Liberating Ourselves from the Thrall

2011 has run itself out. The world will not slow down. A whole sea of wonderful things happened this year, as did some not-so-wonderfuls, but that's the way it goes. I'm hugely grateful for all the kind and funny people in my life--and look forward to more in 2012, where ever it takes us. Thanks for stopping by--happy new year!

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Rookery, Traci Brimhall’s smart, sensual debut and the recipient of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s 2009 First Book Award, opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson: “Split the Lark—and you’ll find the Music.” If we read this as an imperative to find the muse in birdsong, it stands in useful contrast to the preface poem, “Prayer for Deeper Water.” In that poem, a man attributes his hatred of women to those who do not recognize “the frightened wingless birds” singing within their chests; he abhors their “stuttering” flutter against his body. The speaker gently resists, citing the blessings of the earthly moment—“Even the shape of your mouth is a miracle”—and her confidence in her own inner mystery. She asks him to “forget the beginning,” to move forward and embrace the real world and its flawed denizens.

-Sandra Beasley reviews Traci Brimhall's book Rookery in the new issue of Blackbird, which also has some of Traci's lovely poems, as well as excellent new work from Matthew Nienow, Erica Dawson, and Malachi Black. Go get you some.

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I am now going to proffer some little things that may combine in your mind to mean something, or not. They may mean something discretely, or not. They may combine better in an order I do not have the wit to determine, but that is okay, since you are having to hear them in the air where they are already subject to the Brownian motion of podium slur and so are already combining in the weird indeterminate order of the misheard and the partially heard. I grasped Brownian motion before flunking out of chemistry school. Had the mother-in-law who powdered herself so prodigiously spilled talc into the toilet, a distinct possibility given the liberality of the dusting of her cruller, you could have seen the talc move on the toilet water in what is called Brownian motion. If there is calculus to describe Brownian motion I mercifully flunked out still innocent of it. That one can even now utter the clause “if there is calculus” is an indicator of supreme naivete because there is calculus to describe everything, which is why, aside from reading Mr. Williams when I was supposed to read Mr. Morrison and Mr. Boyd, I flunked out of chemistry school. I am going on about this now not merely because of my giant reluctance to start the Craft Talk without Craft but also because remaining innocent of things is in my view an important part of writing, which will become clear if I ever start the talk.

-Padgett Powell's winding and wonderful craft lecture from a recent visit to Columbia University.

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In fact, I don’t want to consider erasing any of the poets she includes; since we’re in virtual space, for now, hurrah for abundance. Let them stay; we can simply agree to disagree about who the rising stars might be. I think Dove should, however, come clean about two categories she refers to – the too-expensive poems and the buried antipathies. It would be valuable for me to know exactly what poems and poets were disqualified for economic reasons. It must have been frustrating to know that, although she was engaged to render a personal, rather than a consensus, anthology, she would be constrained by inadequate funds. If she would reveal those expensive works, we could see more clearly what her ideal anthology would have looked like. I would really love to see her ideal Table of Contents.

-Editor R.T. Smith weighs in on the Penguin Anthology

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MONEY DERIVES ITS MEANING from society, not from those who own the largest piles of it. Recognizing this fact is the first move toward liberating ourselves from the thrall of concentrated capital. We need to desanctify money, reminding ourselves that it is not a god ordained to rule over us, nor is it a natural force like gravity, which operates beyond our control. It is a human invention, like baseball or Monopoly, governed by rules that are subject to change and viable only so long as we agree to play the game. We need to see and to declare that the money game as it is currently played in America produces a few big winners, who thereby acquire tyrannical power over the rest of us as great as that of any dictator or monarch; that they are using this power to skew the game more and more in their favor; and that the net result of this money game is to degrade the real sources of our well-being.

-Scott Russell Sanders, via Orion Magazine

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Powerhouse.

The Best Deal

Woke up this morning to find my poem "Problems with the Dictionary," from the latest issue of the Southwest Review, featured on Verse Daily. Talk about a great Christmas present--I've had Verse Daily as my home page for about four years and have always admired their taste, their mission, and their simplicity. The poem comes from my manuscript-in-progress, and risks (near) rhyming couplets.

