NER Out Loud brings the page to the stage

Friday, October 26, 7:30 pm

October 15, 2018

NER Out Loud is back for its fifth run! Join us Friday, October 26th, 7:30 pm, in the Mahaney Center for the Arts Dance Theatre for an evening of readings from New England Review. In partnership with the Mahaney Center and Oratory Now, NER Out Loud presents selections from the magazine, read by a talented team of Middlebury students. Sign language interpretation will be included.

And leave room for dessert—students will cap off the evening with a reading of their own work in the Mahaney Center lobby, while you enjoy Middlebury’s finest Indoor S’mores!

This year’s program:

• Melanie Rivera ’19 reading “In Order of Appearance,” a poem by Heather Christle
• Gillinda James ’21 reading “Dead Weight,” a story by Raven Leilani
• Masha Makutonina ’21 reading the story “Biomass” by Alla Gorbunova, translated from Russian by Elina Alter
• Pele Voncujovi ’19 reading the poem “Don’t tell them we’re going or they’ll want to come too” by Nathan Trantraal, translated from Afrikaans by André Trantraal
• Sam Martin ’19 and Rebecca Berlind ’21 reading “Modal Window,” a story by Janet Towle

Editors and contributors to the student literary magazines will also be on hand at the post-show reception to discuss their publications and read from their recent work. Read more about NER Out Loud.

NER at Open Books in Seattle

Join us Saturday, October 20, 7 pm

October 11, 2018

We’re celebrating 40 years of New England Review with readings by Poetry Editor Rick Barot and recent NER contributors Gabrielle Bates, Keetje Kuipers, Eric McMillan, Susan Rich, Martha Silano, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Join us at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, on October 20, 7 pm. Open Books is located at 2414 North 45th Street in Seattle, WA.

Rick Barot, poetry editor of NER, has published three volumes of poetry: The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord (2015), all published by Sarabande Books. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2020. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Gabrielle Bates works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and helps edit the Seattle Review, Poetry Northwest, Broadsided Press, and Bull City Press. Her poems and poetry comics appear in the New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, and Gulf Coast, and she is the recipient of support from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Hugo House, and Artist Trust. She is originally from Birmingham, Alabama.

Keetje Kuipers has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Her work is published widely, and her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She is the author of the poetry collections Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010), The Keys to the Jail (BOA, 2014), and All Its Charms(forthcoming BOA, 2019). Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest and on faculty at Hugo House, Keetje lives with her family on an island in the Puget Sound where she is at work on a novel and a memoir.

Eric McMillan served ten years as an Army officer, participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and later returned in command of an infantry company during the “Surge” of 2007–2008. He has received support from the Richard Hugo House and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and his story “Havoc” appeared in NER 38.3. His fiction has also appeared in Gulf Coast and Witness. He lives in Seattle with his wife and son.

Susan Rich is the author of five books, most recently, Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press). She is the winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement Award, London. Her poems have been published in all 50 states including in such journals as the Antioch Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and Poetry Ireland. Along with Kelli Russell Agodon, she is cofounder of Poets on the Coast, a yearly writing retreat that takes place in La Conner, WA, each September.

Martha Silano is the author of four books of poetry, including Reckless Lovely and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, both from Saturnalia Books. She also co-edited, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Her poems have recently appeared in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, and elsewhere. Gravity Assist, her fifth collection, will appear in early 2019 from Saturnalia Books. Martha teaches at Bellevue College.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet of Palestinian, Syrian, and Jordanian heritage. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017) and Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize. She earned her MFA in Poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop of Pacific Lutheran University. Her poems and essays have been published in Kenyon Review Online, World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, and Winter Tangerine. This year, she is the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle.

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Lexa de Courval on Carl Phillips

October 9, 2018

Former Office Manager Lexa de Courval considers the persistent questions and mysteries found in “Beautiful Dreamer,” an essay by Carl Phillips, from NER 35.2 (2014).

“Beautiful Dreamer” demands your attention in the very first paragraph. I admire how Carl Phillips chooses here to write about what is difficult and also very real, and in doing so he creates images we will respond to differently—we might feel uncomfortable, or charmed, perhaps even angry. Regardless, I find myself contemplating the Blue King, and mesmerized by the beauty of his descriptions.

Of the many treasured pieces we published during my years at NER, I am still drawn to this work because I feel that it is courageous, and it came to me at a time when I was questioning the world around me on a deeper level. Our lives are filled with experiences that require us to rely on our instincts while sorting through truth and myth. Recently I have reflected on what it means to be human today, and how social media has created another layer to living behind a mask. We are not always how we envision ourselves, and at times are warriors within our own lives trying to heal and find our inner beauty. Asking probing questions and taking risks can be like being on a battlefield, particularly with the unsettling challenges in our current world.

For decades I have adored poetry, spending hours rereading intriguing lines to ask myself: Have I missed the point? How do I know this isn’t my selfish interpretation of something I need to happen in this work? Phillips comforts me in this as he writes about his own poem “Beautiful Dreamer,” and in response to poetry.

