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News +
Notes, posted November 17,
2008
Last Thursday Governor
Schwarzenegger appointed Los
Angeles poet and novelist Carol
Muske-Dukes to succeed Berkeley
poet and writer Al Young as
California Poet Laureate, a
rotating position that was
created in 2001, offering a $10,
000 stipend for a two-year term.
The California State Senate now
must approve the appointment.
(Carol Muske-Dukes is a
Democrat.)
 Carol
Muske-Dukes, who teaches at the
University of Southern California
and founded the school’s
graduate program in Literature
and Creative Writing, has
published seven books of poetry,
four novels, and two books of
essays. She also founded and
taught in a Creative Writing
program at a women’s prison
on Riker’s Island in New
York.
The Laureate works with the
California Arts Council to
promote poetry, "from classrooms
to boardrooms across the state"
as the Governor's official press
release puts it, especially among
children and those not usually
exposed to poetry and creative
writing, and "to inspire an
emerging generation of literary
artists and to educate all
Californians about the many poets
and authors who have influenced
our great state through creative
literary expression." The council
takes nominations and recommends
four to the governor.
Carol Muske-Dukes’s husband
was the actor, David Dukes, who
died of a sudden heart attack in
2000. Her most recent book of
poetry, Sparrow, which
was a finalist for the National
Book Award, is a book of elegies
for him. Others of her books of
poems include Applause, Red
Trousseau, and An Octave
Above Thunder, her new and
selected poems which was
nominated for the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize. Carol
Muske-Dukes most recent novel is
the Los Angeles Times
best-seller Channeling Mark
Twain. The Irish poet Eavan
Boland has said of her, “Carol
Muske is a beautiful, ambitious
poet who has not rested on her
gifts for language and cadence.
She has chosen instead to let a
musical light become the
infinitely more testing light of
disaster and interrogation.”
Among her honors are National
Endowment for the Arts and
Guggenheim fellowships, an
Ingram-Merrill grant and several
Pushcart Prizes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
News
+ Notes, posted by Joyce Jenkins,
October 29, 2008
Along with our
daily postings of event listings
for California and beyond, I'm
going to be posting editorial
tidbits as they come in to
Poetry Flash. Many have
called and asked where the
Watershed Poetry Festival in
Berkeley will be held if, well,
it is raining on Nov. 1. The rain
venue is Berkeley City College,
2050 Center Street, half a block
from Civic Center Park on Martin
Luther King, Jr. Way at Center
Street, downtown Berkeley. These
locations are all very close to
downtown Berkeley BART (Berkeley
City College is half a block from
BART). The weather is looking
pretty good here now! And we are
looking forward to a powerful
festival. Come check out the
readings, music, and
exhibitors---including Manic D
Press, Heyday Books, Tea
Party Magazine, River of
Words, Sixteen Rivers Press,
California Poets in the Schools,
and others.
Intersection
for the Arts in San
Francisco has just
announced the winners of the San
Francisco Foundation's 2008
Jackson Phelan Literary Awards.
The judges this year were Bay
Area writers
Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich,
and giovanni singleton.
Joseph Henry Jackson Award -
Kelly Luce, Woodside, California,
fiction writer
James Duval Phelan Award -
Allison Benis White, Irvine,
California, poet
The winners
will be celebrated at a reading
November 18,
7:30, at Intersection for the
Arts, 446 Valencia Street
(between 15th Street and 16th
Street), in the Mission, San
Francisco. See Northern
California November Calendar for
event details.
About
the winners, from
Intersection:
Kelly Luce is
the winner of the 2008 Danahy
Fiction Prize from Tampa
Review, and has published
fiction in North American
Review, The Gettysburg Review,
Fourteen Hills, Opium,
Nimrod, and
Alimentum. Her work has
also been recognized by a
fellowship to the MacDowell
Colony and a residency at Devil's
Tower National Monument.
Originally from Chicago, she
worked for two years in Japan.
She now lives in the Santa Cruz
mountains, where she divides her
time between writing and trying
to start fires in her wood stove.
She can be found online at Crazy
Pete's Blotter:
www.thecrazypetesblotter.blogspot.com.
The judges
said:
The three short stories that
comprise Kelly Luce's fiction
manuscript, "Ms. Yamada's
Toaster," are engaging feats of
imagination and awakening. In the
collection's title story,
divinity becomes as accessible as
a toasted piece of bread. "Cram
Island" takes karaoke to a place
beyond song while the last and
longest story, "Rooey," maps
intricate social and emotional
terrain. Each narrative
effectively challenges commonly
held beliefs and raises important
questions about the multi-layered
relationship between life and
death. As if "working a jigsaw
puzzle in the dark," Luce
masterfully threads ordinariness
through a focused lens, be it a
street, an alley, or a beer
bottle, with captivating results.
