sound, quotations, and definitions that the threads defy separation. We are taken on an unforgettable journey into the thoughts and experiences of Washington and some of his contemporaries their public and their secret selves as they battle racism and its apostles in various ways. Everyone who cares about justice should read this marvelously written book.” -Naomi Long Madgett, poet laureate of Detroit Bill Harris retired as professor of English at Wayne State University in 2011 and is author of numerous plays, including Robert Johnson Trick the Devil, Stories About the Old Days, Riffs, and Coda. He is the author of three books of poetry, Birth of a Notion; Or, the Half Ain t Never Been Told (Wayne State University Press, 2009), The Ringmaster s Array, and Yardbird Suite: Side One, which won the 1997 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Harris was named the 2011 Kresge Eminent Artist by the Kresge Foundation in recognition of his professional accomplishments and community engagement. Terry Blackhawk’s latest book of poetry is The Light Between, a collection probing beyond and through the painful dissolution of a long marriage to examine the complexities of love with bravery and delicacy. Mythical themes, elements of the natural world, and masculine/feminine polarities resonate throughout Blackhawk’s poems as she explores loss, the nature of relationships, and the integrity of the individual soul. Ultimately, The Light Between celebrates our connectedness to one another, to the planet, and to the natural world. “The intricate progression of these poems reveals the poet at work remembering and forgetting, then forging the thrilling slippages and figurative language that can make the mind leap to a new apprehension of things.”—Natasha Trethewey on The Light Between
Terry Blackhawk is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Escape Artist, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize. She has received the Foley Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, the Michigan Governor s Award for Arts Education, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. She is founding director of Detroit s acclaimed InsideOut Literary Arts Project and lives and writes not far from the river in Detroit, Michigan. |
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| Posted in: Author signings, Author/artist interviews and lectures, Book Signings, Detroit & Michigan, Poetry | No Comments » |
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Collected for the first time are Sinclair’s poetry, reviews and writings on the musical genius of John Coltrane. A companion CD is also being issued by the publisher Trembling Press in New Orleans. [John Sinclair is] … deep inside a tradition beginning with Whitman, Williams, and Ezra Pound, and continuing through Charles Olson and Ginsberg. John Sinclair’s writing about “The Music” has always been well informed and inspiring, from his early Detroit-hip days. So it’s important to gather this writing to show where he and we have been, and the great period of American Classical Music we lived through and particularly the marvelous revelation that John Coltrane provided everybody who could hear. Poet, activist, major jazz head, John Sinclair’s SONG OF PRAISE is a wild outward/ inward ride through time like any of Trane’s great solos. It’s a surge of time travel from the ‘60s breakthroughs & breakdowns as reflected in the revolutionary free jazz awakening as well as in the political uprisings of that time that changed the world. About the CD: Finally, John Sinclair’s legendary performances and tributes to John Coltrane are available together in this collection; Sinclair has long been on the scene recording the history and extolling the beauties of these life changing moments in music. The entire suite HOMAGE TO JOHN COLTRANE was first performed by John Sinclair’s newly-formed Blues Scholars—Michael Ray, trumpet; Richard Theodore (Harry Lenz), alto sax & bass clarinet; Nick Sanzenbach, tenor sax; Phil deVille, guitar; Lucky Joe Drake, bass; Michael Voelker, drums—at Kaldi’s Coffeehouse in September 1994 in conjunction with John Coltrane’s Sept 23 birthday. The moon was full that night and the DAT recording by Keith Keller became Sinclair’s first album, FULL MOON NIGHT, on Alive/Total Energy Records in Los Angeles. The first version of “I Talk with the Spirits” is from Sinclair’s second Alive album, FULL CIRCLE, recorded in Los Angeles in 1996 with Wayne Kramer, guitar; Charles Moore, trumpet; Ralph “Buzzy” Jones, tenor & alto sax; Craig Stewart, alto sax; Paul Ill, bass; Brock Avery, drums, and the shortened suite HOMAGE TO JOHN COLTRANE—spiritual, consequences, blues to you, i talk with the spirits—is from a live broadcast on KXLU-FM in Los Angeles in August 1997 with the same band less Craig Stewart and with Michael Voelker in place of Brock Avery, issued on Sinclair’s 2000 album UNDERGROUND ISSUES. The opening reading of “spiritual” is a duet with Marion Brown, alto sax, recorded by Mark Bingham at the Louisiana Music Factory in February 1993, first issued on the 2nd number of the WWOZ ON CD series in 1994.
Author, poet and activist John Sinclair (born October 2, 1941, in Flint, Michigan) mutated from small-town rock’n’roll fanatic and teenage disc jockey to cultural revolutionary, pioneer of marijuana activism, radical leader and political prisoner by the end of the 1960s. In 1966-67 the jazz poet, downbeat correspondent, founder of the Detroit Artists Workshop and underground journalist joined the front ranks of the hippie revolution, managing the “avant-rock” MC5 and organizing countless free concerts in the parks, White Panther rallies and radical benefits. In 1969 Sinclair was railroaded off to prison on a 9½ to ten year sentence for giving away two joints to an undercover policewoman. While he was in prison, Sinclair wrote the books Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings, a collection of his writings for the underground press between 1968-71, and Music & Politics, co-written with Robert Levin. Sinclair was released from Jackson Prison when the twenty nine month campaign to gain his freedom climaxed in the mammoth “John Sinclair Freedom Rally” in Ann Arbor, Michigan on December 10, 1971, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Bobby Seale and others performed and spoke at the eight-hour long event in front of 15,000 people. Lennon wrote and performed his song, “John Sinclair,” later released on his Some Time in New York City album. Three days after the concert, the Michigan Supreme Court released Sinclair, and later overturned his conviction. Following his release from prison, Sinclair got back into music management and promotion and hosted popular radio shows on WNRZ and WCBN, founded the People’s Ballroom, the Free Concerts in the Park program, and the Ann Arbor Tribal Council, and played a leading role in the success of the local Human Rights Party that resulted in the election of two City Council members and the institution of the legendary $5 fine for marijuana possession in Ann Arbor. For the next fifteen years he raised his family in Detroit and worked as editor of the Detroit Sun newspaper, founder and director of the Detroit Jazz Center, adjunct professor of popular music history at Wayne State University, artists manager and concert producer, WDET-FM program host, director of the City Arts Gallery for the Detroit Councilof the Arts and editor of City Arts Quarterly. |
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| Posted in: Book Signings, Music, Poetry, Politics | No Comments » |
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| Posted in: Author/artist interviews and lectures, Detroit & Michigan, Poetry | No Comments » |
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(to be read while listening to Gnossienne #5) Poem to a Gnossienne of Erik SatieEd SandersThe issue of the rose It always has And it’s to grow the rose It always was Ink on paper told me that It always has There comes a time You know, my Erik– Everyone & fun, my Erik, The rose haunts Meanwhile in our And the rose haunts it always has March 1998 This poem also appeared in Work #6, a 2009 Detroit Artists Workshop Anthology of Generations |
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| Posted in: Music, Poetry | No Comments » |
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