Hungry Monks
Farewell to Summer We hope you were able to join us at this event. It was a successful blend of food, music, poetry . . . and sunset over the Saluda River! Our thanks to all who attended.
Link to our featured performers, the Hungry Monks acoustic band (photo below). Also presenting were readers from our hugely popular Open Mic series.
EMRYS ANNUAL MEETING 2011
Emrys Press releases its 12th publication, How Language Is Lost
“Today a sparrow, doubtless / a Yeatsian” a poem begins, one of many delightful, unexpected turns in this first volume by Celisa Steele–poems with form, learning, clarity, and grace; a light touch and a dead-on, unsentimental seriousness. Loss, love, language, poetry, religion may be the usual poet’s fare, but there’s nothing usual about the way Steele’s poems go. Here’s a wholly original voice, a poet who questions received wisdom, who looks and listens afresh. –Becky Gould Gibson, author of Need-Fire
Celisa Steele, launched her poetry chapbook, How Language Is Lost, published by Emrys Press, at the 2011 Emrys Annual Meeting. Celisa Steele was born and spent the first twenty-two years of her life in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Arkansas with a double major in English and French. Her love of languages and literature then took her to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she completed a master’s in comparative literature. She has remained in the Tar Heel State and now makes her home in the Paris of the Piedmont, Carrboro, where she lives with her husband and two children. Celisa is managing director at Tagoras, which provides research and consulting to assist organizations with e-learning initiatives. She served as first vice president of the North Carolina Poetry Society from January 2009 to May 2011, and she has been on the Poetry Council of North Carolina since 2005. She was selected as one of four participants from the central region of North Carolina to work with distinguished poet Becky Gould Gibson for the 2009-2010 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets Series, which pairs aspiring poets with poet mentors. How Language Is Lost is Celisa’s first book. Read more praise for How Language Is Lost»
Four Are in the River
Four Are in the River for Soprano and String Quartet, on poems by Sarah Blackman, composed by Jon Jeffery Grier was performed by graduates of Furman University and The Fine Arts Center, led by FAC Music faculty member, John Ravnan.
Jon Jeffrey Grier holds a D.M.A. in Composition from the University of South Carolina and is Instructor of Music Theory, Music History, and Composer in Residence at the Greenville Fine Arts Center. He composes frequently for student and faculty performers at the FAC, usually when he should really be grading papers. Jon has also been a writer/keyboardist with various jazz ensembles in Greenville since 1984. His sons Benjamin and Daniel are college students; he lives in Greenville with wife Marion and manic mongrels Roxanne and Gracie Jean.
Sarah Blackman, Instructor of Creative Writing at Greenville’s Fine Arts Center, is a poet, fiction and creative non-fiction author originally from Washington D.C. She graduated from Washington College, summa cum laude, with a BA in English, minor Creative Writing, and earned her MFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 with a primary concentration in fiction and a secondary concentration in poetry. For the past five years she has been teaching composition, creative writing and literature at the University of Alabama where she also served as the fiction editor for the Black Warrior Review. Sarah’s poetry and prose has been published in a number of journals and magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, Third Coast, The National Poetry Review, American Poetry Journal, Oxford American Magazine and The Greensboro Review among others. She has been anthologized in the Poets Against the War Anthology and Best New American Voices, 2006, and was the recipient of the 2006 American Poet’s Prize and the 2007 Laureate Prize for Poetry. Currently, she is the Assistant Prose Editor for DIAGRAM magazine and is at work on a novel set on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Violist John Ravnan is well known for his solo and chamber music performances in the United States and Canada. A former member of the Atlanta Chamber Players and the Atlantic String Quartet, he has also collaborated with many distinguished ensembles including the Borodin Trio, Kandinsky Trio, Converse Trio, the Garth Newel Chamber Players, and the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society. While in Atlanta, Mr. Ravnan premiered works by Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Harbison and Anne LeBaron. His performances have been heard on National Public Radio’s Performance Today, CBC Radio in Canada and in a live recital broadcast from the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. Solo performances include concertos with orchestras in the United States and Canada such as the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Greater Spartanburg Philharmonic, Brevard Chamber Orchestra and the East Carolina University String Orchestra. As an orchestral musician Mr. Ravnan has appeared with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and has served as Principal Violist of the Atlanta Opera, Savannah Symphony, Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, and Banff Festival Opera.
Equally celebrated as a teacher, John Ravnan was recognized by Chamber Music America as one of the nation’s leading chamber music educators and invited to participate in their first Educator/Ensemble conference. Mr. Ravnan has been a member of the viola panel at the American String Teachers Association’s National Studio Teachers Forum at Indiana University. He taught at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and has presented master classes at the University of Memphis, Rhodes College, and East Carolina University. This past summer he taught viola and chamber music master classes at the Hindemith Music Centre in Switzerland and at the North Carolina School of the Arts summer session. Mr. Ravnan currently teaches Strings Chamber Music at the Fine Arts Center, a public school for the arts in Greenville, South Carolina.
Mr. Ravnan holds degrees from Eastman School of Music and Peabody Conservatory of Music; his principal teachers have been Heidi Castleman, Karen Tuttle, and Sally Chisholm. Mr. Ravnan joined LYRA as part of the LYRA String Quartet from 2003 – 2006.
Praise for How Language Is Lost
Whether in form or free verse, these poems give the reader a bounty of wit, humor, and heart.How Language Is Lost confirms that Celisa Steele is one of the Carolinas’ finest poets.
–Ron Rash, author of Burning Bright
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“Energy is eternal delight,” said William Blake, and what I love most about Celisa Steele’s How Language Is Lost is its energy. She writes in many different forms–ottava rima, villanelle, sonnet, prose poem, couplet, free verse–and in all these forms there is a delightful play of language, a sheer joy at how language is not lost, how language can take any experience and transform it into passion, into humor, into fresh and unusual insights into the seemingly ordinary experiences of life from going to the grocery store to eating out. In this lovely and fresh collection, we see the narrator remake in words her roles as teenager, daughter, wife, mother, and, most of all, writer. This is a collection to savor.
–Anthony S. Abbott, author of New and Selected Poems: 1989-2009
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In How Language Is Lost, Celisa Steele proves herself a nimble metalinguist, exploring how language works, how puns are made (“Sin Tax on Syntax Passes House by Narrow Margin”), and how the plasticity of English allows an expression like “luculent encomium of labor” to coexist with “Al Considers the Fucking Holy Spirit” in a single book of poems. A poet’s poet, at ease with villanelles, prose poems, and invented forms, she investigates the nature of poetry itself, experimenting with metaphors like ping-pong and a baby “being worked out / in the woozy womb.” Despite her title, the English language is more than safe in Steele’s hands. In fact, this daring yet accomplished collection could be titled Linguistic Paradise Regained.
–Janice Moore Fuller, author of Séance
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A poet’s first book is a glad awakening, not only in her life but in the lives of her readers. We discover in these twenty-four finely made poems so much wisdom and delight that the only way to celebrate is to read them again, and again. Each time the familiar (“something small and simple”) turns to mystery, “transformed into something we can swallow,” and we are made, for a time, whole. Next year, and the year after, more poems by Celisa Steele. This is only a beginning.
–Emily Herring Wilson, author of No One Gardens Alone: A Life of Elizabeth Lawrence