Janaka Stucky

Last updated
Janaka Stucky
JStucky.jpg
Born(1978-03-23)23 March 1978
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation Poet
Website
janakastucky.com

Janaka Stucky (born March 23, 1978) is an American poet, performer, independent-press publisher, and impresario, based in Boston, Massachusetts. The founder of Black Ocean, an independent press, and publisher of its journal Handsome, he is also the author of three collections of his poetry: Your Name Is The Only Freedom (Brave Men Press, 2009), The World Will Deny It For You (Ahsahta Press, 2012), and The Truth Is We Are Perfect (Third Man Books, 2015). His articles have been published by The Huffington Post and The Poetry Foundation. In 2010, he was awarded the title Best Poet by The Boston Phoenix in its annual "Boston's Best" reader's poll.

Contents

Personal life

Janaka Stucky was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and spent much of his childhood in an ashram. He was originally named Jonathan, but "when he was eight months old, his parents' guru suggested they christen him Janaka", [1] after the ancient king of Mithila, a spiritual leader whose philosophy is chronicled in the Ashtavakra Gita and whose attainment of perfection is mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita (III,20,25). Stucky received a BFA degree from Emerson College, where he co-founded the street poetry collective The Guerilla Poets. [1] He received his MFA degree in Poetry from Vermont College in 2003.

From 2002 to 2009, he worked as an undertaker, which, he says, "influenced and informed my work a great deal. ... I came to understand the poem as a ritual, a funeral for the constant death of language." [2]

He is also interested in boxing. [3]

Writing and career

The Guerilla Poets

During his senior year at Emerson College, Stucky co-founded The Guerilla Poets, a group which gave spontaneous public poetry performances in non-traditional locations, such as streetcorners, malls, fast-food restaurants, and subways. The group appeared at the People's Poetry Gathering in New York City, where Stucky won a head-to-head haiku competition against established Vermont poet Marc Awodey, impressing Awodey so much that he published a selection of the group's poems, Speak These Words: A Guerilla Poets Anthology (2001), edited by Stucky. [4] The group subsequently toured in a van across the United States three times, at one point performing as many as thirty shows in twenty days and selling more than nine hundred copies of their book, a large number for a book of poems by unestablished poets. The Guerilla Poets disbanded in 2002. [1]

Black Cat Burlesque, Feast of Flesh, Black Ocean

In 2003, he co-founded the Boston-based horror-themed neo-burlesque troupe "Black Cat Burlesque", performing and emceeing under the name J. Cannibal and becoming known as the "King of Horror Burlesque". [3] As J. Cannibal, Stucky initiated what grew into a popular semi-annual horror-movie and entertainment night called J. Cannibal's Feast of Flesh. In 2010, for its tenth occurrence, he expanded it into a nine-day horror-film festival, Terrorthon. [5] As of October, 2014, however, he terminated the Feast of Flesh evenings to concentrate more on organizing poetry readings and other literary events.

In 2004, Stucky founded Black Ocean, [6] an independent press publishing mostly poetry, with staff in Boston, Chicago, and Detroit, which he continues to run. He is also the publisher of Handsome, the press's annual literary magazine. [7] Black Ocean has published books by Zachary Schomburg, Aase Berg, Brandon Shimoda, and Joshua Harmon, among others. For some time Black Ocean produced Black Cat Burlesque events and J. Cannibal's Feast of Flesh, [8] although as of 2014 it no longer does.

Stucky's poems have appeared in Cannibal, Denver Quarterly , Fence , Free Verse, No Tell Motel, North American Review , redivider, The Equalizer, and VOLT. [2] He wrote the introduction to Marc Awodey's 2008 collection of poems and artwork, Senryu & Nudes. [9] In November 2009, Brave Men Press published a chapbook of his poems entitled Your Name Is The Only Freedom. [10]

In April 2010, readers of the Boston Phoenix named Stucky "Best Poet" in the paper's annual Boston's Best poll. [11] He was a write-in candidate, competing against Sam Cornish, Robert Pinsky, Louise Gluck, Rosanna Warren, Margo Lockwood, and Frank Bidart. In November 2010, he contributed a literary postcard to the silent auction for Grub Street, Inc.'s "From The Desk Of" series. [12]

"How to Survive in the Age of Amazon"

In January 2012 on the web site of the Poetry Foundation, home of Poetry magazine, Stucky published an essay, "How to Survive in the Age of Amazon," directed at independent bookstores whose existence is threatened by massive online retailers. [13] The essay was reprinted by The Huffington Post [14] and widely discussed by literary blogs and bloggers such as Bound: A Blog About Books & Libraries, [15] Diana Dilworth, [16] and Austin Allen, who declared the essay's recommendations "The Stucky Plan." [17] Allen summarizes his sense of Stucky's essay:

Bravo to Janaka Stucky, whose new article in Poetry on struggling independent bookstores is both the most sensible and inspiring thing I've read on the subject. Stucky concedes what everyone in the industry knows, that a price war with Amazon is one small bookstores cannot win. Reasoning that these stores must therefore fight on different turf, he offers some concrete suggestions: establish a lively Web presence, feature expertly curated staff selections, and above all, host more events—that is, become a hub not just for reading material but for readings.

