Natasha Trethewey featured in DVD Anthology "POETRY ATLANTA:TROUBLE & HOPE"

Trouble & Hope is DVD anthology of poets in performance and conversation more than two years in the making. The film features some of Atlanta's finest poets and spoken word artists. Featured on the DVD are: Travis Denton, Kodac Harrison, Karen Head, Collin Kelley, Alice Lovelace, Opal Moore, Natasha Trethewey, Dan Veach, Megan Volpert and a special tribute to the late Shannon Leigh.

Read more about the DVD and the upcoming viewing at the Georgia Center for the Book here:
http://www.georgiacenterforthebook.org/

Dan Albergotti to read at "Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series"

Friday, June 12, 2009
Final Chin Music of the season Thursday.

Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series
Featuring Sarah Manguso, Dan Albergotti, and Blue Chevigny

Please join us for the season finale of Chin Music, the Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series. Next Thursday, June 18th, we are excited to feature three wonderful poets: Sarah Manguso, Dan Albergotti, and Blue Chevigny. Writers on-deck for the autumn season include Roddy Lumsden, John Casteen, Paige Starzinger, Major Jackson, and David Baker.

Read more about the event and the series here:
http://pacificstandardbrooklyn.blogspot.com/2009/06/final-chin-music-of-season-thursday.html

"No Pause for Breath" Camille Dungy on the One-Sentence Poem

Camille Dungy

No Pause for Breath

I was talking to a friend today about one-sentence poems I love.

By one-sentence poems I don’t mean very short poems like the one-line poems Michael McFee discussed in his Feb. 2008 article in the AWP Writer’s Chronicle. McFee has written a whole book made up of monostich (The Smallest Talk), and so he is likely much interested in the form and its function. That is an interesting line of inquiry (pardon the pun), but not what I’m talking about when I mention one-sentence poems here.

Read the entire post here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/06/no-pause-for-breath/

A. Van Jordan on "Writers on Writing with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett"

Marie Stone moderates a poetry panel with poets Stanley Plumly, author of Old Heart, B.H. Fairchild, author of Usher, and A. Van Jordan, author of Quantum Lyrics.

Read more here:
http://writersonwriting.blogspot.com/2009/06/stanley-plumly-bh-fairchild-and-van.html

Listen to the podcast here:
http://www.barbarademarcobarrett.com/writersonwriting/audio/Stanley-Plumly_B.H.-Fairchild_A.Van-Jordan_Jun-3-2009.mp3

Jeniifer Julian Reviews David A. Taylor's "Success: Stories" for storySouth

David A. Taylor’s Success: Stories
by JENNIFER JULIAN

Success: Stories
by David A. Taylor
Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 216 pages, $15.95






David A. Taylor, journalist and documentary film writer, presents fourteen superbly-crafted tales in his recent collection, Success: Stories. While aptly titled, this is not an assortment of fourteen “success stories” in which protagonists achieve their desires and experience triumph in the face of adversity. Rather, these are moments that explore the most vital crises of existence, when human emotions—desire and isolation, suspicion and jealousy—boil over, leaving in their wake exquisite failure and a conflict that blooms in complexity every time the reader revisits it.

Read the entire review at storySouth: http://storysouth.com/2009/03/success-stories-david-taylor.html

"Five Canadian Women Eco-Poets" New post by Camille Dungy at The Poetry Foundation

Camille Dungy

Five Canadian Women Eco-Poets

I’m in Canada right now at the biennial conference for Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). In honor of my host nation, I thought I’d write about a few Canadian women poets whose work I enjoy.

Since I’m at the ASLE conference, thinking about the intersection between poetry and discussions of human impact on the environment, I should start by talking about Di Brandt. Brandt has been concerned about these issues for most of her career. In a review of her collection Now You Care, Jeff Gundy of the Georgia Review writes, “Brandt roams this industrial landscape like a feminist environmentalist postmodern Apollinaire, one who finds beauty and destruction wherever she goes.”

Read the entire post here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/06/3214/

Natasha Trethewey to take part in The Fourteenth Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge

June 1, 2009

Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge

Poets House presents

The Fourteenth Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge
Monday, June 8, 6:30pm

with poets Hettie Jones, Galway Kinnell, Thomas Lux, Natasha Trethewey and Kevin Young, and actor Bill Murray.

