Review: SONICS IN WARHOLIA
Andy Warhol Under the Microscope and Imagination of Megan Volpert, December 6, 2011
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) –
Megan Volpert has the gift. She is well known in some circles for her work as a poet and a critic from Chicago who has successfully transplanted to Atlanta. According to the package insert she is ‘rooted in confessionalism and surrealism, her work has a strong interest in the performative and is also influenced by second-generation New York School poetry. Volpert is a theory junky and cannot resist rock and roll.’ This bit of background is supplied by the publisher Sibling Rivalry Press – that ever-amazing source of creativity that seems to blossom more with each published volume.
SONICS IN WARHOLIA is much like a dream sequence in which Volpert channels Andy Warhol, places situations in his presence (or lack of) to challenge his responses were he not dead, and has conversations (often one way) with Warhol testing his capacity for creativity and for the acts of absurdity he performed. There are intriguing diatribes about Truman Capote, questioning how Warhol would have responded to that other fascinating creature, mediations on acts of sexual gratification, on lists of phone numbers and their owners, on suicides and deaths and the assault on Warhol (GSW to chest) – all written in an enthralling style Volpert compares to the technique of listening to old tapes that have to be turned over to hear the continuation.
This is poetry of a unique form, free-associated, rambling, yet succinct in phrases and in picture making. Reading Volpert is not unlike sitting in an empty dark room, the only light being on shards of mirror dangling in a chandelier like fashion from the ceiling, each mirror finding a face or a toupee or a costume that was Warhol – the ingredient Volpert arranges for us into an image of a man the poet flashes back at us, and we discover part of ourselves in the mélange. Her writing is tasty, pithy, and erudite. Sample, from her mediation on Truman Capote: ‘This is hundreds of miles away from New Orleans or Monroeville. This is gone from Truman’s blanky on display in the Old Courthouse, long removed from Harper Lee’s precocious little friend who could read at age five, well past pasty outcasts hungering to escape into a Mardi Gras whose mirage of unspoiled plumage they imagine in their closet cased youth, when graveyards held less death and more sexy mystery.’
Megan Volpert conjures Andy Warhol and in her rituals she so exquisitely shares we discover Warhol anew – and wonder who deserves that 15 minutes of fame more – Warhol or Volpert. She is just that good! Grady Harp, December 11
Press Release for Paterson Literary Review Lifetime Service to Literature Awards 2011- ANNAPOLIS RESIDENT “GRACE CAVALIERI”
For Immediate Release
Contact: Maria Mazziotti Gillan (973) 684-6555
Date: November 16, 2011
The Poetry Center Recognizes Poets
for Lifetime Service to Literature
The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College has announced that Grace Cavalieri, Stanley H. Barkan, James Haba, and Vivian Shipley are the recipients of the 2011 Paterson Literary Review Award for Lifetime Service to Literature.
“Each of the winners of the 2011 Paterson Literary Review Award has dedicated many years to serving the needs of writers and to bringing other writers to national and international attention. In doing so, each has contributed greatly to literature and enriched the lives of readers everywhere,” says Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Executive Director of the Poetry Center.
ABOUT THE HONOREES:
Grace Cavalieri has produced and hosted “The Poet and the Poem,” weekly, on WPFW-FM (1977-1997) presenting 2,000 poets to the nation. She now presents this series to public radio from the Library of Congress via NPR satellite. Grace has received the Pen-Fiction Award, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Silver Medal, and awards from the National Commission on Working Women, the WV Commission on Women, the American Association of University Women, and more. She won a Paterson Prize for What I Would do for Love, and The Bordighera Poetry Prize for Water on the Sun. She received the inaugural Columbia Merit Award for “significant contributions to poetry.”
Stanley H. Barkan is the founder/editor/publisher of the Cross-Cultural Review Series of World Literature and Art, that has, to date, produced some 400 titles in 50 different languages. Cross-Cultural Communications just celebrated its 40th Anniversary. He was the 1991 New York City’s Poetry Teacher of the Year (awarded by Poets House and the Board of Education), and the 1996 winner of the Poor Richard’s Award, “The Best of the Small Presses” (awarded by the Small Press Center), for “25 years of high quality publishing.” Along with Peter Thabit Jones, Barkan hosted the International Poetry Festival in June 2011 at the Dylan Thomas Theatre in Swansea, Wales. His latest book is the ABC of Fruits and Vegetables, which is illustrated by his daughter, Mia Barkan Clarke.
Jim Haba was Poetry Director for the Dodge Foundation and the designer and producer of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival—the nation’s largest poetry festival for 22 years—held biennially in Waterloo Village. Haba is a Professor Emeritus from Rowan University and holds a BA from Reed College and a Ph.D. He has been a special convener for the entire poetry community.