Following his own advice, Stucky himself has been hosting the monthly BASH poetry reading series since 2011 at the Brookline Booksmith, an independent bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts. [18] Poets reading in the series have included Joshua Harmon, Eileen Myles, and Stephanie Burt.

The World Will Deny It For You

In February 2012, Stucky's second chapbook, The World Will Deny It For You, was released. It was selected by Catherine Wagner to win the first Ahsahta Press chapbook contest. [19] Randolph Pfaff reviewed the book for apt, the literary journal of Aforementioned Productions:

There are reminders here of the imagery of Paul Celan and Mina Loy, certainly, but Stucky's consistency of thought creates a throughline of loss and reconciliation—and more than anything else, the vast space in between the two—that is all his own. The emotion here is raw as a fresh cut and Stucky's thoughtfulness and lucid diction give The World Will Deny It For You a resonance that is often absent from contemporary poetry. This book will force you to acknowledge the fluidity of stasis, the permanence of the in-between, and the realization that when our lives seem most ambiguous, we are perhaps, most clearly our true selves. [20]

In July 2014, Jack White's record label Third Man Records launched a spin off book-publishing arm called Third Man Books, whose first commercially available book, Language Lessons, Volume I, co-edited by Chet Weise and Ben Swank, contains poems by Stucky, along with works by many other contemporary writers. [21] In conjunction with the release of this book, Stucky and several other poets gave readings that year under the rubric "Language Lessons" at the Newport Folk Festival. [22] [23]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

Bliss Carman Canadian poet

William Bliss Carman was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada's poet laureate during his later years.

Thomas Lux American poet

Thomas Lux was an American poet who held the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne, Jr. Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology and ran Georgia Tech's "Poetry @ Tech" program. He was the author of fourteen books of poetry.

Kwame Dawes

Kwame Senu Neville Dawes is a Ghanaian poet, actor, editor, critic, musician, and former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. He is now Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine. New York-based Poets & Writers named Dawes as a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, which recognises writers who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community.

Brian Henry is an American poet, translator, editor, and literary critic.

William Corbett was an American poet, essayist, editor, educator, and publisher.

Noah Eli Gordon was an American poet, editor, and publisher.

Bill Knott (poet) American writer

William Kilborn Knott was an American poet.

Joan Larkin is an American poet and playwright. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion in the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. She is now in her fourth decade of teaching writing. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.

Douglas Blazek is a Polish-American poet and editor who published the literary chapbook Ole and was proprietor of the Open Skull Press.

Jan Beatty American poet

Jan Beatty is an American poet. She is a recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and the Creative Achievement Award in Literature.

Belladonna* Collaborative is a small press non-profit publisher and collaborative organization based in Brooklyn, New York City. It was founded in 1999 by Rachel Levitsky as a reading series at Bluestockings in New York, NY. The reading series quickly expanded to a matrix of readings, publications, and informal salons, featuring avant-garde feminist writing, with an emphasis on hybrid and language-focused writing. Currently, the press operates as a non-hierarchical collaborative, publishing books and hosting literary events with attention to diversity in its roster of authors and editorial board.

Paige Ackerson-Kiely was born in October 1975 in Biddeford, Maine. She is a modern poet and also works for the Poetry Journal Handsome. She currently lives in Peekskill, New York.

Dan Beachy-Quick is an American poet, writer, and critic. He is the author of seven collections of poems, most recently, Variations on Dawn and Dusk, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Awards, and other books including A Whaler’s Dictionary, a collection of essays about Moby Dick. His honors include a Lannan Foundation Residency and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Elizabeth Robinson is an American poet and professor, author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently Counterpart, "Three Novels" "Also Known A,", and The Orphan and Its Relations. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, the Denver Quarterly, Poetry Salzburg Review, and New American Writing. Her poems have been anthologized in "American Hybrid", "The Best of Fence", and Postmodern American Poetry With Avery Burns, Joseph Noble, Rusty Morrison, and Brian Strang, she co-edited 26 magazine. Starting in 2012, Robinson began editing a new literary periodical, Pallaksch. Pallaksch, with Steven Seidenberg. For 12 years, Robinson co-edited, with Colleen Lookingbill, the EtherDome Chapbook series which published chapbooks by emerging women poets. She co-edits Instance Press with Beth Anderson and Laura Sims. She graduated from Bard College, Brown University, and Pacific School of Religion. She moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado where she taught at the University of Colorado and at Naropa University. She has also taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has twice served as the Hugo Fellow at the University of Montana.

