Bøger af Brett Rutherford

CRACKERS AT MIDNIGHT. New Poems 2015-2107 by Brett Rutherford. This book's title-poem - a small recollection of a hungry boy meeting his grandmother for a secret feast of saltine crackers and butter - is a metaphor for the book itself: a feast of poetic narratives and visions that the reader can savor, indulging in "just one more" until the last page is turned. Two story-poems come from the Pennsylvania landscape: the tale of Pittsburgh's radioactive millionaire who haunts Allegheny Cemetery, and the childhood memory of a visiting Rabbi who makes a Golem-monster in rural Scottdale. The feast, however, also spans continents and eras, as the poet takes us to the grave of Leonardo da Vinci in France, the exhumation of Goethe's body in Weimar, a flamingo sacrifice by the Emperor Nero, ancient Alexandrian gossip about ibises, and a shattering visit to the home of Emily Dickinson in Amherst. Sometimes the poems inhabit a strange, visionary world, overhearing a prayer on Cyprus from a hunted archbishop, visioning Eldorado rising from a glacial lake, or penetrating the psychology of the Egyptian Pharaoh Snofru. A cluster of nature poems from Edinboro Lake in Northwestern Pennsylvania, and some melancholy contemplations on "The Loved Dead," round out this collection of 40 poems.

Emilie Glen (1906-1995) was best known as a poet, but she started her writing career in fiction, first published in H.L. Mencken's The American Mercury, Prairie Schooner, and other magazines. In these nineteen short stories, Glen presents a portrait of mid-20th century America, using penetrating character portraits to show a world already nearly-gone, its customs and manners as odd to some of us as those of an Amazonian people. A keen observer of manners and of the human drama, Emilie Glen centers sometimes on family drama: a high-stakes croquet game among heirs, the prize a Bermuda resort hotel; a mother and daughter competing for the same man; an Irish mother and daughter trapped in poverty in Hells' Kitchen, each wanting "the best"; and a wealthy matron in the Hamptons determined to stop her son from marrying a Latina girl. From a time when religion ruled the heartland, Glen writes about a town struggling with the worst preacher ever; a minister fired for his liberal values during the McCarthy era; and a woman forced to choose between becoming a minister's wife, or being ordained herself to take over her father's church. Other stories are wonderful character portraits: a country woman whose life is changed when she comes into possession of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; a bored office worker with a secret hobby of purse-snatching; a businessman who would rather be a street beggar; the man determined to be top of the pecking order among the Central Park bird-watchers; a young girl determined to get her first ballet shoes; a dancer locked in a fierce rivalry and obsession over a Siamese cat; a husband and wife living off the earnings of a child model; an industrialist whose entire existence is defined by ladies' feet; and a desperate song-writer knocking on the doors of music publishers. This volume also includes "From This Window," Glen's experiment in prose poetry.

Spanning just one year of Brett Rutherford's poetic output, this 264-page collection shows the American neo-Romantic, Gothic poet at the peak of his powers. The new poems include biting satires and laments about the current decline of the United States, as might be expected from a self-professed "outsider." But there are many facets to this dazzling kaleidoscope of a book: childhood memories of the coal and coke towns of his Pennsylvania childhood; riveting narratives such as that of a freezing woman going from door to door begging for coal, or a grandmother telling her grandson about "the things that happen to women" living alone in the country; and memories of college years overshadowed by the Vietnam War. The supernatural, as always plays a large role, as an invisible monster lurks in a Pennsylvania swamp, angry Native American spirits pop the windows off skyscrapers and snap the wings off airplanes, Medieval thieves are magically prevented from robbing an Abbey; and the tale of a Danish girl, a raven, and her lover's eyeball. One of the darkest poems here is an imagined monologue of the crazed military Roman Emperor Domitian, as he leads a group of senators and oligarchs into his subterranean "Black Room."Translations from Spanish, French, Old English, German, Danish, and Old Norse show the poet working in the tradition of American poets such as Longfellow, tapping the poems and lore of other times and cultures, yet making of them new works that delight (and caution) today's reader. Rutherford does not employ rhyme, so these adaptations flow like highly-condensed sketches or stories. At the heart of this book is a poem cycle started four decades ago and only now finished, an adaptation and expansion from German Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, titled Fatal Birds of the Soul. It transcends any label, not translation, not mere adaptation, swallowing the lines of Rilke into a web of interrogations.The book also includes another cycle, as far from serious German verse as can be imagined. Titled Buster, or The Unclaimed Urn, it is an imaginary cat book about the adventures of a winged housecat. Based on notes left behind by poet Barbara A. Holland, this long narrative poem shows what happens when two Gothic poets attempt to write a "children's book." Of course no child would ever be allowed to read a book about drowned kittens, eating mice, and the horrors of being "snipped" at the veterinarian's office.

