Marsh Hawk Press Blog

BASIL KING EXHIBITION IS REVIEWED!

Tom Patterson writes a review of Basil King's exhibition, “The Green Man: Paintings and Drawings by Basil King,” which was on view from March 20 through June 12, 2010, at Poets House. Click HERE for the write-up presented at Exquisite Corpse-Journal of Letters and Life.

MORIA POETRY REVIEWS EILEEN TABIOS' THE THORN ROSARY!

Leny M. Strobel reviews Eileen Tabios' THE THORN ROSARY in the new issue of Moria Poetry! Here is an excerpt:

Once upon a time the eyewitness to the rituals of a Babaylan told of her altered states of consciousness when she did her healing, her communing with the spirits. They didn’t understand her language but they accepted the efficacy of her relationship with the spirit world. They trusted her. They knew she had access to this world. (Why else did the Spanish friars in the 15th century embark on the project of exterminating these Babaylans?).

Does a poet like Eileen also perform, symbolically, the role of a Babaylan? If the Babaylan is able to ferry a person in-between worlds, or is able to summon a wandering soul back to the body, or plead with the spirits to be kind and generous, or negotiate a propitiation—can a Babaylan-inspired poet do the same?

Sometimes reading poetry, for me, is learning how to dive for one’s own meaning. In diving one learns, senses, embodies. This I have learned from my engagement with Eileen’s body of work over the past decade.

If according to Archbishop Fulton Sheen, The Rosary is “a meditation for the blind, the simple, the aged.” is it then possible that the The Thorn Rosary is that which pricks the meditation in order to return us to our own bodies? Our bodies that aren’t blind, not simple, not aged.

Isn’t this the work of babaylan poetics—to walk the angel back into its body in unborrowed light (see Eileen’s Babaylan Poetics blog at http://babaylanpoetics.blogpost.com). Eileen creates her own light, a luminosity that is also sorrowful, joyful, glorious…the light is unborrowed because it has already taken upon itself all that there is—the world into the poem.

Click on ENTIRE REVIEW HERE.

READING: BURT KIMMELMAN AND PHILIP LOPATE

You are invited to:

P R O S E P R O S
Thursday, October 7

6:30 to 7:45 p.m. [starts & ends on time!]
At the Sidewalk Café
94 Avenue A at 6th Street, NYC u 212-473-7373
F to Second Avenue (exit at First Avenue)

WHAT: Prose Pros, curated by Martha King & Elinor Nauen, presents prose readings – stories, essays, critique, and in-between forms by master writers. The programs pair two prose practitioners linked by agreement or opposition, by topic similarities or discordances. Meet writers new to you. See writers you know.

WHERE: The comfortable back room of the Lower East Side’s Sidewalk Café (home of anti-folk music). All readings are on Thursdays at 6:30 (sharp), usually the first Thursday of the month. Food and drink are available; we ask for contributions to pay the readers.

READING ON OCTOBER 7: Phillip Lopate and Burt Kimmelman

Two writers born in Brooklyn just four years apart focus on the city they both love. Phillip Lopate, known for his delicious skewering of the chattering classes, for celebrations of the city then and now, and for powerful critiques of the wallowing-in-my-addiction memoir, has most recently published Notes on Sontag, and, in 2008, Two Marriages, a pair of novellas.

Burt Kimmelman will read from a memoir that reanimates the Park Slope neighborhood of Fifth Avenue when he was a teen, when this now gentrified neighborhood of restaurants and boutiques resembled Hubert Selby’s Red Hook. Kimmelman’s most recent book is a collection of poems, As If Free.

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Find us online: Please friend “Prose Pros” on Facebook.

See also: philliplopate.com njit.edu/~kimmelma

Or contact:

Martha King at gpwitd@aol.com
Elinor Nauen at Elinor@elinornauen.com