Červená Barva Press
Gloria Mindock, Editor & Publisher
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CERVENA BARVA PRESS NEWSLETTER: Issue No. 99 April, 2020
CERVENA BARVA PRESS NEWSLETTER
Gloria Mindock, Editor
Issue No. 99 April, 2020
Email: editor@cervenabarvapress.com
Website: Cervena Barva Press
Bookstore: The Lost Bookshelf
Editorial
April, 2020 Cervena Barva Press Newsletter
Happy National Poetry Month!
This month is very special because Cervena Barva Press is 15 years old!!! I can't believe it!!! It has been a wonderful 15 years and the press has brought so many wonderful people into my life from all over the world. This is just the best! A very special shout out goes to the writing community in this area. What a wonderful group of writers and artists. I think that no one else in the United States has what we have here. I am grateful every day that I live here!
Since I had to cancel the party for our anniversary, I decided to wait until next year when the press turns 16. Then there will be a Sweet Sixteen party!!!! By then, hopefully there will be a vaccine for Covid-19 and life will not turn upside down for the world. I still can't believe that we all are facing a Pandemic at this time. It is so sad. So many dead. It is difficult to grasp. Continue to be safe everyone!
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who donated to the press during this Corona Virus crisis. I am so touched by all the donations and kindness I received from so many. It means so much to me. Thank you!!!! The survival of the press and bookstore is so important to me. Our sales have been zero and with the bookstore closed, we are in survival mode. All events will be cancelled for May too. Three months with our space in the Armory closed is rough.
A huge thank you to everyone who has donated books to the bookstore. It is such a big help, and I am so very grateful. When the store is open again, you must come in and visit. So many books to check out. You will love it! There are so many wonderful friends of Cervena Barva Press and The Lost bookshelf.
Thank you to the healthcare workers, first responders, volunteers, doctors, nurses, National Guard, unsung heroes, restaurant workers, counselors, Council of Aging, teachers, respiratory therapists, and the public who is out there helping those who need it. You all are heroes and angels. If I forgot any specific group, you are thanked. Not meant to be forgotten!
Cervena Barva Press May Newsletter, 2020
Welcome to the May Newsletter. Next month, there will be virtual readings by Cervena Barva Press. Two readings this summer are sponsored by Tipp City Public Library in Ohio. Thank you to Marc Zegans (The Snow Dead, Cervena Barva Press, 2020) for putting me in touch with the librarian in Tipp City. I am so excited about all the readings that are going to happen. Stay tuned.
Interviewed this month are Mbizo Chirasa and DeWitt Henry
Bill and I are still busy working on putting the used books online in The Lost Bookshelf. It is a slow process but we are working on it.
Interview with Mbizo Chirasa by Gloria Mindock
I am so happy to bring you this interview from Zimbabwe. Mbizo speaks out about his country, fighting for change, and social justice. Writing can make a difference. Mbizo is brave and courageous. I am honored to interview him.
When did you first start writing?
I began writing in the late primary school period. I was in Grade six at Zvegona Primary School. My class teacher was literally blessed. He loved reading and arts. Mr. Basvi headed our school drama club. I was a staunch member and organizer of that sterling youthful drama club. You know we lived in dust laden ,poverty ridden rural settings and newspapers were a luxury to our community lot .Major things tucked in most parents mind was food supplies ,planting seasons, Mugabe rallies ,traditional ceremonies and school uniforms. Fortunately my teacher brought me new and old newspaper every time he went to the nearby district town of Zvishavane. I grazed through acres of stories in those papers like a ravenous hyena. I swigged the beverages of political vibe accompanied with a refreshment of humor on entertainment and court sections of Gweru Times and Ziana News. Literary insignia was automatically glued on my mental plaque and my DNA got dipped in poetic vibe. My father shaped readership culture, he taught me a lot of grammatical signals at a very tender age. Despite living in squalid rural settings. I romanced and slept with any form of reading on my lap, whenever I was angry, I would run into a book to escape the devil of anger and stress. I wrote my first poem based on ENVIROMENTAL issues on the demise of vegetation through deforestation with afforestation. My first great recital was at a District World Environmental Day Celebrations. I won the heart of then Zvishavane District Education Officer Hlambelo, who then decided to help I look after his cattle and ploughed fields during holidays I became a young shepherd in the pastures and terrains of Ngomeyabani every school holiday. I read voraciously while manning the large head of the cattle. After holidays owned by the District Education Officer. And he had large library of books and newspapers. When it was back to school time, he would buy me me new uniforms, shoes and other school paraphernalia. That motivated me greatly. The griot in me grew rapidly, I read Animal Farm and Mayor of Casterbridge. I got very much inspired and then followed Things Fall Apart and The River Between as well as Crime and Punishment by a great Russian author, Interesting literature. I was baptized into the into the poetic dominion when Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Jack Mapanje, Musayemura Zimunya, Dambudzo Marechera And the Metaphysics, John Donne, Keats and Yeats, Emily Dickson and the writing expedition though feeble, unnoticed but growing. In MID 1996 WHEN I was worked Zimbabwe’s former Ambassador to Yugoslavia, KD Manyika in Gweru third largest city of Zimbabwe in the Midlands Province, I multitasked as a cattle herder in the large paddock, gardening and manning fowl runs ,the daily rhythm accompanied with these humble but great responsibilities is amazing. These duties taught me and shaped my being a lot in life. Every time when I go delivering in city shops, I would pass through Gweru Times dropping my Letter to the Editor or Opinion pieces. I was overjoyed and got a column. Thanks to the great Dukes Mwanaka, the then Editor of Gweru Times and Oliver Shambira, the then Deputy Editor. Interesting years. Humble beginnings. The Manyika family had a more bigger library, every I swept and dusted the library, I would take volumes of Victorian Poetry. I was introduced to Shakespeare Writings, Ts Elliot, DH Lawrence and I also grazed through the Canterbury Tales. A more over my village carried with it a poetic rhythm, I was rondavels when growing sat the edges of a Dayataya Mountains adjacent to Zvagona hills. I enjoyed the beauty of mist clad Dayataya, birds sang incessantly as if responding to the echoes of ever yelping baboons were a common feature in our land. Monkeys Facebooked on tree branches like rock rabbits jiving to the discord of laughing hyenas as wild hens quacked tenor in synch to the soprano of Mutorahuku stream while our mothers with the armed with zeal and loyalty to their homestead thrashing and grinding millet in wood mortars to brew the beloved village beverage, traditional beer. Drunks, scumbags and talented singers drank the brew to the dregs, their stupor griped hymns and songs carried succulent rhythm and fat meanings. The accompaniment of my the village rhythm, reading culture and stories of my father carved a griot in me as much global views and political affairs are other ingredients to the balanced of my writing career. The rest is now history.
Who are the biggest influences in your life?
My father was a great storyteller. He told me many stories about Zululand, Clansmen stories, African cultural anthropologies, detailed histories of the world. We read an English and Shona novel every evening before sleeping. So, the art of story telling stories was carved into my heart cave long time ago, during my teething ages. Poetry was injected into my DNA like BCG and I became a poem myself and later a poet. I believe every poet is a living poem before he becomes a poet. I am influenced by the village rhythm, the chirruping of small birds over soot- clad rondavels, the soprano of doves as they imitate angels of dawn towards sunrise. The footsteps of the sun as gigantic rays walk over horizons in a triumphant march like battalions to war. I cherish to see mountains dressed in grey gowns of mist and pastures donning the heavy green like military Jackets, the baritone sound of yelping baboons on the fontanel of our hills of home, Facebooking of monkeys on top of three canopies, the jiving of rock rabbits, the beat of rain thunder, the stitch of lightning bolts on our gyrating earth. I love the smell of cow under milk, the scent of grass soot dangling on rondavel roofs inside out. The ceremonial and traditional village songs are part of the catalytic influences to my writing, poetry and griot career. As I carried my bag sagging with traditional hymns, village rhythms and the scent of village smoke, I got into the city where life is a competition, I learnt the language of hustle and bustle in Harare, the city of no sleep. I got a lot to write about, hermits vomiting the snort of illicit beer remains on street pavements without restraint, harlots mad chasing potbellied sex imbeciles in the thickets of night, fake prophets cheating and raping their miracle hungry clue -less congregants. Politicians preaching peace during daylight and kill at night. Propaganda songs rattling from impoverished and congested suburbs were voters feed on plain porridge and stale bread. And even after voting to the from resounding victory of the ruling regime, beggars making more children despite the famishing challenges of hard rock city life. Sisters pimping their dignity for political party positions and the next in dingy brothels. slogan chants, gun shots and baby dumping episodes, Big chinned political imbeciles promising famished youth vast tracks of land later to dump them after rewarding them with drugs and alcohol. Presidential motorcade swirling dust into the face of pedestrians queuing for meal-mealie. As I indicated, the journey to maturation is trailblazing festooned by resilience, faith, dedication and goal getting. I read a lot of books from crime, fairy tales, fantasy, journalistic, biblical and several African anthropological texts. I am influenced by African griots in South Africa West Africa. The former Zimbabwe International book fair was a great exhibition of talents, so I met several WRITERS including the author of Cows of Shambati Taban Liyo Long. I shared a performance poetry stage with Mutabaruka and other great names. The Zimbabwe media shaped and influenced me greatly for they supported me through profiling articles and they followed my performances with great literary zeal. By the way I began as a spoken word poet, a griot and then I sort to expand my wings for global market reach, thus why me and you are chatting now. It has a been a great but an arduous journey. Decades of washing in sweat and bathing in salt tears. While in Harare, I worked alongside the great Charles Mungoshi, Tsitsi, Dangaembwa, David Mungoshi, Memory Chirere, Dudziro Nhengu, Shimmer Chinodya and many great voices. I salute.
What is the writing community like in Zimbabwe?
We have abundant talent. Talent is like a pot of stew puffing out the scent of goat meat, we are a country blessed with Protest poets, griots and underground poets as well as revolutionary poets. We boast of great writers and doyens of literature. A lot have received prestigious awards home and abroad. The likes of Dambudzo Charles Marechera, author of House of Hunger won the Prestigious Guardian Prize in the early 80s. Charles Mungoshi, storytelling meastro won the Commonwealth Prize with his great Novel Waiting of the Rain. Tsitsi Dangarembwa won scholarships home and abroad with her first classical Nervous Conditions. Shimmer Chinodya won Visiting Writer Program at a prestigious Lewis Clark University in USA and also won NOMA award with his thriller Harvest of Thorns. These are some of our acclaimed writing voices of Zimbabwe. We have a whole rising writers also doing well with their new modern styles to mention Brian Chikwava, the winner of 2005 Caine Prize with his captivating narrative Seventh Street Alchemy, Memory Chirere and Writer Publisher Ignatius Mabasa, with his famous Shona Novel Mapenzi rocking the world and included as one of Africas 100 Best Books. Not to be outdone is Chirikure Chirikure, our spokenword poetry maestro. Today the writing and literary arts community has fallen into dark times. Everything is upside down, publishing houses have since closed shop, there is rampant pirating of books and writers are greatly impoverished and their reputation has gone to the dogs. I can say writers and few remaining organizations are trying rekindle the dead literary fire. The government systems are not doing to revive the literary arts terrain of the country, improve readership culture, education literature sector and restore dignity to lives of writers and the book industry. We have few organizations that are rising at least to bandage scars of our failure and are trying their best during these dark days that include LitFest Harare founded by great poet Chirikure Chirikure, now t have a full year Calendar and their program covers all provinces in the country. British Council Zimbabwe does a number of poetry readings and literary arts activities. Pamberi Trust is also doing lineups of Poetry Slams and Literary Arts Culture Workshops in Harare and Mutare. The Zimbabwe Germany Society continues to host a number of book launches, discussions and readings. The only remaining sound and established publishing house is WEAVER PRESS owned by Writer Publisher and Editor Irene Staunton. A lot of budding writers has since ventured into self-publishing. Times are bad.
You have spoken up against injustice and dictatorship in your country.
Have there been any threats on your life because of this? I would think this would make you a target. Have you known any artist that have disappeared or been killed?
It is a common norm that in any African country if you speak truth to political power and justice to autocracy or speak human rights to the dictatorship, you become a target and usually you have to take an option of living in exile or you to silence yourself before you get silenced. The Zimbabwean system does not take Arts Activists and Human Rights Defenders lightly, a lot of mechanism are always put in place to track, to silence, to threaten or imprisoning dissenting voices. Yes I became a target, I was attacked by an electric gadget set in my sleeping house on the 4th of December 2016 that was followed by incessant tracking and stalking as well as threats, I changed places for more than 4 times in 3 months and then I decided to leave. It’s not easy to be a VOICE OF THE PEOPLE in my country and other countries we know. It calls for boldness, bravery and resilience. It is public knowledge that Itai Dzamara, a stauchy human rights defender, writer, journalist disappeared after a lot of one man demonstration against the late President Mugabes regime, he wanted the president to resign, those who witnessed his abduction say he was bundled in a number plateless vehicle and he was never seen again. The Zimbabwe Human Rights have to do a beat to find out about this comrade. Alas nothing up to now Many dissenting voices died during the genocidal 2008 elections including journalists and activists. But we need to continue to speak hard truth to corrupt systems that thrive on abusing the POVO through cheap propaganda laced doctrines and systems that do not respect human rights and violate the living rights of its own people. Poor and bad governance, the value of our currency, the value of banks, the dignity of our voters, the integrity of our people is lost completely, many people live like scavengers. And we speak still and write still. Time shall come and Time heals more calamine lotion or paracetamol.
Being a voice for the innocent is vital. When did you become aware of what was going on in your country and speaking up against it? and with your writing?
