More than just writing: *Dossier*

It's always interesting when poetry, fiction, and nonfiction find a home in places that publish more than just good writing. Such is the case for the magazine Dossier.

According to their site, "Dossier is a bi-annual arts and culture journal incorporating fashion, photography, creative writing, art, music and culinary pursuits. Inspired by the French word for file, we have no themes, features or specific guidelines. We're independently published and owned."

The magazine hails from Brooklyn, and their web presence includes a section of links to other sites they love.

Submissions of writing and art are welcome and should be sent to submissions@dossierjournal.com.

In Celebration: Richard Howard, 10.13.09

Columbia University School of the Arts invites you to a reception and reading in honor of RICHARD HOWARD: Writing Program Professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet on the occasion of his 80th birthday. 

Professor Howard will read with six distinguished alumni & former students:

Gabriella Calvacoressi, Lucie Brock-Broido, Joseph Fasano, Tom Healy, Julie Sheehan, & Craig Teicher

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 | 6:30 pm

Teatro at The Italian Academy

1161 Amsterdam Avenue 116th & 118th Streets

This Week's Events

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 23rd 

DING DONG LOUNGE

8:00pm

929 Columbus Ave, at 106th St

Gordy Sauer (nonfiction)

Heather Monley (fiction)

Marina Blitshteyn (poetry)

Justin Way (fiction)

Julie Kantor (poetry)

Plus special Columbia MFA faculty guest SARAH MANGUSO, who will be reading a cross-genre selection of her writings.  Sarah is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Siste Viator (Four Way Books, 2006).  Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Boston Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among others.

THURSDAY, SEPT. 24th

BEST AMERICAN POEMS 2009 BOOK LAUNCH

7:00pm - 9:00pm

The New School Tishman Auditorium 

66 West 12th Street (near 6th Ave)

This year's gala launch reading for The Best American Poetry 2009 will be better than ever and it's free so we hope everyone will come. Among the contributors to BAP 2009 who have agreed to take part are: John Ashbery, Mark Bibbins,Suzanne Cleary, Billy Collins, Jim Cummins, Mark Doty, Margaret Gibson, Douglas Goetsch, Michael Grabell, Dolores Hayden, Jennifer Michael Hecht reading the late Sarah Hannah's "The Safe House,"Richard Howard, Tina Kelley, Philip Levine, Phillis Levin, Susan Blackwell Ramsay, James Richardson, Martha Silano, Mitch Sisskind, Tom Sleigh, Craig Morgan Teicher, Matthew Zapruder.

----------

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CREATIVE WRITING LECTURE SERIES

Aimee Bender

"The Danger and Power of Exposition or How We Do Spacetime Travel on the Page"

7:00pm

Columbia University, Dodge Hall, Room 501

(Broadway & 116th St.)

Aimee Bender is the author of 3 books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, and Willful Creatures. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, Harper's, the Paris Review, McSweeney's, Tin House, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading, the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, the Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, and many more, as well as heard on PRI's "This American Life".

FRIDAY, SEPT. 25th

EARSHOT

7:30 PM
@ Rose Live Music, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Admission: $5 + FREE DRINK!

Hosted by Nicole Steinberg

Featuring: 
Sarah Sarai (The Future Is Happy)
Andrew Zornoza (Where I Stay)
Paul Hlava (New York University)
Nicole Feldman (Sarah Lawrence College)
Justin Boening (Columbia University)
    
ROSE LIVE MUSIC is located at 345 Grand Street in Brooklyn, between Havemeyer and Marcy. Visit their website for directions: http://roselivemusic.com.

ABZ: A Poetry Magazine

What do you do when your retire from teaching poetry at Marshall University? If you're John McKernan, you start a literary press for poetry, and offer ABZ A Poetry Magazine.

The reading period for the jounral began Septemeber 1st and will continue until December 1st. Expact a response time of two weeks to six months (stand fare among journals). Please include SASE with correct postage (forever stamps!). Currently ABZ does not accept email submissions. Mailing address for submissions is:

ABZ POEMS
Attn: John McKernan
Marshall University
Huntington, WV 25755

Look also for the ABZ Poetry Prize for a first full-length book of poems. ABZ is a yearly publication, and having met it's creator, I can tell you its a labor of love. McKernan told me, over a dinner one evening at the West Virginia Writers Inc. Conference, that he started the prize to help new poets start their careers. He once gave a reading in his home state of Nebraska, and was approached by a publisher about putting out his first book. the book really helped him to launch his career, and now he has created ABZ to do the same.

