There's a Bear There

Please stay tuned ...

2012-02-01T15:02:00.000-08:00

We're close to announcing a winner for this year's contest, but it may take us another week or two. I know the contest guidelines say we announce on or before the first of February, but trust me, people, we'll get to it soon. So many of the entries were outstanding, which always complicates things--in the best kind of way, of course.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for terrific poetry, and really, who wouldn't be except for the entire Republican party, I'd like to plug Pitch by Todd Boss (Norton 2012). Here's a link to his poem "Amidwives: Two Portraits," one of the best poems I happened across in the last year. It thrills and chills me in equal measure: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/241572

It also makes me really, really appreciate my own wonderful mother-in-law, Bernice Baptiste. Thanks for being one of the good ones, Bunnie!

Susan Sontag in a bear suit

2011-08-02T11:01:00.000-07:00

Reposted from vol.1brooklyn.com ...

New Fiction Coming in 2012!

2011-07-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

Bear Star is very pleased to announce that it has just contracted with Rob Davidson to publish his second collection of short stories, The Farther Shore, in early 2012.

And the winner is ...

2011-01-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

Bear Star is proud to announce that Christine Deavel of Seattle has won the 2011 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize for her manuscript called Woodnote. The book will be released in September of this year. Now comes the fun of formatting the poems, choosing the right fonts and cover art, and shouting into the universe that a new book is a’coming soon. If you are a reviewer and would like an advance copy, drop me a line and I’ll get you an ARC when they’re ready.

Speaking of, the comments section for this blog is not reliable and I’m not sure why not. Lots of comments don’t register at all. So it would be best to contact me via email: bethannspencer [at] gmail dot com.

The Bear Star Interview with Rick Bursky

2011-01-20T12:52:00.000-08:00

I love your new book, Death Obscura (Sarabande), but as usual I never know how much faith to place in the information you so casually disperse throughout the poems — the bit about the spoons in "The History of Traitors," for instance, "coated ... with a chemical that turned orange under ultraviolet light" if the soldiers who used them were, presumably, treacherous. Or, in your title poem, the 'fact' (?) that "in 1900, seventy-two colleges offered courses in writing obituaries." I'd ask whether these things are factual, but I suspect you'd point me to "the story about the man who caught a Bengal tiger / with a butterfly net ... / It doesn't matter if it's true." Instead, let me ask where you get most of your ideas for poems. Dreams? History books? Ripley's?

Poetry occupies an interesting place in literature. Poetry, in the minds of many people is confessional writing — it must be true. If it’s not, you would have written it as fiction. Someone recently commented that some of my prose poems had a journalistic quality to them. I never thought of journalism as a word I would use anywhere near my poems, but I write them to have the veneer of reality. While I’m writing them I think of them as real events. In that way the poems have a certain amount of honesty. I don’t control them. I want them to be as true as possible to what really happened, even if it never did. I wonder if this makes any sense? Truth is so overrated. The possibility of truth is what interests me more. By the way, take “The History of Traitors”: do you really think the government hasn’t tried many weird methods to detect traitors? Now I’m not saying true or not true either way, but you don’t have to look at the world too long or hard to see what a bizarre place it really is. I don’t know about heaven or hell, but this world is a great place for a poet.

The second part of your question, where do the poems start, wow, I really don’t know. What’s that old cliché: God gives us the first line and we sweat for the rest. Sometimes I just try to think of an odd line, like “a man caught a Bengal tiger / with a butterfly net …” and see where it goes. I’m constantly scribbling in my notebook. My undergrad degree is in photography. I love images, especially in poems. I might see something out of place, for instance, an apple in a flower pot with tulips. Hmmm, how did that get there? I try to answer that question in a poem.

In the title poem of Death Obscura, you mention a location that is also the site of one of my favorite poems in your first book, The Soup of Something Missing: "The Seaport Diner, Point Jefferson Station." Will you say a little bit about Point Jefferson Station? What is it about the place that inspires such arresting poems?

I don’t really believe in inspiration. You decide to be a poet so you have to write poems. If I waited for inspiration I’d hardly get anything written. You — I — have to go out and look for poems. I do that by opening my notebook and beginning to scribble lines, images, whatever. Sometimes I find my way into a poem. There’s that old cliché: you juggle at the altar of the muse and sometimes she rewards you. On occasion a poem comes to us. “The Seaport Diner, Point Jefferson Station" was one of those poems. It’s completely, absolutely, word-for-word true. On New Year’s Day my mom called to tell me they took Dad, his ashes, to his favorite diner for New Year’s Eve. You can’t make this stuff up. I said, “Mom, therapy might be good.” And then I wrote the poem. That said, I believe a poet has to live an inspired life. You have to be fully engaged in life, love and art. Be part of the world, not a passive voyeur.

Hmmm, I don’t think I really answered your question so let me add that I never lived in Port Jefferson Station. But lots of my family did and still do. My grandparents lived there on a street named after my grandfather. I have many memories of going to visit them and staying for weekends and holidays. It was a little on the rural side at the time and I remember the forest behind their house. My father also died in that town. Too many memories to avoid. And to tell you the truth, I don’t even try to avoid them.

You’re from Far Rockaway, as is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and I don’t recall you ever writing about the place. Are you consciously avoiding writing about it?

You know, I never thought about it until you asked the question. Now it strikes me as strange that Far Rockaway has never shown up in a poem. The name is even poetic; it sounds like a place I would write about. I haven’t consciously avoided it, but now that you bring it up I do want to include those words, Far Rockaway, in a poem. It’s a thin strip of land you fly over when you’re getting ready to land at Kennedy Airport if you approach from the Atlantic Ocean. When I was a little kid there was boardwalk with lots of amusement and food places on it. People used to rent bungalows for the summer. I was last there about ten years ago. Most of what I remembered was burnt down or abandoned. On one block there were only three houses left. One was the house I lived in when I was seven. I stood on the sidewalk and tried to imagine myself as a little boy sitting on the porch.

How does your work in advertising inform your poems? The language of ads and of poetry would seem to be in total opposition, but you've been a poet and ad man for many years now.

A great headline could be poetry, I mean in the literal sense. A handful of words that move the reader to action or an emotion — wouldn’t that be true of both a line of poetry and a headline? If I’m busy at the office, writing a lot of ads, the poetry suffers. It feels too “written,” and often too clever. The attributes of the ad sneak into my poems and that’s not a good thing. I’m constantly on guard for that. Though being an ad writer means you have to be disciplined. You have to have ideas on demand every day. That’s helped me as a poet. The discipline required to write poetry every day, or least most days, is easy for me. If I don’t write something on any given day it doesn’t feel natural. Also, being an ad writer means churning out lots of writing that never sees the light of day. I make few demands on the poetry I scribble out every day. The vast majority of it never leaves my notebook, but in constantly writing, every now and then I get something that has potential and if I’m lucky I manage to turn that into a finished poem. Oh, I’m in the process of writing a book-length poem about advertising called “The Vampire of Madison Avenue.” It has nothing to do with vampires but sort of sums up the feeling of being an ad writer in a large agency.

