The Orphanage

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The Orphanage

Author: William Heyen
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9788182539389
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
Pub. Date: 2022
Price: $60

There we were, sitting outdoors at a beach bar on the sands of Honolulu in 2022 when my friend the American poet William Heyen mentioned to me, as a shapely waitress passed by, that his wife of 58 years, Hannelore?I’ve not met her?had been his “lei against time” since he was eighteen. In fact, he said, he’d written over the years, haphazardly, a whole “broken suite” of muse poems, all rendered in 13 syllables, or, if more than one of Doc Williams’ wheelbarrow-shaped stanzas, then those stanzas, too, were 13 syllables (unless the poem’s thematic concerns suggested something lesser ((say 12)) or more ((say 14)) within itself). (I haven’t counted?kindly let me know if you ever do--but perhaps a tenth of the poems are two or more stanzas here?) In fact, he said, that over almost two decades as other of his books were coming into being, he’d written thousands of these “scherzi,” as his Ohio University graduate school professor and friend Jack Matthews had called them?one poem being a “scherzo.” In fact, he said, he doubted he’d ever get to publish the vast bulk of these scherzi?perhaps a couple dozen had appeared here & there?he mentioned Dean Keller’s Costmary Press in Ohio which Keller, due to old age, has now discontinued…. The waitress passed by again. It crossed my mind that she was my muse. My mind filled with parrots & morays as Heyen recalled how this “inane” (or did he say “insane”?) accumulation of Ezra-Pound-like “gists and piths” had begun for him.

Author BIO

William Heyen
	William Heyen is Professor of English/Poet in Residence Emeritus at the College at Brockport, his undergraduate alma mater. He received his Ph.D from Ohio University, & an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from SUNY. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has received NEA, Guggenheim, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart & other awards. His work has appeared in hundreds of anthologies, & in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper's, The Atlantic, The Southern Review, & numerous other magazines. He was the first Poet in Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace on Long Island, & has lectured at Walt's Camden home. Heyen is the editor or author of more than thirty books including Noise in the Trees, an American Library Association Notable Book for 1975; Crazy Horse in Stillness, winner of 1997's Small Press Book Award for Poetry; Shoah Train: Poems, a Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award; A Poetics of Hiroshima, a Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle selection for 2010. Three new books of poetry (Straight's Suite for Craig Cotter & Frank O'Hara, The Football Corporations, & Hiroshima Suite) & the first four volumes of his massive journal (The Cabin, Hannelore, Poker & Poets, and Too Many Angels), appeared 2013-2017 as did Crazy Horse & the Custers which includes 35 paintings in response to his poems by DeLoss McGraw. Etruscan Press published The Candle, a volume of 45 years of his holocaust poetry, in 2016. The Candle was a 2017 CLSC selection. H_NGM_N Books will publish the fifth of his journal volumes, The Presence I'll Be, in 2020, when MAMMOTH Books will publish a new collection of poems, Vehicles.