Poets that have appeared in ABZ include Angela Ball, James Harms, Jeff Mann, and many others.

Ding Dong Lounge Reading 9.23.09

September 23, 2009

Ding Dong Lounge 

Reading: 

Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay 
w/ five Columbia students TBA 

(I'll update this when I get the names, I know they're already announced somewhere)

929 Columbus Ave, NYC

New York City BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG VERSE

Tuesday, September 29th, 6:30pm
New York City BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG VERSE: POEMS OF TIMES SQUARE

A celebration of the 2nd Annual Bright Lights Big Verse poetry competition, with readings by the winners and Kimiko Hahn, David Lehman, and Paul Muldoon. Co-sponsored by Times Square Alliance.

Admission is free.

Duffy Square, Times Square
Between 46th & 47th Streets, Broadway and Seventh Ave.

Earshot

The EARSHOT Reading Series is dedicated to the work and presence of the most gifted and exciting emerging writers in the greater New York City area. The series, founded in early 2005, provides an opportunity for graduate writing students to share their work with an audience that reaches beyond the MFA community. Each reading also highlights the literary merits of two non-MFA writers, some breaking out and some firmly established in the literary community. EARSHOT allows writers of different levels of achievement and varied styles to mingle freely. Poets and prose writers (both fiction and non-fiction) are equally encouraged to submit and participate.

Readings are bi-monthly, featuring a diverse range of voices. All EARSHOT readers are welcome to sell or distribute copies of their work at readings, provided the material is not copyrighted to others elsewhere.

Past EARSHOT readers include superstars such as: Elaine Equi, Sharon Mesmer, Mark Bibbins, Mónica de la Torre, David Lehman, John Weir, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Jennifer L. Knox, Anthony Tognazzini, Joshua Ferris, Noelle Kocot, Shanna Compton, Amy King, Marissa Walsh, and many, many more!



****** Upcoming...

all readings are on Friday nights and cost $5 + one free drink*


September 25 // 7:30 PM
Sarah Sarai, Andrew Zornoza
Paul Hlava, Nicole Feldman, Justin Boening
 



EARSHOT is held at Rose Live Music, located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Rose Live Music
345 Grand Street (b/w Havemeyer & Marcy)
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 599-0069

Gallery Reading at Columbia 9.17.09

THURSDAY, SEPT. 17TH

501 Dodge Hall

Columbia University

8 p.m.

Readers include:

Chris Garrecht-Williams (Poetry)
Dai George (Poetry)
Sean Hoen (Nonfiction)
Sara Lieber (Nonfiction)
Shelley Scaletta (Fiction)
Nafkote Tamirat (Fiction)


Wine, beer and snacks will be provided.

Campus map

From the Wilderness of Intellect: Monica Ferrell’s Beasts for the Chase

Book Review

Beasts for the Chase

Monica Ferrell

Sarabande Books, www.sarabandebooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-932511-65-9

2008.  89pp.  US $ 14.95

 

Equipped with the authority of tradition, unleashed by the cruelty of her passion, Monica Ferrell’s debut collection, Beasts for the Chase (Sarabande Books, 2008) garners a lyricism infrequent not only among first books, but throughout the industry as a whole.  Winner of the 2007 Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, Beasts for the Chase combines the author’s personal experience with myth – with figures as classically familiar as Alexander the Great, to ones as intimate Ferrell’s own husband (we assume) in the shorter poem, “Homecoming” – to create a work of bold originality, sly cadence and noble contradiction. 

In her foreword to the book, Jane Hirshfield (contest judge for the 2007 Morton Prize) refers to the books opening lines as “uncompromising,” stating that they range from the objective to the subjective “without apology.”  Certainly this is true.  Ferrell writes, “Tonight the lares have eaten their offerings. / The sweetbreads are gone, black kidneys / Infantine and nacred as mollusk-eggs.”  The first line strikes with precision, its movement short and sweet – cutthroat, even.  The second and third lines, however, provide us with our first (but far from last) Ferrellian juxtaposition.  Just as she presents a diversity of subject matter, Ferrell’s syntax is largely varied, never allowing the reader to become bored – or even too comfortable; since Ferrell’s language remains unpredictable.  Though they are not much longer than the first, the following lines, punctuated with a comma and cut with a line-break, force the audience to read at Ferrell’s pace.  No faster, and no more slowly.  Thus, she commands our attention, directs our eyes, and manages our reading with her pen.