What ad have you worked on that makes you proudest in terms of artistry?

I wrote a commercial for Ameriquest Mortgage that appeared on TV during the Super Bowl. It won advertising awards all over the world and is in a museum. You can see the spot on my website at http://rickbursky.com/html_broadcast/ameriquest-doctor.html. It’s pretty funny. I don’t want to say too much about the spot and give away the punch line. I’ve also done a campaign for a lingerie company that’s pretty risqué. On the left side of the page is a photo of a naked woman with the headline “the gift.” On the opposite page is the same photo except the woman is wearing lingerie and the headline is “the wrapping.” On the other side of the spectrum, I wrote a newspaper ad for Wells Fargo Bank, about a charity they supported, probably the most beautiful ad copy I’ve ever written. It’s all on my website: rickbursky.com. There are a few poems there, too. But it’s mostly advertising. The poetry is on my blog, rickbursky.blogspot.com. In all fairness, artistry is a tough word with advertising. Writers and art directors in advertising have to keep reminding ourselves that we’re not creating art, we’re creating communications that serve very specific client needs.

There's a wonderful question in "The Hypnology": "Isn't this the best use of night, / to make us afraid, make us uncomfortable, / make us stare at the ceiling until morning. / Is sleep a skill or a prize?" Do you try to answer such questions, or do you, like Rilke, think more is to be gained by living them?

I’ll split the difference with Rilke. I believe there’s more to be gained by living in the questions. Poetry is a wonderful place for introspection, as long as it doesn’t come off as introspection. How do you make art out of questions? Not with answers, that’s for sure. I love Neruda’s Book of Questions. Though I never try to answer them. I don’t think he intended them to be answered. One of the things I love about poetry is the way our own poems have the ability to amaze us and teach us things about ourselves. Sometimes I write a poem and wonder, Where’d that come from? “Is sleep a skill or a prize?” is for those who read the poem to answer for themselves. If you twist my arm right now I’d say it’s a prize. Tomorrow my answer might be different.

The women in your poems are endlessly mysterious. In The Soup of Something Missing, I thought they seemed mythic, but in Death Obscura I noticed their legs and painted toenails.

The women in The Soup of Something Missing are mythic, in the sense that they aren’t specific. All the women in Death Obscura are real ex-girlfriends, in some cases named, in most not. In some cases, they’re probably pissed about the poems. In other cases, they’re flattered. I think of myself as a surrealistic, romantic poet. And when I’m not thinking of myself as that I consider myself an Eastern European Duendest. I dated a lawyer who used to say literary journals should have a rebuttal column for the poet’s significant other.

On the back jacket, your publisher calls your work "California Gothic." Can you say a little about that?

It’s difficult to escape our environment. It sneaks into our poems without asking. When Los Angeles, or California, sneak into my poems there are no palm trees or movie stars, no Hollywood, no glitter. My version of Los Angeles is darker and grittier. California Gothic, hopefully, hints that my version of the city isn’t the popular version.

When did you begin writing poems? Do you recall reading (or writing) a poem that made you realize this was the path you wanted to follow?

Yes, I remember the exact moment. It was in the basement of a church in Los Angles. I began my life as a poet some twenty years ago with a poetry class at UCLA Extension. I took the class hoping it would make me a better advertising copywriter. I always believed poets were great writers of prose and thought it would be useful to my advertising career. In the first class the instructor read us Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and Etheridge Knight’s “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane.” Right then and there my entire life changed. I found what I would dedicate the rest of my life to.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a book, Ironmongery, of short surrealistic essays about poetry. Some of them are on my blog, rickbursky.blogspot.com. I also have two book-length poems that are just about finished — “The Myth of Photography,” which is my version of the history of photography, and “The Vampire of Madison Avenue.” I’ve also been writing a lot of prose poems lately. I try to write every day, try being the important word here.

To what extent do you feel your experience in the army encouraged your instinct toward poetry? Were you writing much before you joined up?

I was 17 when I joined the army, very much a kid, and they gave me an automatic weapon. What were they thinking!? Being a soldier provides wonderful grist for poetry. Even the words, their sounds — platoon, cartridge, infantry, sergeant — have resonance and depth. Some poets like to use the names of flower and nature-like words in their poems. I’ll take artillery over bougainvillea. Operation Homecoming, the program that provided creative writing classes for the military, was a great thing. I hope more of the recent veterans start writing. The first time I ever wrote anything was while I was in the army. I was assigned to the staff of an infantry battalion in Germany. The adjutant, Captain Caggiano, told me to write a about our basketball team for the battalion newsletter. I guess that was the start. Just by coincidence, when I went to AWP in Denver last year I had dinner with Captain Caggiano and his wife, Jean (also a writer). He’s now a retired colonel living in Colorado. I hadn’t seen him since I left Germany. It was a wonderful reunion. For the longest time I’ve wanted to write a book-length poem about boot camp. One day …

Do you have favorite poets, books that you return to?

I’m always rereading Yannis Ritsos. I’m pretty sure I have everything of his that’s been translated into English. There’s something about his poems that speak directly to my soul. I’ve even attempted to translate a few of his poems. That proved more difficult than I could have imagined. Charles Simic is another poet I love. Other poets I couldn’t live without include Nin Andrews, Laura Kasischke, David Young, Zbigniew Herbert and Lola Haskins. I have about 2,500 books of poetry and think that I’m pretty well-read, still I’m always thrilled to discover someone new, I mean new to me. Vern Rutsala, for instance, has been publishing books of poetry for some 25 years and I just found him. Some books that I’ve just read that really impressed me are Purr by Mary Ann Samyn, Tongues of War by Tony Barnstone, Tall If by Mark Irwin, Zero at the Bone by Stacie Cassarino, Come On All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder, and Alexis Orgera’s book that’s about to come out, How Like Foreign Objects.

Last question, Rick. I know you have a pen fetish. What pen do you use when you're "writing raw" in your notebook?

Yep, I collect fountain pens. I currently have about 90. Most of them are old, from the ’30s and ’40s, though I have a few modern fountain pens. I couldn’t imagine writing with anything else. I have some favorites — the 1939 Parker Oversized Vacumatic with a stub nib, for instance. But I rotate through them so they all get used in the course of two years. I once took a day off from work and spent it learning to make simple repairs from Fred Krinke of the Fountain Pen Store in Monrovia. Fred is a third generation fountain pen repairman. He can fix a fountain pen just by staring at it.

