Writers Festival at the Institute of American Indian Arts, July 19-25

We'll be yawping over at the Institute of American Indian Arts this coming week. Scroll down or go to www.iaia.edu for the full schedule. Here's a glimpse of four of the writers who will be reading, but it's just a glimpse of a much larger scene: http://www.sfreporter.com/santafe/article-8932-dramatic-setting.html

99 Poems for the 99 Percent Reading on July 26

Anthology editor Dean Rader, Dana Levin, and I will read from 99 Poems for the 99 Percent at 4 pm on Saturday, July 26, in the O'Shaughnessy Performance Space at the Santa Fe University of Art & Design (follow the signs to Benildus Hall). The reading is free, of course!

American poetry has a rich tradition of taking on important political and social events. The 99 poems in this diverse and dynamic new collection demonstrate how engagement with what Wallace Stevens called “the actual world” does not diminish poetry’s punch—rather it makes it hit harder. Born out of a popular blog begun by Dean Rader at the height of the recession and at the infancy of the Occupy movements, 99 Poems for the 99 Percent shows that the aims of poetry and the aims of democracy are hand-in-hand. These are poems of anger, love, protest, humor, contemplation, hope, frustration, and beauty. These are poems by the famous and the marginal, by the heard and the ignored. These are poems that speak to the past as well as the future. These are poems of and for the real America.

The anthology features poems by well-known writers like Edward Hirsch, Bob Hicok, Robert Pinsky, Dana Levin, LeAnne Howe, Timothy Donnelly, Camille T. Dungy, Jon Davis, Brian Clements, Ellen Bass, Joan Houlihan, Ray Gonzalez, and Heid Erdrich as well as a generous sampling of work by beginning poets and students.

http://99thepress.com/

http://www.deanrader.com/about.html

http://99poemsfor99percent.blogspot.com/

Reading at St. John's Thursday, July 17

The Institute of American Indian Arts' Writers Festival is Here!

City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis to Host Poetry Reading at the Institute of American Indian Arts on Sunday, June 29, 2014, at 3:00 pm

Poster by Tom Leech & James Bourland, The Press at the Palace of the Governors

SANTA FE, NM — On Sunday, June 29, 2014, from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m., City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis will host “Santa Fe Poets 6,” the sixth and last of six group readings. Each reading has featured a different group of five poets reading with the poet laureate. The June reading will take place in the Institute of American Indian Arts’ Lloyd Kiva New Welcome Center. The event is free.

At this reading, Davis will read new work and work from his most recent published book, Preliminary Report, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. In addition to being Santa Fe’s fourth poet laureate, Davis is Director of the Low Residency MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught for 24 years.

The other poets reading in Santa Fe Poets 6:

Britta Andersson received her BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and her MFA from New York University. Her poems have appeared in the International Poetry Review, Oregon Literary Review, and Salt Hill.

Amy Beeder is the author of Burn the Field and Now Make An Altar (Carnegie Mellon, 2012). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, AGNI, and other journals. She has taught poetry at the University of New Mexico and Taos Summer Writers Conference. She has received the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Bread Loaf Scholarship, a Witness Emerging Writers Award, and a James Merrill Residency. She has worked as a freelance reporter, a political asylum specialist, a high-school teacher in West Africa, and an election and human rights observer in Haiti and Suriname.

Hakim Bellamy is the author of Swear (West End Press, 2013). He became the inaugural poet laureate of Albuquerque in 2012. He has been on two national champion poetry slam teams, won collegiate and city poetry slam championships (in Albuquerque and Silver City, NM), and has been published in numerous anthologies and on inner-city buses. A musician, actor, journalist, playwright and community organizer, Bellamy has also received an honorable mention for the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize at the University of New Mexico.

Donald Levering was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship  in poetry and winner of the Quest for Peace Writing Contest in rhetoric. He was also an Academy of American Poets’ Featured Poet in the Online Forum.  Recent collections include The Number of Names, Sweeping the Skylight, and Algonquins Planted Salmon. His latest book is The Water Leveling With Us (Red Mountain Press, 2014). He lives in Santa Fe with the artist Jane Shoenfeld.

Luci Tapahonso is the Navajo Nation’s first Poet Laureate. She has taught at the University of Kansas, the University of Arizona, and ast the University of New Mexico. She is the author of five books of poetry and stories, and one children’s book. In 1999, she was named Storyteller of the Year by the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers, a year after being recognized with the Regional Book Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association.

