MARSH HAWK PRESS RECEIVES A GRANT FROM CLMP AND NYSCA!

We are delighted and grateful to announce that  Marsh Hawk Press has received a grant from the Community of Literary Magazines (CLMP) and the New York State Council on the Arts. The grant will help the press support its Spring and Fall 2016 authors.

SPD RECOMMENDS JASON MCCALL'S DEAR HERO

Marsh Hawk is a bit late to sharing this, but it's still worth sharing!  Janice Worthen of Small Press Distribution (SPD) recommends Jason McCall's Dear Hero!  You can go HERE (scroll to mid-page) for the total text of her recommendation, but here's an excerpt:

McCall reveals the dualities and pluralities of our time in a way that is humorous, melancholic, and even self-deprecating. Sometimes his book reads like an employee manual or survival guide for the modern hero, who somehow finds it necessary to make ends meet. Other times, it serves as a stage for heroic and anti-heroic speeches. 

Occasionally a single speaker steps out of the story and is able to see it in relation to the real world. What this speaker realizes is our epic stories are really "a mirror." Our only real power is "denial," and "you use that gift to make the world make-believe." Such power may harness superheroes but is no match for "the universe [that] remembers we weren't supposed to be anything more than dust."

The hero fantasies serve as escape but may also be the public's fatal flaw. People dream their lives away in the world of "make-believe" only to find their "heroes will turn/ to dust, and [they] will beg/ to know how [they] ever managed/ to become so small."

McCall leaves us wondering if, instead of the helpless and innocent public, we are instead the villain, the hero-breakers. We will do anything to keep our fantasies alive: "We cast nightmares/ to protect our dreams."

A READING WITH PAOLO JAVIER AND JOHN KEENE!

You are invited to The Brooklyn Rail's literary event:

Counternarratives: A Fiction and Poetry Reading
John Keene and Paolo Javier
with Listening Center

Sunday, December 13
2pm

The Brooklyn Rail in collaboration with Nightboat Books

253 36th Street, Third Floor, Ste. C304
Brooklyn, NY 11232

Paolo notes that David Mason, aka Listening Center, and he will also perform live tracks from their EP, My Aspiring Villain.

Go HERE for more information.

CENTER FOR BOOK ARTS' POETRY CHAPBOOK PROGRAM

Sharon Dolin sends a message about the Center for Book Arts' POETRY CHAPBOOK PROGRAM.  Its deadline for the 2016 competition has been updated to Dec. 16, 2015.  The contest will be judged by Mary Ruefle and Sharon Dolin.

You can go HERE for more information, and to download the PDF application!

COVERAGE IN GALATEA RESURRECTS (A POETRY ENGAGEMENT)!

Galatea Resurrects, an online poetry review journal founded and edited by Eileen R. Tabios, has released its 25^th issue, and Marsh Hawk Press is represented!

Jon Curley’s book Hybrid Moments receives a review by Allen Bramhall; go HERE for the review.

Claudia Carlson’s early 2016 book My Chocolate Sarcophagus also receives an advance review by Neal Leadbeater. Go HERE for the review.

Sandy McIntosh’s engagements with Harvey Shapiro and David Ignatow, featured in his Spring 2016 book A HOLE IN THE OCEAN: A Hamptons Apprenticeship, are also featured HERE. 

As well, Jane Augustine's KRAZY: Visual Poems and Performance Scripts receives a review by Eileen Tabios. Go HERE for the review.

**

Marsh Hawk poets also received reviews for their books published by other presses:

Eileen Tabios engages There Are Words by Burt Kimmelman (Dos Madres Press, Loveland, OH, 2007). Go HERE for the review.

Eileen Tabios engages two of Susan Terris’ publications: MEMOS (Omnidawn, Richmond, CA, 2015) and Double-Edged (Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY, 2009). Go HERE for the review.

Congratulations to all!

INTERVIEW WITH SUSAN TERRIS

We're delighted to point you to this delightful interview of Susan Terris, conducted by another wonderful poet Rebecca Foust, and published in Poetry Flash!  Go HERE!

EILEEN R. TABIOS' LATEST REVIEW

of her recent book INVENT(ST)ORY (Dos Madres Press, 2015) is by Joey Madia at New Mystics Reviews. You can see entire review HERE but here's an excerpt:

...works from Tabios’s early years, beginning with 1996, where, in the very first poem, I read the line “your finger trailing the ragged seam of my stretchmark.” Having read Tabios’s more political work, stemming from issues of Filipino nationalism and diaspora, the condition of the orphan, and gender transformation, among other elevated topics, I found this line a reminder that all art, no matter its purpose, must be personal and evocative. It must paint with words—words chosen with the utmost care and discernment.  

