Hanging Loose News

Cathy Park Hong Event

2011-11-21T17:22:00.001-05:00

Come to the Four Quartets: Variations" which is an Eliot extravaganza with poets and actors, also featuring musical detours into performance sets by The Guidonian Hand (trombone quartet) and Iktus Percussion Quartet. Created by Oni Buchanan and Jon Woodward, the poets involved are Oni Buchanan, John Woodward, Katie Ford and Cathy Park Hong (author of Translating Mo'um).
The Tank www.thetanknyc.org at 7pm on Friday, December 2nd. $15.

Carl Berg Exhibition

2011-11-21T17:16:00.001-05:00

Carl Berg (featured photographer in Hanging Loose 91) has an exhibition at the New Art Center, 580 Eighth Avenue @ 38th Street on the 5th Floor from December 1 - 23. Reception on Friday December 2, 6 - 8 PM.

Paul Violi Memorial Reading

2011-11-20T20:11:00.003-05:00

Paul Violi Memorial Reading: Friday, December 2, 6:30 PM, The New School

Celebrate the life and poetry of Paul Violi, with readings of his poems by distinguished poets, friends, and former students.

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center,
Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

Free; no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served.

Joan Larkin Wins Academy Fellowship!

2011-09-13T13:25:00.001-04:00

Joan Larkin receives Academy Fellowship 2011! Congratulations Joan! We are thrilled for you! http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22558

Readings of Sherman Alexie's Poems

2011-08-10T20:24:00.000-04:00

David Harris will read and discuss selections from The Summer of Black Widows by Sherman Alexie during the live broadcast of Difficult Listening:the Poetry Show on Sunday, January22, 2012 from 10:00 til noon Central time. The program can be heard on 107.1 LPFM in the Nashville area, and via the website www.radiofreenashville.org. Live video (and an archive) of the second hour, which includes poetry segments, should be accessible at http://tinyurl.com/24adsp9. or http://www.ustream.tv/discovery/recorded/all?broadcast=4654694

Readings of Cirelli Poems

2011-07-14T12:53:00.000-04:00

David Harris will read and discuss selections from Vacations on the Black Star Line by Michael Cirelli during the live broadcast of Difficult Listening:the Poetry Show on Sunday, March 18, 2012 from 10:00 til noon Central time. The program can be heard on 107.1 LPFM in the Nashville area, and via the website www.radiofreenashville.org. Live video (and an archive) of the second hour, which includes poetry segments, should be accessible at http://tinyurl.com/24adsp9. or http://www.ustream.tv/discovery/recorded/all?broadcast=4654694

Reading of Dialect of a Skirt

2011-07-06T19:50:00.000-04:00

David Harris will read and discuss selections from Dialect of a Skirt by Erica Miriam Fabri during the live broadcast of Difficult Listening:the Poetry Show on Sunday, April 29 , 2012 from 10:00 til noon Central time. The program can be heard on 107.1 LPFM in the Nashville area, and via the website www.radiofreenashville.org. Live video (and an archive) of the second hour, which includes poetry segments, should be accessible at http://tinyurl.com/24adsp9. or http://www.ustream.tv/discovery/recorded/all?broadcast=4654694

Mark Pawlak Publication

2011-06-10T14:51:00.002-04:00

Here is the link for an excerpt from Mark Pawlak's Denise Levertov memoir-in-progress that just appeared in the Istanbul Literary Review.

http://www.ilrmagazine.net/dsound/issue20_ds2.php

Great News for Chuck Wachtel

2011-05-25T09:49:00.002-04:00

3/03 by Chuck Wachtel was nominated for and won the Media Ecology Association's 2011 Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work. Congratulations, Chuck!

Paul Violi Memorial Reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's

2011-05-23T16:08:00.003-04:00

Memorial Reading for Paul Violi
June 13, 2011
7:00 pm
Monday

Please join us as we remember the life and work of Paul Violi. Paul wrote eleven books of poetry, including Overnight, Fracas, The Curious Builder, and Likewise, from Hanging Loose Press, and a selection of his longer poems, Breakers, from Coffee House Press. He taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and in the graduate writing program at New School University. Violi was an interim Artistic Director for The Poetry Project and a frequent featured reader and contributor the the Newsletter. With Tony Towle, Charles North, Eileen Myles, Bob Hershon, Donna Brook, David Lehman, David Shapiro, Michael Quattrone, Karen Koch, George Green, Reagan Upshaw, Ed Friedman, Amy Lawless, Allison Power, Andrew McCarron, Bill Zavatsky & Mark Statman. FREE

Paul Violi's Obituary in The New York Times

2011-04-18T10:39:00.001-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/books/paul-violi-poet-dies-at-66.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=paul%20violi&st=cse

Joan Larkin Wins The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award!

2011-04-14T16:59:00.003-04:00

We are so thrilled and proud of our author Joan Larkin who is the co-recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award. Rigoberto Gonzalez and Joan are sharing this year's award, just announced on their website at http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/awards/frost_and_shelley/shelley_winners/

The awards ceremony is on Tuesday, April 19, at 7:00 p.m. at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South. Charles Simic will be presented with the Frost Medal, and winners of other PSA awards will be announced. Admission is free, if you like ceremonies....

A Note from David Lehman about the Paul Violi Prize

2011-04-13T09:26:00.003-04:00

On behalf of Robert Polito, I write to announce that the New School Writing Program is establishing a Paul Violi Poetry Prize to be awarded annually to a poetry student in our program. Details -- who will judge, what criteria will be used etc -- will be worked out soon. This project has the blessing of Ann Violi, Paul's widow.

To fund the prize, we encourage people to contribute what they can. This is what donors need to do:

-- Make out checks to "New School Writing Program," with the words "in honor of Paul Violi" in the memo line

-- Checks should be sent to Office of Development, The New School, 79 Fifth Avenue, 17th Floor, New York, New York 10003, attention Mr. Francisco Tezén, Senior Director.

-- Contributors may wish to enclose a letter of intent, an example of which is attached. (The attachment also includes these instructions for donors.)

-- If donors prefer to make a gift by credit card, The New School has a credit card form (which can be found on the university's Web site http://www.newschool.edu/giving/ under "Ways of Giving"). There is a space to indicate a specific "Allocation of Gift."

Paul loved teaching at the New School. "Simply walking in the door made me a happy man," he said more than once.

Please spread the word. Thank you.

David

John Jones, Poet Dies

2011-02-24T17:19:00.001-05:00

We are very sad to report that our beloved author John Jones who appeared in the first issue of Hanging Loose and continued to be publish in our magazine up to the present has passed away.

October 23, 1942 - February 18, 2011

Updates to Sean Grandits Website, Cover Artist for Hanging Loose 97

2011-02-24T17:00:00.002-05:00

http://seangrandits.com/section/217363_Works_on_paper.html

Mark Statman's Book is #21 on Small Press Distribution Bestseller List!

2011-02-18T12:52:00.002-05:00

http://www.spdbooks.org/pages/bestsellers/poetry/default.aspx

Podcast of December 14th Event

2011-01-14T13:21:00.003-05:00

To listen to Sharon Mesmer, Robert Hershon, Gerald Fleming and Jack Anderson speak on prose poetry at the New York Public Library go to http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/periodically-speaking-focus-poetry?nref=90296 for the podcast.

Announcing Our 2011 Titles

2010-12-22T12:20:00.003-05:00

We are so excited that we'll be publishing the follow titles in 2011. All are poetry except Elizabeth Swados' book which is nonfiction. Stay posted as we upload book cover designs and news on how to purchase.

Jen Benka, PINKO, ISBN 978-1-934909-04-1
William Corbett, THE WHALEN POEM, 978-1-934909-13-3
Pablo Medina, THE MAN WHO WROTE ON WATER, 978-1-934909-19-5
Terence Winch, FALLING OUT OF BED IN A ROOM WITH NO FLOOR, 978-934909-22-5
Gerald Fleming, NIGHT OF PURE BREATHING, 978-1-934909-15-7
Elizabeth Swados, WAITING: SELECTED NONFICTION, 978-1-934909-21-8

The New Hanging Loose Is Out

2010-11-30T15:53:00.002-05:00

Hanging Loose 97 has arrived (November 2010) and features an art portfolio by Sean Grandits and exciting new work from Madhuri K. Akin, Indran Amirthanayagam, Stephen Beal, Jen Benka, Philip Dacey, Harley Elliott, Robert Gregory, Robert Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, Gary Lenhart, Joel Lewis, D. Nurkse, translations of Anna Maria Shua by Steven J. Stewart, David Wagoner, and many more.

Prose Poem Discussion at the New York Public Library

2010-11-29T12:46:00.000-05:00

Periodically Speaking:Focus on Poetry

The Rise of Prose Poetry

New York, NY-The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses [ clmp] and The New York Public Library present a new season of Periodically Speaking. The Periodically Speaking series provides a major venue for emerging writers to introduce their work and discuss topics designed to deepen the understanding of literature and publishing, while highlighting the richness of America's literary magazines and the magazine collections of The New York Public Library. Each event offers brief readings with in-depth discussion between an editor from one of America's great literary magazines and poets they've recently published, exploring an issue facing contemporary poetry.

Program iii

The Rise of Prose Poetry -

Tuesday, December 14th, 6 - 7:30 pm

DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, The New York Public Library,

StephenA. Schwarzman Buildingat Fifth Avenue and 42 nd Street

(Please use Fifth Avenue entrance; admittance is free)
Hanging Loose

Editor Robert Hershon in discussion with poets Sharon Mesmer, Jack Anderson, and Gerald Fleming.

