In Cloud of Witnesses memoirist and poet Linda Norton laments and celebrates her bicoastal, peripatetic life (much of this material was assembled during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020) via the cento writ large: every paragraph of prose, every stanza of poetry, is informed by books she has read, half-read, collected into that well-known pile of to-be-reads. Poring over a life spent roaming libraries, museums, and public walkways in New York and California, Norton comes close to Benjamin’s dream (perhaps nightmare) of fashioning a book entirely out of quotations. Fortunately for her readers, she fails, allowing her own insights and observations to serve as the warp and woof of these familiar and unfamiliar citations. Like W. E. B. Du Bois finding solace in his library, Norton moves back and across “the color line,” sits with Shakespeare, Fanny Howe, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, etc., and they wince not, welcoming her into their esteemed company.

—Tyrone Williams

The Irish writer Dervla Murphy said one thing that made her sad about dying was not having enough time to re-read all her favourite books. Linda Norton’s pandemic response to the “death” of her life in public was to re-read books as a kind of replacement for lost community. Cloud of Witnesses is a one-woman, New-Deal-WPA poetry intervention, privately funded by the writer’s voracious reading, care, rage, and love. These poems are an emergency response to hollowness: to lockdown isolation, to erosion of public space by rapacious capitalism, to crumbling US democracy. Stacks of books –from the public and personal library—serve as laptop props for Zoom calls with friends. But then the books themselves start talking, and Norton is their witness. And, lucky for us, ours too.

—Alice Lyons

About The Public Gardens: Poems and History and Wite Out: Love and Work

The Public Gardens is a brilliant, wonderful book, a sort of a wild institution, intense and readable. . . . I find myself loving this writer’s mind, light touch, and generous heart and I, reader, didn’t want to go when it was done. My bowl is out. More! — EILEEN MYLES

Steeped in the language of Scripture and Emerson, the poetry here is fresh and wild, cultivated and desperate. . . [Norton] documents her losses and loves, both as a free person and a mother, and every word she writes has the bittersweet taste of Dinah Washington. — FANNY HOWE

A memoir about a single working mother coping in a rough world she sees all too clearly, Wite Out is a courageous book about a courageous life. I couldn’t put it down. — NORMAN FISCHER

Wite Out is a masterpiece. — JOHN KEENE

Linda Norton is the author of Wite Out: Love and Work (2020), a memoir with poems, and its prequel, The Public Gardens: Poems and History (2011, introduction by Fanny Howe), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Norton is also the author of two chapbooks, Hesitation Kit (2007) and Dark White (2019).
Norton received a Creative Work Fund grant in 2014, the year she exhibited her collages at the Dock arts center in Ireland with support from the US Embassy in Dublin. Her collages have appeared on the covers of her own books as well as books by Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr, and other writers. She was a 2020 columnist-in-residence at the SFMoMA Open Space.
Norton was born in Boston and lived in Brooklyn for many years before moving to Oakland, where she raised her daughter and met her foster son. Norton’s children are the heart and soul of Wite Out, a book John Keene and Eileen Myles call a “masterpiece” and Norman Fischer calls “a gorgeous, courageous book.”
Norton is a dual citizen of the US and Ireland/EU. She teaches online at the Yeats Academy at IT Sligo/Atlantic Technological University in Connaught, Ireland.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 102 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-464-2

$22

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Cloud of Witnesses by Linda Norton Book Preview by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd

“As Whitman averred, “there are millions of suns left”. And in that spirit, Nick Courtright avers, and irrefutably, that the meaning of Whitman’s project leans into futurity, into eternity. With In Perfect Silence at the Stars, the art of close-reading becomes a Vastation, an experience without limits. In the spirit of a practical idealism unique to America—the spirit of William James, Charles Ives, and Guy Davenport—Courtright has gifted Whitman with a further cosmos. This is an exhilarating book.”

“With In Perfect Silence at the Stars, the art of close-reading becomes an experience without limits. In the spirit of a practical idealism unique to America, Courtright has gifted Whitman with a further cosmos. This is an exhilarating book.”

