Happy Summer, friends!

In addition to continuing work on my most recent manuscript, which is totally out of my control, it seems—and lovingly so—it has also been a time of solicitations and collaborations lately. Last year, I was solicited for a poem on Detroit music for the forthcoming anthology on Michigan State University Press entitled I Just Wanna Testify: Poems About Detroit Music. In thinking about all things Detroit music, my glance and heart turned to my late friend Blair, who to me was music and poetry blended and personified. The poem is entitled “Memorial in Open Air,” and it celebrates Blair’s life as poet, as musician, as a great-hearted man. That anthology will be published this Fall, 2018.

Following that solicitation, this winter I received an exciting invitation from my friend David Sullivan out in Santa Cruz, CA, to compose a poem on either Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Brueghel the Elder, for an anthology of poems in response to the art of Bosch and Brueghel. I chose to focus on the middle panel of Bosch’s terrifically terrifying triptych “Death and the Miser.” My poem, which became titled “The Owner at Closing Time,” is rather irreverent and absurd and I really hope Bosch would approve. As soon as that anthology is due to be published, I’ll let you know.

Also, this spring, I received an invitation from the wonderful composer and musician David Biedenbender to compose a piece for him to set music to, which you can read about more at length right here.

It is a thrill  to be asked for poems, and to come together with other artists!

I have a couple readings upcoming this summer, and am gathering testimonials and preparing pre-publication materials for my forthcoming collection, Severance, due out from Salmon Poetry in Ireland in Spring, 2019! Stay tuned…

Happy summer days, all.

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Published by Robert Fanning, poet

River Fanning (aka Robert) is the author of six books of poetry, including four full-length collections: Severance (Salmon Press, 2019), Our Sudden Museum (Salmon Press, 2017), American Prophet (Marick Press, 2009), and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006) as well as two chapbooks: Sheet Music (Three Bee Press, 2015) and Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press Poetry Award 2003). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Waxwing, Thrush, The Atlanta Review, and other journals. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College, he is a Professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University.