Marsh Hawk Press Blog

A LOVELY REVIEW FOR BURT KIMMELMAN

by Eric Hoffman was published by Home Planet News, while now available HERE. While the review is of Burt's latest, THERE ARE NO WORDS, it also mentions nice things about Burt's MHP books, The Pond at Cape May Point and Somehow. An excerpt:

This alternation between the larger world experienced through the perceptions of other artists, whose own perceptions mingle with that of Kimmelman’s speaker, and the speaker’s relationships with his family and his immediate environment, draws the reader in to a life informed and deepened through the experience of art. Kimmelman’s next major collection after an equally impressive collaboration with painter Fred Caruso -- The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), published by Marsh Hawk Press, another thematic collection, this time centered around the speaker’s relationship to another specific environment -- was 2005’s Somehow, also published by Marsh Hawk Press. Somehow continues this alternation between the experience of art and the experience of life, and how these two often constitute a single experience; that life informs art and art informs life, often in quite mysterious and inviolable ways. Somehow is thus far Kimmelman’s most important work; it incorporates poems revised from previous collections (including Musaics and his chapbook First Life published by Jensen/Daniels in 2000) in addition to many newer poems, a number of which rank among Kimmelman’s finest. The collection evinces a poetic eye for detail and an ear for the quiet, almost hypnotic rhythms of language that result from Kimmelman’s increased assurance and skill. Yet Somehow also displays an increasingly conservative approach to poetic form – gone are the sometimes awkwardly stylized capitalization and punctuation of his earlier collections. Perhaps the most impressive work in this collection is the section of poems centered around months of the year, “Late in a Slow Time.” These elegantly exact poems, never exceeding more than twelve lines in length, have been stripped down to the bare essentials of the moment’s image.

PLEASE JOIN US AT THE 21ST ANNUAL INDIE & SMALL PRESS BOOK FAIR, NEW YORK CITY!

More information, including directions, may be found at the Marsh Hawk Press web site, but here's info:

SATURDAY, December 6, 2008 10 am to 6 pm
SUNDAY, December 7, 2008 11 am to 5 pm
Free Admission!
The New York Center for Independent Publishing
20 West 44th Street (5/6)
New York City

NEW WEST REVIEWS JANE AUGUSTINE'S LATEST BOOK!

Alex Young reviews Jane Augustine's A Woman's Guide to Mountain Climbing for New West. You are invited to click on the excerpt below for the entire review:

It’s hard to think of poetry and mountain climbing in the American West without thinking of the Beat poet and the mountain-climbing hero of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, Gary Snyder. All of us who see mountain climbing as a bit more spiritual than the average weekend recreation owe a little something to Snyder and the Beat generation’s vision. In a certain sense, poet Jane Augustine also owes a lot to Snyder: like him, she is an enthusiastic mountain climber, a devoted student of Buddhism, an erudite reader of world literature, and a poet who, despite traveling the world, has maintained her roots in the West where she was born. In her poetry, likewise, she shares Snyder’s penchant for the short free-verse lyric.

MARSH HAWK PRESS AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS!

Click HERE for photos of Eileen Tabios' three Marsh Hawk Press books exhibited at the Library of Congress! Exhibition runs through the end of November.

Here is curator Luisa Igloria's Introduction to the Project:

WELCOME TO THE SECTION ON FILIPINA POETS!

While this is a non-juried section of the Wompherence, nevertheless we have wanted to make sure that the section is thoughtfully curated.

Other poets whom we have been unable to contact directly either by email or other correspondence, are represented through their bios and sample poems culled from available links on the web.

Most of the poems which have been culled for this celebration of Women's Poetry on the web are in English, but this is more a result of the issue of convenience given the short window of time to prepare text and images for inclusion, and given that all of the wonderful sections here have come into being, powered purely by volunteer effort from Fest staff.

The Filipina poets whose works you will read in this section, by no means represent the richness and plenitude of poetry as written by Filipina women. Literature in English, however, is only one small thread in the tapestry that is Filipino literature. In an archipelagic culture steeped in tradition and lore, vernacular languages and literatures tell as eloquently if not more so, of women - and men and children - and their precolonial, colonial, postcolonial and transglobal or diasporic realities.

As it happened countless times for me as I worked on curating this section, when you browse through these pages, doubtless some of the ads below the main Wompherence banner will call up some of those stereotypical images -- of the Filipina as mail order bride, the Filipina as domestic worker, or as shy and subservient "Maria Clara."

But there is so much more to the idea and reality of being Filipina -- whether she is indeed a mail order bride who has found her way to a rural community in Kansas; or a domestic worker in Dubai or Hong Kong helping her compatriots organize to learn more about their rights as migrant workers; or the nanny somewhere in Europe, who has temporarily put aside her teaching career and her degree in physics; or the former Wall Street banker who has decided to make wine and write poetry; the poets who are mothers and the mothers who are poets, and who use writing to forge new definitions of family in defiance of distance; or the poets who have come to writing from "outside the academy" ...

It is my hope that through the works of the 100 Filipina poets here, readers will see not only the fierce and visionary foremothers in Filipina poetry -- those babaylanes or early priestess-poets as well as those Filipina poets who have been trailblazers in their own time -- but that their legacy is very much alive in the Filipina poets writing today, wherever they are in the world.

HARRIET ZINNES READING!

You are invited to

a reading by Harriet Zinnes who will read at the Poets Fest at Queens College library (5th floor) at 2:45 pm on Thursday, November 20, 2008.

READING FEATURES THOMAS FINK AND BURT KIMMELMAN!

You are invited to:

Poetry at the Café
by

Tom Fink, Burt Kimmelman, and Carole Stone

November 10th
6 PM
$7 Cover Charge

Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street
NYC 10014
212-989-9319

For directions etc.: http://www.corneliastreetcafe.com/

About the poets:

Thomas Fink’s fifth book of poetry, Clarity and Other Poems, was published by Marsh Hawk Press in Spring, 2008. A Different Sense of Power (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001) is his most recent book of criticism, and in 2007, he and Joseph Lease co-edited “Burning Interiors”: David Shapiro’s Poetry and Poetics. His work appears in The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner’s). Fink's paintings hang in various collections.

Burt Kimmelman has published five collections of poetry – Musaics (Sputyen Duyvil Press, 1992), First Life (Jensen/Daniels Publishing, 2000), The Pond at Cape May Point (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, Somehow (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005), and There Are Words (Dos Madres Press, 2007); his volume of poems titled As If Free is forthcoming in 2009 (from Talisman House, Publishers). For over a decade he was Senior Editor of Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998); and, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (Peter Lang Publishing, 1996; paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (Facts on File, 2005).

Carole Stone, professor emerita, , has published two books of poetry, the most recent, /Traveling with the Dead, /Backwaters Press, 2007 and six chapbooks. Her most recent chapbook is / Etudes/, Finishing Line Press, 2008. She has received fellowships from Hawthornden Writers Retreat, , Chateau de Lavigny, and three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

MARSH HAWK PRESS DISPLAYED AT U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS!

Eileen Tabios' Marsh Hawk Press books (e.g. HERE and HERE) are part of an exhibit at the U.S. Library of Congress in conjuction with "100 Filipina Poets" during the First Annual Festival of Women's Poetry. You can go HERE for information on the exhibit in the

Asian Reading Room, LJ150
Jefferson Building
101 Independence Avenue, N.E.
Washington DC

Eileen's participation may also be viewed through three of her new poems HERE.