I’m delighted to announce the newest cohort of Free Verse Editions authors and their books: Ashley Seitz Kramer, Proxemics; Claire McQuerry, Through Glass Rooms; Kylan Rice, Cloud on Page Opposite and Kathleen Rooney, O Western Wind [New Measure Poetry Prize winner selected by Rodney Jones]. These books will be published approximately one year from now. Look for them at your favorite bookstore, on Parlor Press’s website, or your preferred online vendor. Many thanks to Rodney Jones, our New Measure Poetry Prize judge, and all those who submitted manuscripts for publication. Happy New Year to all!
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I'm late to the party, but am watching the TV series, "Mad Men," which is a brilliant look back at early 1960s America. "Mad Men" is of course a pun with various meanings--the men of Madison Ave., ie the world of advertising in New York, but also "mad men"--men who are made mad by their license and privilege. "Privilege" is a much used term these days, but to me what this series dramatizes is not just the power of these white male advertising executives, but the casual cruelty to women and blacks that this system inculcated. Seeing women only as sexual objects, they are blind to every other capacity they possess. The ad men/ mad men literally are blind to the world they live in, misperceiving it, and so they remain blind to their own cruelty and to themselves. With the current MAGA nostalgia towards the fifties and sixties at high tide, "Mad Men" reminds us of the tremendous loss of human capital marginalized in that time, and the costs of that uber-hierarchical, conformist, unbalanced world. Not least to white heterosexual men themselves. Don Draper, the advertising whiz at the center of the series is a cipher to himself, and as a human being is lost. It turns out the series is like nothing more than a horror film where everything supernatural and outré has been ruthlessly stripped away, revealing the horror and emptiness of that way of life in that era. Don Draper is Gatsby, one generation on.
Watching Pope Leo introducing himself to the world reminded me anew of how intensely theatrical papal introductions are. The black smoke. The white smoke. The imperial banner hanging down from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, "the Loggia of the Blessings." The crimson velvet curtains trimmed with gold behind the new pope so like those in a theater. The stagecraft of the supporting actors on the balcony, speaking in Latin (mystery, the ancient). The Loggia has to be the most impressive stage in the world. Everything high, remote, and authoritative so that the choreographed human gestures take on a mythic dimension. Then there is the drama of new life replacing new death--the whole event turning on the carefully-guarded element of surprise, which of course is crucial to any dramatic performance. Gramsci once said that the Catholic Church is "the oldest and most successful political party in the world." To me--and I write as a Catholic apostate--there is certainly some truth to the claim. And if it is true, it is true in part due to the Church's mastery of theater and stagecraft. Yet the Church knows too the deep human appetite for ritual and continuity. An appetite which can be used to ensure its own continuity and interests--but also it can be addressed and used on behalf of the spiritual and physical needs of wretched of the earth, and even those more fortunate. With each new pope, there's the question of "Which Rome is now going to turn up"?
Jeongrye Choi's poem "Forest" from Instances, translated by the author, Brenda Hillman and Wayne de Fremery, has been selected for display on London Underground Tube carriages throughout June 2025 as part of the "Poems on the Underground" initiative. It will also appear on a variety of high profile UK websites devoted to poetry (like The Poetry Society, The National Poetry Library, and more). Brava!
Turns out that just 20 miles away, in Durham, NC, there's a a fine jazz nightclub. In fact, better than fine: Downbeat magazine ranks it as one of the 100 finest jazz clubs in the world. Last weekend, we went and heard the Lynne Arielle Trio there. I love her version of "Blackbird..."
Proud to announce that Free Verse Editions has just published a fascinating translation of Song Keong-dong's I am Not Korean. In addition to his career as a poet, he is a remarkable activist. The translation was done by by Fr.Anthony of Taizé, one of the leading Korean translators of poetry in English. Kyeong-dong is a celebrated poet in Korea and has won numerous literary prizes. Here is the webpage for the book .Get ahold of it!
Currently at the North Carolina Museum of Art there's a fantastic exhibit of Grace Hartigan's paintings. As many know, Grace Hartigan was a fellow-traveler of Frank O'Hara, in fact, he was an early and important champion of her work and the connections between her and the New York School of poetry are many and various. There's also a series of paintings there inspired by the poetry of Barbara Guest. Not to be missed. For more, here.
This Iranian film, shot entirely in secret, is about a family in Tehran during the recent uprising protesting the repressive regime there. The father in the film has recently ascended to the role of being a judge in the revolutionary courts and is charged with finding protestors guilty en masse. What I found most compelling about the film was its representation of the domestic sphere where the judge's wife and daughters are virtually confined by the regime to live out their lives. The near-adult daughters chafe against the restrictions imposed upon them while the mother tries to balance the impossible, conflicting demands between obedience to the regime and her daughter's desire for more freedom. In the film, the only, very limited freedom they have has been restricted to the small apartment they live in; in fact, less than that: just their bedroom of the daughters, as the living room and kitchen become sites of conflict with their parents. What interests me is the way the film represents the contraction of the world in an authoritarian regime: the only place where they can dress as they like, and express themselves, is in the apartment, but even that becomes limited. But in this sequestered space, the world breaks in in the heard protests in the streets, and with bloodied friends and with rumor and regime propaganda. To me, most powerfully, the film dramatizes the emotionally strangling dynamics of authoritarianism, its ever-increasing desire to contract the world to smaller and smaller spaces and to fill the void with loud hatred and ugly edicts towards anyone with different beliefs. We're not there in Trumps's America, but to me, you can see the aspiration in this administration towards that kind of control. Everywhere you turn now, there's the desire to eliminate difference, to abolish it or to exile it and to live in a state of mythological MAGA purity. Where? Increased book bannings, elimination of non-white history in the classroom and government (and non-government) websites, the attacks on liberal university education which have as its core exposure to different thoughts, ideas, literatures, histories--these are just a few examples. It's the emotionally-wearing noise, the loudness of the repeated pronouncements by the Iranian regime, the way it chips at the soul and seeks to paralyze with its ugly noise and sweeping pronouncements that struck me. Lots of people have written about the politics of authoritarianism. Few texts have captured the way it works to wear down the psychology and soul of individuals as powerfully as "The Seed of the Sacred Fig." Little surprise that Rasoulof, the director, and the cast, had to escape Iran to avoid harsh punishment.
Free Verse Editions is delighted to announce a Zoom reading on Sunday, June 8 at 1.00pm Eastern Standard Time to celebrate our newest poets and their books. The poets will be Lily Brown, Chengru He, Elizabeth Jacobson, L.S. Klatt and Molly Spencer.
The event is free--and please feel free to spread the word far and wide. Here is the link to register for the event: https://clemson.zoom.us/meeting/register/ZhmOkS6qQeS6Y8Qel6HHKA#/registration https://bit.ly/free-verse-reading-2025 Congratulations to Elizabeth Jacobson. Her book There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral was named as one of the winners of the 2025 New Mexico Press Women's contest! Wonderful news indeed!
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April 2026
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