“Portrait in Nightshade and Delayed Translation” by faculty member C. Dale Young

Photo by William Anthony

An excerpt from “Portrait in Nightshade and Delayed Translation” by poetry faculty member C. Dale Young, published by the Academy of American Poets.

Portrait in Nightshade and Delayed Translation

In Saint Petersburg, on an autumn morning,
having been allowed an early entry
to the Hermitage, my family and I wandered
the empty hallways and corridors, virtually every space

adorned with famous paintings and artwork.
There must be a term for overloading on art.
One of Caravaggio’s boys smirked at us,
his lips a red that betrayed a sloppy kiss

recently delivered, while across the room
the Virgin looked on with nothing but sorrow.
Even in museums, the drama is staged.
Bored, I left my family and, steered myself,

foolish moth, toward the light coming
from a rotunda. Before me, the empty stairs.
Ready to descend, ready to step outside
into the damp and chilly air, I felt

the centuries-old reflex kick in, that sense
of being watched. When I turned, I found
no one; instead, I was staring at The Return
of the Prodigal Son. I had studied it, written about it

as a student. But no amount of study could have
prepared me for the size of it, the darkness of it.
There, the son knelt before his father, his dirty foot
left for inspection. Something broke. As clichéd

as it sounds, something inside me broke, and
as if captured on film, I found myself slowly sinking
to my knees. The tears began without warning until soon
I was sobbing. What reflex betrays one like this?

[…continue reading “Portrait in Nightshade and Delayed Translation” at poets.org]

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“The Arborists” by faculty member Connie Voisine

An excerpt from “The Arborists” by poetry faculty member Connie Voisine, published by On The Seawall.

The Arborists

Achilles weeps over Hector’s body, the body he had
killed for glory, revenge, to open the door to his own

prophesized, glamorous death. He weeps not for Hector
but for his own father and, truly, for himself. Priam weeps

over his son’s gorgeous corpse, so gorgeous it won’t rot.
I wish I didn’t feel sorry for warriors, but I’m listening to

Derek Jacobi tell the story, his rich English voice filling my earbuds.
I approach the trees that line the Green, where men on ropes

climb with chain saws, trimming as they mount even higher
against the woolen sky. Their confidence in their task astounds.

[…continue reading “The Arborists” at On The Seawall.]

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A conversation with faculty member Connie Voisine

Poetry faculty member Connie Voisine discusses her work on Spokane Public Radio. D

Connie Voisine is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Cathedral of the North, which won the 1999 AWP Prize in Poetry, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and 2015’s Calle Florista. Her most recent chapbook, And God Created Women was published in 2018, and later this year, she will release a book-length poem set in Belfast, Northern Ireland titled The Bower. 

Listen to the conversation on Spokane Public Radio.

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Faculty Member Dean Bakopoulos Talks About His New Film “Don’t Come Back From the Moon”

Faculty member Dean Bakopoulos smiles at the camera in a blue gingham button down with a green t-shirt underneath.

Fiction faculty member Dean Bakopoulus talks about his new film “Don’t Come Back From the Moon” on Iowa Public Radio.

“When I was 16, my father went to the moon…” 

That’s how the new movie “Don’t Come Back From the Moon” begins. It’s a new major motion picture starring James Franco and Rashida Jones and is based on Iowa author Dean Bakopoulos’s first novel Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon. 

In both the book and the film, fathers disappear, leaving families to wonder what happened to them. 

“The huge majority of us live paycheck to paycheck and are a few bad turns away from economic ruin,” says Bakopoulos. “I really wanted to capture that. Economic uncertainty is a spiritual condition. When you’re worried about debt, and you’re worried about income, and you’re worried about how you’re going to feed your family, it’s a spiritual problem. And I really wanted to capture that.” 

“Now, there are cell phones, Facetime, co-parenting and shared custody. Before that, if divorce happened, it was like people would disappear.”

During this Talk of Iowa interview, Bakopoulos talks with Charity Nebbe about the film. Director Bruce Thierry Cheung also joins the conversation. 

[…Listen to the full conversation here]

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“Resurrection” by faculty member Susan Neville, online at Diagram

An excerpt from “Resurrection” by fiction faculty Susan Neville, published at Diagram.

Resurrection

When the leaves turned yellow and the cold October rains began, children in the elementary school were given egg babies to care for. They spent recess making cribs out of shoeboxes, and some of the children made cunning little onesies out of cloth cut from the legs and arms of old clothes purchased from the five cent box at yard sales. 

 Those who were interested in design (and there were several) put shoeboxes together to make a sort of house, often with back yards, and playground equipment made from spoons and straws smuggled in from the lunch room. The most elaborate of these were displayed on the craft table to show the grandparents who showed up on Parents Day. 

Some of the children wrapped construction paper around the shoeboxes and drew on windows and doors and made dividers for the inside of the box. When the teacher said the box was supposed to be a crib, these children scoffed because the box was way too big for one baby and besides, the baby would never grow any larger.

