Karl Elder's "Gilgamesh at the Bellagio" Nets Publishing Contract, National Recognition
Lakeland College Fessler Professor Karl Elder’s manuscript, Gilgamesh at the Bellagio, has been awarded a publication contract as a runner up in The National Poetry Review Prize Book Series. The volume—not to be confused with his recently published long poem by the same name in Black Warrior Review—is scheduled to appear in 2007 or early 2008. Conceived as a trilogy, the first section of the manuscript, Mead (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize), is followed by Gilgamesh at the Bellagio and Z Ain’t Just for Zabecedarium (portions of which received the Chad Walsh Award from Beloit Poetry Journal).
“This is a dream,” Elder said of the latest award, “one that I rarely dared to share for fear that I’d jinx the book, the joy of the years I’ve had working on it, which came to an abrupt halt during my sabbatical last spring when I’d completed the effort. For the last couple of days I’ve been pinching myself to be certain I’m awake.”
Seems Poem Nominated for Pushcart Prize
From Seems #40 (edited and published by Karl Elder with assistance from Lakeland College student interns Jodie Liedke, Ross Fale, Zak Ford, Lea Holz, and Wendi Kulas) Louis McKee’s “Diary,” a poem chronicling the death of the poet’s uncle from malaria contracted on Guadalcanal, has been has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the esteemed poet Philip Dacey.
Elder Essay Reprinted
Karl Elder’s “The Sense in Nonsense,” commissioned by Poetry Daily in celebration of National Poetry Month (April), has been reprinted by the Wisconsin Humanities Council on its web site and may be accessed here: http://www.wisconsinhumanities.org/elder.html.
Elder’s Work Receives More National Exposure
Karl Elder’s “Logo Rhythms” from his chapbook The Minimalist’s How-to Handbook is reprinted in the brand new Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, available in bookstores nation-wide. A description of the anthology may be had by clicking here: http://www.poems.com/pdess2007.htm
Elder Publishes Bar Story
Karl Elder’s “Pals,” an excerpt from his novel-in-manuscript, Run, appears in Bar Stories, an anthology from Bottom Dog Press available from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Powell’s Books.
Elder’s “Snapshots,” included in his forthcoming volume of poems, Gilgamesh at the Bellagio, from The National Poetry Review Prize Book Series, appears on the e-zine qarrtsiluni. The piece may be accessed by clicking www.qarrtsiluni.com.
Elder Poem Published in India Karl Elder’s poem, “American Koan,” which originally appeared in Oklahoma Review, has been reprinted at the invitation of the editors of Taj Mahal Review, the international journal devoted to arts, literature, and culture from Govindpur Colony, India. (Click on the attachment above for a picture of the issue in which the poem appears.)
Current Issue of Seems Released
Seems #40, “The Return of the Limerick Kid,” edited and published by Karl Elder with the assistance of student interns Ross Fale, Zak Ford, Lea Holz, Wendi Kulas, and Jodie Liedke, was recently released, boasting a collaborative cover design conceived by Elder, assembled by Liedke and Kulas, and enhanced by Eric Binversie of GT Graphics. This latest number of the magazine features an over-the-top, “pulp” short story by a young writer from Ohio, Ryan Ireland—his first publication. Completing the issue are poems from well-seasoned and prolific writers like Philip Dacey and Michael Cadnum as well as several with Wisconsin connections, including a new young poet, Austin Smith, who graduated from U.W.-Madison in June, spent four months living in a tent in Alaska, and now works on his family’s dairy farm near Freeport, Illinois.
Elder's Sabbatical Project Published
“Gilgamesh at the Bellagio,” Elder's 1,300 word mini-epic in strict syllabics based on the Gilgamesh myth and composed during his sabbatical in spring, appears with an introduction by Beth Ann Fennelly in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Black Warrior Review, the literary journal from the University of Alabama. Of his good fortune, Elder said, “I thought the poem, because of its length, would never see the light of day except when I opened the drawer in which I had it housed. But I’d shown it to two persons in March, given their interest in my work, our correspondence, and their generous blurbs on the back of my Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums, which appeared around year ago. In June, out of the blue, came a call from one of the two, Fennelly, who’d just been honored with a guest editorship at BWR. I went into a momentary state of shock, unable at the time to say yes to her desire to write an introduction to and to publish the poem as her sole contribution to the issue. Then I went on a long walk.”