Rane Arroyo American poet, playwright, and scholar

Ramón Arroyo was an American playwright, poet and scholar of Puerto Rican descent who wrote numerous books and received many literary awards. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo in Ohio. His work deals extensively with issues of immigration, Latino culture, and homosexuality. Arroyo was openly gay and frequently wrote self-reflexive, autobiographical texts. He was the long-term partner of the American poet Glenn Sheldon.

Michael Meyerhofer is a contemporary poet and fiction writer. He was born in Iowa in 1977, received his Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Iowa in 2000, and his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2006. He currently teaches as a Visiting Professor at DeVry University in Fresno, California Retrieved on December 18, 2014.

Janet Holmes is an American poet and professor. She was the director of Ahsahta Press. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The ms of m y kin. Her poems were published in literary journals including American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, Carolina Quarterly, Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, MiPoesias, Nimrod, Pleiades, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 1994 and The Best American Poetry 1995. Her honors include the Minnesota Book Award and fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She earned her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. She taught at Boise State University.

Jadene Felina (Acciavatti) Stevens (1947–2013) was an American poet.

Maureen Seaton is an American LGBTQ poet, activist, and professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Miami. She is the author of fourteen solo books of poetry, thirteen co-authored books of poetry, and her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls. Throughout her writing career, Seaton has often collaborated with fellow poets Denise Duhamel, Neil de la Flor, Kristine Snodgrass, and Samuel Ace.

Samuel James Cornish was Boston’s first poet laureate. He was associated with the Black Arts Movement. He taught at Emerson College.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Camille Dodero (2005). "Dead Poet Society: Janaka Stucky Always Seems To Find A Way To Get Next To Death". Archived from the original on 2011-09-25. Retrieved 2011-03-20.
  2. 1 2 Sophie Buonomo (2010). "Clarion 14: an interview by Sophie Buonomo with Janaka Stucky" . Retrieved 2011-03-21.
  3. 1 2 Kate Silverstein (2011). "Sig Amet: Janaka Stucky at Lorem Ipsum". Archived from the original on 2011-07-24. Retrieved 2011-03-22.
  4. ↑ Stucky, Janaka (July 2001). Amazon listing. ISBN   1930149085.
  5. ↑ Jeffrey Sullivan (September 23, 2010). "Terrorthon opens this week in Somerville" . Retrieved 2011-03-23.
  6. ↑ Janaka Stucky. "Maverick Magazine". Archived from the original on 2010-12-27. Retrieved 2011-03-21.
  7. ↑ "Black Ocean staff page" . Retrieved 2011-03-20.
  8. ↑ "Black Ocean event posters". Archived from the original on 2011-04-15. Retrieved 2011-03-22.
  9. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2015-01-21. Retrieved 2015-01-20.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  10. ↑ Foley, Brian (November 7, 2009). "NOW AVAILABLE from BRAVE MEN PRESS - YOUR NAME IS THE ONLY FREEDOM by JANAKA STUCKY".
  11. ↑ The Boston Phoenix (2010). "Best Poet 2010" . Retrieved 2011-03-20.
  12. ↑ "A Taste Of Grub". 2010. Archived from the original on 2011-02-04. Retrieved 2011-03-22.
  13. ↑ Janaka Stucky (2012). "How to Survive in the Age of Amazon" . Retrieved 2015-01-16.
  14. ↑ "How To Compete With Amazon". HuffPost. January 14, 2012.
  15. ↑ "Bound:: Saving Indie Bookstores in the Age of Amazon". January 16, 2012.
  16. ↑ "How Poetry Readers Can Help Indie Bookstores". www.adweek.com.
  17. ↑ ""Humanity Over Technology": The Stucky Plan to Save Bookstores". Big Think. January 12, 2012.
  18. ↑ "Archived copy". www.brooklinebooksmith-shop.com. Archived from the original on 26 June 2013. Retrieved 14 January 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  19. ↑ "Janaka Stucky . The World Will Deny It For You . Ahsahta Press". 2012. Archived from the original on 2012-09-24. Retrieved 2012-06-29.
  20. ↑ "Review: Janaka Stucky's The World Will Deny It For You". apt - a literary magazine. March 22, 2012.
  21. ↑ "THIRD MAN RECORDS ANNOUNCES FIRST BOOK, LANGUAGE LESSONS: VOLUME 1 and PUBLISHING WING, THIRD MAN BOOKS". www.thirdmanrecords.com.
  22. ↑ Blistein, Jon (July 22, 2014). "Jack White's Third Man Records Starts Publishing Wing". Rolling Stone .
  23. ↑ "Singular sensations at Newport Folk Festival". The Boston Globe.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.