Asheville Poetry Review marks 30 years
In May, a very special anniversary issue of the Asheville Poetry Review was released for public consumption celebrating 30 years as one of this country’s seminal literary journals.
For 30 years, founder and managing editor Keith Flynn and his staff have been collecting poetry, author interviews and book reviews which have been sent via this journal all across the U.S. and abroad. Flynn has demonstrated a true example of focus and commitment at a time when in many places the interest in poetry is on the wane.
In a multi-generational, international collection of some of the best poets over the past 30 years — such as Robert Bly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Russia), Eavan Boland (Ireland), Bob Kaufman, Jack Spicer, Pablo Neruda (Chile), R.S. Thomas (Wales), Antonio Machado (Spain), Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, Ron Rash, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Paticia Smith and Dorianne Laux — we’re gifted with this collection of almost 100 poets covering those three generations. The poems by the elders listed here set the tone for the younger poets that have carried on the poetic tradition that have also been documented by Flynn and his Asheville Poetry Review based here in the Katuah Bioregion of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Diligent since the beginning in 1994, Flynn has continued to collect and also bring us local and regional, old and new voices that speak to their generations and beyond. Herein are poems, interviews and reviews that not only activate our imaginations but also speak truth to power at a time, now, when it is needed most.
As well as the poems in this distinguished collection, there are reviews of the poetry of pioneering writers such as our own Canton native Fred Chappell and his legacy as the teacher of such younger poets as Kathryn Byer and Robert Morgan. Bruce Spang writes about W.H. Auden in “Poets Speak Out, Your Voice is Important” and Jay Bonner’s essay on the “Poems of Catullus” and then interviews with R.T. Smith about his life as magazine editor and Jessica Jacobs on the book of Genesis. All these and others are intermingled with some 300 pages of poems. In Suzanne Cleary’s review of Carol Moldaw’s book “Go Figure,” we get Moldaw’s perspective on the role of woman as muse as well as a formative voice during trying times of male dominance. “I struggle with the idea that what I write might be irrelevant to the realities of the conditions of our world,” she writes.
And in Spang’s essay on Auden he writes, quoting Auden’s take on the challenges of new young writers living in challenging times and comparing Auden’s post-WWII life to what we’re currently experiencing here in the U.S.: “First, is the loss of ‘belief in the eternity of the physical universe,’ and it being replaced with the ephemeral, fluctuating nature of modern society and social change. As such, the poet is faced with the enormous task of finding the language as well as the perspective to call attention to what must be enduring and commonplace to us all when, with 24/7 news, with rapidly changing information, technology, and social change, nothing seems permanent.”
There is so much good verse to choose from in this APR collection, so let’s just start at the beginning with poems of consequence addressing real personal and social issues such as the poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko “Monolog of an Effigy” that echoes Auden’s words and where he writes: “I was burnt as punishment/because of my dangerous talent/for being so readily inflammable/in politics, and in love.”
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And in the poem “A Buddha in the Woodpile” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, we get similar sentiments along a similar theme: “If the inner ears of the inner sanctums/had only been half open/to any vibrations except/those of the national security state/and had only been attuned/to the sound of one hand clapping/and not one hand punching/then that sick cult and its children/might still be breathing/the Free American air/of the First Amendment,” he writes at the end of his poem.
We move further into the collection with Native American poet Joy Harjo’s poem “The Flood” and Harjo writing in the voice of the eternal feminine: “The power of the victim is a power that will always be reckoned /with, one way or the other. When the proverbial sixteen-year-old/ woman walked down to the lake, within her were all sixteen-year-old /women who had questioned their power from time immemorial.”
And then approaching the end of this collection we get the voice and perspective of Welsh poet Menna Elfyn in her poem “Murmurs” in which she ends her poem with the lines: “Poets live with beats,/consistently irregular;/lubb-dupp, its melody/carries a pitch that flows/through all the heartaches/and meter of the blood” — a kind of warning to youthful wanna-be poets and what they may find themselves facing in the future.
All the above is but a smidgeon of what this thoughtful volume of essays and poems is comprised of. There is much more than politics or finger-pointing contained herein. Almost a hundred individual voices represented over the time span of 30 years. Flynn and his editors have chosen poems that have current meaning and depth even though written, for the most part, in past decades. All these poets and all these poems, it should also be noticed, are bound in an eye-catching cover illustrated from a digital collage artistic process done by Denise Petrey. One can pick up a copy of this timely anniversary issue of APR at Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville or in your nearby independent bookshop, via ashevillepoetryreview.com on amazon, or by direct contact to APR/P.O. Box 7086/Asheville, N.C. 28802.
(Thomas Crowe is a regular contributor to Smoky Mountain News and Smoky Mountain Living and is the author of the award-winning memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.”)
