Marsh Hawk Press Blog

You are invited to:

Marsh Hawk Press Reading

Please Join Us for a Celebration of Major New Books by

Edward Foster (Dire Straits)

Sandy McIntosh (Cemetery Chess, Selected and New Poems)

and Paul Pines (Divine Madness)


October 11, 2012 - 6:00PM

Elizabeth Kray Hall
Poet’s House
10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282

Map and directions: http://www.poetshouse.org/about/tour-our-space/visiting

Reading by each of the poets will be followed by a reception and book signing.

Edward Foster’s Dire Straits:
“Edward Foster is the epitome of the poet / scholar.”
—Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry

“Foster writes with great economy. His words feel chiseled and dovetailed into place. Like Zukofsky, Foster evinces the meticulous care of a seasoned cabinet maker. But it is out of this economy that he finds the richness that he is looking for.... Foster, who likes the muted registers and stunning clarity of the black and white photography he often includes in his books, is engrossed by the dialectic between art and life and the complexities and ambiguities of human emotion. This is his strait. His narrows. He doesn't just articulate ideas, he struggles against them. His poetry has as edgy undercurrent. It doesn't settle. It searches for where the words begin."—John Olson

Sandy McIntosh’s Cemetery Chess, Selected and New Poems
“McIntosh's imagination is so vivid that the primary response to [his poetry] is delight.” —American Book Review

“ I don’t like people calling writing ‘gorgeous’ but this really is gorgeous writing. What a crazy/delicious world McIntosh invents.”—Lanford Wilson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Paul Pines’ Divine Madness
"an extended meditation on...the psychic wormholes that allow instantaneous travel along our internal galaxies, that hide just underneath the next memory, the next sentence, and behind the all, the ALL itself—unknowable, perhaps, but in Pines’ poetry nearly imaginable." — The American Book Review

George Spencer had a video-taped conversation with Burt Kimmelman last year at the famous Gathering of the Tribes on the Lower East Side. That conversation (including readings) is now available on YouTube (in two parts:

Link to Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLZCp_Bh0YU

Link to Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BGIRmvIu4U

Marsh Hawk thanks George and to Director Mitch Corber for making the videos available!

The poet, critic, editor and teacher William Allegrezza maintains a blog, "p-ramblings," where he sometimes posts reviews of poetry collections. Sandy McIntosh's newest book, Cemetery Chess, Selected and New Poems, is the latest recipient of Bill's "Daily Glance" review which you can see HERE. Here's an excerpt:

Sandy McIntosh’s Cemetery Chess: Selected and New Poems is intelligent, funny, well-crafted, and just fun to read. McIntosh’s work has been around in the background for me for quite a while. I knew of it, but I did not know it well; thus, this book comes as a welcome introduction to the scope of his poetic arc. His work is strikingly clear, but with a clarity that comes from a place that throws us off kilter, for it seems that he is looking at daily life with more insightful eyes than ours.

A wonderful follow-up to Basil King's "Basil's Arc" project is available at:
http://www.blog.basilking.net/basils-arc-event/


Martha King writes:

Feel free to share the links to the Green Man video and to George Quasha's video portrait of Baz. BTW, we have the okay to use them both, wherever may be appropriate so download and/or share with as you like.

Just two requests:

Please post comments on the film (if you've seen it) on Nicole's site basilkingmirage.net Check there first for information about future showings. The film has been entered in a number of film festivals here and about.

And post any comments or questions on the art or other aspects of the program on the blog page above.

And thanks again for being part of this event in support of Baz and his art. xxxMartha

Congratulations to Mary Mackey. Her most recent collection of poetry and Marsh Hawk book, Sugar Zone, has won the 2012 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature!

You are invited to attend the Award Ceremony which will be held on December 1st from 2 to 5 pm at the Rockridge Branch Library, 5366 College Avenue, Oakland, California.

