Sunday May 12th brings the one year anniversary of the passing of Brant Lyon, one of the founders of great weather for MEDIA and the person who gave us our name. Brant brought a crazy amount of light and love into our world, and we know he would have so appreciated all the wonderful support and encouragement received from writers, readers, audiences, venues, bookstores, and more this past year. We really feel we are following Brant’s dream and building a community here at great weather for MEDIA. If you are in New York City this Sunday, come along to our weekly reading series at the Parkside Lounge and say a few words to celebrate his life or read a poem. We also have two fabulous features and we are excited to hear them and—as always—new poetic voices from the open mic. Poetry lives! Love and words matter!

Convergence

(In Memory of Brant Lyon)

by DAVID LAWTON

Everything feels so far away

Steeply rising toward the heavens

On a scavenger hunt
In search of a flashback
Rumored into inclination
You want to retrace the steps
That you never took

Outside this plane of existence

But the vastness of blue sky
Holds you dumbfounded

That’s the glory coming

Angels soar overhead
In lazy loops
Mocking our fragility
With chaotic barrel rolls
Leaving us helpless
From knife-edge turns
Casting for the vertex of their angle

Everything is synchronized for a fall

Like a sea hawk
Crashing the surface of water
To seize a fish
An angel punches through the stratosphere
To pluck a life out of being

What just happened is long gone
You reach out to touch it
But it is speeding away from you
Screeching against the howling wind

In the cafe where I imagined myself
Disappearing by never leaving
The crazy lady enters for the third time
Ranting something about the birds
And the angry owner chases her back out
Onto the crooked street.

*

David Lawton is the author of Sharp Blue Stream (Three Rooms Press, 2013). His poetry can also be found in the great weather for MEDIA anthology, It’s Animal but Merciful. David is one of the hosts of our Spoken Word Sundays reading series.

While Eating Oysters by Kit Kennedy, CLWN WR BKS, Brooklyn, 2012

Reviewed by CINDY HOCHMAN

As someone who stands 4’11”, I have a vested interest in the proposition that “good things come in small packages.” After reading Kit Kennedy’s bite-sized and provocatively titled book, While Eating Oysters, there is even more reason to appreciate all things diminutive. In the same way that fine restaurants serve small portions, Kennedy’s poems, written from the perspective of a creative gourmand, are elegant, flavorful, and satisfying. Kennedy writes for an intelligent audience, adding just the right amount of Tabasco to give this meal a robust kick.

in French,
everything sounds like an invitation

Beckoning us to enter, we become guests at Kennedy’s well-planned dinner party. It is easy to envision the intimate candlelight, tempting smells, and warm atmosphere. Ooh la la—our host has whipped up a memorable feast for us—this poet has brought out the fine china and set the table in grand style. Culinary delights combine with experimental art to create a tempting palette for the discerning palate. (Is your mouth watering yet?)

her body
a series of small dishes

                       . . .

 broken
& much more interesting

Among the many appealing aspects of this book is that it can be read in one delightful sitting. The format is notable in that it contains just 23 one- or two-line poems, answering the question of whether a brief poem can have the same substance and depth as an epic—and the answer is a resounding YES. And while the poet makes the process look seamless, don’t underestimate the intense labor and precision it takes to write poems of this nature; a form which, pared down to its bare bones, requires every word to count. Kennedy trusts her readers to use their imaginations to infer and interpret according to taste, and one gets the distinct feeling that what is left unsaid is just as vital. It is also a treat to discover that the book can be read several different ways:  as individual, abstract non-sequiturs (a la carte, so to speak) that rock the senses; as a cohesive continuum, one poem building upon the next to create a full course; or, for those of us who prefer to eat our desserts first, it can even be read from back to front (don’t forget to wipe your mouth!)

Conservation of verbiage is Kennedy’s forte, as evidenced by this seven-word poem that is no less sensuous (albeit, subtle) than a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe:

 I love tulips
for their sexy insides

I would be remiss, and this review would be incomplete, if I didn’t, at this juncture, tip my hat to publisher Bob Heman, whose CLWN WR imprimatur has produced attractive, pocket-sized books and journals for over 40 years, giving voice to unconventional poets whose work deserves wide exposure.

