More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
Larissa Szporluk
Larissa Szporluk, this issue's featured poet
is author of three books of poetry, Dark Sky Question (Beacon Press, 1998),
winner of the Barnard Poetry Prize; Isolato (University of Iowa Press, 2000
winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and The Wind, Master Cherry, the
Wind,
forthcoming with Alice James Books in fall 2003.
She has new work in Daedalus, Faultline, and Meridian.
In addition to having received a 1998 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, and an NEA grant for 2003,
her poems have been widely anthologized in Best American Poetry 1999,
Best of Beacon 1999, Best American Poetry 2001, New American Voices, and Young American Poets.
She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at
Bowling Green State University.
Robin Behn is Professor of English and teaches in the MFA Program in
Creative Writing at The University of Alabama. Her books of poetry are
Paper Bird (Texas Tech University Press), winner of the Associated Writing
Programs Award Series in Poetry; The Red Hour (HarperCollins), and
Horizon Note (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the Brittingham Prize.
She is also co-editor of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from
Poets Who Teach (HarperCollins). A recipient of fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the state arts
councils of Illinois and Alabama, and the New England Review narrative poetry
prize, her work appears in the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best American Poetry,
and many literary journals.
Richard Garcia is the author of Rancho Notorious, BOA Editions, 2001,
and The Flying Garcias, University of Pittsburgh Press. His poems have
recently appeared in the Mid-American Review, The Colorado Review, Kestrel and
the Crab Orchard Review. He is an instructor with the MFA in Creative
Writing program at Antioch University Los Angeles and teaches writing at
California State University, Long Beach. He has been the poet-in-residence at
The Long Beach Museum of Art and at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles. More information
can be found at Richard Garcia .
John Hennessy's poems presently appear or are forthcoming in Ontario Review,
The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, New Letters, and Pleiades.
His book manuscript has been a finalist or semi-finalist for five prizes,
including the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press,
the John Ciardi Prize at BkMk Press, the Samuel French Morse Prize (Northeastern U. Press),
and the Nicholas Roerich Prize (Story Line Press).
John Hennessey currently teaches at Boston University.
A recent graduate of the Southern Illinois University MFA program,
Adrian Matejka is a Cave Canem fellow and currently teaches at SUNY-Geneseo.
His poems have recently appeared in Beacon Street Review, Elixir, and
Lake Effect among others. His first collection of poems, The Devil's
Garden, was the winner of the 2002 Alice James Award and is forthcoming in
October 2003.
Ayukawa Nobuo is one of the founding poets of the Arechi (Wasteland) group, and the
translator of T.S. Eliot. Ayukawa was drawn to Eliot after encountering "The Wasteland"
when it was first translated into Japanese in the 1930s. The sociopolitical environment
of pre-fascist Europe and economically depressed England resonated for Ayukawa and
reflected the situation in his own country at the time.
Ayukawa was drafted into the war in 1942 and was stationed in Sumatra.
Ayukawa sought to create a poetics of responsibility and political awareness
by acting as a kind of spiritual "medium" for the voices of the war dead.
While many of his friends died, Ayukawa managed to survive, or rather "failed to die."
Ayukawa's passionate refusal to let the war dead die, and his highly personalized poetic
inquiry into the nature of race, culture, and identity--while keeping a sharp critical eye
on the deadening effects of "progress" and the chameleon-like politics of the times--
won him abiding influence among generations of poets to come. Ayukawa died in 1986 at
the age of 66 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Eunice Odio is considered the mother of Costa Rican poetry in the twentieth century.
Born in San José in 1919, Odio traveled widely before settling for much of her
life in Mexico City. Her volumes of poetry include Los Elementos Terrestres
(Earthly Elements), Zona en territorio del alba (Zone in the territory of
dawn), and a book-length creation myth, El tránsito de fuego (The Fire's Passage).
She died in 1974.
Raymond Queneau was born in 1903 in Le Havre and is one of
the most influential French authors of the twentieth century.
Queneau was at the forefront of the surrealist movement of the 1920s,
the Collège de ’Pataphysique in 1950s, and the Oulipo,
or Ouvrier du Littérature Potentiel (Workshop of Potential Literature),
which continues today. With several novels published, among them the
prize-winning Le Chiendent, Queneau became an editor at Éditions Gallimard.
During the Occupation, Queneau refused to take part in the collaborationist
La nouvelle revue française and worked in secret on Resistance publications.
After the war he was a prominent character in the circle of artists and intellectuals
that frequented St. Germain-des-Près. Fascinated by numerology, psychoanalysis,
and linguistics, he joined the Mathematical Society of France in 1948 and was
elected to Académie Goncourt in 1951. In 1954 he became director of the
Encyclopédie de la Pléiade. His best-known novel,
Zazie dans le métro, was made into a movie by Louis Malle in 1959.
Kathryn Rantala currently has work posted at Drunken Boat, In Posse Review
and others, upcoming in The Iowa Review and Archipelago.
She co-edits Snow Monkey. Her book, Missing Pieces, is available from
Ocean View Press or via her website:Ravennapress
Anna Ross is an MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia University. She has
received the Gertrude Claytor Prize from the Academy of American Poets
and has poems forthcoming in The Paris Review. Her poems have appeared in
The Connecticut River Review and at CanWeHaveOurBallBack.com and
Shampoo Poetry.com. Anna is the poetry editor for Columbia: A Journal of Art
and Literature and lives in Manhattan with her husband and two cats.
Mathias Svalina currently teaches and learns in Richmond, VA. He has work
forthcoming in River City Review and Willow Spings, among others.
S-C Kevin Tsai is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His poetry has appeared in Salamander and Del Sol Review.
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