VRZHU bullets of pure love

VRZHU in the City Paper

VRZHU is happy to note a nice bit of press.  After a great interview with Michael Gushue (or as he's known in our more Ramones-apeing moments, "Michael Vrzhu") The Washington City Paper Arts Editor Amanda Hess featured our efforts in a nice piece titled

"Pertinent Press: How does an upstart poetry publisher pass the bullshit test?"

I can only assume that our inclusion in the piece means we passed the test.  We were delighted to be included with two other great publishing stalwarts whose work we respect and admire, Reb Livington of No Tell Books and Maureen Thorson of Big Game Books. 

And yes, that would be our two mugs on the front page of the City Paper's website.  Nice photo props go to City Paper photographer Darrow Montgomery who managed to make us look earnest and bookish all at once.  I was so getting a crick in my neck from that photo-shoot.  Sadly he didn't take any of my "pouty lips" poses.

Now if you came to the site to see more of VRZHU, check out our fine books!
Kim Roberts' The Kimnama and Hiram Larew's More Than Anything are still available and the best way to begin the new year!  To read a sample from the books and to read the raves from reviewers visit the links above our our books page [here].

And if you're an Edgar Guest disciple here to express your thunderous outrage at Michael Vrzhu's slams on the venerable home-loving poet, leave a comment too.

Split This Rock in March!

NEW! Call for Poetry Films -  January 30 Deadline: Seeking artistic, experimental, and challenging interpretations of poetry that explore critical social issues. Films up to 15 minutes. Entry fee: $15. Selected films and videos will be screened during the festival's film program. For full guidelines and required entry form: http://splitthisrock.org/film.html

Panel Proposals - Deadline Extended to January 1: Split this Rock invites proposals for panel discussions and workshops on a range of topics at the intersection of poetry and social change. Possibilities are endless. Challenge us. Let's talk about craft, let's talk about mentoring young poets, let's talk about working in prisons, connecting with the activist community, sustaining ourselves in dark times, the role of poetry in wartime. Deadline extended to January 1, 2008. Download the form here: http://splitthisrock.org/documents/Call-for-Proposals.doc

Poetry Contest - January 15 Deadline: The contest benefits Split This Rock Poetry Festival. $1,000 awarded for poems of provocation & witness; Kyle G. Dargan will judge. $500 for 1st, $300 for 2^nd, and $200 for 3rd place. 1st place winner will read the winning poem at the festival. The poem will also be published on the festival website at www.SplitThisRock.org. All winners receive free festival admission. $20 entry fee benefits the festival. Postmark Deadline: January 15, 2008. Guidelines for entry: http://splitthisrock.org/contests.html.

Support Split This Rock, the historic gathering of activist poets: The CrossCurrents Foundation made a challenge grant of $10,000 to Split This Rock last month. They'll match every dollar you give. We're 25% of the way to meeting the match � double your donation by giving today! Every dollar you give is tax-deductible through our fiscal sponsor, the Institute for Policy Studies. Just click here: https://secure.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/IPS/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=1120 and be sure to designate "Split This Rock" as the project you'd like to support. Or send a check payable to "IPS/Split This Rock" to: IPS, 1112 16^th Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC  20036.

Many thanks! Your contribution will make a tremendous difference.

Remembering poet Ann Darr - Grace Cavalieri

Ann Darr, poet and teacher, World War II pilot, circus member, and author of nine books of poetry has passed away.

She was the author of Confessions of a Skewed Romantic, The Myth of a Woman's Fist, Do You Take This Woman, Flying the Zuni Mountains , Riding with the Fireworks, and Cleared for Landing.  She also edited Hungry As We Are, An Anthology of Washington Area Poets.

She also taught countless students at American University and at the Writers Center in Bethesda.

The Washington Post had a fine obituary earlier this week.[link] It quoted Darr as once writing:

"The poems I write and read help me to handle the feelings that would otherwise shred me," she once told an interviewer. "Poetry may not have saved my life, but I can't imagine a life without it."

