Adrienne Rich Dies
March 29th, 2012
Baltimore native Adrienne Rich, an award-winning poet whose socially conscious work influenced a generation of feminist, gay rights and anti-war activists, has died at 82. She died Tuesday at her Santa Cruz home from complications from rheumatoid arthritis.
Born in Baltimore in 1929, she had lived in Santa Cruz since the 1980s. Rich graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book of poetry, A Change of World. She published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and five collections of nonfiction. She won a National Book Award for her collection of poems Diving into the Wreck in 1974, when she read a statement written by herself and fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, "refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women." In 1997, Rich refused President Clinton's National Medal of Arts citing the administration's "cynical politics." Rich's books have sold more than 750,000 copies.
Rich (right), with Audre Lorde (left) and Meridel Le Sueur (middle), 1980
Herrera Appointed California Poet Laureate
March 22nd, 2012
Juan Felipe Herrera was appointed California Poet Laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday. Herrera, 63 and son of Mexican migrant workers, will be the first Hispanic writer to serve in the post. He holds the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair in the department of creative writing at UC Riverside. His 23 books include poetry, prose, short fiction, young adult novels and books for children. His accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA fellowships, California Arts Council grants, the UC Berkeley Regent's Fellowship, the Breadloaf Fellowship in Poetry and the Stanford Chicano Fellows Fellowship. Herrera's 2008 collection, Half of the World in Light (Arizona, 2008) won the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry.
Poems By Me Drawings By You
March 7th, 2012
Frank O’Hara and Jan Cremer:
The Amsterdam New York Set or The End of the Far West. 1963 / 1978
Load of Fun
120 W. North Ave.
Baltimore, MD
Fridays: 6 pm—11pm
Saturday: 2pm—11pm
Sundays: 2pm—5pm
Through March 11 (Note: the website says the exhibit runs through February 29, but it has been extended through this weekend.)
For three decades, Sherwin Mark, master printmaker and the proprietor of Load of Fun, a community-based gallery and venue in Station North, didn’t know anything about Frank O’Hara, despite owning a series of prints—a collaboration between O’Hara and Dutch visual artist, Jan Cremer—since 1978, which at one point he kept rolled up in a zebra pelt. Two or so years ago, he asked Michael Ball, the Baltimore-based poet and founder of the currently discontinued i.e. reading series, if he knew this O’Hara guy. Ball, ecstatic, recognized immediately the importance of the collaboration. With the help of his longtime friend and colleague, Chris Mason, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which wassecured by Ben Stone, director of the Station North Arts and Entertainment, Inc.), this obscure collection found a means to an end with its first U.S. exhibition.
The series is titled, “The Amsterdam New York Set or The End of the Far West,” as opposed to “poems by me drawings by you,” an early suggestion of O'Hara's. The series consists of ten poems by O’Hara inspired by Cremer’s prints, which clearly show a connection to Pop Art and the combines that blew up the contemporary art scene in the early 60s. Cremer’s vocabulary is limited with the use of wheels, trucks, American flags, and the occasional phallus. But these images were certainly readily recognizable to O’Hara, since his poems riff directly on the visual vocabulary, such as the following taken from the final section of “In New York We Are Having A Lot of Trouble With the World’s Fair”:
The Shakespeare Gardens in
Central Park
glisten with blood, waxen
like apple
blossoms and apples simultaneously. We are happy
here
facing the multiscreens of the IBM Pavilion.
We pay a lot for our entertainment. All right,
roll over.
The poems are blown up and overlarge. O’Hara’s penned corrections remain, as if to remind the viewer of the poems’ spontaneous origin, with only half a thought toward correct capitalizations and typos. But this is vintage O’Hara—dashing off verse, perhaps in a letter to a friend or a moment of lucidity in the whirl of a cocktail party, and then moving on to the next thing. If a cowboy film is on the television, then that’s cause enough for something like “The Green Hornet”:
I couldn’t kill a man when he was drunk
or shoot him
when he’s unarmed, could I?
You sure couldn’t, kid.
