me in Chicago

The week after awp I find myself in Chicago doing a guest poet gig at u of Chicago. I miss being at a university--makes me feel safe the way hiding I'm a shrub did when I was little.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Me on Starting Today: Poems for Obama's First 100 Days

Last Wednesday was my day on this amazing blog curated by Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg. They assigned a poet to write a poem for each of Obama's first 100 days in office. Here's my poem. I've been writing lots of poems shaped and rhymed like this lately.

New or Forthcoming Books I'm Excited About

POETRY

Most are pubbing--you guessed it!--April. Though I bet some were made available early for AWP, where I was not this year.

As If by James Galvin (Copper Canyon, 2009)
-haven't seen a galley of this yet, but I've liked the poems I've seen in mags.

Rising by Farrah Field (Four Way, 2009)
-Farrah is a good friend and a blazing poet.

The End of the West by Michael Dickman (Copper Canyon, 2009)

It is Daylight by Arda Collins (Yale, 2009)

The Plum-Stone Game by Kathleen Jesme (Ahsahta, 2009)

Transcendental Studies by Keith Waldrop (U of California, 2009)

Chronic by D.A. Powell (Graywolf, 2009. Just released)

Collected Poems and Unfinished Poems of C.P. Cavafy, trans. by Daniel Mendelsohn (Knopf, 2009--March)

PROSE

The Way Through Doors: A Novel by Jesse Ball (Vintage, 2009)

Close Calls with Nonsense by Stephen Burt (Graywolf, 2009)

The Winter Sun by Fanny Howe (Graywolf, 2009)

Brenda Nominated for NBCC Award

Brenda Shaughnessy, who is, among many other things, my wife, was nominated for the 2008 Nataional Book Critics Circle Award for her second book, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon, 2008). I'm very excited and I hope you'll all cross your fingers for her.

Just to keep the record straight--I was recently elected to the board of the NBCC, but my term does not start until March 2009, after Brenda's award is decided.

Posting

So I've been a bad blogger.  How many times have I said so on my blog over the last several years.  But I'm going to try something new.  Thanks to a widget in the new iWeb, I've been able to put this blog's RSS feed on the home page of my website.  I'm going to try to use this as a space to post news, as such, and musings when I have them.  

"Ultimately Justice Directs Them" selected for Best American Poetry 2009

I'm very excited and honored to report that guest editor David Wagoner has selected my poem, "Ultimately Justice Directs Them," first published at Notell Motel, for Best American Poetry 2009, to be published by Scribner in September.

Click here for an interview Notell did with me.

Thank you Notell Motel, and Davids Wagoner and Lehman.

Reginald Shepherd 1963-2008

Reginald Shepherd died two nights ago. I didn't know him well, but I did know him a little bit--we began corresponding about each others poems, met at AWP once or twice, and last spring, he wrote a signed review of Mark Doty's selected poems for me at PW. It seemed to me that he suffered a very great deal and wrung a great deal of life and energy out of his work as a poet. Somehow, I'm shocked and stunned by this news, though it's not really surprising. The US poetry community will notice his absence and miss him. I hope he knew that.

Here is the excellent review he wrote of Mark Doty's book:

Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems Mark Doty. HarperCollins $22.95 (340p) ISBN 978-0-06-075247-7
Signature

Reviewed by Reginald Shepherd

Doty's first book, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. He has published six books of poetry and four memoirs, all excellent, since. This hefty selection from his seven collections, plus a generous sheaf of new poems, should solidify his position as a star of contemporary American poetry.

Doty's poetic career really took off with My Alexandria (1993), his third book, which made his reputation. Fire to Fire contains only two poems from his first two books—“Adonis Theatre,” about an old movie palace turned gay porno theater, and “The Death of Antinous,” about the Roman emperor Hadrian's lover's afterlife in statuary, both of which are meditations on representation, absence and desire. Desire, and its capacity to transform and transfigure, is one of Doty's main themes. Enough desire (so often mixed, as T.S. Eliot wrote, with memory) can make us as beautiful as the objects of our desire.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Doty has never eschewed beauty. Indeed, beauty, its unlikely, often unexpected, yet constant recurrence and its elusive fleetingness, is central, as demonstrated by several new poems titled “Theory of Beauty,” each with a parenthetical specific occasion. Beauty is found everywhere in Doty's poems, in a band playing cast-off chemical drums in Times Square, even in Chet Baker falling from an Amsterdam hotel window: “a blur of buds//breathing in the lindens/and you let go and why not.”

The title poem “Fire to Fire,” from School of the Arts (2005) is a gorgeous meditation on the way that life's fire infuses the world, in sunflowers, goldfinches, and even a neighbor's puppy: “fire longs to meet itself/flaring, longing wants a multiplicity of faces,//branching and branching out.” The selections from “The Vault” (which really needs to be read in its entirety) reveal the poetry in men meeting other men's bodies in a sex club, incorporating references to the Middle English poem “Western Wind” and to James Wright's “A Blessing,” and including a subtle revision of Rilke's “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” in which the men are deep in the club's “mine of souls,” “that shaft where inner and outer//grow indissoluble.”

At times the poems unnecessarily explain what their vivid images and striking phrases makes clear, but the commitment to the particular, and to its possibilities, is unwavering. As Doty writes in “Ararat,” “Any small thing can save you.” The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence, since “desire can make anything into a god.”

When I die and go to heaven

This is what I want to see for eternity:

Me on Poetry Daily

Hello everyone and no one,

I'm pleased to draw your attention and browser to the wonderful Poetry Daily website, which, today, Saturday 6/21/08, is featuring the title poem of my book. I'm especially happy they picked the title poem, as it's one I tried for a long time to place, with no success.

Hope all are well.

Jenny Scheinman

This is a nice piece from the New York Times today about Jenny Scheinman, a jazz violinist and singer with whose work I'm very much taken. She has two new records out.