Save the Date: Michael Hettich reads from Like Happiness

Friday, October 15, 2010

8 p.m.

Books & Books,

265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables

"Michael Hettich's poems are like grace, like gifts, like the natural world made Technicolor, like Technicolor making the natural world.  He is a master of the simile, and in Like Happiness, he harnesses a specific and collective memory, the power of myth and allusion, like no one else.  His poems give his readers a deep happiness, an earned happiness, a happiness decided upon with clarity and wisdom." ~Denise Duhamel

"Michael Hettich's poems resemble half-remembered fables or lyrical dreams, animistic dramas played out in moonlit meadows, domestic interiors that shimmer like velvet jewelry boxes. Wisdom and enchantment are his calling cards, and he strews them about with purpose, like Hansel and Gretel marking the path home through the forest. Like Happiness is a beautiful and haunting book"

 ~ Campbell McGrath

"Michael Hettich’s persona, vividly alert in a subtropical landscape where the imagination holds it own against the knots and crosses of life, never reduces the world to a formula, poetic or otherwise. Instead, he breaks through, his innocence grounded by experience and with a childlike sense of wonder, into a world 'bigger than we are, like happiness, and full of/ fish that live nowhere else.' Like Happiness is amazing work. I'm filled with gratitude for it."

 ~Alan Davis, author of Alone with the Owl and Rumors from the Lost World.

About Michael Hettich:

Michael Hettich's books of poetry include FLOCK AND SHADOW: New and Selected Poems (New Rivers 2005), SWIMMER DREAMS (Turning Point 2004) and the just-released LIKE HAPPINESS (Anhinga press, 2010). His most recent chapbook, MANY LOVES (2007), won the Yellow Jacket Press Award for Florida Poets. A new book of poems, THE ANIMALS BEYOND US, is forthcoming (in 2011) from New Rivers Press. He teaches at Miami Dade College and lives with his family in Miami Shores, FLA. His website is michaelhettich.com

Interview with Orlando Menes @ West Branch Wired

WB: You often write about food, frequently in relation to the divine. For example, in the poem "Bacalao," you use the image "nailed to the larder's crucifix / long cords of dried pimento." In "Frogs" you describe a "rosary / of garlic bulbs." Do you see an underlying connection between food and the sacred?


OM: As a Roman Catholic, how can I not? The very Host, this thin wafer I was taught to let dissolve in my mouth and never chew, is the transubstantiated body of Christ, not a symbol, not an idea, but His very flesh. This kind of concreteness is compelling to me as a poet, and thus pervades just about anything that I write creatively, my use of language to connect body and mind, earth and spirit, the ordinary and the miraculous. I cannot bear any type of disassociation, division, fragmentation. I have a passion for amalgamation, not just as a trope but as a way of thinking, a style of living. No wonder my attraction to the Baroque, besides my ongoing interest, perhaps fascination, with Santería, a syncretic Afro-Cuban religion in which food plays a substantial role in ritual, divination, and in the very lives of the orishas, Yoruba deities who must be fed their favorite foods, whether fresh fruits, spirits like rum and aguardiente, animal flesh and blood. Physical sustenance, apart from prayer, is a vital component of this and other ancient spiritualities. Such ritualized feeding is the essential, inviolable component in the bond between the human and the divine; otherwise, the believer will incur the wrath of his or her orisha (Yemayá, Oshún, Shangó, etc.). The sacred exists in the realms of earth, fire, water, and air, which I find more inspiring than any notion of transcendence. To feed a god means to love a god. Aren't words too the food of poets-what sustains our imagination? Those fertile tropes that stave off what we fear most: writer's block, the famine of creativity? As Wallace Stevens writes in Esthétique du Mal, "the greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world . . . ."


About Orlando Menes:


Orlando Ricardo Menes’s poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies and in such magazines as Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Chelsea, and Green Mountains Review. He has also published translations of such poets as the Argentine Alfonsina Storni and the Cuban José Kozer. His third poetry collection, Furia, was published in 2005 by Milkweed Editions. Menes is also the author of Rumba atop the Stones, published in 2001 by Peepal Tree Press (Leeds, England), and has edited the anthologies Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred(Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and the forthcoming The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). He is an associated professor of English at Notre Dame. Poetry by Menes appeared in West Branch 66, Spring/Summer 2010.


