My Ph.D. colleague, Dante Di Stefano, recently had an essay published by Shenandoah. The essay, “A Defense of Train Wrecks: Lyric Narrative Poetry and the Legacy of Confessionalism,” makes a fine case for narrative poetry today. Not only does the essay give a deep reading to some of the best contemporary narrative poets, including Joe Weil, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Denise Duhamel, and Sharon Olds, but the essay looks at the history of that mode of poetry, going back to Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, viewing their work as a reaction against Eliot, Williams, Pound and other Modernists who often fractured narrative.
This essay gives a good reading and deep understanding to the last several decades of American poetry. Check it out.
I’m pleased to announce that there is a new website/journal dedicated to creating community among poets based in northeastern, Pennsylvania. The website, Poets of NEPA, is seeking submissions as a way to showcase local talent. One of my poems, “Sipping Tea with You in September,” was published today. It is a very autumn-centered poem, and you can read it here.
If you are an NEPA-based poet, then submit your work!
I have few upcoming readings over the next two weeks, including a Halloween-themed jazz/poetry reading. My set will primarily deal with ghosts, and a few of my poems will also reference horror movies. I just may dress up, too. Here are some details about the upcoming events:
Sunday, October 11 2015 6-9 .m.
Jazz/Poetry Night (Halloween Themed)
Old Brick Theater, 126 W. Market Street, Scranton, PA
I will one of the featured readers. The other featured readers are Ali Pica, Amanda J. Bradley, and Larry Pugliese.
Saturday, October 17 2015 3-4:15 p.m.
Italian American Studies Association Conference/Poetry Panel
The Marriott, Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, DC
I will be reading with Nicole Santalucia and Dante Di Stefano.
I’m pleased to say that I have a new poem, “Trying to Call Forth a Ghost,” over at The Kentucky Review, which you can read here. The poem will also appear in print in the annual issue, slated to be published in January. For now, read it online. Many thanks to Robert S. King for accepting the poem and for the wonderful work he does with the magazine.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of community, community in the poetry world and the community I grew up in as a teenager, the punk rock scene at the turn of the 20th Century in Pennsylvania. There used to be a number of venues across the state where under 21ers could hang out on a Friday and Saturday night and listen to their best friends’ bands bang away on the snare drum and hammer power chords for a sweaty, sloppy 40-minute set. I had a number of venues that I went to as a teen, Café del Soul in Scranton, Homebase and Café Metropolis in Wilkes-Barre, and after I migrated to Philadelphia, I caught shows a the TLA, the First Unitarian Church, and a number of other venues across the city. I can’t count how many bands I’ve seen over the years, and I can’t say one power chord-charged set stood out to me the most, but what I do remember the most are sidewalk conversations before or after shows. I remember the first time my friend mentioned Emma Goldman outside of Café Del Soul when we were in high school. I know that conversation sent me to the library, where I researched Goldman’s activism and learned that there is indeed a different, better way to live. I remember discussing the first time I heard the Clash, and I remember mourning the untimely deaths of Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer with friends.
NEPA Scene noted that this week marks the five-year anniversary of Café Metro’s closure in Wilkes-Barre, which was really the last venue standing in the area, and also the longest running, at 14 years. They posted a link to a short documentary about the venue, which you can watch here, and I encourage you to do so.
Following the recession, so many venues nationwide have closed and funding for the arts has dried up. Programs have been slashed from school budgets. I worry about this because where do all of the young writers, musicians, and artists go? Where do they find community? Sure, they are interconnected, thanks to social media, but interaction behind a screen does not compare to curbside conversations and meeting people face to face.
I feel fortunate that as a poet, I get to read in different spaces. I’ve visited a lot of communities where things are happening, where people have taken it upon themselves to really invest in their local art scene. I have seen friends all across the tri-state area and beyond expend energy building something. Due to their inspiration, I started a reading series four years ago that is still going.
But what about all-ages venues for younger folks? What about their scene and community? There are no venues left here, and that is the story of a lot of towns across the country. My hope is that they will start something new and they will grow up to take energy and pour it into something positive.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, [PANK] magazine will close its doors at the end of this year. They had one hell of a 10-year run and quickly became one of the most influential lit. mags on the scene, publishing diverse writing and offering a platform for women’s voices early on. In their farewell statement, posted on Facebook, the editors did leave open the possibility that the magazine could return in some form one day, maybe just online.
