Tag: Poetry

Buy the man a beer, or something

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Three years ago,  Jason Lucarelli and I met to discuss creating a new reading series in northeast, Pennsylvania, one that would include featured readers only, no open mic, and combine poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Out of those initial meetings came the Writers Showcase Reading Series, which was held at the now defunct New Visions Studio and Gallery in Scranton and then the Vintage Theater this past year. We wanted to showcase the work of our friends, and since then, we’ve hosted over 100 writers, some local and some from far away as Chicago.

Jason has been an instrumental part of this reading series. He has invited several poets and prose writers to our area, connections he’s made through his  low-res M.F.A. program in Vermont.  Furthermore, once I started the Ph.D. program, took on a full-time teaching job, and released a new book, he took on the press duties  and has succeeded in ensuring our readings got publicity in the weekly arts papers.  So far (fingers crossed) we’ve never had a low turnout for any of the readings, and that is because of Jason’s hard work getting the word out.

All of this said, Jason will be moving away to Philly for a new job. I wish him the best of luck. We ran this series for three years, and it’s been a great run. It will continue, at least for July and November, dates we confirmed a long time ago with the Vintage. Our next reading will be Saturday, July 12 at 7 p.m., and it will feature Bryne and Charlotte Lewis, Paul Capoccia, Eric Wilson, and Bernadette McBride. Here is the Facebook event page.

When it’s a little closer to the date, I’ll post more info about July’s featured writers, including their bios, and post some articles from the local arts papers. It’s unclear now whether or not Jason will still be in town to co-host the reading, but if he is there, give him a thank you for co-organizing this series over the last three years. Buy the man a beer when we all go out to a bar afterwards.

Here’s a picture from the first reading at New Visions. The featured readers were Norma Bernstock, Amye Archer, Steve Keating, Alexis Belluzzi, Tom Borthwick, Jason, and I. In the meantime, keep supporting the other readings in the area, both the open mics and featured readers series. Other people like Jason put a lot of time and energy into sustaining this local literary community, and they deserve support.

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The Early Bird Gets the Worm

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If you’re looking for something new to read, one of my favorite new literary journals is Tahoma Literary Review, which publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. The journal will soon release its debut issue, and you can already read about some of the contributors. It’s a rather impressive list. I also like the journal because of the blog posts the editors write every few weeks, which contain some of the most practical advice on writing I’ve read, especially for those first getting started. In the latest post, editor Kelly Davio stresses the importance of submitting work early in a submission period. This post stuck because because when a lot of journals and magazines open for submissions in September, I don’t always submit my work to them immediately. Kelly’s post is making me re-think that.

Here’s what she has to say about submissions, “When editors see a piece we simply have to have, we know we’d better grab it before it appears in another magazine’s pages. That means we often have few pages left in the issue by the last week or two of the submission period:, and competition that was already tough to begin with reaches cutthroat proportions. I sometimes have to say no to great poems when they reach me on the late side.”

She adds that for the first submission period, they received work from over 350 poets, usually five poems per poet. Of the poems, over 200 came in the last week, but the journal was already 2/3 full. Those statistics really put things into perspective, and when September rolls around and a flood of journals open for submissions, I don’t plan to wait. Send the work out there at the beginning of the period.

If you have the time, I suggest going back and reading some of the older blog posts, too. All contain useful information.

On Father’s Day

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Normally, no matter the classes I teach each semester, I always do a poetry unit. Often, I break the poems up either by time period or by theme, and when I do it by theme, I always include a section on parents/sons and parents/daughters. I tend to change the poems up every year and have included work by Natasha Tretheway, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Toi Derricotte, Theodore Roethke, among others. But no matter how I change the unit, I always include “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, one of the poet’s most famous works, and also one of my favorite American poems.

Like me, a product of an economically depressed, blue-collar coal mining town, my students always relate to the poem. No matter the semester or the type of students, I always get a positive reaction to the poem. The students can relate to the father’s labor, the way he starts the fire,  warms the home, polishes the son’s shoes, and yet, expects no thank yous. The poem is beautiful and tender, rich in its language in just 14 short lines. In a lot of ways, it makes me think of and remember my father, dead 10 years come February. He too labored hard but did not expect praise, even though he picked me up from school daily and like my mother, spent years working to carve out a good life for his kids.

I encourage you on this Father’s Day to click the link to the poem and enjoy it. Here’s another link, one to a short audio podcast from The Poetry Foundation on “Those Winter Sundays.” It includes a recording of Hayden reading the poem, some background on him, and analysis by another favorite poet of mine, Terrance Hayes.

Finally, I’ll end this blog post with a link to one of my poems, “Waiting Room,”. Enjoy, and Happy Father’s Day!

Scranton ZineFest

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If you’re  around northeastern, PA this weekend, then I encourage you to come out to Scranton ZineFest. Since it’s creation a few years ago, the festival has grown to include more artists, zinesters, poets, and this year musicians. It has become an inclusive festival over the last few years that does its best to include a variety of art forms and media.  The free event will take place Saturday from 1-7 p.m. at the Tripps Park Community Center, 2000 Dorothy St. in Scranton. This year’s event features artists from all over the East Coast, including Maryland, Philadelphia, Richmond, DC, and artists from far away as Chicago. For a list of the artists and zinesters participating, click here.

