May 1, 2017 - Django Reinhardt-style jazz. His music will be part of Waywords and Meansigns, an online audiobook (with m
Krakatoa Picnic by James Heflin Hedgerow Books Publication date: May 1, 2017
[email protected]
About Krakatoa Picnic “The unlikeliest thing keeps on happening so often you think it's normal.” So states a line from the title poem of James Heflin’s original, searching, and wide-reaching debut volume, which dives right into the zeitgeist and tinkers with abandon. From a man who fashions a telescope only to look through the lens and see himself at an earlier time, to an unknown rider who dumps the bones of St. Thomas Aquinas into the Rhone; from a person who finds a tiny snake with jeweled eyelids under his tongue, to a night walk through a village of accordionists, Heflin’s world is bizarre yet recognizably our own, with dark and humorous underpinnings – one step in a kitchen puddle, one step ahead of apocalypse. Paul Mariani, noted poet and biographer of Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and others, called Krakatoa Picnic “as unsettling an inaugural book of poems as I've read in decades.” He continued, “Heflin demonstrates an uncanny sophistication in the web of language he has woven and what even the most scrutinized language can and cannot tell us about ourselves.” This is whimsy with meaningful intent, no more so than “Exit into Sunlight,” a standalone book within a book accompanied by scratchboard drawings by Texas artist Dan Darr, a twelve-step manual like no other, an occultist’s guide with imperatives like, “Carve a heart for yourself. This seems maudlin. But it is essential. We do not mean some metaphorical stand-in; we are not being fancy. We mean to encourage a degree of realism.” Heflin senses existence keenly, so that these poems, which constantly keep us off balance in a surreal dance, are never out of touch, never un-followable; they wring the heart with a truth that hovers on the horizon. Poet Thomas Lux:
What others have said:
“It is rare to read a book of poems and not a single one is directly autobiographical. To this I say: Yaaaay! Paradoxically, all poems are autobiographical: they reveal what the poets loves, fears, hates, has lost, etc. This is what a reader gets from James Heflin's powerful and highly original poems: a man with eyes wide open, in all his joy, all his despair. You read life, not about life, but life.” Poet Wyn Cooper: Welcome to the delightfully quirky world James Heflin has created in Krakatoa Picnic. These fablelike poems draw you in for an off-kilter look at human behavior and consciousness. It’s as if you’re
being given instructions for living in an alternate universe, one that’s by turns peculiar and recognizable, one that “has its own laws/ vis-à-vis everything else.”
About James Heflin James Heflin has received two Massachusetts Cultural Council artist grants for poetry, the Greenfield Poet's Seat prize, and the Amherst Live poetry prize. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Conduit, and other journals, and his fiction has appeared in Cafe Irreal, The Golden Key, and others. He holds an MA from Hollins University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was for some years the arts editor of The Valley Advocate, editor of Preview Massachusetts, and a features writer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette. He is a longtime musician, most recently performing Django Reinhardt-style jazz. His music will be part of Waywords and Meansigns, an online audiobook (with musical accompaniment) of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. He lives in Western Massachusetts. High-res press photos (in color and black-and-white) available here: http://www.jamesheflin.com/for-press/ For more info and links to online publications, visit www.jamesheflin.com. For interview and other requests, contact the author:
[email protected]
Press/media Interview, Greenfield Recorder http://www.jamesheflin.com/wp-content/uploads/greenfield_recorder_20130525_D02.pdf Onstage interview at Amherst Live https://youtu.be/YYQSL5kzTYY?t=558 Performance (by Matthew Duncan) of “All West,” winner of Amherst Live poetry prize https://youtu.be/YYQSL5kzTYY?t=146
Poems and interview exerpt about Poet's Seat award, Greenfield Recorder http://www.jamesheflin.com/wp-content/uploads/PoetsSeatRecorder2.pdf
James Heflin on the origins of the poem “Krakatoa Picnic” https://jmwwblog.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/origins-krakatoa-picnic-by-james-heflin/
Brief interview, Massachusetts Cultural Council's Artsake Blog http://bit.ly/2kAfb23
From Krakatoa Picnic The False Gods The false gods resent the true gods. Their intensity trebles when their rage is questioned: is it, too, false? Their victims never make it to autopsy. Their canoes sink. The lines with which they stake the planets just go ping and voila: asteroid. Rumor says the ground upon which they stand is not ground. It is the accretion of all their untruths, little dried-up falsehoods like brine shrimp and whoppers the size of a humpback. How do they stand there and ask anyone to believe them this time? How can they not see the true gods with all those miles of supplicants awaiting favor with the gusto that only certitude delivers? They reach out a hand to a straggler covered with dust and they smile. Their fingers creak open to offer a doll made of jawbone or a burnt squirrel with a bow tied 'round. They cannot understand that even if a box full of glowing truth got unveiled in the center of their shabby Olympus it would be, ipso facto, false, false, false.
Krakatoa Picnic The unlikeliest thing is the one that is happening now, as if it were likely all along, the thing that would happen because some brackish glop malingered,
and, struck by a zag of light, fizzed into a little frisson of being. That is why your eye slides to the side to take in the pixies of the periphery and why the sea comes scrabbling with its desperations and static. The galaxy whirls to avoid surprises and all those orbits remain noncommittal because, after all, that's the sun with its bubble and squeak and not a thing to take lightly any more than a picnic on Krakatoa. The unlikeliest thing keeps on happening so often you think it's normal to sit on the bed unclothed on a Saturday, voices humming from the speaker, and look through melted sand at the birds hopping in their glaze of worm. Parking Lots of Milwaukee Which is a place I've never visited but I feel as if I would know its parking lots better than anybody. As if I were born with a tattoo like a thousand square lakes from above delineating sans distraction the parking lots of Milwaukee. Imagine: parking badly is a crime punishable by fine. Imagine the parking lot at the airport, full— a holding pattern for the holding pattern. A Milwaukee mall walker mails a mill worker. Imagine a future of parking lots beside buildings long since crumbled. Nowhere to go. Just walk to the next parking lot, snap some pics, go home. No one closer than anyone else to the thing they’ve have come here to see; the handicapped spaces no more desirable than the ones where philanthropists park their palaces across two spaces to keep at bay the car doors of Milwaukee.
