Kirjahaku

In the first volume to collect the paintings and drawings of Clarence Major, readers are offered six decades of unique, colorful, and compelling canvases and works on paper-works of singular beauty and social relevance. These works represent Major's personal painterly journey of passionate commitment to art. This generous selection of more than 150 paintings and drawings shows us the melding of rich ideas and fertile images, the braiding of imagination and motif. With their pleasing arrangement of elements, the works come vividly to life. Major often juxtaposes a decorative scheme with his own unique choice of color combinations, reinforced with rigorous brushstrokes that release chromatic energy. The paintings complement and challenge the great traditions of Realism, Impressionism, and Expressionism. Major is primarily a figurative and landscape painter. Here we find landscapes of singular vitality, rich in color and design, dramatic landscapes, and cityscapes representing, among other things, Major's extensive travels in America and Europe. We are also treated to Major's signature figurative work. In these paintings, he ventures fearlessly into familiar yet unexpected areas of richness. Also included is an introductory essay, ""The Education of a Painter,"" written by the artist, which further sheds light on and helps to lay a biographical, social, and historical foundation for this essential volume, reflecting a lifetime of serious commitment to painting at its best.

A pulsating, powerful tale of the blues, from one of the great American writers of the twentieth centuryIt is Chicago in the 1950s and Manfred Banks has the Dirty Bird Blues. A musician and a blue-collar worker, he feels hard the tug of his two responsibilities: those to his wife and child, and those to rhythm and rhyme, to the lyrics that groove a hollow in his mind. Beneath both is the awful grinding racism Manfred meets on streets each day; that which plucks opportunity from his grasp; that which keeps him wandering in search of fresh starts. And so, in want of easy answers, he turns to the 'Dirty Bird': Old Crow brand whiskey.One of Clarence Major's most influential novels, Dirty Bird Blues is both an extraordinary portrayal of twentieth-century Black reality, and an ode to the richness and power of the blues.

In Myself Painting Clarence Major seeks to re-create for readers the inexpressible feeling that comes from creating art, with poems that speak not of painting itself but of its underlying process. Major incorporates the techniques of painting- particularly that of Post-Expressionism- into his verse, describing scenery with an artist's eye and using form and color to evoke striking images: ""Desire, artichoke green . . . leaves all radiant, / creating the thickness of blue shadows."" A master of highly structured free verse, Major also paints sounds, enthralling the reader in a realm of private symbols and dream visions. Using dynamic, surreal images, this original collection invites readers into the poet's own fascinating world.

In Myself Painting Clarence Major seeks to re-create for readers the inexpressible feeling that comes from creating art, with poems that speak not of painting itself but of its underlying process. Major incorporates the techniques of painting- particularly that of Post-Expressionism- into his verse, describing scenery with an artist's eye and using form and color to evoke striking images: ""Desire, artichoke green . . . leaves all radiant, / creating the thickness of blue shadows."" A master of highly structured free verse, Major also paints sounds, enthralling the reader in a realm of private symbols and dream visions. Using dynamic, surreal images, this original collection invites readers into the poet's own fascinating world.

Beginning and ending in Clarence Major's atelier, My Studio demonstrates how art can influence our perception of the world, prompting ""all the parts [to] coalesce into a cohesive whole."" With precise and engaging imagery, Major contemplates the spaces we occupy and the ""beauty in everyday things"" from the familiarity of his studio. ""This is more than a room,"" he observes. ""It's an unimpeded mental vista.""Major harnesses both humor and seriousness to investigate a wide range of human experiences. In A Tragedy Indisputable, he considers the funeral of a young boy, and the bewilderment and confusion of the crowd, whose ""allegiance to logic and reason [is] now in perpetual sway."" In another poem, he paints the picture of a serene day interrupted by ""the hammer's sympathy for the nail, the chatter of ghosts in the bedroom."" In rethinking the relationship between poetry and the world of visual art, Major crafts an intricate and insightful collection, full of passion and inventive language, in which everyday life becomes an opportunity for inward reflection.

Deeply felt and brimming with humor and philosophical inquiry, Sporadic Troubleshooting, the latest volume from Clarence Major, both acknowledges poetic literary tradition and explores exciting new territories in language. Throughout, Major uses an improvisational technique, applying it to well-known mythological stories to enhance narrative and lyrical intensity. Breathtakingly vivid, these poems are testaments to universal subjects such as love, charity, nature, fear, survival, loyalty, justice, and beauty. Major's poems offer vigorous inquiries into life and art with a view toward renewal and transformation.

