And so we begin another year, with two wonderful book projects awaiting us: Amber Nelson’s Diary of When Being With Friends Feels Like Watching TV and Harold Abramowitz’s A House on a Hill. What will we do with these wonderful books–we’ll pass the manuscripts over to our interns and we’ll have them decide on design, paper, stitch–you name it, they’ll do it.

And, of course, the big poetry hike is coming up…but two extra components we weren’t expecting until they fell in our laps.

1. We’re teaming up with the wonderful Ryan Browne and Carl Peterson who oversee the Pure Products Reading series in Tuscaloosa. They’re being gracious enough to bring some locals in with some out of towners we just love and adore. Details here.
2. Our undergrads are teaming up with some of the hike’s visiting writers and other UG’s from U of GA, U of TN, Kenyon College, and UAB for their first film endeavor. We’ve got Flips in hand…

So, where are we reading? The amazing Cahaba National Wildlife Reserve. Here’s a little taste of location scouting. A little shaky and quick panning, but for the first time ever taking shots, we’re pleased with their efforts.

-Joe at PestPro Exterminators
-The Alcove
-Egan’s Bar
-The Black Warrior River
-The Arboretum
-Sokol Park
-The Bike Shop
-The U of Alabama Book Arts Program
-Hank Lazer and Creative Campus
-The Moody Art Gallery (Jasper Johns, Sally Mann, Robert Rauschenberg last year!)
-The Kentuck Arts and Crafts Center
-The Kentuck Festival
-OZ Music
-Little Italy Pizza
-Sitar (Great Indian food!)
-Ruan Thai
-Archibald’s BBQ
-Dreamland BBQ
-Maggie’s Diner
-Netflix (I recommend Laurel and Hardy.)
-JD’s
-BBQ nachos from the cart in JD’s parking lot
-Manna Foods
-Slash Pine’s 2010 Writer Hikes (Did someone say Slash Pine?)
-Claudia Keelan will be a visiting writer in residence at U of Alabama this spring!
-The Gorgas Library’s record collection
-Townes Van Zandt’s shout-out to T-town in “Waiting Around to Die”
-America’s Greatest Thrift Store
-Anne’s Tiques
-The Crimson Tide (Roll Tide! “It’s a tradition.”)
-Natty Ice is always on sale everywhere
-Fireworks are legal
-The St Paul United Methodist Church sign–it’s the most prophetic marquee in town (“We are too Blessed to Be Depressed”)
-Sometimes you can get a haircut and auto detailing in the same place
-Mockingbirds
-Magnolia trees
-Old train bridge in Northport
-Mary’s Cakes (Great croissants!)
-Bama Theatre
-Oliver Lock and Dam
-Cicadas
-Mule Day Chicken Fest (in Gordo)
-The Foundry (thrift store in Bessemer)
-Charlemagne Records (in Birmingham)
-The Bottle Tree (in Birmingham)
-Pie Lab (in Greensboro)
-Rural Studios (in and around Greensboro)
-Mustang Oil (in Greensboro)

*Special Note: Whiskey is way cheaper at ABC Beverages.

On my to-do list:
-Civil Rights Museum (in Birmingham)
-Hank Williams Museum (in Montgomery)
-William Faulkner’s house (in Oxford, Mississippi)
-Flannery O’Conner’s peacock farm (in Milledgeville, Georgia)

In the words of Robert Creeley, What do you do,/ what do you say,/ what do you think,/ what do you know.

Today, I just finished an email exchange with The University of Alabama’s Office of Sponsored Programs. I was talking about budgets and matches. Earlier today, I talked with my co-founder about future plans and how to pay for things–most importantly, how to sustain ourselves and shoestring together resources.

The upshot: grant writing is time consuming and detail dense and requires portions of my brain I thought were as developed as an infant’s sense of balance. It’s something you have to earn, often at no-pay if you want to build something from the ground-up.

But it has, in a weird way, cultivated something else: it requires me to think of art as an act of inclusivity as opposed to one of pure meritocracy; it makes me responsible to my community at large, just not the comfort of my peers; it forces me to look at writers as workers–because we are, we work, it’s about “the work”–and to do my best to see they get some level of reimbursement when possible since those opportunities are not always readily available and coming to Alabama is not always the foremost of everyone’s desires.

Because of grant writing, I’m forced to listen and value voices I could easily dismiss otherwise.

I’m forced to be out of my own head and into someone else’s.

To be really honest, grant writing has broken my belief that poetry is a bubble no one cares about except poets. People give a shit–not in the way one would always like, but people do care–often, it’s tax dollars supporting it.