A fusion of magic and reality
dramatically expands the
possibilities of our human
existence. These stories do not
end with their last sentences but
rather they are a shore from
which the reader sets sail on a
journey of transformation. And it
is truly "a marvel for anyone who
care(s) to look."
Allison
Benis White's poems have
appeared in The Iowa Review,
Ploughshares, and
Pleiades, among other
journals. Her awards include the
Indiana Review Poetry
Prize, the Bernice Slote Award
from Prairie Schooner,
and a Writers Exchange Award from
Poets & Writers. Her
full-length manuscript,
Self-Portrait with
Crayon, recently received
the 2008 Cleveland State
University Poetry Center First
Book Award, and is forthcoming in
spring 2009. She is currently at
work on a second manuscript,
Small Porcelain Head,
and she teaches as a lecturer in
the English Department at the
University of California,
Irvine.
The judges
said:
In Allison Benis White's "Small
Porcelain Head" the panel of
judges found a seamless cycle of
poems that employ the figure of
the doll---as emblem, as
childhood nostalgia, as
subject/object for the human
figure, as locus for attachment,
detachment, and the careful way
one learns to love and to see
one's own human frailties in
another. Benis White's poetry
engages her reader by
simultaneously holding both the
physical and the abstract in
language that is deceptively
simple and beautifully
complex:
After our
fingers, we put our mouths to the
pain--a ceramic tongue broken off
like chalk.
As a child, I pressed my tongue
to my wrist to see what it would
be like to feel someone.
What should I do with my mind?
Think of the way it broke until
breaking is
language.
Benis White employs a fresh
poetic voice, at once
experimental and still
accessible, giving a sense of
openness and possibility. "Small
Porcelain Head" was unanimously
selected as the 2008 James Duval
Phelan Literary Award winner by
this year's judges for both its
accomplishment and promise.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
News +
Notes, posted by Joyce Jenkins,
July 15, 2008
Alfred
Arteaga, 1950-2008
Alfred Arteaga, poet and
University of California Berkeley
Professor of Chicano and Ethnic
Studies, died of a heart attack
on July 4 at the age of
fifty-eight.
 A
groundbreaker in postcolonial and
ethnic minority literature
studies, a key early Chicano
movement poet, he will be
remembered, among much else, for
the creative fusion of his art
and his academic studies, and
among his students and colleagues
for a special sweetness,
receptiveness, and
accessibility.
Arteaga was born in Los
Angeles in 1950 and began writing
poetry at the age of eight,
loving music and words in their
twinings. He earned a M.F.A. in
Creative Writing from Columbia
University in 1974, a M.A. and
then a Ph.D. in Literature from
UC Santa Cruz in 1984 and 1987,
respectively, and arrived at UC
Berkeley in 1990 after three
years teaching in Houston.
His five books of poetry are
Frozen Accident (2006),
Zero Act (2006),
Red (2000), Love in the
Time of Aftershocks (1998),
and Cantos (1991). He won
a PEN Oakland/ Josephine Miles
Award in 1997 for his eclectic
book of essays House with the
Blue Bed, an unusual
collection of poems, literary and
artistic criticism, and personal
reflections, and he published,
right at the heart of his
concerns, a pioneering book of
literary theory, Chicano
Poetics: Heterotexts and
Hybridities, as well as the
collection of essays he edited,
An Other Tongue: Nation and
Ethnicity in the Linguistic
Borderlands.
"He was a very beautiful, a
very large-hearted generous human
being," says Laura Pérez,
a UC faculty-mate."He was loved
and respected by his students as
a caring mentor and by his
colleagues as a collegial man
with an easy laugh." She also
praises Frozen Accident as
his "masterpiece...very bold,
daring and successful." She
describes it as a book that
stages a dialogue between Western
and pre-Columbian philosophies
about meaning, truth, and the
afterlife. A long poem on
California as the last stop for
Western culture, published by Tia
Chucha Press, it echoes Dante in
its primary section,
"Nezahualcoyotl in Michtlan," a
trip to hell. Gilles Deleuze
wrote of Cantos,
"Something strikes me profoundly:
you are among those rare poets
who can draw into or cut from
their language a new language. A
new language in which roots and
sources would be heard."