Now, far be it from me to be a spoiler here, although I can state with certainty that the final poem will make you come back for a second (and third) helping.  But the penultimate poem is no doubt Kit Kennedy’s tribute to the aphrodisiac effects of oysters, poetry, and the simple joy of being:

while eating oysters, only the present is possible

Behind the mystery and hedonistic smolder of While Eating Oysters, there is a quiet grace. These are poems to digest, savor, and read again and, as a poet, ponder the miraculous way in which language steeped in brevity can provide such nourishing sustenance to both body and soul.

Thanks to the unique talent of chief cook and poet extraordinaire, Kit Kennedy, while you eat these oysters, you will be gifted with pearls.

While Eating Oysters by Kit Kennedy, CLWN WR BKS, Brooklyn, 2012. Available directly from author.

Kit Kennedy is also co-author, with Susan Gangel, of Inconvenience (Littoral Press, 2010) and Constellations (Co-Lab Press, 2011). Her work appears in the great weather for MEDIA anthologies It’s Animal but Merciful and The Understanding between Foxes and Light, and in numerous journals including Otoliths and The Pedestal Magazine. Kit lives in San Francisco. Blog

Cindy Hochman is the editor-in-chief of the online journal First Literary Review-East. Her poems may be found, or are forthcoming, in New York Quarterly, CLWN WR, and the Cancer Project Anthology. Her latest chapbook is The Carcinogenic Bride.

We are pleased to announce that we will have an interview and poem by the lovely Patricia Smith in are forthcoming anthology, “The Understanding between Foxes and Light.”  I had a great time interviewing her, talking about her process and we talked about her new short story anthology, “Staten Island Noir.”  This is a great mystery book filled with scandal and death and laughter and bad accents and rebirth on the forgotten borough.  Patricia just won the 2013 Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for her story in the book, “When They Are Done With Us.”  We talk about that amazing story in the interview but if you want to check out her new book of short stories go to Akashic Books.  We are excited to have Patricia be a part of this great new anthology that will be out in September.  And for the rest of the contributors in the book we are so excited for this anthology.  We think it’s our best and boldest one yet.  You made that possible.  Believe.

Hello all in Great Weather for Media land.  Today is a very special day, we have 2 Great Weather poets having their book releases today.  First off, Jane LeCroy and her book “Signature Play.”  For those of you who don’t know Mrs. LeCroy, her voice was born on Saturn and her body was made in New York.  That’s one special kind of New Yorker.  She is also in our forthcoming anthology called “The Understanding between Foxes and Light.”  She is a powerhouse and you don’t want to miss this.  Next up Sir David Lawton.  His new book, “Sharp Blue Stream” is just a powerhouse of poetry and it is so so so so so satisfying.  I feel like David and I are really close and to be able to go on that ride with him to see where his poems were 5 years ago to where they are now has been a delight and educational to me as a poet and human being.  Both these books are being put out through out friends at three rooms press.  Tonight’s show starts at 7pm at the Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge on 158 Bleecker.  If you aren’t able to show tonight please check out threeroomspress.com for these releases.  Also this Sunday David will be featuring for us at Parkside Lounge from 4-6pm………

Matthew Hupert’s poetic response to It’s Animal but Merciful. Read more of Matthew’s work in our forthcoming anthology, The Understanding between Foxes and Light. 

Follow-Haswed by Laura Walker, Apogee Press 2012

Reviewed by Alex Rieser

I liken the experience of reading Follow-Haswed to trying to find your way around a town you are visiting in a country whose dialect is not your own. You move forward (at night, there’s nobody it appears, to ask for directions) at a loss for your methodology. You aren’t certain, but you think you’re going the right direction. You are looking perhaps for your hotel (semblance of home). To be more direct: the titles repeat themselves. If this book is some kind of city, then they are street signs.

