The Lawrence Welk Diaries * The Hallucinogenists, John Colburn

Our first poem-as-play. Colburn's The Lawrence Welk Diaries is a poem in four scenes featuring conversation between Lawrence Welk, Michel Foucault, Eartha Kitt, and Sam Shephard. The poem/play is followed by a "detour through a flaming hoop," or Colburn's poem, The Hallucinogenists.

An excerpt:

LW: In North Dakota I heard a pony
count handclaps through dirty teeth and
I understood, the gayer the lights, the
better the luck; we were all tripping
on that tour. I don't see getting drowned.
I don't see looking unlovely. It's mother's fault.
The hundredth bang, very sore, it makes
me smaller, I'll live on, I'll nude, I'll
swerve notes until the old Greek scales
fall from our eyes. As the pumping organ
cannot speak, I can guarantee you love.


JOHN COLBURN is originally from Mantorville, MN. He is a publisher and editor at Spout Press and teaches writing at the Perpich Center for Arts Education and at Hamline University. His first chapbook, Kissing, was published by Fuori Editions in 2002.

Elizabeth Robinson, The One Big Secret

The six poems in Elizabeth Robinson's new series meditate on the violence of the "briefly animate" body taken and taken apart. With their stripped-down line and chilling delivery, these are haunting poems.


An excerpt from "Creature"


The afterlife is its own dunce,

furred, stupid with bewilderment So

who did it--from or to us--

mixing sebum and

grime into a paste: briefly animate The

ground beneath us is slippery with it, cruel and

puling runt So life goes



ELIZABETH ROBINSON is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Apostrophe from Apogee Press, and Under That Silky Roof, from Burning Deck Press. She lives in Colorado and co-edits 26 Magazine, EtherDome chapbooks, and Instance Press.

GLINTS arrives

GLINTS is hot off the press. The 13th in our WinteRed chaplet series, GLINTS is a fantastic long poem in fragments by Twin Cities performance artist and poet, Gabrielle Civil. Here's an excerpt:

***

at the edge of the firewall

dark skin exaggerated like a church

stacks of books.
the scruff of deer.

fucked up
around the lake


It is Already Morning.


your brain feels and feels

like gold lining

on a rooftop

turned inside out.

reverberation

****

GABRIELLE CIVIL is a black woman poet, scholar, conceptual and performance artist originally from Detroit, MI. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and currently teaches literature and writing at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, MN. The goal of her work is to open up space.

Order GLINTS by sending $1.39 to WinteRed Press, 2306 27th Avenue South, Mpls. MN 55406

Song On, Thomas Sayers Ellis

Song On, by Thomas Sayers Ellis, offers six new poems that soar with inventive music and syntax. An excerpt:

Afro(Fisted) Pick

A symbolic growth tender-headed as protest,
The genre beneath
Blackness.
All red, black and green
Without being
Red, black and green.
All social work
And struggle.

The revolution at the root
Of every groove
Of grooming.
Soul wouldn't be Soul
Without it
And neither would America
Or where America
Bogarts peace.


THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS is an Associate Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University and a faculty member of the Lesley University low-residency M.F.A. program. He is the author of a chapbook, The Genuine Nego Hero (Kent State University Press 2001), The Maverick Room (Graywolf Press 2005) and the editor of the forthcoming Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets (University of Michigan Press 2006). His poems have recently appeared in Fair Trade, Lit, Mosaic, Tin House and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Visit his website: http://www.tsellis.com/

I Promise, Fanny Howe

Eleventh in the WinteRed series, I Promise is a broadside elegantly designed and printed on 8.5 x 14" paper.

An excerpt:

It is winter. Thick wet snow padding. Branches are broken, trees cracked by a recent ice storm. I cross over the bridge. On the right and below, where the river flooded and now is thick and iced, I see a deer hanging over the branch of a tree.
Velvety, frozen, not even the birds have set to eating it. The deer hangs like the fate of beauty among the branches and snow.

FANNY HOWE is the author of over twenty books of poetry and fiction, including On the Ground, Gone, Saving History, Famous Questions, and The Quietist.

Balm to Bilk, Rodrigo Toscano

Rodrigo Toscano's Balm To Bilk (a poem for two voices) riffs and rhymes its way through a playful discourse on language, politics, and the aesthetics of the poem. An excerpt:

exactement. when they blurt, we brandish
when they brandish, we blurt.

on the level of aesthetics you mean?

yes. but how do you pare the imperialist
from the imperialist aesthetic,
and the imperialist aesthetic
from the imperialist?
not an easy 'formula' as you say.

RODRIGO TOSCANO is a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry. He is the author of To Leveling Swerve (Krupskaya Books, 2004), Platform (Atelos, 2003), The Disparities (Green Integer, 2002) and Partisans (O Books, 1999). His work has recently appeared in Best American Poetry, 2004 (Scribner) and War and Peace (O Books, 2004) and In the Criminal's Cabinet: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction. He lives in New York City.