[…continue reading here]

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“Hammond B3 Organ Cistern” By Gabrielle Calvocoressi

An excerpt from “”Hammond B3 Organ Cistern” By Gabrielle Calvocoressi, published by The New Yorker:

Hammond B3 Organ Cistern

The days I don’t want to kill myself
are extraordinary. Deep bass. All the people
in the streets waiting for their high fives
and leaping, I mean leaping,
when they see me. I am the sun-filled
god of love. Or at least an optimistic
under-secretary. There should be a word for it.
The days you wake up and do not want
to slit your throat. Money in the bank.
Enough for an iced green tea every weekday
and Saturday and Sunday! It’s like being
in the armpit of a Hammond B3 organ.
Just reeks of gratitude and funk.
The funk of ages. I am not going to ruin
my love’s life today. It’s like the time I said yes
to gray sneakers but then the salesman said
Wait. And there, out of the back room,
like the bakery’s first biscuits: bright-blue kicks. […continue reading here]

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Intrioview with Kevin McIlvoy

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An excerpt from Intrioview with Kevin McIlvoy published at Waxwing:

Intrioview

Three remarkable books of unconventional fiction that are simply like nothing else published recently have created excitement that is growing all on its own: Lynette D’Amico’s Road Trip (Twelve Winters Press, 2015); David Rutschman’s Into Terrible Light (Forklift Books, 2017), and Joseph Scapellato’s Big Lonesome (Mariner Books, 2017). No sustained promotional effort has been launched, giving these books the long exposure that such works of fiction must have in order to gain greater attention from our U.S. reading audience, an audience always resistant, at first, to the unfamiliar. Wishing for Scapellato and Rutschman and D’Amico to stand in the light a little longer, I contacted the authors about doing this intrioview. Over a period of three months, I asked them to address three broad topics specifically relevant to their books: boldness, aspects of scale, and estrangement. The format is demanding, since it requires that each author must address the topics through comments upon the works of the other two; each then must address, as in a normal interview, comments upon her/his own work. I have tripled the labor for this trio of writers. They have responded with selfless enthusiasm. […continue reading here]

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Behind the Byline with Paul Otremba

An excerpt from the interview, Behind the Byline, with faculty member Paul Otremba, published at NER:

Behind the Byline

Paul Otremba (“Like a Wide River,” 39.3) speaks with NER Poetry Editor Rick Barot about industrial landscapes, the Mississippi in his imagination, and being an artist in the Anthropocene.

Rick Barot: Can you tell us about how “Like a Wide River” came to be?

Paul Otremba: I had to go back and check early drafts of this poem, and it started from a writing exercise I’ve been using for the past five years or more. I choose a line or lines from someone else’s poem, and for each word, I try to come up with an amateur definition or select language from the context in which I may find the word. It’s really an exercise in metonymy, using contiguity and association to generate a draft, or at least some potentially interesting lines. This practice frees me up, so I don’t feel like I need to start with an idea or inspiration. I’m pretty loose with it, letting myself free write and extend off of a word, not worrying if I get to the next word of the instigating poem if I feel like I’m off chasing something.

A paradox of this practice is that while it originates in an arbitrary fashion, by the time I’m into it, I’m drawing on ideas and feelings that are present to me or deep within. I start by writing in a journal until I feel like I’ve exhausted the exercise, and then I type it up, revising as I go. When I first started doing this, I was performing this kind of “metonymic translation” for one single poem, in its entirety, over and over—William Carlos Williams’s “Poem, (‘As the cat…’).” The results were always wildly different.  

What I can tell from the first draft is that I started with the self-conscious investigation of metaphor, or perhaps more precisely, conceptual metaphor, the kind that is born out of experience but then becomes its own way of framing how experience is understood or felt thereafter. I grew up along the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities, and it holds a powerful place within the source of images from which I have drawn to make poems. One must have the mind of a river, so to speak, etc.

[…continue reading here]

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Lauren Groff, National Book Award Finalist

Congratulations to Lauren Groff. Her most recent book, Florida, was named a finalist for the National Book Award.

From the National Book Award site:

The New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and Furies returns, bringing the reader into a physical world that is at once domestic and wild—a place where the hazards of the natural world lie waiting to pounce, yet the greatest threats and mysteries are still of an emotional, psychological nature. A family retreat can be derailed by a prowling panther, or by a sexual secret. Among those navigating this place are a resourceful pair of abandoned sisters; a lonely boy, grown up; a restless, childless couple, a searching, homeless woman; and an unforgettable, recurring character—a steely and conflicted wife and mother.

The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence. Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments and decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury—the moments that make us alive. Startling, precise, and affecting, Florida is a magnificent achievement.

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“Transept” by C. Dale Young

An excerpt from the poem “Transept” by C. Dale Young, published at Scoundrel Time:

Transept

Unlike me, she made a choice, chose
Indian over Chinese, because she felt
she looked more Indian than Chinese.

It “takes strength” to choose. At age five,
while playing near her feet, my grandmother
knitted sweaters for me because she was

always convinced I was cold. You smile
too much. You are too pretty for a boy, too pretty.
You will bring yourself trouble. I smiled

and laughed the way only small children do
when teased. Pretty boy with an English heart,
cold cold heart that needs warming. […continue reading here]

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