Grand Canyon by Lois P. Jones (Chinese) translated and read by Anna Yin

Our interview touches on Joseph Fasano's influences, his award-winning collection Fugue for Other Hands, followed by Inheritance as well as the groundbreaking Vincent, recently release by Cider Press Review. Joe's work has been deemed "inexplicable." I'd say indescribable would be more accurate. Writers, and the best of them are so profoundly moved they are at a loss for words. Here are a few who have achieved success:

Eloquent, haunting, and dangerously attuned to both the beauty and the suffering of almost everything alive, the poems in Joseph Fasano's exquisite Fugue for Other Hands suggest the poetry Young Werther might have written if Goethe had transported him into 21st-century American adulthood instead of burying him under a linden tree in fictional Wahlheim. And yet there s no mistaking these poems so distinctive in their conception, and so bold in their execution for anyone else's. I can think of very few recent books of poetry that manage to create such a vivid, wild, psychologically resonant and quite possibly unforgettable atmosphere as that of Fasano's perpetual autumn, where a "Teutonic man- / child" has "cuffed himself fast // to a balsam," where the wind is like "a scribe / in his blindness, pacing the stones of his chamber," and where October itself stands "hunched like a colt / in a suit of black leaves." Audacious, moody, surreal but never silly, wise but never pithy or pontificating, Fugue for Other Hands is like a skull-sized mushroom that appears in the forest after a rainstorm it is a logical product of the forest, and of the storm, and of time itself, but we still gasp when we behold it, and we are humbled to have it entrusted to us. --Timothy Donnelly

I have seen these poems coming for some time, but it is only now, when they are ample within my grasp, dark to my eyes and dolorous to my hearing feast and leave not plenty is the poet's desperate gospel that I have learned their active nature, how they attend in the reading: it is country-living and country-perishing that is consecrated here, where Joe Fasano traverses each threshold the way a child touches everything, with the hand of his murderer. These hinterland poems are singularly lovely, but it is in their multifold gathering that they score, that they gain their ultimate musical identity, a symphony of release the poet calls it,like Wagner and Mahler, preternaturally rich. --Richard Howard

Somewhat indescribable, as original things often are, the poems of Joseph Fasano feel hunted, gathered, built like fires, brewed like storms. Elemental and feral, Fugue for Other Hands is full of disturbing deeds and haunted rituals. At once mythic and specific, these poems are blood-stained, grief-scarred, providing their solace only from their commitment to art's depths. "Say you were the wild gift," one poem states; Fasano has such a gift, and therefore with his bare hands and torn heart makes poems worth living in. --Jeanne Marie Beaumont

_________________

Joseph Fasano is the author of three books: Vincent (2015), a book-length poem based on the 2008 killing of Tim McLean; Fugue for Other Hands (2013), winner of the Cider Press Review Book Award and Poets' Prize nominee; and Inheritance (2014), nominee for the James Laughlin Award. His poems have appeared in FIELD, The Yale Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, Boston Review, and other publications. A winner of the RATTLE Poetry Prize, he has been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors' Prize and the Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition, as well as a nominee for a Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at Manhattanville College and Columbia University. For more information, please visit www.vincentbook.com.

Joseph Fasano on Poets Cafe - June 10, 2016 - KPFK Radio

LAWRENCE GOLDSTEIN

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1943, he received a B.A. from UCLA in 1965 and a PhD from Brown University in 1970. Beginning in 1977, Goldstein was the chief editor of Michigan Quarterly Review, an academic journal featuring new writing by prominent critics, essayists, poets, and fiction writers. Goldstein stepped down as editor of Michigan Quarterly Review after its Spring 2009 issue.

Goldstein has written and/or edited several books of literary criticism (including work on romantic poetry, technology and literature, and film and literature), and published four volumes of poetry: Altamira, in 1978; The Three Gardens, in 1987; Cold Reading, in 1995; and A Room in California, in 2005.

Discussing poems about cinema in his book The American Poet at the Movies (1994), Goldstein remarks, "Poems about the movies are acts of reflection, acts of completion, asking in turn for readers willing to engage *their* unique and complex reality. What follows, then, is the first effort to undertake the journey down to the mouth of Plato's cave and speak with several generations of emerging poets about the mysterious shadows inscribed in the living body of their imagination."

