Illinois Press Book Blog

The November 5, 2009, edition of Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac will feature Maura Stanton’s poem “Psalm for a Lost Summer” from her recent book Immortal Sofa.

On September 19, 2009, the Bowery Poetry Club in New York hosted a launch reading for Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader, edited by Maria Damon and Ira Livingston. 

Penn Sound has posted audio clips of the event.

Readers include Ira Livingston, Maria Damon, Tracie Morris, Charles Bernstein, Amitava Kumar, Renato Rosaldo, and Pierre Joris.

David Wagoner’s book, A Map of the Night, has been named winner of the 2009 Washington State Book Award in Poetry.

Sponsored by the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library, the award recognizes books that exemplify the best writing in the state during a given year.

Congratulations, David.

Kevin Stein’s new book of poems, Sufficiency of the Actual, received some fine recognition in the January 11, 2009, issue of the Chicago Sun-Times:

A skilled reader, Stein is at home playing with Aristotlean definitions and Wittgenstein conundrums as well as miscarriages and night-shift factory work. There is a healthy respect for rock ‘n’ roll — the Who, for example — and enough common sense to have a healthy disrespect for the legends who are rock ‘n’ roll.

 
Kevin Stein, poet laureate of Illinois and author of the new book of poems Sufficiency of the Actual, was featured in the January 24, 2009, edition of the Chicago Tribune.

Kevin Stein is used to it by now. When people first discover that he’s poet laureate of Illinois, and then when they find out that Gov. Rod Blagojevich is the guy responsible for picking the state’s first poet, everybody makes the same joke.

“They want to know how much I had to pay him,” Stein says with a laugh.

Jim Barnes, author of the recent book of poems Visiting Picasso, was appointed Poet Laureate of Oklahoma by Governor Brad Henry. 

From the January 15, 2009, press release:

The Oklahoma Humanities Council announced today that Governor Brad Henry has appointed distinguished author Jim Weaver McKown Barnes as State Poet Laureate for 2009 through 2010. The Humanities Council facilitates the poet laureate selection committee, which reviews statewide nominations on behalf of the governor, and coordinates the activities and appearances of the poet laureate throughout his/her term.

“It was my privilege to name Jim Barnes as Oklahoma’s Poet Laureate,” said Governor Henry. “His unique artistic vision, considerable creativity, and deeply moving works made him a natural choice. Jim Barnes is an accomplished poet and teacher who has done much to expand the cultural horizons of Oklahomans and all Americans.” (more…)

A January 8 post on Bookslut points to VQR’s top 10 poetry books of 2008, which led me to a comment below that refers to this ZYZZYVASPEAKS post, which mentions our own Laurence Lieberman.

It’s great when I learn something about one of our recent books from a blog via a Google alert.

From littlegyroscopes:
Class: The origami pictures were pretty
Poet: They are poems
Class: But how can you read them?
Poet: What would you have to do to read them?
Class: (silence) I guess you’d have to unfold them
Poet: Right. And how are you going to unfold them?
Class: (silence) Would you make the origami yourself?
Poet: Right! Yes! And then?
Class: Write the letters on the bird the way it shows in the pictures?
Poet: Right! And then?
Class: And then you’d unfold it and read the poem
Poet: Exactly! My point with the origami poems was, in part, that as a reader, you only get a limited part of the poem, only the surface level of any text is available if you don’t engage with it, turn it over and touch it.  You have to be curious enough about the poems to take the effort to physically make the shape, copy down the writing, unfold it and read it.  But once you do that, it’s like you’ve found your own secret little hidden poem. It’s almost like you wrote it yourself, but in a language you didn’t quite understand until you’d finished.  Art is supposed to be interacted with, touched, poked, folded…sometimes you have to get in and do it yourself or it won’t make any sense at all.”

Last night Mark Doty won the National Book Award for his Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems. Doty has a long history with the University of Illinois Press. In 1993 we published his multiple-award-winning *My Alexandria, and in 1995 his Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight. He has also been a friend to us in our publishing of other volumes in the National Poetry Series.

 *Still available in an old-school cassette, yo!