Brief readings by the poets will be followed by an in-depth discussion about the controversial subject of prose poetry.

This series is made possible in part by support from the Axe-Houghton Foundation; the New York State Council for the Arts, a state agency; the new york city Department of Cultural Affairs; the National Endowment for the Arts; The New York Public Library; and Friends of [ clmp], a diverse group of individuals committed to supporting independent literary publishing.

For more information visit: www.clmp.org

Sherman Alexie Featured in World Literature Today

2010-06-25T13:49:00.002-04:00

Sherman has been featured in World Literature today in conjunction with being the recipient of the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award.

A new interview with Sherman Alexie headlines the July 2010 issue of World Literature Today, in which he talks about the pragmatics of Indian politics, the commercialization of art, engagement with his critics, Sarah Palin, and much more with characteristic humor, acumen, and abandon. Additional highlights include new verse by Syrian poet Adonis, short stories by Bernard Quiriny and Jorge Amado, an essay on soccer’s “last defender” (the goalkeeper), and an interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes.

http://www.ou.edu/worldlit

Please Read Donna Brook's article in THE NATION

2010-05-19T14:05:00.000-04:00

http://www.thenation.com/article/ten-things-you-can-do-improve-your-healthcare

John Jones Publishes a Book!

2010-05-07T13:57:00.001-04:00

A Fearful Joy: John Jones’ Selected Poems now available

When Hanging Loose magazine turned 25 years old, we decided to publish a big double issue to celebrate. We invited work from many HL regulars and made a particular effort to reach contributors to our first issue. In many cases, that wasn’t a challenge; we had never dropped out of touch with John Gill or Jack Collom or Denise Levertov. There was another group of contributors who were in that first issue and were never heard from again (by us). Among them was one John Jones.

We put out inquiries to see if we could locate any of these writers. Nothing. But months later, we got a note from John saying, “Someone told me you’ve been looking for me.” It turned out that John’s poems in HL were the last he’d published before illness laid him low. A student of Jack Gilbert’s and Thomas Merton’s, he’d been on a fast track, but now had been off the poetry scene for many years. John and I began corresponding. And then he began writing again. And we began publishing him again – most recently in HL94, over 40 years since his first appearance in the magazine.

Now John’s work is finally available in a book. A Fearful Joy: Selected Poems 1962-2006, 64 pages, shows John at his funny, sexy, lyrical Louisiana best. Give it a try.

To order: Send $15 plus $3 for shipping and handling to John Jones, The Guest House, 10145 Florida Blvd., Baton Rouge, LA 70815.

Mark Pawlak Has a New Book Out

2010-04-19T13:41:00.002-04:00

http://thelostbookshelf.com/index.html#Jeffersons%20New%20Image%20Salon

Jefferson’s New Image Salon
Matchups & Mashups
by Mark Pawlak
Červená Barva Press, 2010

Mark Pawlak is the author of five previous poetry collections of which Official Versions is the most recent. He is also the editor of numerous anthologies, including When We Were Countries, fourth in a series of the “best” poetry and prose by high school-age writers, and Present/Tense: Poets in the World, an anthology of contemporary American political poetry. His work has been translated into German, Polish, and Spanish, and has appeared widely in English in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals and in such literary magazines as New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann’s Review, and The World, among many others. He supports his poetry habit by teaching mathematics at UMass Boston, where he is director of Academic Support Programs. He lives in Cambridge.

When will we pass Raphael’s Silver Cloud Lounge and Goya Cosmetics? Do we have time for a quick stop at Unicorn Hair & Nails? Do you ever wonder what’s on the menu at the Café Magritte? Have you put in your holiday order with the butcher at Bosch’s Meat Market? Do you secretly want to sneak into Grendel’s Den or buy the latest discount item from Golem Sales? This is America, and, as Mark Pawlak makes amply evident, it just keeps getting stranger and stranger. If you are trying to get to Vampire Manor or need the phone number of Sasquatch Taxidermy, this is the only accurate guidebook available today.
—John Yau

In Jefferson’s New Image Salon, Mark Pawlak transforms a one-trick pony into a circus of surprising yokings, which on further inspection turn out to be not only surreal—Shylock’s Hair Designs, Onan Gasoline Engines—but poetic and real. The preposterous, often hilarious names of American businesses Pawlak found in doing his mixing and matching make Edsel seem a great name for an automobile.
—Charles North, author of Complete Lineups

Cover Art: “Coda,” Digital Collage by Daniel Y. Harris, www.danielyharris.com

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9844732-0-5 | 32 Pages | In Stock

Robert Hershon Blogging on Best American Poetry This Week

2010-02-18T10:42:00.001-05:00

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/hanging-loose/

Sherman Alexie's Books Top 4 out of 5 for the Decade on SPD.

2009-12-23T10:21:00.001-05:00

See link.
http://www.spdbooks.org/pages/bestsellers/poetry/poetry-bestsellers-september/Poetry-Bestsellers-Archive.aspx

Great Review of Hanging Loose Magazine in newpages

2009-12-15T10:39:00.002-05:00

http://www.newpages.com/magazinestand/litmags/

Alexie to Re-Visit Colbert Report

2009-12-01T11:20:00.002-05:00

Sherman Alexie will make a repeat visit to The Colbert Report on December 1. The show will air that night on Comedy Central and is shown again the following evening. On his first visit, last year, Sherman more than held his own—at one point, Colbert just put his head down on the table, laughing—so he (Sherman) expects Colbert to be more than ready for him this time.
http://www.colbertnation.com/home

Terence Winch's Stint as Poet-in-Residence

2009-11-05T13:53:00.003-05:00

Terence Winch, author of Boy Drinkers and That Special Place, is doing a stint as poet-in-residence for the high schools of Howard County, Maryland, during which he visits all 14 high schools in the county; he's done 6 so far and has enthusiastically promoted HL magazine (and the high school anthologies) to the students and their teachers. The Baltimore Sun did a piece on his high school visits:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/howard/bal-ho.neighbors01nov01,0,2671202.story

Mort Marcus Dies

2009-11-02T09:22:00.003-05:00

On another sad note, Mort Marcus, author of When People Could Fly, published by HL has also passed away. Here is the obituary.

Poet Morton Marcus dies at 73

By WALLACE BAINE
MediaNews
Updated: 10/29/2009 01:38:11 AM PDT

Poet Morton Marcus in his Santa Cruz home in 2006.
Morton Marcus, one of Santa Cruz's most prominent literary figures, died Wednesday at his home after a long battle with renal cancer. He was 73.
Marcus leaves a legacy of influence in at least three separate spheres. He was an internationally recognized poet, having published 10 books of poetry. He was a celebrated film critic and historian. And, for 30 years, he was a mainstay on the English Department faculty at Cabrillo College in Aptos.

A former Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year (1999), Marcus just last year published his 500-plus-page memoir "Striking Through the Masks," which served as both autobiography and re-evaluation of poets and writers of his generation. His final book of poems, "The Dark Figure in the Doorway," is slated for 2010 release.

"He was larger than life," said Santa Cruz poet Joe Stroud, who knew Marcus for more than 40 years. "Mort loved nothing more than to have a meal and to have a conversation. I think of him as a conductor almost, eating and drinking and driving the conversation this way and that. It was an unforgettable experience."

Marcus' fingerprints are everywhere in Santa Cruz literary circles. He led a free-wheeling film discussion group twice a month at the Nickelodeon, up to his last days. He was the co-host of a popular public-access TV program on film called "Cinema Scene." Until recently, he hosted KUSP's "Poetry Show." And he influenced hundreds of students over the years at Cabrillo College.

Marcus was born and raised in New York City. As he outlined in "Masks," his early life was a time of severe emotional trauma. His father left when he was 3, and Marcus was shuttled back and forth between boarding schools, between bouts of watching his mother endure abuse at the hands of a stepfather.
"He began his life in such an unpromising way, with so many strikes against him," said Mark Ong, a long-time friend and student who helped design many of Marcus' books. "It's a real testament to what was inside him that he became the man he did. I used to call him up and say, 'Why are you not insane?'"

After a youthful flirtation with boxing and a stint in the Air Force, Marcus came to California in the early 1960s, and to Santa Cruz in 1968.

"When Mort came to Santa Cruz, there was no poetry scene whatsoever," said Stroud. "He developed the reading series at Cabrillo and in various restaurants and bookstores, bringing such poets as Vasko Popa, Michael McClure and Al Young among many others."

He began publishing in the 1960s and achieved a wide readership with his volume "The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems," which, said Stroud, seemed to capture a distinct back-to-nature essence of the period.

"Mort was a master of so many different kinds of poetry. Lyric poetry, comic, cosmic, prose poetry. In fact, during the last part of his career, he really became one of the finest in the world at prose poems."

At Cabrillo, where he also served as the president of the Teacher's Union, Marcus was known as a great lecturer, and those public speaking skills carried over in his discussions at the Nickelodeon, which attracted a loyal core audience for years. He traveled widely, reading his poetry in workshops and serving as poet in residence at universities across the country.

In his later years, he wrote poetry, translated work from the Serbian poet Vasko Popa, and composed a libretto for an opera. He also helped edit a history of the Croatians in the Pajaro Valley written by his wife Donna Mekis and his sister-in-law Kathryn Mekis Miller.

