| Author | Message | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 33560 Registered: 11-1998 |
. Dear Membership – In between all the other things we try to do, steve and I have been attending numerous poetry readings and performances. About a week ago, we were able to attend a reading by a poet who was unfamiliar to us. The attendance at this poet’s reading was very small, which was fortunate and unfortunate. Unfortunate because more people really should have experienced him, and fortunate because the group was so small, it made for a more intimate experience and allowed us personal access to him. His name is Jay Leeming. Leeming, a lifelong resident of Ithica, New York, is a slender, long-legged, soft-spoken poet with a sense of humor. His poems are works of art, each carefully crafted until the words are reduced to mean just what he intends. He paints lovely pictures of everyday life, relationships and moments in time between two souls. Leeming has studied with Robert Bly, who praises his work and often reads it at his own performances. Leeming is not only a great poet, but a wonderful performer. His humor and his charm are infectious. I purchased his book Dynamite on a China Plate, and am so glad that I did. He has kept me amused, entertained, and informed every night this past week. This book earned Jay the 2003 Readers’ Choice Award. His subject matter is sometimes very offbeat, yet still accessible and welcoming. Leeming is also an accomplished musician, and the rhythms of music are evident in the way he puts words together on a page. I can assure you that the poems in this volume are definitely worth the cover price. Dynamite on a China Plate by Jay Leeming is available in the WPF BookShop under “Admin’s Featured Five-Star Book Picks." Love, M (Administrator) __________________________________________________________________ Dynamite on a China Plate by Jay Leeming __________________________________________________________________ BOOK DESCRIPTION Excerpt from Back Cover: “Jay Leeming has his own way of thinking which isn’t like anyone else’s. His most individual poems come from that surprising angle of vision that mark him as a real poet. His poems are witty, winged beings that dive straight to the playful, lunatic heart of human companionship.” -- Robert Bly “These poems are a delight to read. They move effortlessly between the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious, accounting for the multiplicity of human desire and imagination.” -- Li-Young Lee “Jay Leeming writes like an angel. Luminous, startling poems that lift and transform – once you experience them, it is quite possible you will begin, immediately to need them. This is a very good sign.” -- Naomi Shihab Nye “Every poem in Dynamite on a China Plate drenches us like the wake of a blue whale suddenly breaching from someone’s suburban lawn pool, where at first we might think the beast lost or out of place, we quickly realize it is we who are lost and that the courageous occurrences of such unlikely deep diving poems as “Supermarket Historians” is trying to find us, asking our hearts to weep out a greater water of grief and laughter big enough for us all to jump in and be beautifully lost together.” -- Martin Prechtel EDITORIAL REVIEWS Excerpt from a Book Review by Kirk Pinho, Blackwarrior: “Leeming is not a volatile or explosive poet, even in his funniest moments. Rather, he is a deliberate wordsmith, one with the tact and restraint that allows for more than the Wow at the linguistic apex. His 83-page collection is nuanced, and yet, even when his most humorous moments are paired with somber subjects, he maintains a tonal uniformity, a significant feat. He works as comfortably in six lines as he does in 100, with line breaks and without, and his talent with memory and human interaction is inspirational. It’s hard not to conjure images of a poet like Robert Bly—who offers considerable praise for this collection on its back cover—writing poems like these, a series which manages to be sparse yet expansive, serious yet silly. This is a poet of contradictions who accomplishes an impressive feat in his first collection.” TABLE OF CONTENTS PART ONE The Barber Apple Red Autumn Bells I Want to Go Back Taking a Bath Middle of the Night The Beams of My Parents’ House Rowboat Typing Class Copier Feedback Lament of the Recording Engineer Exit, with Moose PART TWO At Golgatha He Breathes Out Slowly Crows Dream of Russia What is the Door Six Colors PART THREE The Comedian’s Ten Songs I Pick up a Hitchhiker Lawn Service “Thirty Seconds,” Said the Soundman Law Office Supermarket Historians Conversation with Nobody Organ Music A Demonstration Against Cargill Agricultural Company Song of the Poison in the Executioner’s Needle Nicollet Island Bonfire The Light Above Cities PART FOUR Boxes and Oceans PART FIVE Man Writes Poem Ego A Theory of Personality Joke Jazz for the Widow of Ice Cream Man in a Lighted Room at Sundown Van Gogh: “Self-Portrait in Straw Hat” and “Woman Peeling Potatoes” Subway at Rush Hour Circe Mosaic In Summer Her Name Written in Pencil on the Wall Beside the Phone Grandpa Putting Salt on His Ice Cream Sugarhouse She Killed the Spider Driving a Retarded Girl to Lake Minnetonka Scrubbing a Pan Moving Away Secret River SAMPLE POEMS: Supermarket Historians All historians should be supermarket cashiers. Imagine what we’d learn; “Your total comes to $10.66, and that’s the year the Normans invaded Britain.” Or, “That’ll be $18.61, the year the Civil War began.” Now all my receipts are beaches where six-year-olds find bullets in the sand. My tomatoes add up to Hiroshima, and if I’d bought one more carton of milk, the cashier would be discussing the Battle of the Bulge and not the Peloponnesian War. But I’m tired of buying soup cans full of burning villages, tired of hearing the shouts of Marines storming beaches in the bread aisle. I want to live in a house carved into a seed inside a watermelon – to look up at the red sky as shopping carts roll through the aisles like distant thunder. Law Office I am sitting in an adjustable chair on the 32nd floor of a skyscraper in New York City. I am typing a list of a thousand names into a computer. As I work I am listening through headphones to a recording of the journals of Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who traveled to the United States in the 15th century. The office is air-conditioned and I am wearing a tie. A hurricane has drowned half of de Vaca’s crew, and most of the rest are sick and dying of starvation on an island off the Florida Keys. The names I am entering are plaintiffs in a case against Union Carbide chemical company, and about half of them are deceased. Some filing cabinets are behind me; one is marked “Bhopal” and another reads “Breast Implants.” The secretary sitting beside me goes to get a cup of coffee. De Vaca and his crew have eaten their horses, and are now sailing in a makeshift raft that uses their hides for sails. I keep tying. At noon a man comes through the office and waters all the plants. Every hour another sailor dies of pneumonia, or loses his grip and slides off the raft into the storm. . | ||
| Teresa White
Advanced Member Username: teresa_white Post Number: 1802 Registered: 01-2005 |
M, Thanks for the info on Jay Leeming. Definitely one I'll be reading. ~T. Be satisfied that ye have enough light to secure another foothold. Anon. | ||
| Emusing
Senior Member Username: emusing Post Number: 7342 Registered: 08-2003 |
M this looks like a terrific poet and a worthy read. Another to add to my list. Thanks for posting this. I truly enjoyed the poem and I could imagine what a great treat it was to hear him read. Love, e Word Walker Press; Moonday Poetry; Kyoto Journal |
