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February 6, 2008

         Readings…

                     Wednesday, February 6, 2008, 7:30pm Reception to follow

                                   Co-Hosted with Harvard Advocate

                    Harvard Advocate, 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA

A reading with contributors to Flim Forum Press anthology, A Sing Economy:

                                              Kate Schapira

                                             Jennifer Karmin

                                               Jaye Bartell

                                                  Laura Sims

                                                 Adam Golaski

                                                  John Cotter

                                                 Matthew Klane

                                                   Deborah Poe



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September 2007

September 20-23, 2007

Christopher Okigbo International Conference

Hosted by Harvard University, University of Massachusetts, Wellesley College, in association with Christopher Okigbo Foundation of Brussels, Belgium and the Grolier Poetry Book Shop

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Highlights of Events:

Thursday, September 20

8:00-9:30pm at U.Mass, Faculty Lounge, 11th floor , Healy Library, 100 Morrissey Boulevard

Dinner and Poetry Fest

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Friday, September 21

9:30am -12:30pm at Harvard University, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street., Thompson Room.

Christopher Okigbo:Arms and the Poet

Chair: Henry Louis Gates

Keynote Address: Wole Soyinka

Christopher Okigbo and His Time

Chair: Michael J.C. Echeruo

Keynote Address: Chinua Achebe

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Saturday, September 22

4:10-5:10 A Comparative Examination of the Political Poetry of Christopher Okigbo and Ezra Pound

Presenter: Ifeanyi Menkiti

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About Christopher Okigbo

     It is perhaps not too much to say that Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967) was by far the greatest postcolonial, modernist, African poet of the twentieth-century. Born on August 16, 1932 to a prominent Igbo Roman Catholic family in Ojoto, Nigeria and educated at the Government College Umuahia and later at the University College Ibadan where he majored in Greek and Latin Classics, he began in translating poetry from Latin into English and visa versa. Within the ten year period between the composition, in 1957, of his earliest published poem, “Song of the Forest” and his death in August 1967 while fighting as a field-commissioned Major on the Biafran side of the Nigerian-Biafran war, he established himself as a commanding force, not only in modern Africa poetics, but in world literature at large. Today he is widely recognized as one of the exemplars par excellence of global or transnational modernism.

     Okigbo’s claim to greatness rests on five main factors, namely: his all-inclusive multicultural sensibility; his mythopoetic imagination; his infusion of ritual seriousness into the praxis of his poetry; his masterly fusion of a wide diversity of poetic modes from traditions across the world; and above all, his all-encompassing vision of reality–the phenomenal and the imaginative–in the fortunes of his poet-hero, the Prodigal, through whose “burden” and “Journey” of “several centuries” he has constructed a complex “fable of man’s perennial quest for fulfillment”, in cycles of poems which, “though written and published separately are organically related.”

     Running through –and unifying– all the dimensions of his poetry is his overriding concern with the ideals of the open society–decolonization of the mind, cultural freedom, human rights, and civil liberties, security of life and property guaranteed by the rule of law.

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Saturday, October 6, 7:00 pm   Allforme poems by Brian Sheridan,

                                                             read by Kelly Sheridan

On Brian Sheridan’s Poetry by Ifeanyi Menkiti

The poems of Brian Sheridan display a vibrant quality that takes its surge from an admirable combination of irreverent humor, defiant sorrow, and graceful tenderness. They address many different human situations, which young and old alike face on life’s journey; and they show a young poet wise beyond his years. And whether it is the spirit of poetry that brought him to his wisdom or wisdom he fetched elsewhere that brought him to the poetry, we cannot answer; nor do we have to. All we know is that despite the agony of the years immediately preceding his death, his poems continued to sing, proud and insistent, as if saying:deal with us, we are here to stay, we will not go away. He wrote with confidence and was not afraid of bending language to get his poetic truth across. We as readers will never know where all of this would have led, had he been able to continue. But it is evident from the poems assembled in this volume that young Sheridan had a firm intuitive grasp of the things important to a poet’s craft, and that he was mature and emotionally honest enough to have written these lines:

                                            Show me your light

                          the light which illuminates the apocalyptic sky

                                 defeating the gods with your beauty

                                           gracefully, invigorating

                                               an angel so divine

                                                  peace of mind

                                             Show me your light

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Wednesday, Nov. 7, 7:30pm at Adams House, Plympton St., Harvard Univ.

