BOA Editions Blog

In celebration of the release of their new record, Eight Belles, the band Jessie Murphy in the Woods did something truly, impressively unusual: they interviewed a poet. More specifically, BOA’s own Keetje Kuipers.

Why, you ask, would a band do something like that? Good question. Here’s what they say:

“We – Jessie Murphy In The Woods – have just completed the great adventure of releasing our first record, Eight Belles. We’ve put it out, we’ve played shows in homage to it, we’ve been interviewed about it, and we’ve traveled in support of it.

Now it’s time for something new.

It’s time to turn our attention from out put to input. We are seeking new sounds, words, ideas and inspirations. Part of our process of doing that is conversing with other artists and persons of serious intrigue. We’d like to share some of these conversations with you, 10 of them to be exact, in a series we call Thank You, Please, and Welcome to The Woods. We will be interviewing ten artists who are (by our lights) total luminaries in their craft. During these late August nights, surrounded by tall pines and whistling winds, we will warm ourselves by the fire of their intellect and we will share that warmth with you.”

And they started their series with Keetje Kuipers! Wow – a band that’s so interested in poetry that they turn the focus away from their own project onto the work of a contemporary poet? Give those folks a prize! Or, at the very least, a hearty round of applause.

Read the entire interview here and gain some new insights into Keetje’s debut collection, Beautiful in the Mouth, even above and beyond the author’s favorite kind of ice cream (one small hint: it’s “Peppermint–the kind with the little chunks of candy canes in it.”)

[Keetje Kuipers interview by Jessie Murphy In The Woods]

Keetje Kuipers. BOA poet.

The Write Question is an NPR show that, ”explores the world of writing and publishing in the Western United States.” Poulin Prize-winning poet Keetje Kuipers appears on the show today to talk about (and read from) her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, and the writing life.

Listen to the show here: [Keetje Kuipers on the Writing Life]

Here’s the program’s introduction to the feature:

Keetje Kuipers has a unique way of creating poetry: she walks and puts words to the rhythms of her strides. Once in a while, if a poem gets too long, she’ll grab an advertisement out of someone’s mailbox and a pencil from a laundromat so she can scribble the thing down. During this program Kuipers talks about her writing and travel experiences, and she reads a few poems from her first collection of poetry, Beautiful in the Mouth.

Kuipers teaches writing at the University of Montana and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She divides her time between San Francisco and Missoula.

BOA Poets: Dan Albergotti, Cecilia Woloch, and Keetje Kuipers

The thrust of Wallace Stevens’ poem ”Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself” is often repeated as the hard nugget of a quote from William Carlos Williams’ poem “A Sort of a Song”: “No ideas but in things.” If ever a poet’s method could be distilled into five words, it is this.

 In the newest BOA translation, The Book of Things, (translated from the Slovenian and with an Introduction by Brian Henry), Aleš Šteger simultaneously adopts and discards this poetic advice. Each poem in the book is built around a single, simple noun (or “thing”). For example: Egg, Knots, Stone, Grater, Chocolate, Bread, Hand Dryer, Knives, Aspirin, Salt…

 In this way, Šteger hews closely to the notion of making poetry from the common “things” of our lives. However, once his subject is secure, Šteger launches into associative flights that make it clear that the noun, the object, the thing, is merely the start of his creative process. As translator Brian Henry writes in his Introduction: “In Slovenian, the poems in The Book of Things employ subtle sound play, puns, doublings, and echoes, which I have tried to transmute into English on a comparable linguistic scaffolding. Of course, the ideal translation of these poems would not be other poems, but the things themselves.”

Indeed. Here is one my favorite poems from The Book of Things that takes a carnivorous subject for it’s leaping off point: Sausage. While it may not be an actual sausage, or even the original Slovenian version of Šteger’s poem, it is a wonderous creation in its own right.

Sausage

Did you see? Two hundred thousand frankfurters

Demonstrated for workers’ rights.

Six million kosher salami gassed in the second world war

And a million hot sausages murdered fifty years later in the Balkans.

But at the same time, concern. The number of obese mortadella is rising.

It is necessary to take immediate steps against gonorrhea in the blood sausage.

And ooooh, some special sausage in a mini skirt.

And look at that Hungarian in high heels. Her stitch and wonderbra.

Meaty mixture of lies, fears, faltering and hope.

But why love, this frightening concept?

Is your stomach rumbling again? Come, put it in your mouth.

Between the anus and the mouth the appetite of a body for a body.

Bulimic mass, caught in the bowel of language.

Hurt it. Take it. Let the words burst between your teeth.

BOA poet Ales Steger. Photo by Joze Suhadolnik.

We got great feedback on yesterday’s post of Ko Un paintings from Flowers of a Moment (BOA, 2006) translated by Brother Anthony of Taizè , Gary Gach, and Young-moo Kim. So we decided to share some more riches today!

Ko Un #7

Ko Un #8

Ko Un #9

Ko Un #10

Ko Un #11

Publishing poetry-in-translation has always been a key part of BOA’s activities. Want proof? Just check out BOA’s distinguished list of translated poetry titles: [BOA Translations]. Our dedication to translation stepped up a notch when the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, New Mexico began providing funding to support our translated books, including generous honorariums to both poets and translators. Since that time, BOA has published 18 translations through our Lannan Translations Selection Series. In each translation, we also include a handwritten poem by the poet which we build into the interior design of the book. In the case of Flowers of a Moment (BOA, 2006) we had the unique opportunity to include brush paintings by the author as well. And since the author is internationally celebrated Korean poet Ko Un – and the paintings worked in perfect conjunction with the text – we took the opportunity to design the book especially to accomodate Ko Un’s poems and paintings. The result is

BOA is based in Rochester, NY, but our authors and translators live all over the world. So it’s always a treat for us to have one of them in town. Tomorrow (8/6) translator Judith Kerman will be in Rochester in support of her new translation, Praises & Offenses: Three Women from the Dominican Republic (BOA, 2009).