You can really feel the line being written on the paper with a fountain pen. It’s satisfying to watch the ink dry. Writing with fountain pens lets me sort of live with a line before moving on to the next one. Sometimes I write the same line over and over again. Writing with a fountain pen slows me down, and that’s good for a poem. There’s nothing poetic about a computer, though I do love my MacBook Pro.

###

THE SEAPORT DINER, POINT JEFFERSON STATION

My mother and a cousin decide to go to The Seaport Diner,

my father's favorite, for a cup of coffee on New Year's Eve.

Though he's been dead for six years, they take him along.

The black marble box that holds his ashes is placed

in a shopping bag, then on their table next to a window.

On another night the waitress might have asked about the box.

But tonight the diner is crowded, she doesn't notice

that two women asked for three cups of coffee.

There are many ways to suck the marrow out of time's bones.

This is my mother's. No one's seen the inside of the box,

though at times I've thought all of heaven was within.

By refusing to bury it my mother is unwittingly hiding

my father from the devil. At a small table in the center of the box,

my father sits. Ashes piled to his knees, he remembers

flames and fears he's in hell. If he walked forever

he would discover the wall and on the other side of the wall

my mother's hand holding the spoon she stirred coffee with.

Robert Hill Long on The Kilim Dreaming

2010-11-18T17:52:00.000-08:00

I asked Robert if he would say a few things about his book and he graciously sent the following essay.

Where my writing touches on nature it often concerns paradise, whether this or that place is Edenic/Arcadian, a peaceable kingdom lost in mythic past; or a place beyond death/after this life, a heaven or Elysium for the just and the brave and the virtuous; or a parallel to our world but invisible except to private imaginings (as it is in my personal life), the dreams of cults, the prophecies of shamans or utopians, where all is as it might be—as it could or should be Only If—(fill in your hypothetical ideal conditions here).

The poem “Hemlock” (which closes my earlier book, The Work of the Bow), set in Colorado near Aspen, is in part about how people pioneering west in search of a paradisal future brought with them—unknowingly, half-knowingly, or fully aware—seeds of old European/eastern botanical culture, along with their books of Homer & Virgil, that altered the landscape and the culture-scape of the West, and brought old death to new earth. Another poem in that book, “The White Ibis,” takes the matter up in a more direct way: how any human incursion (in this case, real estate development of Carolina barrier islands) into a previously unsettled habitat destroys what can be protected only by leaving it alone forever.

In “The Spear Lily” and “The Kilim Dreaming” (as well as in “The Wire Garden,” once part of The Kilim Dreaming but now a limited edition of elegies for my father) my essential aim was to retool the Garden of Eden myth, starting with the moment that the two human inhabitants realize they’re stuck together in what might have been a paradise—except for what humanly happened to each of them. As Robert Hass so casually put it as a premise: “In the life we lead, every paradise is lost.”

The core metaphor—the heart of both narrative systems—is a mythic garden where a pair of strangers, after becoming acquainted, find that they must mutually negotiate their sense of belonging (their place on the earth, their place in each other’s life); examine their responsibility to tradition (the cultural past), to community (the present) and to posterity; and finally, come to terms with having permanently altered each other’s identity, and how this in turn will alter their destinies.

In “The Spear Lily,” the protagonists are survivors of sexual abuse as well as sexual outsiders: the woman an urban, middle-class Bay Area prostitute, the man a Dutch coffee dealer and avowed celibate after years of gay prostitution. Neither has family nor a partner, but over the course of an afternoon, each considers what their sharing of similar life-stories entails. Would they make sensitive partners, granted each other’s history of violations and tragedies, and each other’s differing strengths of character? Would each be a good candidate to ‘protect the other’s solitude,’ in Rilke’s phrase about an ideal marriage? The Dutch man proposes this is worth thinking about, but as in Milton’s poem, “The Spear Lily” closes with a woman and a man leaving a darkened garden together, without any resolution about either’s future.

“The Kilim Dreaming” is fundamentally about how a Turkish rug dealer’s attitude toward the welfare of innumerable women who live as rug-weavers changes after he meets a younger woman who not only possesses some very rare kilims, but is apparently capable of supernatural communication—with him, with a recently dead woman who was her nurse/chaperone, with other weavers she introduces him to. In short, he encounters the cultural remnants of Amazon matriarchy and changes his life and business practices. And like “The Spear Lily,” “The Kilim Dreaming” is also a romance about the mystery of displaced, shifting identities, about the stripping of veils and masks, the relative costs and consolations of maintaining solitary illusions and of mutually sharing disillusionment. But while “The Spear Lily” was pure fiction (other than some of the botanical settings), “The Kilim Dreaming" was first inspired by a nonfiction profile of a Turkish rug dealer, and gradually built out of research into the history of flatweave textiles in the Anatolian region. It does have a San Francisco connection: one of my primary sources was the book Anatolian Kilims by Cathryn Cootner, which catalogues the Jones kilim collection at the de Young in San Francisco.

It meditates on weaving (presuming natural dyes/wools/practices) as the closest human analogue to what the earth does as a total system. (“The Spear Lily,” which I wrote before “The Kilim Dreaming,” is more straightforwardly based on the Adam & Eve conundrum, and set in the San Francisco Botanical Garden.) In “The Kilim Dreaming” I was committed to telling a longer story, developing the characters more deeply, but also to portraying how the concept of a paradise-garden is transformed into a valuable artifact, a purely human object. I was also pursuing a formal analogy between the sonnet sequence and rug-weaving. In their traditional forms, both depend on standard measures of length and width—the loom’s warp and weft designed for certain sizes (the 3x5 of a prayer rug; the 9x12 of a main tent rug, the 14 lines times 10 syllables (12 in my case) of each sonnet. Both can (hypothetically) be endlessly lengthened—the red carpet runner unrolled for visiting royalty, the thematic or narrative sequencing of sonnets; both depend on the rhythmic joining of the abstract to the concrete—the knots that join dyed wool to patterned images, the accentual-syllabic joining of syllables and linguistic elements to imagery and metaphor and story. Another formal intersection, for me, is how flatweave techniques favor repeating geometrical images and visual rhythms, while my thinking about the poetic elements of syllabics, rhymes, cadences and verbal music is a sort of musical math designed to represent people living the mystery of earthly existence.

Back to the cultural and paradisal aspects, though, here’s a useful generalization: Anatolian rugs portray a heaven seen from earth, while Persian rugs portray an idealized earth seen from the eternal perspective of heaven. (The word “paradise” itself derives from the Persian word for a walled garden.) So each is rich with paradoxical suggestions about time, and about the functions of desire and memory in depicting the intersection of the mythical with the actual. Rugs are not only image repositories, but cultural repositories; their commercial and cultural values are inextricably knotted together, warp and weft; yet they are made be walked on, sat on, eaten on, prayed on, and among some nomadic people they retain their oldest function: portable flooring in a world where the pastoral life and country itself is a homeland not to be desecrated by permanent dwellings, which are in any case an illusion. Many rugs are composed of one or more central “fields” and one or more “borders”; common images in Anatolian kilims include fruit trees and flowers (but also a figure thought to be a relic of Neolithic goddess-worship, and winged creatures who may be angels); the oldest surviving fragment from the fifth century BCE has representations of horses, deer, and humans together in a liminal state between the wild and the domesticated. And of course every ancient kilim is composed entirely from living materials extracted from the weaver’s environment: wool, dyes from vegetables, fruits, insects, woven on a wooden frame.