                              F.D. Reeve and Davis/Deleault/Reeve Jazz Trio

                               The Blue Cat Walks The Earth

About F.D. (Frank) Reeve, poet and novelist who has had a varied career. After acting in summer theater, harvesting wheat in the Midwest and working as a longshoreman on the Hudson River docks, he became a Russian scholar and spent a year in Moscow and Leningrad on an exchange with the USSR Academy. In the years that followed, Reeve published poetry, fiction, translations, and literary criticism . He reviewed for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and was a professor at Wesleyan University. His many works include eight books of poetry, five novels, two volumes of short stories, and three works of literary criticism.

Alcyone and The Urban Stampede are long poems designed for musical accompaniment. A concert performance was premiered at London’s Barbican. Eric Chasalow wrote the music for The Puzzle Master which premiered at Brandeis in May 2007 as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival.The poetry book, The Return of the Blue Cat, along with a CD (by the poet and improv jazz trio, Exit 59), came out in April 2005. 2007 also marked the appearance of the third Blue Cat book, The Blue Cat Walks the Earth, and the beginning of performances by the Davis/Deleault/Reeve trio. The Toy Soldier, a book of new poems by Reeve will be out in August.

Reeve’s writing has won him an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Society.

About Joe Deleault, composer and session pianist.

About Don Davis, saxophone, shakuhachi, flute and multi-reed player.

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Saturday, November 10, 2007, 2:30pm

                      Kathleen Spivick reading, party, and launching of

                                      Moments of Past Happiness

About Kathleen Spivack and Moments of Past Happiness

Moments of Past Happiness is a collection of poems that interweave distinct experiences to form a quilt of memories.

Kathleen Spivack has five books to her credit, both prose and poetry, The Jane Poems (Doubleday); Flying Inland (Doubleday); Swimmer in the Spreading Dawn (Applewood); The Beds We Lie In (Scarecrow Press) which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; The Honeymoon (Graywolf). Her poems, essays, and short stories have been published in many magazines and anthologies.

A student and friend of Robert Lowell, Ms. Spivack has written about the poets of his time–Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and others, with a focus on how they approached their writing.

Kathleen Spivack writes and teaches in Boston and Paris. An international writing coach she directs the Advanced Writing Workshop, an intensive training program for professional writers. She has been a Fullbright Professor in Creative Writing in Paris and has served as a Visiting Professor of American Literature/Creative Writing in France since 1990. She has held posts at the University of Paris VII-VIII, the University of Tours, the University of Versailles and at the Ecole Superiere (Polytechnique). She also teaches at Sante Fe, Aspen, Skidmore and other programs throughout the U.S. She performs her works worldwide.

Here is what some writers have said about her work:

“Kathleen Spivack’s poems are rich in feeling and texture, compassionately aware and vividly articulated.” —Stanley Kunitz

“Kathleen Spivack’s poems are direct, visceral, and immediate, studded with images that have the look and feel of fresh paint. She has an ear attuned to speech as we hear it, an eye that flinches at nothing.”–John Malcolm Brinnin

“Ms. Spivack is one of the best poets in English of her generation…”                            —-William Alfred, late Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

Earthwinds Editions is proud to present this book length collection of Kathleen Spivack’s poetry.

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Saturday, November 10, 2007, 2:30 pm   joining Kathleen Spivack

                        Ifeanyi Menkiti reading from his latest book

                                      Before a Common Soil

About Before A Common Soil by Ifeanyi Menkiti

Quoted from the editors as appears on the back cover of Before A Common Soil:

“ Before A Common Soil is dedicated to the late John Meredith Langstaff, founder of Revels. Revels’ performances across the U.S. focus on tradition, song, ritual, and dance. Menkiti has written of the last poem, ‘Before A Common Soil’ that it is ‘an invocation of the power of the earth to bind, not just biological life, but also the social ceremonies which speech has made possible, which song celebrates, and which ritual re-enacts, year in and year out.’

Ifeanyi Menkiti was born in Onitsha, Nigeria. He is professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College and is the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop. Readers familiar with Menkiti’s writing are fast discovering a poet of enormous range. Although the poems deal with serious social, political, and historical matters, the poet’s sense of humor is also often on display, bubbling beneath the surface, ready to break out. The breadth of his concerns, moods, and engagements is perhaps understandable, given his multi-faceted background. Planted securely in his roots, Menkiti is able to take on the larger world, and does so with a sense of elder concern, and generosity of spirit, unusual in contemporary poetry.

A strange beauty haunts some of these poems, especially the poems in the third section of the book. Poet, Tomas O’Leary, reviewing Menkiti’s last collection, Of Altair, the Bright Light, has written, ‘Like a shaman at his divinations, Menkiti brings a childlike awe to his appointed task of scaring up profoundly moving truths from both the sere bones and the fertile aspiration of history.’

In the present collection, Menkiti continues this summoning up of truths that move us all, and ‘the bones and aspiration of history’ are still a center of his poetic concerns.”

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