Robert K. Johnson Feb. 27, 2014 4PM

Robert K. Johnson is a retired English professor from Suffolk University in Boston. Johnson has been widely published in the small press. He is the author of  a number collections of poetry, his latest being: From Mist to Shadow and Choir of the Day. Johnson has also written two critical studies, one of Francis Ford Coppola, and the other of Neil Simon. His poetry has appeared widely in newspapers, and literary journal across the country.  He is a winner of the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award along with other notables such as: Robert Pinsky, David R. Godine, Louisa Solano, and Jack Powers. Johnson was the first poetry editor of Ibbetson Street affiliated with Endicott College.

PoetAfaa Michael Weaver Nov 14, 2013

Lef to Right: Professor Dan Sklar, Professor Debbie Finklestein, Afaa Michael Weaver, and Professor Doug Holder

Nov 14 2013 Afaa Michael Weaver 4PM

Afaa Michael Weaver

b. 1951

http://www.afaamweaver.com/

Bill Larsen

 

 

A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Afaa Michael Weaver was born Michael S. Weaver to working class parents in 1951. His poetry echoes the gospel and blues ethos of his mother and father, who were themselves the children of farmers in southernmost Virginia. His father grew up as a sharecropper. The eldest of five children, Weaver graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic high school and entered the University of Maryland in College Park at the age of 16. He studied for two years before leaving to marry and take a job in a Baltimore factory owned by Bethlehem Steel. He also joined the 342nd Army Security Agency as a reservist that spring. Weaver was called to basic training in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, that winter and returned to Bethlehem Steel in the spring of 1971, when he was hired as semi-skilled worker at Procter & Gamble in the Locust Point neighborhood of South Baltimore, just across the harbor from Fells Point, the neighborhood in which Frederick Douglass lived until he escaped from slavery.

Weaver received his Chinese name, Wei Yafeng (蔚雅風), in its initial form from Ching-Hsi Perng of National Taiwan University. Bei Ta of the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature in Beijing, China, modified “Wei” by adding the “grass radical” on the top of the character. “Yafeng” refers to the ya fueh section of The Book of Songs, China’s first anthology of poetry, first officially compiled by Confucius.

Weaver developed interests in jazz and photography while working in the factory, a time he refers to as his literary apprenticeship, and they inform his poetry. From 1970 to 1985, he labored at the craft of poetry, established 7th Son literary press, and worked as a freelance journalist for the Baltimore Sun papers, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the City Paper of Baltimore. A member of the Baltimore literary renaissance of the early 1980s, in 1985 and still a factory worker, he received a fellowship from the NEA. Weaver left factory life two days after learning about the NEA fellowship, and his first book of poetry, Water Song, was published that year.

Weaver entered the Brown University graduate writing program that fall on a full university fellowship. He focused on playwriting and theater under George H. Bass and Paula Vogel and simultaneously finished his BA at the University of the State of New York, a distance-learning institution that is now Excelsior College. After graduation, he taught as an adjunct at New York University, Seton Hall Law School, the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Essex Community College, and Brooklyn College before landing a tenure-track appointment at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, where he received tenure with distinction as an early candidate.

The years 1996 to 2001 were transitional for Weaver. In 1996, he was invited to speak with the fellows at Cave Canem, and in the following year, he became a member of its first faculty, along with Elizabeth Alexander, and was subsequently named its first elder. From 1997 until 2001, he edited Obsidian, an academic journal at devoted to writing in the Black Diaspora. He served as poet in residence at the Stadler Center of Bucknell University in 1997 and later accepted an endowed chair at Simmons College.

In 1997, with the encouragement of Tess Onwueme, the Nigerian playwright and novelist, Weaver took the name Afaa. He refers to it as a symbolic ritual inspired by the one in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, in which a spirit who takes children away must be appeased. During his first marriage, Afaa and his wife lost their first child, Michael S. Weaver Jr., to Down syndrome.

In 2002, Weaver taught at National Taiwan University as a Fulbright scholar, and his lifelong interest in Chinese culture took on deeper dimensions. After his return to Simmons, he began formal studies of Mandarin. Since that time, he has convened two conferences of Chinese poets from abroad at Simmons and lived and studied in Taiwan and China on several occasions. He terms his Chinese language studies as an ongoing pursuit alongside his Daoist practice.

In early 2013, the University of Pittsburgh Press published The Government of Nature, Weaver’s 12th collection of poetry and the second book in a trilogy that began with The Plum Flower Dance. He has had two plays produced professionally and has won awards for other plays over the years, including the PDI Award in playwriting from the eta Creative Arts Theatre in Chicago.

