“Renew” is a snapshot of both the spring season as well as a metaphor for rebirth and new beginnings. The poem succinctly captures the small and often unseen mechanisms of life that are easily forgotten in our quotidian experiences. Seeds and grains of sand mirror one another in describing the foundations of nature, both miniscule and buried in the earth, beneath and oblivious to the changing landscapes of human existence. This is creation. This is life and birth and death, and everything in between.

As much as “Renew” is about birth, “The Lure” is about death. These two poems stand facing one another, two experiences essential to every living being. A grey bird walks on the shore, leaving footprints in the wet sand. The tide comes in and washes the footprints clean, and the bird in turn flies off into the horizon, leaving the narrator of the poem reflecting, “That was when I lost sight of everything.” In describing life at its other end, there is the inevitable erasure of it, which may seem to belie the self-important narcissism of individuals in society. However, this is just the nature of waves, of the sea’s relentless beating, a heartbeat that continues even as we do not.

The last poem, “Sanctioned,” slices open the heart to reveal the inner monologue of love. Two hands clasp in prayer for the narrator’s beloved at the beginning of the poem, and later, the hands hold “something so gentle as a bird.” The bird is released and thus freedom is found in the conjoined union of two souls. Sanction is granted, as easily and naturally as letting go.

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While supplies last, get a limited edition (38″ x 27″) ’Wind in Her Hair’ poster signed by both Fred Chandler and Bruce Botnick in the shop today!

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Read it here today:
http://voxpoetica.com/todayswords.html

or find it here in the archives after December 31, 2012.

In “Singing To You”, Fred explores “another kind of music beyond the ears, the eyes, and the mind.” The music of life exists not only in sound and rhythm but in all experience, memory, and love itself. It is in the act of “dancing in sun rays and shadows” that we produce bodily music joyfully and painfully, for both weave the fabric of life.

These poems address the essential nature of writing texts, because as Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

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Bruce Botnick (The Doors engineer), friend and poetry mentor of Fred’s, edited the poem into song lyrics as he did for Morrison’s poetry so many years ago when he was producing the LA Woman album for The Doors.

Catherine Martin (Academy Award winner for Art Direction of Moulin Rouge and Art Director for Baz Luhrmann’s recent movie Australia), had her creative team create a unique graphic, true-to-form image of William Blake in The Sick Rose. With an incredible print job, this beautiful poster was the end result!

Visit their website to read the poems: http://www.crackthespine.com/

“Mending Tools” was chosen out of hundreds of submissions for the print publication of Crack the Spine’s Spring 2012 Anthology. “Your Cross,” a new poem penned this fall, will be published in Yes, Poetry’s next issue.

Look for it here: http://yespoetry.com/

Check back soon for a new recording of three poems to be posted on this website in December.

Fred Chandler’s second CD is a collection of poems read at Beyond Baroque, a historical venue for poetry and writing in Venice, California. This epic recording reaches towards the meanings of human existence, love and relationships, transformation, personal and collective heritage, 9/11, and journeys to the end of the world.

In the poem What Follows, “memory explodes into darkness.” We understand this line at the beginning of the CD as a direction in which to feel the words we hear. It guides the reader—or perhaps it is a forewarning—into the sometimes abyssal darkness of death and tragedy of the poems to follow.

As darkness turns, the poems turn to images of birds, symbols of mind, thought, messengers, wisdom, and transformation. “Listen tomorrow, in the morning. It’s all told in the story the blackbird sings,” Fred states at the end of the poem Heritage. Simultaneously a poet spinning lyrical metaphors and a raconteur, we are assured that meaning lies in waiting, in the dappled morning light, in the simple song of a blackbird’s call.

Yet night falls again as it does at the end of every day, and we are again transported to darkness as it falls at the end of the recording.”My blood-stained boots have walked from far away. The road I traveled took its toll on me, every day. I bury innocent children in shallow dirt graves.” The imagery invoked in these spare and haunting lines hearken loss, longing, guilt and culpability.

These poems take us on a hallucinatory trajectory through sins andsolace, sinners and dreams. What we’re left with in the end is a portrait painted with the most ecstatic and incriminating colors, staggered with beauty and pathos.