“With In Perfect Silence at the Stars, the art of close-reading becomes an experience without limits. This is an exhilarating book.”

~ Donald Revell, Guggenheim Fellow & Professor of English at the University of Utah

*

“In Perfect Silence at the Stars has all of Nick Courtright’s usual hallmarks: humor, trenchant readings, sustained skepticism, and a tactical leveraging of critical voices both old and new.”
~ Dr. Matt Cohen, Co-Director of the Walt Whitman Archive and author of The New Walt Whitman Studies (Cambridge UP)

*

“I appreciate, as always, Nick Courtright’s lively and accessible writing, engagement with audience, and the ambition of this project. I’m impressed by how much ground he covers.”
~ Dr. Chad Bennett, author of Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry (Johns Hopkins UP) and Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era (Sarabande)

*

“Dr. Nick Courtright’s In Perfect Silence at the Stars is groundbreaking. Of course, there is the lush 300+ page analysis of a single Walt Whitman poem, a hermeneutic feat that is nothing short of remarkable, and which showcases Dr. Courtright’s incredible gifts for scholarly exegesis and close reading. But more importantly, this book opens up a number of important theoretical lenses for thoughtful readers and university students of all levels with remarkable ease and acuity. Dr. Coutright showcases, in full splendor, the rewards and possibilities of the study of poetry. In a world where humanistic pursuits exist under constant threat, this is necessary and profound work.”

~ Kristina Marie Darling, Fulbright Scholar & author of Look to Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle

Dr. Nick Courtright is Founder and Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press, and is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light, and Punchline. In addition to The University of Texas at Austin, where he received his PhD, he has also received degrees at Texas State University and Ohio University, and has taught at a wide variety of public and private institutions of higher education. His writing has been featured in such publications as Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, SPIN Magazine, and many others.

Learn more at atmospherepress.com and nickcourtright.com, and feel free to reach out to him directly at nmcourtright@gmail.com.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 284 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-454-3

$22

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In Perfect Silence at the Stars- Walt Whitman and the Meaning of Poems by Nick Courtright Book Preview by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd

Bruce Jackson’s Ephemera finishes his recent triplicate of essay collections. This one, which starts with an almost breezy account of his own near heart-attack, feels as undeniable as his Places and Changing Tense. Jackson is a wonderful conversational writer. Even when he’s polemicizing against torture-mongers, Bush-men, Buffalo’s goodies, or bad Sontag, he doesn’t bring a hammer to the debate (though he’s glad to shiv a Dershowitz). Jackson’s writing always conveys his happy warrior’s appetite for life. This guy’s got eyes and ears and stories for the Ages. He also once had a great dog! Read all about it…

—Benj DeMott, editor, First of the Month

Bruce Jackson is a writer, folklorist, documentary filmmaker and photographer. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. He is author or editor of more than 40 books, the most recent of which are Ways of the Hand: A Photographer’s Memoir (2022), Changing Tense: Thirty memento mori (2021), and Places: Things heard, things seen (2019). Two of his early works have recently been dramatized by New York’s Wooster Group. In collaboration with SUNY Distinguished Professor Diane Christian, he has directed and produced five documentary films, three books, and, since spring 2000, curated the Buffalo Film Seminars. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, was nominated for a Grammy Award, and was named an Associate Member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters. The French government appointed him Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and Chevalier in the Ordre national du Mérite in 2012.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 256 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-442-0

$22

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Ephemera 1995-2022 by Bruce Jackson Book Preview-Af by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd

Aldon Lynn Nielsen was born and spent his childhood in Grand Island, Nebraska, the place where The West begins, its outskirts the forward edge of The Big Empty. This extended series of written interviews with E. Ethelbert Miller begins with a vivid recollection of that space, tumbleweeds and all, then moves on to Nielsen’s formative years in Washington, DC. Miller’s questions lead to considerations of Nielsen’s development as a poet, musician and scholar. As you would expect, these reflections treat his engagement with African-American literature from the Black Arts Movement to the growth of university departments of Black Studies and his role as an anthologist and critic in offering us both the texts of innovative Black writing and critical ways to approach it. The detail here is engaging and important, but this is most fascinating and instructive as the account of the evolution of a sensibility and how it moved from “empty” to open and inclusive.