"Mort was a giant, loving intellect where you could have rich, very in depth discussions about almost any subject," said longtime friend George Ow Jr. "If you wanted to discuss any movie subject, Chinese poetry over the last 3,000 years, Greek and Roman mythology, hiking paths of Greece and Crete, best places to stay in Prague or Croatia, the history of Cabrillo College, New York City baseball, the San Francisco 49ers or anything else, you would have a good time and learn a lot."

Mark Ong said that Marcus, both as a teacher and a friend, demanded excellence but recognized the difficulty in achieving it.

"He was a person of integrity and great dignity and lived what he espoused," said Ong. "(His was) a life of inquiry, a life of rigor, a life devoted to excellence."

"He was a man of incredible energy," said Stroud. "He had enormous passions and he pursued them with zeal. He lived the life of the mind, and he lived the life of the heart as well."

Albert York Dies

2009-11-02T09:10:00.002-05:00

HL is sad to announce that Albert York, cover artist for Hanging Loose 94, has died. Here is the obit from The New York Times.

Albert York, a painter of small, mysterious landscapes who shunned the art world yet had a fervent following within it, died Tuesday in Southampton, N.Y. He was 80 and lived in Water Mill, N.Y.

Roy Davis

Mr. York in 1989.

Enlarge This Image

Davis & Langdale

Albert York's “Porch Bench With Seated Figure,” around 1967.

The cause was cancer, said Cecily Langdale of Davis & Langdale, the gallery that, first as Davis Galleries and later as Davis & Long Company, has represented him since 1963.

In a 1995 New Yorker magazine profile of Mr. York, Calvin Tomkins said he was perhaps “the most highly admired unknown artist in America.” He described a shy man who avoided anyone connected to the art world, who worked slowly and who was perpetually dissatisfied with his work, prone to scraping down his wood panels and starting over.

Ms. Langdale said Mr. York usually wrapped his paintings in brown paper and mailed them to the gallery. She said that when one arrived, unannounced and “practically still wet,” she often felt that Mr. York “had to get it out of the house in order not to destroy it.”

Rarely measuring more than 12 inches on a side, Mr. York’s paintings evoke a world in which time and art seem to stand still or even move backward through history. His trees had the symmetry of those in Renaissance paintings. His images of a single cow or dog evoked the manner of Dutch or English painters. His occasional figures might be robed or turbaned as in earlier times, or accompanied by a skeleton signaling life’s brevity. He frequently zeroed in on small vases of flowers, recalling late Manet, and even went so far as to do his own rendition of Manet’s “Olympia.”

But his paintings’ geometric simplicity, flatness of form and workmanlike brushwork exuded a quiet modernity, as did their wholeness of composition and feeling. In the catalog to a 1975 York exhibition at Davis & Long, the critic and painter Fairfield Porter wrote, “Certainly part of the strong emotional appeal of these paintings” is that Mr. York “is not clever, and in no sense superior to the nature of his medium or the nature of the subject, but that he is at one with both.”

Albert Edward York was born in Detroit in 1928. His parents were not married, and he was raised by his father but lived mostly in boarding schools and foster homes while his father worked as an electroplater in the automobile industry. In his teens he lived with an aunt and uncle in Belleville, Ontario. He studied at the Ontario College of Art and then at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit; after serving in the Army during the Korean War, he moved to New York in 1952.

He studied briefly with Raphael Soyer until Mr. York’s life was taken over by odd jobs and he stopped painting altogether. Things eased in 1957, when he found a steady job as a gilder with Robert Kulicke, the innovative frame maker who died in 2007 and was also a still life painter.

Mr. York returned to painting in earnest in 1960, after four months spent in France with Virginia Mann Caldwell, whom he had met at a loft party in 1959, and her two children. They married later that year. He is survived by his wife; two stepchildren, Jonathan Caldwell of Santa Fe, N.M., and Kristin Caldwell of Carlisle, Pa.; and four step-grandchildren.

In 1962 he reluctantly showed his paintings to Mr. Kulicke, who enthusiastically recommended them to Roy Davis, Mr. Kulicke’s art school friend and business partner, whose small gallery began as a showroom for Kulicke Frames. Mr. York had his first exhibition at the Davis Galleries in 1963 and his last (at Davis & Langdale) in 2007, for a total of 16 exhibitions there. Because Mr. York worked so slowly, some paintings were exhibited repeatedly, but that seemed to fit Mr. York’s sense of time.

He painted only about 200 to 250 works in his lifetime. Most are in private collections and museums. A rare auction of his work took place after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who owned six of his paintings.

Mr. York and his family moved to the East End of Long Island in the early 1960s, and he earned money painting houses and doing rough carpentry; financial need was an important incentive to make paintings. When his mother, who he had been told was dead, reappeared in his life in the early 1970s and set up a trust fund for him, he worked even more slowly.

Mr. York had a small solo show at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., in 1993, and his paintings appeared in numerous group exhibitions, about which Mr. Davis kept him uninformed for fear he might refuse to participate. In 1989, when the critic and curator Klaus Kertess organized an exhibition of landscape paintings by Jane Freilicher, April Gornik and Mr. York at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, he did so without meeting Mr. York and was never sure if he even saw the show, since no one knew what he looked like.

Ms. Langdale said Mr. York did go to the show with her and Mr. Davis; she took a rare photograph of him on the occasion. In his New Yorker article, Mr. Tomkins wrote that after seeing his work at the Parrish, Mr. York said he was “pretty upset about what I’d been doing for these last years.”

Robert Kulicke offered an explanation in the New Yorker piece: “What Al doesn’t understand is that in art you never hit what you’re aiming at, but the difference may not be downward.”

Sherman Alexie Reading from FACE on News Hour

2009-10-23T11:42:00.002-04:00

Sherman Alexie was on News Hour on Thursday October 22nd reading poems from his new collection of poetry, Face.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment/poetry/profiles/poet_alexie.htm

Congratulations to Rackstraw Downes

2009-08-27T15:46:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Rackstraw Downes who won a 2009 MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.
http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.5458009/k.8D03/Rackstraw_Downes.htm
Rackstraw's work was featured in Hanging Loose 89.

Liz Swados and Robert Hershon on the Radio

2009-06-17T12:08:00.001-04:00

The program will be live on WBAI 99.5 FM on 6/22/09, streaming live at www.wbai.org, archived for 90 days at www.wbai.org and archived forever at www.catradiocafe.com.

News from Arnold Mesches

2009-06-17T12:05:00.002-04:00

Arnold Mesches, FBI Files, has been awarded an HONORARY DOCTORATE by the University of Florida.

Congratulations to Jen Hadfield

2009-01-20T10:08:00.000-05:00

Scottish poet Jen Hadfield, who was published in Hanging Loose 79 & 82 and in the anthology Word Jig: New Fiction from Scotland, has won the most prestigious British poetry prize, the T. S. Eliot Award. Congratulations Jen.

From the Independent

Rising Star: Jen Hadfield, poet

By Katy Guest
Friday, 16 January 2009

As the youngest winner of the T S Eliot Prize, at 30, Jen Hadfield is also a relative newcomer. The £15,000 cheque that she collected on Monday has previously been awarded to Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes – though never to Andrew Motion, the chair of this year's judges.

Announcing her win, Motion described Hadfield's poetry collection, 'Nigh-No-Place', as "a revelation; jaunty, energetic, iconoclastic – even devil-may-care". Born in Cheshire, with an English father and a Canadian mother, Hadfield studied English at Edinburgh University, where she worked with the novelist and poet Robert Allan Jamieson.

In 2002 she received a Scottish Arts Council Writer's Bursary, and in 2003 she won an Eric Gregory Award which she used to fund a year in Canada. Four years ago she moved to Shetland, a place and dialect which informs much of her poetry. A stint in a fish-packing factory to makes ends meet resulted in a poem about haddock and their "gut worms".

Sherman Alexie Is Small Press Month Posterboy

2009-01-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

We're very proud to announce Sherman Alexie is the posterboy for Small Press Month. As some of you may already know, Hanging Loose was the first to publish Alexie in our magazine and published his first book, The Business of Fancydancing. Since then he has gone on to publish many books, has made two movies and won numerous awards for his work, including the National Book Award which he won last year. He has remained loyal to Hanging Loose Press and continued to publish all his books of poetry with us, including Face which will be out in April of this year (2009). His other books The Business of Fancydancing, First Indian on the Moon, Summer of Black Widows, One Stick Song and The Business of Fancydancing: The Screenplay are all available from Hanging Loose Press. His website is www.shermanalexie.com.

Michael Cirelli Is One of the Debut Poets in Poets & Writers This Month

2008-12-17T10:33:00.000-05:00

Please check out POETS & WRITERS this month. Michael Cirelli (LOBSTER WITH OL' DIRTY BASTARD is one of the twelve debut poets.

HL Authors Receive NEA

2008-12-05T15:28:00.000-05:00

We're proud to announce Hayan Charara (ALCHEMIST'S DIARY) and Doug Goetsch (NOBODY'S HELL) are both recipients of an NEA this year.