After the death of JOSHUA Nkomo, Father Zimbabwe in 1999, Zimbabwe fell into bad times. Our leadership used land invasion gig not as way to redeem the people of their hunger to land and natural resources. Alas the Mugabes regimes weapon to remain in power and land issue was handled badly. They were a lot abnormalities, a lot of killings, displacements. Political charlatans took advantage to loot the land and everything it. That created a lot of diplomatic gaffes, we lost international trust, friendships and important trade deals due to political leadership and lack of sound domestic affairs management. The economy crumbled, corruption became rampant, we suffered a lot of diseases including cholera and other deadly endemics, typhoid ,dysentery and HIV/AIDS, while the masses were suffering leadership was globetrotting, squandering the few revenue resources of the country, hoarding cars and building Mansions home and abroad. Zimbabwe became unbankable. VOICES OF REASON were maimed and silenced, human rights abused, activists imprisoned, we were not a loud to speak. I wrote protest and resistance poetry to international journals since 2006, the system didn’t get a whiff of it that time but with time due to the essence and growth of diverse digital media platforms, I suspect and am sure they found my writings and literary arts activism activities were discovered with such, you are automatically dubbed enemy of the state. Even now the Zimbabwean economy requires a miracle to survive, 80 percent of the people are suffering under the yoke of economic malaise and the bondage of political decadence, we have to work hard to return to the bread basket of Africa status. The national leadership need to put stern measures on corruption, money laundering and oil barons. Many economic saboteurs are walking free, while masses are writhing under the yoke of poverty and bondage of perjury. if we are not careful, we slithering into becoming Banana or Cassava Republic.
Have you tried to have another country help you with political exile?
I have a lot of Comrade Supporters locally and abroad and just recently I received a six months Freedom of Speech Scholarship from the Germany PEN through their Foundation of Free Speech and Writers in Exile Program. I want to pass my profound and heart felt thank you to my Literary Arts Activism Partner Jamie Dedes, the Founder of Bezine Arts and Humanities as well as The POET A DAY Webzine has been and she is tirelessly working hard to find me safe harbor on top of that I got a lot of goodwill and care from a number of organizations, including Artists at Risk Connection, Free-muse. I thank Thomas Block and the International HUMAN RIGHTS Art Festival for appointing the inaugural international Fellow me in 2019 that was a great eye opener and a wonderful opportunity for me. Above, I would like thank my illustrious publisher of the book A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT, Mwanaka Media Publishing led by the ICONIC Tendai Rinos Mwanaka. I salute great goodwill from comrades around the world and Africa, some chipped in with internet bills, accommodation bills, traveling and other upkeep bills. I thank you all supporters, friends and comrades. Brother Keepers Beatrice Othieno Ahere, Samuella Conteh, Omwa Ombara, Nancy Ndeke, Tracy Yvonne Breazile, Elke Lange, Munia Khan, Corina Ravenscraft, Rebecca Robinson, Martina Mwanza, Robson Shoes Lambada, July Westhale, publishers of journals, Zines and reviews. A shout to Comrade Nsah Mala.and more comrades. The issue of my exile stay is in pipeline. A big shout to the Poetry Chef Comrade Dr. Michael Dickel. Aluta Continua, Together We Rise
Discuss “Letter to the President?”
A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT is experimental writing in style combined with the hard truth against super power supremacy, African dictatorship regimes. It is a poetic whip to the unrepentant pseudo revolutionaries rotting the state with corruption to the core, the poetic verses in there spit into the remorseless fat cats, big chefs sleeping during parliamentary sessions and sometimes wield fist fights like pick pocketers while masses are rotting with disease and hunger. It is a weapon of mass instruction, was written as a chronicle of political, economic decadent in my country first and other countries. It speaks against xenophobia, Afrophobia. It a story of the people and for the people sharply angling on the unbalanced state of the world. It is chlorine to clean murky waters of economic malaise and disinfect the country from the dirty mud of political decadence. We fear to be killed when we say the truth but I have decided contain my fears and bravery in a book form. This collection itself is different in delivery, presentation and scope. It is a scholarship of global and African political patterns, a social justice commentary and insignia of freedom of expression while we fail to enjoy freedom after expression. I suffered threats and scurry stalking in Zambia after the launch of A Letter to the President, it tells you our political elites are still in fear of the voices that chronicle and tell the truth to power, it gives you a clear indication that democracy is just a word easily spoken but not acted. Actors of democracy are scarce. I implore political science students and those studying political histories, Arts and humanities to graze this my nerve shredding poetry collection, Yes, the verbatim and the vibe in there is scurry but you know truth is always scurry, few people wants the truth. A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT is a fusion of spoken word and page poetry, influenced by the hardships we experienced with our parents after independence and how they walk to rallies to wait for a politician who will bring them a 2kg of rice after a full day of scorching sun and rumbling stomachs and after those daunting rallies, the politician will disappear into the clouds with a furnished and secured helicopter while masses walk for distances back home empty handed but armed with fake promises, anger and slogan smacked faces. A Letter to the President talks to the president to repent, any president, every president who is not doing the right thing. It seeks leadership to rethink, to restart, to reform, like in Zimbabwe we need corruption top stop ASAP, we need the worker to be restored his/her dignity, we need cash barons, oil barons and killers of the economy to nabbed, we want a robust approach to the governing of the country, A leadership that respect artistic voices, human rights defenders and other actors of positive activism, let the country restore the integrity of the masses, people have suffered for long time now. A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT.
Recently, there has been an uprising and many have been shot while protesting. There has been an invasion of privacy, skyrocketing prices, a strike, human rights violations, and hunger. How do you inspire hope for your country with your writing?
My country has been in the economic intensive care for the past twenty years now and people have suffered enough and has some people lost lives in the process. My writings continue to give courage to the masses, to invoke dialogue but now our people no longer read as much, most of them are busy hunting for food and other upkeep materials. Readership culture has fallen apart. Things have fallen apart, but I want to assure you, one thing, Zimbabweans are a resilient humanity, they thrive in this economic struggle. It pains me to see masses scavenging for dear life in other countries while the economic wealth is enjoyed by the few. It stinks really. I have written a lot of new poems. And I have developed a new writing style through social media platforms reading communities are reading through and there is some feedback as well. So even so, we write still, we read still, we speak still, Time heals and Freedom from Corruption and politically caused poverty shall end. I am also completing a Chapbook on my nasty experiences during COVID 19 lockdowns and the farce of exile. A lot of my writings is froth for change, freedom, resistance and resilience on digital thickets across the globe.
You are the creative director of Girl Child Creativity and Festival. Can you share with the readers what this is.
Girl child creativity is a project designed to mitigate under-representation and unbalanced participation of young female writers/poets in areas of creative writing, literature, literacy and poetry performance development. It further enhances the ability of the girl child to develop herself mentally - the motto is: freedom of mental media air waves for community development. A creative nation is a developed nation. The project featured a lot of writers and arts activities in schools, out of school communities and in colleges, we also partnered with the 100 thousand poets for change global founded by Michael ROTHENBURG to hold the first of its kind GirlCHILD talent Festival in 2013 and 2014. We have produced and inspired great talent that is practicing its chores across Africa and the world, we drilled talent in more than 20 schools and this project now has involved into the now most popular WOMAWORDS LITERARY PRESS to continue further the empowerment sister’s creative energies through digital spaces and platforms. We aim to feature more than a 1000 artists, writers, leaders and activists from Africa and abroad. We believe that every revolution begins with WORD.
Talk about being curator for “Brave Voices Poetry Journal.” When did you start this?
When I got into exile, I thought it was and is vital to continue the struggle in a different way, to start a virtual program that would strengthen the literary activism revolution that I had already lit. So I started the platform online on Facebook through the 100 Thousand Poets for Zimbabwe an affiliate to the Zimbabwe We Want Poetry Campaign and 100 Thousand Poets for Change Global. The project got a wide response from many young voices in Zimbabwe, Africa and abroad, so I began compiling poetry by brave voices every fortnight that we then sent to Tuck Magazine in Canada for archiving, I had then negotiated a content archiving deal with Michael Val Tuck, the Founder of Tuck Magazine. Sometime in December 2018, the Brave Voices became a full-fledged and a globally known activity by young voices that we later hosted on MIOMBOPUBLISHING another online space I founded and is also archiving TIME OF THE POET DIGITAL SERIES with most popular offing SECOND NAME OF EARTH IS PEACE, #GLOBAL CALL FOR PEACE PROJECT that saw the featuring of more than 50 poets from around the globe. We have produced so far more than 60 issues of BRAVE VOICES POETRY JOURNAL since inception and the voices are strong and are shaking the walls of JERICHO.
For Womawords, you interview many women poets giving them a voice and a place to talk about their work. I learned about many new writers because of this site. How have these writers enriched your life? What have you learned by these interviews?
It is a beautiful project I founded in 2019 through my Fellowship with the International Human Rights Art Festival. I wanted to use the quarterly grant I got from the IHRAF Fellowship to do something different. I found it worth some to involve girlchild creativity into WOMAWORDS LITERARY PRESS. Yes the interviews and prolific writings abound has influenced my career in a positive way, I have learnt whipping out copy or manuscripts, I am still learning, learning is a process is not event, beating and working according to deadlines, to be true in everything I do and respect women artists and especially those who have with themselves the zeal in them to change the world, to shape their communities in a very different, those see their voices bringing freedom and success promise. The project has taught me patience and communication etiquette and more advanced creative skills. I have since improved in my work presentation, writing and delivery, it’s a beautiful process as much it requires the tenacity, due diligence and resilience.
You have written articles for Cultural Weekly. What article stands out with you and why?
Cultural Weekly is a great literary experience and I thank fellow writer and Curator Adam Leizipeg at Cultural Weekly for affording me the golden opportunity to be read widely, it’s heartening in a positive way to see your writings read by people across the world. I am excited and humbled that you also passed through my column at Cultural Weekly. These are some of the outstanding articles of mine at Cultural Weekly
1. Everything Remembers in Michael Dickel’s Nothing Remembers, a critical review.
2.Talking in Poetic Tongues.
3). Jongwe’s Fist: Mugabe and His Magic of Paradox
4. POETIVISM, a new art of resistance in Zimbabwe. Other articles are also good but it depends on the angle and theme of any given work.
In 2020, you received the Freedom of Speech Literary Activism Culture Fellow at PEN-Deutschland, Germany, Poet in Residence at the Fictional Café. Congratulations to you. What has this experience been like?
I am greatly humbled and of course excited when afforded an opportunity a scholarship/fellowship to write, to express and to weild the pen, a weapon of mass instruction. Its strengthens me, it cultivates, it evokes the poetic tiger in me. It settles in me the promise to remain defending, speaking for the voiceless and my people through literary arts activism. It is greatly important to have more organizations that supports writers in exile, writers at risk, free speech, artists at risk and defenders. I want to take this wonderful opportunity to thank the Vice President of Writers in Exile PEN-Zentrum Deutschland Leander Sukov, the Writers in Exile Commissioner, the Writers in Exile Project Head Sandra Weires-Guia and the whole PEN-Zentrum Deutschland board for affording me an opportunity to continue defending rights with free speech And literary arts activism with great support. It humbles me greatly, the struggle continues we write still. Yes the Fictional Café, I am working with Jack B Rochester, the Baristas and the editorial team, they have created my page as their Poet in residence. I have read submissions sometime last where I helped to make choices on the publication, yes of course for you to get the Poet IN RESIDENCE role, you have to be outstanding and a refined poetry barista. Its great taking part in great literary initiatives for they continue shape us and hone our career. I thank you greatly,
Mbizo Chirasha
Interview with DeWitt Henry by Betsy Levinson
Who inspired you to write essays?
I began by writing realist fiction inspired by Richard Yates; then narrative memoir inspired by Frank Conroy, where I dramatized “about-ness” and was sometimes misread as being “too personal.” In my collection SAFE SUICIDE: NARRATIVES, ESSAYS, AND MEDITATIONS, I started using central symbols or topics as a kind of lattice that framed emotions, such as my essay on “Gravity,” which was partly inspired by Tim O’Brien’s device of listing the physical weight of things carried by soldiers in order to describe their moral and spiritual baggage. I also loved Thoreau’s way in WALDEN of leading readers to explore a topic such as “Economy.” I pushed this lattice idea still farther in my new collection, SWEET MARJORAM: NOTES AND ESSAYS. I focus on laden moral topics—topics that seem at best tired, and at worst empty in the era of Trump. The idea of human dignity, for instance, as we debate assisted suicide, “the right to choose,” or immigration policies. The idea of empathy (“surrounded by and blessed by larger hearts than my own,” I write, “I wonder if I suffer from ‘empathy deficiency disorder’…I hang up on charity calls”). I wonder about dreams, American and otherwise. The idea of silence. The ideas of privilege and oppression (“Aesthetic distance…where readers have no chance to intervene, is different from social distance, where…in small acts and large, we can reject oppression and take our place in a braver, more generous world”). The mysteries of conscience. Of courage. I keep my reflections brief, associational and fragmentary, more like poems. My models became Hamlet’s soliloquies as well as Stephen Dedalus’s stream of consciousness and the rambling associations of Montaigne’s essays. Half-mocking conventional form, I invented a form, where the fun is in “the act of the mind finding what will suffice.” I do my best to weigh our beliefs and our collective wisdoms against both personal example and what I can learn and absorb from language, imagination, and the findings and theories of science. I feel that I am an average, sentient, thoughtful person in a universe of human expertise beyond my grasp, an expertise that merges with mystery. I try to be well-informed. I weigh the dialectics and obligations, and I’m responsible for choices. I hope I lead the reader to deliberate and choose also; and to find fun, surprise, and beauty in the process.
When did you know you wanted to do it for a living?
At 8, I wanted to be a G-man; at ten, an executive like my father. At twelve a newspaper man and printer, like Ben Franklin. I was divided in my senior year of high school between working for a printing company and going to college. I chose college, where my writing was praised, I studied English literature, and edited the college literary magazine for three years. If there were no draft, I may have pursued a New York career in magazine publishing for livelihood; as it was, I continued on to graduate school in English, confident that I would find a teaching job, but when I finished my PhD, there was a depression in the humanities. I taught composition as an adjunct, worked on a novel, started Ploughshares fifty years ago as a volunteer with other writers in The Plough and Stars, a local pub, married a Head Start teacher, built up the magazine and lived on grants, until I was hired full-time at Emerson in 1982. I wrote and edited for love, never for a living.
Who or what influences your work now?
