Camille Dungy is the author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. Dungy has received fellowships from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and Cave Canem. She is associate professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.
View the featured poem here: http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14271
Read the entire piece here: http://poems.com/feature.php?date=14271
On May 17, 2007, From the Fishouse and City Lights Books were pleased to present a reading by poets Barbara Jane Reyes, Matthew Shenoda, Camille T. Dungy, Maria Hummel, and Shane Book at City Lights in San Francisco, California.
Read more and listen to the entire event here:
http://fishousepoems.org/archives/poems/fishouse_live_at_city_lights.shtml
Listen to Camille Dungy's reading here:
http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/camille_t_dungy/camille_t_dungy_full_reading_at_city_lights.shtml
The board’s tidy squares once reassuring, now gone,
this game they’d been playing nightly,
(Mom points to an empty spot on the shelf)
the ups, the downs, muted pinks and the blues.
This game they’d been playing nightly,
“to keep him sharp,” she offers,
the downs, ups, muted pinks and blues,
those thumb-rubbed tiles and that faceless one.
“To keep him sharp,” she offers,
“I’d even lose a game or two.”
I imagine the fast-fading tiles and that faceless one
upside down on the table, a jumble.
“I’d even lose a game or two,
though I don’t think he noticed.”
Tiles upside down on the table, a jumble
“I tried not to use the q or the z,
though I don’t think he noticed.”
A kitchen lamp is lit, everything in violet shadow.
“I tried not to use the q or z,
but you’d be surprised how hard it is to lose.”
A kitchen lamp is lit, everything in violet shadow.
Mom points to an empty spot on the shelf.
You’d be surprised how hard it is to lose
the board’s tidy, reassuring squares, now gone.
Read and listen to the entire feature here:
http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/elizabeth_volpe/scrabble.shtml
I, in my capacity as coordinator of Fort McPherson Sons and Daughters of U.S. Colored Troops and Sailor Chapter, will serve as the uniformed representative honor guard at the Native Guards Symposium in Biloxi on Jan. 10.
This is an Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art opening reception and symposium event highlighting the Second Regiment of Louisiana Native Guards who served at Ship Island during the Civil War.
An exhibit titled “Native Guard: A Photographic History of Ship Island’s African American Regiment” will be at the museum. The museum is hosting an opening and book signing reception honoring Pulitzer Prize winning poet and Gulfport native Natasha Trethewey from 6 to 8 p.m. Jan. 9, at its 1596 Glenn Swetman St.
At 9 a.m. Jan. 10, a Native Guards Symposium and book signing with Trethewey will be held at Bancorp South. The symposium features a panel of experts on the black military experience during the Civil War, specifically the Second Regiment of Louisiana native guards at Ship Island.
Key presenters are James G. Hollandsworth Jr., Nana Bennie McRae Jr., and C.P. (Kitty) Waver.
An evening reception honoring Trethewey will be in the home of Julie and John Gustafson in Ocean Springs from 5 to 7 p.m. on Jan. 9.
Read the entire article here:
http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/news/2009/jan/04/join-me-native-guards-symposium/
A decade ago, I didn’t think twice about taking a day off and hunkering down with a novel. Diaper changes and pre-school pickups have temporarily obliterated such big bouts of reading, but lately poetry has been coming to my rescue. While novels demand large swaths of time, poetry asks for an opposite kind of attention that is perfectly suited to shorter sittings. This August at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference I had the pleasure to meet three poets whose prize-winning debut collections—two received the Poulin Prize from BOA Editions, one the Bakeless Prize from Bread Loaf—have saved my reading bacon and created worlds as rich as those I find in novels.
In The Boatloads, Dan Albergotti focuses on rendering moments when his characters become intensely aware of human vulnerability—physical, psychic, and spiritual. A boy watches a squirrel die; a fish gets carried off by a raptor. In Albergotti’s lines, which tend toward the vernacular, there is an implicit questioning of language itself as a tool of human comprehension and expression. “I do not believe a special providence / makes this world say anything,” (24) he writes. And people never seem to be able to get their words out right, as in Bad Language:
We fear to speak, and silence coats the night air.
So we are dumb, as quiet as the kitchen pans
hanging on their cabinet hooks. What words
do we even have? (25)
Such lines bespeak a muteness in the face of our desire to know, and since the desire to know gets so tied up with the Big Questions of Being, it’s no surprise that The Boatloads hovers close to religion. God makes several appearances, and both Jesus and Abraham make cameos; but it is the non-appearance of the divine as in Poem in Which God Does Not Appear that most occupies Albergotti. This non-appearance, often represented as of silence, aligns closely to human difficulties of language and communication.
The music of the spheres may be a great symphony
of unbroken silence: void, more void, a crescendo
of void. (41)
The last song of the one true god
is silent because the one true god
sings in a vacuum behind the thick,
black wall. (73)
One can never accuse Albergotti, with his weaving together of human and divine muteness, of shirking his poetic duty to dig toward the core of life.
Read the entire review here:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/three-new-poets-i-met-at-bread-loaf-by-steve-wingate/
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