There have also been many great postings online about her passing.  E. Ethelbert Miller has posted the family's press release about her death on his blog.[link]

Merrill Leffler has created a Tribute page to Darr on the Dryad Press site. [link]

We asked Grace Cavalieri, who was a good friend and one of Darr's publishers, if she would share a few words about Darr.  I believe they provide a wonderful portrait of this amazing poet:

This may sound strange, but I am not so afraid of death now, with Annie over there. It will be more like life itself -- her exasperation, her flashing blue eyes, her trembling love, indignation, loyalty, temper, passion, inspiration, yearning.  It will make the hereafter worth the trouble. She will, of course, have a beau at her side because Ann was a 20th century beauty in the style of our silver screen heroines. And men could not stay away. I never knew her when there was no one in love with her. She told poet Lisa Ritchie "one should always look her best, as if she were about to go on stage." The last time I saw her, maybe five years ago, she was in satin and brocade at poet Robert Sargent’s birthday party...he is now gone as well...she said “Grace, I had to give up teaching as I cannot remember my students' names." She had a retired Air Force Colonel at her side that day, proud to be her companion.

My remembrances of Ann Darr hark to the 70’s when I was just beginning to give public readings. She was already a nationally known figure, and I look back, humbled by her unflinching support and loyalty. I cannot remember any reading I gave where Ann was not in the front row. She understood my craziness and took it for art...something she could relate to...for she was a risk taker on the page and in life, and held nothing back. She did not mind when I went over the edge. She’d been there and back.

I have recordings of her from "The Poet and the Poem," several from the last 30 years, now archived at GWU library and Pacifica, ...and to listen is to know that there is no one else in the world that can read her poetry -- a tremulous voice, a beautiful broadcast vibrato; the soul and intensity in each word knocked my breath away, and always will.

My publishing house, The Bunny and the Crocodile Press, published two of Ann’s books, Confessions of a Skewed Romantic and Flying the Zuni Mountains.  Her famous pilot-photo graces the cover of Zuni, designed by my daughter, Cindy Cavalieri;  and Ann’s daughter designed the cover art for Skewed. Working with Ann was like being a teenager again at a sleepover trying out different color nail polishes. We met when we could. I was at St. Mary’s College every May for 28 years and Ann was a frequent guest poet. One May we put together the proof of Zuni Mountains in between teaching workshops and poetry readings. How I miss the chemistry we had together; she must have been in her sixties then. We were girlfriends, compatriots, and bonded in trust, putting together her books with only scraps of time between us...sitting in a dorm at St. Mary’s College with papers and pages covering the floor, then back to DC …and then a session in my condo before we went to see plays at Arena Stage... then doing the finals in my daughter’s kitchen...putting together her books, making something permanent...publishing on the run...poetry on the fly.

We had everything in common-- writing, daughters, and flying machines. Because my husband, Ken Flynn, was a Navy Pilot, our relationship was multidimensional. Only he knew exactly what her flying experiences entailed, the subtext of thrill and terror. Ann and I talked poetry, literary gossip; Ken and Ann talked technical maneuvers and detail missions. She cooked for us, we cooked for her. I never felt anything but comfort in her presence. I knew I was totally accepted. Who would want that to go away? Where can I find that now?

The fuel for Ann’s life was love and rage, in equal parts. I see her bristling at any injustice. I see her poems clinging to the brilliant absurdities and riding them out. She has a book called Riding with the Fireworks. That is her epitaph, blazing and moving. When Reuben Jackson heard of her death, he said “Fly- pilot – Fly.”  How perfect that we all remember her in motion, as a triumph of energy, as an exertion of power.

Grace Cavalieri

ANN DARR Online

E. Ethelbert Miller has the family's original press release about Darr's death.

Merrill Leffler and Dryad Press, which published Darr's Cleared for Landing Poems by a WWII female pilot in 1978 have posted a loving tribute to Ann Darr on their website at http://www.dryadpress.com/AnnDarr.htm

"We note with sadness the passing of Ann Darr, a prominent DC poet.  Dryad Press has started an 'In Memoriam' page on their website that is terrific.  The link reprints poems, and gives biographical information.