Shakespeare, forever. But the wired media has also offered me, now in my seventies, a seemingly infinite store of references. In addition, I have renewed access to my print library. After emptying my Emerson office, I built walls of bookshelves at home. Many of my books had been boxed for storage, now they faced me like forgotten friends. As I free-associated on a given topic, I could revisit memorable authors and relate their meanings to the topic and my life. I could follow my whims and instincts. That was freeing, outside of classroom teaching. It may also have grown from my earlier editing of anthologies and from the editorial dialectics of Ploughshares. I feel some affinity with David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010). I enjoy the collage approach that Shields invoked, both in poetry and prose, as well as his own mental sprezzatura. Since finishing SWEET MARJORAM, I’ve gravitated towards writing poems-like-essays rather than the other way around. My models have been Eliot, Frost and Lowell, and the work of friends and colleagues including John Skoyles, Bill Knott, Thomas Lux, Joyce Peseroff, Gail Mazur, Seamus Heaney, and many others from my Ploughshares years.
What are the challenges and joys of editing an online website/press?
At best, online magazines are communities of far-flung readers, writers, influencers, and editors. One edits, of course, at home, on a screen, keeping hours at will. The pleasure is always discovery, and the mission of widening the tunnel vision of trade publishing and culture. The economics and immediacy of online publishing widens opportunity for both readers and writers. There are many niches and room for innovation. Novelist Sandra Tyler began The Woven Tale Press ( https://www.thewoventalepress.net/about-3/ ) as a monthly magazine that is at once a literary journal and an art publication, with full-color graphics. She began it in 2013, and once long ago having been my intern at Ploughshares, she asked me on as a contributing editor in 2016. The format, quality, and professionalism caught my imagination and I’ve worked on the prose side of it ever since. At first I wrote a regular column where I reviewed online resource sites for writers, ranging from places to publish to places to learn about editors and agents or to find model writers’ websites. Since 2018, I’ve served as Prose Editor and enjoyed the variety and excellence of unsolicited submissions, which we respond to within a few weeks. The discoveries of writers new to me is my greatest joy, along with watching our community and readership grow.
Bury Me in the Sky by Sara Comito
Nixes Mate Books, March 2020
Review by Anne Elezabeth Pluto
May 8, 2020
Sara Comito’s debut collection invites the reader into a world divided into five spaces, where we are the mosquito in the amber looking out from the beautiful but permanent line joining life and death.
The pull of each poem’s magnificent lines can be summed up in her poem “A Charming Rub”:
Even in its mating does a wolf
know the taste of foal-
newly standing, newly felled.
Each poem reminds us of this brutal dichotomy – an alchemical marriage in nature that is always life and death. In the “In Tidal”: the horizon curves dizzingly for our floating – and we float through the poems as “Iodine” is the heaviest element and “Spill” where Comito is heir to Elizabeth Bishop: seeing the clown grimace of grouper. It is an unexpected catch, the biggest fish I’ve ever had on.
Comito’s book is a “catch” – these are the poems to read as we move through social distancing, quarantine, and uncertainty of COVID 19. We are: in cobalt twilight the whole, world wants to scream – are you touched or just simple. She demands in “Vengeance”:
I want
your tears
as verses
useless
as semen
spent
in grass.
Comito’s poems are lessons for the reader. We learn in “Permission to Expand” :
If you can work on your posture – you can work
on anything
In “The Flea Market Sells Our Sacred Origins From Under Us” we learn that our sacred origins disappear in the preposterous liquidations of human epoch. Exactly where we are now.
In “If Blake Had Only Known” we learn that Sundardan Tigers – too much salt in the diet has unpredictable effects. The tigers burn bright and eat humans.
In “Religion at the City Pier”:
Some things get bigger over time, others shrink with the
Evolution. Some just sag under the surface for finding.
In “Night in the Tropics” we feel the heat and distance of nature – see what humans have built to disturb the alchemical balance.
High rises spring up
like teeth – as we
finally inhale –
false mountains
and a moon drips
off the page.
Comito’s images drip off the page and stay with us. Ever present are the relationships between “felled” objects – In “Overdone”
The speaker address the other:
You were felled thing too
And I was the bereaved.
In “Microscopic” the speaker allows us into their young self – haunted by everything antediluvian:
everything that lived still a coelacanth
until one pulls one up
what to ask of history
when it looks you in the eye?
What are we asking if history now in the age of new born plagues –
Dust dances like a devil.
It always does.
In the title poem “Bury me in the Sky” we slide backwards –
Hold tight to the dream
With the balled fists
Of an infant. Prayer flag tatter
As bald griffons in search
Of those things earth
Loves to offer sky – life
That fed now feeds
And is carried as mudra.
Perhaps the mudra which is her poem “Dedication”:
For dead dogs
and stolen children
a special heaven
with rubber balls
and each other.
In the last section, Sargasso, the book spirals down, standing us on our heads in “Pristine Creature”
The edge of a bridge
carries up the rain
a slate tombstone to the sky.
In the poem “Sargasso” the portal becomes stronger:
My heart is a shadows of clouds
tin vapors hiding in the sun.
My heart is horizon
a peeling back of the skin of day.
…
You are neither destination nor origin
but Sargasso – a swirling eye of ocean,
that confounds the efforts
of all my sweating, displaced natives.
The dead keep returning and we must welcome them, in “Husk of a Whale”
I loved you like a war zone in haunted,
full of unknowing dead. A leviathan
Isn’t supposed to die: get big as a 16-wheeler
And you set an example. Rivers traverse
counties inlaid by slavery and ill-financed
railroads; the tracks still birth flowers
Of bees…
…its bell consigned to rust, the bones
of its shadows mined like phosphate grants
purchase on shifting sand….
Beaches, a husk of whale, once
The fossils tell us, they were mammoths.
The fossils the key; the reader must be aware of the proof of the alchemical marriage -the actual mosquito in the amber.
In “Dark Island Landing” we go back to the antediluvian past -
In the forest edge dark
The god screeches.
the frogs
the night lilies
the open throated
children to the suckling sky
Expertly, in her final poem – “All There Is” Comito, a beekeeper, bring us back to the beginning of the book. Her first poem “Sweet Formincation”:
if there’s poetry in this sacking
it’s food meant for one queen has
at least gone to another.
Her final poem “All There Is”:
Ruin your eyes
it always comes back to the mother
somehow.
We are not equipped to
deal with speeding trains, that step
off the platform always on skirting
of two unknowns.
The two queens – one must leave – the mating wolf and her thoughts, her mouth tasting newly felled foal. And, the mare, the mother who knows that terrible scene that may come.
The relief of meeting with something
solid. Let them step over my fetal
form. All the subway police need to know.
here is all there is.
Bury me in the Sky is a compelling haunting book. Nature, history, geography, life, and death. All of it is precious; perhaps now more than ever.
Cervena Barva Press Staff
Editor & Publisher: Gloria Mindock
International Editor: Flavia Cosma
Contributing Editor: Andrey Gritsman
Contributing Editor: Helene Cardona
Contributing Editor: Juri Talvet (Estonia)
Interviewer: Karen Friedland
Fictions Reviewer & Publicity: Renuka Raghavan
Poetry Review: Miriam O’Neal
Poetry Review: Gene Barry (Ireland)
Poetry Review: Annie Pluto
Poetry Review: Christopher O’Reilley
CERVENA BARVA PRESS NEWSLETTER
Gloria Mindock, Editor
Issue No. 99 April, 2020
Email: editor@cervenabarvapress.com
Website: Cervena Barva Press
Bookstore: The Lost Bookshelf
Editorial
April, 2020 Cervena Barva Press Newsletter
Happy National Poetry Month!
This month is very special because Cervena Barva Press is 15 years old!!! I can't believe it!!! It has been a wonderful 15 years and the press has brought so many wonderful people into my life from all over the world. This is just the best! A very special shout out goes to the writing community in this area. What a wonderful group of writers and artists. I think that no one else in the United States has what we have here. I am grateful every day that I live here!
Since I had to cancel the party for our anniversary, I decided to wait until next year when the press turns 16. Then there will be a Sweet Sixteen party!!!! By then, hopefully there will be a vaccine for Covid-19 and life will not turn upside down for the world. I still can't believe that we all are facing a Pandemic at this time. It is so sad. So many dead. It is difficult to grasp. Continue to be safe everyone!
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who donated to the press during this Corona Virus crisis. I am so touched by all the donations and kindness I received from so many. It means so much to me. Thank you!!!! The survival of the press and bookstore is so important to me. Our sales have been zero and with the bookstore closed, we are in survival mode. All events will be cancelled for May too. Three months with our space in the Armory closed is rough.
A huge thank you to everyone who has donated books to the bookstore. It is such a big help, and I am so very grateful. When the store is open again, you must come in and visit. So many books to check out. You will love it! There are so many wonderful friends of Cervena Barva Press and The Lost bookshelf.
Thank you to the healthcare workers, first responders, volunteers, doctors, nurses, National Guard, unsung heroes, restaurant workers, counselors, Council of Aging, teachers, respiratory therapists, and the public who is out there helping those who need it. You all are heroes and angels. If I forgot any specific group, you are thanked. Not meant to be forgotten!
Cervena Barva Press May Newsletter, 2020
Welcome to the May Newsletter. Next month, there will be virtual readings by Cervena Barva Press. Two readings this summer are sponsored by Tipp City Public Library in Ohio. Thank you to Marc Zegans (The Snow Dead, Cervena Barva Press, 2020) for putting me in touch with the librarian in Tipp City. I am so excited about all the readings that are going to happen. Stay tuned.
Interviewed this month are Mbizo Chirasa and DeWitt Henry
Bill and I are still busy working on putting the used books online in The Lost Bookshelf. It is a slow process but we are working on it.
Interview with Mbizo Chirasa by Gloria Mindock
I am so happy to bring you this interview from Zimbabwe. Mbizo speaks out about his country, fighting for change, and social justice. Writing can make a difference. Mbizo is brave and courageous. I am honored to interview him.
When did you first start writing?
I began writing in the late primary school period. I was in Grade six at Zvegona Primary School. My class teacher was literally blessed. He loved reading and arts. Mr. Basvi headed our school drama club. I was a staunch member and organizer of that sterling youthful drama club. You know we lived in dust laden ,poverty ridden rural settings and newspapers were a luxury to our community lot .Major things tucked in most parents mind was food supplies ,planting seasons, Mugabe rallies ,traditional ceremonies and school uniforms. Fortunately my teacher brought me new and old newspaper every time he went to the nearby district town of Zvishavane. I grazed through acres of stories in those papers like a ravenous hyena. I swigged the beverages of political vibe accompanied with a refreshment of humor on entertainment and court sections of Gweru Times and Ziana News. Literary insignia was automatically glued on my mental plaque and my DNA got dipped in poetic vibe. My father shaped readership culture, he taught me a lot of grammatical signals at a very tender age. Despite living in squalid rural settings. I romanced and slept with any form of reading on my lap, whenever I was angry, I would run into a book to escape the devil of anger and stress. I wrote my first poem based on ENVIROMENTAL issues on the demise of vegetation through deforestation with afforestation. My first great recital was at a District World Environmental Day Celebrations. I won the heart of then Zvishavane District Education Officer Hlambelo, who then decided to help I look after his cattle and ploughed fields during holidays I became a young shepherd in the pastures and terrains of Ngomeyabani every school holiday. I read voraciously while manning the large head of the cattle. After holidays owned by the District Education Officer. And he had large library of books and newspapers. When it was back to school time, he would buy me me new uniforms, shoes and other school paraphernalia. That motivated me greatly. The griot in me grew rapidly, I read Animal Farm and Mayor of Casterbridge. I got very much inspired and then followed Things Fall Apart and The River Between as well as Crime and Punishment by a great Russian author, Interesting literature. I was baptized into the into the poetic dominion when Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Jack Mapanje, Musayemura Zimunya, Dambudzo Marechera And the Metaphysics, John Donne, Keats and Yeats, Emily Dickson and the writing expedition though feeble, unnoticed but growing. In MID 1996 WHEN I was worked Zimbabwe’s former Ambassador to Yugoslavia, KD Manyika in Gweru third largest city of Zimbabwe in the Midlands Province, I multitasked as a cattle herder in the large paddock, gardening and manning fowl runs ,the daily rhythm accompanied with these humble but great responsibilities is amazing. These duties taught me and shaped my being a lot in life. Every time when I go delivering in city shops, I would pass through Gweru Times dropping my Letter to the Editor or Opinion pieces. I was overjoyed and got a column. Thanks to the great Dukes Mwanaka, the then Editor of Gweru Times and Oliver Shambira, the then Deputy Editor. Interesting years. Humble beginnings. The Manyika family had a more bigger library, every I swept and dusted the library, I would take volumes of Victorian Poetry. I was introduced to Shakespeare Writings, Ts Elliot, DH Lawrence and I also grazed through the Canterbury Tales. A more over my village carried with it a poetic rhythm, I was rondavels when growing sat the edges of a Dayataya Mountains adjacent to Zvagona hills. I enjoyed the beauty of mist clad Dayataya, birds sang incessantly as if responding to the echoes of ever yelping baboons were a common feature in our land. Monkeys Facebooked on tree branches like rock rabbits jiving to the discord of laughing hyenas as wild hens quacked tenor in synch to the soprano of Mutorahuku stream while our mothers with the armed with zeal and loyalty to their homestead thrashing and grinding millet in wood mortars to brew the beloved village beverage, traditional beer. Drunks, scumbags and talented singers drank the brew to the dregs, their stupor griped hymns and songs carried succulent rhythm and fat meanings. The accompaniment of my the village rhythm, reading culture and stories of my father carved a griot in me as much global views and political affairs are other ingredients to the balanced of my writing career. The rest is now history.
Who are the biggest influences in your life?