There will also be live music throughout the day and a poetry reading at 2 p.m. I’ll be reading, along with Rich Howells, Alexis Belluzzi, Rachael Goetzke, and David J. Bauman. For a list of our bios, click here.

If you want more information about the festival, then check out this article The Weekender just published.

A big thank you to Jessica Meoni and her partners in crime for organizing this whole thing for yet another year.

Contemporary American Voices

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Many thanks to Lisa  Zaran, the editor of Contemporary  American Voices, for making me the featured poet for the June issue and publishing five of my poems. Even more exciting is the fact I got to pick the poets for this month’s issue, which include my fellow Ph.D. colleague at SUNY Binghamton, Jason Allen, and PA-based poet David J. Bauman, whose blog, The Dad Poet, you should check out now. To read all of our poems, click here.

I also want to note that I’ll be reading with David this Saturday at the Scranton ZineFest. The reading is at two, and the event will be held at the Tripps Park Community Center, 2000 Dorothy St. in Scranton. Here’s a list of the other readers, and I’ll post more about ZineFest mid-week.

In Honor of Dr. Angelou

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In honor of Dr. Maya Angelou and her recent passing, I wanted to post one of my favorite videos of her. This is an interview/conversation she had with Dave Chappelle from the show Iconoclasts. The conversation focuses on a number of issues, including language, race, the Black Arts Movement, hip-hop, and her family history. Enjoy.

The Space for Poetry

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Lately, I’ve been re-reading a lot of Adrienne Rich’s poetry and essays, in part because I’m working on a field exam about the intersection between personal narrative poetry and social and political issues. Beyond my research, I’ve always enjoyed Rich’s theories and poetry and teach her work when I can. There are two essays/notebook entries of Rich’s I’ve been thinking about lately, “The Space for Poetry” and “What Could We Create?,” both available in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics.

In both pieces, Rich addresses poetry’s dilemma in the U.S., namely that is not leashed to profit and consumerism, so it is pushed to the margins, given little space in public discourse. In “What Would We Create?” she states that poetry has been placed under house arrest and is irrelevant to mass entertainment culture and wealth, thus out of sight and out of mind in a hyper-capitalistic society.

In another essay/journal entry from the same collection, “Those Two Shelves, Down There,” Rich explores this idea a bit more while addressing chain bookstores and the fact poetry occupies very little space in such stores. She concludes the essay with the statement, “I’m on a search for poetry at the mall. This is not sociology, but the pursuit of an intuition about mass marketing, the so-called free market, and how suppression can take many forms-from outright banning and burning of books, to questions of who owns the presses, to patterns of distribution and availability.”

I keep thinking about Rich’s essays and journals on poetry and politics and this idea of accessibility and poetry under house arrest. I keep thinking of these essays as yet another report has surfaced that Barnes & Noble plans even more stores closures by year’s end. With the loss of the indie bookstores, thanks to Borders and Barnes & Noble, and now the loss of the chain stores, thanks to Amazon, what does that mean for the state of poetry and its accessibility? Sure, Amazon and other online stores offer countless poetry books, but don’t most people visit those sites with specific purchases already in mind? I find it quite unlikely a consumer is going to discover a poet by browsing Amazon.

There are certainly numerous poetry events happening in communities and countless reading series, but young poets only get better from reading, reading, and re-reading different poets and different traditions. As much as I’ve griped about Barnes & Nobles’ poetry selection, the closure of more stores means greater inaccessibility to poetry. What does that mean for the future of poetry? Will we continue to see the journals and magazines filled with names of recent M.F.A. and Ph.D. grads because they’re the ones most reading poetry? I don’t know, but I’m optimistic that maybe, just maybe, the loss of the chain stores will lead to the rise of more indie bookstores in communities again, run by people that stock not only the heavyweights, but also indie authors and small presses. We’ll have to wait and see how this all shakes out, and meanwhile, I’ll continue to ponder Adrienne Rich’s warnings.

 

New Reviews

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I wanted to share two new reviews of my poetry collection, All That Remains. The first review was published in the Maine-based journal Off the Cost. Initially, the review was published in print only, but the editors recently uploaded content online. The reviewer, Richard Aston, says of the collection: “All That Remains works as a maturing of Fanelli’s previously published chapbook Front Man. Now he is in a position to branch out to the larger community beyond his personal experience, both in terms of personal story and time line; that which follows from the kind of study and scholarly research that will make him an excellent teacher and writer. The future may bring modifications in form, both of the line and the work itself. Whether the future form he uses is formalist or experimentimental, a doff to poetic traditions of rhyme and meter is in order.”

The other review was published by [PANK] today and written by Tricia Fidler, who had a lot of kind words to say about the book. She writes: “Like a Dylan or Springsteen record deserves more than one spin, Brian Fanelli’s All That Remains is a book that deserves more than one read. Rich in small town culture, this collection is filled with characters that have overcome the losses in life, but it doesn’t forget those who have not. It is down-to-earth and true to those often overlooked groups, the young idealists and the rural working class. Fanelli’s lyrical rhythms whisper and howl, croon and screech, reminding us there will be repercussions for every loss. At the same time, the collection leaves us with the extraordinary hope that it seems only music can bring. For whenever the music stops and all that remains are the ghostly echoes of silence, there will always be the remnants of a song.”

Many thanks to the writers for these reviews, and if you haven’t had a chance to pick up a copy of the book, please do. I’d appreciate the support. Let me know what you think of it!