Sleep/Echo/Song, Dan Beachy-Quick

Ninth in the series is Dan Beachy-Quick's Sleep/Echo/Song. This chaplet mixes lyrics and lullabies written after the birth of the poet's daughter. An excerpt:

When a child I thought myself
A thought--
Then thought became my home--

When thought became my haibt
The ocean grew
Absent above the stone

DAN BEACHY-QUICK teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has two books: North True South Bright (Alice James) and Spell (Ahsahta). A third volume, Mulberry, will be published in the Spring of 2006 by Tupelo Press.

Paradise, Wang Ping

Eighth in the series is Wang Ping's Paradise, a series of poems and oral histories that chronical the effects of globalization on Chinese workers. An excerpt:

My Mountain Lotus,
Is this the paradise you've been seeking--
sweatshop, factory, restaurant, hair salon, house cleaning?
You wept in each letter: lonely, tired, broke, broke.
"Come home," I said, "better poor together than rich apart."
"Only fools like you plough the fields," you wrote back.
Then no words or money, only cousin's message:
"She rubs foreigners' feet in hotels
and hangs with fat old men.
Earrings, bracelets, hair like a bird nest . . .
Oh man she look shot, but not for you.
Hurry, claim your right as a man.
Enclosed is travel money.
Work on construction sites to pay me back."

WANG PING was born in Shanghai and grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. After three years of farming in a mountain village, she attended Beijing University. In 1985 she left China to study in the U.S., earning her Ph.D. from New York University. She is the acclaimed author of the short story collection American Visa, the novel Foreign Devil, the poetry collection Of Flesh and Spirit, the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, and most recently The Magic Whip, a second collection of poetry. Wang is also the editor and co-translator of the anthology New Generations: Poetry from China Today. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and teaches at Macalester College.

whthrrthms, Maria Damon

7th in the WinteRed series is Maria Damon's whthrrthms, poems playfully engaged with the Minnesota landscape over the span of one fall and winter. An excerpt:


Wednesday, September 10, 2003

milk the sky: a
splendid way to make
time disappear. the mind
the word-sword's sheath
the skein-prism liberator
rainblow prison-shatterer
iris continuum from greed to
gratitude a formal grace--
trees bowing


MARIA DAMON teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry, and co-author (with Betsy Franco) of The Secret Life of Words and (with mIEKAL aND) of Literature Nation, E.n.t.r.a.n.c.e.d., and PleasureTextPossession. Read her interview with Chicago Postmodern Poetry here: http://www.chicagopostmodernpoetry.com/mdamon.htm

Logic With Mr. Quine, Deborah Meadows

6th in the WinteRed series is Deborah Meadow's Logic With Mr. Quine, three poems in conversation with American philosopher and logician, Williard Van Orman Quine. In Deborah's words, this chaplet explores "another face of both western and Buddhist studies in the area of logical paradox."


An excerpt:

You can rely on it that
all poets are unreliable.

I am unreliable.

I am unreliable, when unreliable
is appended to its own quotation, so
"yields an unreliable result
when appended to its own quotation."


DEBORAH MEADOWS teaches in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where she has been part of ongoing exchanges of writers and scholars to and from Havana. Her works include a Tinfish chapbook, The 60s and 70s: from The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick, Representing Absence from Green Integer, and Itinerant Men from Krupskaya Press. Many of her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Jacket, How2, and the New Review of Literature. See her interview at: http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/01/photo-credit-courtney-gregg-deborah.html

Brief History of North American Youth, Stephen Burt

5th in the WinteRed series, Brief History of North American Youth, features new work by Twin Cities poet and critic, Stephen Burt.


excerpt from Brief History of North American Youth


Spring pinches as it enters in the style of a foreign

eye or garment quizzically over the market's final square

outdoors the household keeps warm keeping in

the ancient of days the last novices practice their weave

their crabapples and their demography barricades

against the inexplicable the roar

of the material victory whose bracing

final snow abandons every year


STEPHEN BURT teaches English at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. He is the author of Randall Jarrell and His Age, as well as two books of poetry, Popular Music (Center of Literary Publishing/University Press of Colorado, 1999) and Parallel Play (Graywolf, 2006). Visit his website at: http://www.accommodatingly.com

Bullets Retrieved, Rachel Moritz

4th in the WinteRed series, Bullets Retrieved is a long collage poem based on King Philip's war (1675-76) between the Wampanoag Indians and the white settlers of New England.