For the last five or so years, I’ve been a consistent book reviewer, and doing so has allowed me to keep track of what was happening in the contemporary poetry scene. My final review is of John Amen’s latest collection, Strange Theater, published by New York Quarterly Books. Read the review here.
Big thanks to the editors for allowing me to be part of the [PANK] family for so long. I’m also appreciative for the reviews of my two books that the magazine ran. Here’s hoping that [PANK] returns in some form or another one day.
If you’re into poetry, and you haven’t been paying attention to Poets’ Quarterly, then you should be. It is one of my favorite journals in terms of content, especially the interviews and craft essays. Check out the newest issue, and my review of Neil Shepard’s latest book, Hominid Up.
My personal favorite in the new issue is the essay on Baudelaire and the madness of love.
I would be remised if I didn’t share my thoughts on the recently announced indefinite hiatus of The Gaslight Anthem. I can’t think of a band that I’ve blogged more about over the years than those guys.
Writing on Facebook, the group said, “We wanted to let everyone know that we’ll all be taking a break from The Gaslight Anthem after this next European tour in August. We’re all going to do other projects and stay active in some way or another, both in and out of music, but we’d like to step away from the band until we decide what we’d like to do next.”
It’s unclear when or if the band will get back together for more shows or another album, but I’m glad I had the chance to see them play numerous times in Philly and NJ. I still remember when I bought their first album, Sink or Swim, back in 2007. I was living in a ramshackle apartment, just out of college, and working a full-time job as a reporter. Some of my roommates were still in college, and I was in that weird in-between phase of being an adult and still clinging to those college days of late night drives coming back from Philly after punk shows, my clothes stinking of sweat and cigarette smoke, my car stereo blasting three-minute tracks.
Yet, by that point, I was tired of spinning the same familiar punk albums from my record collection. I hungered for something to jolt me in the same way that I was floored when I heard The Clash or Black Flag for the first time. Since The Gaslight Anthem was getting such immense attention in the punk community, I wanted to hear what all of the fuss was about.
I must have listened to Sink or Swim half a dozen times when I first got it. There wasn’t anything groundbreaking in the music; big hooks, power chords, and rapid snare beats have always been the formula for punk music. But Brian Fallon’s lyrics resonated with me the most. Those tracks about “dime-store punks” and waiting for a lover by the light of the moon stuck me as a writer. The band’s soulfulness was evident even on those driving, three-minute punk songs, and that soulfulness would only grow throughout their career. I also liked Brian’s ability, even on the first album, to mash-up rock n roll lyrics in his songs, everyone from Joe Strummer to Bob Dylan to Springsteen. It was clear, almost immediately, that the band would not be confined to three chords and sweaty basement shows. They were going places and their influences were too broad.
Over the years, the shows got bigger and I saw the guys perform less and less, but with each album, no matter the changes in sound, I found tracks to love. The last album, Get Hurt, a document of Brian Fallon’s divorce, came out as I split with my fiancé. For me, it was the right album for the right time, just as Sink or Swim was at the time.
When I first saw Gaslight, at a record release party for the Loved Ones in Philly, I told them after their opening set they were going to be big. They shrugged it off, but the soul, the poetry, the punk rock energy, and the best kind of rock n roll influences were all there from the beginning.
Thanks for all of the music and memories, guys! Please come back soon!
Here’s a video from their final show at the Reading Festival in the UK this past weekend.
I just want to give a quick shout-out to the fine folks at Electric/Diamond City for the wonderful write-up on the August edition of the Writer’s Showcase at the Old Brick Theater in Scranton. I’m thrilled we got to sit down with them for an interview and photo shoot. This reading series continues to grow, and I couldn’t be more proud. Check out the article here.
The reading will take place this Saturday from 7-9 p.m. Admission is $4. The Old Brick Theater is located at 126 W. Market Street in Scranton. I couldn’t be more excited about this edition’s line-up! Check out their bios:
Carrie Reilly is a genderqueer poet from Philadelphia and host of Wild Mischief: A Reading Series & Literary Gathering. Carrie earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and has had poems published in Apiary Magazine and My Favorite Bullet, as well as the collective chapbook, “Bodies of Fire,” with poets Julia C. Alter and Julia Perch.
