I've been selected to serve as the 2022-2023 U.S. Beat Poet Laureate

OMG. I have been pretty much speechless since hearing the news earlier today. There are so many worthy candidates across our nation and I'm a bit incredulous that I've been selected. But I promise I will do everything I can to be worthy. Poetry saves lives. Someone asked me if I really believe that and I do. It saved mine.

Immense gratitude to the National Beat Poetry Foundation and everyone who has supported me over the years and has helped me evolve and continue evolving as a poet and person.

Performing June 21st in Evansville, Indiana!

I'm looking forward to performing at the Bokeh Lounge in Evansville this Tuesday at 7 p.m Central. This event is part of the Poetry Speaks: Readings and Performances series hosted by "Hoosier Bill" Sovern, the recent Indiana Beat Poet Laureate. It will be my first reading in that state since 2017. Looking forward to seeing area poet friends and hearing new voices!

Bokeh Lounge
1007 Parrett Street
Evansville, IN 47713.

NFSPS Convention in Columbus Next Week!

 

You now have until June 19th to register for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies Convention that is happening in central Ohio on June 23rd through 26th, hosted by the Ohio Poetry Association. 

Hanif Abdurraqib will be their convention Keynote speaker. If you can't attend in person, there is also an option to attend virtually.

More info: https://www.ohiopoetryassn.org/nfsps-2022-convention.

I'll be participating in two events there:

A reading by contributors to I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio's Appalachian Voices on 6/23 at 8 p.m. and a Poets Laureate panel on The Power of Literary Citizenship on 6/24 at 1 p.m.

Hope to see you!

June 11th online: I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing anthology reading

On June 11th, the Cuyahoga County Public Library will host a reading by contributors to the new I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio's Appalachian Voices anthology (edited by Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour and published by Sheila-Na-Gig). This reading will take place online and we'd love for you to tune in. 

Registered participants will also have the option of attending in-person at the South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch to watch the event on a large screen.

Please register here to attend.

June 2nd: Pauletta Hansel, Jonie McIntire and John Burroughs at Visible Voice

I will have the distinct honor and privilege of reading with two of Ohio's finest poets, Pauletta Hansel and Jonie McIntire, on Thursday June 2nd, 7 p.m., at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland.

Jonie McIntire, John Burroughs and Pauletta Hansel

Pauletta Hansel’s nine poetry collections include Heartbreak Tree, a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia, published in 2022 by Madville Publishing, and Friend, Coal Town Photographand Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award for best Appalachian poetry, all from Dos Madres Press. She is 2022 Writer-in-Residence for The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, The Anthology of Appalachian Writers, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily, among others. She recently served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Cincinnati.

Jonie McIntire, Poet Laureate of Lucas County, Ohio, is the poetry editor at Of Rust and Glass and Membership Chair with Ohio Poetry Association. Her most recent chapbook, Semidomesticated (Red Flag Poetry, 2021) won Red Flag Poetry’s 2020 chapbook contest and is being re-released by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her prior chapbooks are Beyond the Sidewalk (Nightballet Press, 2017) and Not All Who Are Lost Wander (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poems, published in print journals, anthologies, online and even into cement, have been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prize. McIntire hosts a monthly reading series called Uncloistered Poetry from Toledo, Ohio.

Visible Voice Books
2258 Professor Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44113
visiblevoicebooks.com

Video: the jojo show featuring John Burroughs

It was fun to talk with John Compton for over an hour (and also read some poems) on May 9th's episode of the jojo show. John has been talking with a different poet every day (and broadcasting these conversations live) since January. 

Permalink to my episode: https://www.facebook.com/100042464478026/videos/413199673679455/.

Follow the jojo show on Facebook.

May 14th in Toledo: I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing anthology reading

On May 14th, Uncloistered Poetry and the Toledo Lucas County Public Library will host a reading by contributors to the recently published I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing anthology (edited by Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour and published by Sheila-Na-Gig). We'd love to see you there!

