Events

Gerald Vizenor on the road in support of Blue Ravens and Favor of Crows

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Gerald Vizenor, arguably the most prolific Native American author of our time, is on the road sharing his knowledge with audiences far and wide. After events in New York City and Minneapolis, he is gearing up for a series of readings and lectures that will take him to several European destinations and Japan in support of his new books: Blue Ravens, a groundbreaking, fact based novel of Anishinaabe soldiers in WWI,  and Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku. 

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First he will visit King’s College of London, where he will lead a masterclass on Native American Indians in the First World War and give a public lecture on Literary Transmotion: Native American Indian Literature of Survivance. Then, Gerald will be off to Paris, reading from his new books at Galerie Orenda, where artwork by Tony Abeyta (Navajo) and Brenda Kingery (Chickasaw) is on display in an exhibit titled “Rhythms and Colors of Native America.” The next stop is the University of Vienna, for the conference “Native North American Survivance and Memory: Celebrating Gerald Vizenor.”  This is the first gathering of its kind, offering a systematic look at Vizenor’s poetic, fictional, theoretical, and juridical writing.  Finally, Gerald will spend time in Japan, presenting his work in a series of lectures for audiences at Keio University and at the American Center Japan. We thank Kinokuniya Bookstore for providing books at these events. 

Stay tuned…when Gerald returns to the United States he will make some stops in New England. Those details are forthcoming. 

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Photographs from Vizenor’s visit to NMAI in New York City. Clockwise from top left: in Central Park; with esteemed artist Robert Houle, who provided artwork for Favor of Crows; signing copies of his books after the panel discussion; with his wife, Laura Hall.  Photographs courtesy of Laura Hall.

The British Raid on Essex

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At 7:30 pm last night, as the sky grew dark, a bonfire lit  the water-side green at the Connecticut River Museum in Essex. Jerry Roberts, author of The British Raid on Essex: The Forgotten Battle of the War of 1812, recounted the story of the infamous raid on the town, in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the battle.  ‘Light Up the Night’ was the first in a series of celebrations as Essex takes its place in history and is formally recognized as a battle site in the War of 1812. Roberts is the official historian and special project coordinator of the Bicentennial Committee for Battle Site Essex. You can catch Jerry Roberts presenting from his book on April 24th, 7:00 p.m., at Acton Public Library, 60 Old Boston Post Road, in Acton, CT. Read about more events here.

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Samuel R. Delany receives the 2013 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Award

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delany-1-of-1The Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA) has announced that Samuel R. Delany is the recipient of the 2013 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. The award recognizes Delany’s lifetime achievements as an SF author. Delany will receive the award at the Nebula award ceremonies in May. Delany is the author of many beloved books published by Wesleyan University Press.

Here is short introduction to Delany’s life and work, compiled by Wesleyan University Press director and editor-in-chief Suzanna Tamminen:

Samuel R. Delany is one of science fiction’s most influential authors, critics, and teachers. He appears to be always writing and to always have been writing. This is both a commentary on his many published books and also on the way he seems to live inside language, in both the spirit and the word. His work is dear to many writers, indeed his work has profoundly influenced several generations of writers, and the spirit manifested in his words, how he uses words to create and open up structures of thought, has earned him many ardent readers.

Delany’s works range from autobiography and essays to literary and cultural criticism, to fiction and science fiction, this last his most widely recognized genre. He served as professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and most recently has been a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.

The outline of the writer’s life is itself novel-worthy. Delanyʼs grandfather, Henry Beard Delany, was born a slave in Georgia in 1857, and became the first black suffrage Episcopal bishop of the Archdiocese of North and South Carolina as well as vice-chancellor of a black Episcopal college, St. Augustineʼs, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

He grew up in Harlem where his father, Samuel Sr., owned and operated the Levy & Delany Funeral Home. His mother, Margaret Delany, was a clerk in the New York Public Library system. The family lived in the two floors over Samuel Sr.’s Seventh Avenue business. His aunts were the Delany Sisters who were always Having Their Say.