Here is Brett Rutherford's first new compendium of poems in seven years. Following on The Gods As They Are On Their Planets (2005) and Poems from Providence (1991), this book is a must for fans of this neo-Romantic American poet. The 94 new poems and revisions in this collection range from a dark-shadowed childhood in the coal and coke region of Western Pennsylvania, to New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. The jolting sequence titled "Out Home" is a poetic memoir of broken families and childhood terrors, and the imminent threat of kidnapping and mutilation by "Doctor Jones," a crazed surgeon who roams the countryside in a sinister roadster. The small boy of these poems is already a self-styled outsider, defining his difference from the crushing environment around him. In "Past the Millennium" and "Ars Poetica," the full-grown poet soars, with politically-charged poems on Solzhenitsyn, the self-immolation of Czech martyr Jan Palach, and the imagined overtaking of Bush and Cheney by "The Black Huntsman." Rutherford walks in Poe's footsteps on a Hudson River pier, visits ancient Rome for a chat with the law-giving King Numa Pompilius, and puts Poe to work tracking down a cemetery spectre in 1848 Providence. Two historic verse plays give voice to the mad Carlota, Empress of Mexico, and two Austrian policemen with an unexpected prisoner on their hands. Humor abounds in this volume, too, from the possessed sex toys in "A Night in Eddie's Apartment," skeptical Martians refusing to believe there's life on Earth, nine-year-old Dante meeting Beatrice in Providence's Federal Hill, and a surrealist adventure across Europe as a lost sock-puppet searches for its owner, meeting Sigmund Freud along the way. A sequence of poems on Love and Eros titled "Love Spells" plumbs the depths of desire and obsession, and presents several powerful elegies, culminating with the poignant "The Loft on Fourteenth Street." The erotic poems, some set in Ancient Greece and some in the present, are frank and often amusing, perhaps some comfort for those who think the fun ends at thirty. Ending the book is a clump of supernatural poems, as expected from this heir of Poe and Lovecraft: a story-length poem, "Dawn," presents the ennui of a 300-year-old vampire; the birth and education of the feared witch Keziah Mason; wind elementals attack the headquarters of Bain Capital in Boston; and Elder Gods arrive to make humans their playthings. An Expectation of Presences is a wide-ranging and startling collection, romantic, defiant, and bracingly hopeful.

20th Anniversary Edition of the most startling collection of poems ever published about the Ocean State. Autumn musings, graveyard happenings, bad behavior by Greek gods, and a general atmosphere of neo-Romantic rebellion make this a dangerous book.

Brett Rutherford published The Pumpkined Heart in 1973 as a 48-page illustrated chapbook. Now, almost a half-century later, he has assembled all of his poems that have Pennsylvania as their locale, into one huge book, a kind of personal memoir in poems. Three towns figure in this saga that spans early childhood to college years: Scottdale, in the coal and coke district when the skies were black with smoke and fumes from the coke-ovens; West Newton, a grim steelworkers' town hugging the steep banks of the Youghiogheny River; and Edinboro, a college town in the northwest corner of the state, its placid lake setting contrasting with the tumult of Vietnam-era protest.From early childhood in Scottdale, the poet casts himself as an outsider, breaking rules, recruiting neighbor children to act in "monster shows," absorbing Native American lore from a story-telling grandmother, and learning about the Golem legend from Jewish neighbors. The other side of his family life is "out home," where his maternal grandparents live in squalor in a tar-paper-covered shack. These country people, their pride and their secrets, left an indelible impression that emerges in "memory poems," written many decades later. In "Peeling the Onion," a grandmother relates to him the dark side of living alone in the mountains, and "the kinds of things that happen to women." Four high-school years in West Newton with a degenerating family and an evil stepfather are lightened by self-discovery: "I was a poet. A cape would trail behind me always." Here he studies Latin, writes his first poems, and deepens his abiding love of the Gothic in literature and film. The fantasy poem "Son of Dracula" celebrates artistic birth, and "Mr. Penney's Books" gratefully recalls the town's one mentor for the unruly young, a bibliophile with 10,000 books.Readers turning to the Edinboro section of this book will be startled by the transformation of theme and mood. Rutherford attaches himself to the town's glacial lake, its flora and fauna, its sharp seasonal divides, and weaves them into a Whitmanesque vision. These poems, while modern in style, are in the spirit of Shelley, Whitman, Rilke, and Jeffers. Returning to the locale again and again over many decades for renewal and recollection, the poems celebrate what the poet calls, "my first-found home." Other poems lift the veil on the student life of the time, and the choices one had to make about war or resistance.The longer poems here are stories in verse, several of them with multiple voices, most notably the four-voice tale, "The Doll Without A Face." But all the poems are clear, easily read aloud, and aimed at the reader who may be wary of poetry.

Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe's posthumous defender in her 1860 book, Edgar Poe and His Critics. She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916. As critic, she was a ground-breaking American defender of Poe, Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Alcott, and Emerson, yet none of her literary essays other than her defense of Poe have ever appeared in book form. She and her friend Margaret Fuller are credited with being the first American women literary critics.This volume presents Whitman's literary essays with more than 500 annotations and notes, tracing her literary sources and allusions, and revealing the remarkable breadth of her readings in literature, philosophy, history, and science. Brett Rutherford's biographical essay is rich in revelations about Whitman's time and place, her family history, and her muted career as poet, essayist, and den mother to artists and writers. Exploding the standard view of her as the secluded "literary widow," we can now perceive her as a literary radical pushing against a conservative milieu; a suffragist and abolitionist who dabbled in séances; and a devotee of the New England Transcendentalists and the German Idealists who inspired them.The complete text of Edgar Poe and His Critics presented here, includes the opposing texts by Rufus Griswold, whose libels provoked her landmark defense of Poe's writing and character. This annotated version identifies all the contemporary press reviews and books Whitman read and critiqued, making it indispensible for students of Edgar Allan Poe.The selected poems in this volume include the hyper-Romantic traversal of rival mythologies in "Hours of Life," her most ambitious work; her poems to and about Edgar Allan Poe; sensitive and atmospheric nature portrayals; a defense of the then-reviled art of the drama; a love poem from Proserpine to Pluto; an occasional poem about Rhode Island penned in the after-shadow of the Dorr Rebellion; and translations from French and German poets, most notably the most famous of all European ghost ballads, Bürger's "Leonora." Whitman's allusions and unattributed quotations from other poets are all annotated, making this book a must for scholars and students.

This is the expanded sixth edition of Brett Rutherford's landmark poetry collection, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poetry. This extraordinary 420-page paperback contains all the poet's supernatural poems, including 12 major new poems added since the last edition, and revisions to eight of the earlier works. Praised by Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury, these may be the best supernatural poems of our time. The writing ranks from the seriously Gothic through the downright hilarious, including Gorgons, Golems, Egyptian mummies, Lovecraftian horrors, vampires, werewolves, possessed sex toys and stuffed animals, and the personal recollections of Fritz, the hunchback assistant of Dr. Frankenstein. All of Rutherford's Lovecraft-related poems are collected in this volume -- more than 100 pages of Lovecraftian items including all the poems written for the annual ceremonies at HPL's gravesite in Providence. Other major new items in this collection include the long narrative poem "Mrs. Friedman's Golem," and accounts of Pittsburgh's radioactive grave-walking specter, the most alarming bed-and-breakfast stay of all time, a secret mental ward full of Lovecraft fans, and a young girl's lessons in witchcraft in ancient Corinth. This is the 255th publication of The Poet's Press, under its Grim Reaper Books imprint.

Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was called "the Sybil of Greenwich Village," for her sometimes eerie presence and her incantatory readings. By 1970, she had published her work in over 700 magazines, and had read her work everywhere a poet could read. After seeing several small chapbooks published, Holland decided it was time to tackle the big New York publishers. The Shipping on the Styx, recently rediscovered in the poet's papers, was rejected by all the publishing houses by the end of 1972. What would have been her "breakthrough" book is finally presented here. Its three parts include a solitary observer's impressions of bustling New York harbor; a medley of her Manhattan-based poems that she read in coffeehouses; and her blistering and unforgettable Gothic poem, "Black Sabbath."Rounding out this volume is Songs of Light and Darkness, a manuscript that probably dates to 1951, the end-point of Holland's graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. These poems show the poet embarking on her career as a devotee of the work of T. S. Eliot and, perhaps, of Thomas Hardy. Pre-dating her "New York style," this never-before-seen glimpse at the early Holland is a revelation. This is the 259th publication of The Poet's Press.

Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was called "the Sybil of Greenwich Village," not only for her sometimes eerie presence and her incantatory readings, but also because she wrote a number of powerful poems on mythological women. In 1976, the poet went off to the Macdowell Colony in New Hampshire with a working manuscript collecting her unique "impressions and impersonations" of famed or unknown women who, "in conflict with the gods or the mores and customs of their cultures, are alienated." The manuscript she brought back to her Greenwich Village home yielded some powerful poems that she read for the rest of her life, inhabiting the spirits of the classical Cassandra, Sybil, and Eurydice; the Biblical Lilith, Hagar, and the Witch of Endor; the medieval snake-woman Melusine and Wagner's Grail-temptress Kundrie; two 12th-century Hindu saints, and even a Revolutionary War-era witch who spied for General George Washington at Valley Forge.Seen in the context of the feminist poetry being written in New York in the 1970s, Holland's work can be seen as a recasting and re-voicing of women's magical attributes, both for good and evil. This is the 257th publication of The Poet's Press.

The work on these poems started in 1976, an attempt to translate, adapt, and expand upon the first two of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies. The project was abandoned, the sketches only rediscovered in late 2019. In April 2020, I decided to complete the project, revising and expanding the original sketches and making them into a connected cycle of 21 poems."This cycle is in no way an explication of Rilke, and the German poet would doubtless be horrified at the thought of a young atheist, neo-Romantic American poet of the 1970s making a palimpsest over his work, with the shades of Shelley, Walt Whitman, Poe, and even H. P. Lovecraft looking over his shoulder. That Rilke himself stepped away from the Elegies after writing the first two, only returning to the project some years later, gives some indication of the daunting power of Elegies 1 and 2. I, too, unsure of what I had done, and what was to be done with it, put the project aside."Some of my recent work with translations and adaptations gave me the self-confidence to return to this perilous project, this time trusting my own voice and letting even more expansion emerge from the original material. If I have succeeded, Rilke's own words fit seamlessly into the flow of my own. I was in his thrall for a number of years, and his Letters to a Young Poet gave me comfort and inspiration when it was not coming from those around me. I already had a sense that in poems such as this, one is being "lived through" by language, creating a freestanding work that has its own existence, its own right to be."To illustrate this book I turned to some of the Greek sculpture that makes clear some of Rilke's language about the vocabulary of touching in classic sculpture, and I was able to find a photo of the Latin tomb inscription Rilke found in Venice and copied down. I introduced the god Hermes, who, as a messenger of the gods, served the same role as messenger angels to the Greeks. These visual embellishments may help the reader recreate the visual elements of Rilke's musings on angels, on sculpture, and on Beauty in general."This is the 287th publication of The Poet's Press.

Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was called "the Sybil of Greenwich Village." Her poems of Greenwich Village's Bohemia in its last decades are sharp and surreal takes from an outsider who fled a Wall Street job and chose to live among the writers and artists, a "full-time poet" when such a choice of profession was a guarantee of neglect and poverty. She is the flaneur of streets and harbors, of coffeehouses and lofts, always "alone in my voice" but eager to share her sharp and biting images and visions. From the papers and notebooks of Barbara A. Holland comes The Beckoning Eye, this collection of 150 poems that appeared in little magazines, few of which have ever appeared in book form. Holland's long-time publisher Brett Rutherford has also added 29 other poems, recovered or reconstructed from the poet's notebooks and typed manuscripts. This is the third volume of publications from the Barbara A. Holland papers, following Medusa: The Lost First Chapbook and The Secret Agent.Whether writing about doomed love affairs or her flirtation with the mysteries of Hindu religion; recreating the persona of a jealous witch, or an outraged Virgin Mary in grief at Calvary; playfully bouncing stars, moons, and mirror images in Magritte-inspired pre-dawn fantasies; or puzzling over her fellow residents of Gotham's Bohemia, Holland is at turns brilliant, unnerving, and witty. Many of her poems are miniature opera arias, tightly-knotted in syntax, poetic hand-grenades disguised as walnuts. They are meant for reading and performing aloud, and unfurl their meanings on repetition. This is the 253rd publication of The Poet's Press.