Darr's Writing online:

"At Sixteen"

"Relative Matter" (Dryad Press site)

The Long Flight Home (on Women at War)

Audio

Ann Darr on her Poetry on PRI's Radio Dialogue
1994 Interview with George Liston Seay

Michael Lally on Ann Darr

The Washington Post has a great obituary by Patricia Sullivan online [link].

 

Thursday Blogasbord - News

Whoa. First a poem by the fantabulous Sandra Beasley (r.) appears in Slate (picked by Robert Pinksy), and then the encroyable Sarah Browning (l.) has her book Whiskey in the Garden of Eden show up all reviewed and spiffy on the Poetry Foundation blog! May a thousand flowers bloom for both SB's. Vrzhu salutes you! DC poets rule.

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The Map: This quote from Helen Vendler connects the New York School to Whitman. An editorial comment appends:

It is not surprising that critics have found him self-indulgent . . . the poems are all about him and the people and images who wheel through his consciousness, and they seek no further justification. . . . Unlike the "message" of committed poetry, [O'Hara's work] incites one to all the programs of commitment as well as to every other form of self-realization--interpersonal, Dionysian, occult, or abstract. Such a program is absolutely new in poetry.

That last phrase--"absolutely new"--is not entirely accurate: Whitman said repeatedly that he was not preaching a program, but actively urging his readers to find their own form of self-realization. Yet Whitman's messianic voice turned his first readers into devotees rather than seekers of personal authenticity. What is new in O'Hara and Ashbery is their refusal of an earnestly didactic tone. Describing O'Hara's poetry, Ashbery staked out his own territory as well--states of consciousness, demotic language, a democratic inclusiveness of mention:

Surrealism was after all limited to the unconscious and O'Hara throws in the conscious as well--doesn't it exist too? Why should our unconscious thoughts be more meaningful than our conscious ones . . . ? Here everything "belongs": unrefined autobiographical fragments, names of movie stars and operas, obscene interjections, quotations from letters--the élan of the poem is such that for the poet merely to mention something creates a place for it, ennobles it, makes us realize how important it has always been for us.

This, too, is a Whitmanian program: mentioning something to create a place for it is surely the justification of Whitman's catalogues. But the New York postwar writers, from O'Hara to Koch to Schuyler to Ashbery, extended the things mentioned beyond what Whitman had thought possible.

Editorial comment: If this is true, and it certainly seems so, it's not just  Ginsberg, who explicitly states his lineage, who descends from Whitman, but also O'Hara, and Ashbery, who never explicitly put their lineage to the fore, and their implicit antecedents are mostly French, or, in any case, not Whitman. Frank O'Hara is so much the opposite of a beat poet that he is often mistaken for one.

The Territory: this quote by Walt:

Language, be it remember'd, is not an abstract construction of the learn'd, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are made by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea.

The Map: this quote:

The grotesque prudishness and archness with which garlic is treated...has led to the superstition that rubbing the bowl with it before putting the salad in gives sufficient flavor. It rather depends on whether you are going to eat the bowl or the salad.

-Elizabeth David

The territory: This clip:

Tuesday Sports Roundup

TODAY'S TOP STORY:  ROBERTS' KIMNAMA REVIEWED BY STEVEN ALLEN MAY!

And below the fold . . .

1. From a review of A Life of Picasso, Volume III, The Triumphant Years:

[Picasso] turned objects into people and vice versa, but never, in the manner of the surrealists, reduced women to machines.

COMMENT: ...unlike the automobile industry.

1.1

Question: Do you think the poetry written by Americans during the last ten years shows any line of development (progressions)?

Wallace Stevens: The older poets have to be considered as individuals; the younger poets, whom it is easier to see as a group, lack a leader. After all, the fury of poetry always comes from a the presence of a madman or two and, at the moment, all the madmen are  politicians.

-Wallace Stevens, 20th Century Verse, September - October 19382.

2. A while back, we put out an all points for the Latin word (or equivalent) for 'blog." Recently, an informal member of the Vrzhu Research Bureau Irregulars (little did she suspect), Latin scholar Jane Brinley, was able to assist us.

