Beall Poetry Festival 2016
Event Details at: http://www.baylor.edu/beall/
Amaranth Borsuk
A poet, book artist, and scholar, Amranth Borsuk's work involves the material nature of words and collaboration among artists and textual media. She has written and published five books of poetry and published numerous essays and book reviews. Her work with the OULIPO poet, Paul Braffort, helps to introduce American audiences to the OULIP movement in poetry and mathematics.
The links below are to Prof. Borsuk's works in the Baylor Libraries and her home page.
- Amaranth BorsukAuthor's web page with links to events, scholarship, interviews, and bibliography of works.
Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse: Between Page and Screen by
A convergence of old and new technologies, an unlikely marriage of print and digital, Between Page and Screen chronicles a love affair between the characters P and S while taking the reader into a wondrous, augmented reality. The book has no words, only inscrutable black and white geometric patterns that, when coupled with a computer webcam, conjure the text. Reflected on screen, the reader sees himself with open book in hand, language springing alive and shape-shifting with each turn of the page. The story unfolds through a playful and cryptic exchange of letters between P and S as they struggle to define their passionate but fraught relationship. Rich with innuendo, anagrams, etymological and sonic affinities between words, Between Page and Screen takes an almost ecstatic pleasure in language and the act of reading. Merging concrete poetry with conceptual art and the tradition of the artist's book with the digital future, Between Page and Screen expands the possibilities of what a book can be.
ISBN: 9780979956287Publication Date: 2012-04-30- Sunt Lacrimae Rerum by Ms. Borsuk has an excellent descritption at: http://www.amaranthborsuk.com/?s=sunt+lacrima+rerumCall Number: Moody Polk Books N7433.4.B677 S96 2012 (by appt. only)Publication Date: 2013
"Sunt Lacrimae Rerum" by Amaranth Borsuk
An artist book responding to the bombing of the centuries-old bookmakers street in Baghdad. These images give you a sense of the work:
Nicole Cooley
Nicole Cooley's work spans many genres and topics from motherhood in academia to poems about the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, to a collection of poetry on Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast.
The links below are to Prof. Cooley's web page (which includes selections from her forthcoming work, My Dollhouse, Myself: Miniature Histories, and a bibliography of her published works) and to her books in the Baylor University Libraries.
- Nicole CooleyAuthor's web page with links to readings & events, online works, and a bibliography of her publications.
Resurrection by Call Number: Moody General PS3553.O5647 R47 1996ISBN: 0807120596Publication Date: 1996-04-01
The Afflicted Girls by Call Number: Moody General PS3553.O5647 A37 2004ISBN: 0807129461Publication Date: 2004-04-01
Breach by Call Number: Moody General PS3553.O5647 B74 2010ISBN: 9780807135846Publication Date: 2010-04-26
Milk Dress by
In this cool, manifold chronicle of motherhood, Nicole Cooley tackles the experience of creation, occupying a new vernacular of love within danger. Her poems--animate self-reflections of both merged bodies and violent separation--confront the turbulence of fear and safety.
Call Number: Moody General PS3553.O5647 M55 2010ISBN: 9781882295838Publication Date: 2010-11-30
- Salem Lessons (Artist Book)Brief notice about the collaborative project between Ms. Cooley and artist Maureen Cummings, "Salem Lessons" which resulted from their American Antiquarian Society's Creative and Performing Artist and Writers Fellows award.
Kevin Young
Kevin Young is a poet, essayist, editor, and curator. As a student at Harvard University where he studied poetry with Lucie Brock-Brodio and Seamus Heaney, Prof. Young joined the Dark Room Collective of poets, writers, and artists which encouraged African American writers and performance artists. In his role as curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University, Prof. Young builds collections of poetry and literary archives of rare and modern poetry and writing (Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, and Salman Rushdie, among others) for Rose Rare Book Library.
Below are links to Prof. Young's website and links to his books owned by the Baylor Libraries.
- Kevin YoungAuthor's website with links to biography, books, event schedule, and news/reviews.
Blues Poems by
Born in African American work songs, field hollers, and the powerful legacy of the spirituals, the blues traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to “Sweet Home Chicago,” forming the backbone of American music. In this anthology–the first devoted exclusively to blues poems–a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power. The blues have left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden, to “Blues on Yellow” by Marilyn Chin and “Reservation Blues” by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues-inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics–poems in their own right–from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters. The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.
Call Number: Moody General PS595.B6 B58 2003ISBN: 0375414584Publication Date: 2003-09-02
For the Confederate Dead by
In this passionate new collection, Kevin Young takes up a range of African American griefs and passages. He opens with the beautiful "Elegy for Miss Brooks," invoking Gwendolyn Brooks, who died in 2000, and who makes a perfect muse for the volume: "What the devil / are we without you?" he asks. "I tuck your voice, laced / tight, in these brown shoes." In that spirit of intimate community, Young gives us a saucy ballad of Jim Crow, a poem about Lionel Hampton's last concert in Paris, an "African Elegy" which addresses the tragic loss of a close friend in conjunction with the first anniversary of 9/11, and a series entitled "Americana" in which we encounter a clutch of mythical southern towns, such as East Jesus ("The South knows ruin & likes it / thataway - the barns becoming / earth again, leaning in - ") and West Hell ("Sin, thy name is this / wait - this place - / a long ways from Here / to There"). For the Confederate Dead finds Young, more than ever before, in a poetic space that is at once public and personal. In the marvelous "Guernica" Young's account of a journey through Spain blends with the news of an American lynching, prompting him to ask, "Precious South, / must I save you, / or myself?" In this surprising book, the poet manages to do a bit of both, embracing the contradictions of our "Confederate" legacy and the troubled nation where that legacy still lingers.