If you read this blog, you know I work with undergrads in an internship. One component is grant writing. It’s not so they’re more “marketable” per se, but that they see art as something greater than their own predelections. But wouldn’t it also be nice to see a few of them become future cultivators and homes for the arts, some even within the public sphere?

There will always be, unfortunately, some level misappropriation, red tape, politics, and bureacracy. And I think there always needs to be a place for renegade art, the place where local talent gathers and comes together based on shared belief and/or aesthetic. But for me–for my growth, as writer and reader of poetry–grant writing has forced me to be accountable to something larger than myself. Who knew money could sometimes be a force–dare I say–for good?

More information on festival as it approaches–sooner than you might think.

Today the good news is that Claudia Keelan will be in Tuscaloosa during the spring of 2011 as a visiting professor at the University of Alabama, and this is the first of several (forthcoming) reminders that now is the right time to begin to seek companionship in her poems. Finishing her new book Missing Her (New Issues 2009) Saturday morning at the Ashe County Farmers Market in West Jefferson, North Carolina, surrounded by gorgeous vegetables, flowers, BBQ, delicious baked goods, cheeses, and wonderful handmade quilts, it struck me again that it is hard to come by poems that are more heartfelt and bluntly earnest in their attentions. Cleaving to “dear life, where we are all in time together,” Keelan is deeply committed to a salvation that speeds towards the wreckage of salvation, to the ecstasy of contact with the world and with others (community!) and to the transformational potential of loss (“Ecstatic Émigré”).

Here’s a link to the first installment of her expansive, amazingly energetic APR column “Ecstatic Émigré”: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_keelan.php

And a breathtaking poem from Missing Her, “Pity Boat”:

I would not blow
         Into the tube
Of the life vest
Not in English
Nyet in Spanish
There were far too many ways to drown
Flying over Texas

        So I’m lying
Next to William Blake
In a big rubber raft
& he’s teaching me how to love
Being dead. A slow study,
I fling my arms
After every cactus we pass.
“You’re dumb, Claudia,” Blake says.
“I am not,” I say and poke
Poor William Blake
With a gun.
William Blake is beyond asking why.
And since the many and/or the few
Fuck everyone and/or thing they can
& since to fuck is to hit with a club,
He moved to Paradise.
I drive each day
Down Paradise Road
& one day I saw myself there.
I was 11 and I was crying
Running home through eucalyptus
To the El Granada motel.
Those trees knew the future,
Sweet tan bark
Shedding perpetually
In the salty air.
William Blake stretches out,
Happily naked and dead
In the what’s next.
He’s singing a song behind my eyelids
Somebody knows where we’re going
William Blake is eating stars
& one, very slowly,
Brightens inside my mouth

Williams: Poetry is “the news.”
Olson: “Some good news/ better get behind”

Of course, if I ate NY prime for a continuous month, I’d be sick of that over time. Meaning: novelty wears off quick.

In other words, I thought if I lived in Lawrence for more than a month, would the writing continue? What about last year in Eastern Kentucky or Woodside, CA in 2004.

I suppose what makes a good place to be a poet is either novelty predicated on work or a place that can be bland as muck but has enough external stimulation to be internally inspired over a long duration.

What says you? Does it matter where you are if you are going to be a poet?

WHO WOULD WIN

• Whitman vs. Dickinson
• Pound vs. Williams
• Lowell vs. Bishop
• Goethe vs. Rilke
• Ginsberg vs. Baraka
• Rimbaud vs. Leraine
• Millay vs. HD
• Crane vs. Stevens
• Hopkins vs. Auden
• Creely vs. Oppen
• Levertov vs. Duncan
• Rich vs. Lourde
• Sandberg vs. Percy
• Wilbur vs. Merrill
• Clare vs. Blake
• Keats vs. Cooleridge
• Brooks vs. Clifton
• Levis vs. Levine
• James Wright vs. Franz Wright
• Charles Wright vs. Charles Dickens
• Transtromer vs. Salamum
• Chaucer vs. Joshua Beckman
• O’Hara vs. Ashberry
• Bernstein vs. Silliman
• Elytis vs. Seferis
• Ahkmatova vs. Yuvteshenko
• Cavafy vs. Levertov
• Plath vs. Hughes
• Smart vs. Pope
• Milton vs. Merton

And now my daughter requires attention. Feel free to add more false binaries or correct existing ones.

As the first layers of oil now reach the Alabama and Mississippi coastlines, I’m beginning to see my friend was not intending irony. He was saying, I think, this place, in all its ruinedness, is still a place and we need to honor it as such. Granted, an entire eco-system was not destroyed in a failing mall (no, that is the failure of our presumptions about consumption and making, about how far our money would go and for what, about an economy on the brink of disaster). The Gulf Coast shoreline that will be decimated over the coming months is supposed to be composed of ill-tempered gannets, dunes whose shapes vary by the day, and plenty of horizons, which implies wonder and introspection, humility perhaps.

