Well, it’s about time! The Ramones are set to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys in February. Other recipients include Dolly Party, Julie Andrews, and The Kingston Trio.

The Ramones changed everything. They were the godfathers of American punk rock who made CBGBs in New York famous. Johnny Ramone’s buzzsaw guitar sound developed the three or four power chord style that other punk rock bands still emulate to this day. Furthermore, the band stripped rock ‘n roll to its bare bones, took out all of the fat, long-winded guitar solos, and slick production and produced tracks no longer than two or three minutes.

This band is also a reoccurring name in my poetry chapbook, Front Man. In fact, the first poem of the book is about hearing The Ramones for the first time.

The First Listen

Opening chords blast,

 rattling pictures on my wall.

Snare and booming bass echo

louder than gunfire.

The singer shouts,

Hey Ho! Let’s Go!

I ball my fist,

dream I mosh and slam,

shred my jeans,

wear a black motorcycle jacket,

like the four Ramones

posed on that first album cover.

I see myself at Café Roach,

hanging with people father calls freaks, burnouts,

hair red, green or blue,

safety pins poking through clothes.

Johnny Ramone’s power

chord formula could be a map

to the stage, where I’d rise up,

spray the crowd

with machine gun speed riffs.

I am working on a new reading series with the owner of the Exhale Hookah Lounge and Kabob Grill on Wyoming Ave. in downtown Scranton. Our first reading in the series will take place this Wednesday at 7 p.m. The readers include fiction writers Tom Borthwick and Matt Holmes and poets Victoria Garafola, Dale Wilsey Jr, and I.

The event should be an all-in-all good time that features diverse work from local writers. Admission is free.

Prominent publications and organizations have posted their best of the year poetry collections for 2010.

The HuffingtonPost posted its list this week, and it includes H.L. Hix’s collection First Fire, Then Birds: Obsessions 1985-2010. This book covers a span of Hix’s work throughout his career. I don’t have the collection yet, but I have read a few of Hix’s collections, including Chromatic, which was nominated for a National Book Award, God Bless, poems consisting of phrases from speeches given by George Bush and Osama Bin Laden, and As Easy as Lying, an essay collection on the craft of poetry.

HuffingtonPost’s writer, Anis Shivani, commented that Hix is “one of our most daring poets, his oeuvre a rebuke to timidity, apathy, and retreat in any of its manifestations.”

I also wanted to point out that Hix serves on the advisory board of the Wilkes Graduate Creative Writing Program, where I earned my M.F.A. In addition, a lot of his work, including the book mentioned on HuffingtonPost’s list, was published by Etruscan Press, which is housed out of the Wilkes creative writing offices. I also interned for the press during my last semester of the program. So congrats to Hix and congrats to the Wilkes program.

The list also includes Major Jackson’s latest collection, Holding Company, one of my favorites of the year, and collections by Arab poet Adonis, C.D. Wright, who has made other lists, Paul Muldon, who also made other lists, Charles Simic, and others.

Some other lists include the New Yorker’s 11 best poetry books of 2010, which includes this year’s winner of the National Book Award, Terrance Hayes, for his collection Lighthead, also one of my favorites of the year.

The Poetry Foundation and others have also posted their lists, so check them out if you have time.

As  I had mentioned earlier, Holding Company by Major Jackson is one of my tops for the year. In this collection, Jackson created a major shift in form from his previous two books, Leaving Saturn and Hoops. Instead of the narrative form that often composes his work, he created brief, 10-line poems in Holding Company that created a greater sense of urgency and forced him to make the point sooner.

Another one of my favorite collections of the year is Terrance Hayes’ Lighthead. Hayes just has a gift for language, metaphor, and pop culture references, especially music.

Over the weekend, I took part in the OutLoudLit series in Mechanicsburg, PA. This reading is held bi-monthly at a spacious art gallery appropriately named The Gallerie, right in the downtown at 13 E. Main Street. Saturday’s event consisted of well-polished poetry and fiction from writers mostly based in Central, PA. Several of them are also current students, alums, or faculty from the Wilkes University Graduate Creative Writing Program. Since Christmas is about two weeks away, the event had a holiday theme, so everyone’s work, including my own, referenced some aspect of winter and the holidays.

The quality of the work was stellar, I thought. These stories and poems were polished and ready to be shared, and all of the readers did a great job at the podium. 

This series was put together by Ally Bishop, a current student in the Wilkes program, and it was clear to me after the reading concluded that this series has helped stenghten and grow the writing community in Mechanicsburg. I hope it continues for a long time because it does provide another venue for writers to share their work.

Upon driving home from the reading, I realized I’m even more interested in strengthening the writing community here in the Scranton area. We already have some solid ongoing events here. A writing group meets every Saturday at noon at Anthology Books.  The used book store also has several different book clubs, and all of that info is on the store’s website. There’s also a writing group that meets the first and third Monday of every month at The Vintage Theater. Our next meeting will be Dec. 20 at 7 p.m.

Furthermore, I’m starting a reading series at the Exhale Hookah Lounge and Kabob Grill, located at 136 Wyoming Avenue in downtown Scranton. Our first reading will be on Wednesday, Dec. 22 at 7 p.m. The readers include fiction writers Tom Borthwick and Matt Holmes, and the poets include Dale Wilsey Jr, Victoria Garafalo, and myself.

I hope this reading series catches on and does for this community what the OutLoudLit series has done for Mechanicsburg.