Read more about the event here:
http://njpoetspoetry.blogspot.com/2009/06/poetry-walk-across-brooklyn-bridge.html

Natasha Trethewey in the JoongAng Daily

Pulitzer poet stirs Korean sorrow

Trethewey’s visit provides inspiration for young generation of writers

May 05, 2009

	Natasha Trethewey

By Hannah Bae, Contributing writer

With their focus on the black Southern experience, the poems of Natasha Trethewey may not appear immediately relevant to Korean audiences. But oppression, loss and the aftereffects of war are familiar to the psyche of both South Korea and the American South, a message that emerged in the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s series of lectures in Seoul last week.

“I’m constantly talking about historical memory,” Trethewey, a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said Friday before her lecture at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College. “I’d like to present a fuller version than what’s always been told by the white men.”

Read the entire article here:
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2904376

Camille Dungy at the Poetry Foundation

Camille Dungy

Mujeres poetas de Venezuela/Women poets of Venezuela

I received an unanticipated package early this week. Each month, enough packages containing books or journals show up in my box that I tend to be unfazed when an unexpected package arrives. Often, when such books arrive, I take a cursory glace at the cover and the table of contents, register interest, then set the book aside, promising to return to it when I have a bit more time. Lately, I’ve been on the run, with too much to do in too few hours, and I’ll admit I opened the padded envelope without even bothering to see who/where it was from. But this little package was different. It had come all the way from Venezuela, carrying with it the work of twenty-five women I immediately wanted to get to know. Perfiles de la Noche/Profiles of Night: Mujeres poetas de Venezuela/Women poets of Venezuela compelled me to stop all my running, to sit down, to read.

The House Inside

To Poetry

The house needs both my hands.
I must hold up its plaster like my bones,
its salt like my joys,
its fable in the night
and the sun burning in the middle of its body.
I have to suffer the curtains and their seagulls
dead in flight.
Be moved by the garden and its sketched mask of flowers,
the innocent brick accused
of not being up to the mirrors,
and the doors open for new brides
with their sound of rice growing under the veil.
I have to look after its replica of the universe,
the memory of fields in the vases,
the concerted vigil of the table,
the pillow and its likeness of strayed birds,
the milk with dawn’s face under its brow
with the stiff solitude of a lily
simply being born.
I have to love it whole, going out of my hands
with the grace that lives on my dying grace.
And not know, not know there’s a clover village
with the sea at it’s door
and no names
nor lamps.

Read the entire post here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/05/mujeres-poetas-de-venezuelawomen-poets-of-venezuela/

Dan Albergotti Reviewed at "Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century"

Mon 20 Apr 2009

THE BOATLOADS by Dan Albergotti

Review by Kerry Krouse

THE BOATLOADS
by Dan Albergotti

BOA Editions, Ltd
250 N. Goodman St, Suite 306
Rochester, NY 14607
ISBN 978-1-934414-03-3
2008, 96 pp., $16.00
www.boaeditions.org

We like for things to be orderly—for our houses to shine and our gardens to be weedless. We want the world to be as easy and knowable as the predictably designed houses and neatly ordered streets in new subdivisions. But to read Dan Albergotti’s collection of poems, The Boatloads, winner of 2007 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, you have to leave the comfort of the subdivision and stand at the uncomfortable borders where worlds meet: the ancient burial ground that sleeps below the shopping mall, the sidewalk shared by the faithful and the homeless, the streets lined with fruit trees but also gutters. The poems of The Boatloads live in this intersection where antiquity intersects modernity, where the sacred intersects the profane, where faith collides with truth.

Read the entire review here:
http://www.rattle.com/blog/2009/04/the-boatloads-by-dan-albergotti/

Natasha Trethewey to Read for the Cropper Writers' Series

Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Comes to USD

Take a journey through the depths of the deep South this Friday with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, whose body work has been described as “muscular, luminous poems (that) explore the complex memory of the American South.”

She’ll take the stage at USD as the focus of the Cropper Writers’ Series; her most recent collection of poems, Native Guard, explores the story of one of the first black regiments to fight during the Civil War. The work is said to be “both a pilgrimage and an elegy,” in which Trethewey “skillfully employs a variety of poetic forms to create a lyrical monument to these forgotten voices.”

Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Native Guard, becoming on the fourth African American to win the esteemed award. The book includes passages that honor her mother and recalls her parent’s interracial marriage, which was still illegal in 1966 in Mississippi. The poet brings a tremendous strength to the Cropper Writers’ series through her work, which focuses on the public and personal aspects of ancestral remembrance.

