New Books

Announcing “Treaty Shirts” from Gerald Vizenor

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The imagined narratives of seven native exiles from the White Earth Nation

Gerald Vizenor creates masterful, truthful, surreal, and satirical fiction similar to the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman.  In this imagined future, seven natives are exiled from federal sectors that have replaced federal reservations; they pursue the liberty of an egalitarian government on an island in Lake of the Woods.  These seven narrators, known only by native nicknames, are related to characters in Vizenor’s other novels and stories.  Vizenor was the principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, and this novel is a rich and critical commentary on the abrogation of the treaty that established the White Earth Reservation in 1867, and a vivid visualization of the futuristic continuation of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation in 2034.

An online reader’s companion is available at http://geraldvizenor.site.wesleyan.edu.

vizenor treatyshirts

Gerald Vizenor is a prolific novelist, poet, literary critic, and citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota. He is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His novels Shrouds of White Earth and Griever: An American Monkey King in China were both honored with the American Book Award, and the latter also received the New York Fiction Collective Award. Vizenor and his wife, Laura, now live in Naples, Florida, making regular visits to both Minnesota and France.

“In writing that’s full of possibilities, Gerald Vizenor delivers to us the native world that should be.”
—Diane Glancy, author of Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education

“Treaty Shirts presents a masterful exhibition of the capacities of stories to create enduring images of natural reason, as it strides the shifty terrain of cultural survivance, treaty rights, and political sovereignty. Perhaps the most impressive is the way Vizenor achieves his goals, not through condemnation but through the humor of tease of stories that are the achievement of a literary artist at the height of his powers.”
—Billy Stratton, author of Buried in Shades of Night

May 10, 2016

148 pp., 6 x 9”

Jacketed Cloth, $24.95 x

978-0-8195-7628-6

eBook, $19.99 Y

978-0-8195-7629-3

Landfill Meditations

Read an excerpt from Landfill Meditations, for an introduction to Gerald Vizenor’s family.

 Vizenor-Treaty-R-72-3

Read an Excerpt from Treaty Shirts: October 2034—A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation

Announcing “The Selected Letters of John Cage”

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Letters of an avant-garde icon available to the public for the first time

Events: May 1- Atlas Eclipticalis at Wesleyan

May 7, NYPL for Performing Arts.

This selection of over five hundred letters gives us the life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important and groundbreaking composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his early trips to Europe in the 1930s through his years with the dancer Merce Cunningham, and shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde. Cage’s joie de vivre resounds in these letters—fully annotated throughout—in every phase of his career, and includes correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among others. Above all, they reveal his passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. The voice is one we recognize from his writings: singular, profound, irreverent, and funny. Not only will readers take pleasure in Cage’s correspondence with and commentary about the people and events of a momentous and transformative time in the arts, they will also share in his meditations on the very nature of art. A deep pleasure to read, this volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.

Cage_Selected

JOHN CAGE (1912–1992) was an American composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas profoundly influenced twentieth-century music. He was an early proponent of aleatoric music (music where some elements are left to chance), used instruments in nonstandard ways, and was an electronic music pioneer. LAURA KUHN is the John Cage Professor of Performance Art at Bard College and director of the John Cage Trust.

 

“The publication of a great artist’s letters is always an important event, but rarely is such a volume as thrilling to read as is The Selected Letters of John Cage, which takes us from the 1930s, when Cage was an eighteen-year-old college dropout traveling in Europe and Algeria, to his robbery at knifepoint shortly before his sudden death in 1992. In his published writings and even interviews, John Cage was so naturally reticent, so unfailingly polite and formal, that the letters, wonderfully informal and often surprisingly frank and even severe, come as a real surprise. Anyone interested in the development of the twentieth-century American avant-garde will want to read Cage’s week-by-week reaction to its twists and turns. His life-in-letters emerges as a heroic tale of struggle and triumphant survival.”

—Marjorie Perloff

“Cage’s letters are invaluable in that they show us the day-to-day life of a composer at work: organizing concerts, raising funds, working with performers, worrying about getting the next piece done. Essential reading for anyone interested in Cage’s music.”