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More and more, though, the national perception of poetic loci is shifting; that is, the concept of real versus imagined and desired location is blurring due to the Internet; geography loses significance. When you can access poems, biographies, interviews, critiques, photographs and even, via video, "live appearances"with just a few keystrokes, a lyric poet from Anchorage becomes as immediate as the narrative wit from Philadelphia.

-a compelling conversation between Rita Dove and Jericho Brown, from the BAP Blog

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When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

via The Nation

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“There is no point in fighting them or explaining to them that we should be able to coexist civilly in the marketplace,” she wrote me. “I don’t think they care. I do think it’s worthwhile explaining to customers that the lowest price point does not always represent the best deal. If you like going to a bookstore then it’s up to you to support it. If you like seeing the people in your community employed, if you think your city needs a tax base, if you want to buy books from a person who reads, don’t use Amazon.”

Op-Ed by Richard Russo in NYT

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Best-selling poetry books of 2011

Horoscopes for the Dead / Billy Collins
Copies sold: 18,406
*Author’s est. earnings: $44, 177

Leavings / Wendell Berry
Copies sold: 2, 928
*Author’s est. earnings: $4,377

Come, Thief / Jane Hirshfield
Copies sold: 2,250
*Author’s est. earnings: $5,625

*Assumes a 10 percent royalty rate.

282,000 Copies of Tim Tebow’s autobiography, Through My Eyes, sold since its May release.

via New York Magazine

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This was an amazing night of music.

Takes Away the Luster

Seattle is gray and cold, but mostly dry. Hard frosts in the morning. Great notebook-scribbling weather.

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This is a recording from 1959 of Flannery O'Connor reading A Good Man is Hard to Find at Vanderbilt University.

Probably one of the coolest things in the world right now.

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Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem—there has to be part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility.

-an interview with W.S. Merwin (which has sent me back to his books, which have me wide-eyed all over again)

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Killer first line of the moment:

Now close the windows and hush all the fields:

from Robert Frost's "Now Close the Windows"

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What They Say They're Fighting About: How we should analyze and grade poetry. It's pretty clear Vendler is more selective. Her argument being that letting everyone into the club, the list, or in this case, the anthology, takes away the luster from actually being included. And it's not unlike the same debates in the world of pop culture like the gripes with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or the selections process of an NCAA tournament, or a Michelin list. Dove's point obviously counters the notion that fewer is better, as she points out that Vendler loses out on diversity, and perhaps much more by focusing on her chosen few.

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How about some end-of-the-year lists?

NPR's Best Books of 2011

Paste Magazines Best New Bands of 2011

KEXP's John Richard's Top 10 Albums of 2011

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I Want to Care About It All

A hard frost the last three nights. Rain in the mornings and the coonhound won't leave the porch. We're settling-in here. There's snow in the mountains and soon we'll be skiing. It's time for running in sweatpants, reading near the space heater, and getting dark early. Thanksgiving is a week away.

Let's say that again: Thanksgiving is a week away.

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Killer first line of the moment:

How I hope never to attend that party again.

from "Tercets for Naiads" by Ben Doyle

(Radio, Radio, LSU Press, 2001)

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There is a shooting in Norway. A troubled but popular singer dies. The U.S. economy implodes. Unemployment rises. Economies in other countries collapse. The earth cracks open on an island and then in another country and another country and another country. Floods wash away an entire town. A dictator is overthrown and another and another and another. A terrorist is assassinated. A dictator goes into hiding. He is found. He is killed. Everywhere, the earth is dry and when it rains, it is never enough. Children are starving. Their parents are starving. Women and their bodies and their right to make choices about their bodies are increasingly under attack. A starlet who never had a chance continues to spiral out of control. Real housewives act messy all over the place. A celebrity who is famous for being famous for making a sex tape gets married on television. Less than three months later, she divorces her made for television husband. An innovator dies and his life is bared for examination. A teenage girl’s sex tape goes viral and worse yet, people watch. Politicians start their campaigns and race each other to the bottom. The world moves at such a bewildering pace these days. Everything demands our attention. There is hardly time to breathe. Or think. Or feel.