Well give me the money.
More of your funny business!
Talk fast, kid. You’ve got just one minute more. Yipe!
Turn that stage team loose.
Do you mind waiting for me
in my office? I’ve got some papers for Judge Hawkins to sign.
You might look pretty.
So Wyatt Earp wrote you a letter?
Told you a lot of things about me?
A girl wants a man
worth sticking to.
Joe Brainard, a longtime friend of O’Hara’s, recounted the writing of the above poem to Brad Gooch, author of the O’Hara biography City Poet: “We were watching a western on T.V. and he got up as tho [sic] to answer the telephone or to get a drink but instead he went over to the typewriter, leaned over it a bit, and typed for four or five minutes standing up.”
In my conversation with Mark, Ball and Mason, we hashed out anecdotes and myths surrounding O’Hara’s life. He was an epicenter, a crossroads of the New York art and poetry scene in the 50s and 60s; and he was ephemeral—here today, gone tomorrow, passionate and fleeting.
“The End of the West” doesn’t feel, ultimately, like a predetermined collaboration so much as it flows like two individuals borrowing freely from common pop cultural vocabularies. There is no guide as to what goes with what; Mark took that liberty himself, and the result is successful in its simplicity. In a brief 1959 essay on poetics, O’Hara summed up, a little pithily, the push and pull of poetry and the poet’s surroundings: “It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.” That is the essence of O’Hara’s signature “I do this, I do that” poetry, which recreates everyday life and either attaches to its objects profundity, absurdity or neither. In a 2008 New Yorker piece, Dan Chiasson wrote, "That primal cry 'Here I am!' is what every O'Hara poem implies—the long, art-starved past now behind him, the beauty of representation having replaced the stultifying air of actual life." Consider “Chicago” in full:
Death is the Dashiell Hammett idea of idiocy
but Gide agrees with it
it’s red, isn’t it?
and rough and ready?
it’s ready all right
and it isn’t over
not by a long “shot”
but there’s always the alienation of distance
at least from
detonation
“what, may I ask,
was that?”
That was the Walled City and if
anyone sees through my merchant drag
I’ll
go out tomorrow morning
with the garbage
it won’t be an explosion
I’ll be just a package
O’Hara moved easily between pop reference, significant introspection, and whimsy, and his dime-turning verse keeps the readers on their toes.
This series is, in some ways, an anticlimactic end to a long line of brilliant collaborations O’Hara executed with such renowned artists as Franz Kline and Larry Rivers. O’Hara and Kline produced “21 Etchings and Poems” in 1960, a series of diptychs pairing Kline’s abstractions and O’Hara’s poetry (reproduced in his own handwriting). In 1962, O’Hara collaborated with Harold Bluhm and created a lovely series of 26 “poem paintings,” which were collages of images and text.
From 1957 through 1960, O’Hara and Rivers created a series of lithographs titled “Stones.” The two scratched image and text directly onto the stones (backwards since reproductions would appear as mirror images), creating hodge-podge, lyrical narratives.
“The Amsterdam New York Set,” by comparison, is static. While O’Hara and Cremer exhibited a strong chemistry, as well as a platonically romantic bond typical of many of O’Hara’s relationships throughout his life, there simply wasn’t enough time during O’Hara’s dash through Europe to focus on something more in-depth. Sshortly after O’Hara brought Cremer to New York, the poet died in a tragic car accident.
These poems are neither burdened by that knowledge nor are they particularly great examples of the width and breadth of his abilities. But as with so much of his work—work that sat forgotten in typewriters and desk drawers and existed only in letters to friends—his words breathe with immediacy and nerve, all the more so through Mark’s excellent prints.
By Andrew Sargus Klein
SP Poet Noah Falck on NPR
February 15th, 2012
Poet Noah Falck was featured on NPR's 91.3 WYSO. He read a couple of poems including "Staring Contest" which appears in the next issue of Smartish Pace. Listen here. 