—James Pritchett

 

Publication of this book is funded by the

Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund

at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

 

January

680 pp., 6 illus., 6 x 9”

Cloth, $40.00

978-0-8195-7591-3

 

eBook, $31.99 Y

978-0-8195-7592-0

Announcing “Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart” from Kenneth Bilby

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Celebrating the legendary studio musicians of Jamaican popular music through personal photographs and interviews

bilby wordsofourmouth

While singers, producers, and studio owners have become international icons, many of the musicians who were essential to shaping the sound of Jamaican music have remained anonymous. Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart: Pioneering Musicians of Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae, and Dancehall, complete with 98 color photographs, is the first book devoted to the studio musicians who were central to Jamaica’s popular music explosion. Bilby delves into the full spectrum of Jamaican music, from traditional and folk genres, such as Mento, Poco, and Buru, to the popular urban styles of ska, rocksteady, and reggae. Photographic portraits and interview excerpts (with such musical pioneers as Prince Buster, Robbie Shakespeare, Sly Dunbar, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and many of Bob Marley’s early musical collaborators) provide new insights into the birth of Jamaican popular music in the recording studios of Kingston, Jamaica in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The book illustrates how players of “traditional” Jamaican music and lesser-known singers have made fundamental and wide-ranging contributions to the music. Appendices include a recommended listening list, a bibliography of interviews and field recordings, and a glossary of terms.

Kenneth Bilby is an ethnomusicologist, writer, and lifelong student of Jamaican music. He is the former director of research at the Center for Black Research at Columbia College Chicago and currently a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. Author of True-Born Maroons and coauthor of Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae, his collection of field recordings of Jamaican traditional music is one of the largest in the world.

“Bilby celebrates his roots in Jamaica in this magnificent book through beautiful photographs and interviews with musicians. Bilby unveils the backstory of Jamaican music, and his work will be cherished by all who love Jamaican music.”
—William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues

“Bilby doesn’t just tell the story that’s never been told—delivering an homage to the heroes who helped shape Jamaican music—he lets these heroes tell the story in their own words, writing their own chapter in history.”
—Baz Dreisinger, producer and writer of Black & Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop and Rhyme & Punishment

“An essential work of Jamaican musical scholarship. The interviews are engrossing on multiple levels. Our understanding of the black musics of the New World would have fewer gaps in it if there were more of the kind of thorough oral history that Bilby does here. He proves himself to be not merely a good collector but a good listener.”
—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

Enjoy some musical examples!

Drums of Defiance: Maroon Music from the Earliest Free Black Communities of
Jamaica. (CD) Smithsonian/Folkways. 1992. [1970s–1990s]

Example of Nyabinghi drumming

Mento version of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”, performed by The Jolly Boys

Alerth Bedasse & Chin’s Calypso Sextet perform “Industrial Fair”

Cedric “Im” Brooks and the Divine Light. From Mento to Reggae to Third World
Music. (CD) VP. 2008. [1973]

Studio One Ska—The Skatalites “Beardsman Ska”

Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae. (CD) Mollselekta. 2009. [2000s]

The Harder They Come (Deluxe Edition). (2-CD box set). Hip-O. 2003. [1960s and 1970s]

Publication date: May 10, 2016
256 pp., 7 x 10”
Paper, $29.95 x
978-0-8195-7588-3
eBook, $23.99 Y
978-0-8195-7604-0

Announcing 2 books by TED GREENWALD

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“Is it cynical or is it innocent? He has an almost machinic way. But is it utopian? The most progressive of Ted Greenwald’s poems are just that. No, they all are: forward thinking, Sagittarian, and wildly Americanly kind.”    –Eileen Myles

GreenwaldRaffle

We are pleased to announce the release of two noteworthy books by prolific poet Ted Greenwald! Greenwald’s long career spans six decades and more than 30 books. Based in New York City, he has long been associated with St. Mark’s Poetry Project and founded Poetry Readings at Ear Inn with Charles Bernstein. His work has appeared in Paris Review, Partisan Review, C, Lines, Big Sky, Angel Hair, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Bomb, Adventures in Poetry, The World, Poetry Project Newsletter, nY, and Shiney.