Read the entire article here:
http://www.sandiego.edu/insideusd/?p=2331

Dan Albergotti at "First Book Interviews"

First Book Interviews
Continuing in the tradition of Kate Greenstreet

#19 - Dan Albergotti
Thursday, April 2, 2009

In a recent section in Poets & Writers, Debut Poets, you are one of the featured poets. I’m going to try and ask some questions dealing with some answers from that article. How often had you sent out The Boatloads before it was chosen as the winner of the A. Poulin Poetry Prize? It says you spent eight years writing the book. Was this the last eight years, or had you been writing the book before that without knowing it? I could also ask: Did any of The Boatloads come from your MFA thesis?

It was pretty much the last eight years, at least in terms of writing the actual poems that appear in The Boatloads. But from another perspective, you could say that I’d been “writing the book” for much, much longer. I’m sure I’ve been obsessively thinking about the ideas and themes of these poems for more than half my life. A lot of the poems in the book did appear in my MFA thesis, but that collection has, as you might expect, a much less unified vision.

Read the entire interview here:
http://firstbookinterviews.blogspot.com/2009/04/19-dan-albergotti.html

Camille Dungy at the Poetry Foundation

Camille Dungy

What’s the word for wonderful in your language?

Global capitalism is nothing new. Through history, the need to maintain the flow of capital has driven the diasporas of people, languages, and, yes, poetry. Whoever thinks contemporary North American poetry is provincial or isolationist hasn’t read the four poets I discuss in this post.

Read the entire post here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/04/1863/

Dan Albergotti Interviewed at "32 Poems"

Dan Albergotti Interview

by deborah ager
March 31, 2009

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. In 2008, his poem “What They’re Doing” was selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina.

1. Do you think poets have an easier time getting published with higher credentials? Why or Why not? Also of your “hats,” which do you find most difficult to wear and why?

Over the years, I’ve occasionally heard this suspicion that having a good cover letter can get you “in” at magazines and presses. I just don’t buy it. Only the work matters to editors. And if a lot of people being published have degrees in creative writing, isn’t there a rival hypothesis to the idea that the degree “got them in”? Doesn’t it make sense that someone who committed two-to-four years of his of her life to study writing at a post-graduate level might just have developed abilities to the point that he or she is writing poems worthy of being published?

I do wear a lot of hats, and it’s difficult in the sense that it stretches my economy of time very thin. But I’m lucky in that every hat I wear—as writer, teacher, editor—is wonderful, so it’s hard to apply the word “difficult” to any of it. I’m blessed, really.

Read the entire interview here:
http://blog.32poems.com/997/dan-albergotti-interview/

Natasha Trethewey Visits James Madison University

Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Visits JMU
Harrisonburg, Va.
Mar 23, 2009

James Madison University hosted a Pulitzer Prize winner Monday night. Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her recent collection of poems, "Native Guard."

Read the entire article here:
http://www.whsv.com/news/headlines/41723402.html


Watch the WHSV3 Interview here:
http://ww2.whsv.com/global/video/flash/popupplayer.asp?ClipID1=3578211&h1=Pulitzer%20Prize%20Winning%20Poet%20Visits%20JMU&vt1=v&at1=News&d1=52881&LaunchPageAdTag=News&fvCatNo=&backgroundImageURL=&activePane=info&rnd=39902383

"The Line: Here" Camille Dungy at The Poetry Foundation

Camille Dungy

The Line: Here

Three of the grand mysteries: What makes a poem? What makes a stanza? What makes a poetic line?

James Longenbach opens his most recent book on the craft of writing with this quote from George Oppen: “The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.” For the next 120-odd pages Longenbach details his opinions on The Art of the Poetic Line.

The first two sentences of the book read thus: “Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of writing.” He goes on to say (though I am still quoting only the preface): “The line’s function is sonic, a way of organizing the sound of language, and only by listening to the effect of a particular line in the context of a particular poem can we come to understand how lines work.”

Read the entire post here:
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/03/the_line_here_1.html

Dan Albergotti Featured at "How a Poem Happens"

How a Poem Happens
Contemporary Poets Discuss the Making of Poems

Monday, March 9, 2009
Dan Albergotti

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. In 2008, his poem “What They’re Doing” was selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.


