The best news of the summer has been the listening–mainly Mozart–and the art.

In early August, at a friend’s invitation, we spent a few days in Izu to escape the heat. Right across the way from my friend’s house is the Ikeda Museum of 20th Century Art. Among the treasures was one of the best late Francis Bacons I have ever seen. A week later I spent a good half a day with Gauguin’s “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?”–long enough to see Gauguin himself crouching in front of the painting, sick, poxed, and contemplating the end. I also noted the Japanese reaction to the fox pictured in Gauguin’s painting of the pale young girl who has just lost her innocence. “Of course, the Kitsune would be connected with such things!” an old woman said to the family members contemplating the masterpiece with her.

Finally, I got my first real look at Frieda Kahlo’s wonderful self-portrait dressed in the elaborate head dress of her homeland in Mexico at the Setagaya International Museum. I also saw some wonderful work there by Orozco, Rivera, and lesser-knowns like Anguiano, Morado, Goita, Ledesma, Herran, Mendez and Tamayo.

A great summer! A Mozart summer!

The Massachusetts Poetry Festival book readings are noon to 5:00 on October 17, at Barnes & Noble Booksellers 151 Merrimack Street Lowell MA 01852-1723. Rich will read at about 4:00. A table with books will be at the Festival Central check in and information center at the National Park Visitor Center 256 Market Street, Lowell.

Reading at Towson University is on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 5 p.m., Lecture Hall 238, Towson University, 8000 York Road, Towson, MD, 21252.

Grace Ocasio will be doing a book signing/reading of Hollerin From This Shack on Friday, September 25, at 7 P.M. at the Diversity Den cafe in Concord, NC.

Ahadada author Adam Halbur has won a month’s residency at the Frost House. Congratulations to Adam, author of Poor Manners, available from this site and SPD.

We took the long ride on the train last week to pick up four new beautiful books:

Seducing Velasquez, plays and performance texts by Dayana Stetco.
Hollerin from This Shack, a collection of poems from Grace C. Ocasio.
Dreaming of Sunflower Fields–Cherokee poetry by Barbara L. Thomas.
Sueno(s) for Alejandra by Robert Estep.

They’ll be available soon from this website and SPD.

The Mozart Summer continues!

Check out our latest ahadada e-chap from Annie Finch, now available. Mark DuCharme’s ahadada e-chap is currently under construction. Jess

Thanks so much to the latest Pedestal Magazine for the great review of Even the Dog Won’t Touch Me. Actually, another ahadada author–Judith Skillman–is featured in the poetry section. John Amen’s magazine is tops. Google it up and see!

A brief note from Ahadada author Maurice Scully:

Thanks for the ebook Jesse. I didn’t know it was up & out there. Good to see Ahadada alive & well.

I’ll be going to CA next month for a few gigs. If it fits you might flag it on yr blog.

Mon 21st: USCLA with Tom Raworth

Tues 22nd: Pomona College, Claremont + Tom

Wed 23rd: Berkeley

Thurs 24th: USFC, Poetry Centre with Tinker Greene

Murk here. Summer has left Ireland.

All best -
Maurice

A perceptive take on Ahadada author Donald Wellman from David Rich:

Donald Wellman, James Cook, Ewa Chrusciel and Zachary Martin: The New Prose Poets & a Neo-Baroque
“The nature of my involvement in the subject of Gloucester keeps me always in Ward 4 and in Heaven simultaneously.” — Charles Olson to Joseph Garland

“If one thought in terms of sacrament (and as a child Charles had absorbed an awareness of sacrament) it was a kind of sacrament of the ‘chance’ presentation of existence that he met anew every day.” — Gerrit Lansing, concerning Olson

Donald Wellman, James Cook, Ewa Chrusciel, and Zachary Martin write verse- and prose-poems of attentiveness, drama, complexity, persona, care, cartography, and performance — tuned to an urban sacrament of chance — by turns soliloquy, gazetteering, hagiography, legend, hearsay, rumor, myth, city hall debate, protest, lament, eulogy.

To start with, Donald Wellman, editor of O.ARS, the journal of poetics and phenomenology, author of Prolog Pages (Ahadada 2008), and two new series, “A North Atlantic Wall” and “Urika.” His work appears as eighteenth-century travelogue, as gazette; but Wellman enters into his observations, although he is an outsider he approaches with sympathy and imagination, collapsing (to the extent one can) barriers of self to other, observer to observed, through persona the ego can subside; he is no imperial agent, no colonial traveler, but a refugee, a self-exile, sharing, as he wrote, bread and cheese of the refugee by the beach-fire.

Wellman, too, has a kind of neo-baroque method: mapping cities; patterns that fold in on themselves, repeat, shimmer, combine and recombine; using persona, history, medieval bestiaries; and more. His poems do not pare away specifics, do not corral away the particulars life draws richness from. Rather than practice a slender poetics of ellision, a poetics often quiet, narrow, and bourgeois, Wellman is a poet of excess in the best sense — a poetics of the wide embrace — an embrace, given how wide the arms and mind must extend, an embrace that dispells, exorcises the will to power (although there is, as Wellman has written, an oar and a steersman).

The rest of the review can be found at: Rich’s Gloucester Boat Train Blog: http://gloucesterboattrain.blogspot.com/2009/08/let-me-draw-attention-to-four-poets-who.html

Donald has a busy schedule of readings lined up for the immediate future.

Jesse

The latest Specs Journal (this one devoted to Faux Histories) arrived! Specs is a beautifully produced journal from Rollins College. This issue features a rich assortment of work with a scattering of names of people whose work I know–David St. John and Patricia Smith–and lots and lots of new names, which is a real treat for the likes of those well past 50 (as is yr. humble correspondent). More comments to come, but big congrats to editors Vidhu Aggarwal and Jeanne Genis. Go to www.specsjournal.org for the nitty-gritty. Jess