The dialect, although not your own, is derivative of the language that’s yours; you recognize prefixes, suffixes, perhaps even guessing at the meaning of the symbols at large. I use this metaphor to liken the way that Walker defamiliarizes the title terms, claiming them entirely for the city Follow, in the country Haswed. I know what a street sign is you think, like I know what furlong, gibbous, and godwit are. When the titles repeat, you begin to familiarize yourself with them. Perhaps at first the terms are strange to your eyes, but like they’ve adjusted to the night, they adjust to words.

Seeing the signs reappear tells you that you are in a linear direction. Although lost, perhaps having made a circle or two, the solution must be to cover more ground. Perhaps at this point you are feeling the adventurous side of not knowing your way. As though bewilderment is a type of compass.

between blue and
nature, permission
to proceed. (15)

Gosh this is exciting, you think, it looks nothing like it did in the pictures. Nothing like the places I’ve visited before. You have no control over what you find, only whether or not you find it. The vernacular architecture is eclectic, almost collaged, some is old while some is very new. Although there are conventions of order: a door, a lodge, a basement, they are hard to pinpoint among the ins and outs of the forest rivers:

& shapes of thinges
corresponding (21)

she looked like a boat (29)

be sea
schippes with salt
counterfeit Gods (32)

the calling of a sailor
the door for her in silence (56)

There may be an entire city brewing, an entire drama being played out. What’s more is that you are sensing that the country is in turmoil. Bodies, wreckage, perhaps war? You notice the presence of military. You get the impression that history is being made. This is where Walker shows her expertise: in this state, any sign is a charged possibility, and one needs but a single distinction to be swayed. Is it direr if you don’t know what’s at stake? Either way:

never
a time
to have been pregnant (40)

Is it possible that in order to charge language with meaning to the utmost degree that you must first strip it of its constructed meaning? First it was recognizable, then not so, then you remember that people live here. They use this language of the dictionary every day. This is what it means to understand the unfamiliar; this is your induction. My god you may not have left home at all.

Follow-Haswed by Laura Walker, Apogee Press 2012, ISBN: 978-0985100728, $15.95

Alex Rieser is the author of Emancipator (New Fraktur Press, 2011), and has internationally published poetry, fiction, interviews, and criticism. He holds an MFA from The University of San Francisco, where he worked as the Chief Art & Associate Poetry editor for Switchback. His works have appeared in, or are forthcoming from Ploughshares, Transfer, Idiolexicon, Quiet Lightning, Corium, and Feathertale. He currently lives in Riverside, CA with his wife and two dogs.

Laura Walker is the author of Follow-Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012), birdbook (Shearsman Books, 2011), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004), and the chapbook bird book (Albion Books, 2010). She grew up in North Carolina and now lives in Berkeley, California, where she teaches creative writing.

great weather for MEDIA accepts book reviews for our website. Please query via the contact page before submitting. Reviews must be under 1000 words. Our aim is to support new and emerging writers, and other small presses. Poetry and experimental prose reviews preferred. Review submissions accepted all year round.

]]> http://greatweatherformedia.com/laura-walker-follow-haswed/feed/ 0 http://greatweatherformedia.com/two-poems-pacific-standard-march-7th-readers-amy-leigh-cutler-donald-lev/ http://greatweatherformedia.com/two-poems-pacific-standard-march-7th-readers-amy-leigh-cutler-donald-lev/#comments Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:06:03 +0000 Thomas Fucaloro http://greatweatherformedia.com/?p=1766

We are excited to have two major New York area talents cross over the river with us to feature at a rockin’ venue in Cobble Hill, Pacific Standard on Thursday March 7th at 7pm!! Upstate New York’s former Brooklynite returns to his old stompin’ grounds, DONALD LEV and NYC’s own AMY LEIGH CUTLER!! Check out examples of their poetry below.

Pacific Standard is a California craft beer bar with an awesome performance space in back where you can stretch out, kick back, have a drink and soak in the poetic brilliance.

You’ll have a chance to strut your stuff in an open mic as well.

Other awesomeness: It is the easiest place in the city to get to because it’s a five minute walk from the Atlantic Terminal by that big rusty whale-like thing: the Barclays Center!