Common Sense

First published in 1978, Common Sense evinces a spare street-wise style rooted in the vernacular of the city. Now something of a cult classic, the book is recognized as an understated masterpiece, pushing at the edges of spoken word. This is the language of everyday, brought onto the page in such a way that we never lose the flow of speech and at the same time we become attuned to its many registers—musical, emotional, ironic. Ted Greenwald’s work has been associated with several major veins of American poetry, including the Language movement and the New York School, but it remains unclassifiable.

The Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems, 1969–1982

A New York-based poet with close ties to the New York School and the Language poets, Ted Greenwald has written daily since the early 1960s. The Age of Reasons includes the best of Greenwald’s uncollected poetry. While some of these poems appeared in literary journals or magazines in the 1970s, none were included in any of his previously published books. These distinct works were written in advance of or alongside the extended explorations of a mutated triolet form that increasingly occupied him from the late 1970s on. Alongside Common Sense (1978), The Age of Reasons evinces Greenwald’s ability to think with his ear, to hear what’s said as it arrives as a fresh sound or shape in his head. This work is singular in its pattern-making, its music-making, and its ability to simultaneously follow multiple paths.

“No poet has taken the idea that poetry should be at least as good as overheard conversation as seriously as Ted Greenwald.”  –Publishers Weekly

“Ted Greenwald knows what real American talk sounds like, understands the rhythm and pulse of the language, and knows how to write poems that are built around that knowledge. He is one of America’s most ambitious and provocative poets.”  –Terence Winch, Jacket 19

“Ted Greenwald’s poems ‘give voice’ to a variety of New York idioms, and with that, a distinct attitude toward both language and experience. His ultimate strength as a poet is his basic humanity, something that can be claimed for very few.”  –Bill Berkson

“I have called Greenwald an ‘urban primitive’ because his work seems to spring from the base materiality of New York streets, the immediacy of enunciation, abrupt demand, tough neighborhoods, shifting milieus, grit and exhaust, flux and flurry. I see him as a genuine original whose method is a unique exploration of common language, utterly without academic pretense.”  –Curtis Faville, publisher, L Publications

 

LAST FIVE MINUTES
The long and the short
Of it is
I have to keep pushing
I feel myself
Pushing against the
Lead-in to beauty
And take a hunch through
With me
Into the halls
Where the everyday
Seems like eternity
There’s no fooling around
About something
As serious
As it is beautiful
There’s no match
For the feeling
That gets there
When I get there
And absolutely no sense
Of duration
And no telling
How everything turns out

 

April

202 pp., 6 x 9 1/4”

Paper, $17.95 x

978-0-8195-7642-2

eBook, $14.99 Y

978-0-8195-7643-9

Wesleyan University Press @ AWP2016 – Los Angeles

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Join Us @ AWP 2016, in Los Angeles!

Booth #1213

AWP-16EventsImage

Don’t miss these events:

A Lunch Time Reading at Ace Hotel

Thursday, 3/31: Noon–2PM 
Ace Hotel, 929 South Broadway, Los Angeles
1913 Press, Sidebrow & Wesleyan University Press present:

Rae Armantrout
Fred Moten
Ben Doller
Sandra Doller
Amaranth Borsuk
Kate Durbin
Lily Hoang
Mathias Svalina

Just Saying: A Tribute to Rae Armantrout

Thursday, 3/31: 3-4:15pm
Room 502 A, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level R255

Stephen Burt
Amy Catanzano
Catherine Wagner
Monica Youn
Rae Armantrout

Four author-critics approach Armantrout’s work from a variety of angles, including her association with Language poetry, her exploration of science through verse, her treatment of pop culture and current events, and her merging of everyday experience with epistemological questions about perceptions. Read more here.

Friday Afternoon Cocktail Celebration for BAX 2015

Friday, 4/1: 4-5pm, AWP Booth #1213
Purchase a copy of Best American Experimental Writing, 2015 for $10 (50% off cover price) & enjoy a free Moscow Mule!

