FEATURING: Ben Doyle & Sandra Miller

Ben Doyle's first collection of poems Radio, Radio was selected by Susan Howe for the 2000 Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets. His poems can be found in current or forthcoming issues of Boston Review, Tin House, Denver Quarterly, and Indiana Review. His new manuscript, Dead Ahead, is forthcoming from Ahsahta. He lives with his wife, the poet Sandra Miller, and their canine in Roanoke, where he teaches Creative Expression to tough kids—when he's not in Boise as Distinguished Visiting Writer. Doyle co-edits the Kuhl House Books contemporary poetry series of the University of Iowa Press.

Sandra Miller's first book, Oriflamme, was published by Ahsahta Press in 2005. Selections from her new work—Chora—keep popping up in Aufgabe, Verse, Crowd, La Petite Zine, and The Canary. She teaches on one of those one-year things at Hollins University, where she lives on Maggie's Farm with her husband, the poet Ben Doyle, and their dog, the dog Ronald Johnson. The founder and editor of an international journal and press of some repute, Miller is also a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Boise State and a recent recipient of the Paul Engle-James Michener Fellowship.




From The Sonneteers:

The Sonneteers (a 50 "sonnet" sequence, a demi-corona) were constructed between August 2004-December 2004 as part of a relationship-experiment (ongoing). The 1st Sonneteer spontaneously combusted in the apartment of Biswamit Dwibedy, who had a Shakespeare sonnet in his typewriter. Turning this sonnet 90 degrees in the typewriter allowed space for the birth of the Sonneteer—with each of us writing alternate lines, messing with rhyme scheme, playing with the instantaneity of the art object-verbal object as a performative mode. (In the case of the first sonneteer, someone was reading from the book of Revelations in a thick brogue...) In the ensuing sonneteers, ink was spilled, more typewriters were deployed, and simultaneous sonneteering occurred. A dialogue emerged not just between the writers and their slant-rhymed couplets, but also between the found-art-papers and the texts. We're particularly attracted to the dual notion of the "sonneteer" as a sonnet-writer and as a shoddy poet, and sought to push these boundaries in our multiple resistances to form and regiment. We're grateful to Biswamit Dwibedy for the initial party impulse, and for many of the papers. Other papers have been constructed and generously contributed by the sonneteers themselves, as well as Sarah Doyle, Scott Inguito, the Toyota Company, The New Yorker, a jump rope, a slipper, Sandra Bullock & Ben Affleck, with cameo appearances by Srikanth Chicu Reddy and Louise Glück.

Sonneteers are also appearing in Area Sneaks, OxMag, Disaster3, and Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets.





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