with a full gospel choir crooning behind him, with twenty thousand spectators surging to their feet, with an arena of flashbulbs flashing its approval, and I’m spellbound, thinking it’s all so spectacular, until
the broadcast team weighs in, and Charles Barkley says, “That wasn’t the greatest dunk,” and Marv Albert says, “But the presentation was pretty fun,” and I’m made to revisit what I thought I saw as one question replaces all others—
Was it truly extraordinary? Or, by the paragon of unimpeachable aesthetic standards by which the annual NBA Slam Dunk Competition is adjudicated, was it actually pedestrian, mortal, a somewhat meh occurrence made mythic only through gimmicks and frills?
[…continue reading “Blake Griffin Dunks Over A Car” at Four Way Review.]
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It abides in secret on my pencil tip— Greenland graphite, fossil bodies, the spans of lost beginnings hoarded from the deeps into softest stone across geologic time to bring its word here for the wind to edit, dawn quickened in folds of a stringent pool. So life leaps from non-life, leaps outside the loop of the un-living factum, the material pit, to ride the sudden unfolding of a tide, billions of years passing, before it snaps into the billowing the sea-vents emit; before it steadies, permeates, picks up speed to surface dimly from the thrumming deeps.
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An excerpt from a poem by faculty member Matthew Olzmann (poetry ’09), published in Poem-a-Day on October 22, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
My Invisible Horse and the Speed of Human Decency
People always tell me, “Don’t put the cart before the horse,” which is curious because I don’t have a horse. Is this some new advancement in public shaming— repeatedly drawing one’s attention to that which one is currently not, and never has been, in possession of? If ever, I happen to obtain a Clydesdale, then I’ll align, absolutely, it to its proper position in relation to the cart, but I can’t do that because all I have is the cart. One solitary cart—a little grief wagon that goes precisely nowhere—along with, apparently, one invisible horse, which does not pull, does not haul, does not in any fashion budge, impel or tow my disaster buggy up the hill or down the road. I’m not asking for much. A more tender world with less hatred strutting the streets.
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“Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czeslaw Milosz” by faculty member Matthew Olzmann (poetry ’09) was part of Jenny Holzer’s new series of light projections at Rockefeller Center, VIGIL, which ran October 10-12. She projected poems from the anthology Bullets Into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, among other works.
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Marianne Boruch, The Anti-Grief from Copper Canyon
Caitlin Horrocks, TheVexations from Little Brown
Maurice Manning, Railsplitter from Copper Canyon
Pablo Medina, The Cuban Comedy from The Unamed Press
Alix Ohlin, Dual Citizens from Knopf
Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others from Little Brown
David Shields, The Trouble with Men from Mad Creek Books
Dominic Smith, The Electric Hotel from Sarah Crichton Books
Alan Williamson, Franciscan Notes from Tupelo Press
Eleanor Wilner, Before Our Eyes: New and Selected 1975-2017 from Princeton University Press
Alumni News & Publications
Lake Michigan Mermaid: A Tale in Poems by Linda Nemec Foster (poetry 88) and Anne-Marie Oomen was selected a winner of a 2019 Michigan Notable Book Award.
Catherine Barnett’s Collection (poetry 02) Human Hours was a finalist for the 2019 Believer Book Award
Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry 11) has been appointed Poet Laureate of Houston, TX. She is the fourth Houston poet to receive this honor.
Faith S. Holsaert (fiction ‘82) has been awarded the Albright Prize for nonfiction from NC Literary Review.
Rose McLarney’s (poetry ’10) collection Forage has been published by Penguin Books.
Katie Bowler Young’s (poetry ’07) collection Through Water With Ease has been published by Louisiana Literature Press.
Rebecca Foust’s (poetry ’10) chapbook The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, won the 2018 Swan Sycthe contest and will be released this October.
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s, (poetry ’15) A Wake with Nine Shades was published by Texas Review Press in August.