Call Number: Zeta Young Adult Collection 811 Y734FISBN: 9780307264350Publication Date: 2007-01-09
Book of Hours by
A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. "In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor," he tells us, in one of the collection's piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement ("Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me"), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life's passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in "Crowning," he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing "her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air." Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking "What good/are wishes if they aren't / used up?" while understanding "How to listen / to what's gone." Young's frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life's mysteries.
Call Number: Moody General PS3575.O798 B66 2014ISBN: 9780307272249Publication Date: 2014-03-04
Blue Laws by
"Blue Laws gathers poems written over the past two decades, drawing from all nine of Kevin Young's previously published books of poetry and including a number of uncollected, often unpublished, poems. From his stunning lyric debut (Most Way Home,1995) and the amazing odouble albumo life of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2001, oremixedo for Knopf in 2005), through his brokenhearted Jelly Roll: A Blues and his recent forays into adult grief and the joys of birth in Dear Darkness and Book of Hours, this collection provides a grand tour of a poet whose personal poems and political poems are equally riveting. Together with wonderful outtakes and previously unseen blues, the profoundly felt poems here of family, Southern food, and loss are of a piece with the depth of personal sensibility and humanity found in his Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels or sequences such as oThe Ballad of Jim Crowo and a new oHomage to Phillis Wheatley.o"
Call Number: on orderISBN: 9780385351508Publication Date: 2016-02-02
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 by
Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."--Publishers Weekly "All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."--Publishers Weekly "If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."--NPR "The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington Post "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton--both the woman and her poetry--is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."--Toni Morrison, from the Foreword The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. "mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days): all that I am asking is that you see me as something more than a common occurrence, more than a woman in her ordinary skin.
Call Number: e-bookISBN: 9781942683001Publication Date: 2015-06-20- Furious Flower I: Conversations with African American Poets, 1960 - 1995 by From the database: "Black Studies in Video" by Alexander Street Press. "A production of James Madison University and Shenandoah Valley Educational Television." Readings originally presented at the Furious Flower Conference held September 29-October 1, 1994 at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia.Call Number: Streaming videoPublication Date: 1998
Ernest Suarez
As a Professor of English Literature at Catholic University of America (CUA), Dr. Suarez's research interest is in Southern verse. His forthcoming book is on the mutual influences of blues, rock, and poetry. He is the author of essays and books on southern poets and faith and spirituality in prose and verse. Links to Dr. Suarez's faculty home page at CUA, to selected essays by Dr. Suarez, and to his books in the Baylor Libraries are below.
- Ernest Suarez: Faculty Home Page Dr. Suarez's research interests, publications, courses, and education as Professor of English at Catholic University of America.
- "Southern Verse in Poetry and Song." Chapter 5 of "The Cambridge History of American Poetry." Access the PDF of the chapter by clicking on the "View Chapter PDF" link near top of page.
- "Writing the South" Chapter 35 of "The Cambridge History of American Poetry" Access PDF of this chapter by clicking on the "View Chapter PDF" near the top of the page.
James Dickey and the Politics of Canon by
Suarez examines Dickey's colorful and controversial career, showing how literary politics brought about his fall from critical grace.
Call Number: Moody General PS3554.I32 Z87 1993ISBN: 0826209211Publication Date: 1993-11-01
Southbound by
"There's a real flowering, I think, of southern poetry right now, . . . assembling at the edges of everything." This observation by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright reflects upon the continuing vibrancy and importance of the southern poetic tradition. Although the death of James Dickey in 1997 left southern poetry without a recognizably dominant voice, an array of other vibrant voices continue to be heard and recognized. "Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets" provides detailed discussion of the art and craft of poetry by many writers who promise to keep southern poetry vital into the twenty-first century. Beginning with an interview with the late literary giant James Dickey, "Southbound" collects the ideas and insights of both well-known and rising southern poets, including Dave Smith, Charles Wright, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Rodney Jones. Suarez's guiding principle for conducting and revising the interviews was to let the poets express themselves as clearly and fully as possible. Each interview is ultimately defined by the poet's own personality and voice, yet all explore similar themes the relationship between technique and subject, the nature of the southern canon and each poet's place in it, and the state of contemporary poetry. As Dave Smith relates, "My sense of appreciation of what life means or could mean, whatever I know about life, stems from a sense of place, a sense of the ghostliness of meaning." It is this sense of place and meaning that Suarez allows each poet to convey truthfully in his interviews. Including a brief introduction to each interview and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources for each poet, "Southbound" is a useful tool for scholars and a springboard for casual readers. More important, this collection of interviews makes a significant contribution to the tradition of southern poetry and its most prominent voices."
Call Number: Moody General PS261 .S83 1999ISBN: 0826212638Publication Date: 1999-11-29
- "'You Say You Want a Revolution'": The Blues, Poetry, and Rock." Critical essay from the journal "Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art."
