'What Next, Old Knife?' Axelrod Releases New Poems | La Grande Life

La Grande has a rich literary community and among this community is a?literature and creative writing professor at Eastern Oregon University whose work reaches beyond our Grande Valley.

David Axelrod has published five collections of poems,?The Jerusalem ?of Grass?(Ahsahta), two limited-editions of long poems,?The Kingdom at Hand?and?The ?Chronicles of the Withering State?(ice river),?Departing by a Broken Gate?(Wordcraft of Oregon), and?The Cartographer?s Melancholy?(Eastern ?Washington ?University ?Press), which ?won ?the Spokane Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon ?Book Award.

Axelrod?s most recent work is being released through Lost Horse Press,?What Next, Old Knife? will enjoy a local reading and wine at?Bella?s in downtown La Grande on Thursday evening April 5 at?5:30

About the Collection of Poems

Ranging across a diverse contemporary society of night school courses and displaced ?adult learners,? concrete apartment blocks full of exiles and poor economic migrants, to the Iraq War, Germany of the 1930s, Vilna of the 1920s, and medieval Girona,?What Next, Old Knife??is a sobering encounter with class, culture, and history?personal and otherwise. Throughout this new collection of poems, David Axelrod struggles with how we learn and unlearn our humanity, imagining the ways in which individuals and whole societies live with and recover from moral catastrophe. The collection ends with a long choral poem, a visionary dialogue between the living and the dead who insist that language can resist nihilism, reclaim hope, and enact future accord.

?David Axelrod?s work is deeply informed by history, religion, and culture, but it never loses the music and magic of true poetry.What Next, Old Knife??has an Old World depth and elegance, but also a fresh currency that is wry, often ironic and vividly surprising in the way it discovers new territory. Learned and lyrical, sensuous and cerebral, speaking as sharply, usefully and dangerously as a trusted knife, this is a great book of poetry.?

?Henry Hughes, author of?Moisture Meridian

[Axelrod?s poems are] a moving journey into a landscape where we are all pilgrims making our way down dark roads in search of some transcendent moment that may never occur, yet the will to keep traveling impels us ever?forward until we reach a kind of solace and release.

?Ai, author of?Dread

Q&A With the Author

Q: What was the impetus behind this collection of work?

My wife, Jodi Varon, and I spent the autumn of 2005 through the spring?of 2006 living in a concrete apartment block near an old Nazi army?base. Our neighbors were mostly economic immigrants from Asia, Asia?Minor, and the former Soviet Block. Mostly they were people who seemed?a little lost, as were we: disconnected from our homes and families,?living in the no man?s land between our native languages and the?language of our host nation. It was awkward and lonely there.

I?d gone there expecting to write another book. I wrote that book, a?novel, but I wasn?t much impressed with it. I spent months grinding?away at it. The pages kept growing in number, but nothing genuine ever?came into being. Simultaneously, the work that became WHAT NEXT, OLD?KNIFE? started forcing itself on me. I was a bit reluctant at first to?listen because I had something else to do after all, another purpose?altogether. But the extremity of living in that place between?languages brought something new to my own writing, and I frankly found?it exciting: the work became a fantasy about immigration, economic?marginalization, the ghosts of history, the desperate effort to try to?hold on to one?s identity in a world where one is identified as an??other.?

Q: How do you intend your audience to perceive the piece / collection

Everywhere around us everyday there are people going through what I?describe in WHAT NEXT, OLD KNIFE? We live in the era of the refugee.?There is no reason to believe this is going to change. Mass movements?of human beings from inhabitable to habitable places is inevitable.?And it could be anyone or all of us this happens to. A little?compassion for those who are already in that circumstance would go a?long way toward making life on earth more bearable for everyone.

Q: Where can someone get a copy?

Buy it at Bella?s!

Local bookstores, too, should be able to order it from their?distributors. You can also go to the Lost Horse Press website or the?University of Washington Press website and order it. UW is the?distributor for Lost Horse.

My publisher and I agreed NOT to sell the book through Amazon because?Amazon sucks all the profits away from small publishers by offering?huge discounts even before a book is published. In other countries,?for example Germany and I think the EU generally, there are laws?limiting Amazon?s ability to discount when a book is published, so?that publishers can make back their investment and independent?booksellers have a chance to make a buck too. That is an example of?how government can help make capitalism work for the many, rather than?just the few with the most wealth and power.

Small businesses like Bella?s, like Looking Glass Books and Sunflower?are the backbone of a healthy local economy. My publisher and I would?like to encourage that too.

Q: Is there a local reading / release?

Yes, at Bella?s in downtown La Grande on Thursday evening April 5 at?5:30. I?ll do another event in La Grande with a fellow writer, Carlos?Reyes, on Wednesday October 17. The Bella?s event though will feature?a wine tasting?

I?ll also be doing quite a number of other readings in Oregon,?Washington, Idaho and Montana in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Q: What was trying to be said with the video piece ? and how does it relate to this collection of work?

Making the trailer for WHAT NEXT, OLD KNIFE? (see trailer below) was an idea that just popped into my head in its entirety. I?thought I could replicate the entire arc of the book?s moral universe?in a few minutes based on what I?d already written and some of the?source materials for what I?d written.

That turned out not to be quite right, as Chris Jennings and I had to?make severe edits to make it more focused and compelling, but the?trailer really does get at the dilemma I?m trying to portray in this?book. That would be the ways in which human societies are seduced into?losing their humanity, into losing respect for or understanding of?others, and behaving in violent and ruinous ways.

I?m thinking of the debacle in Iraq. But I?m also thinking of history,?particularly the history of the middle of the 20th century, and even?moments in Medieval history, too, such as in el Call in Girona, Spain,?or the old town of Vilnius, Lithuania where my own family originated.?The real question for me is: after a moral catastrophe, how do we go?on, how do we re-learn our humanity, how do we become people again?

The last sections of WHAT NEXT, OLD KNIFE? address that very question,?from a number of different angles. I won?t say I have an answer?exactly, but suffice to say that the living and the dead must strike?an accord between them to enact a future worth living. It?s our?ultimate responsibility: to assure the possibility of a future?predicated on courage, not carnage, on joy, not despair. It?s really?our only hope.

The Book Trailer: Video

Source: http://www.lagrandelife.com/what-next-old-knife-axelrod-releases-new-poems/

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