Like Light: 25 Years Of Poetry & Prose By Bright Hill Poets & Writers
Published by Bright Hill Press, November 2017
Featured Poems: “Vertigo” and “To a Midge”
About the poems:
These two poems, representing my former life in NYC on the Hudson River and my current home in the California desert, sum up, on facing pages, the two central geographic poles of my creative life. I am grateful to Bertha Rodgers, whose trajectory from the West Coast to New York, has inversely mirrored mine, for having selected them for this impressive anthology.
About the anthology:
Spanning 25 years and over 400 pages of poetry and prose by writers who have read or performed at Bright Hill in Treadwell, NY, or were published by Bright Hill Press, this anthology celebrates a literary and arts organization inspired and sustained by the poet and visual artist, Bertha Rogers. As she states in her introduction, “My 25 years as Founding Director and Editor in Chief of Bright Hill are coming to a close. I know that I wished to build a book that shared what I have loved about this word-charmed place and the people for whom it exists—I knew that it would be rich with thought by those who daily abide in the world of imagination.”
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Entering The Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo
Published by Wavertree Press, 2011
Featured Poem: “Blues, For Bill”
About the poem:
“This poem was begun in September 1998. The previous fall, my mentor and friend, William Matthews had died suddenly. Although almost a year had passed, I was still coming to grips with the enormous hole his death left. In his collection Blues If You Want, is a poem which I have always loved, “Mood Indigo,” which draws on memories of time spent on a dairy farm in Ohio. During a residency at VCCA, the presence of cows outside my studio window made his poem very present to me, making it in turn possible for me to write my own homage to Bill under the spell and in the spirit of its lyrical mystery. When “Blues, For Bill” was finished, for the first time I felt I had done justice to him for all he had given me. Coincidentally, Ploughshares accepted this poem shortly after 9/11, when I was displaced from my home near Ground Zero. The original acceptance letter was lost in the aftermath; only because Don Lee finally reached me months later did I learn the good news, compounding the poem’s bittersweet legacy.” —Andrea Carter Brown
About the anthology:
This anthology celebrates the 40th Anniversary of The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts with previously published poems by VCCA Fellows inspired by or about their residencies on Mt. San Angelo.
Praise:
“Leaving VCCA, taking the narrow road back to the highway, [Fellows] see a sign that says “The Real World,” yet most would say that VCCA is the real world, the other being a place of confusion and discord—or maybe it’s just a bit trivial in comparison. There are over sixty poets here and they represent many countries; their names and contributor notes make it clear that VCCA has made its mark felt worldwide. VCCA is international in scope, local in feeling, and exists, for the artists, in a timeless universe. All of them are important poets; all of them are exciting and adept. Their work brings us not only the ‘real world’ but the real stuff.” —Kelly Cherry, Virginia Poet Laureate 2010-2012, author of Beholder’s Eye & 18 previous poetry collections
“This anthology is at once a work of literary merit, a celebratory offering, and an historical record of an hallowed place.”
—Margaret B. Ingraham, Editor
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Online at the VCCA’s website (link to review)
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The Waiting Room Reader: Stories to Keep You Company
Published by CavanKerry Press, 2010
Featured Poem: “The Disheveled Bed”
About the anthology:
The Waiting Room Reader was co-sponsored and co-conceived by CavanKerry and LaurelBooks’ partner, The Arnold P. Gold Foundation for Humanism in Medicine. Publisher Joan Cusack Handler and Gold Foundation President and CEO Sandra Gold observed that patients, while waiting to learn about their physical health, typically are provided only pop culture magazines—perhaps entertaining but without the solace and comfort that literature provides. The Waiting Room Reader was designed to address that need by bringing fine and accessible writing to “keep the patients company.” Here are uplifting and inspiring poems that focus on life’s gifts – everyday pleasures: love and family, food and home, work and play, dreams and the earth. This collection, originally offered only to hospitals and physicians’ waiting rooms, was received with great success and is now available to a wider audience.
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Online at CavanKerry’s website
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I Speak Of The City
Published by Columbia University Press, 2007
Featured Poem: “The Old Neighborhood”
About the anthology:
“I Speak of the City is the most extensive collection of poems ever assembled about New York. Beginning with an early piece by Jacob Steendam (from when the city was called New Amsterdam) and continuing through poems written in the aftermath of 9/11, this anthology features voices from more than a dozen countries. It includes two Nobel Prize recipients, fifteen Pulitzer Prize winners, and many other recognizable names, but it also preserves the work of long-neglected poets who celebrate the wild possibilities and colossal achievements of this epic city.”