My father was a great storyteller. He told me many stories about Zululand, Clansmen stories, African cultural anthropologies, detailed histories of the world. We read an English and Shona novel every evening before sleeping. So, the art of story telling stories was carved into my heart cave long time ago, during my teething ages. Poetry was injected into my DNA like BCG and I became a poem myself and later a poet. I believe every poet is a living poem before he becomes a poet. I am influenced by the village rhythm, the chirruping of small birds over soot- clad rondavels, the soprano of doves as they imitate angels of dawn towards sunrise. The footsteps of the sun as gigantic rays walk over horizons in a triumphant march like battalions to war. I cherish to see mountains dressed in grey gowns of mist and pastures donning the heavy green like military Jackets, the baritone sound of yelping baboons on the fontanel of our hills of home, Facebooking of monkeys on top of three canopies, the jiving of rock rabbits, the beat of rain thunder, the stitch of lightning bolts on our gyrating earth. I love the smell of cow under milk, the scent of grass soot dangling on rondavel roofs inside out. The ceremonial and traditional village songs are part of the catalytic influences to my writing, poetry and griot career. As I carried my bag sagging with traditional hymns, village rhythms and the scent of village smoke, I got into the city where life is a competition, I learnt the language of hustle and bustle in Harare, the city of no sleep. I got a lot to write about, hermits vomiting the snort of illicit beer remains on street pavements without restraint, harlots mad chasing potbellied sex imbeciles in the thickets of night, fake prophets cheating and raping their miracle hungry clue -less congregants. Politicians preaching peace during daylight and kill at night. Propaganda songs rattling from impoverished and congested suburbs were voters feed on plain porridge and stale bread. And even after voting to the from resounding victory of the ruling regime, beggars making more children despite the famishing challenges of hard rock city life. Sisters pimping their dignity for political party positions and the next in dingy brothels. slogan chants, gun shots and baby dumping episodes, Big chinned political imbeciles promising famished youth vast tracks of land later to dump them after rewarding them with drugs and alcohol. Presidential motorcade swirling dust into the face of pedestrians queuing for meal-mealie. As I indicated, the journey to maturation is trailblazing festooned by resilience, faith, dedication and goal getting. I read a lot of books from crime, fairy tales, fantasy, journalistic, biblical and several African anthropological texts. I am influenced by African griots in South Africa West Africa. The former Zimbabwe International book fair was a great exhibition of talents, so I met several WRITERS including the author of Cows of Shambati Taban Liyo Long. I shared a performance poetry stage with Mutabaruka and other great names. The Zimbabwe media shaped and influenced me greatly for they supported me through profiling articles and they followed my performances with great literary zeal. By the way I began as a spoken word poet, a griot and then I sort to expand my wings for global market reach, thus why me and you are chatting now. It has a been a great but an arduous journey. Decades of washing in sweat and bathing in salt tears. While in Harare, I worked alongside the great Charles Mungoshi, Tsitsi, Dangaembwa, David Mungoshi, Memory Chirere, Dudziro Nhengu, Shimmer Chinodya and many great voices. I salute.
What is the writing community like in Zimbabwe?
We have abundant talent. Talent is like a pot of stew puffing out the scent of goat meat, we are a country blessed with Protest poets, griots and underground poets as well as revolutionary poets. We boast of great writers and doyens of literature. A lot have received prestigious awards home and abroad. The likes of Dambudzo Charles Marechera, author of House of Hunger won the Prestigious Guardian Prize in the early 80s. Charles Mungoshi, storytelling meastro won the Commonwealth Prize with his great Novel Waiting of the Rain. Tsitsi Dangarembwa won scholarships home and abroad with her first classical Nervous Conditions. Shimmer Chinodya won Visiting Writer Program at a prestigious Lewis Clark University in USA and also won NOMA award with his thriller Harvest of Thorns. These are some of our acclaimed writing voices of Zimbabwe. We have a whole rising writers also doing well with their new modern styles to mention Brian Chikwava, the winner of 2005 Caine Prize with his captivating narrative Seventh Street Alchemy, Memory Chirere and Writer Publisher Ignatius Mabasa, with his famous Shona Novel Mapenzi rocking the world and included as one of Africas 100 Best Books. Not to be outdone is Chirikure Chirikure, our spokenword poetry maestro. Today the writing and literary arts community has fallen into dark times. Everything is upside down, publishing houses have since closed shop, there is rampant pirating of books and writers are greatly impoverished and their reputation has gone to the dogs. I can say writers and few remaining organizations are trying rekindle the dead literary fire. The government systems are not doing to revive the literary arts terrain of the country, improve readership culture, education literature sector and restore dignity to lives of writers and the book industry. We have few organizations that are rising at least to bandage scars of our failure and are trying their best during these dark days that include LitFest Harare founded by great poet Chirikure Chirikure, now t have a full year Calendar and their program covers all provinces in the country. British Council Zimbabwe does a number of poetry readings and literary arts activities. Pamberi Trust is also doing lineups of Poetry Slams and Literary Arts Culture Workshops in Harare and Mutare. The Zimbabwe Germany Society continues to host a number of book launches, discussions and readings. The only remaining sound and established publishing house is WEAVER PRESS owned by Writer Publisher and Editor Irene Staunton. A lot of budding writers has since ventured into self-publishing. Times are bad.
You have spoken up against injustice and dictatorship in your country.
Have there been any threats on your life because of this? I would think this would make you a target. Have you known any artist that have disappeared or been killed?
It is a common norm that in any African country if you speak truth to political power and justice to autocracy or speak human rights to the dictatorship, you become a target and usually you have to take an option of living in exile or you to silence yourself before you get silenced. The Zimbabwean system does not take Arts Activists and Human Rights Defenders lightly, a lot of mechanism are always put in place to track, to silence, to threaten or imprisoning dissenting voices. Yes I became a target, I was attacked by an electric gadget set in my sleeping house on the 4th of December 2016 that was followed by incessant tracking and stalking as well as threats, I changed places for more than 4 times in 3 months and then I decided to leave. It’s not easy to be a VOICE OF THE PEOPLE in my country and other countries we know. It calls for boldness, bravery and resilience. It is public knowledge that Itai Dzamara, a stauchy human rights defender, writer, journalist disappeared after a lot of one man demonstration against the late President Mugabes regime, he wanted the president to resign, those who witnessed his abduction say he was bundled in a number plateless vehicle and he was never seen again. The Zimbabwe Human Rights have to do a beat to find out about this comrade. Alas nothing up to now Many dissenting voices died during the genocidal 2008 elections including journalists and activists. But we need to continue to speak hard truth to corrupt systems that thrive on abusing the POVO through cheap propaganda laced doctrines and systems that do not respect human rights and violate the living rights of its own people. Poor and bad governance, the value of our currency, the value of banks, the dignity of our voters, the integrity of our people is lost completely, many people live like scavengers. And we speak still and write still. Time shall come and Time heals more calamine lotion or paracetamol.
Being a voice for the innocent is vital. When did you become aware of what was going on in your country and speaking up against it? and with your writing?
After the death of JOSHUA Nkomo, Father Zimbabwe in 1999, Zimbabwe fell into bad times. Our leadership used land invasion gig not as way to redeem the people of their hunger to land and natural resources. Alas the Mugabes regimes weapon to remain in power and land issue was handled badly. They were a lot abnormalities, a lot of killings, displacements. Political charlatans took advantage to loot the land and everything it. That created a lot of diplomatic gaffes, we lost international trust, friendships and important trade deals due to political leadership and lack of sound domestic affairs management. The economy crumbled, corruption became rampant, we suffered a lot of diseases including cholera and other deadly endemics, typhoid ,dysentery and HIV/AIDS, while the masses were suffering leadership was globetrotting, squandering the few revenue resources of the country, hoarding cars and building Mansions home and abroad. Zimbabwe became unbankable. VOICES OF REASON were maimed and silenced, human rights abused, activists imprisoned, we were not a loud to speak. I wrote protest and resistance poetry to international journals since 2006, the system didn’t get a whiff of it that time but with time due to the essence and growth of diverse digital media platforms, I suspect and am sure they found my writings and literary arts activism activities were discovered with such, you are automatically dubbed enemy of the state. Even now the Zimbabwean economy requires a miracle to survive, 80 percent of the people are suffering under the yoke of economic malaise and the bondage of political decadence, we have to work hard to return to the bread basket of Africa status. The national leadership need to put stern measures on corruption, money laundering and oil barons. Many economic saboteurs are walking free, while masses are writhing under the yoke of poverty and bondage of perjury. if we are not careful, we slithering into becoming Banana or Cassava Republic.
Have you tried to have another country help you with political exile?
I have a lot of Comrade Supporters locally and abroad and just recently I received a six months Freedom of Speech Scholarship from the Germany PEN through their Foundation of Free Speech and Writers in Exile Program. I want to pass my profound and heart felt thank you to my Literary Arts Activism Partner Jamie Dedes, the Founder of Bezine Arts and Humanities as well as The POET A DAY Webzine has been and she is tirelessly working hard to find me safe harbor on top of that I got a lot of goodwill and care from a number of organizations, including Artists at Risk Connection, Free-muse. I thank Thomas Block and the International HUMAN RIGHTS Art Festival for appointing the inaugural international Fellow me in 2019 that was a great eye opener and a wonderful opportunity for me. Above, I would like thank my illustrious publisher of the book A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT, Mwanaka Media Publishing led by the ICONIC Tendai Rinos Mwanaka. I salute great goodwill from comrades around the world and Africa, some chipped in with internet bills, accommodation bills, traveling and other upkeep bills. I thank you all supporters, friends and comrades. Brother Keepers Beatrice Othieno Ahere, Samuella Conteh, Omwa Ombara, Nancy Ndeke, Tracy Yvonne Breazile, Elke Lange, Munia Khan, Corina Ravenscraft, Rebecca Robinson, Martina Mwanza, Robson Shoes Lambada, July Westhale, publishers of journals, Zines and reviews. A shout to Comrade Nsah Mala.and more comrades. The issue of my exile stay is in pipeline. A big shout to the Poetry Chef Comrade Dr. Michael Dickel. Aluta Continua, Together We Rise
Discuss “Letter to the President?”
A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT is experimental writing in style combined with the hard truth against super power supremacy, African dictatorship regimes. It is a poetic whip to the unrepentant pseudo revolutionaries rotting the state with corruption to the core, the poetic verses in there spit into the remorseless fat cats, big chefs sleeping during parliamentary sessions and sometimes wield fist fights like pick pocketers while masses are rotting with disease and hunger. It is a weapon of mass instruction, was written as a chronicle of political, economic decadent in my country first and other countries. It speaks against xenophobia, Afrophobia. It a story of the people and for the people sharply angling on the unbalanced state of the world. It is chlorine to clean murky waters of economic malaise and disinfect the country from the dirty mud of political decadence. We fear to be killed when we say the truth but I have decided contain my fears and bravery in a book form. This collection itself is different in delivery, presentation and scope. It is a scholarship of global and African political patterns, a social justice commentary and insignia of freedom of expression while we fail to enjoy freedom after expression. I suffered threats and scurry stalking in Zambia after the launch of A Letter to the President, it tells you our political elites are still in fear of the voices that chronicle and tell the truth to power, it gives you a clear indication that democracy is just a word easily spoken but not acted. Actors of democracy are scarce. I implore political science students and those studying political histories, Arts and humanities to graze this my nerve shredding poetry collection, Yes, the verbatim and the vibe in there is scurry but you know truth is always scurry, few people wants the truth. A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT is a fusion of spoken word and page poetry, influenced by the hardships we experienced with our parents after independence and how they walk to rallies to wait for a politician who will bring them a 2kg of rice after a full day of scorching sun and rumbling stomachs and after those daunting rallies, the politician will disappear into the clouds with a furnished and secured helicopter while masses walk for distances back home empty handed but armed with fake promises, anger and slogan smacked faces. A Letter to the President talks to the president to repent, any president, every president who is not doing the right thing. It seeks leadership to rethink, to restart, to reform, like in Zimbabwe we need corruption top stop ASAP, we need the worker to be restored his/her dignity, we need cash barons, oil barons and killers of the economy to nabbed, we want a robust approach to the governing of the country, A leadership that respect artistic voices, human rights defenders and other actors of positive activism, let the country restore the integrity of the masses, people have suffered for long time now. A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT.
Recently, there has been an uprising and many have been shot while protesting. There has been an invasion of privacy, skyrocketing prices, a strike, human rights violations, and hunger. How do you inspire hope for your country with your writing?
My country has been in the economic intensive care for the past twenty years now and people have suffered enough and has some people lost lives in the process. My writings continue to give courage to the masses, to invoke dialogue but now our people no longer read as much, most of them are busy hunting for food and other upkeep materials. Readership culture has fallen apart. Things have fallen apart, but I want to assure you, one thing, Zimbabweans are a resilient humanity, they thrive in this economic struggle. It pains me to see masses scavenging for dear life in other countries while the economic wealth is enjoyed by the few. It stinks really. I have written a lot of new poems. And I have developed a new writing style through social media platforms reading communities are reading through and there is some feedback as well. So even so, we write still, we read still, we speak still, Time heals and Freedom from Corruption and politically caused poverty shall end. I am also completing a Chapbook on my nasty experiences during COVID 19 lockdowns and the farce of exile. A lot of my writings is froth for change, freedom, resistance and resilience on digital thickets across the globe.
You are the creative director of Girl Child Creativity and Festival. Can you share with the readers what this is.
Girl child creativity is a project designed to mitigate under-representation and unbalanced participation of young female writers/poets in areas of creative writing, literature, literacy and poetry performance development. It further enhances the ability of the girl child to develop herself mentally - the motto is: freedom of mental media air waves for community development. A creative nation is a developed nation. The project featured a lot of writers and arts activities in schools, out of school communities and in colleges, we also partnered with the 100 thousand poets for change global founded by Michael ROTHENBURG to hold the first of its kind GirlCHILD talent Festival in 2013 and 2014. We have produced and inspired great talent that is practicing its chores across Africa and the world, we drilled talent in more than 20 schools and this project now has involved into the now most popular WOMAWORDS LITERARY PRESS to continue further the empowerment sister’s creative energies through digital spaces and platforms. We aim to feature more than a 1000 artists, writers, leaders and activists from Africa and abroad. We believe that every revolution begins with WORD.
Talk about being curator for “Brave Voices Poetry Journal.” When did you start this?
When I got into exile, I thought it was and is vital to continue the struggle in a different way, to start a virtual program that would strengthen the literary activism revolution that I had already lit. So I started the platform online on Facebook through the 100 Thousand Poets for Zimbabwe an affiliate to the Zimbabwe We Want Poetry Campaign and 100 Thousand Poets for Change Global. The project got a wide response from many young voices in Zimbabwe, Africa and abroad, so I began compiling poetry by brave voices every fortnight that we then sent to Tuck Magazine in Canada for archiving, I had then negotiated a content archiving deal with Michael Val Tuck, the Founder of Tuck Magazine. Sometime in December 2018, the Brave Voices became a full-fledged and a globally known activity by young voices that we later hosted on MIOMBOPUBLISHING another online space I founded and is also archiving TIME OF THE POET DIGITAL SERIES with most popular offing SECOND NAME OF EARTH IS PEACE, #GLOBAL CALL FOR PEACE PROJECT that saw the featuring of more than 50 poets from around the globe. We have produced so far more than 60 issues of BRAVE VOICES POETRY JOURNAL since inception and the voices are strong and are shaking the walls of JERICHO.
