Thursday, April 14, 2011

First Southern California readings for The Quarry and The Lot




My first two Southern California readings featuring The Quarry and The Lot are coming up a few weeks from now. I won’t be reading only from the book, most likely, although most of the reading will certainly feature the book, which I’ve never read in public before. If you’re nearby, I’d love to see you there.

Saturday, May 7
7 p.m.
The evening will also feature literature in performance by India Radfar and Simone Forti
Agitprop Gallery
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn's
Market)
San Diego, CA 92104 * 619.384.7989

Thursday, May 12
6 p.m.
Pfau Library Room 4005
California State University, San Bernardino
5500 University Parkway
San Bernardino, CA 92407-2318
(909) 537-5000
Directions to Campus: http://www.csusb.edu/MapsDirections/Directions.aspx
Campus Map: http://www.csusb.edu/MapsDirections/img/CSUSB_Campus_Map_web.pdf

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The Quarry and The Lot



Joseph Klein was a brilliant boy, talented—and dangerous. When he dies, at age 32, under uncertain circumstances, a group of his former friends gather for his funeral and see each other for the first time in some years. How did Joseph change them and what does he mean to them? What do they mean to each other, and why have their lives come to be what they are? The Quarry and The Lot is a novel about love and its limits, memory and history. It explores whether any truth can be stable when what’s happening is changed by what people understand and where what passes for normal is something far more frightening.


Mark Wallace's The Quarry and The Lot is a big, complex, tender, angry, haunted charting of how each of us is many strangers, any past many pasts, our biographies always-already written by others.  Ultimately, though, for me it's about that bland, dangerous medication called the American suburb--how, once you've had a taste of that stuff, it's almost impossible to kick, even as it turns you into a ghost, or a guerilla, or, sometimes, both at once.
            --Lance Olsen, author of Calendar of Regrets and Nietzsche's Kisses


My new novel, The Quarry and The Lot, is now available.

You can find it here from BlazeVox books.

For those who prefer, it can also be found here on Amazon.

And here, you can read a short, pre-release interview with me by Jefferson Hansen, based around his reading of the first chapter of the novel back when it was available in an earlier version in an online magazine, Big Bridge.

For those interested in potentially reviewing the book, review copies are available. To obtain a review copy, please leave an e-mail address and mailing address here in the blog comments, or drop me a note at markwallace1322@yahoo.com

Many thanks to all the people who helped me with the many parts of the process of the book, both in its writing and its publication. Any book is truly a group endeavor, and I couldn't have finished it and brought it into the world without a great deal of help from others.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

If you're in Detroit on Thursday night

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit Reading Series
Curated by K. Silem Mohammad, featuring Alli Warren and K. Lorraine Graham
Thursday, March 24th at 7PM

Please click this link for further details.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

State Worker Pensions Aren't Bankrupting States

I really hate to break up with actual details the barrage of right-wing manipulative hysteria, but just in case you're a person whose political ideas might involve caring about facts, here's a good article on the subject of how state worker pensions are affecting the finances of U.S. States. Happy reading.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/06/109649/why-employee-pensions-arent-bankrupting.html

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Brief Reviews



With its not-at-all-as-dumb-as-I-sound slang, all elbows humor, and pseudo-historical research, Adam Robinson and Other Poems, by Adam Robinson (pictured above), is as fun a book of poetry as I’ve read in awhile. The poems in this book (published by Narrow House) make some use of google searches in a way that recalls both Flarf and Conceptual Writing without being either. Reminiscent of a New York School matter-of-fact-poet who has gone on a consciously ironic self-aggrandizing bender, Robinson consistently and playfully puts a sense of personality center stage. The poems have a wide range of reference that they handle wryly and about which they seem to ask, in an undergraduate drunken slur, “Am I going to be tested on this?” A big plus: This book has the first poem I’ve ever seen about Judas Priest, and it’s good. From the poem “Frederick Law Olmstead”: “He didn’t go to college because sumac poisoning messed up his eyes!/He thought slavery was bad business and wrote about it when he was a journalist/Also he was like a Red Cross guy in the Civil War/He designed the park system in Milwaukee and Buffalo”