—Michael Anania

As you begin Memewars, think of Ethelbert Miller’s leading questions as melodies, recognizable tunes, and Nielsen’s responses as harmolodic extensions, waxing nostalgic, and just as moving, just as important, playing all the changes on a prolific career and life in music and writing.

—Tyrone Williams

Nielsen layers reminiscences of a Nebraska childhood and observations about contemporary family life with a cultural commentary that doesn’t tell us what to think, but instead causes us to question what we thought we already knew.

—Kathy Lou Schultz

Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s MemeWars reveals a world where deep listening, reading, and rumination place us on a journey that traverses the fertile ground of Black creativity. With the right questions being asked by the incomparable E. Ethelbert Miller, Nielsen gifts us with the life of the intellect that facilitates our understanding of the work and brings us to the point where we are made aware of the power of the lived literary experience that is informed by writing and teaching. Through his recollections of an astonishing group of legendary intellectuals/artists like Russell Atkins, C.L.R. James, Lorenzo Thomas, Jayne Cortez, Amiri Baraka, Ahmos Zu-Bolton, and several others, Nielsen is privy to what the poet M. B. Tolson called the “artistry of circumstance.” How grateful we are that Nielsen has been listening, remembering, and responding with his astute critical eye! This interview/memoir weaves through the physical and cultural landscape where a young boy can spend his early days dreaming of comic book heroes, range riders, and scientists, finding his way from Nebraska all the way to Chocolate City, Pennsylvania, California, and further. Nielsen’s life is marked by movement, Black ones. Within the pages of the crucial book, he astutely comments on the rich texts and lives of those innovators he encountered. He delivers us to a place where we can hear the lament and celebration of the blues, the electric/eclectic jazz riff improvisatory bop and weave, p/laying it all out like a ring dance in the cooking fires of resistance and liberation. Importantly, it is also a story of Nielsen’s origins and how he fashioned his critical and poetic acumen to give us observations that speak from his commitment to championing and documenting the breath, breadth, and depth of a rich legacy. This book ignites us and returns us to the launch pads of our own strivings. Here is a place where ideas resonate and can be savored. Read and digest these interviews. Be reminded how important it is to witness and remember!

— T. J. Anderson III, author of Devonte Travels the Sorry Route (Omnidawn, 2019)

His bicycle firmly attached to his Toyota Corolla, Aldon Nielsen set out across America, eventually parking himself for a decade in San Jose, California. Over the decades he has taught at Howard University, San Jose State, UCLA, Loyola Marymount, Pennsylvania State University, and the Central China Normal University in Wuhan. His most recent books are Back Pages: Selected Poems, Sufferhead, Spidercone and The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka. When not haunting the lounges of Dulles Airport, he makes his home in Santa Barbara, with his wife, Anna Everett, who has heard all of this . . . twice.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 180 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-416-1

$22

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MemeWars by Aldon Lynn Nielsen Book Preview-Af by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd

Gloria Frym has written a love story about how we read and why we read, and the way books invade our psyches and change our lives. Within these pages are her encounters with Proust and Flaubert and Dickinson and Whitman, and they are for her what the great cities of the world are to life-long travelers, dream destinations, whole worlds. Her lucid and wide ranging thoughts make for necessary reading now more than ever, because books Frym proves here can save us still.

–Tom Barbash

How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays by Gloria Frym––one of America’s finest, most crucial poets and prose writers––is a treasure culled from a lifetime of reading widely, freely, carefully, with passion, intellect, and curiosity. Frym reads not for erudition or pedantry, but for the deep pleasure of entering another’s created world. Her sphere of reading––which spans the work of San Francisco County Jail inmates to Proust, Emerson, Chekov, Flaubert, her dear friend Lucia Berlin, her teacher and mentor Robert Creeley, even the beloved Grimm Brothers (and this is just a short list)–– is an ever-shifting prismatic globe where one arrives as Gulliver does, starved, shipwrecked along the shores of Jonathan Swift, grateful to be alive. These essays were written at different times in Frym’s life, many presented at conferences, festivals, classrooms, yet they compose an immediate seamlessness in her calm, undisturbed, inviting prose, a translucency that brings us close to the act of reading as immersion. Frym reminds us that reading is correspondence, even friendship, an intimacy in which we are “breathing deeply the oxygen of another writer.” I loved this book for its love, for its generosity, for at last delineating the differences between Niedecker and Dickinson, and for taking me back to reading sentence for sentence, word for word.