An early experimentation of Tabios’s that defines her relationship to the reader that I found fascinating is from 2003, when she published There, Where the Pages Would End, which is a series of “footnote poems.”  The idea was to have one of the poems at the bottom of an otherwise blank page so that the reader could create the story that would generate the footnote. I encourage the reader to do so. For writing teachers, or writers looking for exercises to sharpen their skills, this is powerful practice. In general, there is a considerable portion of Invent[st]ory that could be used to structure a series of workshops or to engage a class of writers with the endless possibilities for our craft that are left beyond the margins when we teach a static poem on the page and ask them to merely imitate.

For the one poem Joey Madia said he would recommend to a newcomer to Eileen's poetry, he recommended "What Can A Daughter Say?"--a poem that features prominently in two of Eileen's Marsh Hawk Press books, 2007's THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES (which is the poem's first publication) and 2010's THE THORN ROSARY.  Available HERE is Part I of the six-part poem and John Bloomberg-Rissman's engagement with the poem.) 

THE MARSH HAWK REVIEW, FALL 2015

We are delighted to announce the release of the Marsh Hawk Review, Fall 2015, edited by Norman Finkelstein.  The review may be accessed HERE and features poems by


Rachel Tzvia Back
Don Bogen
Joseph Donahue
Thomas Fink
David M. Katz
Claudia Keelan
Basil King
Ralph La Charity
Sandy McIntosh
Mary Mackey
Nathaniel Mackey
Robert Murphy
Peter O’Leary
Paul Pines
George Quasha
Kristen Renzi
Michael Rerick
Donald Revell
Mark Scroggins
Eileen Tabios
Susan Terris
Henry Weinfield
Tyrone Williams

THE MARY MACKEY PAPERS AT SMITH COLLEGE

Marsh Hawk is pleased to share that Smith College has acquired Mary Mackey's literary papers. Smith is taking copies of all of her first editions including her Marsh Hawk Press books, as well as manuscripts, rough drafts of poems and novels, fliers for her past readings, copies of all the publications that contain her work, and a lot of other things including her literary correspondence. The latter also means that if anyone has ever published one of her  poems or written her a letter or an email that does not contain intimate personal information, that work will be housed with the Mary Mackey Papers at Smith.

Mary Mackey's books with Marsh Hawk Press are

Travelers With No Ticket Home

Sugar Zone, which received the 2012 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature! 

Breaking the Fever

Congratulations, Mary!

NOTRE DAME REVIEW EDITORS SELECT PAUL PINES

Congratulations to Paul Pines! His book Message from the Memoirist is one of the books highlighted in "Editors Select" by the Summer/Fall Notre Dame Review.  You can see the mention HERE but here's an excerpt:

Paul Pines’s new volume of poetry is also illustrated—in this case by Mark Shaker. The poems and illustrations make up a lively dialogue throughout. Like Lera Auerbach, Pines is also something of a polymath, and his poems manifest a deep interest in fields ranging from cosmology to jazz, the movies, and baseball. He also draws on his experience as a psychotherapist. Like one of his heroes, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Pines’ basic sense of well-being is derived from a memory that remembers itself.

CHARD DENIORD TO BE INSTALLED AS POET LAUREATE

From the Burlington Free Press:

Chard deNiord will be installed as the poet laureate of Vermont on Monday evening at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.

DeNiord, 62, will become the eighth poet laureate of Vermont at a ceremony presided over by Gov. Peter Shumlin. The position was held first by Robert Frost, who was appointed in 1961.

Click HERE for entire article.

NEW REVIEW OF EILEEN TABIOS' SUN STIGMATA!

Chris Mansel reviews Eileen R. Tabios' SUN STIGMATA for The Daily Art Source. You can go HERE for the entire review but here's an excerpt:

You have to admire the fluidity in the way Tabios writes. In another poem entitled Jade, she writes, "No need to turn the urn/to realize I no longer believe/ in the humility of monks." This is fitting. She is out there, where Hemingway spoke of, Sun Stigmata is like applying perfume to the pulse on your wrist and neck. The constant vibration of these words will radiate,and burst from the palms of your hands. This is a volume that is necessary. The sun gives life and so does good writing.

EILEEN TABIOS' NOVEMBER EVENTS IN BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA

Eileen R. Tabios' first November event will focus on one of her Marsh Hawk Press books, The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes!  She will be presenting a lecture and Q&A in an event open to the public at San Francisco State. click on link below for more information!

