SPC to Feature Two Great Poets on March 8
On March 8, I am hosting a big event at the Sacramento Poetry Center, featuring award-winning poets Jim Powell (1993 MacArthur Fellow) and Heidy Steidlmayer ( winner of the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize). Come hear these great Northern CA poets. The event starts at 7:30 pm and there will be open mic afterwards.
The Features
Jim Powell is the author of two collections of poetry, Substrate, just published by Pantheon Books, and It Was Fever That Made The World (University of Chicago Press), and the translator of The Poetry Of Sappho (Oxford University Press) and Catullan Revenants (Booklyn). His poems and translations are included in the Paris Review Anthology, the Norton Introduction to Literature, the Oxford Anthology of Classical Verse In English Translation, California Poetry, From the Gold Rush To the Present, and the Addison Street Anthology. His honors include the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Younger Poets Prize, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Translation Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. He held the Sherry Poet lectureship at the University of Chicago in Fall 2005. He is a native and resident of Northern California.
Substrate is "a book about nature -- human nature, philosophical nature, the natrue of place and identity," praises its "vidid density," and writes that its "multiplicity [of subject and approach] is the most extraordinary thing about ... this remarkable volume," making it "a book big enough for everyone.... Powell is as good as they come on the natural world." David Ulin, Los Angeles Times.
"What comes alive in gripping poems like "Epistemology" and "Our Music on the Shore" is the persistence of a place and its past, even in the face of its transofrmation through time. Substrate is a great read." Viola Allo, Sacramento Book Review.
"Together these poems are a marvel. Powell''s subject is nohting less than how energy and power rise, decay, then reconstitute themselves in the human and natural worlds.... An exhiliarating book." Frank Bidart
Substrate is "tremendously good--stunningly serious and artful." Robert Pinsky, Slate.com.
"Powell keeps his ear close to the ground, seeming almost to eavesdrop on the earth [and] commands a powerful music.... Beneath his ... apparently casual lines, a classical sensiblity is at work." Eric Ormsby, Times Literary Supplement.
"Combining the grace and languor of classical sculpture, Powell's tender and unforced rendeing of seemingly casual moments casts them in the light of eternity. The past to which the title Substrate refers is always present beneath his evocation of contemporary life. These are poems in which the author is hardly visible, demonstrating that the heightened quality of poetic language arises from condensation rather than the intensity of a poet's personal melodrama." Belle Randall, Common Knoweldge
Sample Poems by Jim Powell
SOVEREIGNTY
The child riding his father's shoulders
above the crowd
looks down into the whirl of faces swimming at his knees,
king of the world
in his own mind:
at each turn alternate destinies
invite his liking;
he gapes meanwhile, and holds tight, safe on the charmed brink of childhood,
a bubble clinging
at the fall's lip,
delighting to be thus elevated.
Later, learning
to carry his own weight on solid ground he will denounce
the idols riding
his father's back,
curse naked king and paper crown
to make his way,
still not noticing how his choices begin to overtake him,
the water rising
at his heels.
And what if, his father's age, hearing
his own son
on his shoulders laughing in his blind spot he starts to glimpse
amid the hazard
of stray blows
like a face returning in a dream
the emerging features
of the fate that took him captive ‹ sovereign, indelible:
suppose he finds
the means to climb
from the staining flood of self to see
the circle whole
and know he is what he's become as the weight bears him down
now will he
learn mercy?
*
SIEGFRIED'S DESTINY
When Siegfried killed the dragon
guarding the chamber of his destiny,
the mazy cave of legendary echoes,
tasting its blood
he understood
the parlance of the birds
and unperfidious language of wildflowers
and recognized his teacher's wheedling
purposed to wield him
to alien ends
an unknowing tool:
self-deluded in disillusionment,
estranged from his own purposes, astray,
he circled bewildered,
harrowed by furies
that drove him to distrust
even the overdose of dragon's blood
that unstopped his ears to the earth's voices
and purged his wits
of nice lies
delivering him at last
to the high rock-bound narrow windy pass
where the world falls away on both sides, there
to constellate
his fated stars.
Heidy Steidlmayer
Born in Chicago, Heidy Steidlmayer is a graduate of Northwestern University and of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. In 2007, she was a recipient of the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, and in 2009 she was awarded a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award for emerging women writers. Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Literary Imagination and Calyx, among others. Her work is also included in Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, Second Edition, by Helen Vendler. Of Steidlmayer’s work, Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman wrote to The Sacramento Bee newspaper in September 2009: “She is a remarkable poet (who) writes poems of great compactness and density, as technically accomplished as they are emotionally devastating. This is an age of irony and sprawl, and she’s going – bravely and with great success – her own way. People may not know much about her work now, but they will soon.”
Sample Poem
Knife-Sharpener’s Song
I said no word of her to him,
nor he of her to me, oh yes.
We sharpened down the sliding
hour the knives wooled thick
with rust, oh yes; the days grew
small and wider, stripping
words down to their edge—
cutthroat, flashy, without a flaw—
what he did to me, oh yes.