The event will be held at Greenwood Books, 123East Avenue, Rochester, NY. The reading begins at 7:30pm and is free and open to the public. 

Praises & Offenses presents the work of three powerful Dominican poets: Aida Cartagena Portalatín, Angela Hernández Núñez, and Ylonka Nacidit-Perdomo. Judith Kerman began this translation project in 2002 while she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in the Dominican Republic, and she believes that these three poets present a rich contrast of linguistic and stylistic elements, as well as addressing shared political and cultural issues and illuminating what it means to be a woman living in modern day Dominican Republic.

Judith will read from Praises & Offenses and also discuss the creation of the book, the translation process, and answer questions from the audience.  

Here’s a sample poem by Aída Cartagena Portalatín from the collection:

A Woman is Alone

A woman is alone. Alone with her stature.
With her open eyes. With her open arms.
With her heart open like a wide silence.
She waits in the desperate and despairing night without losing hope.
She thinks she is in the flagship
with the saddest light of creation.
Already she has hoisted her sails and let herself be carried by the North wind
in accelerated flight before the eyes of love.

A woman is alone. She holds her dreams fast with dreams,
the dreams that remain to her, and all the sky of the Antilles.
Solemn and quiet before the world that is a human stone,
in motion, adrift, lost in the sense
of its own word, its useless word.

A woman is alone.  She thinks that now everything is nothing
and no one says anything from the party to the mourning
about the blood that leaps, about the blood that runs
about the blood that is born or dies of death.

Nobody comes forward to offer her a dress
to clothe her voice that sobs naked, spelling itself.

A woman is alone.  She feels, and her truth drowns—-
in thoughts that translate the beauty of the rose,
of the star, of love, of man and of God.

Aida Cartagena. Photo credit Max Pou.

“There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

That’s what they say, right? Even a terrible review usually includes a kernel of positivity – and, at the very least, there’s the chance that the reviewer’s revulsion will spark someone’s curiosity.

But the best thing about a bad review is that you don’t have to sit down to Sunday dinner with the offending reviewer. The best thing to do is read it (or don’t), recycle it, and move on with your life. I mean, it’s not like they’re your… mom.

Which brings us to one of the most nerve-wracking experiences an author can face: the presentation of one’s book to family members. How will they react? Will they see themselves in your pages? And, once they do, will they like what they see? And when they don’t… then what? 

As Barbara Jane Reyes says in this illuminating and funny blog post, “Critics, book reviewers, academics, po-biz H8ers got nothing on the fear I felt when I handed my mother her copy of Diwata.”

Barbara’s new collection, Diwata, is hot off the presses and delves heavily into her family history. Read how Barbara handles the “presenation of the book” to her family and also talks about the power of connecting her work back to her family:

 [Diwata: Telling and Writing Family Story]

Jane Hirshfield. Final Judge for the 10th A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.

The 10th Annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize is now open! This year’s distinguished final judge is Jane Hirshfield. The winner will receive a $1,500 Honorarium, paid in March 2011, and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in March, 2012, in The A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America Series. Other poets who launched their first books through the New Poets of America Series include Li-Young Lee, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Janice N. Harrington, and, most recently, Dan Albergotti, Jennifer Kronovet, and Keetje Kuipers.

Click here for complete guidelines [A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize]

Sometimes technology actually makes things harder. You send the wrong email to the wrong email list and cause mass confusion. Or else a spambot does that for you about, say, 956 times, and everyone on the list emails each other to say how upset they are, thus exponentially increasing the amount of spam everyone receives. Or maybe you forget your passcode because you have 89 of them that control every aspect of your life. Or maybe you get dumped by your sweetheart via Twitter.  Oh the (lack of) humanity! 

But then again, sometimes technology is very very cool. Say a book comes out by an author who you love, but you live 3,000 miles away… or just down the block from them, but you’re completely tied up with raising a family and/or flock of sheep… or the same goes for the author, and they’re not able to get out and promote their book at your local bookstore… Either way, the result is the same. You wish you could hear that author discuss their book and read choice passages, but it just isn’t going to happen.

That’s where the “cool” part of technology comes in!

Witness BOA author Craig Morgan Teicher and the “Virtual Book Tour” for his new collection, Cradle Book: Stories and Fables.  Craig would love to read for you – wherever you are. He really would. But he just can’t do that. It wouldn’t be physically possible. He may not even know your address. So, instead, he uses the miracle of technology to beam himself right into your computer where he can share stories and chit-chat with you in the comfort of your own favorite free wi-fi zone.

Here’s how Craig describes the situation:

“Welcome to my virtual book tour!  I wasn’t able to embark on an actual book tour to promote my new collection of stories and fables, Cradle Book, just published by BOA Editions (please buy it–please, please, in print or as a Kindle E-book), so I decided I’d stage this little virtual tour, reading a few fables from various places around my house.  Here’s the first stop–my favorite chair!  Each video features one fable.  Thanks for watching!”

So why are you still reading this blog post? Go ahead and check out Craig’s Virtual Book Tour below!

[Craig Morgan Teicher's "Virtual Book Tour"]

Keetje Kuipers on TV 

Click on the above link to see Keetje Kuipers on TV!

In an interview with the University of Oregon, her alma mater, Keetje Kuipers discusses her past and present experiences with poetry. In particular, she reflects on past efforts to alter her technique and style that lead to the development of the poet she has become today. Kuipers also talks of future aspirations for the direction of her poetry and reads two poems from Beautiful in the Mouth, her recently published collection, and winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize.