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Five Questions for Poet Lyman Grant

8/7/2017

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Tell us about the birth of your book. How did it get into this world?
 
The birth of Old Men on Tuesday Mornings goes back to the late 1980's when in my mid-thirties I decided to re-commit myself to my teenage dream of being and living like a poet (whatever that meant).  I was part of what was then called "the men's movement," and I joined an informal poetry group comprised of John McElhenney, Bill Jeffers, David Jewell and maybe a couple of other men.  We were all associated with The Austin Men's Center, whose founder was John Lee.  And all of us were involved in someway with MAN! Magazine, a pretty successful newsstand publication at the time. Times changed.  The men's movement was mainstreamed.  Lives changed. John Lee left Austin and had a career as a public speaker, group leader, and teacher in men's issues and recovery.  But we all remained friends even though we seldom saw each other.  Time passed.  Then in the fall of 2014, John Lee has returned to Austin, and we found ourselves available and eager to start another poetry group.  For a couple of years, I had been writing prose, not poetry, so I was certainly ready to pick up the habit again.  Our process was simple:  mostly we met at John's Lee's house, talked about what we had been thinking, read some poems, wrote a draft of a poem, shared it.  And then, in my case at least, I went home and revised it, if I could.   We met for about six months then lives changed again, but these men had gotten me writing poetry again.  
 
 Do you write every day to a schedule, or do you write in bursts and sprees? 

I work full-time and have a family, so I don't have a regular writing schedule.  This book was written at first a poem a time, maybe two a month.  Then the summer of 2016, I was able to protect a regular routine for a couple of months, while reading and studying the late poems of Jim Harrison, so he is kind of muse for much of this book.
 
 
Give us an idea of your writing method. First draft by hand or by computer? Do you outline or improvise? 

My method varies.  Some of these poems evolved from general conversations with my friends, say, a physical ache or a regret.  We would write in a notebook.  I am not a fast or inspired writer, so I revised those poems a lot.  I wrote other poems inspired by Jim Harrison's poems. In the morning, I would read three or four or more poems.  Feel what was provoked, come up with a first line, then (like William Stafford suggests) follow where that line leads.  By noon, I would have a pretty good draft that I would tinker with for weeks.  All of that would have been in front of a computer. For others, I might have a line or title that rattles around in my head for weeks until a second idea joins it and gives it direction, and that method would be to write a few lines by hand on an envelope or receipt that I hope I don't lose before I can get to the computer.
 

What are your four or five (or ten) favorite books? 

Wow.  There are too many.  Related to this book are
  • The Half-Lived Life, by John Lee.  The Flying Boy, his first book, got me into men's work in the first place.
  • In Search of Small Gods and Saving Daylight, by Jim Harrison.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge's conversation poems have always been important to me, but particularly so in one long poem in the book.
  • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and The Encheiridion by Epictetus.  I think Stoicism befits an older man. 

Other books in the past;
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila by Robert Persig.
  • Shadow Dancing in the USA, by Michael Ventura.
  • Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.
  • Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis.
  • Poems by Robert Bly, Rumi, Kabir, Rilke, James Wright, Franz Wright, Spencer Reece, Bill Jeffers, Brigit Kelley, Sharon Olds, Naomi Nye, and Jill Alexander Essbaum Peng.
 
If you could be any character in a work of literature, who would you be?  

John Ames in Gilead by Marianne Robinson.  Or Walt Whitman in Song of Myself.
 


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Six Questions for Poet Laura Guidry

7/16/2017

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Tell us about the birth of your book.  How did it get into this world?

Sitting in my writing studio a couple of summers ago, my friend and mentor Sally Ridgway and I gave one another a challenge – that we would each put together a poetry manuscript for a first book within the year. We researched what was involved in compiling the manuscript. For years, we'd attended conferences where poets talked about this topic. So we pulled out our notes. At a recent Poetry at Round Top panel discussion, one poet had offered this piece of advice – when trying to group the poems, ask “What is the poem thinking about?” Sally and I agreed we would check in periodically on our progress and be each other's first reader.  It was the impetus I needed. I've always known what I wanted the title of the book to be. Luckily, I have this wonderful studio – the one room in the house I chose to carpet so I could sit on the floor. I sorted poems over several months with the luxury of being able to leave the stacks where they were. Always in the back of my mind, was a quote from Robert Frost (that I had read in Jeffrey Levine's excellent article “On Making the Poetry Manuscript”), “ 'If there are x number of poems in a book, the book itself is the final poem.'”  I enjoyed the process of putting the book together, seeing how the poems related to and played off each other. And Sally and I both finished our manuscripts within the year. 

Do you write every day to a schedule or do you write in bursts and sprees?

Definitely, bursts and sprees. But if the wheels are spinning and I'm reading poetry or books about poetry, studying craft – I think that all counts.

Give us an idea of your writing method.  First draft by hand or by computer?  Do you outline or improvise?

I always write the first draft by hand, but I put it on the computer quickly and print it out.  Then I keep the poem close to me – in a pocket perhaps, through rooms in the house as I move about, often times in the car. I always say my poems to myself, silently and out loud. Sound is crucial to poetry. So when I'm creating and especially revising, I choose words for their sounds as well as meaning. I can go through many revisions for just the right sound of the words. The way the poem looks on the page is important to me, too. I am drawn to symmetry. 

What are you four or five (or ten) favorite books?

I'm going for ten because I want to name poetry books, works of fiction and an autobiography. In poetry, The Poetry of Rilke and Uncollected Poems, both translated by Edward Snow. My husband Larry gave me Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, Vols. I and II which I treasure. Also on the list are Mary Oliver's American Primitive; The Wild God of the World – An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, selected by Albert Gelpi, and A Book of Luminous Things – An International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Czeslaw Milosz. I could keep going but I'll move to fiction and name Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. And the autobiography is Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 

 If you could be any character in a work of fiction, who would it be? 

