Dear Friends,
It’s time to emerge with poetry and books. Accents and Third Street Stuff invite you to an Open House and Open Mic on Saturday, the 23rd of April from 4pm to 7pm.
From 4pm to 5pm – browse books, drink coffee, hang out and catch up.
from 5pm to whenever – everyone is welcome to read a poem.
After the reading – hang out some more.
If the weather is nice, we’ll be outside. A few Accents authors will be in attendance to sign books.
We look forward to spending time together!
Poet Pat Williams Owen answers a few questions about Orion’s Belt at the End of the Drive (Accents Publishing, 2019)
Do you still like your book? Why or why not?
I still like Orion’s Belt at the End of the Drive. I’m proud of the poems and the period of my life it portrays. It’s honest and heart-felt and represents several years of conscientious work.
What is the highest praise you’ve received for it?
The highest praise I’ve received from it was from my granddaughter who said she loves it, that it made her laugh and cry.
What didn’t make it in the book?
What didn’t make it into the book were poems of lesser quality and those that didn’t fit thematically.
Is there a poem from the book you’d like to share with the readers of the Accents blog?
I’d like to share “After My Untimely Death” as a sample of a list poem that any writer can model.
After My Untimely Death
Sometimes as I leave the house
I foresee people coming in and finding
remains of my life spread out like the ruins
of Pompeii. For sure on the floor
my Birkenstocks, well-worn and embedded
with my DNA, journals, books and magazines
stacked by my chair, yesterday’s running shoes
beneath the table, shoe strings dangling
toothbrush standing at attention, maybe the towel
still damp, a coffee cup with the final dregs,
today’s New York Times spread out,
half read.
Did I leave a light still burning,
awaiting my return? The chairs
around the table askew,
a life in process, my fuzzy lap
blanket still on the footstool,
housing my sloughed -off cells
hiding out in the folds of the yarn,
fingerprints on the sliding door
belong to this particular life.
Thoughts and dreams religiously recorded,
black ink in journal after journal,
stacks of them. Shelves of books
underlined and notated, my sweat
smudged on each page. Light streams
in through the blinds as usual.
Funny, all the years of viewing Orion’s belt,
I thought my place on earth
was permanent.
How did you arrive at the title?
The title is taken from one of the poems in the book. In my poetry I try to address the intersection between the mundane and the transcendent. This poem is a metaphor for that.
Do you have a favorite Accents Publishing book (other than yours) and if so, which one?
My favorite Accents book other than mine is Katerina’s The Porcupine of Mind.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on new poems, observations of life as it passes.
Share a poem, or at least a sentence from your new writing.
Last Wash for the Old Car
To honor our 30 years of caretaking
I take my place in line with all the others
seeking purification,
that one moment of perfection
when the grey face of the car emerges
shiny dripping wet through the soapy steam.
Blue-shirted, brown-skinned workers
white towels wrapped round their heads
embrace it with rags
scrubbing until all surfaces shine.
I climb into the leather seat one last time,
fresh lemon scent surrounds me.
Poet J. Kates answers a few questions about Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing, 2010)
Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book.
Not sure there is a story to tell. I had written some poems, they seemed to fit together in theme, there was a chapbook contest from Accents Publishing, and I submitted to it. You liked it, apparently.
Do you still like it? Why or why not?
The poems I write that stand the editorial test of time long enough to make it to publication are poems I like. The rest, I throw away.
What is the highest praise you’ve received for it?
Not sure I’ve received any “praise” for Metes and Bounds. You published it, some people have bought it. That’s praise. Can’t recall if it was ever reviewed.
What didn’t make it in the book?
Most of the poems I’ve written in my life. Luckily, a good many have made it into other books, with, I hope, more still to come.
Is there a poem from the book you’d like to share with the readers of the Accents blog?
I’d like to have your readers read them all. That’s why I wrote them. If it’s your blog, you choose.
Selected by Katerina and inserted in the text:
DOING THE WORMS’ WORK
The first April I am certain I will die,
the ground too cold, too wet for planting,
the river only a foot down from flood,
the compost heap a contradance of bees,
I need to be looking toward a harvest.
I will turn dirt. Without stooping
to pick rocks, I do the worms’ work
for an hour or two, see how I like it,
see how I enjoy the company of worms.
Not bad, they say, not bad for a beginner .
How did you arrive at the title?
Ah, there’s an interesting question. In New England, where I live, it has long been customary to establish boundaries not by formal surveying, but by noting and describing landmarks (or by creating them, as with walls and cairns). All the poems in this little collection somehow have to do with limits and limitations, and there is a rural cast to them; it seemed an appropriate title. I have worried, since, however, that the title sounds a little too bucolic, characterizing my work (unfairly, I hope) as “when the Frost is on the bumpkin.” Perhaps that’s balanced by the cosmopolitanism of an earlier chapbook (Mappemonde, Oyster River Press) and by other published poems.
Do you have a favorite Accents Publishing book (other than yours) and if so, which one?
Partial to anthologies and to translation as I am, you can guess I’d single out The Season of Delicate Hunger, for its introduction and presentation of contemporary Bulgarian poets.
What would you like to see Accents do going forward?
Succeed. On your own terms.
What are you working on now?
I have two full-length manuscripts being widely rejected. I continue to write — including some experimental, urban prose poems — and to translate.
Share a poem, or at least a sentence from your new writing.
“The human in me knows how to retreat.”
ACCENTS POETRY CRAFT SERIES
We’re very happy to start offering live online craft sessions. We intend for these to deliver brief but powerful bursts of energy and inspiration on interesting topics. The sessions are accessible to anyone with a device such as a computer or smartphone and an internet connection.