Now that the fall semester is winding down and I have some of my final grades finished, I’m freed up to do some more readings. Last night, I participated in the Mulberry Poets and Writers Association’s Winter Solstice at the Dante Literary Society in South Scranton. The MWPA has been around for decades in the area, and recently, they’ve become quite active again, launching and planning collaborative events between poets and artists, open readings, and even a future bus trip to NYC so group members can read at the Bowery Poetry Club and tour the Poets House. For anyone interested in poetry, I recommend joining this group. It’s only $10 a year and it provides the chance to showcase your work at a few different events throughout the year. Another benefit, and one I really enjoy, is the chance to simply mingle with people who have a deep appreciation for poetry.   More info about the group can found here, though the website is currently in the process of undergoing some changes.

Today, I’m off to Mechanicsburg to read with alumni, current students, and faculty from Wilkes University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, where I completed my MA and MFA. The event, called OutLoudLit, starts at 2 p.m. and will be held at The Gallerie, 13 E. Main Street. Admission is free, and there will also be some food and a book sale.

I am going to teach a 5-week long poetry workshop at The Vintage Theater in downtown Scranton starting Wednesday, Jan. 19 and running through the next few Wednesdays. The sessions will feature lessons on various techniques of poetry, including metaphor, form, line break, rhythm, persona, narrative, revision, and public readings.  Each student’s work will be heavily critiqued by fellow students and myself. Furthermore, I will always take student work home with me and heavily comment on it. The last session will feature a reading party to showcase the work the students completed during the five weeks.

The cost of the workshop is $75, and some of that money will go to The Vintage Theater. At this point, I am near my limit for students, but I can still add a few more. If interested, contact me at bfanelli84@gmail.com.

I want to give props to someone who has really benefited the writing community in central, PA. Ally Bishop, a student in the Graduate Creative Writing Program of Wilkes University, has taken it upon herself to start a reading series. The reading series, OutLoudLit, is held every few months at The Gallerie, located at  13 E. Main Street in Mechanicsburg. The reading series features current students, alums, and faculty from the Wilkes program. Bishop has managed to pull together writers from all genres and provided them with a unique opportunity to share their work.

The next reading will be held on Saturday, Dec. 11 at 2 p.m. at The Gallerie. I will be one of the readers at the event, and I’m eager to share the stage with other writers whose work I’ve enjoyed reading  or listening to through the Wilkes program. This event is free and open to the public.

To learn more about the program, check out this article written by Wilkes alum Lori Myers, who will also read at the event next Saturday.

Last weekend, I took a trip to Ithaca, New York and want to recomend a few places we visited. Our first stop was the famous vegetarian restaurant The Moosewood. Though the menu was not terribly long, I was impressed by the fact it changes it every few weeks or so and includes various sandwiches, salads, soups, and tofu dishes. Also, the price ranges are affordable. Most of the meals are not over $10.  There’s also a variety of seasonal beers available, some of them locally brewed. If you stop there, I recomend purchasing one of the organic candy bars near the cash register. The chocolate is so rich, and you won’t feel as guilty after eating it!

After we stopped at The Moosewood, we visited Autumn Leaves book store, located at 115 The Commons, in the downtown, only a few blocks from The Moosewood. The store’s website brags about having over 60,000 used books, and I believe it! Every section has dozens and dozens of used books filling the Ikea shelves. Of course I went to the poetry section first. I found the section to mostly contain collections from canonised poets and more helpful for customers seeking a collection by Frost or Whitman rather than more contemporary work like Terrance Hayes or Kim Addonizzio.

The store also contains two other floors-The Owl Cafe on the third floor and Angry Mom Records in the basement. The record shop has something for any vinyl lover. Just like the book store, the stock is fairly expansive. There are dozens and dozens of jazz, blues, and hip-hip albums and hundreds of rock ‘n roll albums. Even the punk rock and indie section is pretty huge. I came away with a copy of Patti Smith’s LP Horses and a Best of Blondie LP and only spent about $10 for both.

I plan to schedule a poetry reading for Ithaca  in the coming months, and I certainly will stop at these stores again!

 Electric City published a nice review of my poetry chapbook Front Man this week. You can check out the article here.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!

Last week, one of my favorite rock ‘n roll icons, punk rock poetess, Patti Smith, won a National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids, which recounts her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who later confessed he was gay and died of AIDs in the late 1980s. I haven’t read this book yet, but I look forward to it. While I was in Ithaca, NY over the weekend, I managed to pick up an autographed copy of it for $45!

Upon winning the award, Smith started crying and said, “I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on the shelf.” In the age of the E-reader, Smith also made a defense for the book as a physical object, saying, “There is nothing more beautiful than a book,” adding, “Please don’t abandon the book.”

Now that Smith has won a National Book Award, perhaps it will bring more attention to her poetry collections. As a recent article posted on Huffington Post points out, Smith has a long relationship with poetry. Anyone who has listened to her albums or live concerts knows she has always blended poetry with punk rock, and her love of the genre goes deep. According to the article, her mother gave her a copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience when she was just eight.  And the title of her latest poetry collection, Auguries of Innocence, is a quote from Blake.

I also want to mention that one of my favorite contemporary poets, Terrance Hayes, also won a National Book Award  last week for his latest collection of poems, Lighthead. The Pittsburg-based poet’s fourth collection is a great book that contains a variety of narrative and lyric poems featuring icons as diverse as Harriet Tubman and Wallace Stevens. The book is a great combination of personal and cultural history. Check it out, and also check out his earlier collections, Hip Logic and Wind in a Box, two of my favorites.