Seems Honored in The Best American Essays 2006
Seems #38, edited by Karl Elder and Lakeland College writing majors Ross Fale, Lea Holz, and Jodie Liedke, is cited in the forthcoming edition of The Best American Essays for publishing as a notable piece William Huhn’s “The Call of the Child.” Elder said of the honor, “This is a pretty tall feather in our cap with the likes of The New Yorker and, say, Virginia Quarterly Review in competition. Although the manuscript needed some work, all of my assistants knew we had something special in our mitts, reading it, when it arrived in the mail out of the blue. We had such faith in finished product that we included it on the Seems web site as illustrative of the best of the issue.” Huhn’s essay may be accessed by clicking here: http://www1.lakeland.edu/seems/pages/38.htm
Karl Elder’s “Brush Strokes,” an acrostic of 100 syllables composed at the invitation of Nimrod International Journal from the University of Tulsa in celebration of Oklahoma’s centennial and the journal’s 50th anniversary, appears in Doing the Hundreds at 50, an anthology containing work from 100 writers from across the nation.
Brush Strokes
One honey of a dreaded count’s one shy:
ninety-nine when, Dude, you’re the lone shepherd even a Stetson from Sheppler’s don’t hide.
Heck, what with her digital glowing 1:00 under your silver dollar sun, it’s time
now you pen yourself in, 10 x 10—Lord damn that lost heifer, the whole herd, before
red becomes you and you become rawhide— escape to her room, your phantom cowgirl
doing her hair, whom you pine with rime for.
Fiction by Karl Elder
A complement of three stories by Karl Elder about a mysterious and alluring little girl appear in the Autumn, 2006, issue of Triptych, the recently founded e-zine of short fiction from the Pacific Northwest. All three stories—“The Kiss of Narcissus," "The Offspring," and "Not Kissing Artist Montgomery”—may be accessed at once by clicking here: http://www.geocities.com/triptych_zine/karlelder.html.
Elder Welcomes Online Comments
Karl Elder’s “Professor Lucifer in the Arena of Angels” appears on the latest posting of the e-zine qarrtsiluni for which the current theme is “education.” Readers of Mr. Elder’s contribution are encouraged to post commentary about and/or reactions to the poem. The piece, which is from his recently completed sequence of 26 poems, Z Ain’t Just for Zabecedarium, can be accessed at http://www.qarrtsiluni.com . Submitted by: Mehraban Khodavandi, khodavandim@lakeland.edu Writers Festival Karl Elder’s “The Cave,” which originally appeared in the California-based literary magazine Eclipse, is now on the web as an example of dramatic monologue in a supplement to an article in the new issue of The Writer Magazine (available in Esch Library) by contributing editor Marilyn Taylor, who happens to be one of this year’s featured writers during our Great Lakes Writers Festival on November 2nd & 3rd. For information about the festival, go to www.greatlakeswritersfestival.com .
Out & About
Poet in Residence Karl Elder was one of five featured readers during the tenth anniversary celebration of Parallel Press, the imprint of the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Library, held at the Neville Public Museum in Green Bay on July 27th.
Out & About
Karl Elder's "Tour in Stone" received Honorable Mention in the recent "Mask of Ordinariness" contest conducted by Free Verse. Karl's poem appears in issue #84 of the journal, which is available in the periodicals section of John Esch Library.
News Archives
May 15, 2006
May Brings More Honors for Lakeland’s Elder
The Council for Wisconsin Writers has singled-out Lakeland College Professor Karl Elder's Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums for Honorable Mention among "an admirable field of submissions" for its Posner Award of 2006.
Elder was a guest at the council's annual banquet at the Wisconsin Club in Milwaukee earlier this month where he was presented a certificate and honorarium.
