Steve Scafidi will be at the W.Va. Book Festival, October 13 and 14, 2007, at the Charleston Civic Center. Some people say he’s the best poet in W.Va.

He is an amazing word magician. Reminds me of what the poet Robert Wallace said, “No magic, no poem.” You’ll see what I mean. You’ll know it… his subjects as wide-ranging as Rosa Parks, Karla Faye Tucker, prayer, Ovid, marriage, Johnny Cash, nature, eroticism, hope, despair.

You’ll hear his voice — full and clear and strong….
Born and raised in Virginia, Scafidi (MFA, Arizona State University) works as a cabinet maker and lives with his wife and two children in Summit Point, West Virginia.

He is the winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University and the James Boatwright Prize from the literary journal “Shenandoah” …. His poems have appeared in “American Poetry Review,” “Southern Poetry Review” and elsewhere.

The Levis prize, by the way, is in memory of Larry Levis, a beloved poet and Virginia Commonwealth teacher who died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of 49. This year’s Levis prize was awarded to Joshua Weiner for his collection “From the Book of Giants,” published by The University of Chicago Press. Weiner will read at VCU sometime this September.

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In “Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer,” Scafidi’s striding, long-sentence poems pick you up and carry you away like an ocean wave.

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Click here for a 2002 interview with Steve Scafidi in “Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.”

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Steve Scafidi’s books:
“Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer” (2001)
“For Love of Common Words” (2006)

Over her desk are these words by Henry James: “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

She went to grade school in a one-room schoolhouse. She’s said her early years involved “a daily scramble for existence.” She’s a boxing fan who once interviewed Mike Tyson. One of her novels, “Black Water,” became an opera for which she wrote the libretto that follows a path of love and tragic, violent death.

One of the nation’s pre-eminent literary figures, Joyce Carol Oates will deliver the 2007 Betsy K. McCreight Lecture in the Humanities, 7:30 p.m., October 18, at the University of Charleston.

An award-winning novelist, story writer, poet, essayist, critic, playwright, editor and book publisher, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Her eight collections of poetry — and one forthcoming called “The Coming Storm” — represent a small part of her extraordinarily complex and prolific output.

She is a winner of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize. Her new book, “The Gravedigger’s Daughter,” was published in May 2007 by Harper Collins.

Check with the West Virginia Humanities Council for more details. The speaker will sign copies of her books after the lecture. The program is free and open to the public.

Link of interest:
Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page 

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Excerpt from “The Time Traveler: Poems”
by Joyce Carol Oates

I SAW A WOMAN WALKING INTO A PLATE GLASS WINDOW 

I saw a woman walking into a plate glass window
as if walking into the sky.

I saw her death striding forward to meet her,
shadowed in flawless glass.

Dogwood blossoms drew her, a lilac-drugged air,
it was beauty’s old facade,
blinding,
blind: the transparency
that, touched, turns opaque.

The frieze into which she stepped buckled in anger
and dissolved in puzzle parts about her head.
 *          *          *
I saw a woman walking into sunshine confident and composed
and tranquil to the last.

I saw a woman walking into something that had seemed nothing.
As we commonly tell ourselves.

The trick to beauty is its being unassimilable,
a galaxy of glittering reflections,
each puzzle part in place.
Not this raining of glass and blood
about the amazed head.

The unfathomable depths into which she stepped became
the merest surface,
Pain and noise.
 *          *          *
I saw a woman walking into her broken body
as if she were a bride.

I saw her soul struck to the ground because mere space
could not bear it aloft.

I saw how the window at last framed only what was there,
beyond the frame,
that could not fall.

My throat filled with blood:
you would not have believed how swiftly.

Poet José Alejandro Peña edits The Refined Savage Poetry Review in Scott Depot, W.Va. From Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Peña is a Marshall University grad student. Four issues of the review are available so far.

In 1986, he received the National Poetry Prize for his book “The Dreamt Retaliation” (National Library, 1986).