Ms. Brinley writes:

. . . about the Latin for blog. I came across an article that suggested blogis which would decline like this:

blogis        bloges
blogis        blogium
blogi         blogibus
blogem        bloges
bloge         blogibus

The second conjugation verb proposed would have principle parts as follows: blogeo, blogere, blogevi, blogetus.

. . .and Ms. B also researches the back translation of "Love me, love my blog."

If that's a command/imperative it would be ama me, ama blogem meum. You can fool with the word order eg: me ama, ama blogem meum or ama me blogem meum ama. If the command is addressed to multiple people it would be amata me, amata blogem meum. Same word order variants work.

Thank you, Jane Brinley.  Excellent work.

COMMENT: in the accompanying figure note the use of the stylus to keystroke this Roman laptop circa 29 BCE. We have come so far.

3. A poetry doping scandal reported on at the blog of Charles Berstein:

Doping Scandal Rocks Poetry
by Mike Freakman

    July 30, New York (AHP2 News Service) – The poetry world has been rocked by recent revelations that several of the most prestigious national poetry contest winners in 2005 and 2006 were written with the aid of performance-enhancing drugs.

    “Over the past decade, poetry contests have emphasized our openness to all participants, with the promise that each manuscript is judged on its merits along,” said Guadalupe Maximino Glumstein, the Chancellor of the International Poetry Contests Federation (IPCF). “Doping is a huge step backward in our efforts, since it gives an unfair competitive advantage to those who are willing to do anything, including risk long-term damage to their bodies and minds, in order to write the best poem.”

    The IPCF advocates testing for performance-enhancing drugs as a prerequisite for national book publications, slam competitions, as well a poetry contests. Poets that violate IPCF rules would be ineligible for prizes or anthologies for penalty periods of one year for first offenders to eternity for repeat offenders. Poets that comply with IPCF guidelines get a sticker to affix to all their publications certifying their poems as doping-free.

    “Unless we want poetry to sink back into the margins of society, we must assure readers that poets produce their work with their own sweat and imagination. When we teach a poem to a young person in a school setting, to inspire and instruct, we need to be able to say that anyone can aspire to write a poem as good as this. We can’t afford to send a message that doping is necessary to write the best poems. We have to have an even playing field.”

    Several leading poets were asked to comment on the scandal but refused to talk on the record, for fear of provoking IPCF investigations of their conduct. Unlike the use of doping in baseball, track, and cycling, poets often use poetry-performance-enhancing drugs to cause temporary physical and mental impairment or paralysis, in order to hyperactivate their imaginative capacities. The practice has been shown to cause a number of long-term physical and mental maladies.

    But 11-year old Daisy Threadwhistle of Incontrobrogliaria, New Jersey, was eager to speak on the record. Ms. Threadwhistle said she was very disappointed when a poem from her school reader was removed when its author tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. “ ‘The Moon Is My Revenge, Venus My Soldier of Midnight’ ” was my favorite poem this year. I feel cheated. I don’t think I want to read any more poems.”

    In early 2006, IPCF introduced a battery of blood and psychological tests to detect poetic doping. An IPCF study group is now investigating whether the use of certain computer programs and search engines also should be banned from poetry.

3. The illustrious Ms. Jill Dybka has put up a worthy and nifty donation request at her blog (to which you should be a regular visitor or visitrix), the Poetry Hut.  It says:

Public service announcement:

Seeking poets who might have an extra copy of their chapbook or book they'd be willing to donate to a lucky student. Each week, during my 8-week undergraduate poetry class, there will be a drawing to see who wins the book a poet has been generous enough to donate. The winner will be responsible for reading your book, reviewing it, and selecting a favorite poem to read to the class the following week. If you like, contact information and book price should be included so that others in the class can buy your book. Students will be STRONGLY encouraged to buy the books of poets who, after all, were kind enough to contribute a book to their education. If you're willing, please send your book (autographed would be nice) and contact and price details to:

Jeff Winke
Upper Iowa University - Milwaukee Center
620 S 76th St.
Milwaukee, WI 53214

4. M. Mark Wallace, a valued member of the DC innovative poetry community, and since decamped to Carlsbad, CA, has some v. interesting questions on his blog that I urge you to take a look at and respond to as appropriate, to wit, and I quote:

While you’re actually writing a poem, how conscious are you of the history of poetry? Are you constantly thinking about how your poem will relate to the poems that have come before, or do you not think about that at all? Are you somewhere in between?