NOVEMBER EVENTS:

Nov. 2, 2015: Writers on Writing, San Francisco State University

http://eileenappearances.blogspot.com/2015/08/writers-on-writing.html

Nov. 15, 2015: East Wind Books Reading
http://eileenappearances.blogspot.com/2015/10/east-wind-books-reading-berkeley.html

OUTSIDE/INSIDE MARTHA KING'S MEMOIR

Prose Pros – Thursday, November 5 (6:30 at SideWalk Café, Avenue A @ 6^th Street)—will celebrate publication of a large excerpt from Martha King's full length memoir, Outside/Inside,in the fall issue of “A Public Space” magazine. She says:

"Stories, some sad and some glorious with Paul Blackburn, Dan Rice, Frank O’Hara, Lucia Berlin, G.R. Swenson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Jim Rosenquist and many many others, in the life of Martha and Basil King.  On hand to read their own prose –and mine—the redoubtable “Friends of Basil King”: Burt Kimmelman, Vincent Katz, Kimberly Lyons, and Mitch Highfill.

​

"Photo by Lynn St. John.  (I was 22.)   Other photos by Lynn and others are inside.

"I do hope you'll be encouraged to explore the Fall 2015 issue of "A Public Space" for a look at the feature excerpted from my memoir!  And drop me a line."

http://apublicspace.org

"AJAX IN AMERICA" by PAUL PINES

You are invited to Paul Pines' all vets project, Veteran's Voices, which is an off-shoot of his  The Theater of War. Paul shares that the project's "vision is that the classic Greek tragedies speak powerfully to contemporary issues of returning vets and the impact of war on the culture. Sophocles was a General and most of the audience at these plays had been touched by war. 'Ajax' may be one of the most powerful statements on it. I am directing a concert reading of the play to be held at Skidmore College on 11/12. "  See below for details:

(click to enlarge)

FILM BASED ON A PAOLO JAVIER POEM!

Lynne Sachs and Sean Hanley's short film, Starfish Aorta Colossus, is based on a poem of the same name in Paolo Javier's newest book, Court of the Dragon.  The film has been making the film fest circuit. Here are some details:

Anti-Matter Media Art Festival in Vancouver, B.C.   
http://www.antimatter.ws/     Oct. 16 - 31

Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image in Johnson City, NY  http://www.transientvisions.org/2015tv.html  Oct. 16  

Haverhill Experimental Film Fest in Haverhill, Mass.  http://www.haverhillexperimental.org/#!films--videos-2015/cyvg

The film also will screen Nov. 13 at Spectacle Theater and Nov. 25 at Anthology Film Archives.

Last but not least, here is a nice review of the film (last paragraph)!

CONGRATULATIONS Paolo!

CELEBRATE FILIPINO-AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH WITH EILEEN TABIOS' BOOK!

October in the United States is Filipino American History Month. In California, over at the American Canyon Public Library, the commemoration includes a book exhibit that includes several of Eileen Tabios' Marsh Hawk Press books!  Here are some photos from an October 14 event promoting the celebration, as co-curated by librarian Ricah Quinto and poet-professor Janet Stickmon:

Display with THE THORN ROSARY

Caramel Cake!

Display with SUN STIGMATA

Display with NOTA BENE EISWEIN, THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES and THE AWAKENING

Janet Stickmon and Ricah Quinto

Sheila Bare with Eileen's books!

Huge Filipino flag on library fence.

The kulintang!

Highlighted accomplished Filipinos included Cristeta Comerford

Presenter on the need for Fil-Am Studies

Student performer

Event coordinators and performers

More books!

MARY MACKEY AND EILEEN TABIOS AT SAN FRANCISCO LITQUAKE!

Mary Mackey and Eileen R. Tabios are part of this year's LitQuake in San Francisco!  Click on the links for information on their appearances, both of which will take place from 6- 7 p.m. on Saturday, October 17, 2015:

http://www.litquake.org/events/bay-area-generations

Mary Mackey

http://www.litquake.org/events/eleven-eleven-and-fourteen-hills-present-your-lucky-numbers

Eileen R. Tabios

PAOLO JAVIER IN PS1 MoMA'S GREATER NEW YORK SHOW!