He is looking for well-written, engaging poems. Send three to five short poems (32 lines or fewer) with a brief biography and a photo (optional).

To e-mail submissions, click here.

For those without e-mail, the address is 124 Meadow Drive, Scott Depot, WV 25560.

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SELF-PORTRAIT

We imagine a bridge and we go through it
where we want.

But once there,
in the distance,
the heart is broken
like old planks.

A man is like a light stain
underground.

His looks to never return
to the rotten hive of the nights.

A man is like a thousand sunken cathedrals,
without memories, without friends,
without one more day
in a desert of hours.

– José Alejandro Peña, from his new book “Blasphemies of the flute” (2007), translated by Joni R. Radcliff

Armand E. Singer, Ph.D. (Duke U.), WVU professor emeritus of romance languages, world traveler, Don Juan specialist, editor, died July 12, 2007, at Ruby Memorial Hospital, Morgantown, W.Va. Dr. Singer was associated with WVU since he signed on as a teaching fellow in 1940.  He combined a lifetime of teaching experience with a love for poetry.

“Since time out of mind, mountains have served as religious symbols…[and]…It scarcely needs saying that external nature –- mountain, plain, or sea –- inspired literary reactions at least as long ago as the descriptive similes of Homer and Virgil.”
–- Armand E. Singer (1982), in the introduction to Essays on the Literature of Mountaineering

Link of interest:
Where’s Armand?
Tracking the Nomadic Professor, Armand Singer

“All ages are contemporaneous in the mind.”
– Ezra Pound

If you know anything about the rest of this Walt Whitman/W.Va. story, please comment or fire off an e-mail to me; it has been in the back of my mind for almost 40 years.

When Walt Whitman was a young man, he wrote a poem called “Isle of La Belle Rivière” on Blennerhassett Island in West Virginia. Edgar Lee Masters wrote in his book “Whitman” that the poem was written in 1848 but wasn’t published until April 30, 1892, in the Cincinnati Post.

“Isle,” as it was published in the Post, was preceded by the following:

“Parkersburg, Va., April 30– (Special.) — It is well-known that the late Walt Whitman made a pilgrimage down the Ohio Valley in the year 1849; that he stopped on Blennerhassett Island for a brief season (a spot almost world-famous in song, story and history as the home of the exiled Blennerhassett, and as the scene of Aaron Burr’s machinations for the destruction of this Republic); that he drank from the historic old well of Blennerhassett, and that he retained pleasant recollections of his pilgrimage long afterward.

“What is not so well-known, in fact, if it is scarcely known at all, that he composed a characteristic poem while on the visit to the old island which appears in the Post for the first time. The original draft of this poem was left at the home of Whitman’s entertainer, old Farmer Johnson, who then lived on the island. The poet took a copy, and the Post representative has a copy of the original, so that these three are the only known copies of the poem in existence, if indeed the copy which Whitman took exists anywhere….”

Robert Rogers Hubach, an English professor who has written much about the good gray poet, says Whitman was traveling from Brooklyn to a newspaper job in New Orleans at the time “Isle” was written. Turns out, Whitman held the job only about 3 months — he had a conflict with his employer — before he went back North. On the way to New Orleans he traveled by stage coach to Wheeling, W.Va., where he descended the Ohio River. He stopped in Cincinnati and also spent some time in a hut on Blennerhassett Island and wrote a poem about the island. Many readers and scholars have made note of “Isle” too, but if there is even a shred more to the story, let’s have it.