I want to care about all of it, the atrocious and the admirable and the awesome and the absurd. I don’t want to feel numb.

-gorgeous and well-wrought essay by Roxane Gay over at The Rumpus

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We’ve turned a fine-tuned hunting animal, the wolf, into a wide variety of creatures, from the wolf-looking shepherds to the bizarre toy breeds. Before domestication, dog’s life was tough. But when people pulled specific wolves out of their packs and began breeding them, we changed everything. There were some traits that made this easy – the social structure of wolves, for example, made them predisposed to belonging to a community. Still, we opened up a number of genetic traits and allowed them to express variety that would have been fatal in the wild. We not only allowed these traits to persist, we encouraged them. We picked dogs that were less aggressive or looked unique. And in doing so, we spurred on rapid diversification and evolution in an unbelievable way.

-via Scientific American

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It was midway through the pregame prayer session that the gorge hit high tide. There is always something a little nauseating in large spectacles of conspicuous public piety, but watching everyone on the field take a knee before the Penn State-Nebraska game, and listening to the commentary about how devoutly everybody was praying for the victims at Penn State, was enough to get me reaching for a bucket and a Bible all at once. It was as though the players and coaches had devised some sort of new training regimen to get past the awful reality of what had happened. Prayer as a new form of two-a-days. Jesus is my strength coach. Contrition in the context of a football game seemed almost obscene in its obvious vanity.

-via Grantland

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Occupy protests complicate matters by bringing a segment of society—a white middle-class segment—into, what is for many, first contact with police authority. If you think of police as coming whenever you call for help, you may be surprised to learn that police do not work for you. Officers work first for the police department and then for the city that pays them. A force designed to maintain order and the status quo will never sing Kumbaya with protesters who combine a desire for change with a privileged sense of agency and entitlement.

-via Slate

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Everything Must Go

In a purging state of mind. I'm thinking maybe it's safe to have less than 3 copies of the same literary journal (mostly contributor copies of the past few years) languishing on the shelf. These are great issues and they need great readers, so I offer to send them to whoever's interested (just shoot me an email and let me know which ones you want--try to limit it to 2/person) in the hope you might enjoy them and purchase a subscription (or better yet, a gift subscription!). Support these excellent and hard-working folks. I've got:

Birmingham Poetry Review 37 (featuring work by Richard Bausch, Claudia Emerson, Rebecca Morgan Frank, William Logan, Caki Wilkinson, and others)

Georgetown Review 11.1 (featuring work by Seth Abramson, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Ravi Shankar, and others)

Passages North 32.1 (featuring work by Traci Brimhall, Frank Giampietro, Bob Hicock, Sandy Longhorn, Matthew Nienow, Matthew Thorburn, dawn lonsinger, and others (!))

Hollins Critic XLVII.4 (featuring discussions on the work of Howard Frank Mosher by James Robert Saunders, Elaine Feinstein by Kelly Cherry, and Maxine Kumin by David Slavitt)

RATTLE 32 (featuring work by Laura Eve Engel, Colette Inez, Molly Peacock, David Wagoner, Tony Barnstone, Patricia Smith, and others)

Third Coast 29 (featuring work by Quan Berry, Jehanne Dubrow, Gray Jacobik, Tomaz Salamun, and others)

Tar River Poetry 49.1 (featuring work by Ross White, Gary Fincke, Michael McFee, Brittany Cavallaro, Michelle Boisseau, and others)

Beloit Poetry Journal 59.4 (featuring work by Peter Munro, Simon Perchik, Avery Slater, and others)

Poet Lore 103.3 (featuring work by Nin Andrews, Michael Boccardo, George David Clark, Alex Dimitrov, Jane Shore, Katrina Vandenberg, and others)

Roanoke Review 33 (featuring work by Caitlin Horrocks, Carrie Shipers, Wiley Cash, and others)

New York Quarterly 65 (featuring work by Dorianne Laux, Mark Bibbins, Donald Lev, Matthew Zapruder, Bruce Weigl, David Shapiro, and others)

First come, first serve. Thanks for stopping by.