5. At FreeRice.com, you can donate 10 grains of rice by choosing the right answer to a vocabulary question. The rice is distributed by United Nations’ World Food Programme. It was created by John Breen, a computer programmer who also created The Hunger Site.

The rice is paid for by the advertisers whose name you see on the bottom of the screen.  As of November Seventeenth, 2,457,120,420 grains of rice were given away.  By the way, one cup of rice contains about 1,000 grains.

6. Finally, please tune in Thursday for a VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT from the Vrzhu Research Bureau.

Tuesday Miscellany

       The extremely well-designed and upscale-looking Virginia Quarterly Review has put some of its Fall 2006 Writers on Writers issue on the web.  The issue sold out so VQR has onlined its special feature of original stories by a bunch of contributors, stories in which a famous writer appears by name. Six of the eleven stories feature poets, giving poets a bare majority over novelists: Emily Dickinson, Richard Eberhart, E. A. Poe, Aeschylus, G. M. Hopkins, Stephen Crane (a crossover I suppose).  There's also a cool cover by Chris Ware.

But before you go to the stories, see if you can match the authors with the poets they're writing about:

Jim Shepard                    Emily Dickinson

Christopher Tilghman           Edgar Allen Poe

Edmund White                   Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ron Hansen                     Richard Eberhart

Joyce Carol Oates              Aeschylus

Elizabeth Gaffney              Stephen Crane

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Catching up on news.

Rod Smith, DC poet, was the recipient of a nice article in the City Paper a couple back.  The article compares him to the Baroque original instrument ensemble, the Talking Heads, though I believe the more apt comparison is to a small jelly tricycle. While I'm crushing on Rod, I must also mention that "In Memory of My Theories" is a damn good title.

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Vrzhu Inaugural Authors Hiram Larew and Kim Roberts continue their barnstorming world tour with readings coming (through the next year) in:

Milton, DE
Arlington VA
Washington DC
Amherst, NY
Charlottesville, VA

And tentative (pending funding) readings planned for

Ulaan Baator
Yakutskh
Pangnirtung
Ushuaia
Suva
Grytviken
Godthul

and

the isles of Langerhans.

The world tour T-shirt will be available sometime next year ("Vrzhu Is World" on the front, "World is Vrzhu" on the back).

For more info, please visit our website, who is feeling a bit lonely and under the weather.

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For extra credit match the pictures with the authors mentioned above. Answers to this week's puzzlers will appear in next week's Tuesday Melange. See you then!!

Tuesday Miscellany

Damas y caballeros—though I have promised myself to be more regular in my postings here, it remains a promise broken, a dream reverse-mortgaged.

On the QT, for faithful viewers of Vrzhu Bullets of Pure Love, I will try to update at least once a week, probably of a Tuesday. Regardless of whether I can think of anything. Or not.  As for the others—you never know who is listening.

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DC rules!

-or-

Alias Smith and Winch

A few weeks ago not one but two poets from the DC area made a splash on the super-popular site Poetry Daily.  On consecutive days!

I like both Terence Winch's and Rod Smith’s work very much, and both have new books out.  Smith's and Winch's poetic differs from each other, but there are also some commonalities.  They have works online also, if you’d like a taste of their smart, funny, penetrating, distinct work.

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Happy Birthday, John Keats

Last week’s All Hallow’s Eve was also the 212th birthday of John Keats.  He certainly was capable of provoking the uncanny (unheimlich -Heidegger) in his works as befits a hallowe’en baby.  His has become my essential poet of the period, perhaps not edging out the contemporaneous John Clare, but nosing ahead of Coleridge and, at the moment, clearly preferred over Shelley and Wordsworth.  It took a while for me to get to this current lineup, as much by way of his letters and prose as by his poetry. 

