Content Tagged ‘John Rybicki’

from When All the World is Old, by John Rybicki

published by Lookout Books

—Anna Sutton, Lookout Intern

Wow! I can’t believe the Fall semester here at Lookout Books has come to an end. We’re a teaching press (as you probably know already). Our staff is almost entirely made up of graduate students doing design, marketing, editing, blogging, social media, and way more.

As blog editor, it has been an absolute pleasure to work with our current staff: Joe Worthen, Katie Jones, Ethan Warren, Anna Sutton, and Ana Alvarez. I’d like to thank them for their hard work and take a brief moment to re-cap my favorite blog posts this semester:

Lookout Books poet John Rybicki will be doing a reading and workshop at Haverford College next week.

On a Friday afternoon last April, I stood in the back of a classroom and watched John Rybicki, author of Lookout’s first poetry collection, When All the World Is Old, pace in front of a group of middle schoolers. John wore a short-sleeved blue shirt that showed off his wiry, muscled forearms, and he could barely stand still as he addressed the class. He would hold his arms above his head or spread them like wings; sometimes he’d step in close to talk to the kids, other times he’d lean way back to convey the scope of some grand bit of wisdom.

“On the page,” he told the kids, “where anything is possible, I’m a different kind of animal. And I want to cultivate in you, after your parents have been protecting you, trying to put a protective coat of their own skin around you, a sense of lawlessness and danger and emotional jeopardy. And when it happens on that canvas in front of you, you become godlike in your scope. A drop of God’s fire fell from the heavens and lodged in each of us.”

I remember being bored to tears by most of the special visitors I saw in middle school. But I also remember those visitors who just electrified me—the ones who approached us on our level, who talked to us like peers, who had more energy than you usually find in a classroom. Seeing those students sitting straight up at their desks, their eyes alight, I knew John was one of those visitors for them, one they’d remember for a long time.

A powerful silence graced the room as Rybicki weaved through anecdotes of time spent with his wife and passages from his books. As he finished, most felt not a deafening sense of sorrow but rather a promised notion of his fortitude in overcoming a grave loss.

“He makes his poems out of true feeling — he lives his poetry,” said creative writing professor Robert Fanning, who introduced Rybicki to an audience of more than 100. “He’s doing things that are so far beyond what we can do in our best hour with our sharpest pen.”

This excellent article was published by CMU’s student-run publication, Grand Central Magazine. Read onward (more photos included).

It’s here! It’s here! Fantastic book trailer for John Rybicki’s When All The World Is Old.

Made by UNCW students and our dedicated Lookout Interns. Great work all!

– John Mortara, Lookout Intern

This past week was full to the brim with fantastic Lookout events and guests! John Rybicki flew in to Wilmington on Thursday, April 12, and visited Roland-Grise Middle School the next day as a guest teacher for a class of thirty-seven seventh graders. The class loved him and showed some pretty powerful poetry chops themselves! We got some great video of the lesson.

Lookout celebrated National Poetry Month by releasing John Rybicki’s When All the World is Old last week. The book of raw and wise poetry pays homage to the brave love John and his wife, Julie, shared during her sixteen-year battle with cancer. If we do say so ourselves, it is a collection for every kind of reader. To continue to honor Poetry Month, some of the Lookout interns would like to share the other poetry currently on their nightstands.

“I just finished reading Rocky Dies Yellow by Michael Lally. Fantastic poems, but I may have some kind of a bias because Lally is a Jersey boy, too. Read it through one sitting, and plan to read it again before giving it back to my professor, Mark Cox. A+ for teachers who lend students awesome poetry all the time!”

(Rocky Dies Yellow is out of print. It was published by Blue Wind Press.)

– John Mortara, Lookout Intern

This week we’ve been busy getting ready for Edith Pearlman and John Rybicki to land here in Wilmington, NC for their reading this Sunday and to kick off the Binocular Vision tour of NC. So many pictures to come!