Turn by turn, those knives of hers
shone quietly aware, oh yes,
not I but she would be the one
he carefully undressed—
but he said no word of her to me
nor I to him of us, oh yes.
The Features
Jim Powell is the author of two collections of poetry, Substrate, just published by Pantheon Books, and It Was Fever That Made The World (University of Chicago Press), and the translator of The Poetry Of Sappho (Oxford University Press) and Catullan Revenants (Booklyn). His poems and translations are included in the Paris Review Anthology, the Norton Introduction to Literature, the Oxford Anthology of Classical Verse In English Translation, California Poetry, From the Gold Rush To the Present, and the Addison Street Anthology. His honors include the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Younger Poets Prize, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Translation Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. He held the Sherry Poet lectureship at the University of Chicago in Fall 2005. He is a native and resident of Northern California.
Substrate is "a book about nature -- human nature, philosophical nature, the natrue of place and identity," praises its "vidid density," and writes that its "multiplicity [of subject and approach] is the most extraordinary thing about ... this remarkable volume," making it "a book big enough for everyone.... Powell is as good as they come on the natural world." David Ulin, Los Angeles Times.
"What comes alive in gripping poems like "Epistemology" and "Our Music on the Shore" is the persistence of a place and its past, even in the face of its transofrmation through time. Substrate is a great read." Viola Allo, Sacramento Book Review.
"Together these poems are a marvel. Powell''s subject is nohting less than how energy and power rise, decay, then reconstitute themselves in the human and natural worlds.... An exhiliarating book." Frank Bidart
Substrate is "tremendously good--stunningly serious and artful." Robert Pinsky, Slate.com.
"Powell keeps his ear close to the ground, seeming almost to eavesdrop on the earth [and] commands a powerful music.... Beneath his ... apparently casual lines, a classical sensiblity is at work." Eric Ormsby, Times Literary Supplement.
"Combining the grace and languor of classical sculpture, Powell's tender and unforced rendeing of seemingly casual moments casts them in the light of eternity. The past to which the title Substrate refers is always present beneath his evocation of contemporary life. These are poems in which the author is hardly visible, demonstrating that the heightened quality of poetic language arises from condensation rather than the intensity of a poet's personal melodrama." Belle Randall, Common Knoweldge
Sample Poems by Jim Powell
SOVEREIGNTY
The child riding his father's shoulders
above the crowd
looks down into the whirl of faces swimming at his knees,
king of the world
in his own mind:
at each turn alternate destinies
invite his liking;
he gapes meanwhile, and holds tight, safe on the charmed brink of childhood,
a bubble clinging
at the fall's lip,
delighting to be thus elevated.
Later, learning
to carry his own weight on solid ground he will denounce
the idols riding
his father's back,
curse naked king and paper crown
to make his way,
still not noticing how his choices begin to overtake him,
the water rising
at his heels.
And what if, his father's age, hearing
his own son
on his shoulders laughing in his blind spot he starts to glimpse
amid the hazard
of stray blows
like a face returning in a dream
the emerging features
of the fate that took him captive ‹ sovereign, indelible:
suppose he finds
the means to climb
from the staining flood of self to see
the circle whole
and know he is what he's become as the weight bears him down
now will he
learn mercy?
*
SIEGFRIED'S DESTINY
When Siegfried killed the dragon
guarding the chamber of his destiny,
the mazy cave of legendary echoes,
tasting its blood
he understood
the parlance of the birds
and unperfidious language of wildflowers
and recognized his teacher's wheedling
purposed to wield him
to alien ends
an unknowing tool:
self-deluded in disillusionment,
estranged from his own purposes, astray,
he circled bewildered,
harrowed by furies
that drove him to distrust
even the overdose of dragon's blood
that unstopped his ears to the earth's voices
and purged his wits
of nice lies
delivering him at last
to the high rock-bound narrow windy pass
where the world falls away on both sides, there
to constellate
his fated stars.
Heidy Steidlmayer
Born in Chicago, Heidy Steidlmayer is a graduate of Northwestern University and of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. In 2007, she was a recipient of the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, and in 2009 she was awarded a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award for emerging women writers. Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Literary Imagination and Calyx, among others. Her work is also included in Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, Second Edition, by Helen Vendler. Of Steidlmayer’s work, Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman wrote to The Sacramento Bee newspaper in September 2009: “She is a remarkable poet (who) writes poems of great compactness and density, as technically accomplished as they are emotionally devastating. This is an age of irony and sprawl, and she’s going – bravely and with great success – her own way. People may not know much about her work now, but they will soon.”
Sample Poem
Knife-Sharpener’s Song
I said no word of her to him,
nor he of her to me, oh yes.
We sharpened down the sliding
hour the knives wooled thick
with rust, oh yes; the days grew
small and wider, stripping
words down to their edge—
cutthroat, flashy, without a flaw—
what he did to me, oh yes.
Turn by turn, those knives of hers
shone quietly aware, oh yes,
not I but she would be the one
he carefully undressed—
but he said no word of her to me
nor I to him of us, oh yes.
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