I think of the old inscription-on-stone best known in the paintings by Poussin and Guercino of bucolic pastorals: “Et in Arcadia ego”—And I am in Arcadia. Is this, as some critics think, evidence of Death being a tagger in paradise, where the chiseled graffito means “I’m in Arcadia, too, like any other place—you can run but you can’t hide from mortality”? Or is it what Simon Schama terms “a wistful epitaph” about what works of art have in common with gravestones: a formal, compressed testimony, designed to communicate as long it exists the mysterious privilege of having lived as a name on an earth where most of what exists inhabits its essence with no name for itself, no memory (that can be communicated to us), no history, and no future? Kilims are not only colorful memorials to the tedious (but perhaps social and companionable) hours of nameless women. Kilims announce, after their fashion, that the weaver was, at least this once, a visionary medium between the past and the future, and her artifact contains the coded patterns and colors necessary to understand how she conceived the world and abstracted its mysteries—which would outlive her, along with her kilim.

2010-10-25T17:42:00.000-07:00

It’s been a crazy fall, people. Bearnice has barely had time to breathe. Still, I think it would be good if she reminded everyone that Bear Star’s annual competition for the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize will end on November 30. Polish up that manuscript and send it to us, or take advantage of our new online submission process—all reading fees support the publication of the winner’s book.

In other news, Bear Star poet Rick Bursky has a new book coming out with Sarabande this fall and I can’t wait to read it: Death Obscura. It sports another stunning cover, right up there with the one for The Soup of Something Missing, but when you work for an ad agency and teach at an art school you have no shortage of creative friends with whom to collaborate. Congratulations, Rick! Don’t forget you promised to let me interview you sometime soon.

Meanwhile, Steve Gutierrez has an essay in the fall Redwood Coast Review—“The Big Fresno Fair” (online at http://www.stephenkessler.com/rcr/rcr_2010fall.pdf )—that I loved. Here’s his description of his Aunt Ella. “She was the younger one: the rebel who had been a 'career girl' into her late twenties, daring the barrio to call her an old maid, working as a secretary for a corporation and saving enough money to travel. She conquered Mexico with Capri pants that stirred the natives. She dropped in on Hawaii and broke some hearts.”

Also, I’m excited to announce that Bear Star will be publishing a book of poems by Quinton Duval, beloved Sacramento-area poet who passed away unexpectedly last spring. Gary Thompson at Cedar House Books (Friday Harbor, WA) has taken Quinton’s unfinished manuscript and added to it from various files the poet was working on at the time of his death. The book is called Like Hay and will come out in Spring 2011. I can’t wait to begin setting it up in InDesign.

Finally, it’s been a pleasure to enter The Kilim Dreaming for some awards I feel it deserves. Each poem (there are only four) would make a terrific film, but you’re just going to have to order a copy if you can’t wait for Hollywood to come to its senses and make something good for a change. Robert Hill Long is a fabulous storyteller and one of the best sonneteers around.

Congratulations, Steve!

2010-08-16T18:42:00.000-07:00

At last it can be revealed: Stephen D. Gutierrez has won an American Book Award for Live from Fresno y Los. The entire list is as follows:

Amiri Baraka, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music University of California Press)

Sherwin Bitsui, Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press)

Nancy Carnevale, A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890-1945 (University of Illinois Press)

Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (McSweeney’s/Vintage)

Sesshu Foster, World Ball Notebook (City Lights)

Stephen D. Gutierrez, Live from Fresno y Los (Bear Star Press)

Victor Lavalle, The Big Machine (Spiegel & Grau)

François Mandeville, This Is What They Say, translated from the Chipewyan by Ron Scollon (University of Washington Press)

Bich Minh Nguyen, Short Girls (Viking)

Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley, editors, Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (University of Texas)

Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, editors, Poems for the Millennium: Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry (University of California Press)

Kathryn Waddell Takara, Pacific Raven: Hawai`i Poems (Pacific Raven Press)

Pamela Uschuk, Crazy Love: New Poems (Wings Press)

Lifetime Achievement:

Quincy Troupe

Katha Pollitt

***

From the press release:
"The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees,and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to underrecognized authors and first works. There are no quotas for diversity, the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers."

The awards ceremony will be on Sunday, September 19th, from 1:00-4:00 p.m. at the Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin Street (at Grove), San Francisco, CA. A reception will take place following the ceremony. This event is open to the public. For more information, call (510) 642-7321.

See you there!

Excitement in the 'hood

2010-08-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

Bearnice (the press logo bear) is doing a happier jig than usual, and it’s not because someone heated up a piece of tin for her to jump around on or prodded her big hairy backside. No, she’s extremely pleased to have recently learned one of the authors here has received an American Book Award. The news isn’t official yet, but we will link to it as soon as we can.

Speaking of links, Cohasset finally has high-speed internet—insert vuvuzela chorus here—or at least higher speed. Fact-checking, blog-reading, YouTubing, etc., has never been easier. And watching old episodes of 30 Rock on lazy days more tempting than ever.

Have you seen this? http://brightcove.newscientist.com/services/player/bcpid96978243001?bctid=221111468001
Simply mesmerizing. But after a while questions arise. What to make of the fact that large portions of the Midwest and East seem permanently sad? Or that Oregon is less happy than Washington and California? Most perplexing, how is it possible that California’s mood remains one of the highest in the nation despite the myriad ways this state is failing its citizens? Is it our generally warmer clime? The quality of our wine and weed? The vast number of people practicing yoga, zen, and veganism? Or simply that the homeless don’t tweet?

Mama's Got an iPad

2010-05-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

Maybe you saw the video of Virginia, an avid reader in her hundredth year who suffers from glaucoma and, after receiving an iPad, loved it enough to compose a limerick extolling its virtues. If not, here you go: http://mashable.com/2010/04/23/ipad-99-year-old-woman/

The first person I thought of when I watched it was my mother, Dorothy Brunsman Spencer. She’s only 88, but she also lives to read, despite suffering from severe macular degeneration. Knowing she might find it easier to enjoy novels, not to mention the Nation and New Yorker, if she could increase the font size and the contrast between the text and background, inspired me to join wallets with my brother and father to get her an iPad of her own. (As a small publisher gouged by Amazon there was no effing way I was going to get her a Kindle.)