Bathsheba Everdene in Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. She's smart, daring and independent, not intimidated or defined by the expectations society had of a woman in nineteenth century England. She's right out there in the fields with her workers and earns their respect. She's also beautiful and men fall in love with her but unfortunately, at least for awhile, she falls for the wrong one.

We're interested in your next creative endeavor – would you like to share some information about it?

I would like to spend as much time as possible in my studio writing, reading, listening to music. I have my grandmother's piano in the room and I said I was going to learn to play it again. I will continue to submit poems to literary journals and anthologies. I am fortunate to live in a beautiful, wild place and, for as long as possible, I want to enjoy it and, hopefully, in the words of Robinson Jeffers, “feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things.”    










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Six Questions for Poet Dave Oliphant

1/30/2016

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Tell us about the birth of your book. How did it get into this world?
 
Through the good graces of Alamo Bay Press. The book itself is about whatever moved me at the time I was writing it, my wife frequently, but also books that I had read—one entitled Lone Star Stalag—people I knew or had known, scenes that I saw, artwork that I came across, and music I heard.
 
Do you write every day to a schedule, or do you write in bursts and sprees?
 
Bursts and sprees, although when I wrote KD a Jazz Biography I would write for a long spurts.
 
Give us an idea of your writing method. First draft by hand or by computer? Do you outline or improvise?
 
On some pieces I write by hand, but in others I begin on the computer. New York Jewish poet Louis Zukofsky taught me to structure my poems according to word count, although I do not always use that approach. I like to try different forms. William Carlos Williams was one of my first influences and continues to inspire me.
 
What are your four or five (or ten) favorite books?
 
Moby Dick, Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, Don Quijote, Song of Myself of Whitman, William Carlos Williams’ poetry and In the American Grain, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Louis Zukofsky’s A, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, and Beowulf.
 
If you could be any character in a work of literature, who would you be?
 
Gavin Stevens, the lawyer in several Faulkner novels, especially Intruder in the Dust and Light in August.
 
We're interested in your next creative endeavor—would you like to share some information about it?
 
I’m typing up my travel journals, revising them, and adding material that I intended to write but in the midst of the travels to the East Coast, Spain, England, Scotland, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico I did not always have time to do so. I have thought to title the material Travels of a Texas Poet, but it may be too long and I would then include only my various trips to Chile and call it A Texas Poet in Chile.


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The Cowtown Circle Released

2/28/2015

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Alamo Bay Press is very proud to release The Cowtown Circle, Dave Oliphant’s 13th book of poetry.

The poems in The Cowtown Circle are diverse and wide-ranging, dealing with nature, topical issues, and the imprisonment of captured WWII German soldiers in Hearne, Texas, to a section of María Poems (a series devoted to Dave’s wife, begun in 1976) and to sections on grandchildren and a visit to New York City, on music (classical, jazz, and Indian), and on U.S. Presidents. The title of the book refers to a group of modernist artists active in Ft. Worth, Texas (a city known as "cowtown" for its stockyards), during the Second World War.

Dave says he was influenced by many things during the writing of the book. “Whatever moved me at the time, my wife frequently, but also books that I had read—one entitled Lone Star Stalag—people I knew or had known, scenes that I saw, artwork that I came across, and music I heard…The title poem on artists in the city where I was born demonstrates the source for writing in one’s own environment, and the poems on my wife illustrate how the nearest source can be at home.”


Dave Oliphant taught and/or edited a scholarly journal at the University of Texas at Austin from 1976 to 2006. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he won the TIL's 2011 Soeurette Diehl Fraser book translation award for his version of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra's Discursos de sobremesa (as After-Dinner Declarations). A second edition of his translation of a collection of poems by Chilean Enrique Lihn, entitled Figures of Speech, is forthcoming in 2015 from Host Publications. His series of poems entitled Memories of Texas Towns & Cities (begun in 1975 and completed in 2000) includes a 140-page poem on Austin that Michael King reported in The Texas Observer "takes its place. . . as a long poem in a modernist mode which makes an enduring contribution to the literature of its place, time, and country. And that's a great deal for any city to be proud of."



The Cowtown Circle
by Dave Oliphant
ISBN: 978-0990863212


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Janie's Garden released

11/23/2014

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Alamo Bay Press is very happy to announce the release of Janie’s Garden, a collection of poetry from the 2014 Alamo Bay Writers’ Workshop, which met in Seadrift, Texas.

“It’s a collection of work directly inspired by its setting,” says editor Lowell Mick White. “The workshop participants were meeting in a beautiful garden right on the edge of the bay, and what they experienced there, of course, found its way into their poems.”

Featured poets include Dorothy Barnett, Linda Caplin, Linda Dane, Graciela Fleming, Gina Harlow, Julie J. Johnson-Jones, Diane Kramer, Kathryn Lane, Barbara Williams Lewis, Bob Lindsey, Jay Minton, Aubrey Parker, Sophie Rousmaniere, Hazel Ward, and Janie Waghorne—the Janie of Janie’s Garden.

The workshop was led by Lee Meitzen Grue, who writes of the setting, “Surrounded by water, this is rich earth for growing flowers and is a fitting tribute. The garden has become a comfortable work of art like a painting you love and live with for a long time.”

“A poem about gardens is more than a book about gardens,” says Diane Wilson in the book’s introduction. “It’s a poem about the state of one’s soul and the poems in Janie’s Garden book are good indicators of the authors’ souls. At least I think so, but don’t sue me.”



Janie's Garden
Introduction by Diane Wilson
Edited by Lowell Mick White
ISBN:
978-0990863205


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