Created as a one-volume introduction to the poetry of Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988), the mysterious Greenwich Village poet who was a centerpiece of the 1970s neo-romantic and Gothic poetry movement, this volume presents all the reviews and essays about Holland that appeared in her lifetime, along with the poems quoted or cited in those articles. This makes it a perfect book to study and teach the remarkable work of this 20th-century American poet.Twenty-eight of Holland's most memorable writings are here, including the terrifying "Medusa," "Black Sabbath," and "Apples of Sodom and Gomorrah." Her work is garlanded with a group of poems about her by her contemporaries and by younger poets she influenced, including Shirley Powell, D.H. Melhem, Marjorie DeFazio, Dan Wilcox, and Vincent Spina. A memoir of Holland in her coffeehouse haunts by Matthew Paris establishes her image and milieu as a fixture of the last Bohemia of Manhattan.Interviews, reviews and essays about Holland are presented here for their first time since their appearance almost four decades ago. Those who shed light on Holland's unique place in American poetry include Olga Cabral, Stephen-Paul Martin, Maurice Kenny, A. D. Sullivan, Robert Kramer, Ivan Argüelles, Kirby Congdon, Claudia Dikinis, and Michael Redmond.Since Holland's more than 800 extant poems are scattered across numerous chapbooks and books, this volume includes a complete bibliography of the currently-known poems. This is the ninth and final volume of a series based on the Barbara A. Holland Papers, and the archives of The Poet's Press.

Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) made her entrance into the New York poetry scene around 1961 with a self-published chap-book, Medusa. The reaction to its up-front mix of witchcraft, Satanism, and Chthonic mythology among friends, family, and fellow poets must have been discouraging, for the book vanished and Holland never referred to it again. The haunting title-poem, "Medusa" was published and read aloud frequently, and, by the early 1970s, the poet was regaling her audiences with other alarming and terrifying supernatual and myth-infused poems. The Gothic vein in her writing was not to be suppressed. The discovery of the sole remaining copy of the chapbook led to the creation of this book. To round out the collection, Holland's long-time publisher Brett Rutherford has added sketches and unknown poems from the poet's notebooks and manuscripts, now available for the first time. The range of work presented here shows Holland's engagement with Greenwich Village and its eccentric people, with the inner demons of thwarted desire, and with the overarching power of nature: moon, wind, woods, and ocean.Fasten your windows, New York: Barbara A. Holland is back.

Chinese emperors, empresses and concubines play a role in the 78 poems in this new collection, but so do delicate porcelains, three-legged frogs, the play of the seasons across China's landscape, and the story of how an American poet became deeply immersed in Chinese culture through an important friendship in his Greenwich Village days. Brett Rutherford's poem cycle, "Emperor Li Yu, A Life in Poems" takes the reader inside the court of Southern Tang with its military and sexual intrigues, where "the bed just wide enough for one, is also wide enough for two." The 39 surviving poems of Li Yu are adapted and expanded here to form a poetic biography of a complex but doomed ruler, forced to drink poison by the rival Song Emperor. Some of Li Yu's exile poems are regarded as the saddest poems in all Chinese literature, and his saga has been re-enacted in no fewer than three Chinese TV dramatic series.A fantasy poem, "Bai Hu, The White Tiger," is a Shelleyan autumnal narrative, defying age and fear. "The Loft on Fourteenth Street," an elegy but also tribute for the poet's first Chinese friend, uses long-breathed lines to sustain an atmosphere of longing and loss."Emperor Kangxi Drinks Tea from Eggshell Porcelain Teacups" is a cycle of twelve miniature poems, inspired by the delicate hand-painted teacups created for the Kangxi Emperor, each cup showing the flowers and trees associated with a lunar month. It is a brief tour of Chinese flower lore, and the Emperor himself, drifting into his gardens on sleepless nights, becomes a character in the poems."The Thirteen Scorpions," a monologue, presents a narcissist emperor, the powerful and long-lived Xian Long, who considers himself "the most interesting man who has ever lived," as he delivers a Daoist-magic comeuppance to a Jesuit missionary.Pity the Dragon is an entryway into the fascinating world of Chinese history and culture, but it is also a tour de force of neo-Romantic poetry: clear, accessible, unsparing of emotion and sorrow but ready to leap with joy at nature's beauty. Illustrated with examples from classic Chinese painting, and photographs. This is the 309th publication of The Poet's Press.