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Students in Anonymity

I ate the best cheeseburger of my life this weekend at this place. Here's a picture of it.

Small epiphanies.

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Which brings me to God Bless America, a collection that should be seen as part of a body of work intent on eviscerating and then forgiving our pitiful culture of excess, this social milieu in which we—our bodies bent to their “awful purposes”—run amok with the faintest grasp on reality and even less on our own motivations. We spout platitudes on the one hand, like Billy in the title story, about this “land built by opportunists,” and face painful truths on the other, as Sophie does in “Not Until You Say Yes”: “Nothing was ever done, it was always suffering some improvement. Were human beings really such factories of discontent?” Yes, we are, and Almond is a writer who is as painfully aware of the ludicrousness of our predicament as he is a believer in the possibility of our salvation.

-Ru Freeman reviews Steve Almond over at The Rumpus

(I want to read this book!)

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The poets had set the tone for the exercise by reading a poem they had written together, which uses startling, offensive language and has in its first three lines the harshest slurs against blacks and gays. The same slurs emerged on the cards, written by students in anonymity, then read out loud by peers who picked the cards at random from a pile stacked on a desk.

-via NYT

Not sure what to make of this--I think you have to blame the poets/instructors for not being more aware of the situation...oh, words.

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So that’s how and why, this spring, I found myself staring down a teetering stack of people’s poetic accomplishments (and hopes, and dreams), pages binder-clipped neatly together, manuscripts numbered so that each submission would remain anonymous. I learned a few things really quickly: most people front-load their manuscripts (aka, put their strongest 5-10 poems up front); many people are partial to really awful fonts (like Calibri or Arial or Gill Sans); generally, good manuscripts are not going undiscovered (as I later learned many of the manuscripts I chose had been pulled from the contest, as they had already won other contests and were slated to be published); and most importantly, I could only read about 20 manuscripts a day without slowly losing my will to live. This was not because the manuscripts were poorly written—quite the opposite was true: there were very few truly terrible manuscripts. I was sure I would be able to eliminate many right away, but that just wasn’t the case; most were at least serviceable, if not totally fine, and nearly all included at least a few compelling poems. And I had to choose between them.

-great essay by Erika Meitner on her experience as a contest screener

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Lumping together artistic work according to gender was, in Bishop’s opinion, detrimental to women’s writing. In a letter to Jean Keefe, she writes: ‘undoubtedly gender does play an important role in the making of any art, but art is art, and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art.’

-interesting article on Elizabeth Bishop's feminism over at Granta

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It’s what Alberto Salazar, for a while the world’s dominant marathoner and now the coach of some of America’s top distance runners, describes in mythical-questing terms as the "one best way"— not the fastest, necessarily, but thebest: an injury-proof, evolution-tested way to place one foot on the ground and pick it up before the other comes down. Left, right, repeat; that’s all running really is, a movement so natural that babies learn it the first time they rise to their feet. Yet sometime between childhood and adulthood — and between the dawn of our species and today — most of us lose the knack.

Great article on barefoot/minimalist running from New York Times Magazine. I've been using my Merrell Trail Gloves since last April and have never felt better about running...

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New favorite band-of-the-moment.

Very Human Dangers

Happily undertaking a 7 poems in 7 days sprint with a few other folks. Draft, draft, draft.