Book Signings @ Booth #1213

Rae Armantrout (Itself)–Thursday, 3/31, 4:30PM

Robert Fernandez (Scarecrow)–Friday, 4/1: 10AM

Ben Doller (Fauxhawk) –Friday, 4/1, 12PM

 

Stop by check out our new books!

fiction

Treaty Shirts: October 2034—A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation (Gerald Vizenor)

Reality by Other Means: The Best Short Fiction of James Morrow (James Morrow)

poetry

Common Sense (Ted Greenwald)

Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969–1982 (Ted Greenwald)

Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” (Stéphane Mallarmé)

Fauxhawk (Ben Doller)

Scarecrow (Robert Fernandez)

The Book of Landings (Mark McMorris)

A Sulfur Anthology (edited by Clayton Eshleman)

Announcing “Bax 2015” from Seth Abramson

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An annual anthology of the best new experimental writing

 

BAX 2015 is the second volume of an annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year’s volume, guest edited by Douglas Kearney, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors—like Dodie Bellamy, Anselm Berrigan, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, Aaron Kunin, Joyelle McSweeney, and Fred Moten—as well as emerging voices. Best American Experimental Writing is also an important literary anthology for classroom settings, as individual selections are intended to provoke lively conversation and debate. The series coeditors are Seth Abramson and Jesse Damiani.

Abrahamson_BAX 2015

DOUGLAS KEARNEY is a poet, performer, and librettist. He is the author of Patter and The Black Automaton. He lives in Los Angeles. SETH ABRAMSON is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of five books, including Thievery, winner of the Akron Poetry Prize, and Northerners, winner of the Green Rose Prize. He will join the University of New Hampshire as an assistant professor of English in August, 2015. JESSE DAMIANI was the 2013–2014 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Fulbright Commission. He also lives in Los Angeles.

 

“The permission is on every page here. The best annual experience where space is held for radical experimentation is in this book. Thanks to the editors for really keeping it real.”

—CA Conrad, author of Ecodeviance

“Whether oath, tweet, conspiracy simile, or tour of Hummeltopia, this anthology swings with verve and nerve from CM Burroughs’s ‘juncture of almost’ to Roberto Harrison’s ‘contaminate network of paradise.’ The experiment lives! It exists, Lance Olsen writes, ‘the same way, say, future dictionaries exist.’”

—Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts

 

“harriot + harriott + sound +”

 

The pitch and time of luters

bring atlantic situations

all the way across. the moon

thing is a water thing at

midnight and the table

burst with variation.

the beautiful riot say

I’m not like this and

walk away embrace and

dig up under normandie.

what’s a black singing body

got to do with it? look at

my shoes. the setting partly frees

the dissonance in compensation

and tsitsi ella jaji frees the rest.

frayed means are a thingly

jingly nette; you can’t help

yourself if you take too much.

—by Fred Moten

 

November

250 pp., 6 x 9”

Unjacketed cloth, $40.00 x

978-0-8195-7607-1

Paper, $19.95

978-0-8195-7608-8

eBook, $15.99 Y

978-0-8195-7609-5

Announcing “Tempest-Tossed” from Susan Campbell

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First full-length biography of a key figure in nineteenth-century American culture

 

Tempest-Tossed is the first full biography of the passionate, fascinating youngest daughter of the “Fabulous Beecher” family—one of America’s most high-powered families of the nineteenth century. Older sister Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Brother Henry Ward Beecher was one of America’s most influential ministers, and sister Catherine Beecher wrote pivotal works on women’s rights and educational reform. And then there was Isabella Beecher Hooker—“a curiously modern nineteenth-century figure.” She was a leader in the suffrage movement, and a mover and shaker in Hartford’s storied Nook Farm neighborhood and salon. But there is more to the story—to Isabella’s character—than that.

