Observable Readings
An Heir to the Black Mountain Poets, A Metaphysicist from Chicago, and A Snowbound St. Louisan Visit Observable Readings on Feb. 4
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 10:49 PM
Thomas Meyer, who lives in Scaly Mountain, NC, is executive director of the Jargon Society, founded by his late partner, Black Mountain poet Jonathan Williams. Under Williams’ direction, the Jargon Society published the work of fellow Black Mountain poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, as well as the poetry of Meyer. Meyer’s most recent book of verse, Kintsugi, was published last year by Punch Press. He also is the author of a book-length poem titled Coromandel and At Dusk Iridescent: A Gathering of Poems 1972-1997. His translation of the Daode Jing was a finalist for the Pen Award for Poetry in Translation. "His work is lyric and mythical, its diction and images echoing sources as disparate as Wallace Stevens and the poems of Sappho," writes poet Kathryn Stripling Byer. To read selections from At Dusk Iridescent, click here.
Shane Seely won the 2008 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his first book of verse, The Snowbound House, published by Anhinga Press in November 2009. "Shane Seely turns the earth over and over to find ‘the rind of the world,’ " writes poet Dorianne Laux, who judged the 2008 competition. "Two boys discover a bullet, a couple fight ‘through a mouth of toothpaste,’ a father gives his son a rifle. These are poems of filial complexity, meditations on death's cruelty and kindness, poems of amplitude and depth which ask us to live fully in ‘the length of morning.’ " Seely is a senior lecturer in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches composition and creative writing and serves as assistant director of the university’s freshman writing program. To read selections from The Snowbound House, click here.
Peter O’Leary's books and chapbooks include: Watchfulness, A Mystical Theology of the Limbic Fissure, Wren/Omen, Benedicite, and Depth Theology. The last work, writes poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey, "harks back to some of the oldest moments of record and revelation while keeping baseball, parking lots, bumper stickers, boredom, broken drivebelts, Tommy Hearns, and the like in view." A new book, Luminous Epinoia, will be published by the Cultural Society this spring. In addition to editing several collections of Ronald Johnson’s poetry, he has recently edited the selected poetry of John Taggart, which will be published in 2010 by Copper Canyon Press. He teaches in the liberal arts and writing programs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Click here to read an interview with Peter O'Leary. To read a selection of his work, click here.