The Institute of American Indian Arts’ Lloyd Kiva New Welcome Center is located at 83 Avan Nu Po Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For more information, call Jon Davis at 424.2365 or e-mail him at jdavissimo52@gmail.com.

Established in 2005, the Poet Laureate program actively promotes poetry and the spoken word as integral parts of our civic life.

"The Poetry of Light": A Writing Workshop

Sunday, June 1, 1-4 pm, New Mexico History Museum 

Join Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis for a writing workshop based on Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography. Open to high schoolers and older, the session brings participants into the Herzstein Gallery to study pinhole photographs and inhabit them imaginatively. Let language carry you toward and away from the images. Draft poems that engage what’s in front of you—and explore what is only suggested by these often mysterious photographs. Free. Make a reservation by calling 505-476-5096.

Broadside to Commemorate Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography at the New Mexico History Museum

Printed by The Press at the Palace of the Governors

City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis to Host Poetry Reading at the New Mexico History Museum on Friday, May 30, 2014, at 6:00 pm

On Friday, May 30, 2014, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m., City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis will host “Santa Fe Poets 5,” the fifth of six group readings, the last of which will take place in June. Each reading will feature a different group of five poets reading with the poet laureate. The May reading will take place at the New Mexico History Museum in conjunction with the exhibit Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography. The event is free.

At this reading, Davis will read from Reply All, a new manuscript, and from his most recent book, Preliminary Report, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. In addition to being Santa Fe’s fourth poet laureate, Davis is Director of the Low Residency MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught for 23 years.

The other poets reading in Santa Fe Poets 5:

Chee Brossy is a poet, fiction writer, and journalist living in Santa Fe. He is Diné, originally from Lukachukai, Arizona.  He is currently studying fiction writing in the Institute of American Indian Arts’ MFA program. He received both undergraduate and graduate Truman Capote Scholarships and has poems in recent issues of Taos Journal of Poetry & Art, Sentence, and the Denver Quarterly.

Joan Logghe was Poet Laureate of Santa Fe from 2010-2012. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry Grants, a Mabel Dodge Luhan Internship, and a Barbara Deming/Money for Women grant. Her books include What Makes a Woman Beautiful, Twenty Years in Bed with the Same Man, Sofia, Rice, and The Singing Bowl (UNM Press).  With Renée Gregorio and Miriam Sagan she is a founder of Tres Chicas Books.  

The author of a novel and five books of poetry, Carol Moldaw is a recipient of a Lannan Foundation Writer’s Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Moldaw has taught for many writing conferences and university programs, including Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low residency M.F.A. program, and the M.F.A. program at Naropa University.

Henry Shukman is a poet, fiction writer, and travel writer. His first poetry collection, In Dr No's Garden, won the Jerwood Aldeburgh Poetry Prize and was selected as Book of the Year by both The London Times and The Guardian. His poems have appeared in the New Republic, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books. His latest book of poetry is Archangel published by Random House in the United Kingdom.

Farren Stanley is a creative non-fiction writer and poet who teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is a former editor of Black Warrior Review and has had work published by New Delta Review, elimae, RealPoetik, Marginalia, Caketrain, H_NGM_N, and Greying Ghost Press.

The New Mexico History Museumistory MuseumHist  is located at 113 Lincoln Street in Santa Fe. For more information, call Jon Davis at 424.2365 or e-mail him at jdavissimo52@gmail.com.

Established in 2005, the Poet Laureate program actively promotes poetry and the spoken word as integral parts of our civic life.

A Poem from Last Saturday's Workshop

Last Saturday, I threw a workshop at the Main Library. It was a great group, with people who had been writing for years mixed in with people who hadn't written at all since high school. One of the writing prompts involved using a specialized vocabulary--the language of skateboarding or juggling or weather or scuba diving--to talk about the arc of a relationship. They were all pretty terrific, but Moira Gehring, who, together with the other good folks at the Friends of the Library, organized the workshop, wrote a terse poem using the language of economics that was both poignant and darkly humorous. Here it is:

ECONOMICS

An interdependence of incentives marked the early years.

The collateral of human capital enabled a balance of trade... with a surplus of good feeling.

Soon, consumption outpaced resources and the equilibrium price plummeted.

Our quota quickly became the deflation of shared dreams. 

And so we went from surplus to scarcity.

