Iowa State Poet Laureate Mary Swander will be giving a reading at the MUM Library North Lounge at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012. There will be a reception for the author afterwards and refreshments will be served. This event has been made possible through funding from Humanities Iowa.  Click here to listen to audio of the reading.

In 2009, Governor Chet Culver appointed Mary Swander the Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa. Her most recent work is a book of poetry, The Girls on the Roof (Turning Point/Word Tech, 2009), a Mississippi River flood narrative. Swander has worked with the Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre to create a performance piece of The Girls for the stage. Currently, Swander is also touring her play Farmscape, a docudrama capturing the changing rural environment. She is the co-founder of Agarts, a national group designed to explore the intersection of the arts and agriculture, and is developing a website, The Iowa Literary Community, where anyone with an Iowa connection can post poetry and other pieces of writing.

white lace of a communion

dress,

small, like white

blood cells,

vast, like the whiteness of the

sun you could call the church

of confusion.

The tree offers

glints of white;

in the gallery

is a show of paintings so

white and vague, one goes

snowblind.

Walked in for a coffee, some tall cup of politically correct blend from Sumatra or the like.  Noted my books were still on the shelf, only slightly riffled.  Oh, well.  Walked home with a package of Caroline’s shoes in one hand, coffee in the other.  Crossed Court Street.

My mother is still at the kitchen table after finishing the morning dishes.  She is drinking her coffee and smiling as Hank Williams sings on the radio, the immortal Hank Williams.

This was back easily when we lost our minds, the phantom bacon in the afternoons, anthems of puberty, a bacon we’d play, gin rummy, doo ron ron, and an egg, and listen to the police and Paul Revere.  It was an egg radio run over by the raiders, and nobody liked tap water, three pennies a glass.  Who knew otherwise at a plugged sink for lemonade.  Kids we were.  There was a summer at our cardboard who liked to blast, to get through the stand with change, the daylights like a death warrant for the great out-of-the-peonies, and the illegal alien eyeball with firecrackers and alcohol that made a wish to cast what we called pennies into Catholic Nam, and we into the neighborhood heaven, pacified.  The territory on the sticky thought, half with our sticks, fingers of a high us, and small explosives, school dropout Lutherans, and plastic guns.  Named Ted Ned or Holy Roller or Nervous Reilly, the atheist,  we waited for a picnic of cats.  It was our enemy and lover of chicken and a beverage of cats in clover in an ice bucket.  It waited for us, bikinis tied to the Saber jets.  Out of the heat, the wash line roared over us.  Where it could, the radio would sing for our protection.

Hemingway reads his strange, strange Second Poem to Mary, Brubeck takes five, Bukowski is edited to radio friendliness, and then we have some Cake.  Sound like funzies?  Yay!  Tune in!

POETRY NEWS:

Nynke Passi, Bill Graeser, Glenn Watt & Rustin Larson will read at Zanzibar's Coffee Adventure in Des Moines on Friday, October 14th at 7 pm.  Drive on out!  Des Moines is a nice town, and Zanzibar's is the place we'll be.

DIRECTIONS:

In the middle of America lies a state called Iowa. In the middle of Iowa lies a city called Des Moines. And in the middle of Des Moines lies the beginning of your true adventure. We're your guide to a successful journey.

There was in the 1980’s (and perhaps there still is now) a place in Montpelier, Vermont called Julio’s. I guess you would call it a Mexican café; they were known for a hefty plate of nachos back then and any kind of drink you’d care to order. I remember sitting at a table with a group of young poets, short story writers, and novelists.

Before long Bill Kemmett came in and sat down at a table very nearby with a small group of friends. He ordered a tall glass of port with a second glass filled just with ice. Bill Kemmett was fond of port, and, I think still is. His drinking had an air of ritual about it. He smiled at the spirits in the goblet before pouring some in the glass of ice. And then, after a few moments, he would drink the chilled wine, closing his eyes.

Read the rest of this review in the new issue of Pirene's Fountain. Click here.

Flame skunks. They is a problem to most home owners, be all they don't know it though. Pesky little fellers, git in your basement and start feedin off the lint of most furnace filters. You can tell 'em by their plumpish skunk bodies, but they's head's just like a gas broiler with the flames all lit and lickin up the sides like whispy blue whiskery cheeks. Natural fire hazards. Burnt up a whole family in their beds up past Stubsville. Most folk don't want em. But to tell the truth, some flame skunks don't live long enough to burn no house down. Some night when you just layin in bed you might hear a horrible squeakin like someone has blowed up a balloon and is playin jazzy Wally by stretchin the balloon hole and makin it sing, and that's when you all know your basic flame skunk has just got its head chopped off by

THE GHOST OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Earth Listening

Poems by Becky Dennison Sakellariou

Hobblebush Books is proud to announce Volume Two of its Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series, a book by Becky Dennison Sakellariou, whose New England roots have stretched overseas to Euboia, Greece, while nourishing her poetry and connection to both worlds.
Former New Hampshire Poet Laureate Patricia Fargnoli calls the poems “carefully crafted with astonishing phrases and beautiful language and rhythms. Earth Listening, with its depth, its explorations of love and loss, and its spiritual awareness, seems to me like one long prayer. I love this book.”
The poems in Earth Listening reflect the complex tapestries of the two very different worlds that Sakellariou inhabits. She says, “These poems also explore what I call the beginning of dying; the way our pores open to the world even more intensely as we age and as death appears more visceral around us. There is both the contradiction and balance, the push and pull of that continual ‘making sense of the world.’ ”
Earth Listening is released along with the first volume in the series: From the Box Marked Some Are Missing by Charles W. Pratt.

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• ring around the poesy

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