Then I waited. One never knows with Ma. Sure, she loves reading, but she’s also stubborn about things like paper. She prefers newsprint to shiny pages, for starters, so maybe reading on glass would just feel weird. Still, watching her slowly make her way through T.C. Boyle’s The Women when she visited here last month was heartbreaking. In the old days, when her eyes were stronger, she could have finished five novels in the time it was taking her to get through Part 1 of this one.

She called today, having just downloaded another novel by T. C. Boyle, her new favorite writer. I haven’t heard her sound so happy since the day I told her I was finally going to finish college. “I love it,” she said. “I can see the pages so much better.” She also likes the way it saves her place from one session to the next, how she can curl up on the couch with it and read in dim light. “You may not get a thank-you card from me,” she warned at the end of our conversation. “In fact, I don’t want to see anyone, go anywhere, or do anything else but READ!”

You go, Ma. I can’t wait to hear about your downloads. Maybe you’ll even be willing to show me how to use that thing when I see you next.

In Memoriam: Quinton Duval

2010-05-12T16:40:00.000-07:00

Quinton Duval passed away on May 10. A fine poet, a teacher, and the editor and publisher of Red Wing Press, Quinton was a big-hearted man who will be greatly missed. He is the author of four poetry collections, including Joe’s Rain from Cedar House Books. More recently, Rattlesnake Press published his chapbook Among Summer Pines. I have been reading and rereading “Morning Tea,” that book’s last poem since hearing of his death. Here are the last several lines:

Before I left, I saw you set out

the blue bowl full of speckled eggs

and a plate of June peaches.

After breakfast, find Bobo the fisherman

and his four sons. Tell them to bring rope

and a sheet of plywood. I’ve never had

a ride on plywood. I’ve never loved anywhere

as much as here, with you. I’d do it again

in a minute. You know me.

I’ve never had enough.

2010-04-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

Linda Dove just alerted me to this wonderful review of Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name over on the Rattle blog: http://rattle.com/blog/2010/03/eleanor-eleanor-real-kathryn-cowles/ And in case I haven’t mentioned it, another Bear Star won the most recent Rattle prize of $5,000. That would be Lynne Knight. Both these poets are a bit shy about self-promotion, so I’m happy to step in and ballyhoo their success for them. That’s what the Bear is for, after all.

And speaking of bears, I liked the one above, trying hard to see what was going on last week inside the Denver Convention Center.

AWP/CLMP

2010-04-06T14:09:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's that time of year again. The time when hundreds of small literary presses hump their goods to the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, this year in Denver. It's a crazy, chaotic adventure every time, but I always enjoy the chance to talk with other editors and publishers, to meet writers, and to share information about Bear Star. And of course to sell a few books. AWP has for several years now joined forces with the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses, a shrewd pairing that serves both organizations in myriad ways. I am looking forward to the CLMP panel on ebook technology, and I always love seeing the array of books my colleagues display. It's humbling and exhilarating.

If you're going, I hope you stop by Bear Star's table in Exhibit Hall A--Table J22--which is shared this year by Helicon Nine Editions. The following Bear Star writers will be signing books at the table:

Steve Gutierrez (Live from Fresno y Los): TH at 1 pm

Jeanne E. Clark (Gorrill's Orchard): TH at 2 pm

Linda Dove (In Defense of Objects): F at 1:30 pm

Feeding the People

2010-03-05T12:08:00.000-08:00

There's a Bear Star there in the photo above. Last night Stephen Gutierrez (r, with host Rob Davidson, professor & fiction writer at CSU, Chico) gave a rousing reading of two stories from his book Live from Fresno y Los. Though he claimed never to have presented "Feeding the People" before, we wouldn't have known it from his inspired performance, the way he channeled Walter, the two Helens, the Wetbacks Extempore, and the fictional audience hungry--no, starved--for a miracle. Bravo, Steve, and big thanks to Chico State's Writer's Voice series for bringing him to campus.

Resurrection: Poetry Flash

2010-02-21T13:02:00.000-08:00

Good news! The Flash is back, and it’s full, as always, with news, interviews (a good one with Chris Abani, whose novel Graceland still burns in the part of my brain holding impressions of Nigeria), poems, and reviews, including some kind words from Richard Silberg for Plato’s Bad Horse by Bear Star poet and associate editor Deborah Woodard. Here is a selection from “Kore" to entice readers still unfamiliar with her work.

3.

Mother, they’ve strung up the head of the scapegoat
and I want him to open his eyes.
I’ll crawl past the bloodshot filaments, the tears
subsiding where his pain has not yet reached.
In this corner, a yellow barn cat,
fur licked flat about her teats; above, a wasps’ nest
no one has disturbed, the hay scent
and children’s voices hurtling down a ray of light.
Soon, I’ll be the mirror clouded by his panting.
I’ll be a bright penny destined for the locomotive,
and afterwards, the one who picks it up.
The mob gathers, siphoning green oil into their lanterns,
and I walk aimlessly with him
into the old city of the brain with its slant avenues.

The long and the short

2010-02-02T11:33:00.000-08:00

Here we are at the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox with Punxsutawney Phil predicting more snow and rain, which is fine with all of us drought-conscious Californians even if we’d prefer to be outdoors readying our gardens for spring planting. It’s good reading weather.

For some reason, partly to do with a desire to cultivate a longer attention span, I’m into longer books so far this year, following 2666 with Infinite Jest. The latter seems weirdly appropriate in view of the recent SCOTUS ruling. Now that corporations can pour as much money as they like into political races, maybe it’s only a matter of time before the years are named, as in Jest, for sponsors. Somehow, “The Year of Depend Adult Undergarments” doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. I rather like picturing Alito and Scalia in diapers—Thomas, too.

But, speaking of long works, the latest Poetry has a marvelous essay by Durs Grünbein that makes a case for the time-saving aspects of poetry. “A few clusters of words express what the lavish epic draws out over hundreds of pages. Or to put it another way: couldn’t it be that poems, as long as they are alert and open to impressions, are novels by other means—and therefore do sterling service to readers short of time and hungry for intensity? What they offer are lessons in accelerated consciousness, machete slashes through a tangled world.”

And the winner is ...

2010-02-01T13:49:00.000-08:00

… Robert Hill Long of Eugene, Oregon, whose manuscript wowed my stalwart readers and me with four long sonnet sequences—that’s it; no loose change in this book—that exhibit such narrative brio we often forgot we were reading sonnets. Long is the author of three previous poetry books: The Power to Die (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), The Work of the Bow (ditto), and The Effigies (Plinth Books). His new book, The Kilim Dreaming, will be out this fall. Here’s a stand-alone poem from the second section, “The Book of Joel.”