 

Isabella was an ardent Spiritualist. In daily life, she could be off-putting, perplexing, tenacious, charming. Many found her daunting to get to know and stay on comfortable terms with. Her “wild streak” was especially unfavorable in the eyes of Hartford society at the time, which valued restraint and duty. In her latest book, Susan Campbell brings her own unique blend of empathy and unbridled humor to the story of Harriet’s younger half-sister. Tempest Tossed reveals Isabella’s evolution from orthodox Calvinist daughter, wife, and mother, to one of the most influential players in the movement for women’s suffrage, where this unforgettable woman finally gets her proper due.

Campbell_Tossed

SUSAN CAMPBELL is the author of Dating Jesus: Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl and coauthor of Connecticut Curiosities. She has appeared on CBS “Sunday Morning” show, the BBC, and WNPR. Her column about the March 1998 shootings at the Connecticut Lottery headquarters in Newington was part of the Hartford Courant’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the tragedy. She lives in East Haven, Connecticut.

 

“For Isabella Beecher Hooker it was both a blessing and a curse to be born the youngest daughter of one of the most famous families in America. Just when she finally discovered her own calling in the women’s rights movement—working alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull—she found herself embroiled in the biggest sex scandal of the 19th century, the trial of her own brother for adultery. Susan Campbell has brought Isabella’s fascinating, forgotten story back to life with the deep research of a born historian and the vibrant, readable prose-style of a veteran journalist.”

—Debby Applegate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

“With a journalist’s concision and eye for the vivid quote, Susan Campbell captures Isabella Beecher Hooker’s quirky temperament and her passion for women’s rights. This wry and personal narrative is deeply informed, balanced, and a delight to read. “

—Joan Hedrick, author of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Biography

“Susan Campbell’s Tempest Tossed is an enthralling portrait of an American lady: a cross between a character out of Edith Wharton, Emily Bronte, and Sigmund Freud. A work as concerned with the spiritual as it is with the material, readers will find themselves swept up in the details of a particular moment in New England history as it reveals the universal themes of human ambition, frustration, despair, and enlightenment. The writing is gloriously readable and the story is cinematic in its scope and in the crisp development of its remarkable characters. This book might break your heart in some places, but it engages and inspires on every page.”

—Gina Barreca, author of Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League

 

The Driftless Connecticut Series is funded by

the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund

at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving

 

April

236 pp., 30 illus., 6 x 9”

Paper, $18.95

978-0-8195-7597-5

 

eBook, $22.99

978-0-8195-7388-9

 

Biography / American History

 

Announcing “A Sulfur Anthology” from Clayton Eshleman

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A vital compendium of poetic vision

 

From 1981 to 2000, Sulfur magazine presented an American and international overview of innovative writing across forty-six issues, totaling some 11,000 pages and featuring over eight hundred writers and artists, including Norman O. Brown, Jorie Graham, James Hillman, Mina Loy, Ron Padgett, Octavio Paz, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. Each issue featured a diverse offering of poetry, translations, previously unpublished archival material, visual art, essays, and reviews. Sulfur was a hotbed for critical thinking and commentary, and also provided a home for the work of unknown and younger poets. In the course of its twenty year run, Sulfur maintained a reputation as the premier publication of alternative and experimental writing. This was due in no small measure to its impressive masthead of contributing editors and correspondents: Marjorie Perloff, James Clifford, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Keith Tuma, Allen Weiss, Jed Rasula, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, Jayne Cortez, Marjorie Welish, Jerome Rothenberg, Eliot Weinberger, managing editor Caryl Eshleman, and founding editor Clayton Eshleman.

 

A Sulfur Anthology offers readers an expanded view of artistic activity at the century’s end. It’s also a luminous document of international poetic vision. Many of the contributions have never been published outside of Sulfur, making this an indispensible collection of poetry in translation, and poetry in the world.

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is an American poet, translator, and editor. He is a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University.