In a beautiful evening of
Berkeley poetry, Alfred Arteaga
last read for Poetry Flash
at Black Oak Books on November
26, 2006. A sixth book of his
poetry will be published
posthumously. Campus memorial
services at UC Berkeley are being
planned for early fall.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
News +
Notes, posted by Joyce Jenkins,
July 14, 2008
Welcome
to the
unveiling
of the PoetryFlashBlog. As often
as I can, I'll post news,
thoughts, poems,
reviews…whatever doesn't
make it into our print magazine.
At this moment it can't be
interactive, because of our
current technical limitations,
but hopefully in the future it
will be. For now, send me your
news and ideas at
editor@poetryflash.org. And
please try to be
patient---sometimes this is like
flying by flapping your
arms.
One of
the biggest surprises of this
summer of rapid change was the
sudden closing of Cody's Books in
downtown Berkeley on June 20.
Perhaps there were rumblings, but
even to most employees it was a
shock. After moving the Poetry
Flash Reading Series all over
town since the Telegraph Avenue
store closed in 2006, and moving
back to Cody's twice, once to
Fourth Street and finally to
downtown Berkeley, and watching
the number of books on the
shelves dwindle like fading
oxygen, the one strong feeling
that remains is that the book
will survive, damn it, poets and
writers and chewy syllables are
not going away. We'll find a way
and make the best of it---the
economy, the Internet, the book
as an object of nostalgia---all
of it. The Poetry Flash
series will continue with
spirited readings at the
marvelously vital Moe's Books,
the new anchor of Telegraph
Avenue, one Thursday evening each
month, and at Diesel, A
Bookstore, on College Avenue in
Oakland, monthly Sunday
afternoons this fall. Diesel is a
bookstore so intelligently run
that it practically beams. Just
to walk in these bookstores makes
my heart glad and I fall in love
with books all over again. It's
never over.
Spreading
the love wherever they go, it's
all over the Los Angeles book
world that the previously
mentioned Diesel folk, who
already have a cozy and
beautifully selected store in
Malibu, have announced plans to
start a new Diesel bookshop in a
1,500 square foot space in
Brentwood Country Mart, in the
Westside neighborhood still
grieving from the final closing
of Dutton's this past spring. And
just the thought that Skylight
Books in Los Feliz in LA and
Small World Books in Venice are
doing well is reassuring. I've
had the pleasure of sitting and
shuffling through books at both
of those stores, pulling down
favorites, comparing
translations, finding old friends
on the shelves and introducing
them to new readers (often my
patient and bookloving daughter).
Those have been some of the most
pleasurable moments of my life.
Like losing an afternoon at
Powell's Books in Portland, an
evening reading at Open Books,
the poem emporium, or a shiny
morning with coffee at Elliott
Bay Book Co. in
Seattle…
Down the
street from Cody's, Pegasus Books
on Shattuck Avenue also stopped
presenting their readings, but
for a much happier reason. The
mastermind of their poetry
series, Clay Banes, has moved to
his dream job, marketing at Small
Press Distribution, also in
Berkeley---he'll still be
nurturing small presses and
selling poetry and prose to indie
bookstores from his new nonprofit
base.
Our
first Poetry Flash reading
in a Cody's Free World will be
Sunday, August 3, 7:30, at Moe's
Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue,
Berkeley. Richard Silberg,
Associate Editor of Poetry
Flash, will read his own work
with Chad Sweeney (co-editor of
Parthenon West Review and
editor of "Listening In," a
feature on MFA poetry in
Poetry Flash) and Jennifer
K. Sweeney, who are both leaving
San Francisco for the Midwest.
They will be missed.
Here's a
poem by Jerry Ratch, who will
read his poetry at the East Bay
JCC in north Berkeley, 1414
Walnut Street, July 23 at 7:00.
The more things change, the more
they remain the same?
Immolation
at Cody's Bookstore Reading
by
Jerry Ratch
A
man in the audience immolating
himself
cutting his leg over and over
with a pen knife
moaning: Oh God, oh God
Groaning, is more like
it
All
I can think from up at the podium
is
this guy must absolutely hate
these poems
I'm
reading from Puppet X, the first
time in public
for this long 60 page
admittedly somewhat
depressing
but very funny (if you give it a
chance)
book length series of
poems
This
guy must be ready to retch
right in the bookstore
he hates it so much
That is all I can
think
I
am mortified
I didn't think it was that
bad
This
is Berkeley, 1973, Telegraph
Avenue
Anything can happen. The war
keeps raging on
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