Although its title suggests a potentially exaggerated poetic sensitivity that doesn’t appeal to me that much, Louise Mathias’ chapbook Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest (Burnside Review Press) turns out to be full of subtle poems with precise, understated twists of line and subject matter. These are minimalist elliptical poems, creased by hints, suggestions, and not-quite-hidden implications that purposefully never cohere around clear central stories, although love, alienation, abandonment, danger and violence are frequently invoked. Mathias contrasts an emotional fragility, one that in a few moments feels a bit forced, with lines of blunt physicality that effectively evoke never-quite-seen brutality and an always present sense of fear. “If you ask me to loosen my grip,/ Consider the source—/My father put his right hand through the glass.” If some of the scenarios suggested in her poems run the risk of seeming too expected, what Mathias does with those scenarios is always precise and unique.


Clay Matthews’ Pretty, Rooster (Cooper Dillon Books) is a strong series of sonnets notable in their understatement and their ability to make the casual and ordinary seem significant. The chicken art, in the cartoons that frame the collection and the flashbook that runs through it, gives some whimsical pseudo-down home flair to the deadpan humor. The repetition of the last line of one poem as the first line of the next poem was often memorable, although the method starts and stops somewhat randomly. Although no one is going to call this a significantly intellectual book, a convincing world view and philosophy does emerge, one involved in the maintenance and care of the particular. “I wash the gutters, try to patch the house/ together with some caulk. I can’t say that/ without you laughing. That’s how words run south/around here. I feel today I want at/ least to say something beautiful. The dog/licks his leg and we are alive.”


I liked Laura Cherry’s Haunts from Cooper Dillon Books best in its more biting, satirical moments (“Surely your next move/will be a twenty-one bagpipe apology,/with you in a hot air balloon high above/reproach, flaunting your star-spangled manner”. Many of the precise descriptions of character were also revealing and memorable. At times the tendency towards quiet understatement (there’s even a poem titled “After Li Ch’ing Chao) was very evocative and affecting, while at other times the drive to be evocative and affecting seemed overplayed in the context of not always inventive subject matter and situations that didn’t seem as emotionally moving as the language wanted them to be. While the satirical metaphors were often fantastic, other metaphors seemed strained or too conventional in their phrasing (“when I go there/like a butterfly on a pin/of narrow want”). Still, at their best moments (and there were many), these poems effectively highlighted the subtle absurdity and often unarticulated pain of contemporary Americans stunned by their own complexity: “You’re dead and I’m here with your ex-wife. Stranger things have happened, but this one/didn’t occur to me before it occurred.”

Sunday, February 27, 2011

What Is A Lyric Poem?



Lyric Poetry consists of a poem, such as a sonnet or an ode, that expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet. The term lyric is now commonly referred to as the words to a song. Lyric poetry does not tell a story which portrays characters and actions. The lyric poet addresses the reader directly, portraying his or her own feeling, state of mind, and perceptions.

A short poem with one speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses thought and feeling. Though it is sometimes used only for a brief poem about feeling (like the sonnet).it is more often applied to a poem expressing the complex evolution of thoughts and feeling, such as the elegy, the dramatic monologue, and the ode. The emotion is or seems personal In classical Greece, the lyric was a poem written to be sung, accompanied by a lyre.

A type of emotional songlike poetry, distinguished from dramatic and narrative poetry.

Lyric poetry is a form of poetry with rhyming schemes that express personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were meant to be played to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat.

Highly musical verse that expresses the speaker's feelings and observations. In ancient times poems were sung with accompaniment from a lyre. Modern lyric poems, although usually not sung, still possess musical qualities

A short poem of songlike quality.

Lyric Poems such as a sonnet or an ode, express the thoughts and feelings of the poet. Lyric poems do not tell a story which portrays characters and actions. The lyric poet addresses the reader directly, portraying his or her own feelings, state of mind, and perceptions.

Of or relating to a category of poetry that expresses subjective thoughts and feelings, often in a songlike style or form.