 

[in order per CE]

“Begun in 1980 and finished by 2000, Sulfur marked with self-conscious brilliance the culmination cycle for the postwar literary magazine wave that had commenced in 1950 with Cid Corman’s Origin. As an editor, Clayton Eshleman has continuously refined our understanding of poetry by means of intellectual engagement and real commitment to implicating the poet’s artistry in the crucially extensive context of community, cosmos, history, myth, politics, and psyche. Truly, his lifelong dedication to assembling forms of international modernism, statements from depth psychology, texts of innovative poetry, and translations of world poetry is unsurpassed. Hence A Sulfur Anthology is guaranteed to further the refinement process that Eshleman initiated in 1980. From Ezra Pound to Barbara Mor, from Aimé Césaire to Rae Armantrout, from Robert Duncan to Ron Silliman, from Antonin Artaud to Amiri Baraka, from Mina Loy to Linh Dihn, from René Char to Paul Celan, and much more—this anthology radiates a monumental pulse that recounts all the turning points needed for readers in the twenty-first century to understand that Sulfur persists as the most indispensable literary magazine authorized by the Imagination.”

—Kenneth Warren, author of Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980–2012

“A Sulfur Anthology presents an essential selection from the now legendary journal of the Whole Art, but it’s no mere greatest hits collection: experimental and unruly, it’s a kaleidoscopic assemblage of poetry and poetics, archival materials, translations, critical commentary and essays, shocking in range and diversity; an open site for an all too unique communal inquiry into poetry, from its sources in psychology and history to its furthest possibilities of expression, intimate and political. Sulfur was a touchstone for two generations of poets; reading A Sulfur Anthology reminds me what the fuss was all about. But more than that, A Sulfur Anthology is bursting with news that stays news: a retrospective volume with its sights on the far horizon.”

—Stuart Kendall, California College of the Arts

“Sulfur must certainly be the most important literary magazine that has explored and extended the boundaries of poetry. Clayton Eshleman has a nose for smelling out what is going to happen next in the ceaseless evolution of living art.”

—James Laughlin

“In an era of literary conservatism and sectarianism, the broad commitment of Sulfur to both literary excellence and a broad interdisciplinary, unbought humanistic engagement with the art of poetry has been invaluable. Its critical articles have been the sharpest going over the last several years.”

—Gary Snyder

 

Publication of this book is funded by the

Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund

at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

 

From Sulfur #27, “Zero” by Milton Kessler:

The Ch-ing Emperor’s troupe of buried horses

The visor-blinded horses of the jousts

The pompadoured bronze horses of the Renaissance

The Elgin horses roped and dragged from Athens

The Generalissimo’s mount in Freedom Square

The noble cheval burst by English archers

The cannon deaf cavalry of Bull Run

The Imam’s Arabians writhing on the cross of Allah

The dive-bombed horse with tongue of broken glass

Seigfried’s horror horse with Panzer lancer

Horses were never interested in war

War no longer interested in horses

The investment stallions seeding twitched mares

The ground horse catfood of the dispossessed

The cast horses in the Mafia stables

The shiver brained coursers wearing buttercups

The cossack horses higher than whole villages

The porcelain dancers of the Lippizaner

The Indian ponies trained to die like savages

The slipping horsefeet of Alexander Nevsky

The heart-horned horses of the picadores

The cigarette horses branded sex and death

The pinup stallions of gold college girls

The cowboy’s true horse on the lonely range

The dawn is the head of a sacrificed horse

 

December

536 pp., 6 x 9”

Unjacketed Cloth, $85.00 x

978-0-8195-7394-0

 

Paper, $27.95

978-0-8195-7531-9

 

eBook, $21.99 Y

978-0-8195-7532-6

NEA Awards includes $25,000 awarded to Wesleyan UP

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DATE:    December 8, 2015

National Endowment for the Arts Awards More Than $27.6 Million Across Nation Includes $25,000 awarded to Wesleyan University Press

 

Middletown, CT—In its first 50 years, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded more than $5 billion in grants to recipients in every state and U.S. jurisdiction, the only arts funder in the nation to do so. Today, the NEA announced awards totaling more than $27.6 million in its first funding round of fiscal year 2016, including an Art Works award of $25,000 to Wesleyan University Press to support its poetry program.

The Art Works category supports the creation of work and presentation of both new and existing work, lifelong learning in the arts, and public engagement with the arts through 13 arts disciplines or fields.