Weaver’s other awards include a Pew Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a May Sarton Award. Contemporary Literature has published an extensive interview with him conducted by Cynthia Hogue, Chris Burawa, and Stacey Waite. His papers are held in the archives of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

 *Also in 2013 Weaver won his second Pushcart Prize for his poem in Ibbetson Street 32 Blues in Five Four...

Poet Charles Coe Reading Nov. 26, 2013

(Left to Right)  Professor William Harney, Professor Dan Sklar, Series Director Doug Holder, Poet Charles Coe

(Left to Right) Professor Mark Herlihy ( Asst. Dean of Humanities), Professor Margaret Young, Poet Charles Coe, Professor Deborah Finkelstein, Professor Dan Sklar.

*****photos courtesy of Alexa Luddington

Doug Holder (Left) Charles Coe (Right)

Sept 26, 2013 4PM Poet Charles Coe

Poet Charles Coe

Charles Coe, Program Officer for MCC’s Cultural Investment Portfolio, is the author of the poetry collection Picnic on the Moon. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous newspapers and literary reviews and magazines, and his poems have been set to music by composers Julia Carey, Beth Denisch and Robert Moran. Charles also writes feature articles, book reviews and interviews for publications such as Harvard Magazine, Northeastern University Law Review and the Boston Phoenix. In addition to his work as a writer, Charles has an extensive background as a jazz vocalist and has performed and recorded with numerous musicians in the Boston area and throughout New England. His latest poetry collection is All Sins Forgiven.

Photo From Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs with Jim Vrabel

                                                          ( Click on to enlarge)


   Professor Mark Herlihy ( Left)  Professor Doug Holder ( Center)  Jim Vrabel ( As " Henry" from Berryman's The Dream Songs) ( Right)   Emily Pineau   (Endicott/Ibbetson Street  Young Poet Series) author  (Front)

April 11, 2013 :Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs with Jim Vrabel

                      A staged performance of poet John Berryman's masterwork:              

 

 

 

                                                     DREAMSONGS    

Jim Vrabel is a local historian and the author of When In Boston: A Timeline & Almanac (Northeastern University Press). He is co-author of John Paul II: A Personal Portrait of the Pope and the Man (St. Martin’s Press).


A long-time neighborhood activist and former city official in Boston, he now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.


Jim attended the Graduate School of English at the University of Iowa, which is where he first encountered John Berryman’s Dream Songs. After expecting others to do it, he composed Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, an 80-minute one-man play by taking some 90 of the most brilliant and autobiographical of the songs - in whole or in part - re-ordering them and adding a very few lines of connecting text.


The play received a staged reading at the Charlestown Working Theater, and has been performed for the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers at Boston University and at the Oberon Theater as a benefit for the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge.


Paul Mariani, Berryman’s biographer and a poet himself, calls Homage to Henry “a sad and very human story, as stark in its way as anything in Samuel Beckett.”

Poet Tino Villanueva Reading Feb 28, 2013

(Left: Tino Villanueva)   (Right :Doug Holder)

                                                            photo courtesy: Emily Pineau


     Thoughts on the Tino Villanueva Reading

      By Emily Pineau

            “All of us have memory in this room.  A writer takes it one step further,” explains poet Tino Villanueva after he reads a part of his book-length poem, Scene from the Movie GIANT.   This book-length poem that Villanueva reads an excerpt from illustrates his experience of watching a scene that deals with Mexican racism from the movie Giant.   Villanueva’s memories of this scene connect to the idea of cultural identity, and he is very passionate about this subject. Villanueva also alternates writing in Spanish and in English, which is something that I find very intriguing.  When Villanueva did this reading at Endicott he passed out an English translation for his poem “Convocation of Words”, which is about his struggle and determination to understand difficult English words.  Although I do not have the personal experience of being bilingual, I have attempted to learn Spanish before. It was very frustrating for me because I used to be very close to a Spanish family, but I could not understand what they were saying when they’d speak in their language, and I always failed to de-code the Spanish soap operas on television at their house.  Villanueva’s poetry reminds me that language is very complicated, but it is also beautiful and worth untangling. 