DIRECTIONS:
So, just hop on the LIRR or the SUBWAY and it’s pretty darn close to door step service! You can take the 2, 3, 4, 5, D,N,Q,R, B. DRIVERS take the BQE to Tillary St. then to Flatbush Ave. and hang a right onto 4th Ave.

Map

$2 suggested donation

THE DEATH OF CASAGEMAS

by Amy Leigh Cutler

While Paris was drunk on the revolution
Picasso was in Madrid.

Young and wild
with women
and paints,
everything vivid

until his brother of revelry,
his sweet Casagemas,
broke their bond
with a bullet.

The death of an artist is
just an arbitrary
shutting down of cellular
functions;

Artists live through death.

But the bang of
unrequited love shook the walls
of L’Hippodrome Café.
Montmartre wailed

and Picasso came back
to paint the funeral.

Again and again
he brought his friend back,

the blood less red, more black,
the candle less yellow, more gold,

the burial, the memory,
blue.

AMY LEIGH CUTLER is the author of Orange Juice and Rooftops, and two chapbooks, American Woman and You Gentle Thing.  She has toured the U.S. and U.K. and is involved in the NYC slam poetry scene. “I do what I love: collaborate, tour, and lecture with artists from all over.”  The Death of Casagemas was first published in Wooster Collective’s latest book, Graphite.

A POEM FOR IMMORTAL & MORTAL WINOS & BEERLUSHES IN HURRICANE SEASON

by Donald Lev

There are these American flags waving in a breeze,
maybe from a battleship; a blue sky with smoky
clouds; a sea that laps things, and rocks them more or less
gently. Where am I? There was a hurricane through here
yesterday but not today. It will not be the worst
storm this season, which is still young. Why do I not
feel young and rejoice in the sky and sea and flag
of my country? Where am I? Sitting by this word
processor reading a poem by Bukowski
addressed to Li Po. My cat walks in at the exact
same time and line Bukowski’s cat walks in. Only
my cat’s eyes are green, not yellow. Bukowski
pours a glass of ‘beautiful red’ wine to Li Po.
I raise my can of bitter beer to Bukowski.
Thereby concluding this inconclusive poem.

DONALD LEV attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of the Daily News and New York Times, drove a taxi cab for 20 years, and had a brief film acting career. He also worked for The Village Voice and operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side. Award achievements include the Madeline Sadin Award from New York Quarterly in 1973 and a Life Time Achievement Award from the Catskill Reading Society/Outloudbooks in 2003. Donald was Distinguished Visiting Poet for the Northeast Poetry Center in Sugar Loaf, NY in 2012. In 2008 he put out The Darkness Above: Selected Poems 1968-2002. A chapbook, Only Wings: 20 Poems of Devotion was published in 2010, and a new collection, A Very Funny Fellow in 2012. Donald lives in High Falls, NY, where he spends most of his time publishing the literary tabloid Home Planet News, which he and his late wife Enid Dame founded in 1979.

“The throats of our writs brave lilies,” Sylvia Plath.  I have been reading the bee keeper series of poems that Sylvia Plath wrote and they are exquisite.  Who knew bee keeping had so many avenues to drive recklessly down.  There are 5 poems in this series and they are very powerful, “The Bee Meeting”, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Stings”, “The Swarm” and “Wintering.”  Too me, in these poems, it sounds like Plath was struggling with her own identity and her role as a woman in 1963.  ”Her wings torn shawls, her long body, Rubbed of its plush–Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.  I stand in a column.”  This from the 3rd poem in the series called “Stings” is just a taste of Plaths endless connection with the queen bee and as you keep reading that queen becomes more and I think through this Plath was able to free herself from thoughts of what a woman should be.  Now I could be looking too deep into all this and really it could all be about bees but something in my heart says that their was some sort of sorrow or longing that came out in these 5 poems that say so much.  I highly recommend checking these poems out and let us know what you think.  ”The bees are flying.  They taste the spring.”

Home of the Blues, More Selected Poems by Andy Clausen, Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2013 

Reviewed by GEORGE WALLACE

AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING

It must be hard to retain the off-handed conversational style of a working man holding forth at a bar, when you have at your command the lightning-like moves and instincts of a post-bop Spinoza—and the whole history of civilizations West and East at your disposal, right up to the daily news.

