A MARY MACKEY POEM ON PERSIMMON TREE

 You are invited to read Mary Mackey's poem "Pillar of Smoke/Pillar of Fire" published in the magazine Persimmon Tree. Here is the LINK!

RAIN TAXI REVIEWS EILEEN R. TABIOS' THE INVENTOR

Rain Taxi and reviewer William Allegrezza reviews THE INVENTOR: A Poet's Transcolonial Autobiography by Eileen R. Tabios. The review is in the print edition and thus not available online. But you can see excerpts below. 

“An essential book for those who follow innovative poetry and prose…"

"Tabios succeeds in showing how we all might think through, build, and sustain art.”

“The real emphasis is on Tabios as a creator of forms…. witnessing [the hay(na)ku’s] origin story feels akin to being in the room when the first sonnet or tanka was written."

2024 MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY AWARDS

Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 Marsh Hawk Press poetry awards, judged by John Keene:

The MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZE
Xiaoqiu Qiu

The ROBERT CREELEY MEMORIAL AWARD
Martheaus Perkins

The ROCHELLE RATNER MEMORIAL AWARD
Jay Brecker

FINALISTS
Fred Muratori, Peter Kline, N. Minnick, Vincent Rendoni, Marlaina Nugent, Marcy Rae Henry, E. M. Schorb, Eric Evans, Chris Green, Cait Weiss Orcutt, Forester McClatchey, Karina Cochran, Kathleen Spivack, Angela Ball

More information at https://marshhawkpress.org/2024-marsh-hawk-press-prize-winners/

Information about the judge, John Keene, at https://marshhawkpress.org/john-keene-to-judge-2024-marsh-hawk-press-poetry-prizes/

NEW BOOK BY MARK YOUNG WITH TWO MARSH HAWKERS THOMAS FINK AND TOM BECKETT

Otoliths has just released 100 Titles From Tom Beckett — Poems by Mark Young, Paintings by Thomas Fink, & with an Afterword by Tom Beckett.

Mark Young & Thomas Fink

100 Titles From Tom Beckett

full color

152 pages

ISBN: 978-0-6455483-3-4

$US37.75

Direct URL: https://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-young-and-thomas-fink/100-titles-from-tom-beckett/paperback/product-nvwzp98.html?page=1&pageSize=4 [lulu.com]

 

Tom Beckett's list was challenging. Sure there were some straightforward titles; but when you're confronted by 'Some of America’s Finest Malapropisms Stagger into a Bar' or 'He Hadn’t Always Wanted to be Somebody’s Girl' or 'The Nine Stages of the Decomposition of a Corpse.' it's definitely time to kick into overdrive.

 

Add to that, a common comment on my poetry is many of my titles have little relevance to the poems that accompany them. That is something I could not allow to happen here. Instead, the poems had to pay their respect, homage even, to the title that gave them birth.

 

I think I have done that successfully. &, helped along by the paintings from Thomas Fink, given me a collection of which I am most proud.

— Mark Young

 

Mark Young’s insightful, laser-sharp new poems in 100 Titles From Tom Beckett invite paradox and chance to dance with the sparks and echoes of Tom Beckett’s hilarious, downtempo titles and Tom Fink’s paintings of spreading fractals and swirling ropes of color. Young’s humor and pathos sprinkled with inkblots of bathos illuminate this book. His magnetic fields tease the push/pull levers of constraint and release. “I seem to be attracted / to things that do not exist, no / beginning, no end. Non-end - // ities, if you like, until negated / which then creates them.” Young’s poems often playfully reflect upon their own development and diversion as they proceed, exposing an openness to process at each turn of phrase. It is a pure delight to see Young, Beckett, and Fink – three master poets in their own right – join hands in the creative adventure of this marvelously generous work.

— Charles Borkhuis, author of *Rearview Mirror*

 

 

Reading 100 Titles From Tom Beckett makes me recall something I’ve sometimes thought about Mark Young’s poems: if all words created a block, the poet made poems by chiseling some of them out to fall randomly on the floor; the poet then assembled the words into lines and poems surface through a music created by breath and syllablic rhythm. These poems then are unique in that Mark volunteers that he actually tried to make his poems relate to the titles given by Tom Beckett. And yet the leap between title and text is not (always) linear, might be considered opaque in some cases, so that the reader's freedom of response is not diminished. What’s relevant to me is seeing how Beckett’s titles are such strong muses for Young’s poems. These poems present the play of brotherhood, as affirmed by Thomas Fink’s paintings where colors and shapes effect a harmony that couldn’t have been anticipated by each individual element before the painter joined them. Poems can be created through a multitude of ways and these results indicate the generative effect of affectionate brotherhood, while affirming that poetry succeeds by creating relationships and connections.

— Eileen R. Tabios

W.C. WILLIAMS IN "CHAPTER ONE"!

Something new for our latest addition to the "Chapter One" series: a letter from W.C. Williams to D. Ignatow:

https://marshhawkpress.org/w-c-williams-to-d-ignatow-i-wrote-you-an-indifferent-letter-today/