Review of Hanging Loose 92 in HOME PLANET NEWS

2008-11-06T15:17:00.000-05:00

"Hanging Loose has been around since 1966, a long time for a small press, and it's still feisty. This 92nd issue contains 8 pages of full color art by Brenda Goodman, and its poetry covers the gamut from free verse to hip hop to haiku. Marya Rosenberg, a 2nd Liutenant in the U.S. Army, has a knockout haiku/senryu sequence. Here's one: "In his pocket/ when I press against him--the hard/ iron key to the church." Michael Cirelli deploys a souped up language out on the verbal dance floor, catching the beat on the fly, for those who like to get high and jam to a blast of mouth music. There's no dictionary yet for some of these dictions. For those interested in the Sixties--it's been 40 years since '68 folks--there's an eyewitness account, "Columbia Revolt," by Hilton Obenzinger, a participant who puts together a time capsule in prose. The Writers of High School Age section is always a feature of special interest. Look at the poems by these young women: Mariah Coley, Thea Goodrich, Emily Nagin, Bridget Hansen, Elizabeth Rosen, Hannah Zeavin. If there were a Jack Alchemy Prize for verbal skills it would go to all of the above. Educators take note. Hanging Loose Press has published three collections of High School poets. For content, format, and production values, Hanging Loose earns a shower of Brooklyn stars."

Announcing Spring 2009 Titles!

2008-10-16T14:19:00.000-04:00

POETRY

Face, Sherman Alexie. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-931236-71-3, $28. Paperback: ISBN 978-1-931236-70-6, $18. April 15, 2009. First poetry collection in nine years by the recent National Book Award winner.

The One and Only Human Galaxy, Elizabeth Swados. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-934909-08-9, $28. Paperback: ISBN 978-1-934909-07-2, $18. April 15, 2009. The first book of poetry by the celebrated composer, novelist and children’s book author.

On the Imperial Highway: New and Selected Poems, Jayne Cortez. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-931236-99-7, $28. Paperback: ISBN 978-1-931236-90-4, $18. April 29, 2009. Hard-hitting new work and previously hard-to-find early poems.

Getting Lost in a City Like This, Jack Anderson. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-931236-98-0, $28. Paperback: ISBN 978-1-931236-97-3, $18. April 29, 2008. First new book in ten years by the well-known New York poet and dance critic.

If the Delta Was the Sea, Dick Lourie. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-934909-02-7, $28. Paperback: ISBN 978-1-934909-01-0, $18. May 5, 2009. Poems of the Mississippi Delta by the author of Ghost Radio who is also a busy musician.

Complete Lineups, Charles North. Paperback: ISBN 978-1-934909-03-4, $18. May 5, 2009. The legendary baseball lineup poems together for the first time, with art by Paula North.

Circa, Hannah Zeavin. Paperback: ISBN 978-1-934909-09-6, $16. May 12, 2009. A high-energy debut by an 18-year-old Brooklyn poet. Co-published with Scholastic.

Hanging Loose 92 Review in NewPages!

2008-10-14T10:44:00.000-04:00

Here is a look at NewPage's review of Hanging Loose 92:

On Sherman Alexie's two opening poems

"Quoting a section [from Alexie] won't give him justice. Read these poems, cry (from sadness and laughter), and know that Alexie still recognizes, despite his fame, that good poetry demands attention and vulnerability to the world."

On the featured prose

"I thought Helen Elaine Lee's prose poem, 'Life Without,' extremely compelling, for she makes the reader pity prisoners without relying on false sentimentality."

On the magazine's featured high-school-age writers

"This section, along with the entire magazine, demonstrate's Hanging Loose's sincere interest in new and emerging writers."

To see the review in its entirety, please visit http://www.newpages.com/magazinestand/litmags/default.htm

Recent Publicity for New Titles

2008-08-22T14:01:00.000-04:00

WINTER JOURNEY by Tony Towle

"His style bears the hallmark of total engagement. The exciting pacing builds on unexpected projections that are sly, wry and winsome. And comely."—Brooklyn Rail
For full review:
http://brooklynrail.org/2008/02/books/poetry-roundup-2

Tony Towle in poetrydaily.com
http://poetrydaily.org/poem.php?date=13929

In Bloomsbury Review written by Regan Upshaw:
"...striking...poignant...His [Towle's] feelings are amplified in this book by the underlying awareness that his own journey is now entering winter. Through it all, Towle maintains a jaunty bleakness, as befits the recipient of 'an enriching barrage of astonishing perceptions/with which to illuminate the abyss'."

THE SPLINTERED FACE: TSUNAMI POEMS by Indran Amirtanayagam

"...Amirthanayagam's poems achieve a devastating intimacy that necessarily dissolves the separation between countries and peoples."

For full review go to: http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2008_02_012487.php

"In more ways than one...'The Splintered Face' is revelatory."—Island Newspaper, Sri Lanka

"The sheer enormity of the destruction and misery wrought by an event such as the 2004 tsunami has the potential to overwhelm art created about it. A writer could flounder in emotionalism and generalizations, ironically blunting the emotional impact of the work. But Amirthanayagam avoids these pitfalls, largely by adopting a reportorial approach, and his poems are all the more poignant for their specificity."

For full review go to: http://www.iexaminer.org/archives/?p=962

TRAPEZE DIARIES by Marie Carter

“Marie Carter…has real talent…I think we all need to keep our eyes on this imaginative, bold woman’s writing. I predict she may well have a bright literary future.”
www.curledup.com
For the full review go to:
http://curledup.com/trapezed.htm

“A young woman, quiet and overly cautious, with a literary bent, who finds herself newly transplanted from Scotland to the Naked City of New York, comes to terms with herself and the recent death of her father….Her fears and doubts have been and are very much my own, and may I dare say, perhaps yours?…A wonderful read. Highly recommended.”
—Doug Holder
For full review go to:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/search/label/Holder%20on%20Trapeze

"The Trapeze Diaries...is filled with honesty on every page...."
SPECTACLE, Winter 2008

Selected for the Foreword Magazine Book Club in April. Go to forewordmagazine.com to make a comment.

THE VIRGIN FORMICA by Sharon Memser

"During a recent visit to New York City a kind friend asked me if I had read any exciting works of poetry lately. Oh yes, I enthused, naming quite a few written by the West Coast-based poets I know best. She was astounded to hear that Sharon Mesmer's THE VIRGIN FORMICA had not made its way into my hands yet, and she rose from the Bowery bench on which we were eating lunch, to find a bookstore and to buy me a copy of the Mesmer book.

Together we found the book and on my way home I had myself a quick lesson in "Mesmerism." Part of her appeal is her wry, suggestive tone, an extraordinarily intimate instrument she handles with the precision of a surgeon.

A surrealist or at any rate fantastic element imbues the whole...her enthusiasm and her skeptic eye just sweep you off your feet. Anyway all in all, it was a highly profitable trip to New York."

Kevin Killian, excerpted review on amazon.com

Andrei Codrescu in EXQUISITE CORPSE

Sharon Mesmer, The Virgin Formica, New York: Hanging Loose Press. Allen Ginsberg called Mesmer "vivaciously modern," which we misread as "viciously modern." She is, totally. For instance: "Okay, I was loose/foundering even,/a drifting archipelago of estrogen and cigarettes/in the glow of the southern eroticc gardens." If we had only known her then!

P.J. Gallo on coldfrontmag.com

"...Mesmer's voice plainly offers a raw and often refreshing sense of uncompromised subversion along with moments of sweet nostalgia."
Full review: http://reviews.coldfrontmag.com/the-virgin-formica.html

"Prolific, Veteran, and multi-lingual poet Sharon Mesmer returns with another fine anthology of poetry with "The Virgin Formica," a collection of surreal and vividly composed poetry. Both personal and witty, her poetry is gripping and will keep you asking for more."--The Midwest Book Review

THE EVOLUTION OF A SIGH by R. Zamora Linmark

See http://www.bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/ for an interview with R. Zamora Linmark

LOBSTER WITH OL' DIRTY BASTARD by Michael Cirelli

"The poems in Lobster with Ol' Dirty Bastard stand powerfully on their own as precise and complete pieces of writing. As a collection, they weave a complex and fascinating story that is equal parts witty and poignant, and at every moment compelling."—Erica Miriam Fabri in Coldfrontmag

For full review go to: http://reviews.coldfrontmag.com/emlobster-with-ol-dirty-b.html

"Cirelli is on a gangsta lean in a baby Benz blasting old school, riding the seemingly safe daytime streets of craft-poetry, then turning down those dark alleys where the tension and bravado are thick like '...machetes in the air waves.' Cirelli definitely makes it with the Hip-hop heads with his rap culture overtones.... Lobster is an all-night convenience store of lyrical goodies with no fluff in sight. Lobster is also a consignment shop of Hip-hop history."—Mike Amado

For full review go to: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2008/05/lobster-with-ol-dirty-bastard-by_21.html

"...the use of modern street language, often edgy, always colorful, will appeal to the reader that most poetry never reaches...these pieces are built on strong images...the backbones of poetic language."--Kliatt

Yes! Sharon Nails the Fulbright Vault!

2008-08-07T12:52:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Sharon Mesmer (author of THE VIRGIN FORMICA) who just won a Fulbright and to her husband, David Borchart for publishing yet another hilarious cartoon in THE NEW YORKER!

In the NY Times

2008-07-21T16:06:00.000-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/books/review/InsideList-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin

BIG LITTLE BOOKS: America’s best-selling indie poetry book, according to Small Press Distribution, a nonprofit distributor that represents books by some 450 small publishers, is Aram Saroyan’s crafty “Complete Minimal Poems.” The list below, from the S.P.D. Web site (www.spdbooks.org), reflects sales in March and April.