For Womawords, you interview many women poets giving them a voice and a place to talk about their work. I learned about many new writers because of this site. How have these writers enriched your life? What have you learned by these interviews?
It is a beautiful project I founded in 2019 through my Fellowship with the International Human Rights Art Festival. I wanted to use the quarterly grant I got from the IHRAF Fellowship to do something different. I found it worth some to involve girlchild creativity into WOMAWORDS LITERARY PRESS. Yes the interviews and prolific writings abound has influenced my career in a positive way, I have learnt whipping out copy or manuscripts, I am still learning, learning is a process is not event, beating and working according to deadlines, to be true in everything I do and respect women artists and especially those who have with themselves the zeal in them to change the world, to shape their communities in a very different, those see their voices bringing freedom and success promise. The project has taught me patience and communication etiquette and more advanced creative skills. I have since improved in my work presentation, writing and delivery, it’s a beautiful process as much it requires the tenacity, due diligence and resilience.
You have written articles for Cultural Weekly. What article stands out with you and why?
Cultural Weekly is a great literary experience and I thank fellow writer and Curator Adam Leizipeg at Cultural Weekly for affording me the golden opportunity to be read widely, it’s heartening in a positive way to see your writings read by people across the world. I am excited and humbled that you also passed through my column at Cultural Weekly. These are some of the outstanding articles of mine at Cultural Weekly
1. Everything Remembers in Michael Dickel’s Nothing Remembers, a critical review.
2.Talking in Poetic Tongues.
3). Jongwe’s Fist: Mugabe and His Magic of Paradox
4. POETIVISM, a new art of resistance in Zimbabwe. Other articles are also good but it depends on the angle and theme of any given work.
In 2020, you received the Freedom of Speech Literary Activism Culture Fellow at PEN-Deutschland, Germany, Poet in Residence at the Fictional Café. Congratulations to you. What has this experience been like?
I am greatly humbled and of course excited when afforded an opportunity a scholarship/fellowship to write, to express and to weild the pen, a weapon of mass instruction. Its strengthens me, it cultivates, it evokes the poetic tiger in me. It settles in me the promise to remain defending, speaking for the voiceless and my people through literary arts activism. It is greatly important to have more organizations that supports writers in exile, writers at risk, free speech, artists at risk and defenders. I want to take this wonderful opportunity to thank the Vice President of Writers in Exile PEN-Zentrum Deutschland Leander Sukov, the Writers in Exile Commissioner, the Writers in Exile Project Head Sandra Weires-Guia and the whole PEN-Zentrum Deutschland board for affording me an opportunity to continue defending rights with free speech And literary arts activism with great support. It humbles me greatly, the struggle continues we write still. Yes the Fictional Café, I am working with Jack B Rochester, the Baristas and the editorial team, they have created my page as their Poet in residence. I have read submissions sometime last where I helped to make choices on the publication, yes of course for you to get the Poet IN RESIDENCE role, you have to be outstanding and a refined poetry barista. Its great taking part in great literary initiatives for they continue shape us and hone our career. I thank you greatly,
Mbizo Chirasha
Interview with DeWitt Henry by Betsy Levinson
Who inspired you to write essays?
I began by writing realist fiction inspired by Richard Yates; then narrative memoir inspired by Frank Conroy, where I dramatized “about-ness” and was sometimes misread as being “too personal.” In my collection SAFE SUICIDE: NARRATIVES, ESSAYS, AND MEDITATIONS, I started using central symbols or topics as a kind of lattice that framed emotions, such as my essay on “Gravity,” which was partly inspired by Tim O’Brien’s device of listing the physical weight of things carried by soldiers in order to describe their moral and spiritual baggage. I also loved Thoreau’s way in WALDEN of leading readers to explore a topic such as “Economy.” I pushed this lattice idea still farther in my new collection, SWEET MARJORAM: NOTES AND ESSAYS. I focus on laden moral topics—topics that seem at best tired, and at worst empty in the era of Trump. The idea of human dignity, for instance, as we debate assisted suicide, “the right to choose,” or immigration policies. The idea of empathy (“surrounded by and blessed by larger hearts than my own,” I write, “I wonder if I suffer from ‘empathy deficiency disorder’…I hang up on charity calls”). I wonder about dreams, American and otherwise. The idea of silence. The ideas of privilege and oppression (“Aesthetic distance…where readers have no chance to intervene, is different from social distance, where…in small acts and large, we can reject oppression and take our place in a braver, more generous world”). The mysteries of conscience. Of courage. I keep my reflections brief, associational and fragmentary, more like poems. My models became Hamlet’s soliloquies as well as Stephen Dedalus’s stream of consciousness and the rambling associations of Montaigne’s essays. Half-mocking conventional form, I invented a form, where the fun is in “the act of the mind finding what will suffice.” I do my best to weigh our beliefs and our collective wisdoms against both personal example and what I can learn and absorb from language, imagination, and the findings and theories of science. I feel that I am an average, sentient, thoughtful person in a universe of human expertise beyond my grasp, an expertise that merges with mystery. I try to be well-informed. I weigh the dialectics and obligations, and I’m responsible for choices. I hope I lead the reader to deliberate and choose also; and to find fun, surprise, and beauty in the process.
When did you know you wanted to do it for a living?
At 8, I wanted to be a G-man; at ten, an executive like my father. At twelve a newspaper man and printer, like Ben Franklin. I was divided in my senior year of high school between working for a printing company and going to college. I chose college, where my writing was praised, I studied English literature, and edited the college literary magazine for three years. If there were no draft, I may have pursued a New York career in magazine publishing for livelihood; as it was, I continued on to graduate school in English, confident that I would find a teaching job, but when I finished my PhD, there was a depression in the humanities. I taught composition as an adjunct, worked on a novel, started Ploughshares fifty years ago as a volunteer with other writers in The Plough and Stars, a local pub, married a Head Start teacher, built up the magazine and lived on grants, until I was hired full-time at Emerson in 1982. I wrote and edited for love, never for a living.
Who or what influences your work now?
Shakespeare, forever. But the wired media has also offered me, now in my seventies, a seemingly infinite store of references. In addition, I have renewed access to my print library. After emptying my Emerson office, I built walls of bookshelves at home. Many of my books had been boxed for storage, now they faced me like forgotten friends. As I free-associated on a given topic, I could revisit memorable authors and relate their meanings to the topic and my life. I could follow my whims and instincts. That was freeing, outside of classroom teaching. It may also have grown from my earlier editing of anthologies and from the editorial dialectics of Ploughshares. I feel some affinity with David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010). I enjoy the collage approach that Shields invoked, both in poetry and prose, as well as his own mental sprezzatura. Since finishing SWEET MARJORAM, I’ve gravitated towards writing poems-like-essays rather than the other way around. My models have been Eliot, Frost and Lowell, and the work of friends and colleagues including John Skoyles, Bill Knott, Thomas Lux, Joyce Peseroff, Gail Mazur, Seamus Heaney, and many others from my Ploughshares years.
What are the challenges and joys of editing an online website/press?
At best, online magazines are communities of far-flung readers, writers, influencers, and editors. One edits, of course, at home, on a screen, keeping hours at will. The pleasure is always discovery, and the mission of widening the tunnel vision of trade publishing and culture. The economics and immediacy of online publishing widens opportunity for both readers and writers. There are many niches and room for innovation. Novelist Sandra Tyler began The Woven Tale Press ( https://www.thewoventalepress.net/about-3/ ) as a monthly magazine that is at once a literary journal and an art publication, with full-color graphics. She began it in 2013, and once long ago having been my intern at Ploughshares, she asked me on as a contributing editor in 2016. The format, quality, and professionalism caught my imagination and I’ve worked on the prose side of it ever since. At first I wrote a regular column where I reviewed online resource sites for writers, ranging from places to publish to places to learn about editors and agents or to find model writers’ websites. Since 2018, I’ve served as Prose Editor and enjoyed the variety and excellence of unsolicited submissions, which we respond to within a few weeks. The discoveries of writers new to me is my greatest joy, along with watching our community and readership grow.
Bury Me in the Sky by Sara Comito
Nixes Mate Books, March 2020
Review by Anne Elezabeth Pluto
May 8, 2020
Sara Comito’s debut collection invites the reader into a world divided into five spaces, where we are the mosquito in the amber looking out from the beautiful but permanent line joining life and death.
The pull of each poem’s magnificent lines can be summed up in her poem “A Charming Rub”:
Even in its mating does a wolf
know the taste of foal-
newly standing, newly felled.
Each poem reminds us of this brutal dichotomy – an alchemical marriage in nature that is always life and death. In the “In Tidal”: the horizon curves dizzingly for our floating – and we float through the poems as “Iodine” is the heaviest element and “Spill” where Comito is heir to Elizabeth Bishop: seeing the clown grimace of grouper. It is an unexpected catch, the biggest fish I’ve ever had on.
Comito’s book is a “catch” – these are the poems to read as we move through social distancing, quarantine, and uncertainty of COVID 19. We are: in cobalt twilight the whole, world wants to scream – are you touched or just simple. She demands in “Vengeance”:
I want
your tears
as verses
useless
as semen
spent
in grass.
Comito’s poems are lessons for the reader. We learn in “Permission to Expand” :
If you can work on your posture – you can work
on anything
In “The Flea Market Sells Our Sacred Origins From Under Us” we learn that our sacred origins disappear in the preposterous liquidations of human epoch. Exactly where we are now.
In “If Blake Had Only Known” we learn that Sundardan Tigers – too much salt in the diet has unpredictable effects. The tigers burn bright and eat humans.
In “Religion at the City Pier”:
Some things get bigger over time, others shrink with the
Evolution. Some just sag under the surface for finding.
In “Night in the Tropics” we feel the heat and distance of nature – see what humans have built to disturb the alchemical balance.
High rises spring up
like teeth – as we
finally inhale –
false mountains
and a moon drips
off the page.
Comito’s images drip off the page and stay with us. Ever present are the relationships between “felled” objects – In “Overdone”
The speaker address the other:
You were felled thing too
And I was the bereaved.
In “Microscopic” the speaker allows us into their young self – haunted by everything antediluvian:
everything that lived still a coelacanth
until one pulls one up
what to ask of history
when it looks you in the eye?
What are we asking if history now in the age of new born plagues –
Dust dances like a devil.
It always does.
In the title poem “Bury me in the Sky” we slide backwards –
Hold tight to the dream
With the balled fists
Of an infant. Prayer flag tatter
As bald griffons in search
Of those things earth
Loves to offer sky – life
That fed now feeds
And is carried as mudra.
Perhaps the mudra which is her poem “Dedication”:
For dead dogs
and stolen children
a special heaven
with rubber balls
and each other.
In the last section, Sargasso, the book spirals down, standing us on our heads in “Pristine Creature”
The edge of a bridge
carries up the rain
a slate tombstone to the sky.
In the poem “Sargasso” the portal becomes stronger:
My heart is a shadows of clouds
tin vapors hiding in the sun.
My heart is horizon
a peeling back of the skin of day.
…
You are neither destination nor origin
but Sargasso – a swirling eye of ocean,
that confounds the efforts
of all my sweating, displaced natives.
The dead keep returning and we must welcome them, in “Husk of a Whale”
I loved you like a war zone in haunted,
full of unknowing dead. A leviathan
Isn’t supposed to die: get big as a 16-wheeler
And you set an example. Rivers traverse
counties inlaid by slavery and ill-financed
railroads; the tracks still birth flowers
Of bees…
…its bell consigned to rust, the bones
of its shadows mined like phosphate grants
purchase on shifting sand….
Beaches, a husk of whale, once
The fossils tell us, they were mammoths.
The fossils the key; the reader must be aware of the proof of the alchemical marriage -the actual mosquito in the amber.
In “Dark Island Landing” we go back to the antediluvian past -
In the forest edge dark
The god screeches.
the frogs
the night lilies
the open throated
children to the suckling sky
Expertly, in her final poem – “All There Is” Comito, a beekeeper, bring us back to the beginning of the book. Her first poem “Sweet Formincation”:
if there’s poetry in this sacking
it’s food meant for one queen has
at least gone to another.
Her final poem “All There Is”:
Ruin your eyes
it always comes back to the mother
somehow.
We are not equipped to
deal with speeding trains, that step
off the platform always on skirting
of two unknowns.
The two queens – one must leave – the mating wolf and her thoughts, her mouth tasting newly felled foal. And, the mare, the mother who knows that terrible scene that may come.
The relief of meeting with something
solid. Let them step over my fetal
form. All the subway police need to know.
here is all there is.
Bury me in the Sky is a compelling haunting book. Nature, history, geography, life, and death. All of it is precious; perhaps now more than ever.
Cervena Barva Press Staff
Editor & Publisher: Gloria Mindock
International Editor: Flavia Cosma
Contributing Editor: Andrey Gritsman
Contributing Editor: Helene Cardona
Contributing Editor: Juri Talvet (Estonia)
Interviewer: Karen Friedland
Fictions Reviewer & Publicity: Renuka Raghavan
Poetry Review: Miriam O’Neal
Poetry Review: Gene Barry (Ireland)
Poetry Review: Annie Pluto
Poetry Review: Christopher O’Reilley
Cervena Barva Press announces the publication of a new poetry chapbook called, "The Snow Dead" by Marc Zegans.
Marc Zegans is a poet and creative development advisor. He is the author of five previous collections of poems, The Underwater Typewriter, Boys in the Woods, Pillow Talk, The Book of Clouds, and La Commedia Sotterranea: Swizzle Felt's First Folio form the Typewriter Underground; two spoken word albums Night Work, and Marker and Parker, and immersive theatrical productions Mum and Shaw, and The Typewriter Underground. The Snow Dead debuted theatrically in Erotic Eclectic's "Sin-aesthetic" at the Lost Church during San Francisco's 2019 Lit Crawl. Marc lives by the coast in Northern California. His poetry can be found at marczegans.com, and he can be reached for creative advisory services at mycreativedevelopment.com.