Santa Fe Poets 4

City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis to Host Poetry Reading at the Santa Fe Community Gallery on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, at 6:00 pm

SANTA FE, NM — On Wednesday, April 16, 2014, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m., City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis will host “Santa Fe Poets 4,” the fourth of six readings, the remainder of which will take place over the next three months at various venues in and around Santa Fe. Each reading will feature a different group of five poets reading with the poet laureate. The April reading will take place in the Santa Fe Community Gallery. The event is free.

At this reading, Davis will read from his new manuscript and from his most recent book, Preliminary Report, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. In addition to being Santa Fe’s fourth poet laureate, Davis is Director of the Low Residency MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught for 23 years.

Joining Davis for Santa Fe Poets 4 will be:

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, who was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts and is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including, most recently, Hello, the Roses (New Directions, 2013) and I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (U. of California, 2006). She lives in New York City and northern New Mexico.

Valerie Martinez, former Santa Fe Poet Laureate, who is the author of four books of poetry, including, most recently, Each and Her (University of Arizona Press, 2010), which won the 2011 Arizona Book Award. Her first book of poetry, Absence, Luminescent won the Larry Levis Prize.

James Thomas Stevens, who was born in Niagara Falls, New York, and is a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation. Stevens has published seven books of poetry, including Combing the Snakes from His Hair, for which he was awarded a 2000 Whiting Writer’s Award. He teaches creative writing and literature at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Elaine Upton is an educator and translator and the author of a collection of poems,  Children of Apartness (Washington Writers’ Publishing House).

(Carol Moldaw, the scheduled fifth reader, has had to cancel and will participate, instead, in Santa Fe Poets 6 in June.)

The Santa Fe Community Gallery is located in the Santa Fe Community Convention Center on 201 West Marcy Street. For more information, call Jon Davis at 424.2365 or e-mail him at jdavissimo52@gmail.com.

Established in 2005, the Poet Laureate program actively promotes poetry and the spoken word as integral parts of our civic life.

It's National Poetry Month in Taos, Too!

I seem to have the biggest head of all New Mexico's poets. I'll be reading with the more reasonably-sized poets Veronica Golos and Carol Moldaw on April 12 at 7 pm.

Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography

Tom Leech, Director of the Palace Press, asked me to write a poem based on a pinhole photograph from the upcoming exhibit Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography that opens on April 27 at the New Mexico History Museum.  The photograph I chose was Gregg D. Kemp's "Jane Always Dreaded Flying Home." This is the resulting broadside. I just happened to drop in as Tom was printing the first one. It's beautiful. Check out the ligatures on the "st"! (Yes, we poets get excited about the oddest things.)

Other events associated with the show: 

Friday, May 30, 6 pm, “Santa Fe Poets 5,” the fifth of six group poetry readings Davis is organizing as part of his tenure. Joining him in the History Museum Auditorium will be Chee Brossy, Joan Logghe, Carol Moldaw, Henry Shukman, and Farren Stanley. Free.

Sunday, June 1, 1 – 4 pm, “The Poetry of Light,” a writing workshop building on inspiration from Poetics of Light images. Open to high schoolers and older, the event is free, but reservations are recommended. Call  476-5096. 

The Full Essay on David Mutschlecner's "Martin Heidegger / Ezra Pound"

David Mutschlecner, author of three books with Ahsahta Press, lives in Los Alamos. He is a devoted reader of poetry and philosophy and a careful viewer of art. In “Martin Heidegger / Ezra Pound,” he links an existentialist philosopher and an American poet in a meditation on being and meaning and art.

            I was first drawn to this poem by the care-filled voice, the subtle musical effects, the questioning and self-questioning that move the poem forward. Among the many questions lurking in the background is Martin Heidegger’s question from “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “Is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence?”

            The poem is beautifully made, and I could write an entire column about the musical effects, but it’s also highly-allusive and subject-driven, so probably the best thing I can do in this small space is provide some background information.

            Martin Heidegger was a German existentialist philosopher whose philosophical masterwork was Being and Time. Poets, though, love Heidegger’s late work, especially Poetry, Language, and Thought. And why wouldn’t they? In that book, he places poets at the center of the human endeavor to connect meaningfully with the world.

             The subtitle is a quote from Heidegger taken from a much-annotated and discussed passage in Being and Time, the meaning of which probably involves the complexities of defining the abstract term Being in relation to the individual beings in the world. Or simply to complicate the notion of Being and beings, to suggest that we don’t know how we are in the world, that it is a point of discussion, this being-in-the-world, that there is a deep unresolvable puzzle, an enigma. (Enigma’s roots in the word for “fable” suggest that an enigma cannot be spoken about in the direct, propositional language of science and reason.)