1) “Complete Minimal Poems,” by Aram Saroyan (Ugly Duckling).
2) “Poeta en San Francisco,” by Barbara Jane Reyes (Tinfish).
3) “All That’s Left,” by Jack Hirschman (City Lights).
4) “You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am,” by Tao Lin (Action).
5) “The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story,” by Rusty Morrison (Ahsahta).
6) “Lobster With Ol’ Dirty Bastard,” by Michael Cirelli (Hanging Loose).
7) “The Evolution of a Sigh,” by R. Zamora Linmark (Hanging Loose).
8) “Lyric Postmodernisms,” edited by Reginald Shepherd (Counterpath).
9) “Incubation: A Space for Monsters,” by Bhanu Kapil (Leon Works).
10) “Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath,” by Benjamin S. Grossman (Ashland Poetry).

Mark Pawlak's Tribute to Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

2008-07-02T11:02:00.000-04:00

Hanging Loose editor, Mark Pawlak's tribute to HL author Wilma McDaniel can
be read in the latest issue of The Dos Passos Review.

"Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, 1918-2007: An Editors Appreciation" appears in

The Dos Passos Review
Volume 5, Number 1

$8.00 including shipping and handling from

The Dos Passos Review
Longwood University
Dept. of English
201 High Street
Farmville, VA 23909

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Awards Grant to Charles North

2008-06-05T08:17:00.000-04:00

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts is pleased to announce its 2008 Grants to Individuals. Twelve unrestricted grants of $25,000 each, a total of $300,000, are to be awarded to artists in the United States and abroad.

Poetry winner: Charles North

Joan Larkin on AfterEllen.com

2008-05-27T10:28:00.000-04:00

http://www.afterellen.com/books/2008/5/theirownwords_part1?page=0%2C3

Joan Larkin Wins Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry

2008-04-29T10:18:00.000-04:00

We're delighted to announce that Joan Larkin (author of My Body: New and Selected Poems, published by Hanging Loose Press) won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry at the 2008 Triangle Awards on April 28.

Congratulations, Joan!

Kimiko Hahn Wins PEN award

2008-04-25T16:35:00.001-04:00

The PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, established by a bequest from Hunce Voelcker, will be presented for the eighth time to an American poet whose distinguished and growing body of work to date represents a notable and accomplished presence in American literature. The poet honored by the award is one for whom the exceptional promise seen in earlier work has been fulfilled, and who continues to mature with each successive volume of poetry. The award is given in even-numbered years and carries a stipend of $5,000. This year’s judges were Kwame Dawes, Mark Doty, and Marie Howe.

This year’s honoree is Kimiko Hahn. She is the author seven books of poems, including: Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; and The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006). Hahn is a recipient of a number of fellowships and awards, including The Shelley Memorial Prize and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers’ Award. She is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA program at Queens College/CUNY.

Benefit for Jack Agueros

2008-03-04T10:16:00.000-05:00

Host: Rich Villar of Acentos Bronx Poetry Showcase
Location: Taller Boricua @ The Julia De Burgos Cultural Center
1680 Lexington Ave, El Barrio, New York, NY 10029 US
View Map |
When: Tuesday, March 18, 7:00PM
Phone: 646.283.3066 (Natalia Agueros)

Dear Friends, close, far and wide,

Kari, Marcel and I would like to invite you to join us for an evening in honor of our father Jack Agueros.

As you may know, these last years of our father's progressive Alzheimer's and the effect it has had on his writing have been difficult. We are grateful to be involved in this benefit for the treatment of his Alzheimer's so especially befitting him with an evening of poetry in el Barrio.

He has worn many hats over the years, including writing extensively on issues of immigration while working as a community activist, serving as the Director of the Museo del Barrio, writing plays, short stories and poetry dealing with the complexities of the Puerto Rican experience in America, and working to advance great Spanish-language writers such as Julia de Burgos and Jose Marti by translating their body of work for English-speaking audiences.

The evening will include poetry readings by poets Martin Espada, Rich Villar, Lidia Torres, Sandra Maria Esteves, Naomi Ayala, Aracelis Girmay, Bob Hershon, Donna Brook, Hettie Jones and the list continues to grow.

We are looking forward to this evening and hope to see you there!

iPA'LANTE!

-Natalia Agueros

Note: If you cannot make it to the fundraiser, but would still like to make a contribution toward Jack's care, you can send along a check payable to Marcel Agüeros at the following address:

Marcel Agüeros
Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory
Mail Code 5247
550 W. 120th Street
New York, NY 10027

Announcing Spring 2008 Titles!

2007-09-24T13:32:00.001-04:00

SPRING 2008 TITLES

Poetry

Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Michael Cirelli. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-931236-96-6, $26. Paperback: ISBN 978-1-931236-95-9, $16. May 2008. A first collection by the head of Urban Word, an expert on hip hop poetry.

Winter Journey, Tony Towle. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1931236-94-2, $26. Paperback: 978-1931236-93-5, $16. April 2008. “One of the New York School’s best-kept secrets... a feast.” – John Ashbery.

Opening Day, William Corbett. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1931236-87-4, $26. Paperback: ISBN 978-1931236-86-7, $16. May 2008. New poems by the noted editor and memoirist, a mainstay of the Boston poetry scene.

The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems, Indran Amirthanayagam. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1931236-83-6, $26. Paperback: ISBN 978-1931236-82-9, $16. April 2008. Compelling poems by a Sri Lankan writer, author of Elephants of Reckoning.

The Evolution of a Sigh, R. Zamora Linmark. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1931236-89-8, $26. Paperback: 978-1931236-88-1, $16. May 2008. New poems by the Honolulu-based author of Prime Time Apparitions.

The Virgin Formica, Sharon Mesmer. Hardcover: ISBN 978-1931236-92-8, $26. Paperback: ISBN 978-1931236-91-1, $16. May 2008. New poems by the author of The Empty Quarter and In Ordinary Time.

Fiction/First novels and first collections

The Trapeze Diaries, Marie Carter. Hardcover: 978-1931236-85-0, $26. Paperback: ISBN 978-1931236-84-3, $16. April 2008. A young woman’s journey, actual and emotional, from Edinburgh to New York, a story of family and trapeze artistry. By the editor of Word Jig: New Fiction from Scotland.

Review of Paul Violi's OVERNIGHT

2007-09-04T15:48:00.000-04:00

Follow the link:

http://timtim.typepad.com/exultationsdifficulties/

Excerpted Review of Joan Larkin's MY BODY in Lambda Book Report

2007-08-31T15:06:00.001-04:00

MY BODY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
Joan Larkin

Reviewer Julie R. Enszer, page 25

"While Joan Larkin's reputation as a poet extends well beyond the gay and lesbian community, her work has been published and nurtured by the small presses in the gay and lesbian community over the past thirty odd years....MY BODY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS gathers Larkin's newest poems with selections from three of her earlier books....Her new poems are expansive in the subject matter and their location in time and place, but they are grounded in the things that make poetry strong: images, new and startling observations like the consistence of a person's ashes and the excavation of significant relationships--families, caregivers, lovers, and friends.
Alone the new poems of MY BODY are bound to delight readers....
MY BODY is an important collection of Larkin's work for both lovers of poetry and devotees of lesbian literature. It is also an important reminder of hte significance of our independent presses in nurturing and developing the literary talent in LGBT communities."

Review of Hanging Loose 91 on Luna Park blogspot

2007-08-29T10:58:00.000-04:00

Follow this link for a very nice review:

http://lunaparkreview.blogspot.com/2007/08/found-in-hanging-loose-art-by-zevi-blum.html

Excerpted Review of Hettie Jones' DOING 70 in FORWARD

2007-07-11T09:49:00.000-04:00

FORWARD magazine, 6/22/07 by David Kaufman

A review of DOING 70 by Hettie Jones

"Her poetry mixes the everyday diction of William Carlos Williams with a capacious Zen openness. It tends to move swiftly from a concrete present to moments of glaring insight. Her poems usually start with mundane, very urban occurrences (getting towed, calling the plumber, meeting an acquaintance from the neighborhood in the street), only to end with expressions of unexpected joy....
Tough and sexy, they [the poems] remain committed to the upstart possibilities of the postmodern city. Jones lakcs illusion, but she is not disillusioned. That is no small thing, and may well be one of the gifts of age. She is, in the end, a mensch. It is usually mere irrelevance or pure sentimentality to talk about a poet's heart. With Hettie Jones, it becomes a form of praise."