VESTIBULE


I sometimes wish I could find Cindy
to thank her for agreeing with my fine idea
that we sneak into the university chapel
late one night in 1983 to make love.
I don't just want to thank her for giving me
the trump card — “house of worship”—
I hold in every stupid party game that begins,
“Where's the strangest place you've ever . . . ?”
No, I want to thank her for the truth of it.
For knowing that the heart is holy even when
our own hearts were so frail and callow.
Truth: it was 1983; we were nineteen years old;
we lay below the altar and preached a quiet sermon
not just on the divinity of skin, but on the grace
of the heart beneath. It was the only homily
we knew, and our souls were beatified.
And if you say sentiment and cliché, then that
is what you say. What I know is what is sacred.
Lord of this other world, let me recall that night.
Let me again hear how our whispered exclamations
near the end seemed like rising hymnal rhythm,
and let me feel how those forgotten words came
from somewhere else and meant something.
Something, if only to the single moth
that, in the darkened air of that chapel,
fluttered its dusty wings around our heads.

Read the interview here:
http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2009/03/dan-albergotti.html

Camille Dungy at The Poetry Foundation

Camille Dungy

"For oh, I fear"

I’ve spent at least eight hours of each of the past four days reading other people’s poems. I am attending to word choice, comma placement, the arrangement of lines on the page. I am remembering, in this process, how vulnerable we poets make ourselves each time we take first the risk of writing poems and then the subsequent risk of sending these poems out into the world. This can be a terrifying prospect, writing and then sharing poetry. What I like to read, now and again, are poems that speak directly to the perils of this art.

I thought of this idea when I ran across this poem:

"Poetry"

Sometimes I tremble like a storm-swept flower,
And seek to hide my tortured soul from thee,
Bowing my head in deep humility
Before the silent thunder of thy power.
Sometimes I flee before thy blazing light,
As from the specter of pursuing death;
Intimidated lest thy mighty breath,
Windways, will sweep me into utter night.
For oh, I fear they will be swallowed up—
The loves which are to me of vital worth,
My passion and my pleasure in the earth—
And lost forever in thy magic cup!
I fear, I fear my truly human heart
Will perish on the altar-stone of art!

Claude McKay, from Harlem Shadows (1922)

Read the entire post here:
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/03/for_oh_i_fear.html

Natasha Trethewey in The Natchez Democrat

Mississippi natives honored

By Adam Koob | The Natchez Democrat

Published Sunday, February 22, 2009

NATCHEZ — On Saturday evening the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration honored two Mississippi natives with the Richard Wright Excellence Award.

Authors Carolyn Haines and Natasha Trethewey were recognized for their excellence in writing.

Haines, a novelist, and Trethewey, a poet, were both at the event to accept their awards.

While the authors credited Wright and Eudora Welty, the celebration’s honoree, as the initial inspirations for their works, both gave thanks to their fellow Mississippians for their ongoing inspiration.

Read the entire article here:
http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/news/2009/feb/22/miss-natives-honored/

Natasha Trethewey to Recieve Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award

Two authors to win at NLCC

By Special to The Democrat | The Natchez Democrat
Saturday, February 14, 2009

NATCHEZ — Two prominent authors with Southern roots are slated to win major writing awards at the 20th annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration. The event takes place Feb. 19-22.

4Best-selling novelist Carolyn Haines, a native of Lucedale, now of the University of South Alabama, Mobile, Ala.

4Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, a native of Gulfport, now of Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.

Both will be present to receive the awards and make remarks at a free public ceremony at 6:15 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 21, in the Grand Soleil Hotel ballroom.

Haines and Trethewey will each win a Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award, given annually as a way to honor the internationally acclaimed author Richard Wright, Natchez’s own “native son.”

Read the entire article here:
http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/news/2009/feb/14/two-authors-win-nlcc/

Dan Albergotti Reviewed at "The Rumpus"

A Questioning Faith

A Review of Dan Albergotti’s The Boatloads

Brian Spears bio ↓ · February 12th, 2009

I have a special place in my heart for literature that juxtaposes the sacred and profane, that challenges perhaps the most successful meme ever to spring from the human brain: the belief that God is unwaveringly good.

That’s the matter at the heart of Dan Albergotti’s first collection of poems, The Boatloads, winner of the 2007 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. The one constant in The Boatloads is doubt—doubt about God’s benevolence, about His existence, about the speaker’s worthiness of the blessings he has received—and in a world where certainty is fleeting, doubt plays an increasingly pivotal role.