2 p.m.

325 N. Michigan Street
Toledo, Ohio 43604

May 9th online: John Burroughs on the jojo show

I'm looking forward to being John Compton's guest on the jojo show this coming Monday, May 9th at 2 p.m. Eastern, streaming live. For some months now, he's been talking with a different poet every day. Here's who he has scheduled for the next eight:

May
5 - Jeannie E. Roberts (noon central)

6 - Aakriti Kuntal (4 a.m. central)

7 - Jackie Chou (noon central)

8 - William Jr. Taylor (1 p.m. central)

9 - John Burroughs (1 p.m. central)

10 - Kelliane Parker (1 p.m. central)

11 - John James (noon central)

12 - Charlotte Pence (noon central)

 

Visit the jojo show at facebook.com/groups/671866163826859.

May 7th in Akron: I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing anthology reading

On May 7th, Summit Artspace will host a reading by contributors to the recently published I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing anthology (edited by Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour and published by Sheila-Na-Gig). I'd love to see you there!

2 p.m.

Summit Artspace
140 E. Market Street
Akron, Ohio 44308

 

Crisis Chronicles Press publishes Ouroboros by Chansonette Buck!

Crisis Chronicles Press is thrilled to announce the publication of our fifth title of the year, Ouroboros by Chansonette Buck (with striking visual art by Jillian Mardin), on April 22nd 2022. Our release date also happens to be the author's birthday!

Ouroboros is c. 130 pages, perfect bound paperback, 11" x 8.5". Cover art also by Jillian Mardin. Available for $20 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 535 Parkside Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44143 USA. 

ISBN: 978-1-64092-950-0. First edition, 125 copies.

Select Your Location

In the US $20.00 USD Elsewhere $30.00 USD

Praise for Ouroboros:

Chansonette Buck's Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker takes us on a rich journey through the alchemy of dreams. Buck’s dreams are the kind we wish we remembered—full of significance, of meanings, of important messages. Dreams that reveal the deeper truths and greater understandings. Dreams that nourish our souls.

This is a journey of transfiguration—a word that came to me before I saw it in the book. Transfiguration: changing the forms of difficulty, challenge, and darkness into beauty, illumination, wholeness. Into nourishment for our souls. Like holding a kaleidoscope up to the light, and seeing the patterns form and reform, each more lovely than the last.

Buck is our guide, our priestess, our teacher of transfiguration—holding the lamp to illuminate our way. Singing us through her dreams into our own healing.

 

—Ariana Newcomer, Author; Sound Healer; Spiritual Mentor

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In her newest collection of prose works, Ouroboros, author Chansonette Buck chronicles her life’s journey over a dreamscape that defies expectation and interpretation. What at first seem promising destinations end up as obstruction; while impassible crevices and peaks become pathways to forgiveness and grace, as a movable cast of characters provide aid, conflict and insight to our beleaguered walker. The opening section plays like an overture before descending this landscape into deep trauma, and also, ultimately back into the dreamscape of healing and recovery. Once on this path, the reader will find themselves unable to “leave the trail” until they have gone exactly where Ms. Buck wants them to go…into discovery, the divine, and rebirth. 

 

—Paul Corman-Roberts, author Bone Moon Palace (Nomadic Press, 2021) 

 

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When I first met Chansonette Buck, she was a student of painting at the Museum School in Boston. She doesn’t use paints anymore, but draws the most exquisite word pictures, evocative of far more than could be represented in two dimensions. The partnership here with Jillian Mardin is brilliant, because these visual cues help one take the inner journey I think the poet intended.

There are very few writers whose work I find so rich. I can only read them in small doses. This book is one of those. The words, and word-pictures, have to be savored. As a person who works with both words and pictures, I found Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker to be a rare treat. 