Delany finished and sold his first published novel, The Jewels of Aptor, when he was still nineteen. Before his twenty-second birthday, he’d completed and sold four more novels, including a trilogy: The Fall of the Towers.

In 1974, Dhalgren, Delany’s most controversial work, made its appearance. At eight hundred seventy-nine pages in its initial Bantam Books edition, it drew much praise, much scorn—and open anger. Over the next dozen years, however, it sold more than a million copies and, today, has settled comfortably into the slot reserved for “classics of the genre.” As Delanyʼs most popular book, it has been turned into both a play on the East Coast and an opera on the West Coast.

Dhalgren was followed by the highly acclaimed novel Trouble on Triton. From 1979 to 1987, Delany wrote a connected set of eleven fantasy tales: two novels, three novellas, and six short stories. They include The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1987)—the first novel about AIDS released by a major American publisher—and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. In 1984 Delany’s last purely SF novel for twenty-five years would appear, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand—a book in which he predicted the Internet a decade before the fact.

Since then, Delany has written highly praised works, both fictitious and autobiographical. His 1988 publication, The Motion of Light in Water, is a staple of gender studies and African American studies classes and received a Hugo Award for nonfiction. In 1995, he published three long stories, about black life in the Jazz Age, the fifties in New York, and the sixties in Europe, collected in Atlantis: Three Tales and, partly, in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. This was followed by collections of interviews and nonfiction essays, including Silent Interviews (1994), Longer Views (1996), and Shorter Views (1999), all published by Wesleyan University Press.

Among his highly acclaimed academic releases are Times Square Red, Times Square Blue—and About Writing. Other novels, long and short, from this time include The Mad Man, Hogg (“the most shocking novel of the 20th century,” wrote Larry McCaffery), and Phallos. His novel about a black gay poet living in the East Village over the turn of the most recent century, Dark Reflections, won the 2008 Stonewall Book Award. His most recent novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), is over eight hundred pages—an amalgam of gay erotic writing, rural realism, and science fiction.

Altogether, Delany has won four Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards, as well as the Bill Whitehead Award for a lifetime contribution to gay and lesbian writing. In 2002, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. He received the Pilgrim Award for SF scholarship in 1985 and the J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. That same year he was among the judges for the National Book Award in Fiction. In 2007 he was the subject of Fred Barney Taylorʼs documentary The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, in which Delany is interviewed by Jonathan Lethem.  includes an experimental color film, The Orchid, which Delany himself wrote, directed, and edited in 1972.

Wendy Perron ventures west of the Mississippi

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Perron - Through R-72-3In December, Wendy Perron, an editor for Dance magazine and author of Wesleyan’s Through the Eyes of a Dancer, shared her book with captivated audiences in two cities west of the Mississippi. The first event took place in Salt Lake City on December 2nd. Michael Bearden, director of Ballet Arkansas said of the reading “I had the opportunity to hear Wendy Perron read excerpts from her new book last night. She was articulate, insightful and moved the audience to tears. To all my friends in Houston, go hear her speak on Thursday and check out her new book.” Read more about it in 15 Bytes: Utah’s Art Magazine.

On the 5th, Perron was invited to read for an audience at the Houston Ballet. Andrew Edmonson, press manager of Houston Ballet, Tweeted about the event: “just back from a reading by the divine Wendy Perron of her stellar new book, Through the Eyes of a Dancer, a fascinating, opinionated walk through five decades of change and innovation in the dance world. Eye opening and thought provoking.”

Don’t miss Perron’s events in New York City next month. The first will be held on February 24th at the Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side, where she will be moderating a reading by Jennifer Ringer of the New York City Ballet. The second will be on February 28th at Steps on Broadway.

New writing prompt from Annie Finch…win a book!

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Wesleyan University Press and Annie Finch invite you to participate in a friendly writing challenge. Take a chance at winning a copy of Annie’s new book, Spells: New and Selected Poems, while creating your own poetry.