Which is not to say that Albergotti isn’t searching for the transcendent in the universe. It’s in the clash between the sacred and the profane where he most often finds it. For instance, the opening poem, “Vestibule,” reflects on the speaker’s experience of sex in a university chapel. He wants to thank his partner, not so much for giving him a winning story, but “for the truth of it. / For knowing that the heart is holy even when / our own hearts were so frail and callow.” His speaker is a pilgrim much as Dante was, looking for guidance through a darkened wood. Even the direct statement, “What I know is what is sacred,” is undercut by the line that follows, the plea to the “Lord of this other world, let me recall that night,” as though the speaker really isn’t sure of what is sacred on his own, as though he needs permission from another to recognize the superlative.

Read the entire review here:

http://therumpus.net/2009/02/a-questioning-faith/

Spring Garden Press at AWP 2009

Spring Garden Press & The Greensboro Review will be sharing Table 455 in the Northwest Hall of the Book Fair.

Members of the Spring Garden Press Editorial Board will be reading at the following events:


Thursday- February 12, 2009
1:30 p.m.-2:45 p.m.

Waldorf, 3rd Floor. R170. New England Review 30th Anniversary Reading. (Keith Lee Morris, Shannon Cain, Brock Clarke, Natasha Trethewey, Carl Phillips, Jennifer Grotz) New England Review's anniversary reading highlights the diversity of talent that has characterized this quarterly for thirty years. Literary magazines are often fleeting enterprises, but New England Review has been publishing new and established writers since 1978. Three poets and three fiction writers who have appeared recently in our pages will read from their work. Come hear some of the voices that have distinguished and sustained this publication through the past three decades.

4:30 p.m.-5:45 p.m.

Lake Erie, 8th Floor.R201. University of Michigan MFA Program Alumni Reading. (Sean Norton, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Tung-Hui Hu, Nami Mun, Patrick O'Keeffe, Jason Bredle, Tung-Hui Hu) This reading will feature several notable alumni from the U-M MFA Program and will focus on the varied approaches to aesthetics that have traditionally been a hallmark of the program.

Friday- February 13, 2008
3:00 p.m.-4:15 p.m.

Boulevard Room A,B,C, 2nd Floor. F171A. Poetry and Comix. (Tony Barnstone, Bryan D. Dietrich, A. Van Jordan, Stephen Burt, Chad Parmenter) Writers whose work adapts to comic books (and their movie adaptations) will discuss how poetic form relates to the intrinsic narrative and visual form of comix, how to and whether one can unironically approach "low" culture material without risking bathos, ways in which comic book poems can be adapted to new media, and how comic books provide the mythos for our time, a common frame of reference, a manifestation of philosophical and religious themes, and psychological wish-fulfillment and dreams.

Saturday, February 14th, 2009
11:00 a.m.-11:45 a.m.
BOA Editions, Tables 361-362, Book Fair. Dan Albergotti book signing.

6:30PM

"Love on the Line" Poems About Love
Location: Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State St., 7th floor
Cost: Free admission
Website: http://poetrycenter.org
Poets Cynthia Atkins, Frank Bidart, Kurt Brown, A. Van Jordan, Paul Muldoon, Elise Paschen, and Robert Polito read selections from their work. Co-sponsored by The Poetry Center of Chicago, The Writing Program, and The Department of Exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Camille Dungy Featured at "Poetry Daily"

Featured Poet

Camille Dungy

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

Natasha Trethewey on NPR's "Fresh Air"

Natasha Trethewey: If My Mom Could See Us Now

Fresh Air from WHYY, January 20, 2009

Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Native Guard. Her parents had an interracial marriage while it was still illegal in Mississippi, and Tretheway's poetry often draws on her childhood as a biracial child in the south.

Listen to the entire segment here (link)

Download the podcast here: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=13

Podcast of Camille Dungy's Reading at City Lights Available at "from the Fishouse"

Fishouse Live at City Lights

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

Elizabeth Volpe Featured at "from the Fishouse"

Scrabble

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

Natasha Trethewey Featured at Native Guards Symposium

Join me at Native Guards Symposium

Ser Sesh Ab Heter-CM Boxley
Sunday, January 4, 2009

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/

Dan Albergotti Reviewed at "Gently Read Literature"

Three New Poets I Met at Bread Loaf
by Steve Wingate

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/