We are delighted to share that Paolo Javier is included in PS1 MoMA's Greater NY Show. Here is information for the Sunday series: 

http://press.moma.org/wp-content/files_mf/momaps1_sundaysessions_fall2015_pressrelease.pdf

It’s Not What Happens, It’s How You Handle It
Sunday, November 8, 12:00 – 6:00 pm
Organized by John Giorno and Mark Beasley
With Harry Burke, Todd Colby, Andrew Durbin, Ben Fama, Sophia le Fraga, Fanny
Howe, Paolo Javier, Tan Lin, Morgan Parker and Bunny Rogers

Poet, visual artist and originator of Performance Poetry John Giorno is joined by peers and
a contemporary generation of New York based poets. Giorno’s seminal Dial-A-Poem
Poets (1968) in which an audience dialed individual answering machines to hear poems by
poets such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and John Cage while his record label
and American artist collective Giorno Poetry Systems broadened the ‘venues’ for poetry to
records, television and radio. Giorno’s poetic use of the technology of the day mirrors the
contemporary generation’s use of language—deploying twitter-like phraseology with the
fluid and malleable text of the internet as poems and text migrate from text box to text
box and from page to page—underscoring text and the staging of language as no longer a
form fixed by the printed page.

Part of Sunday Sessions: Greater New York.

MADELINE TIGER READING

You are invited to a reading (first time in a long time) by Madeline Tiger:

Sunday, October 18th, at 7:00 P.M. 

Bloomfield Public Library

90 Broad Street

Bloomfield, N.J.

SANDY MCINTOSH ON THE CULTURE OF HAZING

You are invited to read Marsh Hawk Managing Editor Sandy McIntosh's article,

"Culture of Hazing: Donald Trump, Me, & The End Of New York Military Academy"

in Long Island Press.  Here's an excerpt:

It’s been more than four decades since I graduated from the bankrupt New York Military Academy, which was just sold after a bidding war to a China-based investor on Wednesday. For six years I’d attended this private boarding school in Cornwall-on-Hudson, some 60 miles north of New York City. I’d been exiled up there by my father, a lawyer and institutional fundraiser, who had abandoned his enthusiasm for Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, an educational scheme directed by spirit voices, and had become convinced by Fred Trump, his business acquaintance, that a military immersion was just what I needed to flush all that spiritual nonsense out of my system. 

Before I entered military school I spent the summer at the Atlantic Beach Club on Long Island, where the Trumps were also members. Donald, taking the part of an older brother, taught me daily to play Canasta and other card games. But once the school year began, Donald was already in the upper school, while I was in the junior building. We did pass each other occasionally and would talk between roll calls. Throughout my acquaintance with him, he was always kind, though he never laughed at my jokes.

(The young Donald Trump)

EILEEN R. TABIOS' OCTOBER EVENTS

You are invited to Eileen R. Tabios' upcoming events in San Francisco:

Oct. 13, 2015: Kelsey Street Press Reading for Intersection for the Arts’ 50/50 Poetry Nights Series:
7-9 pm
Oct. 13, 2015
Tenderloin Museum
398 Eddy (@ Leavenworth)
San Francisco

http://eileenappearances.blogspot.com/2015/08/kelsey-street-press-reading.html

Oct. 19, 2015: LIT CRAWL with ELEVENELEVEN
6-7 pm
Flax art & design
1699 Market St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

http://eileenappearances.blogspot.com/2015/04/lit-crawl-san-francisco-2015.html

Eileen R. Tabios maintains an Events Schedule Blog, where you also can see "event reports" on her most recent readings/appearances.

PAUL PINES' LATEST ESSAY IN NUMERO CINQ

You are invited to read Paul Pines' wonderful essay, "Trolling with the Fisher King: The Archaeology of Dreams" in Numero Cinq!  Here's an excerpt:

I learned that my nightly dreams constituted a personal myth, but that Mythology functions as our collective dream. Both divulge meaning through symbols and archetypal imagery and serve as portals for information that enlarges waking consciousness. A key function of dream and myth, personally and collectively, is the integration of experience, without which the psyche would split, exist in what might be compared to a schizoid state, “beside itself.” As Carl Jung might have put it, The Spirit of the Times must be informed by The Spirit of the Depths.

REVIEW OF EILEEN TABIOS' POEM IN TWO MHP BOOKS

Eileen Tabios has received a review of her poem, "What Can A Daughter Say," which is a linchpin poem in her 2007 book THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES, and was subsequently reprinted in her 2010 Selected Prose Poems project, THE THORN ROSARY.  (The poem was also reprinted in her Selected Catalog Poems project, INVENT(ST)ORY.)  Here's an excerpt from the review by John Bloomberg-Rissman:

In fact, speaking generally about Tabios’ work, this is one of the things I like best about it…. I’m always left with a bit of a mystery. Which I think is thought and emotion producing. Which is great.