Fred Chandler’s poems, “Key Performances”, “Playgrounds”, and “Mending Tools” have recently been published in the magazine Cracked The Spine. The poems can be viewed here.

Please share you comments below. We look forward to hearing from you!

In “Before Us,” “an ancient statue with broken fingers and worn out eyes” is evoked, a historical remainder of the fragility not only of the human body, but of history writing and rewriting itself. Seeing and blindness merge in this ancient statue’s eyes. What becomes of the witness when the eye turns weary? The answer is contained in the last line of this poem: “We eye these worldly things turning in on themselves and they are gone.”

“Transitory Enchantment” is a poem about many things: dreaming, love, fate, and the unconscious. Fred describes our quotidian struggles with a stark metaphor, “Our headway is very slow and is barely discernible under the dark night.” The dark night, a cloak under which we forever remain, for we can never understand now, this moment in time, until it has passed. Issues of temporality and with it, death and cyclical time, emerge from between the poem’s lines to grace the reader’s eye.Yet, alongside this barely discernible headway, there consists “A hidden strong current is the culprit trying to hold back all our dreams.” This current, which exists in all of us, could very well be the unconscious itself, the pull of our past, trauma and subjectivity swirling through us in the relentless struggle called life.

These six poems can be heard exclusively here. As always, your comments are appreciated and any feedback welcome.

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“Thunder and rain plays like an orchestra…” Fred opines. Much like
 the lyrical play in his poems, the words dance beautifully like music 
as he performs them with grace. This new audio recording is a document
 of the journey audiences have taken with Fred in previous months at
 Venice’s Beyond Baroque. “The pungent smell of moss, water, and
 earth…” exemplifies the ability Fred has to evoke the elements of 
nature, elevating them to not only a visceral experience but also an 
elegy to death and the eventual return to nature. Orange salamanders 
move through family, heart, memory and doors of home.

Please leave us your comments on this special new recording that can
 only be heard here on fredchandler.com. Please check back regularly as 
new content is frequently updated. We look forward to hearing from 
you!

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We’d love to hear what you think. Please leave your comments on the Wall here.

Last night, Fred hosted Beyond Baroque’s monthly open reading. The guest poet was Wyatt Underwood, who began the night by reading a selection of his poems. Fred read his poems, “Light’s Epitaph,” “At Random,” and finally, “Prodigy.” His poems were stark and striking in their imagery. His reading was received with applause and cheer. An audio recording of the three poems is available for viewers to listen to below and in the Readings section of the site.

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We look forward to hearing your thoughts about the poems, which you can post on the wall here on Fred’s website. Stay tuned for upcoming publications!

We look forward to hearing your thoughts about the poems, which you can post on the wall here on Fred’s website. Stay tuned for upcoming publications!

We look forward to hearing your thoughts about the poems, which you can post on the wall here on Fred’s website. Stay tuned for upcoming publications!

The CD was produced and recorded with Bruce Botnick, the record producer best known for his work with The Doors.

Visit iTunes to get Fred’s first audio recordings and hear him read his original poetry. Get your copy now!

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Start Time: 5:00PM
Date: April 10, 2011

Location: Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd. Venice, CA 90291

We look forward to seeing you this Sunday, March 6th at 5 p.m.

Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd. Venice, CA 90291

The monthly reading is open to all poets who will read two poems or for five minutes. Please come join us to hear Fred and other poets read their work. We will have chapbooks and CD’s available. Beyond Baroque is an independent literary and arts center located in Venice. In addition to readings, Beyond Baroque offers workshops and education programs, among others.

We look forward to seeing you this Sunday, March 6th at 5 p.m.

Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd. Venice, CA 90291

And nothing

Existence

And more

The bookfair was filled with booth after booth of literary journals representing their own brands of poetry, fiction, flash fiction, criticism, creative nonfiction, and/or memior. Small presses were seated across from larger publishers. Hand-crafted zines were hawked along with thick copies of Tin House magazine. Universities and art schools decorated their booths with college banners and handed out free pens along with brochures on the now-ubiquitous MFA writing programs from Iowa to Los Angeles.