"I'm grateful for the attention Mead is receiving," said Elder, Lakeland's Fessler Professor of Creative Writing, the college's Poet in Residence and a member of Lakeland's faculty since 1979. "A poet can only hope his or her work will inspire others to scrutinize their experience, thus paying homage to the gift of being and consciousness. Besides, it's fun."
It has been a whirlwind year for Elder, including a feature on the Poetry Daily website, a Pushcart Prize and Pulitzer Prize nomination, the Council for Wisconsin Writers' 2005 Lorine Niedecker Award and the 2005 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize.
In a review of Mead and Elder's The Minimalist's How-to Handbook, Wendy Vardaman writes, "In these two short collections Elder demonstrates his significance to poetry in Wisconsin as well as to contemporary poetry in general."
May 2, 2006
Karl Elder's "Negative Capability" (the poem's title a phrase coined by John Keats in 1817 in a letter to his brothers in which he extols the virtue of uncertainty) dedicated to the 83-year-old editor and matriarch of Beloit Poetry Journal, Marion Stocking, appears in the newly-released anthology, Encore: More of Parallel Press Poets, from the Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison's Memorial Library.
April 28, 2006
Poet in Residence Karl Elder has been invited to unveil his sabbatical project at the first annual Spring City Poetry Festival at Waukesha Public Library on Friday, April 28 and Saturday, April 29. A quasi-narrative poem, a minimalist's epic by contemporary standards, in 26 stanzas of varying length (with an epilogue) and lines composed in strict syllabics, it is called "Gilgamesh at the Bellagio" and is the centerpiece of a yet-to-be titled trilogy--the first and third sections (Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums and Z Ain't Just for Zabecedarium) complete as of December. Additional information about the festival may be accessed at the website of the Academy of American Poets: http://www.poets.org/viewevent.php/prmEventID/4653
January 6, 2006
Karl Elder's prose poem, "Prepubesence, " appears in the newly-released Runes: A Review of Poetry, the annual thematic anthology from Arctos Press of Sausalito, California. An image of the volume's cover is available at http://members.aol.com/Runes/Signals.html .
News Item
Karl Elder was recently awarded the 2005 Beloit Poetry Journal’s 13th Annual Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. Karl’s set of eight poems from Z Ain’t Just for Zabecedarium were the winning selections. Karl's poem "American Bovary (The Cosmetician)" can be viewed on the Beloit Poetry Journal website.
October 18, 2005
Poetry Daily, the world's premier website of its kind (www.poems.com), receiving in excess of 20,000 hits per day, will feature on Sunday, October 23, one of Karl Elder's sequences, "Logo Rhythms," from his collection The Minimalist's How-to Handbook, released from Parallel Press in May of this year. It will be our Poet in Residence's fourth appearance on this prestigious venue for poetry.
On Sunday of this week, Professor Elder read from his new book Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums at the invitation of the Council for Wisconsin Writers at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison. On Saturday, he participated in the festival symposium, "Poetry and Community: An Open Roundtable on Poetry in Wisconsin for Poets, Publishers, Teachers, Book Buyers, and Librarians."
"Demarcations," a poem from Karl Elder's The Minimalist's How-to Handbook, has been selected by Woodrow Hall Editions' POETRY JUMPS OFF THE SHELF program for distribution as a laminated bookmark by independent bookstores in Madison during the Wisconsin Book Festival, October 13-17.
October 4, 2005
Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums
Poet in Residence Karl Elder's Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums is now in print from Marsh River Editions. A preview of the collection, including blurbs, may be accessed on the book's webpage: http://www.marshrivereditions.com/Mead.html. Soon to be available in the Lakeland College Campus Shop, copies are also sold at Book World, Inc., 537 S. Taylor Drive in Sheboygan.
News Item
Karl Elder recently received a letter from Governor Jim Doyle, congratulating Karl on receiving the 2005 Lorine Niedecker Award from the council for Wisconsin Writers. The letter reads as follows:
Dear Mr. Elder,
Congratulations on receiving the 2005 Lorine Niedecker Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. In addition to your 2001 Pushcart Prize and being included in The Best American Poetry of 2005, this is a distinct honor. Through your many published works and your 28 years as a professor you provide an example for other aspiring poets throughout the state.