Thunderclouds in the Forecast traverses the linked histories of two friends—one Black, the other white—who grew up wards of the state in New York. It’s April 1976 and Ray is taking Amtrak to San Francisco to reconnect with Scotty, his oldest friend, who he met in a shelter for abandoned children. While Ray has embraced the stable tedium of steady employment, Scotty’s life has been erratic, a trail of short-lived affairs and dead-end jobs. Maybe Ray, who’s just won the lottery, is finally in a position to help him. When Ray’s train is delayed in Lorena, a Gold Rush outpost turned college town, he meets Alice. Together they embark on a romance that tempts him to stay. By the time Ray arrives in San Francisco, Scotty has abandoned his bartending job, his rented room, and his scant belonging and skipped town with a married woman from Lorena. Now Ray has more than one reason to return. A preeminent American writer who thrives on reinvention, Clarence Major returns with an unforgettable exploration of life on the brink of sweeping change. With spare prose and subtle poignancy, Thunderclouds in the Forecast probes love, loyalty, and belonging. As Toni Morrison wrote, “Clarence Major has a remarkable mind and the talent to match.”

In Down and Up, Clarence Major makes use of American and European public places, their character and voice, to construct poems that explore the physical world juxtaposed sharply with the inner world. Sometimes realistic, sometimes dreamlike, these poems are dynamic, universal in theme, and acknowledge a debt to the great tradition of modern American poetry. Clear eyed and painterly, they explore wherever Major’s fancy takes him. His distinctive voice and compelling spatial and visual approach offer a connection between everyday human occurrences and the physical space they surround.

Clarence Major is a consummate artist whose work in poetry, fiction, and painting has been widely recognized. He has been part of twenty-eight group exhibitions, has had fifteen one-man shows, and has published fourteen collections of poetry and nine works of fiction. Major’s works—and this collection in particular—are distinguished by his poetic sociability and his unblinking but generous and affectionate portraiture.In From Now On, a retrospective of poems from the 1950s to the present—including selections from each of Major’s previous books of poetry as well as a generous selection of new poems—Major creates a vivid gallery of nimbly drawn characters. Here he establishes a voice that is singular and musical, one that draws witty, moving, and empathetic portraits of African American urban and country dwellers. Ultimately, this collection maintains Major’s intimate, conversational poetry while simultaneously becoming more eclectic, multicultural, and cosmopolitan. Major’s poetry is affable, but it suggests an insistence that we can connect with history and social change through the dynamic lives of the people we encounter daily.

This novel, narrated by Baldy, a Navajo/Hopi guitar player, tells the story of Zuni folk singer Painted Turtle, from her childhood experiences on the reservation to her performances in cantinas in the Southwest. First published in 1988 and long out of print, this work from Clarence Major follows Painted Turtle as she seeks to assuage the spiritual sicknesses that have shaped her uneasy relationships with family, friends, and her tribe.

This, Clarance Major's fourth novel, is about people in a town in Connecticut that has just passed a law requiring all men to carry all women across all thresholds at all times. Even before publication the book gained critical attention.

A book-length poem by an African-American author that uses the city of Venice as its backdrop, considering issues of racial and national identity. By the author of My Amputations.

Having written more than eight novels, including My Amputations and Dirty Bird Blues, alongside a dozen books of poetry, Chicago Heat and Other Stories is Clarence Major's second work of short fiction and first book with Green Writers Press.Chicago Heat and Other Stories employs a gorgeous purity and simplicity of language in a series of masterful stories exploring human interaction. Each narrative voice comes forward all at once, individual and complete, without obstacle or complication, enabling the reader to see the characters and feel their emotions. Major does not shy away from the bitter or the harsh; we get to hear it all. Like paint on an easel he blends lyric harmony with moxie and the blunt with the beautiful. The imagery is completely accessible and generously given. Toni Morrison comes to mind. His work is like jewels.

Finalist for the National Book Award Drawing his most outstanding work from nine previous volumes of award-winning poetry, Clarence Major had added a substantial body of new work to present a clear assessment of his forty-year career. By turns humorous and serious, Major is always richly lyrical while remaining precise in his observations. Line by line, his poems insist upon their own integrity, driven on by music as equally inspired by blues and jazz as it is by the Cantos of Ezra Pound. Born in Atlanta and raised in Chicago, Clarence Major is the author of eight previous volumes of poetry, eight novels, including Dirty Bird Blues (originally published in HC by Mercury House), several collections of short stories and nonfiction, and editor of two acclaimed anthologies of African-American literature. He teaches at the University of California, Davis. Like the finest blues, Clarence Major is, by turns, hypnotic, exotic, and healthily erotic.--Al Young Clarence Major] writes poetry with the resistant, angular surface of tumbled brick. As if the poem had been literally smashed. An improvisational, jazz-like quality. Some tough, sharp observations.--Kirkus Reviews Passionate and] controlled lyricism. . . The prevailing tonality of the poetry is quiet, almost philosophical.--Library Journal

