EDITORIAL

October Červená Barva Press Newsletter 2011

Hi Everyone. It is such a busy time of year for everyone. There are so many events and readings happening. Be sure to check out our readings page. If you want to be listed, be sure to send us your information.

October is fundraising month for Červená Barva Press.

Once a year, we ask for your help. We need money to keep growing and to survive. We are an extremely active press, as you know. In these tough economic times, we need help. Some of our books/chapbooks sell better than others. Running a press and publishing books is expensive. Bill and I love what we do but it does not come cheap. With rising costs, it becomes more and more difficult to survive.

Donate to Červená Barva Press

We would like to remind you of our publishing record:
2005: 21 poetry postcards
2006: 4 chapbooks
2007: 10 chapbooks
2008: 19 chapbooks, 8 full-lengths
2009: 12 chapbooks, 9 full-lengths
2010: 12 chapbooks, 8 full-lengths

7 e-books (free)

So far in 2011: 5 chapbooks, 7 full-lengths

In Mid-October, we will be releasing two more collections...

"Now I See It" by Diana Der-Hovanessian (full-length)

"The Hallelujah of Listening" by Preston H. Hood (chapbook)

In November, "On Paths Known to No One" Poems by Flavia Cosma will be released.

So as you can see, we are very busy bringing you excellent work. Any amount you can help us out with, would be greatly appreciated by the press. We appreciate anything! It all adds up and helps us keep going. Cervena Barva Press Needs You!

This month, Červená Barva Press will be releasing a new book, Now I See It, by Diana Der-Hovanessian. The book launch will be October 18th at The First and Last Word Poetry Reading Series. Here is the flyer and information on the series. Harris Gardner and I hope to see many of you at this reading. Diana will be reading with X. J. Kennedy and Fred Marchant. It will be a very special event...

THE FIRST AND LAST WORD POETRY SERIES
Hosted by: Harris Gardner and Gloria Mindock

THE CENTER FOR THE ARTS AT THE ARMORY
POETRY AT THE CAFÉ
191 HIGHLAND AVENUE
SOMERVILLE, MA

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18^TH
6:30 PM /ADMISSION: $4.00
READING AND OPEN MIC

Diana Der-Hovanessian adds three new books to her publications this year with Dancing At the Monastery, (Sheep Meadow Press), Armenian Poetry of Our Time, (California State University Press and NOW I SEE IT (Červená Barva Press, 2011). She has poetry awards from the Writers Union of America, Writers Union of Armenia, Fulbright Commission, Columbia University, the Paterson Prize. For 25 years she arranged poetry and panel programs at the Boston Globe Book Festival and the Longfellow National Site for New England Poetry Club. http://www.dianaderhovanessian.com/

X. J. Kennedy, recipient of the PSA’s Robert Frost medal, since 1955 has been publicly reading and singing serious and unserious verse. In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New & Selected Poems and Peeping Tom’s Cabin are recent collections. His twenty children’s books are mostly verse; the latest: City Kids. He lives in Lexington.

Fred Marchant has written four books of poetry, including Tipping Point, Full Moon Boat and The Looking House. He is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947. Winner of the 2009 May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club, he teaches at Suffolk University in Boston, where he directs the Poetry Center.

The Center for the Arts is located between Davis Square and Union Square. Parking is located behind the armory at the rear of the building. Arts at the Armory is approximately a 15 minute walk from Davis Square which is on the MTBA Red Line. You can also find us by using either the MBTA RT 88 and RT 90 bus that can be caught either at Lechmere (Green Line) or Davis Square (Red Line). Get off at the Highland Avenue and Lowell Street stop. You can also get to us from Sullivan Square (Orange Line) by using the MBTA RT 90 bus. Get off at the Highland Avenue and Benton Road stop.

Look for interviews to come by Denis Nurske, Goran Simic, and Luis Raul Calvo in future newsletters.