For more, please visit West Branch Wired: http://www.bucknell.edu/x63790.xml

Podcast of USpeak KICK-OFF: Reading from DUB WISE

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  SEPTEMBER 24TH: USpeak KICK-OFF

  
  
  

   Listen Now
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Geoffrey Philp is a poet and fiction writer who teaches English at Miami Dade College, where he also chairs the North Campus' College Preparatory Department. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, he attended Mona Primary and Jamaica College, where he studied literature under the tutelage of Dennis Scott. When he left Jamaica in 1979, he went to Miami Dade College and after graduating, studied Caribbean, African and African-American literature with Dr. O.R. Dathorne and creative writing with Lester Goran and Isaac Bashevis Singer at the University of Miami, where he earned both a baccalaureate degree and Master of Arts in English. In 1991, he returned to the U. of Miami as a James Michener Fellow and studied poetry under Kamau Brathwaite and fiction with George Lamming.
  
  
  Prof. Philp has published five collections of poetry; a children's book; two books of short stories, Who’s Your Daddy? and Uncle Obadiah and the Alien, and a book of poems and short stories titled Twelve Poems and a Story for Christmas. His master's thesis, Benjamin, My Son, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2003. A critically acclaimed author, Philp's work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Small Axe, Gulf Stream, Wheel and Come Again: An Anthology of Reggae Poetry, the Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, and the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.
  
  
   Scheduled to be released by Peepal Tree Press in late September,  Dub Wise has already garnered praise from other poets:
  
  
  “Without losing the joy of play or the play of the rhythms, Dub Wise celebrates the burdens and delights of love, friendships and the responsibility of being at home in the world.” --Olive Senior.
  
  
  “Geoffrey Philp...sensitively explores his complex heritage, alert to the environment he has entered and to his Jamaican roots.” --Mervyn Morris
  
  
  “Above all, there is the continuing infolding of a ‘Jamaica Tradition’ as being established in the voices of Morris & Dawes, plus also the acknowledgment of McNeill, Baugh, Mikey Smith & Garvey, and the NL of Jean Binta Breeze.” --Kamau Brathwaite
  
  
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• "A Poem for My Children": Reading @ USpeak (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Review of DUB WISE @ Digital Calabash (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Still Singing LoveSongs (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• "Put Your Vision to Reality":Citizen Journalism at Geoffrey Philp's Blog Spot (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• DUB WISE is Here! (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• New Book: Elegguas by Kamau Brathwaite (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• "First Love," by Geoffrey Philp. (poefrika.blogspot.com)

Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

"Mario Vargas Llosa is the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Nobel Committee announced this morning from the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Sweden. And he wasn't on the lists of favorites.

Since 1901, the Nobel Committee has honored outstanding individuals in the fields of science, peace and literature with a medal, personal diploma and cash award. In his will, Alfred Nobel noted the fourth prize area to be in literature, and since then, respected writers from broad social, cultural an critical areas have been honored, including Orhan Pamuk, Seamus Heaney, John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison."

For more, please visit Huffington Post: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/07/nobel-prize-2010-literature-winner-mario-vargas-llosa_n_753011.html

Photo source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/07/nobel-prize-2010-literature-winner-mario-vargas-llosa_n_753011.html

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Save the Date: One Soul, One Community

October 17, 2010
 4 p.m.
Civic Chorale of Greater Miami

St. Mary's Cathedral

Miami, FL

About Us 

Since its inception in 1970, the Civic Chorale of Greater Miami has grown to approximately 100 singers. We are comprised of both Miami Dade College students and community singers from all walks of life. Our ranks represent numerous professions and range in age from the young to the very young in heart! We all however, share a common love for the singing of great choral music. Our repertoire is as diverse as our membership - we sing it all: from Bach to Rogers and Hammerstein. We are each committed to promoting our organization's mission:

The Chorale's mission is to provide an opportunity for qualified amateur and professional singers to study and perform a variety of choral literature, to bring together people of diverse backgrounds who are unified in their desire to perform great choral music, to attain the highest standards of excellence in performance, and to enhance the cultural life of the community through public performance of choral music, all in an atmosphere that will encourage the development of human sensitivity, friendship, character, self-confidence, and discipline.

