Last Year at Marienbad & Poetry Notes

I found out last night that the Criterion Collection will finally release Alain Resnais' brilliant Last Year at Marienbad on DVD in 2009. Resnais is probably best known for Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Night and Fog, but Last Year at Marienbad is one of those French New Wave films that has inspired countless imitations. It's also one of those movies that you absolutely love or absolutely hate. The plot is "simple" in a way: A man meets a beautiful woman at a luxurious hotel in Marienbad, Czech Republic and falls in love with her. She is engaged to another, but agrees to meet him again a year later. The man returns and finds her, but she has no memory of ever having met him. The rest of the film plays out this premise from various viewpoints with sparse dialogue and voiceovers, discordant music and long camera shots of the labyrinthine hotel and its grounds. The famous scene from the film is a long shot from the hotel balcony overlooking the garden where all the trees have been cut into geometric topiary. People strolling on the lawn are frozen, casting long shadows in the late afternoon sun, but nothing else around them does. David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick and Peter Greenaway were all influenced by Marienbad, and you know how elliptical their films can be, so be prepared if you decide to buy or rent it. The New York Times did a great article on Marienbad earlier this year when it reopened at Film Forum.

I'm happy to be involved with setting up and hosting some fantastic poetry readings in early 2009 at Wordsmiths Books in conjunction with Poetry Atlanta. First up, the "infamous" Stacey Lynn Brown, Chad Prevost and Karen Head will all be reading together on Jan. 17. On Jan. 24, Cherryl Floyd-Miller returns to the ATL to sign her newly released collection from Salt Publishing, Exquisite Heats. And on March 21, I am thrilled to host Paul Guest and Megan Volpert. All the readings are on Saturday afternoons at 2 p.m. Mark your calendars, kids! 

KORA is the name of a new online and print literary magazine set to debut in early 2009. Here's what editor Zachary Bush is looking for: well-crafted non-rhyming/anti-formalist work that follows the traditions of prose poetry, well-controlled free verse, 1-2 lined poems, loose syllabic, magical realism, imagism, surrealism, futurism, confessional, etc. As far as Prose is concerned, KORA favors flash fiction, essays (personal/ authors/artists/lit. & art movements), book reviews, developed criticism, and literary hybrids. You can read more and find submission guidelines at www.korajournal.blogspot.com. 

UPDATE: I erroneously had the date for Cherryl Floyd-Miller's reading as Jan. 22...it's actually Saturday, Jan. 24. She will also be featuring at Java Monkey Speaks on Jan. 25.