Červená Barva Press Author News

On Friday, September 23, 2011 @ Longy School of Music of Bard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mary Bonina addressed the Conservatory students in the Composition Seminar led by Jeremy Van Buskirk of the Department of Theory and Composition. She also read some of her work from her two collections published by Červená Bava Press, Living Proof and Clear Eye Tea. Dr. John Morrison, a composer who chairs the Composition and Theory Department, invited Bonina to give a lecture on the creative process of poetry, and to engage the students in a conversation about what the two art forms share and a dialogue about using poetry as the inspiration for musical composition. The event was also attended by composer Paul Brusk, who has composed work based on the poetry of Denise Levertov, who was one of Mary's mentors.

John Flynn's story, Boss Visa, which first appeared in the Istanbul Literary Review, is part of a new anthology, just released, titled, A Small Key Opens Big Doors. The title is taken from a Turkish proverb, and all the stories in the book center on Eurasia. Three years in the making, and edited by Jay Chen, it's the third volume in a four-volume series of anthologies that cover the globe in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, which is this year. The book is available from Barnes and Noble, or from Amazon. John's novel, Heaven Is A City Where Your Language Isn't Spoken is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press, and he will read from it on
November 15th at the Armory in Union Square, Somerville.
(191 Highland Avenue, Somerville, MA, 6:30PM, 11/15/11)

Saturday, October 15 · 7:00pm - 8:30pm

Joan Gelfand will read from Here & Abroad, a collection of stories that won the 2010 Červená Barva Press Fiction Award.
She teaches for California Poets in the Schools. joangelfand.com
Other readers: Dorothy Hearst & Mary Mackey

Café Que Tal
1005 Geurrero St.
San Francisco, CA

I was so excited to have 10 poems come out in the anthology called "Hildagards Daughters" Six poets, women of a visionary voice (Part of The Green Door editions (Belgium) I would like to thank the editor/publisher Martin Burke. It is so exciting to be in this anthology with Flavia, Rodica, Mira, Jenny, and Camelia. Check it out at:
http://issuu.com/delphicghentbooks/docs/hildagards_daughters

Please check out The Green Door:
http://issuu.com/delphicghentbooks/docs/the_green_door?AID=10752329&PID=3662453&SID=skim725X783301X5c9f273f9d0ab66a80fc5db3408dba27

Mary Bonina Readings

Friday, October 21 @ 7:00 P.M.
Mary Bonina reads @ Assumption College in Worcester, at the D'Alzon Library

Mary Bonina has published poetry, memoir, and fiction in Salamander, Hanging Loose, Gulf Stream, many other journals, and in several anthologies, including Voices of the City from Rutgers University Center for Ethnicity, Culture, and Modern Experience. Winner of Boston Contemporary Authors, a public art project, her poem “Drift” was selected to be inscribed in a granite monolith now permanently installed outside a busy Boston subway station in Jamaica Plain. Bonina is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and is a member serving on the Board of Directors of the Writers’ Room of Boston, Inc. She holds an M.F.A. from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Order Clear Eye Tea

BOOK REVIEWS

all seeds & blues by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Reviewed by Ralph Pennel

The poetry of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's book, All Seeds and Blues, is ruminative in its slow, deliberate examination of the thing desired, while simultaneously approaching the state of desire itself. The works haunt, and are haunted by, the worlds, the states of being they are assuming and being denied access to, both.

Though Radulescu's poems, in form, are themselves not narratives, they disabuse the reader of the notion to not seek out narrative. For, there is as much meaning in what has not been said as there is in what has been said, the very places where only our own lives will serve to inform us of each poem's meaning, sometimes literally:

           I stepped into the day weightless deathless
           A sound on the brink

           Of nowhere

           The cracked mouth: (p.43)

This "sound on the brink," this "cracked mouth," this threshold between what has and has yet to be willed is where we will find ourselves in every poem. Each word, each poem, holds the promise of salvation from that which has not been uttered and the consequences of everything before and after that has. At every breath, each word, each poem, each combination of poems is all at once the thing each desires to define and everything else, too:

           onion soup and the death of a child
           have in common
           five o'clock news         it snows-
           it snows in one place
           the brain keeps snowing
           everywhere (p. 53)

Each word is seed and the sowing of the seeds. The poems, the sentiments they interminably represent, are the blues. The words in these poems must germinate, must have time to germinate before they yield fruit, before they sustain us. They must take root. In this way, they hold the promise of every harvest and the fear of long winters following failed harvests. They hold "little hope first then no hope at all / and we stay in line / waiting for something" where, though we can count on "one two three / four never arrives" (p.36).