Like Andy Clausen. Clausen’s had the kind of magic to enact this kind of championship balancing act in his writing and performance ever since Ginsberg ‘discovered’ him hamming it up naked on the poetry stage in 1968 Berkeley while pounding home political truths Thomas Paine, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs and Crazy Horse would’ve approved of.

I use the word ‘discover’ with a little bit of forethought, by the way. ‘Discovered’ should be reserved for drifting ecospheres and lost continents. The hidden tick-tock of physical and spiritual worlds. But try as I might, I can’t help feeling that Andy Clausen’s a force of nature like that. Has been for more than forty years, and is today.

Once again Clausen proves himself to be both showman, provocateur and brilliant social witness, hitting sweet notes in ”Home of the Blues” like the best of ‘em. In a way, this book is a little chest of precious doors—open any one of them and rediscover your sense of breakneck surprise!

And no matter what political stripe you wear, be prepared to have your own comfort zone pin-pricked like a balloon, somewhere along the way.

This poetry’s the machine gun fire of a man who has that peculiar Beat talent for merging fast paced rap with the insurgent’s knife—amiably displayed, wielded in so disarming a way that you become accomplice to your own skewering. In goes the knife, out goes the breath of stale complacency. And he does it with such a disarming playfulness and wry offhandedness, spilling your guts like an accidental bag of carpenter’s nails on a coffeetable.

That’s something more than bop prosody, enrapturing as that is—the thing Kerouac called ‘spontaneous get-with-it’ and Ginsberg ‘Swift language’ in possession of ‘run-on extended breath mental word riff…the vox populi of one of Whitman’s unreprentant roughs.’

Because these poems are that, and more. Clausen’s expansive Whitmanic perspective is informed by the inescapable tone and tenor of the tainted 20th century experience.

Knowing what he knows, being the unflinching man he is, how could Clausen hold forth Whitmanic? As he says himself, in the frankly great title poem “Home of the Blues”, confronted with the essential ‘contradiction from hell,’ America, “I’d like to be like Whitman…but I can’t, don’t ask why…” Oscillating in a maelstrom of his culture’s unpredictable winds, “All the beneficial bounty/all the music/all the deception & cruel crimes/backed by guns of money & pain & worse…I’ve not only got a right to sing those blues/I’ve got an obligation.”

In another fine poem, “Amsterdam,” Andy Clausen notes, cruising thru the Van Gogh museum, that every painting is worth ‘a lifetime of wages & the guy only sold one painting in his life.’

This book is like that, each poem worth a lifetime of wages. Which makes us lucky — we can still get ‘em while their cheap. Because if life is as fair to Andy Clausen as it was to Vincent Van Gogh, there’s a chance poems from ‘Home of the Blues’ will be hanging on some wall somewhere someday, for those who want to know what the end of the 20th century looked like.

Home of the Blues, More Selected Poems, Andy Clausen (Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2013)

We accept book reviews for our website. Please query via the contact page before submitting. Reviews must be under 1000 words. Our aim is to support new and emerging writers, and other small presses. Poetry and experimental prose reviews preferred. Review submissions accepted all year round.

So I’ve been reading the book “When My Brother Was an Aztec”, a collection of poems by Natalie Diaz from Copper Canyon Press.  This book deals with family, roots and a brother who is addicted to meth.  This book has been flooring me…..Natalie who is Native American, really adds some great imagery and struggle through her words with so little effort…..in the title poem the first line is, “he lived in our basement and sacrificed my parents”, I mean that line says so much while doing so little, it has her heritage, love for her parents and disdain for her brother all in that one line.  It takes lifetimes to find that magic in just one line when writing.  I highly recommend this book for anyone who is looking for something a little different and also if you can relate on a level of addiction.  That drew me in a lot what was going on with her brother and his struggles with drugs.  It hit me in such a way that I’m sitting here, in my bedroom of my mother’s house wondering about her sacrifice and how I’ve taken advantage of that.  I need to be a better person.