Lyrics are the written words in a song. Lyrics can be written during composition of a song or after the accompanying music is composed. Sometimes, however, music is adapted to or written for a song or poem that has already been written. Not all lyrics generally make sense or are even intelligible. This has long been a plaint about the work of rock and roll lyricists, although it doesn't pertain only to that genre of music. From the Greek, a lyric is a song sung with a lyre. Now, it is commonly used to mean a song of no defined length or structure. A lyric poem is one that expresses a subjective, personal point of view.

Through the years, three main kinds of poetry have developed: lyric, narrative, and dramatic. Lyric poetry is any short poem. Narrative poems are ones that tell stories, an epic or ballad. Dramatic poetry also tells a story, but in this case one or more of the poem's characters acts out the story.

On the ancient Greek stage, a dramatic production often featured a chorus, which was a group of speakers, who commented on the action of the play. When a single individual sang or spoke more personally and accompanied himself on a lyre, the verse was called lyric. Thus, our present designation of lyric poetry includes personal, individual emotion. The lyric does not tell a story as an epic or narrative poem does. Most poetry as we think of it is lyric poetry. There are many subdivisions of lyric poetry. The weakest form is the song, especially popular songs that are heard frequently on the radio. With the exception of the hymn and chant, most songs do not achieve the level of true poetry, even though they employ some poetic devices. The words to songs are often inaccurately referred to as “lyrics.” The entire song is the lyric. The next best-known lyric is the sonnet, which may be in the Petrarchan or Italian form, Elizabethan or Shakespearean or English form, or the American or innovative form. The Petrarchan takes its name from the 13th century Italian poet Petrarch. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of two stanzas: an octave of eight lines with the rime scheme ABBAABBA and a sestet of six lines with a varied rime scheme CDE.

A poem, such as a sonnet or an ode, that expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet. The term lyric is now generally referred to as the words to a song.

In ancient Greece, lyric poetry was sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument called a lyre, and its subject matter embraced thoughts and sentiment, rather than heroic deeds or other classical subjects. Housman's "Loveliest of Trees" provides an example of the personal insight associated with lyric poetry: "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/Is hung with bloom along the bough/And stands about the woodland ride/Wearing white for Eastertide./ Now, of my threescore years and ten,/Twenty will not come again,/And take from seventy springs a score,/It only leaves me fifty more./And since to look at things in bloom/Fifty springs are little room,/About the woodlands I will go/To see the cherry hung with snow."

Meaning: A short poem of songlike quality. Classified under: Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents. Synonyms: lyric poem; lyric. Hypernyms ("lyric poem" is a kind of...): poem; verse form (a composition written in metrical feet forming rhythmical lines). Meronyms (parts of "lyric poem"): strophe (one section of a lyric poem or choral ode in classical Greek drama); antistrophe (the section of a choral ode answering a previous strophe in classical Greek drama; the second of two metrically corresponding sections in a poem). Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "lyric poem"): ode (a lyric poem with complex stanza forms).

Lyric Poem Pictures. Click any thumbnail below to go to the full-sized version of that picture or photo.

A poem with song-like qualities, usually employing sensory details to convey an emotional experience. Lyric poems can become songs with the addition of a tune. Ballads and sonnets are popular forms of lyric poems.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Mad Hatters Review Issue 12 Now Available


The next issue of Mad Hatters Review, its 12th, is now available online.

The Mad Hatters Review was founded in 2005 by Carol Novack (pictured above), who is still the publication's Editor-in-Chief. If you don’t know her work, Novack is also an excellent writer of experimental fiction, and a performer ready to spring the unexpected on her audiences at any time.

Mad Hatters is a multi-genre journal, with poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and much else in the way of writing, and it makes innovative use of image and sound. It’s a literary journal that will talk to you, literally, and there’s as much innovation, fun, and significant insight in it as anybody could want. I hope you’ll check it out.

Some of my own pieces of flash fiction, accompanied by music from Paul A. Toth and art from Gene Tanta, can be found in the Wit & Whimsy section.

Happy reading.