            “Those tangled images kept coming in volumes,” Tino Villanueva reads from his poem about Ann Sexton in his book There is Another Voice.   The language and imagery that Villanueva uses is vivid and very powerful.  My personal favorite of the poems he presented is called “Catharsis” which has a jazzy feel to it.  He read this poem fast, and with rhythm.  Since this poem is about studying for a final exam, and the time leading up to it, this style and pacing that he used worked very well.  Also, I really like his poem “Something Beyond Light”, which is about writer’s block, and the moment an idea comes into light.  This concept is one of the themes in my own writing, so I felt like I could really connect.  Also, this theme of writing and writer’s block makes its way into Villanueva’s poem “Voice Over Time”, which he read in Spanish.  With the English translation in from of me, I read to myself, “I wanted to write so badly it hurt.  All afternoon tied to a desk, to a page flat on a table—I was getting nowhere, just fending off failure and the darkening light.”  As Villanueva read this poem in Spanish it made me realize that no matter what language is used, the passion that compels someone to write is a language that everyone can understand.

Tino Villanueva Feb. 28, 2013. 4 P.M.

Tino Villanueva



TINO VILLANUEVA

                                                    



 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE  Poet and writer Tino Villanueva was born on December 11, 1941, in San Marcos, Texas to a family of migrant workers. Because of the demands of traveling to harvest crops, Villanueva was never able to attend school regularly. Despite the hardships, he managed to graduate from San Marcos High in 1960 and began working on an assembly-line at a local furniture factory. In 1963, he was drafted into the United States Army in 1963 and spent two years in the Panama Canal Zone. There he became immersed in Hispanic literature, reading the works of poets such as Rubén Darío and Cuban revolutionary José Martí. Upon returning to San Marcos, he took advantage of the GI Bill to study English and Spanish at Texas State University-San Marcos. He completed his B.A. in three years and then moved to Buffalo, New York to attend the State University of New York. He finished his M.A. in 1971 and moved to Boston University, where he began his doctoral studies.


In the early 1970s, Villanueva began publishing his poems and he became part of what has been called The Chicano Literary Renaissance. His work highlights the tension as well as the richness of living within two different cultures. He writes in both English and Spanish, often switching between the two languages. In 1972, he published his first collection of poems, Hay Otra Voz Poems (There Is Another Voice Poems). That year he also wrote "Chicano Is an Act of Defiance."


After publishing Hay Otra Voz Poems (1972), Villanueva began traveling widely, presenting readings throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America. He founded Imagine Publishers, Inc., and edited Imagine: International Chicano Poetry Journal. In 1980 he published a general anthology of Chicano literature, Chicanos: Antología Histórica y Literaria. A year later, Villanueva completed his doctorate in Spanish from Boston University and accepted a full-time faculty post at Wellesley College.
In 1994 Villanueva won the American Book Award for his book-length poem, Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993). The poem was inspired by his boyhood in San Marcos, where he had first viewed the film at the Holiday Theater. The scene depicted on the screen takes place at a segregated restaurant. In 1995 Villanueva received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Texas State University-San Marcos.


Villanueva has published several books of poetry since earning his Ph.D. He continues to teach, lecture, and research, and to develop his interest in painting. Villanueva currently serves as Senior Lecturer in Spanish, Department of Romance Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University.



BOOKS PUBLISHED
Poetry:Hay Otra Voz Poems, Staten Island, N.Y.: Editorial Mansaje, 1972.
Shaking off the Dark, Houston: Arte Público Press,1984; second printing, Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 1998.
"Autobiographical Disclosures: Tino Villanueva Interviews Anthony Quinn," The Americas
Review, 1988.
Imagine: Arte Chicano Issue, Boston, MA: Imagine Publishers, Inc., 1990.
Scene from the Movie GIANT, Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1993.
Chronicle of My Worst Years, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Crónica de Mis Años Peores, La Jolla, CA: Lalo Press, 1987; 1994, second printing;
Madrid, Spain: Editorial Verbum, 2001, third printing.
Primera Causa/First Cause, Merrick, N.Y.: Cross-Cultural Communications, 1999.
Il Canto del Cronista: Antologia Poetica. Florence, Italy: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 2002.
Escena de la película GIGANTE, Madrid: Editorial Catriel, 2005.

Other:Chicanos: Antología Histórica y Literaria, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980, third printing 1994.
(trans.) La Llaman América by Luis J. Rodríguez, Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1997.

SCOPE AND CONTENTS
This collection is comprised of eight annotated pages of Villanueva's working drafts of the Cabeza de Vaca poem titled Cuento del Cronista, published in Crónica de mis años peores (Chronicle of My Worst Years), 1994, one black and white 8x10 public relations photo mounted on foam core and two posters promoting two separate lectures dated Nov. 6, 1996 for the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and March 11, 1998 for Southwest Texas State University.