In a poem entitled “Eleven Steps to Breaking up a Hart,” Ferrell makes use of the legendary Tristan (from Gottfried von Strassburg’s version of the tale), written in somewhat epistolary style, to convey both a sense of longing, as well as the displacement experienced as a stranger in a foreign land.  Ferrell, from the voice of Tristan, writes:

 

Dear One, it is seven years this summer.

I have counted them out.  I write you now

To say the thorn we thought removed has

Festered, and spread its gangrene in the blood.

 

Once again Ferrell’s lyricism mimics denotation, and her aesthetic rivals, even coincides with meaning.  Of course the word “counted” incites our understanding of Tristan’s pining for Isolde.  It arouses in the reader a feeling of empathy.  The literal image of counting out the years, waiting, and longing, is certainly a familiar one to most.  But moreover, the measured rhythm of the line – with only one word spanning more than a single syllable – does the counting for us.  It is not perfectly iambic (stress falls on the first syllable of “count-ed”), and so it remains unconstrained; wild like the rest of Ferrell’s debut oeuvre.

Another piece materializes on a line from the journal of Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun: “Then my passion broke out in other ways: I took to loving light.  I assure you, it was an absolutely sensual love, a carnal lust…. I never understood Nero’s delight at the burning of Rome until then.”  Hamsun goes on to explain that he caught his own curtains on fire just to watch them burn.  The poem, “Knut Hamsun’s Night of Fire,” spoken from the voice of Hamsun himself, illustrates post-operatively both the ardor and the intellectualism of the act.  Ferrell writes, “The curtains were so beautiful, my God; it was / Like being enveloped in velvet and rocked / To sleep.”  Yes, we see the violence of Hamsun’s deed, and perhaps a trace of insanity; but it is on the foot-heels of violence that passion thrives in Beasts for the Chase.  It liberates us from the confines of the mind, of social regulations and mores – and yet, it remains tethered with such intellectual force, such culture, that it simply cannot be regarded without acknowledging Ferrell’s insight into the chambers of the heart and mind.  Beasts for the Chase is truly a breathtaking debut.

Friday: Paragraph Poetry Series

PARAGRAPH POETRY READING

Friday, September 11th

8:00 pm; Free

Clay Spa, 25 West 14th Street

 

Hosted by Paragraph, Workspace for Writers

http://www.paragraphny.com/events/2009/09/11/

Nearest subways are: 4, 5, 6, N, Q, W to Union Square, L to 6th Avenue (at 14th Street), F to 14th Street (at Sixth Avenue) 1,2,3 to 14th Street

 

 

Come out this Friday and enjoy some poetry:

 

“Paragraph is honored to host a reading with some of our generation’s finest writers. Novelist Darin Strauss and poets Timothy Donnelly and Matthew Zapruder will share their work at the home of our next-door neighbor, the beautiful Clay Spa. Please join us for an evening of warm company and great writing as we celebrate life and literature. A wine and cheese reception will follow at Paragraph. Free and open to the public.”

 

Timothy Donnelly is

the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit

and The Cloud Corporation (forthcoming, 2010). He is poetry editor of

Boston Review. New work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in

Harper's, jubilat, The Nation, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and

elsewhere. He is an associate professor at Columbia University's School

of the Arts.

 

Darin Strauss

is the international best-selling author of the New York Times Notable

books Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy, and the national bestseller

More Than It Hurts You, now out in paperback. Also a screenwriter, he

is adapting Chang and Eng with Gary Oldman, for Disney. The recipient

of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing, he is a Clinical

Associate Professor at NYU's creative writing program.

 

Matthew Zapruder

is the author of the poetry collections American Linden, Come On All

You Ghosts (forthcoming, 2010) and The Pajamaist, which won the William

Carlos Williams Award and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the

top ten poetry volumes of 2006. Luxbooks has also published a graphic

novel version of the poem "The Pajamaist." He is also co-translator

from Romanian of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu.

Charles Simic Reading at NYU, 9.10.09

Charles Simic, recipient of the Pullitzer Prize and former Poet Laureate of the United States, will be giving a talk at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writer's House this Thursday, September 10^th, 2009.  He will be in conversation with Alice Quinn.

Simic, originally from Yugoslavia (in what is now Serbia) is the author of numerous books of poetry.  His Selected Poems: 1963-2003 received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize, and his collection The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems won him the Pullitzer in 1990.  His most recent collection of poems is That Little Something (Hartcourt, 2008).  He will be speaking on his recent work of nonfiction,  The Renegade: Writing on Poetry and a Few Other Things (Braziller, 2009).

 

For more information check out NYU’s website: http://cwp.fas.nyu.edu/page/readingseries

 

 

Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues