Michael McClure: Mysteriosos and Other Poems
New Directions, 2010
Paperback, 144 pages, $15.95

This newest book of poetry by Michael McClure (longtime CCA faculty member and 2005 recipient of CCA's honorary doctorate of fine arts) speaks of working toward freedom and beauty during a time of interminable war and the destruction of our natural surroundings. Included in this new collection is: a long travel poem to an Indian forest where an enraged elephant charges then recognizes an old human friend and turns back into the trees; "Double Moire," which "reads like a fulfillment of Goethe's prophesy and Shelley's: the whole universe seems to be in it, down to the smallest and up to the most vast. It is absolutely what the ultimate nature poem might be" (Jerome Rothenberg). "Dear Being," a garland of 37 stanzas, uses the freedoms of Buddhist hwa yen.

This summer Fashion Design students were busy helping kids make geometry come alive. As part of the Exploratorium’s Geometry Playground summer exhibition was the “You’d Be Naked Without Geometry” event that offered five California College of the Arts Fashion Design students the chance to spur children’s creativity by making opulent dresses out of pink pattern-making paper.

Artist and furniture designer Scott Constable is fall 2010's Wornick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Wood Arts. He is a woodworker who uses his craft to explore the social and philosophical issues of everyday life. His work, ranging from furniture to architecture and environmental sculpture, has exhibited internationally and garnered numerous design awards.

MFA Program in Writing faculty member Gloria Frym's new chapbook, Any Time Soon (Little Red Leaves, 2010) was just released this week as part of issue 5 of Little Red Leaves (LRL), which is a collectively edited annual online journal of poetry as well as an ebook/paperback series of original chapbooks and reprints.