For months after having written the poem, I in fact found it difficult to know with any certainty, if not the poem’s meaning, then at least the meaning to which the poem might be gesturing. Many poets write toward a chosen subject, but I’ve always been the kind who writes from a supposedly clear space into a space of surprise, that is, where I find myself surprised—and not so pleasantly surprised, more often than not, surprised instead into a heightened awareness of something troubling.

We are often troubled by the page and how real it can be; we know what our hearts feel, yet we sometimes question our innate being. Poetry can take us down a dark alley, but we are compelled to know what we will find there. Is it real or is it a dream? Are we hiding behind a disguise of what we imagine? This essay will challenge you to face your dreams and desires.

Was it Dante’s Inferno or The Iliad of Homer that first brought forth the expression to eat one’s heart out, which appears here in Stephen Crane’s rather bestial stanza of a creature eating his own heart? Is it power we seek when we punish or are punished—to claim one’s glory and revel in someone else’s doom?

I enjoyed Phillips’s selections from Shelley and Crane reflecting on power, and on how for some, punishment can often become as addictive as pleasure. “We can never really know another’s heart,” he writes. But if it is our own heart, we are compassionate, and “it’s better to eat of what we know.” He quotes from Crane’s Black Rider series:

“But I like it
Because it is bitter
And because it is my heart.”

Phillips brilliantly describes how a poem is an “interior dialogue we have with our other selves,” how we “write in response to being human.” “The poem is a form of negotiation with what haunts us,” he writes, “. . . insofar as what haunts us is, in part, who we are.”

I was the Blue King. I led the dance.

One might have chosen to skirt the encounter in the park with which Phillips opens this essay, yet he chose to look it in the eye and be mystified, and to attempt to clarify for himself what he really saw. Phillips challenges us to seek understanding in the world around us and be surprised. He continues with the subject of loss in “Untitled,” a poem by Lorine Niedecker. We feel emotion for the subject that is difficult to put into words—Paul / when the leaves fall. Is there beauty in mourning? We do not want to live our lives alone, but sometimes to be human is to feel very alone as we face death and hardships.

Phillips invites us into the work of these other writers, and into their stories, as he brings them into his own exquisite writing. Writers are compelled to record these times, and we relive each day through the histories of others as we create our own moving pictures. What is real and what is a dream, history or imagined, heroic or heartbreaking? Phillips encourages us to write, to seek meaning and confront the challenges in our everyday lives.

Having worked at NER and Bread Loaf for many years I have been continually inspired by authors like Carl Phillips and by their presence in my own life. I remember seeing John Ashbery, whose passages Phillips describes in his final page, surrounded by young scholars in a crowded room. I remember reading Seamus Heaney from a hefty Norton Anthology in college and then what an honor it was to meet him in person and receive his poem, “Du Bellay in Rome” for NER’s 34.2. I cherish the sound of Julia Alvarez lecturing on little children saving the world through medicine. People and place are life and these surroundings make up who we are and how we live.

Phillips leaves us with provocative questions: Are we living, dreaming, or haunted by the moment? What is beauty and how do we make peace with our own inner demons? Admittedly, I cannot know Shelley’s “Ozymandias” or the Blue King of “Beautiful Dreamer,” though I can come to know them through Phillips. While pondering these alluring pages ahead, I hope you will keep dreaming and be enchanted. And, are we not most beautiful while we sleep?

“Beautiful Dreamer” by Carl Phillips

BUY the BACK ISSUE (35.2)

Lexa de Courval was Editorial Assistant and then Office Manager at New England Review from 2009 to 2016. She is currently the Academic Coordinator at the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College. She previously worked in local museum education programs at both Shelburne Museum and Henry Sheldon Museum, and for the Bread Loaf School of English.

Ellen Hinsey

Update on Poland’s Constitutional Crisis

September 19, 2018

Polish Parliament, Warsaw, July 2018, “Time for the final court—final judgment”

a special dispatch from NER’s international correspondent

In the third book of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, we find the historian’s account of the effects of an unbridled pursuit of power and the subsequent lawlessness on Athenian society: “When men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future, and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.”

This summer Thucydides’ warnings returned with all their urgency: on July 4, 2018, Poland’s Act on the Supreme Court, which resulted in the dismissal of nearly 40 percent of its judges, came into force amid widespread protests, including outspoken opposition by the court’s President, Małgorzata Gersdorf. The Act is the latest step in the Law and Justice party’s extensive judicial overhaul (the Act on the Supreme Court has ominously been called by protestors “the final judgment”).

[read more]

This special dispatch is a follow-up to Ellen’s earlier piece on Poland, which is available here. As the International Correspondent for New England Review, Ellen Hinsey has lived in Paris since 1987, and witnessed firsthand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Die Welt, Paris Review, and Poetry, and her most recent books are Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova and The Illegal Age, a poetic investigation into the twentieth-century’s legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality.

New England Review