The poem begins with the poet apparently looking out his window at a parking lot, casually observing at first, until the scene begins to take on a metaphorical charge. Time passes quickly in this poem—one month between stanza one and stanza two, when Heidegger arrives. By stanza three, Heidegger’s question—“what is the Being of [human] beings?—has been “taken down” like the lupins in stanza one. His question “jetties,” metaphorically, from its beginnings in continental philosophy. The visual metaphor established in the opening stanza undergoes its first of several transformations.  But how have Heidegger’s questions about Being been cut off? By what the psychologist Jerome Bruner called “the age of epistemology,” this postmodern age that does not interrogate Being but instead interrogates the questions we ask, where knowledge comes from, and how knowledge is authorized. All questions that arise in the wake of Existentialism and of Heidegger himself, who hoped to end metaphysics and ground life in the physical world.

The “isolation” of the lupin is mirrored twice more in the poem, in the isolated Heidegger, whose question has been sidestepped for a century and in the isolated rock singer, who walks out on his own jetty. The singer seems to enact, in his public isolation, the existential dilemma.  On own hand we find ourselves “thrown” into the world, already in a context in which we must try to construct a self and an ethics. On the other hand, we must become “authentic” in private, since, for Heidegger (in an ultimately ironic prouncement vis a vis Heidegger's own complicity with the Nazis), to accept the mass's values--to fall into what Heidegger calls the "they"-- is to fail to be authentic.

Dasein is Heidegger’s term, more or less, for “the Being of human beings” or, according to other accounts, “the being for whom Being is a question.”  The one who has an enigmatic relation with Being (that which is) itself. The singer from a “heavy band” is a “self-/searcher,” Muchslecner writes, using the line break to intimate an entire philosophy: Is he a self? A self who searches? A searcher of himself? Or all of the above?        

            Here we have the “front man,” “dasein,” “the being for whom Being is a question,” “thrown” into the audience, but his true audience, his true hearer, is himself. “He is wireless, // without connection."

In stanza ten, Muchslecner takes an ironic turn. “We have done our best,” he writes, to “sever being from meaning.” What would it mean to sever being from meaning? This statement of the problem suggests that meaning is outside us, either in a deity or in the world. The poet’s job, according to Heidegger, is to use language to call things into revealingness, into a relationship with human beings, to enact “the undistorted / presencing of the thing.”

But this stage’s “meaning is exhausted in constructed charisma.” Charisma, originally related to grace, a gift of power or talent, lately come to mean “a compelling attractiveness.” “Constructed” charisma, then, so not divinely gifted. A modern charisma.

Once again the image of the jetty returns, this time as something going past the voice into the audience. “Stillness reclaims us,” he writes, “even while the solo sears us.” By stanza sixteen, though, something has survived despite or because of the searing. Mutschlecner plays on the word “mass,” the “mass of sound,” and the word “missa,” meaning “mass” or “liturgy.” Could there be a “mass” here, a sacredness? It seems so. Heidegger’s theories turn around a sense of implicit sacredness, and a calling into the open, into presence, of the sacred world—this world—through language. The way a flower opens (the way a flower’s name opens, also), revealing itself, Mutschlecner writes, is alethia.

The flower that opens into unconcealedness leads us by association to the second figure behind the poem, the poet Ezra Pound, who wrote “In a Station of the Metro,” a two line poem based on his study of Asian poetry: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” “The surge of the irrational” leads us to Ezra Pound’s poem, which leads us to the faces in the Metro, which lead us to the “faces in [the] crowd” at the concert.  (Interestingly, both Pound and Heidegger (in his late works) were influenced by what they knew of Asian poetry and philosophy.)

By stanza nineteen, it’s dark. Presumably the speaker is returning from the concert. Mutschlecner asks us to imagine a “beginningless beginning.” Heidegger himself was fascinated by origins, whether “art can be an origin” or only “a cultural phenomenon that has become routine.” (As in “the metal posture” that becomes “reflex.”) This is where Heidegger joins hands with Pound’s “make it new.” The poem ends with “a far nub of thought / where late headlights turn over lupin.” The poem suggests that art can be “a nub of thought,” an origin. A “nub”—both a small protruberance suggesting growth and the crux of the matter.

[NOTE: In Michael North’s Novelty: A History of the New, there’s a fascinating account of Pound’s phrase “make it new,” the phrase that is often seen as the slogan that instigated Modernism’s pursuit of novelty. In the account, North traces the phrase to Pound’s willful mistranslation of an inscription on a Shang Dynasty washbasin that dates from 1766-1753 BC!]

(NOTE: Heidegger’s complicity with the Nazis has made an asterisk necessary every time one discusses him, but his failures as a human being should not cancel his fascinating writings on language--though I suppose his writings on responsibility and ethics are fair game. Ditto Ezra Pound, whose broadcast rantings on economic policy on behalf of the Italian fascists landed him, ultimately, in a mental hospital. His work, especially his prose, is often marred by his mad, wrongheaded brilliance.)

[NOTE: I use the word “crux” deliberately here to hint at a mysterious sacredness, one which also haunts Poetry, Language, and Thought:

Crux, n. 1814, "cross," from Latin crux "cross." Figurative use for "a central difficulty," is older, from 1718; perhaps from Latin crux interpretum "a point in a text that is impossible to interpret," in which the literal sense is something like "crossroads of interpreters." Extended sense of "central point" is from 1888.]

The poem can be found at The Santa Fe Reporter's website: The Yawp Barbaric

David Muschlecner will give a rare reading at Collected Works on Sunday, March 30, at 4 pm in the Muse Times Two series.

Santa Fe Poets 3

Printed at the Press at the Palace of the Governors

City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis to Host Poetry Reading at the Santa Fe Public Library, Southside Branch, on Wednesday, March 26, 2014, at 5:30 pm

SANTA FE, NM — On Wednesday, March 26, 2014, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m., City of Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis will host “Santa Fe Poets 3,” the third of six readings, the remainder of which will take place over the next four months at various venues in and around Santa Fe. Each reading will feature a different group of five poets reading with the poet laureate. The March reading will take place in the community room at the Santa Fe Public Library, Southside Branch. The event is free.

At this reading, Davis will read from his new manuscript and from his most recent book, Preliminary Report, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. In addition to being Santa Fe’s fourth poet laureate, Davis is Director of the Low Residency MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he has taught for 23 years.

Joining Davis for Santa Fe Poets 3 will be:

Will Barnes, who was awarded two Academy of American Poets’ Prizes at the University of New Mexico. He has poems in CutBank and the Taos Journal of Poetry and Art and has completed his first manuscript of poems.

Monika Cassel, who is chair of the English Department at New Mexico School for the Arts, a statewide charter arts school. She is working on a translation of the German poet Durs Grünbein’s Porzellan.

Matt Donovan, who is Co-Chair of Creative Writing and Literature at Santa Fe University of Art & Design. He is the author of Vellum (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner, 2007), which won both the 2006 Bakeless Prize in Poetry and the 2008 Larry Levis Reading Prize. Donovan is the recipient of a Rome Prize in Literature, a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Christopher Johnson, who is Production Manager at Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse and host of the Collected Words poetry show. He is a member of the Artist Collective Meow Wolf and a poet, freelance writer, and reporter whose articles and poems have appeared in Photo-Eye Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and The Weekly Alibi.

Kim Parko, who teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is the author of three collections of poetry and flash fiction, The Rest of the World Seems Unlikely (Achilles Chapbook Series), Three Acts with Vincent (Mud Luscious Press), and Cure All (Caketrain Press).

The Santa Fe Public Library, Southside Branch, is located at 6599 Jaguar Drive. For more information, call Jon Davis at 424.2365 or e-mail him at jdavissimo52@gmail.com.

Established in 2005, the Poet Laureate program actively promotes poetry and the spoken word as integral parts of our civic life.

Forbidden Words!

I recently unearthed, or rather unstacked, this list of "forbidden words" that I've used over the years with beginning poetry students. It's interesting how often, in young writers' reach for the grand gesture, they dip into this gothic vocabulary. I did. And some of the most promising young writers do, too. Unfortunately, instead of the drama we hope to produce, we get melodrama. The words, by the way, were collected from an anthology of "best" high school writing.

I often assign students to use as many of these as possible. Hilarity, as the movie blurbers used to say, ensues!

The Care and Feeding of Poems

This past month's Yawp Barbaric dealt not with a New Mexico poet, but with a poem by the little-known poet Terry Stokes that my younger brother carried in his wallet. And with Julia Kristeva's theory of language, and with guidelines for the care and feeding of poems. Read it here: The Yawp Barbaric