Review of Larkin and Winch in RAIN TAXI

2007-06-26T15:20:00.000-04:00

Rain Taxi 6/07 by John Jacob

Two new books from Hanging Loose Press explore identity from very different points of view. The first, BOY DRINKERS by Terence Winch, uses narrative poems to describe his experiences growing up Irish-Catholic, much as Jim Carroll did in THE BASKETBALL DIARIES and LIVING AT THE MOVIES. Winch discusses school, church, and the vengeful ways of nuns in three sections that never stray far away from religion and his boyhood.
In the first, titular section, Winch addresses faith, values, and authority in terms of desire, celebration, and the complicated comfort offered by his religion. Winch confesses to having a phony draft card since he was fourteen, the age when he started drinking. The rest of the poem deals with the worry of his parents, who stayed up at all hours as his mother's health declined, and the home visits made by their pastor.
All five poems in the second section are about nuns, each naming a sister who affected the narrator deeply, such as the principal of his school. These witty, narrative poetics are light, brave particles of truth against which his childhood must be judged. The last section titled, "O Mary, I Could Weep for Mirth," deals with stories of his mother, his own sins, and his way of practicing his religion as best as he can.
If Winch calls to mind Jim Carroll, Joan Larkin might not feel badly to be told that she resembles Dorothy Allison. Her poems reflect very directly on the changing of her body, delving deeply into the toughness and harshness of aging. These poems are intensely felt scenes of real life, almost all of them about choices she had made as time has passed her by; she even looks into the future to see what she will be like and discovers herself, measured in brave poetics reminiscent at times of Marge Piercy or Margaret Atwood.
These highly narrative poems discuss what it means to be a woman, and how women are treated in our culture. Each is a woman, and how women are treated in our culture. Each is a measure of what we are and have become. As she says, "I think it only fair to warn you / the heart is sexless," while discussing a lesbian relationship, she seems to conclude that love is an emotion we have regardless of gender or the choices that we are faced with by society. Larkin clearly embraces those challenges, and, while Winch's poems seem to pray, Larkin's rather shout.

Stephen Beal in French!

2007-06-26T12:13:00.000-04:00

This news from Stephen Beal:

Saturday I received two copies of the French poetry journal Midi in which a poem of mine appears. It concerns the Marche de la Poesie, the 23rd thereof, which I attended in June 2005. (Pansy always attends.) Between thirty to forty poetry "vendors" -- magazines and publishers--managing individual booths in the plaza Saint Sulpice before the eponymous church. I dedicated the poem to the French poet Jean Barral, a good friend, but I didn't know till Saturday that he'd translated the poem for Midi.

Marché de la Poésie
Paris, Place Saint Sulpice
23 – 26 Juin, 2005

for Jean Barral

C’est poétique! I cry to a woman whose flowered summer skirt has blown up
to disclose her dark red panties.
My, it’s been hot in Paris these past three days, and now comes the storm that we’ve been hoping for—on the first day of the poetry market, at five in the afternoon—and it sends publishers and poets and editors scurrying for cover into their booths, covering their wares and rolling down their awnings.
A big striped umbrella takes off for Saint Sulpice, and I follow, arriving in the portico among wet poétiques and surprised homeless, then retreating into the cavern of the church while the thunder thunders and the rain rains and my heart pounds with joy—
joy for the poetry, joy for the storm, joy for the church, joy for God above, joy for the broken heat, extinguished like the devil on this day of summer days.

Review of DOING 70 by Hettie Jones in Commonweal

2007-06-18T14:13:00.000-04:00

COMMONWEAL, June 15, 2007 by Marie Ponsot

Try Hettie Jones, too. Her DOING 70 (Hanging Loose Press, $15, 92 pp.) is light and profound. She celebrates being a grown-up grandmother at seventy, with the young vigor of her lively mind. "To exist," she reminds us, "is to stand forth." You may recall her from her wonderful best-selling memoir, HOW I BECAME HETTIE JONES. These tuneful poems are equally centered and engaged. She gives us ourselves, in our middle estate on middle earth, dealing with our stuff and nonsense (cars, clothes, scaffolded city streets, high skies, books, toolboxes), and learning from each other to do the best we can. I know of no other poet's voice so at ease in welcoming the fact that we are all people of color, "looking / for bread but asking / for roses."

Forthcoming Reviews on Winch and Violi

2007-06-13T09:20:00.000-04:00

BOOKLIST

Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof
Issue: July 1, 2007
Boy Drinkers.
Winch, Terence (Author)
Jul 2007. 96 p. Hanging Loose, hardcover, $25.00. (9781931236812). Hanging Loose, paperback,$15.00. (9781931236805). 811.

Poetry doesn’t get much more plainspoken than Boy Drinkers, Winch’s nostalgic new collection about growing up in Irish Catholic New York in the 1950s and 1960s. There is no rhythm, rhyme, or poetic diction of any kind in most of these pieces, and yet they pack the undeniable punch of memories dragged up and, if not quite shaped, at least pried away from whatever might have obscured them from view. There is a parade of priests—kindly or drunken, athletic or preening, indifferent or cruel—including the cringe-inducing Cardinal Spellman, who “waltzed with/J. Edgar Hoover and built monuments to himself,” and the spellbinding Bishop Sheen, whose “piercing eyes won the hearts of all the Irish girls/and his ratings that year even beat out Milton Berle’s.” That last couplet hints at the Larkinesque prankster that Winch should aspire to be more often. As he is, hilariously, in “Prayer to St. Patrick,” a plea for a ban on professional Irishness: “Dear saint of our isle, we’d like to send ya/an urgent plea to abolish Enya.”
— Kevin Nance

Plymouth Magazine, fall 2007

Overnight
by Paul Violi
Pub. Hanging Loose Press, 2007,
Brooklyn, NY 11217-2208

A new collection of poetry by Paul Violi is something to look forward to with relish. His work is always erudite, yet never dull or predictable, invariably full of the sort of surprises you can never see coming, and at the same time wonderfully entertaining and witty. His use of the colloquial is essentially graceful, artful but not ‘arty’, inducing laughter – sometimes out loud and manic – but usually provoking thoughtful consideration in the aftermath. He’s been my favourite contemporary American poet for some time now and this book was simply a joy to read.

The range of the material is wide and his ability to ‘mix genres’ is both accomplished and often hilarious. Take ‘House of Xerxes’, for example, which in its fusing of cinematic technique and classical background, reminds me of his extremely funny rewrite of the French Revolution-as film-score, ‘King Nasty’, which appeared in an earlier collection. I’m not quite sure when ‘…Xerxes’ was written, but it surely can’t be a coincidence that this book came out at around the same time as the film ‘300’, which dealt with the mythic subject of Spartan defiance in the face of overwhelming odds at the battle of Thermopylae. The received wisdom of the aftermath of this battle, of course, states that this was a vital defence of Greek democracy and this inheritance is deeply entrenched in Western thought. Given recent events in the middle-east there’s a certain absurdity in Miller’s graphic homage to military heroism, but Violi’s poem concentrates much more on the visual excess of the military spectacle, and its mix of camp humour and pithy, clipped language is eloquent and entertaining. I can’t believe that Violi hadn’t seen the film before writing this but I may be wrong:

Here come those splendid Persians!
We were expecting fireworks
And here they are!
Short bows, long arrows, iron breastplates-
Nice fish-scale pattern on those breastplates.
Just the right beach touch, very decky.
Quivers dangling under wicker-worky shields,
A casual touch, that.
And those floppy felt caps
Make it all very wearable, very sporty.
Huge amounts of gold,
A killer-look feel
But it still says A Day at the Shore.

This is simply hilarious and ‘echoes’ the films’ insistence on foregrounding the costume design as theatrical spectacle. One of the final shots in the movie depicts the dead Spartans, resplendent in red and gold, tastefully covered with arrows (no arrows anywhere near the naughty bits), mini-tunics displaying muscles and gym-enhanced oiled bodies, slightly eroticised in their heroic death-throes.

The opening poem, ‘Appeal to the Grammarians’, plays with the registers of language in a manner which fuses an easy-going erudition (Violi makes it all look so simple!) with a shock-value ending, more abrupt-halt than the expected bathos! I can just hear him read this piece and hear myself begin to chuckle well before the mood is suddenly seized by something more wrenchingly down to earth!:

We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we’re capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity. …………..

For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it. …………….

But mainly because I need it--here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-age couple
Come strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, “See, that’s why
I don’t like to eat outside.”

Violi is simply brilliant at conjuring this sort of drama out of the domestic or street life he observes and experiences. Sometimes, as in ‘As I was Telling Dave and Alex Kelley’, the ‘humour’ is much grimmer, as the narrative skips from the improbable and absurd to the tragic yet unbelievable. The protagonist in this story (real or imagined – either Violi has a life filled with drama and strange incidents or he has a great imagination – possibly both are true!) comes between two glamorous women fighting in a restaurant, only to discover that they are in fact acting – It was a supper club theatre. The real point of the story however, turns out to centre around – A man who, more than most, feared heights – climbing a ladder and then being hauled off down the road to his death by his wife driving off in their car. His children had, apparently, been using a rope (attached to both ladder and car) in an attempt to steady the ladder. The telling of this story combines bathos with a real sense of tragedy yet you are never quite sure whether this was something that might actually have happened or not!

Violi also has a more lyric, melancholy side, which infuses his writing with succinct, descriptive depth. In ‘Light Rain Falling on Deep Snow’ the ‘I’ of the poem is interrupted by a distant murmur while reading a book in bed. The description of this interruption and its mood-enhancing after-effect is wonderfully conveyed and reminds me of John Freeman, a writer who otherwise I wouldn’t have considered as being at all similar to Violi. The fact that Violi can evoke this mood within the reader – the effect feels genuine to me, not something I could say of every lyricist – and then shift gear into something more akin to satire or the foregrounding of wordplay is an indication of a serious talent, I think.

There are plenty of examples of the latter, as with ‘In Khlebnikov’s Aviary’, where the effect is more akin to a sort-of restrained version of a Bob Cobbing sound poem:

O you Cacklers, cackle away!
O Cacklers and Cacklettes,
Cackle cackle cackle!

This shifts gradually into the more unpronounceable and tongue-twisting variety of poem which nevertheless retains its subject and never quite loses control. I’d love to hear him read this one out loud! In ‘Counterman’, the starting point for the poem is a series of conversations between a street food-vendor and his various customers. We start off with brevity:

What’ll it be?

Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

Whaddaya want on it?

A swipe of mayo.
Pepper but no salt.

You got it. Roast beef on rye.
You want lettuce on that?

No. Just tomato and mayo.

Tomato and mayo. You got it.
…..Salt and pepper?

No salt, just a little pepper.

You got it. No salt.
You want tomato.

Yes. Tomato. No lettuce…………………

This continues and becomes a staccato exchange which has the feel of a ‘worked upon’ found poem. The next customer is more demanding and the language gets classical and clever. This is Violi in full flow:

….The lettuce splayed, if you will,
In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
In a multi-foil arrangement
That eschews Bragadonian pretensions
Or any idea of divine geometric projection
For that matter, but simply provides
A setting for the tomato
To form a medallion with a dab
Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
And--eclectic as this may sound—
If the mayonnaise can also be applied
Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
And as a festoon below the medallion,
That would be swell.

You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

You got it.
Next!

I can imagine that there are places in New York where you could have that kind of conversation without the least sense of pretension or hard business reality getting in the way but perhaps I’m just about to awake from a Violi-induced daydream. I did say he was my favourite living American poet, didn’t I? This is a fantastic collection which contains depth as well as surface, will make you think, laugh and, hopefully, fall in love with the intoxication of his words. Fantastic.

Steve Spence

Article on Paul Violi in Jacket Magazine
http://jacketmagazine.com/33/quattrone-violi.shtml

Paul Violi in Jacket Magazine

2007-05-31T12:09:00.000-04:00

Click this link for an extensive article on Paul Violi in Jacket Magazine.

http://jacketmagazine.com/33/quattrone-violi.shtml

Reviews of Our New Titles!

2007-05-21T11:42:00.001-04:00

Booklist Review, May 2nd
Jones, Hettie. Doing 70. May 2007. 96p. Hanging Loose, $25 (9781931236737); paper, $15 (9781931236720). 811.

Readers will instantly know that Jones is committed to being fully present in the world. That’s why she writes with such engaged interest about what we know well—everyday life. Whether presenting New York scenes with delightfully quirky insight, offering biting but brief political commentary, or lightly cloaking compact observations on the state of the world in simple words with sharp wit, Jones reveals the wisdom of someone who has really thought about life. Yet, her greatest gift, which will make readers wish they could befriend her, is the way she sympathetically connects with strangers, observing in the same way as a concerned friend carefully listens. From an actor neighbor she chats with to the young tow truck driver with whom she shares a long ride, she treasures fleeting life moments, though she never over dramatizes them or exaggerates their impact. With such groundedness and life gusto, it is easy to see why Jones’s poem “Ready or Not” states, “I think I won’t ever be ready/never ready, never/ enough already.” —Janet St. John

Los Angeles Times Review, April 15th

Larkin, Joan My Body: New and Selected Poems, May 2007 76p. Hanging Loose $16 (9781236744) $26(9781931236751) hardcover

For nearly 40 years, Joan Larkin has written poems that stake out a territory of relentless self-examination, taking on love and death, family and sexuality in a voice that is unsentimental, ruthless and clear-eyed.... My Body: New and Selected Poems gathers generous samplings from Larkin’s three previous collections, as well as a substantial array of new material. It’s a remarkable statement, tracing the evolution of a poet from her earliest efforts(“My mother gave me a bitter tongue. / My father gave me a turned back,” she begins “Rhyme of My Inheritance”) to the stunning sweep and simplicity of her current work.

“I’m older than my father when he turned/ bright gold and left his body with its used-up liver/ in the Faulkner Hospital, Jamaica Plain,” Larkin writes in “Afterlife.”

Best of all is the transcendent “Blackout Sonnets,” a sonnet crown (seven linked sonnets, joined by repeating first and last lines), which originally appeared in her 1986 book, “ A Long Sound.” “I drank anything and slept with everyone,” she acknowledges, “ kept my mouth shut about the abortion.”

This poetry without pity, in which despair leads not to degradation but to a kind of grace. –David L.Ulin

The Phoenix Review, April 10th

Violi, Paul. Overnight, May 2007 77p. Hanging Loose $15 (9781931236782)paper $25(9781931236799)hardcover.

Poetry magazine has used some of its Lily bequest to endow a prize for humor in poetry, which Billy Collins won. (If Henny Youngman said that, you might laugh. No one had to look very far to find him.) perhaps the next time Poetry awards the prize they will look far enough to find Paul Violi, whose new book, Overnight should win every prize for humor in poetry on the basis of two poems: “As I was Telling Dave and Alex Kelly” and “Counterman.” There is nothing light about Violi’s verse; his subject is the rich vitality of language his nose so keen and ear so sharp that he finds it in places like Islip, New York, and when order a “roast beef on rye, tomato and mayo.” Violi’s poems are fearless- humor courts failure at every turn-and beautifully constructed. He is one of a handful of American poets worth making a detour to hear read aloud. – William Corbett

The Phoenix Review, April 10th

North, Charles. Cadenza May 2007 76p Hanging Loose $15 (9781931236768)paper $25 (191236775)hardcover.

Charles North’s Cadenza continues his pursuit of what poetry can be. His poems are improbable and wholehearted engagements of a man’s imagination with life and language, which, here, are presented as harmonious entities. While North adeptly commands life-giving language in an eight-line poem like “My Ship Has Sails,” he is equally as adventurous with longer works like “Cadenza” and “Boul’ Mich. His work displays a particular ability to turn on a dime, yet also allows a beautiful poem such as “Romantic Note” to remain that. There’s nothing fussy or experimental here, just freestanding poems of original and exhilarating character, devoid of overbearing description.

- William Corbett

Newark Star-:Ledger, April 22nd

Winch, Terence. Boy Drinkers May 2007 76p Hanging Loose $15 (1931236805) paperback $25 (9781931236812)hardcover

Terence Winch is a poet and a founding member of Celtic Thunder, the storied Irish music group. “Boy Drinkers,” his mesmerizing new collection of autobiographical poems on growing up Irish-American in the Bronx, will be published next month by Hanging Loose Press. Winch spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his office in Washington DC.

Q. What have you been reading?

My best friend is the poet and actor Michael Lally, who is originally from South Orange and lives in Maplewood. He has about 25 books out. He has written on of the great antiwar poems of our time called “March 18th, 2003,” that he wrote just before the Iraq War started. He’s an incredible writer. The poem has come out in several editions here and in Europe. It is a very prescient poem.

I read Alice McDermott’s “After This.” The book is wonderful. She can create a scene, a mood and an atmosphere unlike almost anyone else out there. It’s a very evocative novel.

I loved Richard Ford’s “The Lay of the Land.” I like Ford a lot. He’s a virtuoso writer. His writing has such a high energy and such humor built into it. You know you are righ tin the middle of American when you are reading his books.

I’m reading John Ashbery’s new book of poems right now, “A Wordly Country.” he has a wonderful ear for the way people speak. I’ve admired his work since the early 1970s. He’s about 80 now, but he has been publishing a new book every 18 months for the last 10 years. Asbhery’s known as a “difficult” writers, but if you get on his wavelength, it’s a great, great ride.

Finally, I’ve been reading Sam Harris’ “ Letter to a Christian Nation/” It is an extended essay that is a wonderful attack on religion. Ninety percent of Americans believe in God, yet we do so many evil things in the world. Harris examines what being a Christian nation means. – Dylan Foley

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel Obituary

2007-04-23T14:22:00.000-04:00

We are very sad to report the loss of one of our beloved authors Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Her obituary recently appeared in the LA Times.

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, 88; prolific poet wrote of Dust Bowl migrants in Central California
By Valerie J. Nelson, Times Staff Writer
April 20, 2007

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, "the Okie poet" with the down-home style whose writings reflected the lives of her brethren, Dust Bowl migrants who came to Central California during the Great Depression, has died. She was 88.

McDaniel, who also was the poet laureate of Tulare, Calif., died April 13 of complications related to old age at a Tulare rest home, said her friend Katherine Andes.

"We are not going to see her like again," Gerald Haslam, who has written many books about California, told The Times. "She was the California Walt Whitman — she took plain language and turned it into something magical."

gravy says a lot

about us people

who invoke

the southern fried …

… the way it stretches out

the dreams

from payday till

tomorrow

— From "gravy says a lot"

The poem resulted in a nickname — "the biscuits and gravy poet" — that McDaniel never much cared for. A Fresno Bee book editor bestowed it in the 1970s and it stuck, a salute to her ability to spin everyday experiences into folk wisdom.

"I always thought she was one of the best poets we had," Robert Peters, an accomplished Huntington Beach poet, told The Times. "There was terrific honesty in her work and sheer brilliance in the lyricism of her writing."

Her "homespun poetry with a bite" may not have received the recognition it deserved because McDaniel "didn't play poetry politics," Peters said. "She mostly was off by herself writing wonderfully."

As a young girl, McDaniel scratched out poems on grain sacks or scraps of paper, a habit that stayed with her throughout her life.

In 1936, her sharecropper family was among the thousands to escape the dust storms and hard times in Oklahoma, arriving at a relative's ranch in Livingston, Calif., in the middle of a rainstorm.

The family stayed for four years, then followed the crops around the state.

From the outset, she saw the unfolding landscape "with the personality and mind of a poet," McDaniel told the Modesto Bee in 1996.