–Gillian Conoley

In this wonderful assemblage of essays, Gloria Frym liberates the act of reading from the confines of the page. She leads us into the open air where the personal and the public intersect and create a new avenue of possibilities: the book in the hand, the world outside your window. Especially memorable are the probing essays on Jean Toomer and Lorine Niedecker, and her homage to David Meltzer. How Proust Ruined My Life is a timeless book and deserves a wide audience.

–Lewis Warsh

Gloria Frym is a poet and prose writer. Her book of proses, The True Patriot, was published by Spuyten Duyvil. She is the author of the short story collections–Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)–as well as many volumes of poetry, including The Stage Stop Motel and Mind Over Matter. Her book Homeless at Home received an American Book Award. She is professor in the Writing & Literature programs at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area. She lives in Berkeley.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 200 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-366-9

$22

How Proust Ruined My Life b… by BlazeVOX [books]

This is an edited transcript of a conversation about the work poets do that Robert Creeley and Bruce Jackson held in Robert Creeley’s home—a converted firehouse in Buffalo’s Black Rock district— the morning of September 6, 2001.

One of Bob’s favorite words was “company.” He was always talking about being part of a company—a company of family, of poets, of artists, of deep connections going anywhere in the world, of this group here on this night around this table, eating and drinking and talking, always talking. When the company constricts, so does your world, so do you. The first thing he said when we talked about Allen Ginsberg’s death in 1997 was, “The company keeps getting smaller.” Company, for Bob, was whom you thought of when you had conversations in your head, and whom you talked with when you did it for real. Like the narrator of what may be his best-known poem, “I know a man,” Bob Creeley was always talking. It was part of the great pleasure of his company.

Five days after this conversation—at 8:46 A.M. on September 11, 2001—our world changed. No need to recount that for you: the collapsing buildings, the subsequent paranoia, the ethnic and religious antagonism, and turmoil, the never-ending wars, the continuing (and exhausting) politicization of everything….

That change, since then, has never stopped. This land is now besieged by plague, by governmental lunacy, by racial politics more naked than any time in any of our lifetimes, by a president who seems never to have read a book and whose imagination seems to contain no memory of any work of art in any medium, by a daily barrage of apparent information much of which is mere noise or calculated deception, by economic differences between the very rich and the ordinary poor unimaginable that morning at the firehouse, when we talked about simple things that interested both of us. like poetry, work, people we knew living and dead, the power and place of words.

Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926. He attended Harvard University from 1943 to 1946, taking time out from 1944 to 1945 to work for the American Field Service in Burma and India. In 1946 he published his first poem, in the Harvard magazine Wake.

In 1949 he began corresponding with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. The following year he became acquainted with the poet Charles Olson. In 1954, as rector of Black Mountain College(an experimental arts college in North Carolina), Olson invited Creeley to join the faculty and to edit the Black Mountain Review. In 1960 Creeley received a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Through the Black Mountain Review and his own critical writings, Creeley helped to define an emerging counter-tradition to the literary establishment—a postwar poetry originating with Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Edward Dorn, and others.

Creeley’s honors include the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. He served as New York state poet laureate from 1989 to 1991 and as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and Humanities at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999. On March 30, 2005, Creeley died at the age of 78.

