Monday, March 12, 2007
RopeWalk Reading features first RopeWalk Press chapbook poets
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A special event this month celebrates a recent addition to USI’s RopeWalk family of literary programs: RopeWalk Press. The University’s new publishing house joins the RopeWalk Writers Retreat, Southern Indiana Review, and RopeWalk Reading Series in the University’s effort to enhance appreciation of literary arts in the region. RopeWalk Press will release limited runs of high quality chapbooks (small books of poetry, fiction, or nonfiction centered by a common theme) leading up to the publication of a 20th anniversary anthology. Twenty Years in Utopia: The RopeWalk Writers Retreat Anthology is slated for release in 2008. The first two releases from RopeWalk Press are both poetry collections: Matthew Guenette’s A Hush of Something Endless and Jeffrey Thomson’s Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. Thomson and Guenette will come to USI for a RopeWalk Press Reading at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 22, in Kleymeyer Hall in the Liberal Arts Center. Guenette was an instructor in English at USI from 1999 to 2002. He currently teaches composition, literature, and creative writing in Madison, Wisconsin. His poetry, prose, and book reviews have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Diagram, The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, Interim, and many others. A Hush of Something Endless was released in fall of 2006. The poet Austin Hummell said it is “a vital book – lush diction, imaginative tropes, and at least one perfect lyric about Illinois. If you can’t find something to love about Matthew Guenette’s poems, you aren’t trying hard enough.” Guenette said, “If there's a consistent theme in A Hush... I would say it's the very poetic tradition of a narrator wringing order from the chaos of desire and loss. My goal with these poems was to generate velocity and construct a voice that is both distracted and amazed by a world of strange, beautiful details that hint at a higher order. I also wanted to create a voice that finds humor in this world, as a way of negotiating defeat.” The second chapbook, Thomson’s Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, was released this month. The poems are based on a mythical Chinese encyclopedia described in Jorge Luis Borges’s The Analytical Language of John Wilkins. The encyclopedia, called the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, divides all animals into 14 fanciful categories, such as “mermaids,” “suckling pigs,” and “stray dogs.” In his poems, Thomson uses the categories to create a sequence that brings Borges's encyclopedia to life, exploring the way metaphor, memory, and desire combine to rewrite and alter the human experience. The poet Richard Jackson said, “Jeffrey Thomson’s fabulous and fabulist Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge creates an enchanting world within our own world … each poem introduces us to a new creature that is also a mirror of ourselves. Indeed, the poems are filled with such radical leaps so that we start to ask with him—‘How to count?’ but of course we can’t, for the poems suggest an endless cascade of surprising turns. ‘I could write anything— / a pack of pigs sucking at the blank canvas / of the sow’s belly—and you’d believe it,’ he says at one point, and given the superb control, the authoritative voice and the sheer power of imagination here, we do.” Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge is Thomson's fifth poetry collection. Others are Blind Desire (Dionysus Press), Renovation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), The Country of Lost Sons (Purdue University Parlor Press), and The Halo Brace (Birch Brook Press). He has published poetry and nonfiction in Quarterly West, Isotope, Indiana Review, Sycamore Review, Puerto del Sol, Gulf Coast, and others. Thomson is the recipient of the 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and has won the Masters Poetry Contest and the Academy of American Poets Prize. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Maine-Farmington. RopeWalk Press publications may be ordered online at www.usi.edu/ropewalk/RopeWalk_Press.asp. For more information, email ropewalkpress@usi.edu. Since 1988, RopeWalk has given hundreds of participants the opportunity to attend workshops and confer privately with prominent writers in Historic New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two nineteenth-century Utopian experiments and a history of creative and intellectual achievement. |
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