The Wilhelm Scream

Thoughtful and amazing new reviews of Vinnie Wilhelm’s IN THE ABSENCE OF PREDATORS can be found at NewPages and The Collagist.

Rescue Press & Friends at AWP:

RESCUE EVENTS AT THE 2012 AWP IN CHICAGO:

1. On Wednesday evening Rescue Press will pair up with Parlor Press and Shearsman Books at Columbia College for a reading featuring:

Rosa Alcalá, Jennifer Atkinson, Molly Bendall, Blueberry Morningsnow, Shira Dentz, Lisa Fishman, Carol Guess, Jill Magi, Becka Mara McKay, Caryl Pagel, Philip Sorensen, Andrea Rexilius and Jon Thompson.

2. Rescue Press, Canarium Books, Factory Hollow Press, and Transom Journal invite you to an offsite reading on Friday night, March 2nd, starting at 7:00pm. It’ll be a big old party with poetry, fiction, a film, a dream, and an open bar.

The address is: 656 West Randolph, #5E.

Dream: Kevin Gonzalez (Rescue)
Poetry: Darcie Dennigan (Canarium)
Poetry: Marc Rahe (Rescue)
Poetry: Ata Moharreri (Factory Hollow)
Poetry: Kaethe Schwehn (Transom)
Fiction: Madeline McDonnell (Rescue)
Poetry: MA Vizsolyi (Transom)
Poetry: Anthony Madrid (Canarium)
Poetry: Alex Phillips (Factory Hollow)
Short Film: Nick Twemlow (Canarium)

Melissa Dickey (Safety Book #18)

I’m going to cheat here. My book has no name. It looks like this:

I began writing and reading in it in June, 1999. A gift from my high school boyfriend, it is not a journal, but rather a sort of “copy book” as my friend Jay and I have always referred to it. This is a log of loved poems.

I really got serious about it in 2003. Before then, I’d used it for copying snippets of whatever I was reading, mixed with Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Velvet Underground lyrics—all the usual stuff for age 17. By 2004, my first year of grad school, I’d filled it up with whole poems copied out mostly by hand. For me, it’s a record of another time, of a sort of naïve faith I had in poems and myself and the world. (I was to win the Yale Younger by 21! Be fluent in many languages and translate for a living! Win a Stegner, a Fulbright, and a Guggenheim! Study at the Academy in Rome! Etc. etc. etc.)

Herein lie the usual suspects for a young and passionate reader of poems: e.e. cummings, Dickinson. Also a whole lot of Hopkins, Yeats, and Auden. I don’t think I write anything like Hopkins, Yeats, or Auden. But there it is. There they are. Right beside this weird poem by Laura Jensen:

Bad Boats

They are like women because they sway.
They are like men because they swagger.
They are like lions because they are king here.
They walk on the sea. The drifting
logs are good: they are taking their punishment.
But the bad boats are ready to be bad,
to overturn in water, to demolish the swagger
and the sway. They are bad boats
because they cannot wind their own rope
or guide themselves neatly close to the wharf.
In their egomania they are glad
for the burden of the storm the men are shirking
when they go for their coffee and yawn.
They are bad boats and they hate their anchors.

…..

I love this book because when I am completely fed up with poetry and feel certain it will never again speak to me, a poem in here will. When all modes seem tired and there are too many books, poets are assholes, teaching is misguided, and art is self-indulgent and useless, I can flip through this book, reluctantly, and some phrase will jump out: “Beyond all this, the wish to be alone” (Larkin); “In a dark time, the eye begins to see” (Roethke); “so many languages have fallen” (Clifton). Poems I used to know by heart, or nearly. Lines imprinted on some neurological path of mine and, certainly, in the minds of others.

This book influences my writing because these poems have a life in my brain. Have clarified my life, my brain. Probably the rhythms of the language more than anything else—what I’ve taken in subconsciously, what I’ve relied on to remember them.

I think it was Linda Bierds, in a workshop at the University of Washington in 2001 or 2, who turned me on, in her sweet wisdom, to this idea. I don’t think it’s an amazingly original one, though I do wonder how many poets my age (I’m 30) are copying their favorite poems out by hand these days.

I don’t do this anymore. Now I keep a separate notebook in which I write about every book I read—quotes, whole poems, thoughts, publication data. It doesn’t serve the same purpose or have the same effect as this one does. It’s more orderly, formal. Driven less by urgency and more by habit. Like an adult.