Publications:

Writing Ann Arbor: A Literary Anthology (editor, University of Michigan Press, 2005); A Room in California (2005); Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry (Coeditor with Robert Chrisman, 2001); The Movies: Texts, Receptions, Exposures (coeditor with Ira Konigsberg, University of Michigan Press, 1996); Cold Reading (Copper Beech Press, 1995); The Male Body (editor, University of Michigan Press, 1994); The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History (University of Michigan Press, 1994); The Female Body (editor, University of Michigan Press, 1991); Seasonal Performances: A Michigan Quarterly Review Reader (editor, University of Michigan Press, 1991); Writers and their Craft (co-editor with Nicholas Delbanco; Wayne State University Press, 1991); The Three Gardens (Copper Beech Press, 1987); The Flying Machine and Modern Literature (Indiana University Press, 1986); The Automobile and American Culture (co-editor with D.L. Lewis; University of Michigan Press, 1983); Altamira (Abattoir Editions, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1978); Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977). Many poems, short stories, essay, and book reviews.

KPFK'S POETS CAFE - Suzanne Lummis Interviews Lawrence Goldstein

KPFK RADIO:  Poets Cafe with Ami Kaye

POETS CAFE radio broadcast of Tuesday, 11/22 @ 12:30 PM PST on KPFK radio 90.7 fm Los Angeles. 

Poets Cafe broadcasts every Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. (except for 2nd Tuesdays).

Guest: Ron Starbuck
Produced by Marlena Bond
With host Lois P. Jones

RON STARBUCK is an Episcopalian, a Poet and Writer, and author of There Is Something About Being An Episcopalian, When Angels Are Born, and Wheels Turning Inward, three rich collections of poetry following a poet’s mythic and spiritual journey that crosses easily onto the paths of many contemplative traditions.

He has been deeply engaged in an Interfaith-Buddhist-Christian dialogue for many years, and holds a lifelong interest in literature, poetry, Christian mysticism, comparative religion, theology, and various forms of contemplative practice.

He has been a contributing writer for Parabola Magazine. And has had poems and essays published in Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, an interview and poem in The Criterion: An Online International Journal in English, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, ONE from MillerWords (Feb. 2016), and Pirene's Fountain, Volume 7 Issue 15, from Glass Lyre Press (Oct. 2014). A collection of essays, poems, short stories, and audio recordings are available on the Saint Julian Press, Inc., website under Interconnections.

STARBUCK is also the Publisher-CEO of Saint Julian Press, Inc., a new literary press. Saint Julian Press as a literary and educational organization embraces a vision to create a local and worldwide community, by engaging in an artistic dialogue that promotes world peace, cultural conversations, and an interfaith awareness, appreciation, and acceptance. In our mission as a new creative imprint we hope to identify, encourage, nurture, and share transformative literature and art of both past and living masters.

While giving emerging artists, poets, and writers a place they may come home to and share their work; celebrating the enduring mystery within creation that calls us into relationship with one another. Forming an independent press to work with emerging and established writers and poets, and tendering new introductions to the world at large in the framework of an interfaith and cross cultural literary dialogue has been a long–time dream. Saint Julian Press has just released its fifteenth book of poetry, seven of those books have been published this year, in 2016.

KPFK Poets Cafe - In Coversation with Ron Starbuck

Competition judge, Liz Berry:

"From the moment I read this dark, extraordinary poem it haunted me. It’s mysterious, unsettling, blends the mythic with the real and is just so beautifully written. It’s full of emotional charge and is taut with intensity and violence. And that ending, oh my goodness that ending!"

Winner of the 2016 Bristol Poetry Prize (judged by Liz Berry) and the 2017 Lascaux Poetry Prize.  

*Lascaux Poetry Review accepts previously published works for its annual competition.

Foal

 POETS CAFE 90.7 fm host Myrenna Ogbu interviews the legendary Michael C. Ford! Grammy and Pulitizer Prize nominee Michael's catalog of approx. 26 volumes of published work include books, chapbooks, broadsides, pamphlet editions, both vinyl and compact disk spoken word recordings. His Brainpicnic Productions in association with Hen House Studios produced a poetry film documentary paying tribute to Kenneth Rexroth. Since 2007, Ion Drive Publishing has put his last five volumes into the marketplace. Michael has taught at university and his plays have been staged internationally. Currently he’s in-studio with a CD project: a carefully selected set of ten tracks which will be released with the title Fast Food Sanitarium. His most recent collection is a pamphlet edition of modern music-related poetry entitled Atonal Riff-Tunes To A Tone Deaf Borderguard. It is published by Lawn Gnome Books in Phoenix.

http://www.cinetropic.com/ford/

Lois P. Jones

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