(From The Academy of American Poets)

Bruce Jackson is an American writer, folklorist, documentary filmmaker, and photographer. He is currently SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. He is author or editor of more than 40 books, among which are Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (Harvard, 1972), “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (Harvard, 1974), The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Temple, 2007), Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons (Texas, 2013), and Places: Things heard, things seen (2019). His photographs have been widely exhibited. In 2017, New York’s celebrated experimental theater company, The Wooster Group, premiered a play based on his recordings of Afro-American folklore in Texas prisons, The B-Side. New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley named it one of the year’s ten best New York theatrical presentations. In 2018, Aperture Magazine published a profile on his prison photography by Brian Wallis, “Bruce Jackson: On the Inside.” He and SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian have collaborated on five documentary films and three books. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, was nominated for a Grammy Award, and was named an Associate Member of the Folklore Fellows by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. The French government appointed him Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and Chevalier in the Ordre national du Mérite in 2012. He has been president of the American Folklore Society, editor of Journal of American Folklore, and member and chair of the board of trustees of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 70 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-376-8

$20

Robert Creeley on the Poet’… by BlazeVOX [books]

You might think a book of obituaries would be boring. Forget it! Bruce Jackson shares absorbing, and often hilarious, stories of his adventures with a cast of unbelievably interesting people. He tells a great story!

—Howard S. Becker, author of Art Worlds (1982), What About Mozart? What About Murder? (2015), and Evidence (2017).

Bruce Jackson has written thirty memorial essays about his many friends, ranging from famous philosophers like Michel Foucault, to stray dogs like Randolph Scott, with a host of poets in between. Everyone is singular, vivid, and worthy of remembering. Every one of them changed Bruce Jackson. Each receives a delightful, detailed portrait filled with human (or canine) eccentricity. Some are drunk, others sober. All are dead, but thanks to this book, all now enjoy a second life that will endure for a very long time. Humorous, wistful, and generous, sparkling with care and wonder for the intricate music of life, this is a book that cherishes, and is to be cherished.

—W. J. T. Mitchell, some of whose books are Mental Traveler; A Father, A Son, and a Journey Through Schizophrenia (2020); Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics (2015), Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (1985), and On Narrative (1981). From 1978 to 2020 he was editor of Critical Inquiry.

Bruce Jackson is an American writer, folklorist, documentary filmmaker, and photographer. He is currently SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. He is author or editor of more than 40 books, the most recent of which are Robert Creeley on the Poet’s Work (BlazeVOX 2020), Deux Jours à La Ribaute: A celebration at Atelier Ansel Kiefer (Room With a View Press, 2020), and Places: Things heard, things seen (BlazeVOX 2019). Some others are Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (Harvard, 1972), “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (Harvard, 1974), and Inside the Wire: Photo-graphs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons (Texas, 2013).

His photographs have been widely exhibited. In 2017, New York’s celebrated experimental theater company, The Wooster Group, premiered a play based on his recordings of Afro-American folklore in Texas prisons, The B-Side. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post named it one of the year’s ten best theatrical presentations. A second Wooster play based on his fieldwork is now in development. In 2018, Aperture Magazine published a profile on his prison photography, by Brian Wallis, “Bruce Jackson: On the Inside.”

In collaboration with SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian, he has directed and produced five documentary films, written three books, and curated The Buffalo Film Seminars since spring 2000.

He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, was nominated for a Grammy Award, and was named an Associate Member of the Folklore Fellows by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. The French government appointed him Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and Chevalier in the Ordre national du Mérite in 2012. He has been president of the American Folklore Society, editor of Journal of American Folklore, and member and chair of the board of trustees of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 200 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-385-0

$24

Changing Tense- Thirty Meme…

How does the present imprint itself on language, on poetry? Gloria Frym’s Mind Over Matter shows us that: the outlines of the endless wars, the credit default swaps. But it also shows poetry resisting this. “No poem/would stand for such a line.” Frym writes. “A poem is not a fool.” This book makes me want to cheer.

—Rae Armantrout

Mind over Matter is a thoughtful meditation on poetry in our age of post-theory and reminds us that the authority of poetry has always been ours (“Without words we would fall on our faces”).  Giving us “all of summer in one word,” poetry is a form of “living attention”   It is our true home, bestows freedom in language, and understands best that “now is as old as time.”  I love this book for casting aside the postmodern clichés of poetry’s limitation, preferring to see world and language in fresh relation.  Here, the “definite is infinite,” and the real resonates.   Not the “neo- / Looking out for numero uno,” largely inspired by poetry’s professionalized culture, but a shrewd look at the actual and eternal worlds before us.