Keith Ekiss (poetry ’12) published the fourth volume of translations of Eunice Odio’s The Fire’s Journey with Tavern Books.
LOOK FOR BOOK POSTS FEATURING RECENT ALUMNI PUBLICATIONS OVER THE NEXT WEEK!
An excerpt from an interview with faculty member Maurice Manning published by Plume:
I had the pleasure of speaking to Maurice Manning about his forthcoming collection, Railsplitter: Reflections on the Art of Poetry Composed in the Posthumous Voice of Honest Abe Lincoln, former Pres., U.S. (Copper Canyon, October 2019).
AN: I am interested, first of all, in the title of Railsplitter, subtitled, “Reflections on the Art of Poetry Composed in the Posthumous Voice of Honest Abe Lincoln, former Pres., U.S.” Early in his campaign for presidency, Lincoln was nicknamed “The Railsplitter,” which was, of course, a nod to the kind of physical labor he was known for in his youth and a way of appealing to the common folk by reminding them of his own connection to the land.
To my mind, Railsplitter embodies both the physical and the abstract. Can you speak a little about this, and how you view the title as a way of framing our experience of the poems?
MM: You’re opening question is a great one. Here’s my effort at a response.
In responding to queries from my editors and copy editors at Copper Canyon, the matter of the title came up. Should this book be called Rail Splitter or Rail-splitter, versions of the word that various style manuals prefer. In the end—as all along in my work on this book—I decided to keep the single word formation, Railsplitter. This is indeed a version of the word that appeared in some of Lincoln’s campaign material.
But I also like that the object (rail) is fused to the action (splitter). It suggests a kind of double-meaning or doubled effect, and poetry in general makes use of familiar tools that have a doubling or multiplying effect (such as imagery, simile, and metaphor).
To my thinking, “railsplitter” is also an unintentionally ironic term to apply to Lincoln, who as we know put preserving the Union ahead of all else. In other words, the action of splitting rails out of a log is divisive, even though Lincoln’s political actions were focused on maintaining the Union. So, perhaps the title is an effort to introduce dramatic irony to the reader from the start. Over and over in my reading of Lincoln, his life, and his moment in American history, I stumbled on one ironic fact after another.
Many poems in the book, I think, highlight some of this irony. The great and humbling surprise to me was to realize I did not have to create any of this irony. It’s already there, a feature of our national history. And I imagine that the ironies of our national history were everywhere evident to the real Lincoln.
One of his personal challenges must have been to learn how to live through the ironies that have shaped our country. I do hope the title brings together the physical and the abstract. That seems to be what irony does—it presents us with a reality that cannot be separated from its abstract shadow.
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An excerpt from “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America” by faculty member Matthew Olzmann (poetry ’09) published by Tin House.
Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America
Tell me what it’s like to live without curiosity, without awe. To sail on clear water, rolling your eyes at the kelp reefs swaying beneath you, ignoring the flicker of mermaid scales in the mist, looking at the world and feeling only boredom. To stand on the precipice of some wild valley, the eagles circling, a herd of caribou booming below, and to yawn with indifference. To discover something primordial and holy.
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An excerpt from “An Oboe at Night Among Trees,” a conversation about poetry with faculty member David Baker, curated by Victoria Chang (poetry ’05), published by Tupelo Quarterly.
“An Oboe at Night Among Trees,” a conversation about poetry
VC: As you respond to my questions, I’m remembering how wonderful it was to be your student [I was your student at Warren Wilson twice about 15 years ago and at the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop]. In many of your new poems, there’s a narrative thread that travels across the poems. Is that how a poem begins for you? Via story? Or some other way?
DB: I’ve written the poems in Swift over so long a time that it’s hard to make a single summary. The oldest poems here date from 1982 or ‘83, when I was still in school. Even so I haven’t included any poems from my first book, Laws of the Land. That decision took a deep breath to make.
