Mark Cunningham – Dented Breeze out on Lulu

harry

Mark Cunningham’s new book Dented Breeze is now on sale at Lulu.com

Highly recommended. He published this under his own name and as he has said:

“Donald Sutherland, who wrote on both the English Romantics and Gertrude Stein, said that one of the traits of Romanticism was its attempt to include as much of the world and experience (if those can be distinguished) as possible–an attempt that would become never-ending task as experience would constantly increase, or at least change. Dented Breeze is my attempt to help out. Each piece here adds a bit of information about one piece of information in the sentence of the original poem it glosses. Unfortunately, Donald Sutherland the actor does not appear as a guest star.
This doesn’t cover every aspect of the book of course–particularly the reduction of romantic wonder, political agitation, despair, whatever, to what are basically banal sentences found on Wikipedia, the opposite of all of the above.

 

Drawing The Six Directions – New book by Eileen Tabios

harry

 

Eileen R. Tabios. Drawing The Six Directions now out on Sandy Press

Click on the cover below for book purchase information.

In her drawings, Eileen Tabios brings vibrantly colored multiple gourd patterns within diverse geometric ensembles into fruitfully diverse and dynamic compositional arrangements. Sometimes I recall suprematist canvases; at other times, the drawings hark back to the placement of stones in a Japanese garden.

— Thomas Fink, poet-painter & author of Zeugma

Eileen R. Tabios began her “Poems Form/From the Six Directions” partly because she was trying to create a poem in a new way. Creating mixed-media sculptures whose processes engendered verse-poems fit that impetus. But, unexpectedly, the sculpting process made her focus for the first time on working with physical material. As a writer working with imagination and words, she was surprised by the pleasurable frisson of dealing with the tangible as found materials made their way into her mixed-media sculptures. Such materials included old coasters, used magazines, ribbons, recycled cardboard, department store shopping bags, and so on. The sculpting process created a “simmer” in her belly, like the physical effect she often feels when chasing down a poem into written form. She, therefore, decided to try her hand at working more consciously as a visual artist. She hadn’t intended to go this route but allowed herself to follow the impulse because such an “opening” manifested what she considers wonderful about all Art and Poetry: how they lead its maker and viewer/reader into new experiences. She would end up creating about a dozen sculptures before sculpting led her to drawing.

Her drawings and sculptures were just part of Six Directions, a multidisciplinary and
interactive project that encompassed several performances, exhibitions, and readings in California’s Bay Area (San Francisco, Berkeley, and Sonoma). Because of her initial focus on the project’s interactive aspects with audience, the Six Directions drawings are the project’s least known element. This book offers the entire series of drawings, most of which have never been seen in public.

Mark Young’s – un saut de chat – now out on Otoliths

harry k stammer

un saut de chat – Mark Young

on Otoliths

I’m a couple of years into my ninth decade, & have decided it’s time to tidy a few things up, specifically creating some trope-based collections, rather than collections of recent work.Retrospectively, my Ley Lines II that came out in November 2023 from Sandy Press should probably be considered the first collation: a single trope (‘A line from . . .’), a significant number of poems (just under 100), & written over a number of years (2014-2021). un saut de chat is composed primarily of prose poems, with some found poems & a few ficciones included. There are around 140 pieces in the book, from the past twenty years. I feel, displayed this way, that it gives greater insight into thematic aspects of my work that are not so easy to discern otherwise. The next book in this loose grouping will be my entire Magritte poems, all twenty years of them. It will probably come in at around 600 pages, & be ready for printing around the end of the year. – Mark Young

New Book by George Myers Jr. – Fast Talk With Writers – on Amazon

harry k stammer

Fast Talk With Writers is a collection of conversations with 20th century writers working at the height of their powers in fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. They talk about their intentions, influences and mentors, politics, myths, annoyances, best sellers, and their craft. Interview with Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Robert Bly, David Citino, Evan S. Connell, Annie Dillard, Carlos Fuentes, Donald Hall, Charles Johnson, Gordon Lish, Reginald McKnight, Joyce Carol Oates, Edouard Roditi, Ronald Sukenick, Eudora Welty, and Paul West. George Myers Jr.’s books include Atmopheric Landscapes of North America, Worlds Without End and Mixers: On Hybrid Writing.

Pages for Sandy Press site from Fast Talk-02-16-24

New book by Mark Young – Ley Lines II now on Amazon

harry k stammer

 

As far as I can tell, my first “A line from…” poem used as its prompt words found in a Ron Silliman piece. Jackson Mac Low, Charles Mingus, Paracelsus, Gunter Grass, Friedrich Durrenmatt, & Calvin Coolidge weren’t far behind. But three years before them came “A poem beginning with a line from Foucault” & “A poem ending with a line from Pablo Neruda.” & before them all — in my multiverse, at least — was Robert Duncan’s “A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar.”

There is a history which is there to be taken advantage of. Chance meetings, long associations, stochastic processes. Google as partner on the dance floor. Out of it, along one — dare I say it? — line, have come more than 500 of these “A line from…” poems, encompassing poets, musicians, politicians of many persuasions, scientists, painters, actors, philosophers, as well as all of the American Presidents & some of the sycophantic staff of one of the more recent.

So who’ll have the next fangoogle with me?

Mark Young

Ley Lines II A small sampler

Getting To One – Flash Fictions by Eileen R. Tabios and Art by harry k stammer

harry k stammer
Now out on Amazon

 

 

Blurbs

Blurbs Getting to One

 

 

Sample Flash Fiction

Planet M

Turn left and you’re on your knees. You’re raising your right hand to a long-haired lady, a platinum ring topped by a 3-karat diamond pinched by your trembling fingers. She’s widening her eyes to drink in your marriage proposal. You both will live happily ever after. Turn right and you’re tripping over the hem of your monk’s robe. You catch yourself and continue striding into the dim entrance of a stone building. You exit into the monastery’s interior courtyard where the light is blinding as its walls bask under a noonday sun. These situations—and many others—are offered by the glass walls bordering the paths through which you navigate this planet. Your own body is not involved, just the avatars presented by mirrors. Your race has depended on video screens and selfies for so long that none of this is unusual. What is unusual is when you trip non-virtually and smash your face against a mirrored wall. You are shocked when you feel your brow sunder and the escaping blood paints the walls around you. You raise a hand to feel the warmth of ichor though your veins are not a god’s. You look at your bloodied hand and notice how it’s become the same color as the smears on the cracked mirror facing you. For the first time, you notice Planet M, the world of mirrors that’s evolved around you. You notice how this planet lacks aroma. Perfume has become extinct—once upon a time, you’d favored a lover’s scent of refined citrus accord and geranium as exalted sensually by smooth woods, bourbon, dark patchouli, black amber and cashmere musk while emitting subtle notes of orange, ruby red grapefruit, Mandarin, geranium, bourbon, and dark patchouli—but you don’t know how to weep at the disappearance of fragrance. You don’t know how to mourn evaporation. You only know you created Planet M from sitting too long at the counter of “One,” a bar where each patron must drink alone.