Mary will be posting more details at her Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/marymackeywriter

Burt Kimmelman, one of the co-founders of Marsh Hawk Press, writes:

Along with Paul Pines and in cooperation with Ken Thorp, Karl Young has put up a substantial amount of the writings of the late Rochelle Ratner at his Light & Dust Anthology (see here: http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lighthom.htm) as part of the efforts to create a Rochelle Ratner online archive. For those of us in our Marsh Hawk Press family who are not aware of her literary presence, let me just say that Rochelle was a dear friend and colleague of a number of us, and a member of the editorial board at Marsh Hawk Press until her death. She is still keenly missed though she passed away some years ago now.

We also have permission to reproduce Karl Young's missive about the project:

“There's some other work by Rochelle at L and D already. Way back in the early 70s, I got her a job on the staff of Margins magazine. The most important work I did for Margins was a series of symposiums, which I continued placing in other magazines after Margins folded. [I had hoped to do a longer series, and try to sell it to Twaine or a similar publisher after I'd done approximately 30 installments. The symposiums in one way or another are about all that's still in some sort of circulation. I've got parts of two symposiums on-line at:

on Rochelle Owens at http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/owens/lro-cont.htm

and Michael McClure at http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/mcclure/mcclure.htm

Just about everything written on Rochelle O. done in the last decade has drawn on this, from Jerry Rothenberg's notes on her in Poems for the Millenium to an article relatively recently by Piere Jorris in Jacket. The essay by Francis Crick in Michael's has been quoted ad infinitum, including on the jacket of nearly every book Michael's published since. While I still had my address at L and D, I felt like Michael's secretary. Sometimes this got me into curious adventures, as well as complimentary copies of books, CDs, etc.

Ron Silliman says the symposium he guest edited on Clark Coolidge did moire to teach him about the importance of writing intelligently about contemporary writing than anything else, and the symposium, published as an issue of Stations, has gotten listed in all sorts of sources. In A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, it's listed as one of the six or seven most important publications of 1978. The last, which was the first serious consideration of Tom Phillips, helped get me a job working with mentally ill people -- about which I can make a lot of jokes if nobody makes them first. etc. Rochelle RATNER's home page and archive will be a continuation of this project, perhaps the launch of at least one other, and an experiment in several other endeavors -- one of them being an adjunct to approaches to handling literary estates. Jackson Mac Low and I had discussed my acting as his conservator, and doing something similar before there was an available world wide web in electronic media, but in print.

Rochelle was one of my closest friends. We talked on the phone at least once a week during her last two years, in spite of our hospitalizations, and sometimes even with them. Her last e-mail to me was sent less than 24 hours before her death. Ending with "I've got to hurry. I'm really behind on everything." Rochelle and I sometimes wrote together, as in this pair of essays on John Taggart, apparently the first critical responses to John's move to the "minimal" mode in "Slow Song for Mark Rothko," etc. [between the time I published his Dodeka and Dehiscence on the two sides of the transition, as well as publishing an audio tape of John reading, and his symposium on Ted Enslin published as an issue of Truck, as part of the symposia started in Margins:

http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/le-ry-jt.htm

Ken, among others besides Rochelle herself, said that my essay on Rochelle at

http://www.marclweber.com/sugarmule/sm17.htm

Ken, though, added that Rochelle insisted he recite my essay every night before bed for two years.

The home page/archive will include as much of Rochelle's work as possible. It'll also include commentary. I'll send you an invitation when we're further along. It'll all be pulled together in aq single sub-site, like a lot of the others at L and D. This is in progress, though in sequester, at

http://www.thing.net/~grist/surveys/Rochelle/Ratner.htm

Paul and I have had problems getting copy together and organizing what we've got and how we're going to proceed. For the summer, I've just been putting individual entries on the main menu so they'd be more apparent. If I just did a slapped-together version of the home page, a lot of the people who saw it probably wouldn't stop back when it's farther along, assuming they'd seen it all and "taken care of it" so they could move on to something infinitely more trivial and trendy at some tacky but consecrated site.

Anyway, that's where my Rochelle project's at at the moment.”