Parable of Shadows

What turns cities gray are ghosts: that’s where they answer
monotonous inquiries about the future
in monotones of ash, exhaust, and verdigris.
The residue they leave is like a sustained kiss—

on this portico that sheltered one’s live embrace;
on that marble sill where another leaned her face
into her arms and listened to the song of sirens
and taxis, and weighed the summer she held the reins

of a milk-paint horse, and no one called her in at dark.
The city ghosts touch gray is a moon-luminous ark,
they’re its true passengers. The living are ballast,
perishables with no sure date stamped as their last.

Something stilled in them wants the facades to keep graying.
What the dead do with their colors, they’re not saying.

The Part about the Office

2010-01-31T14:24:00.000-08:00

Reviews of Bolaño’s 2666 tend to focus on the book’s epic scope and darker aspects—primarily, the femicides in Juarez (called Santa Teresa in the book) that continue to this day—but Bolaño is also at times quite a funny writer. In the book’s final section, I laughed aloud at the following passage, which takes place in the offices of an elderly publisher named Bubis. It’s a bit long, but I want to set the scene for the discussion of lapsus calami, or slips of the pen, that so animates Bubis and his employees. There is nothing here that will give the plot away, so just enjoy.

“The atmosphere at the publishing house was one of feverish activity. Sometimes, however, everything halted, and the copy editor made coffee for herself and [an author] and tea for a new girl who worked as a designer, because by now the house had grown and the slate of employees had grown and sometimes, at a nearby desk, there was a young copy editor, Swiss, why on earth he lived in Hamburg no one knew, and the baroness came out of her office and so did the head of publicity and sometimes the secretary, and they talked about all sorts of things, about the last movie they’d seen or the actor Dirk Bogarde, and then the bookkeeper and even Marianne Gottlieb would drop by with a smile, and if the laughter was very loud in the big room where the copy editors worked, then Bubis himself would peer in with his teacup in his hand, and they would talk not just about Dirk Bogarde but also about politics and the dirty business that the new Hamburg officials got up to or they talked about some writers who had no ethical sense, self-confessed and happy plagiarists who hid expressions of mingled fear and outrage behind a cheerful mask, writers prepared to cling to any reputation, with the certainty that they would thus live on in posterity, any posterity, which made the copy editors and the other employees laugh and even prompted a resigned smile from Bubis, since no one knew better that posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats, and then they started to talk about lapsus calami, many of them collected in a book published long ago … and it wasn’t long before the copy editors got out a book … and began to read aloud a selection of cultured pearls:
‘Poor Marie! Whenever she hears the sound of an approaching horse, she is certain that it is I.’ Vie de Rancé, Chateaubriand.
‘The crew of the ship swallowed up by the waves consisted of twenty-five men, who left hundreds of widows consigned to misery.’ Les Cages flottantes, Gaston Leroux. …
‘ “Let’s go! said Peter, looking for a hat to dry his tears.” Lourdes, Zola.
‘The duke appeared followed by his entourage, which preceded him.’ Letters from My Mill, Alphonse Daudet.
‘With his hands clasped behind his back, Henri strolled about the garden, reading his friend’s novel.’ Le Cataclysme, Rosny.”

The list goes on, followed by commentary about particular pearls that if anything is funnier than the pearls themselves. I submit that the reason writers and editors so enjoy this kind of humor is that they—we—are all too conscious of the ease with which such goofs can make it into print, and so we laugh loudly (while knocking on wood to protect against further embarrassments).
I will end this post by reproducing the typo I make most often, and that on dark days I suspect describes me a little too well: edioter.

Got Macmillan?

2010-01-31T12:41:00.000-08:00

Not anymore you don’t, not if you shop Amazon. On Friday, Amazon removed all its buy buttons for Macmillan books, disappeared them from wish lists, and removed downloaded Macmillan sample chapters from Kindles as well. Apparently, the world’s biggest bookseller is retaliating against the publisher for its move to establish a better pricing system for e-books, one that Macmillan says “provides a level playing field, and allows all retailers the possibility of selling books profitably [emphasis mine].” You can read more about it at Publishers Lunch, which also contains a copy of the ad Macmillan ran to alert its authors, illustrators, and agents. So far Amazon has said nothing publicly.

UPDATE: This just out from Amazon:
Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Haiti

2010-01-14T15:25:00.000-08:00

This has nothing to do with the book biz, but if you're about to send a donation to aid relief efforts in Haiti, you want your dollars to go where they're most needed. Today on Talk of the Nation I heard about an organization that rates charities. Do yourself a favor and check it out: www.charitywatch.org/ . There's a handy index and also a list of the top-rated charities. Oxfam's on that list, by the way, and the Red Cross is not.

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
~Bertolt Brecht

Planning the Days

2009-12-26T13:04:00.000-08:00

Or daze, as the case may be. In any case, I was happy to receive my copy of A Working Writer's Daily Planner for 2010 from the good people at Small Beer Press. It's a deal at $13.95, a handsome spiral-bound notebook full of handsome photos, deadlines for various contests, prompts for writers, and so on. I had merely contributed a few choice excerpts from Rotten Reviews (Pushcart Press, 1986; a reminder of how wrong we editors can be, as if anyone reading this post needs reminding) and Small Beer comped me a planner. The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses is full of kind folks who help each other out--and fast. Here is where I should insert a few personal examples of blowing it (there are several) and subsequent speedy rescue, but I'd rather list some rotten reviews. Think of these when you get your next rejection letter.

Catch-22: "Heller wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it. What remains is a debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic looniness, and the sort of antic behavior the children fall into when they know they are losing our attention." ~The New Yorker
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "A gross trifling with every fine feeling ... Mr. Clemens has no reliable sense of propriety." ~The Springfield Republican
Leaves of Grass: "Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics." ~The London Critic
To the Lighthouse: "Her work is poetry; it must be judged as poetry, and all the weaknesses of poetry are inherent in it." ~New York Evening Post
on Emily Dickinson: "An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village--or anywhere else--cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar .... Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood." ~Atlantic Monthly

The Solipsist: a review

2009-12-09T14:43:00.000-08:00

There's a sweet little review of Troy Jollimore's chapbook over on the CPITS blog, just the kind of thing the Bear likes to read in between the manuscripts she's evaluating. Yes, the Bear published it, so of course she thinks it's sweet. (You may have guessed by her profile that she likes sweets, period.) Please note the word "expansive" in the last line--that's an a four letters in, not an e. The Solipsist is perfectbound, with great cover art by Lyn Dillin.