Thank you for sharing your lifetime of experiences with your students. Keep up the good work.
Sincerely,
Jim Doyle
Governor
News Item
Karl Elder's poem "Firebuck" from his 1994 collection A Man in Pieces has been reprinted in Sacred Fire: The Power of the First Element to Change Your Life. For a description of the anthology, click below:
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/159337366X/qid=1133467584/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_8_2/303-3947607-3929019
News Item
Poet in Residence Karl Elder’s “A Short History of History” and “On the Long-Ago Death of John Lennon” appear this week (8/7/05-8/13/05) in the inaugural issue of Bat City Review from the University of Texas at Austin. http://homepage.mac.com/markgutierrez/bcr/2006/contents1.html
Karl Elder’s poem dedicated to Reverend Dave Lauer, “Immersing a Sand-Coated Hand in Water” from Elder’s 1994 collection A Man in Pieces, appears in Sacred Waters: Stories of Healing, Cleansing, and Renewal, which has just been released from Adams Media. A description of the anthology may be viewed at http://stores.yahoo.com/adamsmedia/sawastofhecl.html.
News Item
Seems 38, the “Gone Missing” issue, edited and published by Fessler Professor Karl Elder with the able assistance of student interns Ross Fale, Lea Holz, and Jodie Liedke, has just been released, boasting its eye-catching cover drawing by writing and art major Holz.
This latest number of the magazine features work of fine writers from virtually every corner of the nation—even a young poet from rural Sheboygan County—and Canada, including a dozen poets, three fictionists, and an essayist, William Huhn, whose “The Call of the Child” promises to evoke warm memories of every reader’s childhood struggles with affection and loss.
A limited quantity of the issue is being made available, gratis, to Lakeland College faculty and staff members. Contact Karl Elder (x1276 or elderk@lakeland.edu) to secure a copy.
Out & About
Through an arrangement with Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin, Fessler Professor Karl Elder’s collection of poetry, The Minimalist’s How-to Handbook, which is being distributed this month, is immediately available to members of the Lakeland College community at a 40% discount off the cover price of $10. Please contact Professor Elder by email [elderk@lakeland.edu]or leave him a voice message [x1276] should you wish to obtain a copy or multiple copies that he, of course, will happily sign and/or inscribe upon request.
The following is a description of The Minimalist’s How-to Handbook appearing in the 2005 Parallel Press catalog of forthcoming books:
Remember the blind men who went to see the elephant? Each “saw,” by touch, different portions of anatomy and drew wildly divergent conclusions on the nature of the beast. So Karl Elder would unsettle our perceptions with wild interpretations of familiar forms. Might the numeral “3,” for example, suggest by shape “the unlocked handcuff / Houdini still sports”? And, does the colon of common punctuation gaze at us with “eyes of a dead man / lying on his side”? These mind-stretching works exhibit extraordinary imagination and urge us to deep our eyes and minds open.
Out & About
Karl Elder’s “A Life” from his 1994 volume, A Man in Pieces, appears on Robin Chapman’s Poem a Day Blog for May 12, 2005. One of a very few of Professor Elder’s prose poems, it may be directly accessed at http://robinchapmanspoemaday.blogspot.com/ for several days and will subsequently be archived at http://robinchapmanspoemaday.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_robinchapmanspoemaday_archive.html.
Elder Wins Lorine Niedecker Award
Poet in Residence Karl Elder has won the 2005 Lorine Niedecker Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. The prize, named after "the state's pre-eminent poet of the twentieth century . . . [is] given for a group of shorter poems, which, taken singly or together, represent a significant poetic achievement commensurate with the quality and character of Niedecker's work." Mr. Elder will be presented the award at a ceremony in the Mitchell Room of the Wisconsin Club in Milwaukee on Saturday, April 30th.
Concerning the selection of his poems for the award by the New York poet and critic Rachel Wetzsteon, Elder said, "I'm humbled by this honor because Niedecker (a protégé of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky) who died in 1970, has recently assumed the position in literary circles as the most prominent poet ever to surface from Wisconsin. I admire her work very much. She lived near Ft. Atkinson for nearly all her life and endured with great nobility what anyone in our culture would call hardships—both personal and physical. But she was deeply immersed in the life of the mind and utterly devoted to her aesthetic principles, the most dominant being severe economy of language. By way of the quality of her art and her temperament she is often perceived to be in the line of Emily Dickinson."