—Paul Hoover

________________
Gloria Frym was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Los Angeles, and spent many years in New Mexico. She lives in Berkeley and teaches at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-042-2

$16  Buy it from Amazon!!

Mind Over Matter by Gloria Frym Book Preview

Broad in scale and scope, this volume attends to developments on the terrain of contemporary Anglophone poetry deeply articulated with issues of balance, justice, measure, and distance as these variously cohere, come apart and recombine across the unfolding present. Decentered and transatlantic in orientation, the essays aggregated in this volume emerge from a variety of social contexts, including the popular and the scholarly, print and digital forums, the cosmopolitan and the local, the center and the margin. Areas of interest addressed range from lyric to epic, from late twentieth and twenty-first century poetics to eighteenth century antiquarianism, from phenomenology to textual criticism, from contemporary critical theory to intellectual currents specific to folk forms. The primary target of this volume, however, remains singular: the necessary labor of the poetic in the present.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 256 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-359-1

$18

Sauvage- Essays on Anglophone Poetry by Richard Owens Book Preview

This editor has been poaching Bruce Jackson’s memories for ages. His true tales work on their own—Cue reader response: “Bruce Jackson, the great story guy (living and telling) does it again”—but they take on new weight when taken together. Places: Things Heard, Things Seen amounts to an alt left history of American culture since the 50s. The things Jackson’s heard and seen include the folk revival and cinephilia, The Grolier and Attica. Places is a testament to Jackson’s matchless variousness. This politically engaged, ex-Marine aesthete has hung tight with Harvard fellows and Houston DEA agents. Not because he’s a con man out to be on good terms with anyone, but because he means to imagine the real. Pace Camus. Though I should really find a mot from Jackson’s friend Foucault who’s a live presence in Places, along with Robert Lowell, Pete Seeger, Herbert X, Bill Kunstler, Alan Lomax, et al. Jackson’s stories about his companions remind me of that old Beat dream of a book as good as a friend. Places will take you there.

— Benj DeMott, editor First of the Month

Places: Things Heard. Things Seen unveils Bruce Jackson’s extraordinary career as a writer, photographer, and filmmaker. Jackson’s graphic prose and powerful photographs capture his childhood in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn with Jewish grandmothers who spoke German, Yiddish, Russian, and Polish. We follow his travels to Mallorca, France, Italy, Alaska, to Texas prisons and Attica. And we meet his friends–poets Robert Creeley, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, folklorists Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, photographer Walker Evans, political activists William Kunstler and Herbert X. Blyden, and film historian James Card. At the age of 82, Jackson recalls his life in prose that is as richly detailed, as are his photographs. Places: Things Heard. Things Seen establishes Bruce Jackson as an American treasure.

— William Ferris, The South in Color: A Visual Journal

Bruce Jackson is an American writer, folklorist, documentary filmmaker, and photographer. He is currently SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. He is author or editor of 40 books, among which are Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (Harvard, 1972), “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (Harvard, 1974), The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Temple, 2007) and Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons (Texas, 2013). His photographs have been widely exhibited. In 2017, New York’s celebrated experimental theater company, The Wooster Group, premiered a play based on his recordings of Afro-American folklore in Texas prisons, The B-Side. New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley named it one of the year’s ten best New York theatrical presentations. In 2018, Aperture Magazine published a profile on his prison photography, by Brian Wallis, “Bruce Jackson: On the Inside.” In collaboration with SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian, he has directed and produced five documentary films and written three books. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, was nominated for a Grammy Award, and was named an Associate Member of the Folklore Fellows by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. The French government appointed him Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and Chevalier in the Ordre national du Mérite in 2012. He has been president of the American Folklore Society, editor of Journal of American Folklore, and member and chair of the board of trustees of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 314 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-346-1

$30

Places- Things Heard. Things Seen by Bruce Jackson Book Preview