Poetry Pizzicati

As the new year begins, I continue looking back at some of the accomplishments of our Escape Into Life poets in the past year, plucking just a few from the many!

An innovative poet very active on the web, Nic Sebastian ended one poetry-as-voice based project and started another. At Whale Sound, she offered recordings of contemporary poems, by living poets, and at pizzicati of hosanna you can hear “dead poets’ poems read by Nic Sebastian in English and other languages.”

“Pizzicati” is the plural of “pizzicato,” to pluck the strings of an instrument, or a passage played by such plucking. So Nic has plucked some favorites and used her vocal cords to make a special music, continuing her pursuit of “the double life of the poem” in words and voice, apprehended by eye and ear. She carries on a discussion of this still at Voice Alpha, and you can link to her projects with voice, film, and online chapbooks at Very Like a Whale. Be sure to check out her books Forever Will End on Thursday and Dark and Like a Web. You will love Nic’s voice!

Jannett Highfill might want to click on Nic’s reading of “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost, a poet she loves for “a certain tough-mindedness,” as we learn in a full page spread in the Peoria Journal Star, complete with a picture of her at her desk at Bradley University, where she is a professor of economics. Journalist Gary Panetta was interested in Highfill’s “merger of extremes” in being both poet and economist, and interviewed her on her upcoming chapbook, Light Blessings Drifting Together, due out this month from Finishing Line Press. Jannett also appears in Bluffs and Five Bridges: Poems from Peoria, a chapbook anthology of “place” poems by the Grandview Hotel Poets, a group that meets regularly for critique and support.

Richard Fox has a poetry feature in the winter issue of Blaze Vox, and Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, appears regularly now in The Huffington Post.

Susan Slaviero has a new chapbook, A Wicked Apple, just out from Hyacinth Girl Press, and Sarah J. Sloat has one forthcoming in 2012. (And so do I, later this month, I hope!)

We are so delighted by all the fine work of our poets. Keep an eye out for more news, mini-reviews, brief essays, guest blog entries, and interviews here in the EIL Blog on “poetry Wednesdays,” and do cheer us on or and/or tell us of your own good news by commenting here.

And find more art by Anne-D Mejaki at her EIL feature here, or in the EIL Store.