Click HERE for entire review which appears in THE HALO-HALO REVIEW, September 2015.

MARK DOTY TO JUDGE THE 2016 MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZES

Marsh Hawk Press is delighted to announce its next judge for its Annual Poetry Prize: Mark Doty! Here is part of his bio from the Poetry Foundation:

Since the publication of his first volume of verse, Turtle, Swan, in 1987, Mark Doty has been recognized as one of the most accomplished poets in America. Hailed for his elegant, intelligent verse, Doty has often been compared to James Merrill,Walt Whitman and C.P. Cavafy. His syntactically complex and aesthetically profound free verse poems, odes to urban gay life, and quietly brutal elegies to his lover, Wally Roberts, have been hailed as some of the most original and arresting poetry written today. The recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, Doty has also won a number of prestigious literary awards, including the Whiting Writer’s Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the National Poetry Series, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first nonfiction, and the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (2008). A long-time resident of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Doty teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Be sure to check our website for more information on the contest!

PAUL PINES ON "JAZZ AT THE LAKE"

Paul Pines is interviewed about the "Jazz at the Lake" concert series for which he's the long-time curator.  Here's an excerpt:

Q: How did you get involved in Jazz at the Lake, and what were you doing – personally and/or professionally – before that process started?

A: I had long had a friendship with the poet William Bronk, who owned the lumber company in Hudson Falls and was an American Book Award poet. I would take R & R at his place and got to know other writers in the area. Shortly after my novel, “The Tin Angel,” was published in 1983 and broke into The NYT Sunday Book Review. In 1984, I was invited to spend six months at the Crandall Library [in Glens Falls] giving a creative writing course on a grant from the NYS Council on the Arts. I was living in Belize at the time and had every intention of going back to my little house on the beach in Rum Point. Christine MacDonald knew John Strong {of the Lake George Arts Project}, who was playing with the idea of starting a jazz festival in Lake George. When he learned I was in residence, he called me to see if I would help him set up a festival because he had no idea what was entailed. I told him I was willing to do that but would probably be leaving for Belize shortly after that. Instead, I met my wife, Carol, and 31 years later I am still curating the festival.

Go HERE for the entire interview.

PAOLO JAVIER READS WITH JOHN KEENE

Counternarratives: A Fiction and Poetry Reading John Keene and Paolo Javier With Listening Center Sunday, September 27 3pm The Brooklyn Rail @ Industry City  in collaboration with Nightboat Books 253 36th Street Third Floor, Ste. C304 Brooklyn, NY 11232

John Keene is the author of the novel Annotations (New Directions); the text-art collection Seismosis (1913 Press) with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and the short fiction collection Counternarratives (New Directions). He also translated Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat/A Bolha Editora). He has published his work in a wide array of periodicals and anthologies, and has exhibited his artwork in Brooklyn and Berlin. He teaches in the departments of English and African American and African Studies, which he chairs, and also is a core faculty member in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. Paolo Javier is the former Queens Poet Laureate (2010-14), and author of Court of the Dragon, a new book of poetry published by Nightboat Books. His other full length books include The Feeling Is Actual (Marsh Hawk Press), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He is the recipient of grants from the Queens Council on the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts, and has enjoyed residencies at the Millay Colony of the Arts, The AC Institute, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace. Ongoing collaborations include: a synthervention with electronic outfit Listening Center (aka David Mason) of the entire text of Court of the Dragon; and two new comics projects with artist Alex Tarampi.

CHARD DENIORD THE NEW POET LAUREATE FOR VERMONT

Congratulations to Chard deNiord for his new appointment as Poet Laureate for Vermont!

JON CURLEY REVIEWED IN NEWPAGES!

Congratulations to Jon Curley for receiving a fine review by Benjamin Champagne in NewPages.  You can see the review HERE. Meanwhile, here's an excerpt:

Curley illustrates precisely what is in the root of his traditional use of non­traditional language in identifying the problems of transcending the past while remaining honest to it. This results in the final selection of poems entitled “Whiz Bang!” These poems move in a fashion similar to the phonetic pattern that he has been building since the beginning. Each one explodes just as intended. The purpose of each tightly wrapped little poem, shows off the purpose of each tight phoneme and syllable: to build and restructure the present. Though it is not the last poem, it is a fitting end to a reading of Hybrid Moments:  

Whiz Bang!
Hunting for metaphors, the mournful mage
Encountered siphons of situations that
Washed over him, cleansing him of 
The notion that semblance can ever be 
Summoned and, qua, qua, qua, that’s that.