The sessions are taught by Katerina Stoykova, owner and senior editor of Accents Publishing.
Every Monday 6:00-7:15pm
Sign up a-la-carte for $25.00 a session, or all 5 for $20 each.
Topics:
11/11 Developing a brilliant voice
11/18 Writing very short poems
11/25 Quotes, conversations and scenes in poetry
12/2 Arranging and titling a poetry manuscript
12/9 Submitting your work — pitfalls and strategies
Write to accents.publishing@gmail.com to reserve your spot.
Depending on interest/requests, local people may meet face-to-face.
My mother sleeps in my bed,
my father sleeps
in a ground starting to freeze.
I wake in a moon-lit room
not meant for sleeping.
What else to do but let go
of his wheelchair and inhalers,
his starched pajamas pressed
and resting in his cherry dresser?
–Marianne Worthington,
Bigger Than They Appear:
Anthology of Very Short Poems
(Accents Publishing)
if there is nobody
to contemplate it
to lick its salt and to bring back
the discarded whales
to be vulnerable and small
to be swept with a single wind gust
a single wave to cover it whole
and carry it away
what is it for
if there is nobody
the ocean hangs on your little finger
–Петя Хайнрих
(Petja Heinrich),
translated from the Bulgarian
by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer,
The Season of Delicate Hunger
(Accents Publishing)
Petja Heinrich was born on October 4th, 1973 in Sofia. She holds a degree in journalism from St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia. She translates poetry from German into Bulgarian and has contributed to various German and Bulgarian publications. Petja is the founder of poetry print journal But Poetry, and she frequently blogs at mislidumi.de. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Fly Up and Catch Us (2012). She lives in Düsseldorf, Germany. She is a biker who talks with birds.
Leaving hour, how quick–Patty Paine,
Grief & Other Animals
(Accents Publishing)
Patty Paine is the author of The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse(Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, The Louisville Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor ofDiode Poetry Journal, and Diode Editions, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is interim director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
Hard time didn’t make Brother wiser
like it did Etheridge Knight.
He returned home from prison
with a pocket full of excuses, not poems.
You’d thought he’d read Moby Dick
while on lock down, the way he chased
great whites, each encounter separating him
like Ahab from his leg, first from his own
children and eventually from himself.
Regret is for families forgiving enough
to break their own promises,
not realizing that even if the harpoon
is made of love, it can still drag
the whole boat down with the whale.
We might have understood revenge
and even obsession, but addiction
is more unforgiving than the sea.
–Frank X Walker,
About Flight
(Accents Publishing)
Multidisciplinary artist and Danville, Kentucky native, Frank X Walker, is the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky, and Professor in the department of English and the African American and AfricanaStudies Program at the University of Kentucky. The founding editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture is a Cave Canem Fellow, co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets, and the author of seven collections of poetry including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, winner of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for best poetry collection. The Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry recipient is the originator of the word, Affrilachia, and wholly committed to deconstructing and forging a new definition of a pluralistic Appalachia.
My friend Peter and I were six.
We wore cowboy hats, sheriff ’s badges,
and holsters with cap pistols in them.
We pretended we were at the top of a cliff
in the Badlands
(because they’re full of bad guys, Peter said)
waiting to ambush some train robbers.
We must be a thousand feet high, said Peter,
from here those people down there look like ants.
There were three possible responses to this:
—They sure do.
—Those are ants.
—(I said): None of my aunts looks like that.
Sensing a change in me, Peter made new friends.
-Andrew Merton,
Lost and Found
(Accents Publishing)
Andrew Merton is a journalist, essayist, and poet. Publications in which his nonfiction has appeared includeEsquire, Ms. Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, and The Boston Globe.His bookEnemies of Choice: The Right-To-Life Movement and Its Threat to Abortion, was published by Beacon Press in 1980. His poetry has appeared inBellevue Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Rialto (U.K.), Comstock Review, Louisville Review, Vine Leaves, the American Journal of Nursing,and elsewhere. His book of poetry, Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs?, with a foreword by Charles Simic (Accents Publishing, 2012) was named Outstanding Book of Poetry for 2013–2014 by the New Hampshire Writers’ Project. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of New Hampshire. His website is available here.
Wash the dust from my eyes, out of my ears,
from all pores where the wind has lodged it.
Wash it away—whatever is left from dusty roads
of childhood Rockport, dust of dead parents.
Let me go to Mess Hall clean,
to feed as well as my horse
for tomorrow’s ride.
Break this monotony with abundant splashing
from fountains in Renaissance Rome.
Break this dead dusty road. I am going somewhere
lined with apple trees and red rose bushes.
NL
–Nana Lampton
Wash the Dust from My Eyes
(Accents Publishing)
Nana Lampton is a lifelong resident of Louisville, Kentucky and leads the company her grandfather Lampton founded in 1906. She graduated from Wellesley College and worked under May Sarton. She earned an M.A. from the University of Virginia where she studied with George Garrett. In 2004, she received an MFA in writing from Spalding University. An Honorary Consul to the Kingdom of Morocco, she is an active business woman whose interests include community development, historic preservation, land conservation, and the arts. She serves on the Boards of Yaddo and Fons Vitae, and on the Advisory Board of Sarabande Books. Her books of poetry include The Moon with the Sun in Her Eye, published by Fleur-de-Lis Press, Snowy Owl Gathers in Her Trove, published by Chapman Friedman Gallery, and Bloom on a Split Board, published by Accents Publishing.