Chip Livingston

Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

Who’s Yer Daddy?
Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners
Edited by Jim Elledge and David Groff

“A diverse and colorful anthology. This is the first major work to focus on accomplished writers, on the specific topic of their creative influences.”
—Jerry Rosco, author of Glenway Wescott Personally

So proud to be a part of this amazing anthology. I write about Kenward Elmslie and Tim Dlugos leading me to and through the New York School of Poetry. Below is a photo of Kenward and me in 2005 before going to the Pulitzer Prize luncheon.

INDIOS: Finding Medea in First Contact

Admittedly I’ve not had much experience as a book reviewer, and it’s especially intimidating to write about someone’s work who you admire as much as I do Linda Hogan’s. But this is a book, The Pulitzer Prize finalist’s 12th, I’m happy to help spread the word about.

In INDIOS, a Native woman incarcerated for allegedly killing her children (in a contemporizing the Medea myth into the time of first contact among Indigenous peoples of the Americans and the European colonists) delivers a direct address from prison. The reader participates in the book-length dramatic monologue as an interviewer visiting Indios in prison. You have the privileged seat to a master storyteller with a story both familiar and unexpected.

I’m linking the full review here: Modernizing the Myth

Thanks for all the support at Innisfree Poetry Bookstore in Boulder. Taped this video of me reading “Evolution” from the new book. Hope you enjoy it.

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“Evolution” read by Chip Livingston on Youtube.

Great CU-Boulder reunion at Vic’s coffee shop last week with fellow CU grad novelist Jenny Shank, who gave an awesome reading from her novel THE RINGER.  I read from my new poetry collection.

And we hung out with great friends over pizza and red wine afterwards. Such a fun night.

Yesterday I read a story to second-graders at Colegio Jean Piaget here in Montevideo. The students study English and had prepared questions for me. The boy with his hand raised in the photo asked, “Have you ever written a children’s book?” and I told him not yet, but I promised I would. Now we have proof that I promised. It was an awesome event.

Cover art by Deb Kirkeeide.

My second full-length poetry collection, CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK, will be published on May 1, 2012 by New York Quarterly Books.

Editorial description:

Chip Livingston confronts and immerses himself into new cultural territories in his second poetry collection, Crow-Blue, Crow-Black, an examination – critical, colloquial, and personal – of identity in terms of geography, experience, and blood quantum. A southern, gay, mixed-blood poet is thrust into the big-city literary life of the New York School artists in Greenwich Village, yet finds “home” in Uruguay with an Argentinean. Crow-Blue, Crow-Black crosses traditional Native American narrative and incantatory styles with the quick-witted street poems of the New York School. It crosses the border into the southern hemisphere and bears witness to the influence of the Rio de la Plata, the grand capitols of Montevideo and Buenos Aires on its shores. From rural coastal roots to urban urgency and back to the rhythm of rivers and ocean, Crow-Blue, Crow-Black maps the continents of the Americas.

“Crow-Blue, Crow-Black” at NYQBooks.

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“Talent can be taught.” An interview with Chip Livingston, poet, writer, teacher.

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REFLECTIONS IN A PUDDLE, BLOG by NATALIE LOBAN.

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“I asked Chip if he could do a short interview for my blog, and he kindly agreed. Some of you submitted questions for Chip; they are included in the interview. I appreciate your participation very much. I would also like to thank Chip for his insightful responses.

Natalie (reflectionsinapuddle): Do you write for a specific audience? If so, how would you describe your ideal reader?

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Owl in Glass. © 2011 Gabriel Padilha

OWLS DON’T HAVE TO MEAN DEATH

a story by Chip Livingston

“I want to take you away,” Elan said. “I want to go to the beach.”

I looked up from the newspaper. His face had color in it. After months of weakening, his eyes were lit with some reprieve from illness, not the old fire but a spark from the black sockets that awoke something in me as well. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and yet his eyes were focused: on me, on this idea of the beach.

….READ MORE AT: “Owls Don’t Have to Mean Death” on Drunken Boat.

ARACHNOPHOBIA

(for Danah)

That spiders fall like stars on strings from trees and ceilings of garages, scares the shit out of my tough little sister, a chemist with a PhD who got a pistol from her husband for her twenty-sixth birthday.  My little sister, who played in darts tournaments with mustached gay cowboys at the Round Up on Thursdays, and “whipped their asses,” who used to hunt deer with our father and race motorcycles with her boyfriends.  She sees spiders now when she closes her eyes.  She doesn’t sleep at night.  She stays inside and dusts the closets.  She won’t sit down until she pounds the cushions on the couch.  She shakes out her throw blanket and pulls her legs beneath her lap – the way a spider folds its legs when it’s about to pounce.  My little sister is ready to jump out of her skin.  My little sister thinks spiders sense her fear and are drawn to it, spiders who thought her up.  So she won’t garden; her cats have allergies; she has six exterminators on rotation.  My little sister is afraid one exterminator will find out about another, at a convention or an expo.  Her husband doesn’t even know because she uses her own money. But his head aches behind his eyes when he gets home.  He thinks it’s her.

© 2003 Chip Livingston. First published in Rosebud. Reprinted in Poetry Southeast. Appears in MUSEUM OF FALSE STARTS.

Photo by Gabriel Padilha © 2011.

Poetry reading at IAIA on April 14, 2011.  So much fun visiting with Native writing students and friends. Mahdo.