The Snow Dead is a quiet meditation on life and death imagined as a series of marks in the cold snow-where all color is heightened, and in which even the most subtle register of heat leaves an impression. This gathering of connected poems elegantly incarnates the gravitas of aging - shorn of artifice and romance - in its barest essence.
"The delicate chill of loss and longing described in bone white visions of isolation and ember red recollections of intimacy."
-Janice Blaze Rocke, artistic director Erotic Eclectic
Zegans' spare and revelatory collection embraces the paradox and beauty of winter's morbid hold. It's a magical fascination that plays out with foxes and angels and starlets - startling little stories that shine and entrance. The Snow Dead is a pure and inspiring joy to read.
-Lo Galluccio, author of Hot Rain and Sarasota VII
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-39-0 | 30 Pages
Order Snow Dead here...
Marc Zegans is a poet and creative development advisor. He is the author of five previous collections of poems, The Underwater Typewriter, Boys in the Woods, Pillow Talk, The Book of Clouds, and La Commedia Sotterranea: Swizzle Felt's First Folio form the Typewriter Underground; two spoken word albums Night Work, and Marker and Parker, and immersive theatrical productions Mum and Shaw, and The Typewriter Underground. The Snow Dead debuted theatrically in Erotic Eclectic's "Sin-aesthetic" at the Lost Church during San Francisco's 2019 Lit Crawl. Marc lives by the coast in Northern California. His poetry can be found at marczegans.com, and he can be reached for creative advisory services at mycreativedevelopment.com.
The Snow Dead is a quiet meditation on life and death imagined as a series of marks in the cold snow-where all color is heightened, and in which even the most subtle register of heat leaves an impression. This gathering of connected poems elegantly incarnates the gravitas of aging - shorn of artifice and romance - in its barest essence.
"The delicate chill of loss and longing described in bone white visions of isolation and ember red recollections of intimacy."
-Janice Blaze Rocke, artistic director Erotic Eclectic
Zegans' spare and revelatory collection embraces the paradox and beauty of winter's morbid hold. It's a magical fascination that plays out with foxes and angels and starlets - startling little stories that shine and entrance. The Snow Dead is a pure and inspiring joy to read.
-Lo Galluccio, author of Hot Rain and Sarasota VII
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-39-0 | 30 Pages
Order Snow Dead here...
Karen Friedland interviewed Eileen Cleary and Joey Gould for this newsletter. We also have some book reviews, raves, and a few Memoriams.
Interviews
Eileen Cleary founded and hosts the Lily Poetry Salon in Needham, MA and edits the Lily Poetry Review and Lily Poetry Review Books. Her debut full-length collection, Child Ward of the Commonwealth was released from Main Street Rag Press in June 2019.
We spoke with Eileen about her journey as a poet, editor and salon host.
About Being/Becoming a Poet:
Q: What started you on your poetic journey? What called you to poetry? What was your most significant "poetic schooling"?
A: I first encountered poetry as a child when I fell in love with Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. Later, I found myself drawn to dozens of poets, and then scores more. I've always loved words, how one word can have so many connotations. I loved how syllables sound together and how groups of words fit it to one another. I realized that I was a poet during a course on Medical Ethics at Simmons College. I did not know how to respond to the idea that scientific research had been performed on fragile populations without their consent. I reacted to The Tuskegee Experiment, in which almost 400 black Americans with syphilis were offered no medical treatment, by writing a poem. This was transformative, and I could not go back to being a person who didn't write poetry.
My most significant poetic schooling is ongoing. The MFA degrees I earned at Lesley University and Solstice of Pine Manor taught me to read as a writer, that the more prose and poetry I expose myself to, and immerse myself in, the better writer I become. So, I continue to read deeply, as many poems and collections as each day allows. For me, the MFA programs were so much more than reading a hundred books, studying remarkable works, writing critical and creative theses, or even learning to interrogate a poem. These programs taught me how to build a literary community and a rigorous reading practice, where every day, I am in conversation with poetry and craft, bridging to all the poets I've read before and all I've yet to read.
Q: Tell us a little about your poetic practice-what inspires you to write a poem? How do you prefer to work?
A: I have a practice of reading more than a practice of writing. I usually write alone and when I feel an "energy" to write. Most of the time, I have no idea what I'll be writing until I start, but the poems start with an image. And they never start on the page, they have been going on in my head for a while before I sit down to write them. I usually write and revise poems off-page and then do the secretarial work of writing them down. The final edits take place on the page.
Q: Which poets, contemporary or otherwise, have most inspired you? What quality of their poetry speaks to you?
A: Some of the authors I return to over and over are Kathy Nilsson, Lucie-Brock Broido, Alice Monroe, Margaret Atwood, Emily Dickinson, Marie Howe, Wislawa Szmborska, Louise Bogan, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Gary Soto, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Jean Follain, W.S, Merwin, Richard Wilbur, Franz Wright, Jack Gilbert, Louise Gluck, Rhina P. Espaillat, Paul Celan, Tomas Transtromer, Czelaw Milosz, Charles Simic, Ilya Kaminsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martha Collins, William Carlos Williams , Cate Marvin, Jason Reynolds, Kevin Prufer, Nicole Terez Dutton, Seamus Heaney and Erin Belieu. And now I'm heartbroken, because I can't name them all.
If I had to choose a poet to mention more about, I would say that Lucie Brock-Broido influences my work with her teaching, her ideas about feral poetry and each poetic line being a "station of the cross." She taught me about poetry by watching a fire and listening to a grandfather clock's metronome. Someday, I will write that craft essay.
Q: What other art forms or life experiences have informed or influenced your work?
A: My life experience as a nurse and volunteer in Appalachia has fueled my work. I'm inspired by people and the lives they lead, their challenges and triumphs. Nature inspires me, and its art is unparalleled.
Questions About Being/Becoming an Editor:
Q: Tell us what inspired you to first start a literary salon, a literary magazine, and then a press? Tell us a little about the process of founding and running all three. What are some of the challenges and rewards, thus far? Do you have any tips you'd give others who are thinking of starting up a salon, press and/or literary magazine? What are you doing that feels unique?
A: The Lily Poetry Salon started because a group of my friends wanted to meet regularly and talk about poetry. At first, we thought we might form a private workshop, but that seemed to be about work and not as much pure joy. My friends Christine Jones and Robbie Gamble talked about how we could continue to get together and enjoy poetry. We were meeting at the poet Mani Iyer's home. Mani is a deaf-blind poet from Needham, who attended Lesley University with me. We thought, why not bring readers to Mani's to read from their works, socialize and then, talk about their poetry. At that time, we were all just finishing up our MFA program and we were hungry for those conversations with "established" poets. Four years in, we still are.
I'd been fantasizing about starting a literary magazine for about five years before Lily Poetry Review. I imagined being able to include beautiful poems of various aesthetics in the journal. I put the idea aside and worked as an Assistant Poetry Editor at Carve Magazine. I learned a lot in that position and knew I'd like to run a journal that focused on poetry. It then seemed logical next step to start the Review. I expanded into publishing books because there are so many unpublished, beautiful and deserving manuscripts. I wanted to be a part of putting them into the world.
As absurd as it sounds, the challenges have been few. They are mostly financial. We are a volunteer press, and Amazon and other outlets take the lion's share of any profit on each book. There is no profit with the journal. I can't bring myself to call that a loss, because I get so much satisfaction from publishing and joy in putting this art in the world.
The most rewarding part of publishing is the team of people I have been blessed to have working beside me. Christine Jones, Lisa Sullivan, Renuka Raghavan, Julie Cyr, Chell Navarro, Elizabeth Mercurio, Michael Mercurio, Suzanne Mercury, Sarah Walker, Kay Bell, Konner Jebb, Mark Jednaszewski, Rebecca Connors, Anastasia Vassos, Martha McCollough, and Tzynya Pinchback each contribute their considerable talents meaningfully to Lily. One thing that distinguishes this press is its attention to detail and editing. What we are most proud of is making space in the literary community for writers to debut their work.
If you are thinking of starting a press or journal, I want to share the advice Nicole Terez Dutton gave to me when I shared my dream of becoming an editor and publisher. I had just finished listing for her, all ways which I would turn myself inside out to become "good enough" to start a press. She said, "You are already enough."
Q: As an editor, what draws you to a certain poem that makes you want to publish it? As a press, how do you find great work? Can you tell us about recent and upcoming publications? What about upcoming readings at the salon?
A: I tend to respond to concision, strong imagery, and a distinct voice that has a life beyond the page. We find great work through submittable, where folks can submit poems, flash fiction and art for the journal or chapbook and full-length poetry books.
https://lilypoetryreview.blog/submission-guidelines/
I have also attended readings where I have been so mesmerized, that I was compelled to ask people for their manuscripts. This happened with Christine Tierney's debut, chicken + lower case = fleur, due out in March 2020, and Miriam O'Neal's second collection, The Body Dialogues, out in January 2020.
Heather Hughes and Andrea Read will feature at our salon on December 5th. Upcoming authors and artists include Valerie Duff, Jennifer Jean, Sebastian Jean, Joey Gould, Enzo Surin, July Westhale, Steven Cramer, Joyce Peseroff, Kathleen Aguero and many others.
Q: How do you see the Lily series within the literary community in the Boston area, the country and internationally? What are your feelings about the state of "the literary community" right now?
A: I see the Lily series as a small and growing voice in the literary community. We will continue to grow and expand at a rate that suits us. The literary community will recognize our hard-working and talented authors. We are proud of our literary citizenship and awestruck by our poets. I see the literary community in Massachusetts alive and flourishing. It is a sanctuary and a resistance, and filled with generous and talented people who will keep it vital for years to come.
We spoke with Eileen about her journey as a poet, editor and salon host.
About Being/Becoming a Poet:
Q: What started you on your poetic journey? What called you to poetry? What was your most significant "poetic schooling"?
A: I first encountered poetry as a child when I fell in love with Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. Later, I found myself drawn to dozens of poets, and then scores more. I've always loved words, how one word can have so many connotations. I loved how syllables sound together and how groups of words fit it to one another. I realized that I was a poet during a course on Medical Ethics at Simmons College. I did not know how to respond to the idea that scientific research had been performed on fragile populations without their consent. I reacted to The Tuskegee Experiment, in which almost 400 black Americans with syphilis were offered no medical treatment, by writing a poem. This was transformative, and I could not go back to being a person who didn't write poetry.
My most significant poetic schooling is ongoing. The MFA degrees I earned at Lesley University and Solstice of Pine Manor taught me to read as a writer, that the more prose and poetry I expose myself to, and immerse myself in, the better writer I become. So, I continue to read deeply, as many poems and collections as each day allows. For me, the MFA programs were so much more than reading a hundred books, studying remarkable works, writing critical and creative theses, or even learning to interrogate a poem. These programs taught me how to build a literary community and a rigorous reading practice, where every day, I am in conversation with poetry and craft, bridging to all the poets I've read before and all I've yet to read.
Q: Tell us a little about your poetic practice-what inspires you to write a poem? How do you prefer to work?
A: I have a practice of reading more than a practice of writing. I usually write alone and when I feel an "energy" to write. Most of the time, I have no idea what I'll be writing until I start, but the poems start with an image. And they never start on the page, they have been going on in my head for a while before I sit down to write them. I usually write and revise poems off-page and then do the secretarial work of writing them down. The final edits take place on the page.
Q: Which poets, contemporary or otherwise, have most inspired you? What quality of their poetry speaks to you?
A: Some of the authors I return to over and over are Kathy Nilsson, Lucie-Brock Broido, Alice Monroe, Margaret Atwood, Emily Dickinson, Marie Howe, Wislawa Szmborska, Louise Bogan, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Gary Soto, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Jean Follain, W.S, Merwin, Richard Wilbur, Franz Wright, Jack Gilbert, Louise Gluck, Rhina P. Espaillat, Paul Celan, Tomas Transtromer, Czelaw Milosz, Charles Simic, Ilya Kaminsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martha Collins, William Carlos Williams , Cate Marvin, Jason Reynolds, Kevin Prufer, Nicole Terez Dutton, Seamus Heaney and Erin Belieu. And now I'm heartbroken, because I can't name them all.
If I had to choose a poet to mention more about, I would say that Lucie Brock-Broido influences my work with her teaching, her ideas about feral poetry and each poetic line being a "station of the cross." She taught me about poetry by watching a fire and listening to a grandfather clock's metronome. Someday, I will write that craft essay.
Q: What other art forms or life experiences have informed or influenced your work?
A: My life experience as a nurse and volunteer in Appalachia has fueled my work. I'm inspired by people and the lives they lead, their challenges and triumphs. Nature inspires me, and its art is unparalleled.
Questions About Being/Becoming an Editor:
Q: Tell us what inspired you to first start a literary salon, a literary magazine, and then a press? Tell us a little about the process of founding and running all three. What are some of the challenges and rewards, thus far? Do you have any tips you'd give others who are thinking of starting up a salon, press and/or literary magazine? What are you doing that feels unique?
A: The Lily Poetry Salon started because a group of my friends wanted to meet regularly and talk about poetry. At first, we thought we might form a private workshop, but that seemed to be about work and not as much pure joy. My friends Christine Jones and Robbie Gamble talked about how we could continue to get together and enjoy poetry. We were meeting at the poet Mani Iyer's home. Mani is a deaf-blind poet from Needham, who attended Lesley University with me. We thought, why not bring readers to Mani's to read from their works, socialize and then, talk about their poetry. At that time, we were all just finishing up our MFA program and we were hungry for those conversations with "established" poets. Four years in, we still are.
I'd been fantasizing about starting a literary magazine for about five years before Lily Poetry Review. I imagined being able to include beautiful poems of various aesthetics in the journal. I put the idea aside and worked as an Assistant Poetry Editor at Carve Magazine. I learned a lot in that position and knew I'd like to run a journal that focused on poetry. It then seemed logical next step to start the Review. I expanded into publishing books because there are so many unpublished, beautiful and deserving manuscripts. I wanted to be a part of putting them into the world.