He also provides evidence for a hypothesis of mine, that your favorite season of the year is the season in which you were born.

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Footnote

And, hey, is all y'all are interested in poetry in Washington DC check out these fine sites.

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A Note On Poetry

"My intention in poetry is to write poetry: to reach and express that which, without any particular definition, everyone recognizes to be poetry, and to do this because I feel the need of doing it.

"There is such a complete freedom now-a-days in respect to technique that I am rather inclined to disregard form so long as I am free and can express myself freely. I don't know of anything, respecting form, that makes much difference. The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used. A free form does not assure freedom. As a form, it is just one more form. So that it comes to this, I suppose, that I believe in freedom regardless of form."

--Wallace Stevens in The Oxford Anthology of Literature, 1938

This is from my continuing reading this year of Stevens, which started with some great discussions of The Idea of Order at Key West this past summer, and the question, what is the purpose of poetry.  What indeed?

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Coming Attractions

Beneath the glassy smooth surface of Vrzhu’s waters, things are . . . . evolving. 

-We are working on the first of what might be regular, perhaps even monthly, or more. Vrzhu podcasts. A podcast unlike any other in the vast world of poetry.

-Two new books from Vrzhu Press are coming to fruition.  Check here regularly for immanent news.

-The militant wing of Vrzhu, the Vrzhu Research Bureau, is working on several hush-hush projects in its “black ops” division.  We hope to reveal some of these projects in the near future. (hint: how does one waterboard a poem?)

And, as always, damas y caballeros, we here at Vrzhu cannot begin to express our appreciation for your continued interest, faith and support in what we try to do.

VRZHU – THE WAVE OF THE FUSCHIA

“The desire to write poetry is a weird and unnatural thing.”

Vrzhu author---and one of its guardian angels---, Kim Roberts, is interviewed  by Kathi Wolfe in Scene 4 online.  It’s a wonderful article and a wonderful interview. Continuing congrats to the fabulous Ms. Roberts.

Ms. Roberts also has a website up here.  Worth checking out, mes amis.

Congratulations to S. Beasley

Well, it seems to be a month for belated congratulations here. For some time, I’ve been meaning to give a big shout out to DC’s own Sandra Beasley, for this:

The 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize has been awarded to Sandra Beasley for her manuscript Theories of Falling, which will be published in the spring of 2008. The judge was Marie Howe, author of The Good Thief and What the Living Do.

We here at Vrzhu now take a moment from our research activities to wish Sandra a thousand congratulations, and tante bella cosi.

Liam Rector 1949 - 2007

Liam Rector was a Washington, DC native, and ran the Folger Poetry Series at one time. 

Here's a poem from the Cortland Review:

. . .

So We'll Go No More     

So it's fare thee well, my own true love;
I'm leaving you behind. And not
For the early, for the young reasons, but

For these late, last, ill reasons. I'm almost
Kaput! Yea, you'll get no more of me....
Cancer, heart attack, bypass all

In the same year? My chances
Are one out of two! And I'm fucking well
Ready, ready to go. To go! how often

I've operated that way. That way
Almost the entire caper, the way
For people, places, things:

Abandon, abandon, nay abandon before
Being abandoned. But we've, we've
Stayed. You the third wife for me, I

The second such boy for you, and I love
Looking directly into you, as we look
Directly into this last get-go. We all

Have the talent for leaving, like it
Or no. And oh, how rich it is, how fine
To finally inherit!: the final thing

I was looking for, as it turns out,
The great power of leaving
All the breathtakingly brief all along.

. . .

. . .

. . .

More Liam Rector:

• New York Times obituary.
• "Best Friend" on AGNI
• "The Remarkable Objectivity of Your Old Friends"
• Audio of Rector reading "This City"
• Video of Rector reading at the Library of Congress in 2006(second poet to read)  He talks about his parents being farmers south of DC in Fauquier County and how he was born in George Washington hospital.