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Throughout the coming weeks, we will post poems by Annie Finch, along with related writing prompts from Annie. We invite you to respond to each prompt with a poem of your own. Annie will select the poem that moves her most. The author of the poem will win a free copy of Spells. Please feel free to reply to each prompt with a unique poem of your own. We ask that you reply to each prompt only once, with a single poem.

Prompt for Earth Goddess to Sky God: Write a poem in two voices.

Please send your poems, along with your with name and mailing address to spellspoetryprompts@gmail.com.

The next prompt will be posted on Friday, November 22nd.

Happy writing!

Earth Goddess to Sky God

You haven’t formed me. I’m a monster still.

Then give me your body. Give it to me in rain.

Look up and fill me. I am too dark to stain.

You haven’t held me. I hold apart my will

Spread dryness through me. I have a night to fill

in high heat-speckled waves, apart from where

I will come down. I have nothing to share

with breath. I will give it back. There is one to kill,

one to renew, and one to persuade to weep.

My night holds everything except for sleep.

 

Courtesy of Annie Finch, from Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 2013)

 

Writing prompts from Annie Finch…win a free book!

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Wesleyan University Press and Annie Finch invite you to participate in a friendly writing challenge. Take a chance at winning a copy of Annie’s new book, Spells: New and Selected Poems, while creating your own poetry.

Finch - Spells R-72-3

Throughout the coming weeks, we will post poems by Annie Finch, along with related writing prompts from Annie. We invite you to respond to each prompt with a poem of your own. Annie will select the poem that moves her most. The author of the poem will win a free copy of Spells. Please feel free to reply to each prompt with a unique poem of your own. We ask that you reply to each prompt only once, with a single poem.

Please send your poems, along with your with name and mailing address to spellspoetryprompts@gmail.com.

The next prompt will be posted on Friday, October 25th.

Happy writing!

Paravaledellentine: A Paradelle

For Glen

Come to me with your warning sounds of the tender seas.
Come to me with your warning sounds of the tender seas.
Move me the way the seas’ warm sea will spend me.
Move me the way the seas’ warm sea will; spend me.
Move your sea-warmcome to me; will with me; spend
tender sounds, warning me the way of the seas, the seas.

Tongues sharp as two wind-whipped trees will question.
Tongues sharp as two wind-whipped trees will question.
(Skin or nerve waiting and heart will answer.
Skin or nerve waiting and heart will answer).
Question will answer two tongues and, or will:
heart sharp as nerve trees; waiting, skin-whipped wind.

Brim your simple hand over where the skin is.
Brim your simple hand over where the skin is.
Wish again, whenever hair and breath come closer.
Wish again, whenever hair and breath come closer.
Closer, again, whenever; brim where your skin is;
hair, wish and breath over the simple hand, come.

Spend come warning me, whenever simple sounds will, will;
move your question. Answer your heart-sharp tender
sea-warm will with me. Way of the seas, the seas!
Where skin-whipped nerve trees wind over waiting tongues,
brim closer to me. Again the skin, as wish,
and two of the breath, hand and hair, or come, is.


Prompt for Paravaledellentine: Write a valentine for someone you love, using repetition in a sensual way.

If you would like to write a paradelle, here is the form: each line is repeated once, and then the words of those two repeated lines are jumbled together to make two more lines.  The last stanza jumbles together all the words from the poem.

Twin Cities Book Festival

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We are pleased that Rae Armantrout will be reading at the Twin Cities Book Festival this weekend (October 12th). Get details here. There is a great line up, worth checking out, if you are in the St. Paul area. A big thanks to the festival staff and volunteers, and everyone at Rain Taxi!

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Rae Armantrout Takes on Hong Kong

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Pulitzer prize winning poet, Rae Armantrout, was invited to speak at Hong Kong City University’s summer writing workshop and conference program. She traveled to Hong Kong for the first time in support of her new book, Just Saying, where she also gave a talk on the uncanny and met with students from around the world.