These poems work tirelessly to shoulder out some room in a world that ceases to resist its own weight. In this way, the work is informed without once being nostalgic for it, by the landscapes and heritage Radulescu's Romania: complicated, fiercely independent, loyal to its own identity despite the centuries of occupation and war, where "people in our town / they are still building bridges of blood" (p.47), where "one says that cut off from the world, the body / still grows" (67).

The work is both intensely personal and universal at the same time, the way peering into a microscope forces our gazes downward and out. And when we look up from Radulescu's work, we can't help but feel we understand the world that much better for having gazed so long on the intricacies of its least speculative narratives, saved from a "death by exposure to dreams" (p. 6).

Order All Seeds and Blues at Amazon.com.

INTERVIEW WITH DIEGO FORMÍA
BY LUIS BENITEZ

How has your poetry evolved, from the first to the last book published?

One never really knows who one is, where one is and what one is doing. Just as some try to build self through language (a voice in a specific era), work processes and creative possibilities of language are what drive me. Poetry is what leads us, consumes us; pulls out lives with passion. This poetic vitality comes from an act of intelligible reason. I don't believe in poetics emerging from logical speculation: perhaps this drive to write can be managed rationally, but it loses poetry in the attempt, putting a ceiling on it.

I believe in what Eduardo Milán says in his book Resistir. Insistencias sobre el presente poético - Resist. Insistence on the poetic present (the word Latin American should be added), where he speaks about poetry, about being erratic and about the poet as a wanderer that speaks. A poem as something that strays implies the end of reality dependent poetry. Placeless, only the poet derives, or according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gautarri, "evolves;" becomes something else; goes from identity to identity, in continuous motion. In that endless wandering the poet loses identity and the poem loses its speech holder. There is no longer an identity: there are identities. There is no longer a reality to be obeyed: there are realities and they are all interchangeable depending on where the poet is in this true flight from an absent center. ("Resistir. Insistencias sobre el presente poético," article by Eduardo Milán. FCE, Mexico, 2004.)

My books: Un velero en el vacío - A sailing boat in the emptiness (1999, Rio Cuarto municipal printers) was my first book and while it is genuine and potent, I particularly try to transmute pain, it has many technical issues since at that time (nowadays I can see this as an adolescent pose) I didn't pay much heed to the formal aspects of poetry.

Then came Sonajeros - Rattle, a book-album (published in 2002 by Universidad Nacional de Rio Cuarto) which was envisaged as a game for children and is thus naïve, a deliberate pose aimed at creating a close knit world, a world of positive options in a country that is falling apart at the seams, a place where children, family and friends dance around in a circle. The texts of Sonajeros were created to be read and to be put to music (and embody my continued interest: in the quest of language interchange in order to explore possibilities of expression that I've always shared with artists from other disciplines). All the poems from the book were read and recorded in an experimental album that completes the volume.

Then came Crol en el inviernolíquído - Crol in the liquid winter (2006, Cartografías Editora) which is a plunge inwards, a character who lies on his bed and can't or doesn't want to get up, an existential minimalist; it breaks abruptly with the "children's party" style of the previous book by going to the other extreme, one of questioning loneliness and anxiety.

My latest book is El Pez del ojo - The Fish of the eye (2010, Cartografías Editora) that has strong unity among its poems. It takes past poetic resources (like alliteration, for example) to express the contemporary; under the idea that the "the only truth is overall illusion" that is expressed in poetic images, in the sense that the eye and the organs of perception are imperfect and that physics, that studies the structure of matter through its subatomic theories, has discovered the quantum vacuum of "things." This is something that physicists find hard to explain because it is of admirable beauty and will, at least I believe, end our strong materialistic influence in understanding the universe.

What has been your experience with regard to cultural animation?