Out & About
Fessler Professor of Creative Writing Karl Elder is one of 21 poets Poetry Daily has honored with an invitation to choose a poem from the literary pantheon and comment upon it in celebration of National Poetry Month. Subscriptions to Poetry Daily's electronic newsletter, which will publish the selections on successive weekdays in April, are free. Persons may secure a subscription at www.poems.com
Out & About
Fessler Professor Karl Elder's "Everything I Needed to Know," from his forthcoming book from Marsh River Editions, Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums, has been chosen by Paul Muldoon for The Best American Poetry 2005, due out from Scribner in the fall of this year. Muldoon, recipient of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is a native of Northern Ireland and has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War."
Elder, whose "Alpha Images" was selected for The Best American Poetry 2000, said of the 2005 selection, "Inclusion in the series a second time is as sweet as the first. For one thing, after four years, I'd begun to think of myself as a one-shot wonder. Second, as Beth Ann Fennelley, who also has work chosen this year for a second time, said to me over the phone, 'I think of it as such an honor, coming from Paul Muldoon.'"
Elder's piece, archived along with others of his Mead poems, can be accessed both on Poetry Daily at www.poems.com and on the Beloit Poetry Journal website at www.bpj.org .
News Item
Fessler Professor Karl Elder's poem "Transportation" from his sequence Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums, which is scheduled to appear from Marsh River Editions in late spring of 2005, has been awarded 1st place in a contest sponsored by Free Verse and judged by Milwaukee Poet Laureate Marilyn Taylor.
Citing Elder's poem as the winner, Taylor writes, "Who among us has never felt totally-if illogically-sentimental about a car? "Transportation" skillfully exploits that small quirk of the psyche-the one that exists in virtually everyone who's ever decided to sell a faithful old set of wheels-and it does so with graceful syntax, exceedingly well-crafted lines, and a consistent undercurrent of wit. It's a splendid poem, not only because of the fresh and innovative use of language throughout, but also because it speaks to us in a familiar voice that's impossible to resist."
News Item
Fessler Professor Karl Elder's "The Strip," a genre-crossing literary experiment, will be featured in Dirt, an anthology released in conjunction with The Pittsburg Creative Nonfiction Literary Festival beginning November 12. For details about the anthology, billed as "fourteen dirty little secrets," interested persons may click on www.newyinzer.com/books/product_dirt.php .
Out & About
Eight previously unpublished poems from Fessler Professor Karl Elder's manuscript, Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums, appear in the new issue of Spectaculum, the literary journal of Portland, Oregon, that features annually the work of 5 contemporary poets.
Out & About
Karl Elder's "In a Town Called Unincorporated" appears in the "Saturday's Poem" feature at The Middlewesterner:. The piece will be permanently archived at http://middlewesterner.blogspot.com/2004_08_28_middlewesterner_archive.html#1086
Out & About
Fessler Professor Karl Elder's biography will appear in the 2005 editions of International Who's Who of Authors and Writers and International Who's Who in Poetry from Europa Publications of London.
Out & About
Karl Elder’s “Making History” and “A Disappearing Act” were featured on July 20 by the on-line anthology Verse Daily and may be accessed by clicking on http://www.versedaily.org/2005/kepoemsbpj.shtml. The poems originally appeared in a group of eight from Elder’s new work-in-progress, Z Ain’t Just for Zabecedarium, published this summer by Beloit Poetry Journal. A third poem from the group, “American Bovary (The Cosmetician),” may also be accessed at the BPJ website through the following link: http://www.bpj.org/elderamericanbovary.htm.
Out & About - February 14, 2005
Two poems from Karl Elder's The Minimalist's How-to Handbook (Parallel Press, 2005) have been reprinted in a special issue of alphabet poems from Snakeskin [http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~simmers/], the webzine from the United Kingdom.