 

—Martha Cotton, FinallyFilms.net

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Chansonette Buck’s Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker depicts multiple dreamscapes through which, in poetic language, she shares her psychological journey. Her luminous descriptions (enhanced with gorgeous collages by Jillian Mardin) take readers on a multi-dimensional voyage of obstacles, shadows, and dangerous precipices, but affirms the wisdom of elders, animals, and priestesses. Although the profound losses of fathers and lovers punctuate the book, she returns always to intentional survival and healing. With Whitmanesque exuberance immersed in female magical powers, she bears witness to loving affiliation with everything from people to galactic beings to nematodes. The many portals—windows, doors, cave entries—enable access to deep interiorities: watery domains and tunnels in caves. Those, in turn, allow access between minds, epistemologies, species, even planets. Spheres and consciousnesses interpenetrate. A beautiful book in every way, Ouroboros is a testament to our vulnerabilities, our interconnectedness, and our ever-shifting possibilities of renewal. 

 

—Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Professor of English and Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities at University of California, Berkeley

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Chansonette Buck shares her dream world in Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker, an expansive landscape that blends the natural world, both familiar and ordinary, with a fantastic territory of the imagination. All told with vivid and descriptive detail. She faces challenges, danger, and her own fear. Animal and human companions inhabit imaginary worlds, ancient and futuristic, realistic and visionary, threatening and comforting. Surely, Chansonette has a method for remembering her dreams. The “dreamwalker” of the title indicates these intense dreams are with her in her waking life, both a link to and a dialogue with her interior self. We all have similar episodic dreams, but this long literary stream of remembered dreams creates a personal world that treads somewhere between everyday reality and the nighttime recesses of the psyche. The writing is richly illustrated with collage images by Jillian Mardin, which reflect this magical adventure of both individual struggle and personal power. 

 

—Harvey Smith, Historian; President, National New Deal Preservation Association; Author, Berkeley and the New Deal

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Reading Chansonette Buck’s latest offering, Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker (with Jillian Mardin’s multidimensional artwork accompanying) enabled me to enter a dreamscape occupied by myriad characters, archetypes, shapes, textures, layers, and meanings: light, dark, and in-between. The Carl Jung quote sets the tone from the start, inviting and warning the reader to advance with caution: this will be a journey of initiation and initiates.

It took me many months to travel through this book as part of the unfoldment of circumstances in my life at the time that involved deep incubation, excavation, birth, death, and rebirth many times over. Sometimes it provided a parallel narrative. At other times, it was analogous to entering another world that allowed me to open another way to see.

Always it speaks to defeat, loss, despair, acceptance, redemption, wisdom, and the will to create, and to be.

Such messages are rife throughout, with sentences standing on their own as ends in themselves, or as worlds to get lost in. Senses go on alert as danger makes itself known and must be faced. And yet, despite the danger (or because of it), one travels with kindred spirits all the way as we traverse the dreamtime landscape, pausing to drink in the images. Always we are held and guided, and although we must also collapse, mourn, and endure, it is clear we are always moving towards becoming, letting go, and becoming again. Letting go into life, letting go into death. Light and dark, and the cycles ever-continuing.

Thank you, beloved Chansonette, for sharing yourself so generously with us all. Your work is so necessary. 

 

—Fatima Bacot, Author; Trainer; Personal Development Mentor; Speaker

 

 

Chansonette Buck holds the PhD in English from UC Berkeley. She earned an BFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where she won both of two juried prizes for her works on paper at a New England Regional show. Winner of the first Judith Stronach Prize in Poetry at Berkeley and a two-time Pushcart nominee, Dr. Buck has authored four chapbooks of poetry as well as a memoir of her time growing up “on the road” with “the great minds of [that] generation” as stepchild of Black Mountain School poet Edward Dorn. She is an ordained minister and certified spiritual healer and is adept in many energy healing modalities. As Principal Prose Wrangler in her consultancy Appaloosa WordCraft, she helps public policy think tanks and nonfiction authors with research, writing, and editing. A California Bay Area expat, she now lives in Southern Oregon’s magnificent Rogue Valley with her family. This is her first full-length collection. Another will be following from Hand to Mouth Press soon.