I have discovered three passions in my life, of course with different drivers and intensities: poetry, communication and cultural animation. I discovered the latter about ten years ago and this is in fact one of my tasks at the Municipality of Rio Cuarto. While cultural animation is today a full study subject (my specific training is in social communication) I think the main thing here is to have wide-ranging culture, sensitivity regarding social processes in order to know which are the relevant cultural facts (culture in terms of values and as in any activity developed by man) that need to be promoted within a specific society based on their concrete social developmentneeds. And with regards to promotion, here an artistic-social aspect in termsof creativity comes into play.

For example, the annual poetry conference held for the past five years in Rio Cuarto; the Encuentro Nacional Aguante Poesía- National Poetry Encounter emerged at a time when, together with others (always with others, because cultural animation is not just one type, from one enlightened visionary, it is precisely a social matter) we started to deliberate that in your town there was no space for local poetry to dialogue with nationwide poetry, something that would evidently enrich local poetry most diversely, and that the local scene, within the country's federal vision, had something to say on a national level. Later more practical matters emerged and questions of organization such as getting officials to understand this need because they decide where to invest and where not to.

Once the political decision has been reached, it has to be established how the money the State has decided to invest shall be administered. Then consider concrete actions to be developed at each yearly encounter: which poets shall be invited taking into account the existing heterogeneity in Argentine poetry today, if there will be lectures, talks, literary workshops, etc… Aspects which although implemented by me, are discussed, talked about, agreed to amongst the local poets in the Cartografías group, the group that in fact organizes this encounter and is the creator of this space which belongs to us all; including poets, independent publishers and specialized magazines from other cities that feel they are a part of the Aguante Poesía event because they understand its spirit deeply.

I could also tell you about an Exposure to Science series I headed for five years and which I recall with much affection…. But we'll leave that for another occasion… What I will add is that cultural animation, in order to do it right and for it to succeed in terms of cultural development, needs incredible logistics and A LOT OF WORK. In that I have been surprised by this task; its complexity, the different aspects that need to be taken into account. Everything is planned (for example for the poets meeting) from the microphone, the glass of water, the table, the venue, down to the guests' trip, food, hotel… but also the poetry we will hear at the event.

What are the proposals of your online magazine, Vuelo Digital?
http://www.vuelodigital.com.ar

Vuelo Digital is a WEEKLY which was envisioned and designed as a result of the new media law: a political fact that returned "poetry" to the communications training of those who implement Vuelo Digital, a media that I share with the graphic designer and webmaster Germán Sayago and with my daughter Violeta Formía who is a student of social communication and graphic design. Aware of the fact that the media is just a technological tool and that there are always individuals behind, in front and within all content materials, the different social aspects of this media were devised so as to respond to current circumstances. The team took into account the new technologies and the new habits of the individuals who want to "look outwards" through the media. We understand that the internet and the social networks are valid tools to start thinking about a collective communications space. In this context we also took into account different formats and languages that people today read: text, audio, video, photos, music and the exchange of these languages. Vuelo Digital intends to publish content for the general public (while still maintaining an entertainment goal) based on the construction of a space that listens to the broadcasting needs of artists, educators, cultural agents, social workers, NGOs and educational institutions to build a network that gambles on collective construction. The idea is to give exposure to what the team calls an "emerging" culture because traditional mass media seems not to emphasize certain social and cultural facts that we feel are central when facing a different "reality;" awareness of the fact that the perspective we use and what we look at also create reality.

It is also intended as an area of convergence and dialogue between what is generated by the City of Rio Cuarto and the producers, projects and ideas presented by other cities throughout the country. The weekly comes out every Thursday and its materials are stored in their different sections. Today you can find: Videos: Las grandesaguas - The immense waters (video poem by Griselda García), Hombre en dos - Man by two (short film by Gastón Molayoli), Al perder la dentadura - On loosing one's teeth (video poem by Raúl Mansilla), El imperio de los Colores - The empire of Colors (presentation of the documentary on immigration by Marcos Altamirano), implementation of the IAER Parana, Entre Rios Audiovisual Educational Program, the latest video clip of the Anímica Lunar group by Guillermo Mena, among others.

POETRY READINGS

Please visit the readings page:
http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/readings.htm

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