Bear Star Author Makes a Top-Ten List

2009-11-30T10:02:00.000-08:00

After Publishers Weekly weighed in with a top-tenner that included nary a woman (this in a year that included new books by both Alice Munro and A. S. Byatt), I wasn't especially hopeful that a male HuffPost blogger's list would be more representative, and it wasn't--until I got to number ten, which I quote in full: 10. Melissa Kwasny, Reading Novalis in Montana (Milkweed). Much of the innovative poetry written in America is published not by the big houses, but by independent presses like Milkweed, and its many smaller siblings. Too often, our poetry is obscure, willfully ignorant of realities beyond the immediate self, and pathetic in its complaint, narcissism, and soullessness. Moreover, the language tends to be prosaic, when it's not self-consciously experimental. Kwasny falls into none of these traps; she writes romantic-environmental poetry of a high order, communing with nature in a language that never sells itself short. Can we imagine ourselves, gluttonous twenty-first century Americans, in a better relationship with nature? Can we see ourselves beyond artificial separations between the animate and the inanimate, between the sensate and the inert? Kwasny shows how, as she refuses to back down under the pressure of material degradation. (The rest of Anis Shivani's list can be read here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/huffington-post-bloggers_b_372238.html .)

Bear Star, definitely one of the "smaller siblings" Shivani refers to, published Melissa Kwasny's first book of poems, The Archival Birds, in 2000, and since then her poetry book Thistle (Lost Horse Press, 2006) won the Idaho Prize. Now this, and yes, Reading Novalis in Montana is excellent, and I'm glad Anis Shivani saw fit to list a poetry book in his top ten. Kwasny has also edited Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1950, and--just out--I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights, coedited with M. L. Smoker (Lost Horse Press).

Here's a poem from The Archival Birds. I hope it will inspire you to read more of Kwasny.

DROUGHT

Clean and robed, I carry
in small buckets
the cloud-filled remains
of my quarter tub of water.
The garden lacks light--
only that far corner
I planted in borage
for my eyes, the wide cloths
of comfrey for my back.
The rose spines are tall,
too thin like the sick
men on our streets here,
but they continue to blossom.
Forget-me-nots huddle,
girls on a school yard
who never try their bounds.

Basho wrote of peasants
who dressed in their finest
to cross the high passes.
I check to see if the plums
are still here, if the calla
has returned from last season.
The buckets are my excuse.
Dry earth, from which so much
pushes out, is unbreakable.

(c) 2000 by Melissa Kwasny

One Day Left ...

2009-11-29T08:03:00.000-08:00

... to get your manuscript off for the 2010 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. If it's postmarked by midnight tomorrow, you're good. Thanks to all the poets who have sent material thus far. It's being logged and numbered, then I'm settling into cushions by the wood stove to read. This is the best job in the world, and I'm grateful California's horrid economy hasn't yet forced me to hold a bake sale to keep the bear in the black. (By the way, most of the black bears around this town seem to be cinnamon-colored.) I think we can squeak by without extending the deadline.

So what are we (my other readers and I) looking for? Honestly, we don't have a dominant aesthetic here--we just want to be amazed.

A Poem and Commentary by Linda Dove

2009-11-10T10:14:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about Linda Dove’s collection In Defense of Objects is the reciprocity of her vision, the way her investigation of objects often becomes a two-way interrogation. In “Eye, Appaloosa” this dynamic is especially poignant. Horses intimidate me, but I am nevertheless wild for this poem, so I asked her if she would talk a little about it for this blog. Her comments follow the poem.

Eye, Appaloosa

Object of the west, tiny globe that makes manifest
the seat of its rider. Seer of bloodshed and journey.

Eye that crosses currents with the Palouse River,
that precedes the blanket of flank draped in leopard spots.

Cortez walks the first snowflake horse off the boat
in Mexico, but the Nez Perce recreate it. The eye

is an object of interest. Its sclera must breed white
to show off the colored iris like another dark mote.

It is not a natural object, this bred eye. It is considered.
It is watched, even as it watches. Perhaps it has seen

too much. After the long retreat, the ambush,
the war, it follows the currents of history

to fight no more forever. The cavalry guts the tribe
by its horses—selling, shooting, or mating them

to farm stallions. They see nothing remarkable
in the eye of the animal. But the eye remembers,

in the way that objects will. Long after the ones
who knew it disappear, the eye, Appaloosa moves.

© 2009 Linda Dove

Linda writes: “Eye, Appaloosa” is one of the “glue” poems that I wrote at the eleventh hour for the purpose of “sticking” my manuscript together under its new title, In Defense of Objects. I just now looked up the day I wrote it—November 23, 2008—and the Dorothy Brunsman contest had a deadline of November 30th, so I wrote it and sent it off within the week. I’m pretty sure it repeats the word “object” more than any other single poem in the collection (four times in 18 lines).

It was also a poem born of a dream, an actual, nighttime dream, which I had had in May 2006, during a long period in which I wasn’t writing. The dream was ostensibly about my real-life friend M., also a poet, who started typing furiously, while I collected her pages. There was a clock on the wall, and she turned out about 75 pages of beautiful poetry in an hour. In the dream, I was literally reading the pages, and they were perfectly-formed, Ashberyesque lines about the forest, rocks, river, animals, although they were edgy and raw and long across the page. She divided them into three discrete sections and told me I had to come up with a title for her, so I invented three: Eye, Appaloosa; Cowhand, Traveller, Cow; and The Gift of Green.

The overwhelming color in the dream was green—the green trees in the forest. I was apparently seeing the poems as images at the same time I was reading the typed pages in the dream. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember any specific lines (and, oh, what I would give to be able to remember those lines, those long lines of beautiful verse that were perfectly formed somewhere in my head!). But I did remember (and quickly jotted down) the three titles I had created and knew I had to do something with them, even though I had no reference point with which to begin to explain from whence they had come. “Eye, Appaloosa” and “Cowhand, Traveller, Cow” both became the titles of poems in the collection.

And that’s where the similarity between the dream and these two poems begins and ends. When I finally turned back to these titles two-and-a-half years after they had appeared to me in the dream, I had no idea what to do with them. So I worked backwards into “Eye, Appaloosa” by doing some research into this breed of horse that had arrived so decisively in my dream, but about which I knew little to nothing. The fact that the title appeared to me as a syntactical aberration wasn’t something I understood either; I just went with it. It seemed to suggest a focus for the poem—to “see” the horse and its history through the eye, as both the subject (topos) of the poem, and as an object that would stand in as a synecdoche for the breed itself.

Fortunately, the history of the Appaloosa is fascinating, complex, and storied. There was more than enough to work with just doing a cursory fact-grab online. It ended up as a poem that wants to suggest something about vision—historical vision, poetic vision, ontological vision (how we know what we know, how we see what we see). The Spanish, the Nez Perce, and the U.S. 7th Cavalry all see this object of history differently. Those competing perspectives allow the Appaloosa’s eye to obtain a kind of independence (“even as it watches”), to hover beyond any one way of telling history. It resists classifications of “natural” or “cultural.” And so the poem also covers the territory of beauty and knowledge and love and loss—all well-worn themes in any poetic lexicon—and about what sustains, what can overcome.