Poems begin for me mysteriously. Yes, sometimes there’s a kind of story I want to tell, or parts of stories. Sometimes it’s just a simple tone—like an oboe at night, among trees. I remember thinking about one poem that I wanted it to sound like that. Sometimes there’s a conundrum I want to address, a dramatic irony to enact. Sometimes I just put my speaker or thinker into motion, into circumstance, and see where he goes and what he does. I do not start a poem with the ending already in mind—or rarely. And the ending is rarely an issue of narrative, but more an issue of music, rhythm, an opening as much as a closing.
Still, I do lean toward narrative. Well, as I say that, I also hope I have some lyric skills. Those aren’t exclusive features, are they? It’s like this. I want to make a type of music out of words—lots of types of music. To play a song you have to have a story, a drama; a tone is a tone and two tones is a drama. It’s inevitable. Whenever we make a sentence, or string a couple of words together, we are already working in the realm of narrative. Language is narrative.
Now, perhaps you’re right that a narrative thread or threads do wind across my new poems. That’s inevitable, since I wrote them. I believe the most interesting threads, for any poem, are the ones we do not will to be there, the ones we don’t purposely intend, but rather the ones that show up unbidden, underneath. I’m thinking about the deeper parts of personality and psyche and imagination, where the fear and the adoration and the revulsion and the hope all hover and conspire. There’s a type of landscape that travels from poem to poem in Swift, to be sure, and a manner of being-in-the-world, and something like a voice eventually emerges.
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Tony Hoagland‘s THE ART OF VOICE will be published by Norton in March.
Christopher Castellani’s LEADING MEN was just released by Penguin Random House.
Alumni News and Updates
Part Two of Candace Walsh’s (fiction ’19) craft essay on Patricia Highsmith appears on the Craft Magazine website. The Ears and Noses of the Beholder Part One was linked on this blog earlier in February.
Patrick Donnelly’s (poetry ’03) new collection LITTLE-KNOWN OPERA’s was just published by Four Way Books.
Kristen Staby Rembold’s ( WW poetry ’06) new book of poetry, MUSIC LESSON was published by Future Cycle Press in January 2019.
Two alums are finalist for the James Hearst Poetry Prize. Jayne Benjulian’s “Underpainting” (poetry ’13) and Sarah Anderson’s (poetry ’11) “Caught” appear in the Spring 2019 issue of the North American Review.
Kimberly Kruge’s (poetry ’15) collection ORDINARY CHAOS was just published by Carnegie Mellon Press.
Francine Conley’s (poetry ’14 ) poem “Exile” appears in the January print edition of Inverted Syntax.
J.C. Todd’s (poetry ’90 ) chapbook, THE DAMAGES OF MORNING, was published in late 2018 by Moonstone Press and is available on their website.
Jenn Givhan’s (poetry, ’15) new collection ROSA’S ENSTEIN has been published by University of Arizona Press.
Don Colburn’s (poetry, ’92) collection MORTALITY WITH PRONOUN SHIFTS won the Cathy Smith Bower’s Poetry Chapbook Prize and will be published in March by Main Street Rag.
Justin Gardiner’s (poetry ’05) BENEATH THE SHADOW: LEGACY AND LONGING IN THE ANTARCTIC will be published in March by the University of Georgia Press.
Celebrating the winner as “first among equals,” the 38th Annual PEN/Faulkner Award Ceremony took place at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, May 5, 2018 at 7:00 p.m. The event featured the judges’ citations for each finalist’s book, the conferral of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a reading by each author.
Below, a photo of the winner, faculty member Joan Silber, author of Improvement, with finalists Achy Obejas (fiction, ’93), author of The Tower of the Antilles, and Samantha Hunt (fiction, ’99), author of The Dark Dark. They are flanked by faculty members (and judges) Stacey D’Erasmo and Andrea Barrett. The photo was taken by Joan’s husband, Joe Hagen.
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