Our History: From 1970 to the Present 

In the Spring of 1970, a new community-based choir, the University Civic Chorale was formed by Lee Kjelson, with the aid and encouragement of two University of Miami Deans, William F. Lee of the School of Music and Robert Allen of Continuing Studies. In 1982, Dr. Kjelson was invited to administratively head the community-oriented Miami Choral Society. Consequently, the UCC was incorporated into the MCS structure, joining with the esteemed organization's adult singers to create the Miami Civic Chorale. A third name change occurred in 1985 in order to both recognize the Chorale's expanding involvement in community music of the entire South Florida area, and to coincide with the Chorale's return to independent status as the Civic Chorale of Greater Miami.

The Chorale has long been one of South Florida's most professionally active adult choral ensembles, providing community and college-university singers as well as area audiences the opportunity to experience live performances of great choral music. Of great pride is the acknowledgement that throughout its many years of existence, the Chorale has been a choral ensemble of consequence, recognized with enthusiasm for the quality of its repertoire and musical performance.

Basic to the success of the Chorale is the continuity of leadership that has characterized the more than 30 years that the Chorale has existed. In 2001, Dr. Robert Gower became artistic director, after having served as Associate Conductor and Accompanist since 1972. Jo-Michael Schiebe was appointed to Music Director in 1993 and remained until the fall of 1998. For the next two seasons, Greg Knauf led the Chorale. Chorale founder, Lee Kjelson, served as its principal Music Director from 1970-1993. Since 2006, Dr. Gower has served as Artistic Director, along with Associate Conductor, Paul Whiting.

Also of great importance to the Chorale's recognized reputation has been the numerous performances of monumental works and premieres with such esteemed organizations as the American Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Prominent area orchestras with whom the Chorale has collaborated include the Florida Philharmonic, the New World Symphony, and the University of Miami Symphony. Several of these choral-orchestra presentations have been in conjunction with the Concert Association of Florida as well as the Palm Beach Festival, Festival Miami, and New Music America.

The collaboration with major symphony orchestras and organizations has given opportunity for the Chorale to perform under the direction of major conductors, such as Zuben Mehta, James Conlon, Franz Allers, Frederick Fennell, James Judd, Christopher Keene, Eugene Kohn, Alain Lombard, Jose Serebrier, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Pinchus Zuckerman.

Representative literature indicative of the Chorale's past extensive performance repertoire includes such challenging and diverse works as Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, the Fourth Symphony of Ives, Verdi's Aida and Il Trovatore (concert versions), Dona Nobis Pacem by Vaughn Williams, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Mendelssohn's Elijah, Mass by Igor Stravinsky, and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. In recent years the Chorale has featured Requiems composed by Mozart, Faure, Durufle, and Rutter; Vierne's Solomn Mass, Ramirez' Missa Criolla; Brahm's Liebeslieder Waltzes; Randall Thompson's A Testament of Freedom; Jose Maria Vitier's Missa Cubana, and a concert version of Bizet's Carmen.

There are many ways in which the Chorale maintains an active role in promoting community music and performers. Most traditional is the Messiah Sing-In, which will celebrateed its 38th Anniversary this year. Also of great pride is the Chorale's practice of featuring guest artists from South Florida, which have included the Miami Children's Chorus, the Greater Miami Youth Symphony, Florida's Singing Sons Boy Choir, the Miami Brass Consort, the Miami Symphony, Irish fiddler James Kelly, and highly regarded University of Miami faculty and alumni soloists. In recent years, the Civic Chorale has promoted the musical education and enrichment of local high school music students, by inviting their collaboration in concerts with the Civic Chorale.

Our Musical Legacy Continues 

In January of 2010, a new page in the history of the Chorale will be written with the merger of the Miami Dade College Kendall Campus Community Choir and the Civic Chorale of Greater Miami. The resulting choir joins forces with the goal of promoting the organization's mission of making beautiful music and reaching audiences throughout the South Florida community.

The Civic Chorale has maintained an active role in the local artistic community, providing singers and area audiences the opportunity to experience performances of great choral music.  Similarly, the Kendall Campus Community Choir has been in existence since the late 1960's and has provided singers in southern Miami-Dade county a venue in which to explore and perform music of all styles and genres. The history of both groups is distinguished by performances with major orchestras and under the batons of noteworthy conductors.

The newly formed ensemble begins rehearsals January 11, 2010. Interested community and student singers are encouraged to contact Dr. Kenneth Boss at kboos@mdc.edu for additional information or Phee Price, Executive Director at pheeprice@gmail.com. The newly designed Civic Chorale will be under the direction of Dr. Kenneth Boos and Dr. Robert Gower.

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New Book: Elegguas by Kamau Brathwaite

Elegguas
Kamau Brathwaite

Wesleyan Poetry Series
Wesleyan University Press 

Deeply felt requiems from an internationally celebrated poet


Kamau Brathwaite is a major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the major world poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Elegguas—a play on “elegy” and “Eleggua,” the Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad—is a collection of poems for the departed. Modernist and post-modernist in inspiration, Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies to the Jamaican kumina practice of bringing down spirits of the dead to briefly inhabit the bodies of the faithful, so that the ancestors may provide spiritual assistance and advice to those here on earth. The book is also profoundly political, including elegies for assassinated revolutionaries like in the masterful “Poem for Walter Rodney.”


Throughout his poetry, Brathwaite foregrounds “nation-language,” that difference in syntax, in rhythm, and timbre that is most closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean, using the computer to explore the graphic rendition of nuances of language. Brathwaite experiments using his own Sycorax fonts, as well as deliberate misspellings (“calibanisms”) and deviations in punctuation. But this is never simple surface aesthetic, rather an expression of the turbulence (in history, in dream) depicted in the poems. This collection is a stunning follow-up to Brathwaite’s Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan, 2005), winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize.


Endorsements:


“For nearly half a century, Kamau Brathwaite has been doing nothing short of rewriting the relationship between Africa and the aging ‘new world’—one exquisite and haunting syllable at a time. Elegguas, his newest book, is a tidalectic wave of remembrance and remonstrance. It is, as well, one of Brathwaite’s most compassionate songs.”—Mark Nowak, author of Coal Mountain Elementary.


“Kamau Brathwaite is the major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the great poets of the second part of the 20C anywhere. While framed by elegiac writings of a personal nature, this volume remains profoundly political through a range of elegies for departed public &  political figures, and includes what I consider one of the greatest and most poignant political poems of the era, namely Brathwaite’s ‘Poem for Walter Rodney.’ The greatness of the work lies in the fact that the poet never falls into political rhetoric, but that his language, breathtakingly innovative & inventive at the formal level, always carries a lyrical and poetic charge of unequalled intensity.”—Pierre Joris, author of Poasis and A Nomad Poetics.


About Kamau Brathwaite:



KAMAU BRATHWAITE, cofounder of the Caribbean Artists Movement, is currently a professor of comparative literature at New York University, and shares his time between his home in CowPastor, Barbados, and New York City.

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A Conversation With... Andrea Shaw

Where were you born? Describe current family life.     

I was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and I now live in South Florida with my husband, our two children, my mother, and our two dogs.

What do you do for a living? Why did you choose this vocation?

I work at Nova Southeastern University where I serve as assistant director of the Division of Humanities and as associate professor of English. I teach courses in literature, writing and cultural studies. I am also a writer—fiction, essays, and literary and cultural studies scholarship.

Who are your three favorite writers? Why?

Hmmm…Toni Morrison, John Maxwell Coetzee, and Edwidge Danticat. They are all so deft with language and can manipulate it in ways that leave you feeling as if they have done nothing but tell you a story the way they would tell you if you sat beside them on a bus.

What was the first book you fell in love with and how have your reading habits changed over the years?

My first affair with a book was with Morrison’s Beloved. After reading it I thought about the story for weeks: in the middle of lunch, while playing with my kids, while watching a butterfly drift past, it just kept coming back to me.  

This book helped me know that I am interested in myself. Stories that explore the lives of people of color, women, Caribbean people—stories that help me understand and contemplate my own history are what I’m drawn to.

What are you reading now?

The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo. I rarely read outside of my area of academic interest –African diaspora studies. I feel that I need to branch out and this book is all the rave now so I am giving it a try.  

What makes you laugh?

Imagining what my dogs must be saying to themselves about us. My family also makes me laugh.  On their own no one is particularly funny, but when we are all together, something happens!

What are your other passions?

Art, interior design, cooking, music.

About Andrea Shaw:

Andrea Shaw is assistant director of the Division of Humanities and an associate professor of English at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale . She is a scholar of Caribbean and African Diaspora studies and author of The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women's Unruly Political Bodies. She is also a creative writer. Her creative and scholarly writing have been published in numerous journals, including World Literature Today, MaComére, The Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Feminist Media Studies, Social Semiotics, and FEMSPEC.She graduated from the University of Miami with a Ph.D. in English and from Florida International University with an M.F.A in creative writing. She is on the editorial board of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal and on the board of the Women’s International Film Festival. She and her husband, Dean Nevins, are owners of Irie Isle Jamaican Restaurant.

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Karl Parboosingh Retrospective @ National Gallery of Jamaica Blog

 Karl Parboosingh - Jamaican Gothic (1968), A.D. Scott Collection, NGJ

"Religion, colour and racial pride were recurrent themes in his work. Jamaican Gothic (1968), was quite likely a parody of the painting American Gothic (1930) by American painter, Grant Wood. Here Parboosingh’s paint application greatly contrasts with its American counterpart in striving to bring forward a view of Jamaican social realism as oppose to a re-iteration of European social ideology. The seated figures, a woman and two children, emerge from a melee of erratic brushstrokes. Their environment unrefined yet reflective of a struggle to survive. Their facial identities are obscured and irrelevant yet their racial identity is poignantly present through the emboldened use of black. The warmth of reds and yellows further support an energetic feel to the composition and context. A similar yet more aggressive palette composes Ras Smoke I (1973). The obstinate stare of the depicted Rastafarian and his pipe implies the defiance of the Rastafarian sub-culture to conventionally accepted colonial norms and ideas. Production as a route to nation building is explored in the painting, Cement Company (1966). Hard outlines and solid rigid shapes characterize the industrial-themed work, dividing the canvas into sections or planes. Such a painting could be seen as a precursor to later works of abstraction such as Flight to Egypt(1974) and Industrial Abstraction (c. 1975). In these examples, Parboosingh takes a stylized approach to the use of basic and solid line, shape and colour to communicate subjects and themes, quite different from his previous examples of representation."

To read more about Karl Parboosingh and other Jamaican artists, please visit National Gallery of Jamaica Blog:


Image source for Jamaican Gothic:  http://nationalgalleryofjamaica.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/jamaicas-art-pioneers-karl-parboosingh-1923-1975/

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The Big Read @ Broward South Regional Library With Michael Hettich

Florida Center for the Book at Broward County Library
invites all of Broward County to join us for ....

“All that we see or see is but a dream within a dream.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe

The Big Read
Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe September 15 through November 6, 2010

Edgar Allan Poe may have begun his literary career as a poet and found his greatest success with “The Raven,” but his true legacy can be found in his fiction. Without Poe, the genres of horror, adventure, mystery, and, arguably, the short story itself, would have developed very differently. His fiction and poems remain popular with both young and old and are assured a place in the minds of readers… forevermore.

October 19, 
6:30 to 7:45 p.m.

Poetry Reading - Michael Hettich

South Regional/Broward College Library

For more information, please follow this link:

http://www.broward.org/LIBRARY/CLASSESPROGRAMS/Pages/TheBigRead.aspx

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