NEA Chairman Jane Chu said, “The arts are part of our everyday lives – no matter who you are or where you live – they have the power to transform individuals, spark economic vibrancy in communities, and transcend the boundaries across diverse sectors of society. Supporting projects like the one from Wesleyan University Press offers more opportunities to engage in the arts every day. 

Funding will support the publication and promotion of books of poetry. The press will publish works by Rae Armantrout, Blunt Research Group, Peter Gizzi, Ted Greenwald, and Mark McMorris. Books will be accompanied by online reader companions for teachers, students, and general readers, and will be promoted through social media, the press’s website and newsletter, and author events.

To join the Twitter conversation about this announcement, please use #NEAFall15. For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, go to arts.gov

Announcing “Azure” from Stéphane Mallarmé

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Can the English language live up to Mallarmé?

 Mallarme - Azure-R-72-3

“It is perhaps because Mallarmé is so important to modernism and twentieth-century and contemporary Continental Philosophy that English-language versions of the poet’s work end up inert and academic. The following questions therefore preoccupied us for some time before our labors began: Why can’t the English language live up to the demands of Mallarmé’s art? Can we make these poems live, in English, without betraying them? Can we practice the art of translation as the art of writing poetry? Or the art of reading? Azure is the record of our exploration of these questions through collaborative translation, intensive reading, and our commitment to the process of writing. Mallarmé poses formidable challenges to his translators, his readers, and to poets. We found ourselves meeting these challenges with a challenge of our own. Our primary aim was to create translations that worked as contemporary poems and that linked translation to the reading and writing of poetry. We hope to revive an interest in Mallarmé the poet that rivals the interest in Mallarmé the thinker of poetry. “
— from the Translators’ Note

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) wrote extensively on themes of reality and his desire to turn from it. He married form and content in revolutionary ways that departed from the more tightly controlled French tradition. When translators Bronson-Bartlett and Fernandez observed the absence of Mallarmé from young poets’ reading lists, they sought to rebirth Mallarmé for a new generation. Included in this volume are more than forty of Mallarmé’s poems from the 1899 Deman edition—the editon believed to be most consistent with Mallarmé’s true intentions; “A Cast of Dice”;  and excerpts from an unfinished Livre (book)—translated to English here for the first time.

Stéphane Mallarmé was a poet and critic who influenced Symbolism, Decadence, and other late nineteenth-century aesthetic movements, Mallarmé’s weekly salons were part of the heart of Parisian intellectual life and drew writers such as Yeats, Rilke, and Valéry. Blake Bronson-Bartlett earned his BA in English and French from Hunter College and his PhD in English from the University of Iowa. He is a professor in English at the University of Iowa, and has published essays, interpretations, and translations in a variety of journals. Robert Fernandez earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is an assistant professor of poetry and writing at the University of Nebraska and has published several poetry books, including Scarecrow (2016) and Pink Reef (2013.)

 

“These vivid and utterly convincing translations reopen the poems to controversy, nuance, and innovation. They refresh the poet’s reputation as a sovereign enigma.”
—Donald Revell, author of Tantivy

“The best translation is a hundred translations, and Mallarmé, as one of the inaugural monsters of Modernism, needs at least that many even to begin to reveal his complexities. This new one is exceptionally welcome, as it is a poets’ Mallarmé, built of what earlier translators have left out. Bronson-Bartlett and Fernandez give particular freedom to Mallarmé’s radical music as well as to his essential strangeness. The inclusion of a sizable section of Mallarmé’s work-in-eternal-progress, the ‘Livre,’ never before translated into English, makes a substantial contribution to Mallarmé studies, as does their excellent introduction. Not only a must for Mallarmé enthusiasts, but also simply a grippingly great read!”
—Cole Swensen

 

“Salut”

Then nothing, bright spray, hymnal holiday,
To show us but this skin;
Dead ahead, impacted sirens
Roll perversely: a log of bodies

We set our course, O rangy
Friends, I already at aft,
You at the glinting fore which breaks
The sea’s membrane of flashes and shivers

A honeyed drunkenness sends me
Fearless into foundering
Forward with poise to toast

Solitude, reef, star
These which gathered, drew resonant
And plumped the naked canvas of our craft

 

December
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