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A slow producer of verse, Joe nevertheless has TWO new retrospective collections that came out in September. There's In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New & Selected Poems 1955-2007 from Johns Hopkins University Press, a paperback (also a jacketless hardcover, higher priced, meant for libraries), which has the best poems he's written, plus 27 new ones, some of them pretty good too. This collection has been cited as a 2008 Notable Book by the American Library Association (it's one of two poetry titles that made it---the other is by Laure-Anne Bosselaar). And from BOA Editions, Peeping Tom's Cabin: Comic Verse 1928-2008, in both hard and paper covers. Those dates there are a bit inclusive: Joe was born in 1929, but is going by the ancient Chinese system of dating a baby one year old at birth. And he has sworn not to print any more comic verse until 2009. This book collects the cream of his light or comic verse written for adults (not children) over a lifetime, and includes parodies, limericks, clerihews, previously unpublished "brat" poems, a section called "Tawdry Bawdry," and much besides. For a few mild samples, please see the New Poems for Big People page on this site.
Pegasus Descending: A Book of the Best Bad Verse, the legendary anthology of truly awful poetry compiled by James Camp, X. J. Kennedy, and Keith Waldrop, is back in print at last. After hearing some of its contents, James Wright exclaimed, "Nothing mediocre!" For details, please click on Poetry Books for Adults.
The latest children's book from Dorothy and Joe is a selection of poems by the late great Vermont poet James Hayford. It's Knee-Deep in Blazing Snow: Growing Up in Vermont (Wordsong / Boyds Mills Press), with splendid woodcut-style pictures by Michael McCurdy. For more about it, please click on Kids' Books Available. A stunningly good-looking book; adults report enjoying it too.
The first full-length study of Joe's work is Taking Measure: The Poetry and Prose of X. J. Kennedy, by Bernard E. Morris of Modesto College (Susquehana University Press, 2003; 280 pages, hardcover, $49.50). Professor Morris, who has been working on this book for ten years, provides a critical survey not only of the adult poetry but of the poetry and novels for children. He appends a full bibliography of Joe's writing and an extensive chronology. Order from Amazon.com, BN.com, or other booksellers, or from Associated University presses, phone 609-655-4770.
You can read twelve earlier XJK poems on Caleb Murdock's poetry website www.PoemTree.com/kennedy.htm. This is an excellent site for finding poetry, a wide selection of work by classic poets and moderns.
Carol Wood, composer and Celtic harpist, has set to music all twenty of the short poems in Joe's The Beasts of Bethlehem. Epona Records of Lake Charles, Louisiana, has issued the CD, called The Beasts of Bethlehem, with Carol on the harp, three other singers, other musicians on bassoon, recorder, percussion---and legendary Louisiana jazz man Rick Condit on the Irish whistle! For good measure, the recording also has songs made from poems by Thomas Hardy and Kenneth Graham, and some medieval and traditional carols. The audio is high quality, the packaging handsome. This CD can be ordered from Amazon.com, CDworld, CDNOW, and other suppliers. To hear samples, please go to www.carol.woodpage.com.
The annual X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, which carries with it a cash prize and book publication, has now been handed out nine times by Texas Review Press: in 1998 to Gray Jacobik for The Surface of Last Scattering, in 1999 to Philip Heldrick for Good Friday, in 2000 to Barbara Lau for The Long Surprise, in 2001 to Jorn Ake for Asleep in the Lightning Fields, in 2002 to Jan Lee Ande for Reliquary, in 2003 to Eric Nelson for Terrestrials, in 2004 to Lee Rudolph for A Woman and a Man, Ice-Fishing, in 2005 to Deborah Bogen for Landscape with Silos, and in 2006 to Becky Gould Gibson for Aphrodite's Daugher. (Books appear a year later than the date of the contest win.) There's another contest now open, with a July 2008 deadline. Poets interested are advised that they'll run into less competetion than in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Details can be had from the Texas Review Press website, www.shsu.edu/~www_trp, or by writing to The Texas Review Press, English Department, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77341-2146, including a stamped self-addressed envelope. XJK has judged the first three contests; since then, the judges have included Henry Taylor, Louis Simpson, Maxine Kumin, John Hollander, and Betty Adcock.
You can see and hear Joe singing "In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day," and reading "For Allen Ginsberg" and other poems on the CD-ROM disk that now accompanies Literature, Interactive Edition. For details, please click on College Textbooks Available.
Have you checked out Contemporary Poetry Review, that lively on-line mag of poetry criticism? You can read it at www.cprw.com. It lately named In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus as first runner-up Book of the Year (after W. H. Auden's). Editor Ernest Hilbert plans a spring number with an interview and several discussions of Joe's stuff.
Another site worth ogling is Dee Rimbaud's Independent Press Guide, which offers more photographs of writers' and poets' mugs than you can shake a stick at. The web address is http://www.thunderburst.co.uk.
An extraordinary writer whose work has slipped out of print is George Fox (1930-2000). In 1971 he published Without Music, a novel both grim and hilarious, about expatriate Americans in Majorca, a psychopathic killer, and a tweedy English nymphomaniac. For a living, Fox also wrote best-selling thrillers and the disaster movie Earthquake. He and Joe were friends since they were teen-age science fiction fans. Joe has just edited a selection of Fox's best fiction: the novel and two darkly comic stories first published in Esquire and Paris Review. Anyone interested in poets' private lives will get a kick out of "Kessler, the Inside Man," a quite wonderful yarn about a desperate poet who joins a plot to rob a Riviera casino, with unexpected results. The new collection, Inside Man: A Novel & Two Stories by George Fox, has an afterword in which Joe remembers Fox and offers an appreciation. For more information on the book and for a sample--the opening chapter of the novel--see www.xlibris.com/InsideMan.html and www.xlibris.com/GeorgeFox(editedbyXJKennedy).html Order the book from any bookseller or from the publisher, Xlibris (Xlibris.com or phone 888-795-4274 extension 276). $18.69 in paperback, $28.79 hardcover--a discount price when ordered directly from the publisher. Here's a money-back guarantee. If you don't enjoy Fox's work and don't agree that it deserves rediscovery, mail your copy of Inside Man to 22 Revere St., Lexington MA 02420 and your money will be cheerfully refunded.
Some scheduled XJK appearances:
June 21: Reading at Brockton (Mass.) Public Library. 2 p.m. Book signing.
July 17-18: Books for Young Readers Conference, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. A talk, four informal question-and-answer sessions, two book signings. With Dorothy M. Kennedy.
October 5: Reading with two other poets (to be named) at Katonah (New York) Village Library, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Katonah Poetry Reading Series. Billy Collins, moderator.
February 19, 2009: A talk "What Donne Taught Me" at the conference of the John Donne Society, Cook Conference Center, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA. Paul G. Stanwood will be moderator.
March 26, 2009: Reading at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO.
May 30-31, 2009: Poet in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, West Hills, Long Island, NY. A reading, a workshop, a talk to student poets.
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