We attended panels on “The Art and Authenticity of Social Media: Using Online Tools to Grow a Community” as well as “Thinking Beyond the Book: The Future of Authorship and Publishing in a Transmedia World. We went to a keynote address by author Jhumpa Lahiri and a reading with Mary Gaitskill.

The convention, which was overwhelming at times, was a trove of information. The spirit of camaraderie filled the air as we trolled the aisles, circled the mezzanine, sat in the grand ballroom, and plucked fliers and brochures off of booth tables while elbowing fellow writers and occasionally stargazing at internet writing celebs and editors.

With this year’s convention already in the past tense, we are already nostalgic for it. We look forward to next year’s AWP convention, which we hope will be located in a warmer and more pedestrian-friendly city.

Visit the Shop

I got to see John Thomas’ sculptures at the OK HARRIS gallery on 383 West Broadway. I think John’s work is amazing. He works with different rectangular shapes. Then he paints them with unusual colors with shadows. Ah, he’s tricky because some of the shadows are not painted. They are real! I saw a little girl touching one and she was surprised to find she wasn’t touching a shadow. I’m very intrigued with what John is doing because he’s playing with time, space and color that are full of subtle illusions.

I even found myself testing what were shadows and what were not. I had to follow the little girl’s act to find what was or isn’t reality.

John sculptures are either hung on a wall or are multi-dimensional stand ups. I found the work totally fascinating. It was great having dinner with John and his wife, Kate, to discuss my impression of his work and to congratulate him. If you have a chance to stop by the gallery and see John unique sculptures you will not be disappointed. What I like it really lends itself to thought provoking discussions.

Featured speakers include: Junot Diaz, Sandra Cisneros, Rae Armantrout, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gaitskill, Amy Hempel, Rick Moody,Joyce Carol Oates, Claudia Rankine, Sapphire, and Rosmarie Waldrop, among others.

Panel highlights include:

• Tearing Your Heart Off Your Sleeve: The Problem of Pathos in Creative Nonfiction,
• The Essayist in the 21st Century
• What They Didn’t Tell Us
• We Will Tell You: Four First-Time Authors Discuss the Nitty Gritty of Publishing
• Creative Writing Fulbright Fellowship Reading
• American Poets Respond to Major Global Trauma
• Examining the PhD in Creative Writing
• To Wave or Not to Wave: Writing the Female Body Across Generations

See the full schedule here:
http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2011schedThurs.php
http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2011schedFri.php
http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2011schedSat.php

Offsite events include:

• McSweeney’s & 826DC Present “Meat Trucks
• Steady Habits & Don Rumsfeld: A Talk About Fiction’s Secret Weapon”
• The Four Seasons AWP Reading
• Northwestern University Press Author Reading
• COPPER NICKEL ISSUE 15 RELEASE

Offsite events can be found here:
http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2011offsite.php

“I feel like I should be more hardened at this point, but in a way I feel more vulnerable. With this book I decided not to look at anything at all. Perhaps in the future I’ll ask my editor or someone to show me a few [reviews] that she thinks could really benefit me somehow.”

- Jhumpa Lahiri on an online interviewer for The Atlantic Monthly.

Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, 1954) is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998).

- A great interview with the inimitable Mary Gaitskill on narrative.com

Junot Díaz (born December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American[1] writer and creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Central to Díaz’s work is the immigrant experience. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in 2008.

- Listen to an episode of This American Life on National Public Radio featuring Diaz.

Amy Hempel is a recipient of the Hobson Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006 she was awarded a USA Fellowship grant byUnited States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America’s top living artists. She won theAmbassador Book Award in 2007 for her Collected Stories, which was also named as one of the The New York Times‘ Ten Best Books of the year. In 2008 she won the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2009 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction along with Alistair MacLeod.

- An Interview with Hempel – Forty-Eight Ways of Looking at Amy Hempel

This series of contemporary fiction and poetry readings is organized by Benjamin Weissman, author of two books of short fiction, most recently Headless, and professor of creative writing at Art Center College of Design and Otis College of Art and Design.
Start Time: 07:00pm
Date: 2011-01-25