Here’s the poem:

Isle of La Belle Rivière

Bride of the swart Ohio;
Nude, yet fair to look upon,
Clothed only with the leaf,
As was innocent Eve of Eden.
The son of grim old Alleghany,
And white-breasted Monongahela
Is wedded to thee, and it is well.
His tawny thighs cover thee
In the vernal time of spring,
And lo! in the autumn is the fruitage.
Virgin of Nature, the holy spirit of the waters enshroud thee,
And thou art pregnant with the fruits
Of the field and the vine.
But like the sabine maid of old,
The lust of Man hath ravished thee
And compelled thee to pay tribute to the
Carnal wants of earth.
Truth and romance make up thy
Strange, eventful history,
From the eye of the red man;
Who bowed at thy shrine and worshiped thee,
To the dark days of that traitor
Who linked thine innocent name to infamy,
Farewell, Queen of the waters
I have slept upon thy breast in the innocence of a babe,
But now I leave thee
To the embraces of thine acknowledged lord.
At Blennerhassett–Aged 30

– from “The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman: Much of Which Has Been But Recently Discovered,” by Walt Whitman, published by Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921

 To all of us concerned with inner weather, Laura Treacy Bentley’s first collection, Lake Effect: Poems, seems just right. She’s going to share some poems and sign the book at Tamarack, located off I-77 in Beckley, W.Va.,  Saturday, July 21, 2007, at 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Bentley is a teacher and a widely published poet. Born in Maryland, Bentley has lived most of her life in Huntington, W.Va.

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“Everywhere I look these days no poetry is being written. There is a lot of pretend poetry, but nothing really this fine. With this book it makes it very easy for me to say: Laura Bentley, I dub thee poet supreme.”     – Ray Bradbury

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BEYOND THE BREAKERS

my father is waving
beckoning me
to come

an ocean divides us

him on one side
me on the other

when this ocean was new
we drove all night
and slept on the sand

its sound not a shell anymore

waking in the ocean night
I steal to the water’s edge
the breakers beyond

me on one side
him on the other

the fear rising in mother’s voice

his white face bobs above silver waves
laughing and calling

come on in
come on in
 

– Laura Treacy Bentley

Click above or click here to watch a video clip of John McKernan reading “I Chose the Gyroscope Because It Was Holy,” a poem he wrote about buying a Christmas present for his father. This is a small part of a recent hourlong reading from “Resurrection of the Dust,” McKernan’s new book.

Frank X. Walker’s new arts and culture magazine PLUCK! Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture features a report on hip-hop artists from Bluefield, W.Va. Last week, online, courier-journal.com noted a launch party coming up soon for PLUCK!

Walker and other poets involved with the new magazine will read from their work.

July 12, 2007 — 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., River Bend Winery, 120 S. 10th St., Louisville. Free, open to the public. Info: (502) 540-5650.

In his book “Affrilachia,” Danville, Ky., native Walker coined a word to “make visible / to create a sense of place / that had not existed / for us / for any unwealthy common / people of color / now claiming the dirt they were born in.”

courier-journal.com: Affrilachian poet starts PLUCK! magazine

Video link: Walker reading his poem Kentucke

Author Cheryl Ware will teach a writing workshop to teens and adults at Randolph County Community Arts Center on Saturday, July 14. 

First, though, you might want to read about Cheryl Ware, her writing, her teaching and how she used to stay nights with her grandmother who had 27 cats.

Pre-registration required. Tuition $20. Call RCCAC at 637-2355, or visit the website.

Her accomplishments are too numerous to list, but to scratch the surface:  She has received the WVU Alumni Award, Tamarack’s Author of the Year Award, and her books have been listed in Scholastics Book Club, as well as Amazon.com’s top 20 New Children’s Books.

Everybody knows the song. The lyrics. “Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch a long, lonely time. And time goes by so slowly and time can do so much.”

Hy Zaret, an American lyricist and composer best known as the co-author of the 1955 hit “Unchained Melody,” died Monday, July 2, 2007, at age 99. His link to West Virginia? He once attended WVU Law School.

Today, Google listed 145 news articles, from all over the world, about his death. Read more there and and on Wikipedia.

“Unchained Melody,” hundreds of versions — Roy Orbison sang it. Ronnie McDowell. And of course the Righteous Brothers. Elvis. LeAnn Rimes. U2….