Vivian Shipley is Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and Editor of Connecticut Review and teaches at Southern Connecticut State University. In 2010, an eighth book of poetry, All of Your Messages Have Been Erased, was published by Southeastern Louisiana University. A sixth chapbook, Greatest Hits: 1974-2010 was published in 2010 by Pudding House Press. She was inducted into the University of Kentucky Hall of Fame for Distinguished Alumni, the highest honor the university may bestow on a graduate.
The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College has been awarded several Citations of Excellence, named a Distinguished Arts Project and is funded, in part by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, and made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts.
new title: BROKE by Rusty Barnes
Available from Magcloud in print and digital formats.
www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/286157
More formats available soon…
Dmitry Berenson
Recent Publications:
- Don’t Blame the Ugly Mug Anthology
- Clever (chapbook)
Website: http://www.facebook.com/dmitry.berenson
Discovery moment: When something clicks at the back of my skull like a new muscle.
*
Framer’s Intent
When I don’t feel like working
I think of Benjamin Franklin
rounding the curve of an ‘f’
on a wooden letter block
in his brother’s print shop.
Or maybe the block was metal,
forged by a blacksmith whose
workshop smelled like soot and leather.
The blacksmith must have carried
that smell into his house every night
like a briefcase and his children never
feared fire. Maybe the blacksmith was
friends with Ben Franklin and Ben
would walk into his shop and ask
him to forge a block or two,
maybe get a discount on a pair
of horseshoes. Then Ben would ink up
the blocks and slide them into a press
where they glistened like wet rubies
or maybe he put them into the press first
and then basted them with an inky
roller that sounded like a parched tongue.
Or maybe he didn’t even work in a print shop,
we all know history can be codified bullshit.
Ben Franklin said “A lie stands on one leg,
the truth on two.” What does a poem stand on?
The confused ghosts of the founding fathers
float around in my head and I ask them questions
about war and justice but I get mostly shrugs.
Ben is still trying to understand how lightning
can be trapped on a screen and twisted into colors,
George Washington is amazed by Fixodent.
Don’t laugh, these men are as close
as Americans get to infallibility. Sometimes
the founding fathers just sit together
and don’t speak, turn their heads away
from the frantic world, and wait for the room
that holds them to unwind into nothing.
Colin Herd
Listening to pop music cassette tapes on my bedroom floor ages 8-16 approx, moment of discovery after moment of discovery.
Recent Publications:
- Like (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2010)
- too ok (BlazeVOX Books 2011)
- Blart
- Shampoo 37
Audio mp3
*
one
just down from mine woods there’s a lane
that runs along the side of the bowls pitch
the policeman in my parents’s garden
in the house where i was living and before
they got divorced i didn’t
i gave myself up by the building that used
to be a victorian spa, now a restaurant
later, you’re learning swedish and i can’t
understand a word so getting bored we
watch dreamerj smashing plates in what
looks like a concrete bunker. pig tails, pink
ribbon. not all the plates smash on impact.
then we watch her take a daytrip drive down
the caylee anthony street. she opens the car
door by a no trespassing sign by some shrub-
land and some tribute flowers by a tree.
Claudine R. Moreau
Web site: www.claudinemoreau.com
Recent publications:
Recent Honors:
THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOBS
He did research —
at the grocery store he took notes
on how nipples surface
in the freezer aisle.
On the subway, he estimated cup sizes.
He memorized the parabolic curves
they carved out in space.
He mapped the topography of each pair.
His sketchbooks revealed a cartographer’s
love of the alpine peaks, the gulleys,
the slow rolling hills of breasts.
He taught me how an artist
sees color in skin—
the hidden arcs of green and cerulean blue
in the tender sags of stretch marks,
the dioxazine purple and zinc white
that ring the areola,
the fields of cadmium orange
flanked with dots of hansa yellow
near the hollow of the arm,
the burnt umber shadow
at the curved
cusp of the breast.
Later it came, that sickness,
tore at my left breast,
turpentine lifting layer upon layer,
touch after touch removed,
down to my first set of kisses
on each asymmetrical nipple
in the back of his Camaro
on a dirt road
on a humid August night
with sweat trickling like small creeks
through the beer bottle-littered
canals of our spines.
But, he loved me for my radioactive
hair that pulled out in his hands,
my tubes and my pus, the quiet rip
of hospital tape pulling up skin,
and he dragged his finger across,
my dissected plateau—
quinacridone rose, ochre, titanium white,
he whispered. We laughed hard
for no reason, examined closely
as fear dissolved out of the canvas,
a toxic solvent evaporating
in a well-ventilated room.