I find myself writing poems about things I can't paint, writes Clarence Major who, for 40 years, has been viewed by critics as a polymorphous writer who has been iconoclast, black esthetician, modernist, surrealist, postmodernist, and deconstructionist (World Literature Today).In Waiting for Sweet Betty, Major watches the world with careful longing to capture the exchanges and conflicts between person and place. Just as a painter juxtaposes colors and shapes, Major does the same with words, often writing as an outsider in foreign places. He shifts perspective away from the self, allowing words to play off one another subtly--with puns, inverted/subverted cliches, and sweet bop soundings--so that his vision might become anyone's. His subtle, conversational style, is at once humble, playful, humorous, and studied, and his stories can be seen as well as heard: I ride backwards to see what I'm missing.Big pines and big skies ride up and down and around, Up and down and around then for a straight stretch.A white pickup shooting along a white highway east with us.Note I'm trying to call home but cannot.Sky and brush and pine and salt-earth curving sharply, tilting away--from Train Window Going and ComingClarence Major is a master of everyday language and textual fine-tuning, showing an indebtedness to the Harlem Renaissance, to the Objectivists, and to Black Mountaineers.--Publishers WeeklyClarence Major was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry for Configurations: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon). He is the author of 10 books of poetry, nine novels, a short story collection, and several books of nonfiction. He is the subject of two recent books: Clarence Major and His Art (UNC Press) and Conversations with Clarence Major (Mississippi). Major teaches American literature at the University of California at Davis.

Originally published in 1986, this is a work of American fiction.

PEN / REGINALD LOCKETT LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN LITERATURE • PRIZE-WINNING NOVELIST, POET, AND PAINTER • GEORGIA WRITER’S HALL OF FAME "A world traveler's notebook of gentle, affable observations."—The New York Times Book Review • “A remarkable mind and the talent to match.”—Toni Morrison, Nobel-prize winning author • “A very powerful book!”—Cornelius Eady • “Radiant with attentiveness and loving compassion”—Rikki Ducornet • “A feast to be reckoned with.”—Allison Joseph • “A new book by Major is a literary event.”—John Beckman • “For forty-five years Major has been on the cutting edge of literature.”—Richard Price • “Major is an essential American writer.”—Steve Yarbrough Clarence Major’s Four Days in Algeria is a poetic feast of travel, taking us to Paris, Florence, Ghana, Algeria, and many other places. We also experience the seasons in fresh ways. Delicious food, too, is laid before us. There are quiet moments, as on a houseboat, where the poet is writing poetry. Major gives us adventurous encounters with ordinary life rendered through poems of dazzling agility and fearless bluntness. These are also poems of unfettered Augustan honesty. They radiate with lyrical purity. Allegorical and spontaneous, they are full of holiday energy as the poet passionately affirms life, whether as he travels or simply in quiet moments of reflection.

Mark Smith, is a sensitive thirty-seven-year-old environmental scientist of mixed race. He tries to come to terms with his mother's painful death as he goes through the stages of grief. Mark is also reassessing his relationship with his gay twin sister, Maria, a lawyer. After several failed relationships with women in college, Mark, while at his mother's funeral in Chicago, reconnects with his high school girlfriend, Christy, an artist who paints self-portraits. He now believes he has finally found true and lasting love, but the country's civil unrest and political division plague the opportunity at a second chance. Author Clarence Major has devised a powerful novel about the cumulative unease and random violence that grip American life and ask what we should do about it.

Bringing together critical essays, articles, and reviews by 1999 National Book Award for Poetry finalist, this landmark collection is an impressive look back--and forward--by one of our most visionary authors. From essays on the craft of writing, to critiques of contemporary and classic African-American authors and their work, to observations on the quirkiness of the writing and publishing life, Necessary Distance is a compendium of the best nonfiction prose by an important figure in contemporary American letters. This collection is a portrait of the artist's rise to prominence in American letters. "A writer is usually a person who has to learn how to keep his ego--like his virginity--and lose it at the same time. In other words, he becomes a kind of twin of himself. He remains that self-centered infant while transcending him to become the observer of his experience and, by extension, the observer of a wide range of experience within his cultural domain." From his apt observations on cultural doubleness, to his redefinition of a political poetry that is "organic in its ideas, . . . that in no way compromised its own artistic nature," to his consumate statement on the concept of rhythm in African -American poetry, Necessary Distance is a sweeping tour of new ground in literature and poetics. Clarence Major is the author of nine novels, nine books of poetry, and many nonfiction works and was a 1999 finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry for Configurations. Major teaches at the University of California in Davis. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Essence, and dozens of other periodicals.