Amy Ballard of Two Hawks Quarterly from Antioch University in Los Angeles notified me of the acceptance of “Accidents of the Holy Family.” This poem takes place at the perpetual construction site of Antonio Gaudi’s Temple Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and muses on the completion (or lack thereof) of an enormously complex (one might say “grandiose”) project sans architectural blueprints, and how fate, sometimes called “luck,” sometimes seen as divine intervention, inserts itself in the lives of families. I expect the issue of Two Hawks Quarterly with this poem in it to post online this coming spring.

The Telluride Institute has invited me to read as a Visiting Poet in its Bardic Trails Tour March 1, 2, and 3, 2016. This collaboration among the Talking Gourds program in Telluride, the Montrose Regional Library, and the Lithic Bookstore & Gallery in Fruta (near Grand Junction, Colorado), invites a local poet and a visiting poet to conduct the three-city reading tour.  Montrose poet Jean Bower was named as the local poet for this tour.  Previous poets in the series include Jared Smith, Samantha Tisdel Wright, and Judyth Hill. I am honored to be included in this project that has come to be through the efforts and generosity of Art Goodtimes, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Danny Rosen, Meg Nagel, Kyle Harvey, Audrey Marnoy, Peter Waldor, Elaine Fischer, Sean Murphy, and the Montrose Friends of the Library. I look forward to reading with Jean Bower and hope the weather gods of the Western slope of the Colorado Rockies provide us a window between blizzards for safe travel for us and our audience.

The Winter 2015-2016 issue of Gris-Gris is now available online. It includes two poems from Coltrane’s God, “A Night in Tunisia” and “Fiddle Fest Contestants.” The former concerns a visitation at a notable northern New Mexican bar, the latter is based on a photograph I have of my paternal grandfather, the fiddler. This issue of Gris-Gris displays a photo of the great blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who figures in two of the poems in Coltrane’s God.

IthacaLit has posted two poems online that accepted last year. The poems, “After Hours,” and “Talking to the Octopus,” appear in the Archives tab for Fall 2015. They are also included in Coltrane’s God.

Delighted to see Jennifer Levin’s article in the 12/11/15 Pasatiempo on Coltrane’s God and the book launch this coming Sunday at 5 at Teatro Paraguas.

Debbie DeRosa, editor of South 85 Review, nominated one of my two poems that appeared in the Summer 2015 issue, “Donations,” for the Best of the Net for this year.

The Wallapa Bay Artist Residency program accepted my application for a one-month residency in April, 2016. It is located on Long Beach Peninsula, southwestern Washington (state), along one of the continent’s richest estuaries.  I am honored and excited to be invited!

In the US mail I received a certificate from the National Federation of Press Women for Second Place in the 2015 Creative Verse — Book category competition for The Water Leveling with Us, along with a typescript of the unnamed judge’s comments.  The comments reveal a thorough reading of the book. The full text of the comments is below:

Water sinks to its lowest level; therefore, the title of Levering’s collection—by bringing water down to us—sets up readers for the text’s contemplation of the “big brained apes” we are, destroying ecosystems and moving toward planetary demise. Recalling our undeclared war on Viet Nam heightened by a president who “stokes fear in millions” and more recent reminders of costly warfare citing water boarding and drone pilots, Levering reserves his most stinging judgments for the decisions causing thawing permafrost with “avenging seas” and the debacle of the Deepwater Horizon Spill. His most singular and specific pieces are, inevitably, the most personal and personally moving. He mourns a sea turtle’s need for peace, protection, and most tellingly, hope for her hatchlings with the survival of her species increasingly beleaguered. He deplores the cruelty of the racehorse industry casually exploiting and destroying these animals bred for heavy muscles and tiny, fragile feet that easily shatter under stress. His generally straightforward language occasionally rises when referencing “the red mouth of a traffic light,” but remains steadfastly literal for the most part. Perhaps the most moving and encouraging piece brings us Kent Clegg in his ultralight aircraft leading young whooping cranes on an ancient migration route and teaching them “ancestral flyways…they didn’t know they knew.” The Water Leveling with Us’ hectoring anger and blame also contains some occasional, essential reminders that Clegg’s big brained ape’s conscious choice and the sea turtle’s instinct, anthropomorphized as “hope” may be all that’s realistically possible.

Coltrane’s God is not yet in hand, indeed, the final manuscript corrections were just turned in to the publisher, but on faith in the book’s implacable path from publisher to press, through the myriad tunnels of encrypted data streams and software hallelujah conversions, it shall be printed, bound, and delivered in time for the launch,  scheduled for Sunday, December 13th of this year at 5:00 pm (or 17:00) at the Teatro Paraguas (see calendar entry on this web site). Hooray!

Jay Udall, editor of Gris-Gris, just accepted two poems which will be in my forthcoming Coltrane’s God, “Fiddle Fest Contestants” (about my itinerant fiddler grandfather) and “A Night in Tunisia,” about a wild night at the Mineshaft Tavern, in Madrid, Nuevo Mexico. Although Udall is thoroughly ensconced among Louisiana bayou poetry-voodoo (thus the name of his journal), he has NM roots (brother to our US Senator) and is familiar with the crazy music scene at the Mineshaft Tavern.