Armantrout says,“Last July I was fortunate to be invited to participate in Hong Kong City University’s summer writing workshop and conference program. I spent several hours with talented students from South Africa, Korea, Texas, and other far flung places. I also gave a talk on ” the uncanny” in poetry (what possessed me to do that?) and read a bit from Just Saying.”

 

The poet and literary critic, Mark Scroggins, in his analysis for Parnassus notes, “Armantrout’s intelligence is constantly probing beneath the surface of what she observes, drawing offbeat conclusions from ordinary data…One might be tempted to call Armantrout a kind of laureate of the everyday, if that title weren’t being vied for by so many poets. I’m tempted instead to think of her as the laureate of the uncanny, the Unheimliche, that which is familiar and unsettling at the same time.”

“It was my first time in Hong Kong,” Armantrout says, “a city that is often both overwhelming and startling. I was lucky my husband was around to take photos.” Below are some photos of the trip.

News from Tan Lin

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Tan Lin, author of Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking, wrote the other day, with much good news. Here’s an update on his imaginative projects.

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The poet, novelist, and filmmaker, has two new works, Bibliograpic Sound Track and Ph.D Sounds, that explore the role of reading in various communication platforms. You can view the projects here. The works were commissioned by Artists Space. Lin also presented his work at the Walker Art Center. In both works, Lin assembled pieces from various sources such as SMS, IM chats, video game walk-throughs, Tweets, Tumblr entries, PowerPoint bullet points, photographic slides, the overhead transparency, the text box, the couplet, the book page, the fainting film titling sequence, etc., encompassing various platform specific reading or communications functions. The Powerpoint pieces bracket reading in a larger perceptual and social field that include smells and sounds. Lin reminds people that reading is a kind of all-over experience, but not be confined to a particular object (book) or social platform. To hear more about the two works, check out Lin’s talk at the Walker Art Center, where he discussed the commissioning of his works, and implementation on web based and installation-specific site.

Over the past 15 years, Lin has been interested in creating an “ambient” mode of literature that engages a set of practices including sampling, communal production, and social networks. He continues to embrace new modalities of reading such as Skype, email, Google Drive, etc. and explore their implications for the future literature.

Lin’s work is included in Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, an exhibit up at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver from June 22 through September 2, 2013. More information can be found here: http://www.thepowerplant.org/Exhibitions/2013/Summer/Postscript.aspx

You can check out Lin’s forthcoming book, An Anootated Index to the Photographic Work of Diana Kinsley here, and read an interview, with Angela Genusa, in Rhizome, here.

Lin’s work has been included in two exciting new anthologies as well: Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children and Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare.

Celebrating Aimé Césaire at 100!

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Photo of Césaire courtesy of Al. James Arnold

Celebrating Aimé Césaire at 100!

Two new translations of overlooked work give us a fresh reading of this important poet.

This is the centennial year of Martinican poet, playwright, essayist, and politician Aimé Césaire (June 26, 1913–April 17, 2008). Wesleyan University Press is pleased to announce The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, in English for the first time.

Aimé Césaire cofounded the influential Negritude movement, aiming to restore the cultural identity of black Africans living under colonial rule. Césaire first introduced the concept of Negritude in his work, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. The concept of Negritude was poorly understood in the United States, where it is usually reduced to the tag line “Black is Beautiful.” Césaire’s concept of negritude is displayed in his verse, in the dynamic structure of the lyric and dramatic that he sometimes referred to as Pelean (named for Martinique’s volcano). Using the word Pelean, he was referring to the violent, explosive imagery that characterized his earlier work, from the late 1930s through the 1950s. This explosiveness is evident in fresh translations of two classic texts in their original editions: Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition and The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

The period from 1941 to 1948 marked Césaire’s closest association with the Paris surrealists, evident in the collections Miraculous Weapons (1946) and Solar Throat Slashed (1948). His voice was mystifying to American readers, who were used to the style of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Césaire’s treatment of the subject of lynching, for example, elicited no critical response. His poem on the brutal killing of young Emmett Till, “Message sur l’état de l’Union” (State of the Union Address), was published in the Paris journal Présence Africaine (1956) before being collected in Ferrements (Ferraments, 1960). It met the same fate, seemingly falling on deaf ears.

