available in print or digital download from Magcloud.com

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 44,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 16 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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

Matthew Hittinger – At the Academy….
Angela Pinedo – Apple Season
J.P. Dancing Bear – Raised by Coyotes
Scot Siegel – Mochi Salvation
Andrea Lawlor – Position Paper #3
Grace Cavalieri – The STalker

Congratulations and Good Luck

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.

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