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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.Read More
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Immodestly Noted
Order on Amazon Succinct The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems edited by Jonathan Greene and Robert West Broadstone Books 418 Ann Street Frankfort, Kentucky 40601-1929 My contributor’s copies came in the mail yesterday, and oh my—what are the odds that an off-the-main-map poet like me would find himself among such company? Somewhere between Anonymous and Zukofsky, within hailing distance of Archilochus, Arnold, Brandi, Bunting, Heaney, Kinnell, Niedecker, Rosenow, Villon, three Williamses (Jonathan, Miller, and William Carlos), and yes, Willie Yeats. This gave me a strange sense of elation, enhanced by the beauty of the physical book itself.Read More
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Hai-cool
Ce Rosenow, Poet and Ownerof Mountains and Rivers Press Somehow, a couple of weeks back, probably because I was swamped with end-of-term classwork, I missed this delicious essay by Ce Rosenow (“the undisputed Queen of Hai-cool”). The idea that you may have missed it because of me—well, I’ll just have to live with the shame.Read More
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On Penny Harter’s Recycling Starlight
In a recent review of Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, the politico-literarily inept Lorin Stein reveals himself to be a refreshingly direct, no-nonsense reader of poetry. He values Vendler’s Dickinson for its “sensible, elegant interpretations” of a poet who “has become our founding experimentalist.” By that he means that we are encouraged “to find [Dickinson] daunting: cagey, coy, subversive, furious, elliptical. These are qualities,” Stein adds, “we tend to prize, and even fetishize, in poetry today.” He’s right, of course, and he’s right that this view distorts Dickinson.Read More
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An Interview with Ce Rosenow
I reviewed Ce’s book Pacific awhile back, and earlier wrote about her work as co-editor (with Bob Arnold) of Cid Corman’s The Next One Thousand Years.Read More
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Silliman Tips His Hat to Thomas Rain Crowe
A few posts back I reviewed the latest, lovely publication by Ce Rosenow, proprietress of Mountains and Rivers Press. One of her press’s publications, Thomas Rain Crowe’s The Blue Rose of Venice, is reviewed today by Ron Silliman on his blog. Here’s hoping the exposure brings many more readers to her site! I’ll let Silliman’s review speak for itself, but do want to point out one element he missed in the poem he quotes by Crowe.Read More
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Revelatory Moments
Pacificby Ce Rosenow57 pages, paperISBN-13: 978-0-9643357-2-1Mountain Gate PressBrad Wolthers, Publisher2105 Glencoe RoadHillsboro, OR 97124 Poetry at its best encourages us to pay attention–not, finally, to the words but to the motions of mind and feeling behind them. Once we pay attention, we see that objective and subjective are simply two aspects of the same reality. Look out your window, then close one eye: you’ve lost perspective, so the view seems to flatten. Now open your closed eye and close the open one: the view remains flat and jumps to one side.Read More
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Welcome, Ce Howard
The latest “follower” to join The Perpetual Bird is also the last through the door for 2009. Her name is Ce Howard–and that’s all I know about her! I use “her,” by the way, because my cousin, the wonderful poet-editor-publisher Ce Rosenow is una chica.Read More
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Laura Winter’s Abiding Attention
The line of American poetry that runs from Emily Dickinson to H.D. to Lorine Niedecker to Rae Armantrout is a vein of intensity and concentration that now must be seen to include an Oregon poet named Laura Winter. (I’ve named all women here, but the line I mean does include men, among them: George Oppen, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Ronald Johnson, and Carl Philips.) I received Winter’s latest collection Coming Here to Be Alone from the publisher, Ce Rosenow, who co-edited a recent selection of Cid Corman’s poetry with poet Bob Arnold.Read More