Detroit Tonight Live: Poetry and Photography

Detroit has a lively arts scene and I’m proud to contribute to it in my modest way. My father and I will present portions of our ongoing photography/poetry collaboration as part of M.L. Liebler’s Detroit Tonight Live Series in May. I’ll read several Detroit-related poems as my father’s pictures of the city are projected. Other performers schedule to appear:
• Poet Sophia Rifkin
• Performance Writer Stephen Dueweke
• Blues & Americana Musician Maggie McCabe
• Poet Writer L. Bush
The show will take place May 30 from 7 to 9 pm at the Jazz Café at the Music Hall, 350 Madison Avenue, Detroit. Liebler always assemble diverse and diverting bills for this series.
www.jazzcafedetroit.com

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Ghost Wife

Suzanne Burns, a fine Oregon writer, has a new collection of poetry coming out soon. Her publisher, Night Bomb Press, is offering free shipping on orders of Ghost Wife placed before November 7. Here’s where to go for the deal: http://www.nightbombpress.com/preorders.html.

I met Suzanne a few years ago at the Wordstock book festival, at which we both reading (simultaneously). Having since read her earlier work, I’m now eagerly looking forward to the new one.

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DTL Video

The July 11 Detroit Tonight Live show at UDetroit Café can be viewed by following the link below. My bit, including M.L. Liebler’s intro, begins at 1:14:16 but the entire program of music and poetry deserves a look and a listen.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/23925630

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Detroit Tonight Live, July 2012 edition

Poet M.L. Liebler’s Detroit Tonight Live series spotlights Michigan musicians and writers, and I’m scheduled to participate in the July 11 show (7 to 9 pm at UDetroit Café, 1427 Randolph, Detroit, MI 48226; more details available on the “appearances” page at mlliebler.com). While I might present a passage or two from Fighters & Writers, I plan to read several poems. (And why not? After all, I write about boxers at Gleason’s Gym in both the book and a poem in volume 8 of The Chaffey Review.)

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Prose on Poetry

Although I had probably seen his name earlier, Charles Simic first became known to me for his two poems in the liner notes for the Charles Lloyd Quartet’s 2008 ECM recording Rabo de Nube. Indeed, they are the liner notes. Substituting digital downloads for physical artifacts like CDs could diminish chances for such serendipitous discoveries. But the internet age does have its compensations. Since learning of Simic I’ve become a regular reader of his contributions to the New York Review of Books Blog. In perhaps my favorite post so far, Simic explains why he still writes poetry. And why he started: it had to do with impressing girls. I, too, have written poems for a woman. (Reader, I married her.)

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Multiple Poems

The Chaffey Review posted on its website works from Volume 8, including three poems of mine: “Sweep,” “A Visit to Gleason’s Gym” and “How to Be Invisible.” The Rancho Cucamonga, California-based journal also published a poem by my friend Jeff Alfier, “Calabria.”

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Mongrel Empire & Detroit

Recently I learned that soon I will no longer be Detroit’s sole Mongrel Empire Press author. The Norman, Oklahoma-based publisher, which issued my essay collection Fighters & Writers in 2010, plans to issue Walking into Solstice, poems by Anca Vlasopolos, this year.

 

As it happens, Vlasopolos was teaching at Wayne State University during my graduate studies days there, though I didn’t know her then. But since we have a city, a university and a publisher in common, we’ve discussed the obviously appropriate idea of holding joint readings. Some of her poems posted at The Stone Hobo and Beasts in a Populous City, with their images of bruises from punches and 24-caliber fists, suggest we have some thematic commonalities as well.

 

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Usual Suspects

The fact that I’ve written a fair amount about both Christopher Hitchens and Philip Larkin alone would be a sufficient reason for me to direct readers to “Philip Larkin, the Impossible Man,” Hitchens’s review of Larkin’s Letters to Monica in the May 2011 issue of The Atlantic. Both authors factor in “Dedicated Writers,” for instance, an essay included in my Fighters & Writers. In passing, Hitchens notes that Larkin’s uneasy affection for jazz “helps furnish a key to his muse,” an idea I examine closely in “Ugly on Purpose.”

But a more substantive explanation also exists. Hitchens echoes points I’ve tried repeatedly to make, and I welcome the amplification. He argues that individuals with repellent characters can still produce exceptional art. Perhaps it’s inevitable that some readers will look to writers’ lives to make sense of their work. “It is inescapable that we should wonder how and why poetry manages to transmute the dross of existence into magic or gold, and the contrast in Larkin’s case is a specially acute one,” Hitchens writes. Still, biography can’t explain literary alchemy any more than it should be used to condemn or dismiss the fine work of wretched men. One can be a loutish bungler and still be a great writer – a point I stress in another Fighters & Writers piece, one about George Orwell (whom Hitchens invokes in the Atlantic article).

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A Bit More on “The Fighter Still Remains”

In response to my post about the best books of 2010, I received a thoughtful message from George Kimball, co-editor of The Fighter Still Remains. Kimball pointed out to me that while there was a small amount of overlap between that volume and another anthology of boxing-related poems I mentioned, the collection he and John Schulian assembled had different aims (covering only American authors) and a smaller timeframe (covering only the Queensbury era). To compare such a work with one of another kind was, I concede, neither especially meaningful nor entirely fair.

I had been aware that proceeds from sales of The Fighter Still Remains went to a worthy cause (Haitian earthquake relief). I was heartened to learn that everyone involved – including Paul Simon, who wrote “The Boxer,” from which the book takes its name – eagerly signed off on the use of their material as part of that effort.

Kimball and Schulian also edited the forthcoming At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing. I wouldn’t be surprised if that turns out to be one of my top books of 2011.

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Best Books of 2010

In order to write about them for The Oregonian, The American Interest and other publications, I read a fair number of brand new books in 2010. Nevertheless, I can’t make an honest top-ten list. Here are six that truly stood as exceptional:

1. Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (Alfred A. Knopf)
2. Kevin Canty’s Everything (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
3. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (Scribner)
4. Charles Goodrich’s Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden (Silverfish Review Press)
5. Randy Robert’s Joe Louis: Hard Times Man (Yale University Press)
6. Richard Williams’s The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (W.W. Norton & Company)

The short list reflects my tendency to read roughly proportional amounts of fiction and nonfiction. I probably read more poetry in 2010 than in most years, and Goodrich’s small volume was my favorite of several contenders.

The year 2010 saw new books by authors I once thought of as reliably remarkable – Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera – that I found disappointingly inferior to their earlier efforts. I could name several very good but not quite excellent books. Here’s one: George Kimball and John Schulian assembled a fine collection of boxing-related poems in The Fighter Still Remains. A few years earlier, however, Robert Hedin and Michael Waters edited Perfect in Their Art, an anthology containing much of the same material – and a great deal more.

This leads to the Achilles heel of year-end lists: the absence of the great older stuff. While I read many books published during 2010, I also read many from other years, which are automatically disqualified from “best of” contention but deserve mention all the same. I reread some classics, like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. (I also read several books about Mailer, but these weren’t so good.) I also finally got around to some wonderful books I should have read much sooner, such as Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. If I were to list the ten books I most enjoyed during 2010 regardless of publication date, the four named in this paragraph could be added to the six above.

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