Raymond P. Hammond served over twenty-five years as a law enforcement officer at the National Park Service. He is editor-in-chief of The New York Quarterly Foundation and the author of Poetic Amusement, a book of literary criticism. He is also an adjunct professor at Keystone College and is the faculty advisor for Keystone College Press.
William Black’s short fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, Crazyhorse, The Sun Magazine, Harvard Review, and more than twenty other journals and magazines, and a collection of stories, Inheritances, came out in the spring of 2015. He lives in Scranton and teaches creative writing and world literature at the Johns Hopkins University.
Sarah Zane Lewis is a poet and science geek from Scranton, PA. She is the recipient of the Delta Epsilon Sigma National Writing Prize in Poetry, the J. Harold Brislin Medal for Distinction in Creative Writing, the Sister M. Charitas Loftus Medal for Excellence in Poetry, and a National Science Foundation Research Experience in biochemistry. The author of two chapbooks and several limited edition graphic poems, her work has also appeared in Pulp, and the recent SwanDive Press anthology, Everyday Escape Poems. Sarah Zane founded Seattle’s Word of Mouth poetry series, and featured at the Seattle Poetry Festival, the Seattle Poetry Slam, the National Poetry Slam, the Bumbershoot Music Festival and was the 2001 Bumberslam Champion. Sarah Zane served as Scoring Director for the National Poetry Slam, has coached a youth slam team at Brave New Voices, and mentored young writers through the Emerging Voice program. She holds a B.S. in Biotechnology and a lifetime membership to Trapeze School New York.
Kaylie Jones is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me (2009). Her novels include A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, which was released as a Merchant Ivory Film in 1998; Celeste Ascending (2001); and Speak Now (2004). She is the author of numerous book reviews and articles, which have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the Paris Review, the Washington Post, Confrontation Magazine, and others. She is the editor of the anthology Long Island Noir (2012). Her latest novel, The Anger Meridian, was published in July 2015. Kaylie has been teaching for more than 25 years, including at Southampton College’s MFA Program in Writing, and in the low residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Wilkes University. She co-chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, which awards $10,000 yearly to an unpublished first novel. Her latest endeavor is her imprint with Akashic Books, Kaylie Jones Books, a writer’s collective in which the authors play a fundamental part in their own publishing process.
My favorite scene in the N.W.A. biopic, Straight Outta Compton, is when the group is on stage in Detroit and Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr) looks out on the crowd, turns to Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), and then belts out “Fuck Tha Police.” This incident occurred after the Detroit P.D. demanded that the group not play the song in their city. The group’s decision to defy the police led to a riot and the arrest of the artists and raised a lot of questions about censorship.
There are so many good things that I could say about the film, specifically the way it captures the explosion of “gangsta” rap, the implosion of N.W.A., the rise of Death Row Records, but mostly, I favor the film because of how much it resonates with headlines today, specifically the Black Lives Matter movement. Looming throughout the film is tension between police and black communities, ultimately leading to the Rodney King riots. In one early scene, as the artists step outside of a recording studio, they’re shoved to the ground by LAPD because they’re assumed to be gang-bangers.
There are many criticisms that can be made against “gangsta” rap, namely its treatment of women, but as Ice Cube notes several times throughout the film, the music served as a reflection of their reality, including the tensions with police. In that regard, it can also be said that N.W.A.’s bold decision to play “Fuck Tha Police” in Detroit was an act of civil disobedience.
That particular reminded me of young Black Lives Matters activists who recently shut down rallies by Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush, and have since protested at other campaign scenes. When they shut down a Sanders rally in Seattle, several of my progressive friends questioned their motives, since Sanders is generally open-minded and supportive of civil rights causes. I noted that it doesn’t matter who the candidate is, they should keep employing such acts of civil disobedience. For one, it forces the cnadidates and their supporters to really listen. After shutting down the Sanders rally, for instance, he broadened his platform to include matters of policing in minority communities. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton recently met with BLM activists. These acts of civil disobedience create a national dialogue and force people to pay attention. Any change comes from the grassroots.
There really couldn’t be a more appropriate time for a biopic on N.W.A. produced by Ice Cub and Dr. Dre. Already, it’s continued the conversation that the group started in the late 80s and the BLM activists rekindled, post-Trayvon and post-Ferguson.
Brian Fanelli 