As absurd as it sounds, the challenges have been few. They are mostly financial. We are a volunteer press, and Amazon and other outlets take the lion's share of any profit on each book. There is no profit with the journal. I can't bring myself to call that a loss, because I get so much satisfaction from publishing and joy in putting this art in the world.
The most rewarding part of publishing is the team of people I have been blessed to have working beside me. Christine Jones, Lisa Sullivan, Renuka Raghavan, Julie Cyr, Chell Navarro, Elizabeth Mercurio, Michael Mercurio, Suzanne Mercury, Sarah Walker, Kay Bell, Konner Jebb, Mark Jednaszewski, Rebecca Connors, Anastasia Vassos, Martha McCollough, and Tzynya Pinchback each contribute their considerable talents meaningfully to Lily. One thing that distinguishes this press is its attention to detail and editing. What we are most proud of is making space in the literary community for writers to debut their work.
If you are thinking of starting a press or journal, I want to share the advice Nicole Terez Dutton gave to me when I shared my dream of becoming an editor and publisher. I had just finished listing for her, all ways which I would turn myself inside out to become "good enough" to start a press. She said, "You are already enough."
Q: As an editor, what draws you to a certain poem that makes you want to publish it? As a press, how do you find great work? Can you tell us about recent and upcoming publications? What about upcoming readings at the salon?
A: I tend to respond to concision, strong imagery, and a distinct voice that has a life beyond the page. We find great work through submittable, where folks can submit poems, flash fiction and art for the journal or chapbook and full-length poetry books.
https://lilypoetryreview.blog/submission-guidelines/
I have also attended readings where I have been so mesmerized, that I was compelled to ask people for their manuscripts. This happened with Christine Tierney's debut, chicken + lower case = fleur, due out in March 2020, and Miriam O'Neal's second collection, The Body Dialogues, out in January 2020.
Heather Hughes and Andrea Read will feature at our salon on December 5th. Upcoming authors and artists include Valerie Duff, Jennifer Jean, Sebastian Jean, Joey Gould, Enzo Surin, July Westhale, Steven Cramer, Joyce Peseroff, Kathleen Aguero and many others.
Q: How do you see the Lily series within the literary community in the Boston area, the country and internationally? What are your feelings about the state of "the literary community" right now?
A: I see the Lily series as a small and growing voice in the literary community. We will continue to grow and expand at a rate that suits us. The literary community will recognize our hard-working and talented authors. We are proud of our literary citizenship and awestruck by our poets. I see the literary community in Massachusetts alive and flourishing. It is a sanctuary and a resistance, and filled with generous and talented people who will keep it vital for years to come.
Joey Gould is a non-binary poet who tutors and works with Mass Poetry and the Poetry Society of New York. Their first full-length collection, The Acute Avian Heart, was recently the first book published by Lily Poetry Review Books.
About Being/Becoming a Poet:
Q: What started you on your poetic journey? What called you to poetry? What was your most significant "poetic schooling"?
Joey: I wrote as a teenager, then stopped until I took a poetry class in college as an elective. Alan Feldman, my professor, introduced me to the work of Louise Glück & I fell in love. At the end of the class, he suggested we all apply to a summer poetry fellowship at Salem State University run by J.D. Scrimgeour. I somehow earned a spot, met a bunch of poets who took me seriously, started writing more & sorta went from there! Without the Salem Poetry Seminar & those workshops at the Salem Athenaeum I don't think I'd ever have "become a poet."
Q: Tell us a little about your poetic practice-what inspires you to write a poem? How do you prefer to work?
Joey: I like to get out of the house to write-I write in bars, at Audubon sanctuaries, at beaches. I like weird prompts, like asking my Facebook friends to give me a first line to use. In a very me moment, I overheard a barista say "I love my liver, I respect my kidneys" & used it to write a poem that was published by District Lit! Big picture, I'll often write sets of poems or long poems that share a theme, which was quite handy for writing my book, TAAH-I built it section by section, rather than poem by poem in one giant arc. TAAH makes sense as a Virgo: organized & modular.
Q: Which poets, contemporary or otherwise, have most inspired you? What quality of their poetry speaks to you?
Joey: e.e. cummings was my first love & he has a poem with my full name-joe gould-in it! He's delightfully weird. On the other hand, I like how Glück cuts so deep, so earnestly. Marie Howe is also wonderful like that-I don't think she lets craft get in the way of the sincerity of her words. Craft should be a tool, not a window-dressing. I also have intersectional role models: Tommy Pico's work is fierce & hilarious & troubling, writing about indigenous heritage, gender & sexuality. July Westhale sticks with me as a femme genderqueer whose work intersects feminism, grief, & LGBTQ+ activism. Every poem of Westhale's is an absolute haymaker of imagery.
Q: What other art forms or life experiences have informed or influenced your work?
Joey: I am playing my TAAH Spotify playlist right now as I type this. I love, love, love music. I revise to music a lot, mostly Shoegaze & sad pop music, some Brat Pop. Also, much of the older stuff in TAAH was written at karaoke, if you can believe it! I mention the karaoke place in one of the poems. My poetry comes from places I've been & people I have loved. I think about place a lot, for sure. Israel, the beaches of Gloucester, parks: these places help me see clearly. I often drive by the house I rebuilt with my stepfather, Frank. I can still see the inside of it, I can still hear Frank, I can see him cutting tile.
Q: Speaking of community-can you tell us more about your work with Mass Poetry as well as your experiences as a poet-performer with the Poetry Society of New York's "Poetry Brothel"?
Joey: Mass Poetry has been such a boon for me. I've gotten to meet some of my idols while throwing a poetry party for 1,200 people. I've also taught children the poetry I wish I knew when I was their age. And even better, I've met some of my dearest friends through Mass Poetry. I think their mission is integral to the arts & to Massachusetts, but mostly I'm just grateful that I've been in a position to help them along the way.
I love the PSNY Poetry Brothel! It's a wild idea, one of my most favorite modes of performing. It's taught me a lot about how to perform. I also value the vulnerability of being nearly naked with a spotlight on me, though I could never do it for longer than three poems. It forces me to consider how I feel about my own body-I confirmed through acting a transgender character, Izzie Hexxam, that I am non-binary. PSNY events are always safe spaces & every Brothel event raises money for actual sex workers-we try not to be appropriative either.
Thank you both, so much, for answering these questions, and for the great work that you do!
About Being/Becoming a Poet:
Q: What started you on your poetic journey? What called you to poetry? What was your most significant "poetic schooling"?
Joey: I wrote as a teenager, then stopped until I took a poetry class in college as an elective. Alan Feldman, my professor, introduced me to the work of Louise Glück & I fell in love. At the end of the class, he suggested we all apply to a summer poetry fellowship at Salem State University run by J.D. Scrimgeour. I somehow earned a spot, met a bunch of poets who took me seriously, started writing more & sorta went from there! Without the Salem Poetry Seminar & those workshops at the Salem Athenaeum I don't think I'd ever have "become a poet."
Q: Tell us a little about your poetic practice-what inspires you to write a poem? How do you prefer to work?
Joey: I like to get out of the house to write-I write in bars, at Audubon sanctuaries, at beaches. I like weird prompts, like asking my Facebook friends to give me a first line to use. In a very me moment, I overheard a barista say "I love my liver, I respect my kidneys" & used it to write a poem that was published by District Lit! Big picture, I'll often write sets of poems or long poems that share a theme, which was quite handy for writing my book, TAAH-I built it section by section, rather than poem by poem in one giant arc. TAAH makes sense as a Virgo: organized & modular.
Q: Which poets, contemporary or otherwise, have most inspired you? What quality of their poetry speaks to you?
Joey: e.e. cummings was my first love & he has a poem with my full name-joe gould-in it! He's delightfully weird. On the other hand, I like how Glück cuts so deep, so earnestly. Marie Howe is also wonderful like that-I don't think she lets craft get in the way of the sincerity of her words. Craft should be a tool, not a window-dressing. I also have intersectional role models: Tommy Pico's work is fierce & hilarious & troubling, writing about indigenous heritage, gender & sexuality. July Westhale sticks with me as a femme genderqueer whose work intersects feminism, grief, & LGBTQ+ activism. Every poem of Westhale's is an absolute haymaker of imagery.
Q: What other art forms or life experiences have informed or influenced your work?
Joey: I am playing my TAAH Spotify playlist right now as I type this. I love, love, love music. I revise to music a lot, mostly Shoegaze & sad pop music, some Brat Pop. Also, much of the older stuff in TAAH was written at karaoke, if you can believe it! I mention the karaoke place in one of the poems. My poetry comes from places I've been & people I have loved. I think about place a lot, for sure. Israel, the beaches of Gloucester, parks: these places help me see clearly. I often drive by the house I rebuilt with my stepfather, Frank. I can still see the inside of it, I can still hear Frank, I can see him cutting tile.
Q: Speaking of community-can you tell us more about your work with Mass Poetry as well as your experiences as a poet-performer with the Poetry Society of New York's "Poetry Brothel"?
Joey: Mass Poetry has been such a boon for me. I've gotten to meet some of my idols while throwing a poetry party for 1,200 people. I've also taught children the poetry I wish I knew when I was their age. And even better, I've met some of my dearest friends through Mass Poetry. I think their mission is integral to the arts & to Massachusetts, but mostly I'm just grateful that I've been in a position to help them along the way.
I love the PSNY Poetry Brothel! It's a wild idea, one of my most favorite modes of performing. It's taught me a lot about how to perform. I also value the vulnerability of being nearly naked with a spotlight on me, though I could never do it for longer than three poems. It forces me to consider how I feel about my own body-I confirmed through acting a transgender character, Izzie Hexxam, that I am non-binary. PSNY events are always safe spaces & every Brothel event raises money for actual sex workers-we try not to be appropriative either.
Thank you both, so much, for answering these questions, and for the great work that you do!
Book Reviews:
Review of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets by Valery Fox and Lynn Levin
If you're a poet seeking a cure for writer's block or ways to breathe new life into your work, look no further than the just-published second edition of:
Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets
(Texture Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1-94-578408-8, 146 pages)
by Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin.
Try your hand at a crossroads poem, in which the crossroads can be an actual roadway intersection or a change point in life. Write a poem about an imaginary encounter with a person you admire, and let that encounter be weird. Try a superhero poem or a thank-you poem in which the thanks can be grateful or sarcastic.
This very user-friendly second edition builds on the success of the original and is completely revamped with new prompts and scores of new example poems. The example poems, some hilarious, some reflective, some heartbreaking, show you just what a strong prompt can help you produce. Each prompt in Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets includes an introduction, suggested approaches, and example poems written by undergraduates, workshop participants, and working poets-a formula that stokes the desire to write and illustrates the imaginative possibilities.
Some of the prompts court free verse and hybrid forms, such as prose poetry and flash fiction. Others invite structure, albeit structure set loose to experiment and play. The five-line syllabic cameo cinquain, for example, includes instructions for a get-to-know-you version that can be used as an icebreaker in a classroom or writing workshop. Other prompts give classical motifs a contemporary twist. Consider the paraclausithyron, a lover's lament from outside a closed door, then imagine arriving at the door of your favorite restaurant only to discover that it's no longer in business, or call to mind an Alex Forest-type character (the role played by Glenn Close in the film Fatal Attraction) standing outside a closed door ("I mean, I'm not going to be ignored, Dan"). How about a faux translation of a poem written in a language you don't know?
There's a treasure trove of thought-provoking, imagination-igniting ideas in this valuable resource for beginning and experienced poets alike. It's also the perfect book for writing instructors eager to motivate their students and expand students' understanding of how poems are created. A writing instructor in search of an affordable and very contemporary guide to writing poems will find the second edition of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets especially handy and easy to use. In fact, Fox and Levin are teachers and practicing poets themselves, and, as the introduction notes, they extensively tested the prompts in classrooms and workshops and among their writing peers before including them in the book.
If you're a writing novice in search of guidance or a veteran writer looking for new ways into the craft or a teacher in search of a how-to manual and poetry anthology combined into a single easy-to-use handbook, you'll find that this craft-of-poetry guide is a choice that will pay creative dividends and give much pleasure along the way.
Michelle Moore is the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Deepest Blue (Rager Media) and Longing for Lightness: Selected Poems of Antonia Pozzi Translated from the Italian (Poetry Miscellany Press). Her poems, interviews, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including Commonweal, Heavy Bear, Apalachee Review, Black Dirt, Rattle, Penguin Review, and White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood published by Demeter Press.
Review of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets by Valery Fox and Lynn Levin
If you're a poet seeking a cure for writer's block or ways to breathe new life into your work, look no further than the just-published second edition of:
Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets
(Texture Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1-94-578408-8, 146 pages)
by Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin.
Try your hand at a crossroads poem, in which the crossroads can be an actual roadway intersection or a change point in life. Write a poem about an imaginary encounter with a person you admire, and let that encounter be weird. Try a superhero poem or a thank-you poem in which the thanks can be grateful or sarcastic.
This very user-friendly second edition builds on the success of the original and is completely revamped with new prompts and scores of new example poems. The example poems, some hilarious, some reflective, some heartbreaking, show you just what a strong prompt can help you produce. Each prompt in Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets includes an introduction, suggested approaches, and example poems written by undergraduates, workshop participants, and working poets-a formula that stokes the desire to write and illustrates the imaginative possibilities.
Some of the prompts court free verse and hybrid forms, such as prose poetry and flash fiction. Others invite structure, albeit structure set loose to experiment and play. The five-line syllabic cameo cinquain, for example, includes instructions for a get-to-know-you version that can be used as an icebreaker in a classroom or writing workshop. Other prompts give classical motifs a contemporary twist. Consider the paraclausithyron, a lover's lament from outside a closed door, then imagine arriving at the door of your favorite restaurant only to discover that it's no longer in business, or call to mind an Alex Forest-type character (the role played by Glenn Close in the film Fatal Attraction) standing outside a closed door ("I mean, I'm not going to be ignored, Dan"). How about a faux translation of a poem written in a language you don't know?
There's a treasure trove of thought-provoking, imagination-igniting ideas in this valuable resource for beginning and experienced poets alike. It's also the perfect book for writing instructors eager to motivate their students and expand students' understanding of how poems are created. A writing instructor in search of an affordable and very contemporary guide to writing poems will find the second edition of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets especially handy and easy to use. In fact, Fox and Levin are teachers and practicing poets themselves, and, as the introduction notes, they extensively tested the prompts in classrooms and workshops and among their writing peers before including them in the book.