And I don’t love all these poems anymore, either. I’m not, after all, such a huge fan of Anthony Hecht or Denise Levertov or Randall Jarrell. But, re-reading what’s here, I remember what I loved, or learned. They clarify what I want or do not want, what I value. I still love “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” anyway.

Also, this book is not politically correct. Women and minorities are grossly under- and mis-represented. Many of the poets have been dead for a hundred years. And that’s just the point. When I read these poems and let myself be moved, I can let go of my own expectations, criteria, and notions of what it’s acceptable to love, what it’s all right to like. What a gift, to be divested of those.

Rescue Press published Melissa Dickey’s first book of poems, The Lily Will, in October, 2011. She lives, teaches, writes, makes stuff, and mothers in New Orleans, LA, with her husband Andy and their two small children.

“… the possibility of arrival.”

“And there it is—the bird, the word, the moth, the errant sound, or flying thing that escapes in all these stories, or tries to, or tries desperately to remain suppressed.”

A new review of Madeline McDonnell’s THERE IS SOMETHING INSIDE, IT WANTS TO GET OUT is up at Necessary Fiction:

Rebecca Lehmann (Safety Book #17)

Becky + Dickinson

1. Could you tell us the name of a book that you love, and why?

Selected Poems, Unabridged (Dover Thrift Editions) by Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson is the mother of American verse, but when I bought this book, I didn’t know that; I was a fourteen-year-old kid (see next question). Why do I love this book? I don’t know how you can be a poet and NOT love Emily Dickinson. I think if you don’t there might be something wrong with the language/music receptors in your ears and you may want to consider a career as a meter maid (side note: in the small town of Marshall, Michigan, the parking meters accept pennies; they make a delicious sound as they fall into the meter’s metal bank). Susan Howe, in her book My Emily Dickinson, says that not only is Dickinson the mother of American verse, but that she’s also the mother of experimental verse, because of her use the dash, her fragmented grammar, her capitalizations, her wild use of symbol. How can you argue with that? But, like I said, when I bought this book I was fourteen, so I also wasn’t thinking about the origins of experimental verse.

2. Where were you when you first read, or saw, or heard of this book?

I got this book at a really crappy bookstore in Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1995 when I was fourteen. I think the bookstore was called something like The Little Professor. It carried mostly romance novels, thrillers, and books about fairies or babies dressed as fairies. The whole store was the size of a small kitchen, or a large closet. In the front of the store, by the register, there was a wire rack with a number of Dover Thrift Editions. The book cost $1.00, brand new. This was the first book of poetry I owned, or, for that matter, read.

When I bought this book, my family had recently moved to an extremely rural part of the state, and I felt lonely and isolated. At night, I would lie in my bed listening to the never-ending chirps of crickets, and the loud, long moos of cows in heat. The air smelled like manure and decomposing hay. It drove me crazy. I was struggling with depression and an eating disorder, and not getting good care or treatment for either problem. Reading Dickinson’s poems made me feel like somebody was reaching out through time and space, speaking directly to me, in a special language that only I could understand.

3. Did this book influence your own writing, thinking, sense of the world, or work?

Absolutely. I started writing poetry after (and probably because of) reading this book. Whenever I am feeling stuck or lost in my own poetics, there are a couple of books I return to to help un-stick myself. This is one of them (others include Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, and Joshua Clover’s Madonna anno domini). My own writing can at times be rather baroque and raucous. Reading Dickinson reminds me of the minimalist possibilities of language.

4. Give us a line or excerpt from the text that intrigues, engages, mystifies, inspires, disgusts, or transforms you. Discuss…

Blue Emily Blue

Of Dickinson’s poems represented in this collection, I’m drawn to the morbid. The poem that begins “I died for beauty, but was scarce / Adjusted in the tomb, / When one who died for truth was lain / In an adjoining room” (the Dover Thrift Edition does not include numbers for any of Dickinson’s poems) ends with a stanza that really disturbs me: “And so, as kinsmen met a night, / We talked between the rooms, / Until the moss had reached our lips, / And covered up our names.” I love how creepy this final image is! The moss not only covers up the two corpses’ mouths (a chilling reminder of mortality, the silence of death, and decay), but it also obliterates the names on their grave markers (representing a final annihilation). Furthermore, as the two people, representing Truth and Beauty (PAGING JOHN KEATS), decompose and are consumed by nature (the moss) and ultimately forgotten, so are the lofty ideals of Truth and Beauty. To me, this is a much truer representation of aesthetics than “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” which I doubt even Keats believed.