If we cannot hope for boughs split

Beneath our route from Plymouth

To Providence--State of his Hope

If we cannot see his skin granite

Rolled from a mast-red Hope

These men with their muskets line

Sunless rocks like ants marched for slaughter

And we hope the berries on split

Branches redden


RACHEL MORITZ's chapbook, The Winchester Monologues, won the 2005 New Michigan Press Competition. Her poetry is forthcoming or recently published in Colorado Review, Court Green, Denver Quarterly, How2, and 26. With Juliet Patterson, she is the poetry editor at Konundrum Literary Engine: http://lit.konundrum.com/

from Mulberry Street, GE Patterson

3rd in the WinteRed series, from Mulberry Street features six poems by poet GE Patterson.

excerpt from Apparatus for Distillation

In the world in which there is no one hoping
But as a strange plenitude with for trees
The stones breaking broken into small stones
What bits of them brighten make shells and glass
Like stars waves unbending the bands of light
Of sweet to flowering and fruited bareness
So that there is that in you grand in feeling
Alive a need turned to well as a thing
Or the man for whom once there were the women
Seen then in that difference swimming and home
So there the end this closing beauty brothers
All of that then in alchemical tones
Have each from the other silence a blessing
What is still in us there as that our feeling
In that world which is there is always hoping



Good-bye, Abel’s quiet blessing



GE PATTERSON'S collection Tug is available from Graywolf Press. Recent poems can be found in Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics, Swerve, American Letters and Commentary, Aphrodite of the Spangled Mind, and Open City.

Vestibulary, Sun Yung Shin

2nd in the WinteRed series, Sun Yung Shin's Vestibulary uses the Korean alphabet to explore a "dictionary of myth" in haunting lyrics:

hiuh

Vocal folds open. A passage of air
through the pharynx. Puff of white.

The sound of heat, her, heart. A sparrow hops
over a leaf on a boulder. We are busy bowing to
brides & broken headstones.


chiuch

"Historical accuracy"

A woman does an unseemly grave dance, a
bareheaded coutesan, her flash of white neck
through the cemetary gates. She remembers a
schoolgirl on seesa, mid-air, her betrothed,
grounded. "Brings [history] alive."


SUN YUNG SHIN's first poetry collection, Skirt Full of Black, will be published by Coffee House Press (http://coffeehousepress.org) in the spring of 2007. Her co-edited book Outsiders Within: Racial Crossings and Adoption Politics is forthcoming from South End Press in 2006. Shin is also the author of Cooper's Lesson, a bilingual Korean/English illustrated book for children. She teaches English at the Perpich Center for Arts Education and at The College of St. Catherine, both in Minneapolis, MN.

from CAPITALIZATION, Mark Nowak

1st in the series is Mark Nowak's, from Capitalization, an excerpt from the longer poem of the same name featured in his book, Shut Up Shut Down (CoffeeHouse Press, 2004). Through collage and sampling, this poem weaves together a narrative of Red-scare era union formation and busting with an account of Reagan's quashing of the air-traffic controller's strike in 1981.

An excerpt from Capitalization:

Capitalize the first word
of every sentence, whether or not
it is a complete sentence.
Capitalize the first word of every line
of poetry. I started working
on an assembly line
at the huge Westinghouse plant
in East Pittsburgh when I was sixteen.
The work was dull and repetitive.
From 1954 to 1962,
Ronald Reagan served as host
of the television program, "GE Theater."


MARK NOWAK is editor of XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, co-editor (with Diane Glancy) of Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings after the Detours, and author of two poetry collections from Coffee House Press (http://www.coffeehousepress.org), Revenants (2000) and Shut Up Shut Down (2004).

Subscribe to WinteRed Press

WinteRed is a micro-press publisher of "chaplets," or folded broadsides, edited by Sun Yung Shin and Rachel Moritz. We specialize in the longer, thematic poem or poetic series and have published 13 chaplets since we began in 2003. To order an individual chaplet, send $1.39 to WinteRed Press, 2306 27th Avenue South, Mpls. MN 55408. You can also subscribe to the series for $5.00 annually (4 chaplets), or $10.00 for two years (8 chaplets).

Here's a list of the poets/poems published so far:

Mark Nowak, from Capitalization

Sun Yung Shin, Vestibulary
http://sunyungshin.com

GE Patterson, from Mulberry Street

Rachel Moritz, Bullets Retrieved

Stephen Burt, Brief History of North American Youth
http://www.accommodatingly.com/

Deborah Meadows, Logic with Mr. Quine
http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/01/photo-credit-courtney-gregg-deborah.html

Maria Damon, whthrrthms

Wang Ping, Paradise

Dan Beachy-Quick, Sleep/Echo/Song

Rodrigo Toscano, Balm to Bilk

Fanny Howe, I Promise

Thomas Sayers Ellis, Song On
http://www.tsellis.com

Gabrielle Civil, Glints

Forthcoming in 2006: John Colburn, Juliet Patterson, Elizabeth Robinson, Walter Lew

GLINTS arrives

GLINTS is hot off the press. The 13th in our WinteRed chaplet series, GLINTS is a fantastic long poem in fragments by Twin Cities performance artist and poet, Gabrielle Civil. Here's an excerpt:

***

at the edge of the firewall

dark skin exaggerated like a church

stacks of books.
the scruff of deer.

fucked up
around the lake

It is Already Morning.


your brain feels and feels


like gold lining

on a rooftop

turned inside out.



reverberation


****

GABRIELLE CIVIL is a black woman poet, scholar, conceptual and performance artist originally from Detroit, MI. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and currently teaches literature and writing at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, MN. The goal of her work is to open up space.

Order GLINTS by sending $1.39 to WinteRed Press, 2306 27th Avenue South, Mpls. MN 55406