If you're a writing novice in search of guidance or a veteran writer looking for new ways into the craft or a teacher in search of a how-to manual and poetry anthology combined into a single easy-to-use handbook, you'll find that this craft-of-poetry guide is a choice that will pay creative dividends and give much pleasure along the way.
Michelle Moore is the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Deepest Blue (Rager Media) and Longing for Lightness: Selected Poems of Antonia Pozzi Translated from the Italian (Poetry Miscellany Press). Her poems, interviews, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including Commonweal, Heavy Bear, Apalachee Review, Black Dirt, Rattle, Penguin Review, and White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood published by Demeter Press.
I love this review that Scott wrote about a book published by Cervena Barva Press and wanted to publish it.
Balkan Grit by Milan Djurasovic
Review by Scott Thompson
Balkan Grit begins with a strong entry, simply titled "Retribution," in which the narrator tells the story of his childhood rival and bully, Petar, whose troubled childhood works to humanize his character, yet the death of his parents and his subsequent living situationwith his grandparents, is told with a tone of normalcy as if to make the bleak reality of a parentless household and strange relatives a common occurrence. The sad realities of a broken community are simply a backdrop for the story taking place, though, as "Retribution" focuses on the ridiculously humorous and impulsive scheme the narrator creates to exact his revenge on his childhood bully by failing to seducing his grandmother, then resorting to vandalizing his room in an act of juvenile, poetic justice.
Djurasovic's unique writing creates an aura of ordinarity around strange and fascinating situations that he has witnessed or been a part of. He is able to convey just how normal the abnormal is in a community that is still trying to find sure footing in an era where the future is uncertain. His firsthand accounts present the absurd as an everyday occurance, an annoyance to be expected as people drift through their lives, and yet he realizes these stories are something that speaks to a broader audience than his small Bosnian village where most of these take place.
More introspective than his firsthand accounts are the stories told through him. Stories of universal human struggles, finding their place in the world, being unable to adapt to a changing world, all told through the lens of real, or at least convincingly real, people.
One story stands out to me in particular because it encapsulates the heart of Balkan Grit like no other. "She Was a Good Guy" is a story of two loud-mouthed, oblivious, old men told through Djurasovic as he eavesdrops on their conversation. The two men have a much more traditional mindset than those around them. They discuss current affairs and renounce immigrants, but the tone shifts when one of the men denounces homosexuality as "foreign scum." As it turns out, a female cousin of the other man that grew up with them in their village was openly pursuing a woman. His next words, "they are not an import," is not only powerful enough to quiet the other man, but was enough to make me pause in my own reading. The distinct mixed opinions of the two signal the changing times and the uncertainty of what the future may hold as the two men decide to change the subject and focus on the present, namely their lunch.
Order Balkan Grit here...
Balkan Grit by Milan Djurasovic
Review by Scott Thompson
Balkan Grit begins with a strong entry, simply titled "Retribution," in which the narrator tells the story of his childhood rival and bully, Petar, whose troubled childhood works to humanize his character, yet the death of his parents and his subsequent living situationwith his grandparents, is told with a tone of normalcy as if to make the bleak reality of a parentless household and strange relatives a common occurrence. The sad realities of a broken community are simply a backdrop for the story taking place, though, as "Retribution" focuses on the ridiculously humorous and impulsive scheme the narrator creates to exact his revenge on his childhood bully by failing to seducing his grandmother, then resorting to vandalizing his room in an act of juvenile, poetic justice.
Djurasovic's unique writing creates an aura of ordinarity around strange and fascinating situations that he has witnessed or been a part of. He is able to convey just how normal the abnormal is in a community that is still trying to find sure footing in an era where the future is uncertain. His firsthand accounts present the absurd as an everyday occurance, an annoyance to be expected as people drift through their lives, and yet he realizes these stories are something that speaks to a broader audience than his small Bosnian village where most of these take place.
More introspective than his firsthand accounts are the stories told through him. Stories of universal human struggles, finding their place in the world, being unable to adapt to a changing world, all told through the lens of real, or at least convincingly real, people.
One story stands out to me in particular because it encapsulates the heart of Balkan Grit like no other. "She Was a Good Guy" is a story of two loud-mouthed, oblivious, old men told through Djurasovic as he eavesdrops on their conversation. The two men have a much more traditional mindset than those around them. They discuss current affairs and renounce immigrants, but the tone shifts when one of the men denounces homosexuality as "foreign scum." As it turns out, a female cousin of the other man that grew up with them in their village was openly pursuing a woman. His next words, "they are not an import," is not only powerful enough to quiet the other man, but was enough to make me pause in my own reading. The distinct mixed opinions of the two signal the changing times and the uncertainty of what the future may hold as the two men decide to change the subject and focus on the present, namely their lunch.
Order Balkan Grit here...
Review of WHAT DRIVES MEN, a Novel by Susan Tepper
Wilderness House Press
This review appeared on Amazon and Good Reads
Used by permission.
The idea of travel and picaresque connects with Tepper's earlier fiction, but here the male perspective (s) are new, delightful, and uncanny ("What is it with these women?" Russell was thinking..."Why do they always have to emasculate the male?"), and the landscape is American, ironically recalling all sorts of road trips West, from Grapes of Wrath (and Travels with Charley) to On the Road. I love the characters-Russell as the Gulf war vet and long-distance driver from New Jersey; the decrepit country and western music star, Billy Bud Wilcox, being driven to Colorado; and the three free-loading Gen-Xers they pick up in an Ohio "cowboy bar," the doper Tad, and two drifter girls, Sonia and Peaches. The dialogue and ensemble voices are lively and authentic-enough so that again, as a Tepper fan, I can easily imagine this novel as a feature film, where Clint Eastwood would make a great Billy. Along with steadily diverting encounters and complications on the way, the characters all have depth and vanishing points, and while Billy's story is framed from the outside, Russell's is a warming back to life.
-DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares
Susan Tepper is the author of nine published books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent is a chapbook of poetry titled CONFESS published this month by Cervena Barva Press. Last June her road novel "What Drives Men" was published by Wilderness House Press, and shortlisted at American Book Fest Best Book Awards. Other honors and awards include eighteen Pushcart Nominations, a Pulitzer Prize Nomination for the novel "What May Have Been" (Cervena Barva Press, and currently being adapted for the stage), NPR's Selected Shorts Series, Second Place Winner in Story/South Million Writers Award, Best Story of 17 Years of Vestal Review, Shortlisted 7th in the Zoetrope Novel Contest (2003), Best of the Net and more. Tepper is a native New Yorker.
Wilderness House Press
This review appeared on Amazon and Good Reads
Used by permission.
The idea of travel and picaresque connects with Tepper's earlier fiction, but here the male perspective (s) are new, delightful, and uncanny ("What is it with these women?" Russell was thinking..."Why do they always have to emasculate the male?"), and the landscape is American, ironically recalling all sorts of road trips West, from Grapes of Wrath (and Travels with Charley) to On the Road. I love the characters-Russell as the Gulf war vet and long-distance driver from New Jersey; the decrepit country and western music star, Billy Bud Wilcox, being driven to Colorado; and the three free-loading Gen-Xers they pick up in an Ohio "cowboy bar," the doper Tad, and two drifter girls, Sonia and Peaches. The dialogue and ensemble voices are lively and authentic-enough so that again, as a Tepper fan, I can easily imagine this novel as a feature film, where Clint Eastwood would make a great Billy. Along with steadily diverting encounters and complications on the way, the characters all have depth and vanishing points, and while Billy's story is framed from the outside, Russell's is a warming back to life.
-DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares
Susan Tepper is the author of nine published books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent is a chapbook of poetry titled CONFESS published this month by Cervena Barva Press. Last June her road novel "What Drives Men" was published by Wilderness House Press, and shortlisted at American Book Fest Best Book Awards. Other honors and awards include eighteen Pushcart Nominations, a Pulitzer Prize Nomination for the novel "What May Have Been" (Cervena Barva Press, and currently being adapted for the stage), NPR's Selected Shorts Series, Second Place Winner in Story/South Million Writers Award, Best Story of 17 Years of Vestal Review, Shortlisted 7th in the Zoetrope Novel Contest (2003), Best of the Net and more. Tepper is a native New Yorker.
Raves...
These are three recent books I absolutely loved and recommend. To order, please go to the presses and order from them. Support the small independent presses.
Thanks, Gloria
Prime Meridian by Connie Post
Glass Lyre Press, 2020
These poems are of a seer - unwrapping time, being, the Change we are igniting. The considerations are hard won - who we are, what is coming upon us in this age, the passage we are entering and the exit - the seer knows it. There are no exhortations, no longings for forecasts,only the seeing and the forthcoming Being that envelopes us more and more "until all that is left of us." We need this wisdom book, clear elixirs from the Source. True mind-beauty, caved with humanity - beam, everyone must touch this volume in order to traverse the present age, Bravissimo.
-Juan Herrera, 21st Poet Laureate of the United States
Thanks, Gloria
Prime Meridian by Connie Post
Glass Lyre Press, 2020
These poems are of a seer - unwrapping time, being, the Change we are igniting. The considerations are hard won - who we are, what is coming upon us in this age, the passage we are entering and the exit - the seer knows it. There are no exhortations, no longings for forecasts,only the seeing and the forthcoming Being that envelopes us more and more "until all that is left of us." We need this wisdom book, clear elixirs from the Source. True mind-beauty, caved with humanity - beam, everyone must touch this volume in order to traverse the present age, Bravissimo.
-Juan Herrera, 21st Poet Laureate of the United States
I will Destroy You by Nick Flynn
Graywolf, 2019
The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose "songs of experience hum with immediacy" (The New York Times) Beginning with a poem called "Confessional" and ending with a poem titled "Saint Augustine," Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. "Begin by descending," Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.
Bring me into the Flesh by Rosie Rosenzweig
Ibbetson Street Press, 2020
"To recognize Jewish history is to acknowledge human history. Understanding Rosie Rosenzweig's poetry is comprehending the love of parents, children, and others in what may appear complex but in the end, is an important journey no matter one's age or religion. This volume of poetry will make you glad Rosie Rosenzweig wrote it."
-Zvi A. Sesling, Brookline Massachusetts Poet Laureate
In Memoriam
On January 31st, Bruce Lader passed away. It still is a shock. I published a poetry book by Bruce in 2014 called "Fugitive Hope." In 2014, I read with Bruce and Harry Calhoun at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC. It was such a nice evening. That night I also met Bruce's wife Renata. They both were so sweet and kind.
My heart goes out to Renata, Bruce's family, and his friends. Rest in Peace dear friend...
On January 31st, Bruce Lader passed away. It still is a shock. I published a poetry book by Bruce in 2014 called "Fugitive Hope." In 2014, I read with Bruce and Harry Calhoun at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC. It was such a nice evening. That night I also met Bruce's wife Renata. They both were so sweet and kind.
My heart goes out to Renata, Bruce's family, and his friends. Rest in Peace dear friend...
Harry Calhoun passed away in October, 2015. A huge loss. That was a shock too. So weird to think of such wonderful poets, that I read with, now gone. This is such a huge loss for the writing community.
George Kovach passed away from Cancer. He was editor of Consequence Magazine. He was such a wonderful person and great writer. This is a sad loss for the writing world. There was a beautiful write-up in the NY Times. Here is the link: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=george-stephen-kovach&pid=195990985
I was on a small press panel many years ago with George. He was the type of person who was always genuinely happy to see you. He will be missed. Rest in Peace George...
I was on a small press panel many years ago with George. He was the type of person who was always genuinely happy to see you. He will be missed. Rest in Peace George...
Cervena Barva Press Staff
Cervena Barva Press Staff
Gloria Mindock, Editor & Publisher
Flavia Cosma, International Editor
Helene Cardona, Contributing Editor
Andrey Gritsman, Contributing Editor
Juri Talvet, Contributing Editor
Renuka Raghavan, Fiction Reviewer, Publicity
Karen Friedland, Interviewer
Gene Barry, Poetry Reviewer
Miriam O' Neal, Poetry Reviewer
Annie Pluto, Poetry Reviewer
Christopher Reilley, Poetry Reviewer
See you next month!
Poetry readings
Please visit our website for Poetry readings:
http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/readings.htm
Unsubscribe from the Newsletter:
To unsubscribe from the newsletter send an email to:
unsubscribenewsletter@cervenabarvapress.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject line.
Cervena Barva Press Staff
Gloria Mindock, Editor & Publisher
Flavia Cosma, International Editor
Helene Cardona, Contributing Editor
Andrey Gritsman, Contributing Editor
Juri Talvet, Contributing Editor
Renuka Raghavan, Fiction Reviewer, Publicity
Karen Friedland, Interviewer
Gene Barry, Poetry Reviewer
Miriam O' Neal, Poetry Reviewer
Annie Pluto, Poetry Reviewer
Christopher Reilley, Poetry Reviewer
See you next month!
Poetry readings
Please visit our website for Poetry readings:
http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/readings.htm
Unsubscribe from the Newsletter:
To unsubscribe from the newsletter send an email to:
unsubscribenewsletter@cervenabarvapress.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject line.
Gloria Mindock -
Editor & Publisher
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Červená Barva Press means “red color” in Czech and was founded in April, 2005. The press publishes poetry, fiction, and work in translation from writers all over the world. We have published over 200 chapbooks and books. Many of our authors have won prestigious awards. Červená Barva Press is one of the most active presses in the country. We offer: writing workshops, a reading series, Portrait of an Artist & Poet Series, Pastry with Poets (A teaching workshop), Poetry Roundtable, Translation Roundtable, and Read America Read. Read America Read is an organization founded in October, 2015. Books are left all over the country on park benches, bus and train stations, cafes etc… for the public to take for free. Participants in this are writers, publishers, and the general public. So far approximately 3,000 books have been left all over the US. Červená Barva Press believes in community and giving back. Červená Barva Press solicits for full-length books only. There is an open reading period for chapbooks January 2nd-February 10th of every year. Guidelines are available during December. |
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R. J. Jeffreys (c) 2021
R. J. Jeffreys (c) 2021