Thursday, August 05, 2010
Imagery unites poems in RopeWalk Press's Max
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Wendy Knipe Bredhold Media Relations Specialist, News & Information Services 812/461-5259 Certain images dominate the poems in Max, the fifth chapbook released by RopeWalk Press: The Green Night. The Sun and the Moon. Satellites. The Girl with Xs for Eyes. The poems are interspersed with five "telegrams" that Ron Mitchell, co-founder of RopeWalk Press, describes as "Telegrams from Hell." Mitchell, instructor in English, selected poems for the chapbook from a longer manuscript by the late Joshua Vinzant, who calls himself "Max" in the poems. "These poems fit so well together as a sequence," Mitchell said. "That's the challenge of a chapbook- you're dealing with a limited number of pages, and you have to have a nice arc or theme. The chapbook is less than half the length of the full-length manuscript. There were a lot that didn't quite fit the sequence as well as these that we selected." Vinzant was trying to get the manuscript published before he committed suicide in 2007. Some of the poems were from his MFA thesis at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale others he wrote after he graduated and moved home to Maryville, Missouri. At SIUC, he was a student of English professor Rodney Jones. Devoted to getting the poems into print and bringing them to a larger audience, Jones approached Mitchell about publishing the poems after Vinzant's death. When he read the poems, Mitchell knew immediately that he wanted to publish them. "The darkness of the reoccurring images is unique," he said. "They seem obvious on the one hand, but also fresh and unexpected on the other. Josh's style is a style that isn't appreciated very often and this was an opportunity to publish something that was very deserving to be appreciated by others." Copies of Max can be ordered online at https://www.usi.edu/ropewalk/ssl/purchase.asp. |
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