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

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   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.

Pictures from Fred Marchant Reading 10/25/12

Fred Marchant

                        Professor Mark Herlihy       Professor Doug Holder     Poet Fred Marchant


                                        *******  photos courtesy of Emily Pineau.

Visiting Poet and Founder of the Suffolk University Poetry Center--Fred Marchant--Oct. 25, 2012

Stefi Rubin

Fred Marchant's most recent book of poetry, The Looking House (Graywolf Press, 2009) was named by Barnes & Noble Review as one of the five best books of poetry in 2009. The San Francisco Chronicle picked it as one of the ten best collections of poetry, and the Massachusetts Book Award committee listed as one of the “must reads” of the past year. Janette Currie, writing in Pleiades, has written that “Marchant’s great achievement in The Looking House is to create a new anti-war poetics out of seemingly disparate subjects and images.”

Marchant is also the author of Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize in poetry, and Full Moon Boat (2000). A new and selected volume, House on Water, House in Air, was published in 2002.  He has co-translated (with Nguyen Ba Chung) From a Corner of My Yard, poetry by the Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa, published in 2006 in Ha Noi, Viet Nam.  Marchant is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947 (2008), a selection that focuses on the work done while Stafford was a conscientious objector during World War II.

Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program, and The Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston, Marchant is a graduate of Brown University, and later earned a PhD from The University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. He is a longtime teaching affiliate of The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and was himself a conscientious objector within the military during the Viet Nam War. He has taught workshops at various sites across the country, including The Robert Frost Place (Franconia NH), the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA) and the Veterans Writing Group (Sebastopol, CA). In 2009 Marchant was co-winner (with Afaa Michael Weaver) of the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club, given to poets whose “work is an inspiration to other poets.”

Pictures from the Richard Hoffman Reading (Courtesy of Emily Pineau)

                                    (Left to Right) Debbie Finklestein/ Richard Hoffman/ Doug Holder/Dan Sklar
                                                         
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