The Bear Star West

2009-11-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

Please note that if your state contains any patch o' green you may enter our annual contest. That means you, ND, SD, NB, KS, & TX. We get comparatively few MSS. from outside the blue zone ...

And for those of you who are curious about where Cohasset is situated, I marked its general location in the 530 Area Code with a red X (click on the map to enlarge it). It's a quirky little town of 720 or so on top of a ridge in the foothills of the Cascades. I love that Google Earth can't see the Bear's den for all the ponderosa pines.

Not that I can vote on this, but I really hope the good people of Maine, where I lived as a teen, vote NO today to overturning the law allowing gay marriage.

Bad Reviews--Good Bad vs. Bad Bad

2009-10-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Craig Morgan Teicher, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly who this week is blogging for The Best American Poetry, posed the following question: I'm curious whether readers of this blog read many reviews, especially of poetry, and whether they write them, either on blogs or for print or online lit mags or newspapers or wherever. Why do you do it--reading or writing? I thought I'd respond here. Yes, I read reviews--lots of them, and not just poetry reviews but fiction and nonfiction reviews as well. While I don't write reviews, I frequently write jacket copy for the books I publish (if blurbs don't take up most of the room) and similar copy for press releases and such. I do it, of course, to promote Bear Stars and their books; it's my job. I read reviews to get a sense of what's out there and might be worth my dollar, or because I like the writing itself. In fact, I came by one of my most indispensable guides in editing, A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner, after reading a long, humorous endorsement in Harper's many years ago by the late David Foster Wallace ("Tense Present" can be Googled if you're interested, and it's also contained in his wonderful collection of essays Consider the Lobster). I consult it almost as frequently as The Chicago Manual of Style.

So what about bad reviews? Do they have a place? I think they do, but can we please distinguish between good bad reviews and bad bad reviews? A good bad one will lay out a case for why a book is not worth your time, with examples, and will asperse* thoughtfully, in a clear manner. It won't misquote the author and it won't trash the book in order to show off the reviewer's superior IQ. The GBR can point out to an author how and where the text seems to be lacking, and what's so terrible about that? Nobody ever wants a bad review, but a GBR can at least lead to an author writing/thinking better the next time out, or to an editor being more careful. A bad bad review serves no one. The worst book review I ever read was in response to a book from this very press. Here are just a few reasons it so terribly sucked: 1) the reviewer misquoted a poem. Worse, she introduced a punctuation error where there had been none--it's for its. That made both the author and me look stupid; 2) it was filled with jargon the reviewer deployed clumsily. True, the journal was the organ of a graduate program in women's studies, but there's no excuse for crappy syntax AND incomprehensible arguments, though I suppose the first leads rather quickly to the second; 3) there was nothing to learn from it and the writing was joyless.

By the way, Mr. Teicher, if you would like to review Bear Star's latest offerings, there's no need to request copies. You already have them somewhere. Just dig into that pile.

*from Garner: "asperse (= to disparage; criticize harshly), a little-known but useful verb--e.g.: 'Fazio et al. should cast their barbs at ordained character assassins ... rather than aspersing the American majority that claims to be ...'"

Or a book of poems for less than that?

2009-10-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

If you can buy Stephen King's new novel or John Grisham's 'Ford County' for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25? ~David Gernert, agent for John Grisham

If you love good books, and why would you be reading this blog if you didn't, the ABA's letter to the Department of Justice is worth a skim. In essence, it asserts that independent bookstores are being asked to compete against stores for which books are being used as teaser items--loss leaders--to get customers in the door (or e-door) to buy other kinds of merchandise, thereby garnering WalMart, Target, et al, control of the hardcover market over time. That would spell outta business to independent stores and smaller publishers. The letter can be found here: http://news.bookweb.org/7130.html

On a more upbeat note, last night's reading by Gary Thompson and Quinton Duval at Chico State (closest college to my town) to a full house. Here's a poem by each of them.

NOTE TO KEATS

There isn't much to say about beauty
these days, except that it isn't truth,
unless truth is glossy
and monthly. This is America

the goddamned beautiful
in the twenty-first century,
not Hampstead Heath
in the nineteenth, and we know

the bride is ravished
long before the bridal shower, the tree
logged off before autumn even comes.
Beauty is money, John,

and you know what urns are for.

~Gary Thompson,
To the Archaeologist Who Finds Us (Turning Point, 2008)

OLTREMARINO

And as the rain fell down, silver
dropped from the corrugated tin
roof edge, but there was no blue
to be had in any direction. "Degrees
of Gray" -- the poet said -- hung over
the sea, curtains on November's stage.
Last night we heard geese battling
their way through the storm
while satellite weather showed a mass
of rain and wind come from across the sea
(the Pacific, of all seas) sweeping east
to draw its veil over our house.
It was weather, just one more thing
to wash color from our lives.
I was blue and I don't know what
you were singing. In the grey
I tried not to show it, my cobalt blush
hidden in the dark. I felt I was from over
the sea -- oltremarino -- if that is blue,
if that is a feeling at all. Alien
is one word for it -- out of place and time --
wishing to go into the grey like those geese,
to wash clean in the weather, flying
by instinct and taut to the group
of strangers I travel with, all of us heading
to the place of instinct, to the reeds,
among islands that await our raucous calling.

~Quinton Duval,
Among Summer Pines (Rattlesnake Press, 2008)

Up She Rises

2009-10-16T18:37:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the blog for Bear Star Press!

I intend this to be a place for news about the press and its authors as well as whatever else I feel like talking or ranting about. Usually there's something.

Today, for instance, I'm pondering the news that Google is planning to give Amazon a run for its bazillions by opening its own e-store. Unlike Amazon, though, Google Editions will be downloadable to "any device with a web browser." Any device. Take that, Kindle. This is great news for those of us who think Jeff Bezos has had far too long a reign as master of the universe. Hat tip to the MobyLives blog (one of my favorites: http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/) for waking me up to good news this morning. Yes, I have my issues with Google, too, but I'll save 'em for another post.

I'd like to remind you that Bear Star's annual poetry contest is open for submissions until the end of November. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication in 2010 (most likely by early fall). Those of you thinking about entering may want to sample the poems by previous winners elsewhere on this site. Know that we receive 95% of our entries during the last two weeks. It gets crazy around here then! If you have a manuscript you'd like to send us, consider putting it in the mail sooner--it will definitely get a little more TLR* that way. Remember that you must be a poet living in a state west of the central time zone to be eligible. So what about you poets from Fargo? Yes, you can submit, because part of North Dakota (where our esteemed prize donor was born) is west of the CTZ. There are time zone maps in your phone book if you're not sure of your eligibility. Please check our guidelines page for other requirements.

*R = Reading