Another favorite is this poem:

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed,
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

This poem expresses a lot of the same existential angst that much of Dickinson’s work does. To me, the most haunting lines are the last five. When I teach this poem, I spend a good amount of time unpacking that final image/metaphor, and exploring the representation of final nothingness. It’s lonely, and beautiful, and weird, and supernatural. Space is tolling like a bell! A bell!

I don’t know why I am now or was at fourteen drawn to these poems. At fourteen, I should have been wearing too much flannel, smoking pot, and planning my wedding to Eddie Vedder (all of which I did at a later date), not pouring over depressing poetry alone in my bedroom.

5. Who did you send this book to, why?

I haven’t sent this book to anyone. It’s one of my most prized possessions, and I’m not sharing it. Of course, all of the poets I know have read Dickinson’s poems. If you’re not a poet, or if you haven’t read Dickinson’s poems, go get your own copy. For Christ’s sake, it only costs a dollar!

***

Bio: Rebecca Lehmann is the author of Between the Crackups (Salt Modern Poets 2011), which won the Crashaw Prize. Her poems have been published in Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, and other journals. She lives with her husband in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where she teaches creative writing and literature.

Hanukkah Holiday Sale!

Dear Friends,

R+P+Hanukkah

As the year winds down, we’d like to thank you for the support and enthusiasm you’ve shown for Rescue Press’ books and authors over the last year and a half. We feel fortunate to share Rescue’s growing body of work with such a wonderful community of readers, and are looking forward to this Spring’s catalog, which will feature two new collections of poetry: our Black Box Poetry Prize Winner, Blueberry Morningsnow’s Whale In The Woods, and our Editor’s Choice, Philip Sorenson’s Of Embodies.

As a way of showing our appreciation, R+P is offering a special Hanukkah Holiday Sale: receive our first 8 Rescue Press books—in celebration of the holiday with 8 days—for only $80.

Click on this link to purchase ALL EIGHT of our currently published books for $80 between now and the final night of Hanukkah, December 28th! These books make great gifts, travel companions, and conversation starters! For example: “Hey, your eyes go well with this beautiful purple book called The Smaller Half—and your heart goes well with the poems inside.” Or, “Hi, Grandma—it’s nice to see you again In The Absence of Predators.”

We could go on, but the important thing here is that Rescue Press is grateful for your support and interest in small press publishers. Our Hanukkah Holiday Sale is one small way of saying thanks. And—if you order soon, you’ll receive an additional mystery gift with your package; evidence of how you keep our world infinitely spinning.

Safe travels and family dinners.

With love from the Midwest—

Caryl & Danny

Banjo Band’s Tamborine News:

1. Check out this beautiful review of Melissa Dickey’s THE LILY WILL at iO:

“. . .The Lily Will is also a book that has a changing of seasons, a cycle of both natural and unnatural dying and rebirth. In the poem “Of the Summer Garden” we move from the luminous opening image, “A bee deconstructs a magnolia blossom” to the dark ending, “As when I knew one war/ was over and another would come,/ afraid to tell anyone.” And in the following poem, “Token,” we shift directly from “Love the tracks that go around the bend” to “The memory of that horse shit smell/ Those few times you entered the stable,” a pungent reminder of where Dickey is leading us down that unknown trail. . .” (review by Anne Barngrover)

2. New poems by Marc Rahe at iO.

3. Liner notes from a forthcoming interview with Shane McCrae at the Kenyon Review Online blog.

4. An amazing review of Marc Rahe’s THE SMALLER HALF at Jacket2:

“. . .More than just a show of resignation, refusal, or wariness of the comedic or the sublime, Rahe’s poems are reflective of the times in which we live. Why wish so hard for alternatives that don’t exist? Why indulge in the complex mysteries . . .  when it’s hard enough to get the errands done, furnish your house, try to be good?” (review by Steve Langan)

5. Zach Savich’s EVENTS FILM CANNOT WITHSTAND appears on No Tell Motel’s Best Poetry Books of 2011, thanks to Gary L. McDowell.