O'Bama Honors Dove & Ashbery
February 13th, 2012
President Obama awarded one of the nation’s highest honors for artists and scholars to an eclectic group of Americans who he said have left an “indelible mark on American culture” with their achievements. Obama presented the National Medal of Arts to poet Rita Dove and seven others including actor Al Pacino, painter/printmaker Will Barnet and artist Martin Puryear, in an East Room ceremony. He bestowed the National Humanities Medal to poet John Ashbery and eight others.
In other political/art news, President Obama’s proposed 2013 budget calls for a 5% increase in spending for three cultural grantmaking agencies (NEA, NEH & IMLS) and three Washington, D.C. arts institutions (the Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Gallery of Art). Obama aims to boost outlays from $1.501 billion to $1.576 billion.
Wislawa Szmborska Dies at 88.
February 3rd, 2012
Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, died of lung cancer on Wednesday in Krakow, Poland.
The next issue of Smartish Pace (#19, April, 2012) includes two poems about Szymborska written by Stephen Dunn.
Frank O'Hara & Jan Cremer in Baltimore
February 1st, 2012
Load of Fun Gallery (LOF/g), in collaboration with the i.e. Reading Series, hosts a silkscreen print exhibition and poetry reading. The exhibition combines silkscreen printed poems of Baltimore native Frank O’Hara, silkscreen illustrations by his associate Jan Cremer, and readings of poems and texts by O’Hara presented by the i.e. Reading Series, curated by Michael Ball and Chris Mason. The exhibition is in the newly renovated LOF/g in February, 2012, and is the first public exposure of these works in the USA. For more details please visit LOF/g.
Frank O'Hara & Jan Cremer; Amsterdam, 1963
Naomi Long Madgett Wins Kresge Eminent Artist Award
January 27th, 2012
Poet Naomi Long Madgett won the $50,000 2012 Kresge Eminent Artist Award funded by The Kresge Foundation. The award is given annually to an exceptional artist who has made a longstanding contribution to metropolitan Detroit in the literary, performing and visual arts. Kresge's press release states that the award "acknowledges Madgett's decades of commitment to originating, illuminating, and preserving poetry by African-Americans, and promoting the study and appreciation of African-American literature in schools and universities. A professor emeritus of English at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Mich., Madgett is the author of 10 books of poetry, a pair of textbooks, and the 2006 memoir, "Pilgrim Journey." She also has edited two anthologies."
Jeanne Wagner Wins Beullah Rose Poetry Prize
December 9th, 2011
Jeanne Wagner's poem "Fanlight" won the 8th Annual Beullah Rose Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Here are the complete prize results; all poems will be published in Smartish Pace, Issue 19.
First Prize: "Fanlight" by Jeanne Wagner
Second Prize: "Cognomen" by Erin Radcliffe
Third Prize: "A Girl Gets Sick of a Rose" by Amy Woolard
Finalists:
"Fables" by Patricia Davis
"White Wash" by Deborah Dolittle
"Passerine" by Erin Radcliffe
"Winter Solstice 1983" by Jeanne Wagner
Prize Judges:
Clare Banks, Associate Editor, Smartish Pace
Traci O'Dea, Associate Editor, Smartish Pace
Enter your poems in the next Beullah Rose Poetry Prize!
Alison Pelegrin Wins Erskine J. Poetry Prize
December 1st, 2011
With her poem "Pantoum of the Endless Hurricane Debris," Alison Pelegrin won the 11th Annual Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Here are the complete prize results; all poems will be published in Smartish Pace, Issue 19.
First Prize: "Pantoum of the Endless Hurricane Debris" by Alison Pelegrin
Second Prize: "Last November" by Jason Miller
Third Prize: "Button Under the Couch at 20 Maresfield Gardens" by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Finalists:
"This Poem is a Real Bitch" by Anne Barngrover
"Staring Contest" by Noah Falck
"Catharsis" by M.B. McLatchey
Prize Judges:
Stephen Reichert, Editor, Smartish Pace
Dan Todd, Senior Editor, Smartish Pace
Enter your poems in the next Erskine J. Poetry Prize!