“‘The final measure of the greatness of all people,’ wrote James Weldon Johnson, ‘is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.’ Although it provides only a sampling of the vast amount of literature about New York, I Speak of the City is a testament to the city’s spirit, preserved and newly created in the most ennobling expression of the human heart.”
—Stephen Wolf, Editor
Praise
“Other US cities have nourished their share of wonderful poets, but New York City is unique as a breeding ground and literary capital, a magnet for genius and talent. You’ll find old favorites and splendid surprises alike in Stephen Wolf’s lovingly assembled anthology. I Speak of the City is an unadulterated treat.” —David Lehman, editor of The Oxford Anthology of American Poetry
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Columbia University Press
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Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews
Published by University of Akron Press, 2005
Featured Poem: “Blues, For Bill”
About the anthology:
“Blues for Bill celebrates the life and work of the poet William Matthews through his own language, that of poetry. While poems of William Matthews are well know and remembered, this collection of poems ensures that the world will remember Bill himself: his graciousness, intelligence, knowledge, style, good humor, capacity for friendship, immense talent, and wit. The poems included were written by people who knew Bill in a variety of ways, under myriad circumstances; as friend, both old and new; as mentor and teacher; as colleague; as father. The poems are remarkable, true testaments to Bill and his art.” —The Editors (Kurt Brown, Meg Kearney, Donna Reis and Estha Weiner)
“In this volume of poems and remembrances, [Bill] is best remembered as a teacher and friend. He had a gift for both, and he trained, developed, and disciplined those gifts as if they were his precious children whose talents he could not bear to see wasted. He made friendship and teaching seem easy, as if he’d given them no more thought than he had to quitting smoking. But Bill worked hard at them. Making difficult tasks appear to have been done brilliantly almost by accident was not a point of vanity for him, but a moral principle. Making painful things seem painless, turning evident loss into apparent gain, and converting loneliness into solitude were for Bill ethically necessary.” —Russell Banks, Foreword
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Online at The University of Akron Press website (LINK TO REVIEW)
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Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets
Published by Melville House Books, 2002 (First Edition) and 2011 (Tenth Anniversary Edition)
Poems included: “The Old Neighborhood” and “Ash Wednesday, 2002”
About the poems:
“In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, some artists and writers were able to respond right away. I was not one of them. For months I wrote nothing at all. Not a word. Indeed, the very idea of writing was anathema to me. What could one say? What words could I possibly find to express my feelings, to record what I had seen? I lived a block away, was there that morning and escaped on foot; my life was changed and health compromised that day. Yet, when the “Call for Poems” for this anthology was forwarded to me by a friend six months later, I immediately set down to write. These two poems are the result. They are the only poems I wrote until a year later, when I started writing my eyewitness memoir in verse, a project which continues to grow to this day. For further information about that body of work, please see the page “September 12th” under Current Projects.
Writing these first two poems unleashed in me a delayed flood of work in response to 9/11. I am grateful to Editors Valerie Merians and Dennis Loy Johnson for their inspired idea, one which released the writer in me, and for their visually handsome volumes. Out of so much grief, beauty.” —Andrea Carter Brown
From the Foreword to the Tenth Anniversary Edition:
“Ten years later, lots of little but significant things are different about life in New York due to the 9/11 attacks . . . . But meanwhile, the big thing that this book represents, we believe, is unchanged, and perhaps deepened. That thing . . . is the spirit of New York that existed in the immediate aftermath of the horror that struck that day like lightning, and that seemed equally unexplainable.”
—Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, Editors
From the Introduction to the First Edition:
“How did it feel and what did it mean to be there, at Ground Zero? Or ambling nearby? These poems give some answers. What does it mean to be an American? I suspect that many poets have mixed feelings about America, not just now [in 2002] but permanently. I do myself . . . . But then again I am proud of my country too . . . . Our freedom as artists is staggering. Our ability to pull together as a community is fabled. How lucky we are, and we know it. As Rachel Hadas declares, “We mourn and rejoice at once.” So many ways of mourning, so many of rejoicing. The poems in this book are part of what makes me proud.” —Alicia Ostriker