The full flower of Césaire’s heroic vision of negritude is to be found in his lyrical oratorio Et les chiens se taisaient (And the Dogs Were Silent), first published in English in 1990. Similarly, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land captures the fireworks and passion of Césaire’s earlier work.

During the 1960s, Césaire turned to theatre, discarding the idea of Negritude for black militancy. Both La Tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe), a drama of decolonization in 19th century Haiti, and Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo), the story of the 1960 Congo rebellion, question fate of “black power,” depicting the movement as forever doomed to fail. The condemnation of the United States and the United Nations for complicity in the death of Patrice Lumumba in Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1965) did not elicit much sympathy from either black or white America. Nor did Césaire’s preference for Malcolm X over Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Une Tempête (A Tempest, 1969), written in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. King, improved the playwright’s standing in the eyes of the African-American establishment. The elegiac tone of Césaire’s final collection of verse, Moi, laminaire (I, laminar, 1982), marked a critical engagement with the hero of Negritude.

Césaire was a recipient of the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the second winner in its history. He served as Mayor of Fort-de-France, representing the Communist Party. He later quit the party to establish the Martinique Independent Revolution Party. He was deeply involved in the struggle for French West Indian rights and served as the deputy to the French National Assembly. He retired from politics in 1993. In his art, he explored the paradox of black identity under French colonial rule. Césaire died on April 17, 2008, in Martinique.

Praise for The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
“This book re-presents one of the most significant of all pieces of postcolonial writing in its original version. The scholarship is impeccable; the result of two careers dedicated to Césaire.”
 —Martin Munro, author of Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre

“A remarkable and essential contribution to the scholarship on Aimé Césaire, unquestionably the most important and influential black poet to have written in French. This is the first time that non-specialists will have access to the original published version of this monument of francophone letters, making it one of the most important publications in francophone studies of recent date. Arnold’s introduction argues compellingly for the singularity and importance of this edition in distinction to the familiar 1956 version.”
 —Nick Nesbitt, author of Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature

About the book
Aimé Césaire’s masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire’s quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire’s work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, here in French and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.
Read an excerpt here.  

Praise for Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition
For poets, Solar Throat Slashed may well ignite new poetry and will surely complicate and enlarge our sense of Césaire’s greatness.”
—Adrienne Rich, author of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

“Not only do Eshleman and Arnold give us excellent translations of Césaire’s at times syntactically knotty, etymologically abstruse, and semantically bedeviling verse; they also contextualize the poems—with an introduction by Arnold and endnotes by Eshleman—with crucial historical information and lucid discussions of the complexities of the poems’ language.”
 —Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

About the book
Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed), Aimé Césaire’s most explosive collection of poetry, is now available in English for the first time. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. The original 1948 French edition of Soleil cou coupé has a dense magico-religious frame of reference. In the late 1950s, Césaire was increasingly politically focused and seeking a wider audience, when he, in effect, gelded the 1948 text—eliminating 31 of the 72 poems, and editing another 29. Until now, only the revised 1961 edition, called Cadastre, has been translated. The revised text lacks the radical originality of Soleil cou coupé. This Wesleyan edition presents all the original poems en face with the new English translations. Includes an introduction by A. James Arnold and notes by Clayton Eshleman.

About the Translators
A. James Arnold is an emeritus professor of French at the University of Virginia. He is the lead editor of Césaire’s complete literary works in French (in progress) and author of Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire.
Clayton Eshleman is a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University and the foremost American translator of Aimé Césaire. He has published over forty books during his long career, including his own poetry, nonfiction, and translations of such authors as César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, and others. His honors include a National Book Award in Translation and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.