"I saw the magic along those sandy vineyard rows and orchards, even while doing hot, dirty work, which is the way we had to earn our clothes," she recalled.

She was in her 50s before she was published, discovered by a Tulare Advance-Register editor after she walked into the newspaper offices with a shoebox of her work. Eventually, she produced more than 25 books of poetry, and "never lost touch with the blue-collar life of which she wrote," said Haslam, who taught writing at Sonoma State for 30 years.

A poem about a ghostly reunion with her father was one of McDaniel's favorites:

He doesn't come to me on

Sundays in his good serge suit….

But put me in a Saturday town

of khaki men with Southwest

faces and rich slow tongues

And he will blow around the

corner

on a Prince Albert wind….

— From "Apparitions of

My Father, 1887-1946"

She wrote of a teen's newfound hope in "Picking Grapes 1937" and of the early deaths of too many brothers in "Roster."

"Pies" recalls her mother's mulberry pies as the only thing to bring "a crinkle of hope" around her unemployed father's eyes.

A prolific writer with a spare style, she turned out a poem a day for decades. Some reflected her deep religious convictions.

Her poems were peopled with men named Bobby Gene, Orville and Lester and dealt with the struggles of poverty, the fear of children uprooted, the smells of packing sheds and of Fresno's cotton-picking past.

Born in 1918 in Stroud, Okla., she was the fourth of eight children of Ben and Anna McDaniel.

She never married, and is survived by a brother, Roy.

Educated in a two-room schoolhouse, McDaniel dropped out of high school and later earned her diploma. She had worked as a maid and on farms in fruit-cutting sheds and alfalfa fields.

She was fun to be around, and humor showed up in her work, said Haslam, who saw country singer Buck Owens read her "K-Mart Sage" poem at a Bakersfield concert because McDaniel was in the audience.

… us men don't have to

look no certain way

like a woman does …

you take Buck Owens

why he looks just right

if you put that face on

a woman

they'd run her out of town

Owens' band and the audience went crazy with laughter, Haslam said.

"She didn't know Buck personally, but she knew exactly where he came from," Haslam said. "She could see the beauty and importance of the ordinary in a way very few writers can. That was her great gift."

2004-09-09T11:43:00.000-04:00

Hanging Loose Press

Ron Schreiber's Obituary in the Boston Globe

2004-08-31T16:00:00.000-04:00

This obituary for Ron Schreiber appeared in The Boston Globe on 8/31/04

Ron Schreiber; was poet, editor, English professor
By Tom Long, Globe Staff
August 31, 2004

Ron Schreiber was as direct and accessible as the poetry he wrote. ''His poems had great lucidity, integrity, and simplicity," said Linda Dittmar, a fellow English professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

And the work was very much like the man.

''He was very approachable and nonjudgmental," she said.

Mr. Schreiber, 70, who published several poetry collections in addition to teaching at UMass for more than three decades, died of pancreatic cancer Aug. 22 at his Cambridge home.

His most poignant work, published in 1988, was his final collection, ''John: Poems," a memoir about the slow death of his longtime companion John MacDonald, who died in 1986 from complications of AIDS.

''He once told me, 'This wasn't the plan,' " Dick Lourie of Cambridge said Friday. ''You see, he was about 10 or 15 years older than John. He said, 'I thought I would get old and John would care for me.' "

''John was really the love of his life," said Lourie, ''and much like many widows and widowers, Ron remained single -- though not solitary -- for the rest of his life."

An only child, Mr. Schreiber was born in Chicago and grew up in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated from Wesleyan University and served in the Army from 1955 to 1957. After his military service he moved to New York City, where he earned a doctorate in English at Columbia University.

He joined the faculty at UMass-Boston in 1967, shortly after the school was established in Park Square. ''He came out as a gay man before he came up for tenure," said Dittmar. ''He said, 'If they want me, they should want me as I am.' "

Mr. Schreiber, who retired a few years ago, did get tenure. He taught a survey course on the homosexual in Western literature, beginning in 1973. It was among the first courses of its kind.

''He was a very political, outspoken gay man, but he was never a separatist," said Lourie, who co-edited the literary journal Hanging Loose with Mr. Schreiber. ''He had as many straight friends as gay friends."

Mr. Schreiber belonged to a local men's consciousness-raising group for more than 20 years. ''He was the only admittedly gay man in the group," Lourie said.

Mr. Schreiber was a member of the Gay Liberation Front, which founded Fag Rag magazine. In 1963, he cofounded the literary publishing house and magazine that became Hanging Loose. The group has published more than 80 issues and many collections of poetry.

When the magazine's four-member editorial board met over a kitchen table to read and criticize submissions, Mr. Schreiber would argue passionately for poems he thought should be included. He was also the bookkeeper for the journal. The basement of his Cambridge home is filled with stacks of journals and books that didn't sell.

''He was a rebel with integrity, who was always challenging assumptions," said Dittmar. ''He was the man who was always pointing out that the emperor wore no clothes."

She described him as ''a man who was generous with his money and generous with his heart."

When he was younger, she said, ''he had curly hair and a big smile, like the Greek god Pan. And, like Pan, he was always playful. That playfulness never left him."

A tall man who often had a mustache and whose hair sometimes flowed to his shoulders, Mr. Schreiber had a summer house on Cape Cod, where he was once cited for indecent exposure on a nude beach in Truro.

When he had his day in court, he argued that the National Park ranger who cited him was too far away to determine if he was really nude. Mr. Schreiber's attorney brandished what Lourie called a ''nude-colored" bathing suit and successfully argued that the ranger could not be sure Mr. Schreiber was not wearing it.

Mr. Schreiber was never at a loss for words and was no stranger to confronting death.

''We cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over our heads but we can refuse to let them build nests in our hair," he wrote in his poem, ''The Birds of Sorrow."

Mr. Schreiber leaves a stepson, Juan J. Rios of Cambridge.

A memorial service is being planned.

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Ron Schreiber

2004-08-25T09:37:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends,

Ron Schreiber, co-founder and co-editor of Hanging Loose Press, poet, anthologist, and gay activist, died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last night. He was seventy years old. The cause of death was pancreatic cancer.

Ron's long history in small press began with the co-founding of Things, a letterpress journal that published from 1963 to 1966. When Things went broke, it was succeeded that same year by Hanging Loose, an inexpensive mimeograph production with unbound pages in a cover envelope. The magazine has published regularly ever since. When the press turned to book publication, in 1972, its first title was Ron's first collection, Living Space. Other titles followed from such presses as Calamus Books and Alice James Books (of which he was a co-founder, but active only in an advisory role afterward). His last book, John, was published by Hanging Loose. Ron edited the influential 31 New American Poets and co-edited many anthologies from HL.

A native of Ohio, Ron was a graduate of Wesleyan University and earned his doctorate at Columbia. He was an original faculty member of the University of Massachusetts Boston when it opened in the late Sixties, rising to full professor and serving a term as chair of the English Department before his retirement a few years ago. He was proud to have been a very early advocate for and practitioner of the teaching of gay literature.

Ron's taste, knowledge and frequently unpredictable enthusiasms were major contributions to Hanging Loose Press's long life He often shunned more public roles to concentrate on less glamorous, but absolutely crucial, administrative and editorial tasks. The press will continue as before and Ron's legacy will be evident.

He is survived by his stepson, Juan Rios.

Robert Hershon
Dick Lourie
Mark Pawlak

Hanging Loose News for Fall 2004

2004-08-17T13:09:00.000-04:00

Mark Pawlak will be reading at the following venues from PRESENT/TENSE, the 2004 anthology of contemporary political poetry he edited:

Newtonville Books, Sept. 14 at 7:00PM, 296 Walnut Street, Newtonville, Mass. (with anthology contributor Dick Lourie)

Food for Thought Books, October 3rd at 2:00PM, 106 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, Mass. (with anthology contributors Martin Espada & Dick Lourie).

*
A selection of poem translations from the 2004 HL book DEVOURED BY THE MOON, selected poems of the Spanish poet Rafael Perez Estrada are featured on Poetry Daily (www.poems.com) for August 17, 2004

*
A rave review of 2004 HL title THAT SPECIAL PLACE: NEW WORLD IRISH STORIES by Terence Winch appeared in August issue of the Irish Echo newspaper.

*
SHOOTING THE RAT, the anthology of outstanding poetry and prose by high school writers, edited by Mark Pawlak (HL 2003), was names a Top-40 young adult non-fiction books for 2003 by the Association of Pennsylvania School Librarians.

*

Hanging Loose 85 will appear in October 2004 with new work by Edward Field, Joanna Fuhrman, Robert Gregory, Cathy Park Hong, Morton Marcus, Terry Stokes, Ira Sukrungruang, Patricia Traxler, Robert Terashima, Paul Violi, David Wagoner, and Sarah White, among others.
*

New HL books slated for publication in 2005 include:

A first book (poems) ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT RESCUE by M.L. Smoker, an Assiniboine/Sioux writer from the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana.

A first book (poems) PRIME TIME APPARITIONS by R. Zamora Linmark, a Filipino poet and novelist.

A first book (poems) BLUE COLLAR HOLIDAY by New York poet Jeni Olin, with original drawings and paintings by Larry Rivers.

Kentucky poet Robert Gregory's 4th poetry collection, THE BEAUTIFUL CITY OF WEEDS

New York writer Sharon Mesmer's second collection of stories entitled IN ORDINARY TIME