Of course, the oil barges interrupt those horizons, and now one of those companies wells have ruined the shore. As a poet, I’ve always been interested by space–what it says about its inhabitants, a history and a future. Why we write so much about place: to feel small and part of some larger order. I sit tonight thinking about the time I got lost in a national forest and discovered a family’s grave site dating back to the 1820s. Eventually, I was picked up a guy who did not want to be found by the census bureau, and in his beat up GM truck, he pointed to random thickets and swamps in the forest and said, here’s where the paper mill is, there’s where the Ashtons live–both had ceased in the 1930s, but still he used the present tense. There is no doubt that much of that forest had been altered and ruined due to hubris and folly–though obviously not to such an enormous degree as the present day Gulf. Yet, the forest today remains –cypress and twisted metal, rifle shells and armadillos sleeping–the living and the ruined.

The Gulf’s being destroyed and I don’t believe poetry can do much to stop that–but it can, as the saying goes, bear witness. But to bear witness is not only to be caught in the dead birds or the oil itself, but to see the land–ruined by our own making, altered forever–as a place itself, with a people and a story and a narrative. To see it beyond distaster, worth saving not just now but forty years from now–mostly through the hard work of preservation–but also, in a more minor way, through frequenting it, writing about it, thinking about it as evolving and outside the scope of human intention, even as humans harm it again and again.

–Joseph

Hyland’s poems are dreamy even as they chasten us to wakefulness. As Every Night in Magic City attends to the currents of film and water (both mediums of light) it is increasingly evident that currents both obscure and sharpen our sense of what is at stake in them. Clarities reveal the murky ecstasy of living in the world, arriving like “a lizard’s submerged eye [that] drifts woozily upward” (“Strange Rock Shapes Behind The Highlighting Leaves” 7) and the lens is often “Vaseline-smeared” (“& Then Allowed to Climb” 12). Which is to say, these are poems that are deeply invested in the convulsiveness of the real and in the consideration of shifts of human awareness.

Every Night in Magic City is also incredibly warm and full of genuine kindness. Hyland’s attention always gives precedence to the greater activity of circumstances: “You held/ my hand as we ran to see all these things” (“The Pinned Coat Arm of the One-Handed Man” 8). Conscientious of the poet’s position as thief (as framing arrests activity by stealing moments away from the totality), she picks pockets lovingly like Charlie Chaplin (as her pockets are being picked): “I am picking your pocket with extraordinary affection” (“Strange Rock Shapes Behind The Highlighting Leaves” 7). There is always the sense that the poet is abandoned to the poetry: “dear mister almighty I speak/ by a telephone out of the passing parade” (“The Split-Faced Man Cannot Be Touched” 16). This is also apparent as the wear of experience gives way to process: “aged by sun exposing the film” (16), and the poet is left “Sliding along the street where my hands/ come to rest” (“Caught Around the Dark Submersions” 23).

Recognizing their own temporality, the poems of Every Night in Magic City awaken to a realization that “The Law Always Speaks in Unison” (24). Their organization comes from elsewhere, goes elsewhere. The facts that Hyland attends to are written across the body like “So Many Forms of Superimposed Transport” (18). As “these words shifting upward” move across the screen (18), they score a transcendence “rising through the funeral veil into a kind of viscous light” (“Caught Around the Dark Submersions” 23).

In this sense, Every Night in Magic City serves as an important reminder of Rimbaud’s assertion that departures are always arrivals, and Hyland’s poems are truly departures that arrive “re-entering where we have always been” only to find it new (“The Split-Faced Man Cannot be Touched” 17). “Chaque Soir à Magic-City” enacts this transformation: “made of light where we remove/ our clothes & adieu/ so beautiful!” (13). It in no coincidence that this adieu comes such close proximity to “arrival” (13). Looking back we see that the edge have departed from in “Strange Rock Shapes Behind The Highlighting of Leaves” has changed, shifted: “Bursting stars at the shifting edge” (“Even the Face Unmoving” 21).

One more thing, it is a good book that ends by acknowledging that there is, finally, no one to drive the car; it is a testimony of refreshing innocence: “the steering wheel comes/ loose// & then the body of the car descends from a ceiling into the room full of schoolgirls” (“The Law Always Speaks in Unison” 24). Read MC Hyland’s Every Night in Magic City soon as you get the chance. You’ll be glad you did.