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In order to stay alive as artists, we need to resist the very human dangers of resentment and bitterness. Resentment comes from attending to the injuries and rejections of the past, or to fears of the future. These difficulties are exacerbated by loneliness, and of course writers are perpetually alone with their work, no matter how embedded they are in communities. For many years I thought I needed to write in my quiet study, in a corner of my house where I could get away from anyone except a dog, and I’d be a little annoyed when people walked by talking on the nearby street – which was, after all, a good eight feet from my window. How dare they interrupt the process of my poem! After I moved to New York City I found myself not enjoying writing at home. I found a coffee shop congenial to writing (the location of which, as any urbanite would understand, I would never reveal). Soon I realized that in fact I liked having company. I liked some evidence of activity – milk steaming in the espresso machine, dishes rattling in the plastic bin where you’d put your empty coffee cup. These provided, as Frank O’Hara said about record stores, “some evidence that people do not entirely regret life.”

-Mark Doty's speech from the Whiting Awards Presentation (Heck yeah, Eduardo!)

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More transcendent music coming out of Seattle. Go Team.

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Pickwick - Blackout (Suzzallo Reading Room) from Tyler Kalberg on Vimeo.

Propositions of Any Religion

Talented friends writing beautiful and important things:

Hollins-brother C.I. Shelton has an elegant essay on his experience with the Joplin tornado, in the Paris Review.

The awesome and omnipresent Ed Skoog has a poem for Occupy Seattle in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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The Rush Limbaughs of the world are very comfortable with a narrative that has Noam Chomsky, MoveOn and Barack Obama on one side, and the Tea Party and Republican leaders on the other. The rest of the traditional media won't mind that narrative either, if it can get enough "facts" to back it up. They know how to do that story and most of our political media is based upon that Crossfire paradigm of left-vs-right commentary shows and NFL Today-style team-vs-team campaign reporting.

What nobody is comfortable with is a movement in which virtually the entire spectrum of middle class and poor Americans is on the same page, railing against incestuous political and financial corruption on Wall Street and in Washington. The reality is that Occupy Wall Street and the millions of middle Americans who make up the Tea Party are natural allies and should be on the same page about most of the key issues, and that's a story our media won't want to or know how to handle.

via Rolling Stone

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Well it seems to me that if one takes the propositions of any religion seriously, there's going to be doubt in the experience, there's going to be intermittency and one is going, as D.H. Lawrence once said, "to be converted over and over." And I remember Mr. Eliot, T.S. Eliot, saying that doubt is inseparable from the experience of faith. It's something we shouldn't be ashamed of, and it's funny because, if I may digress, Eliot is also the person who said that fancy thing about how the spirit killeth but the letter giveth life. I guess he was objecting to a sort of hazy spirituality one finds sometimes with some people. But he seems there to be saying that you'd better believe every word in the creed, and he thus represents both ends of the doubt and belief pattern, he's saying wouldn't it be nice, really, to believe that whole marvelous Nicene concoction that we say in church, and at the same time he's saying that any energetic religious life involves doubt.

-wonderful interview with Richard Wilbur

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Lemony Snicket has some things to say about Occupy Wall Street, over at Occupy Writers.

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Dear Parents:

Thanks to their group e-mail, we now know that the families of Millie and Jaden M. recognize Jesus Christ as their Saviour. There still seems to be some confusion about why, if we want to celebrate life, we’re actually celebrating death. To better explain this “bewildering detour,” I’ve asked Adela, who works in the office and makes waffles for us on Wednesdays, and who was born in Mexico, to write you directly.

-Arrested Development writer Maria Semple over at the New Yorker

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Start this at 5 minutes and enjoy. Seattle music continues its amazingness.

Don't Speak the Same Language as We Do

I've been finding poems in the morning, before going to work at the pet store. The poems are unsteady on their legs, but they're trying. Was happy to have one picked up fora future issue of Quarterly West, and to hear the excellent news that I'll be one of 62-Washington artists to receive a GAP grant from Artist Trust. It's a remarkable organization that educates, supports, and connects artists in Washington state, and they're another reason I'm proud to be living here. It's stuff like this that gets me to the desk an hour earlier in the morning, before hauling kibble and cat litter from the warehouse to the shelf, to carve lines in hopes that they might resound. Another writer works at the store, and we were talking about process. I told him about the butt-in-chair rule I stole from the righteous Sandy Longhorn. I asked him what got him to the page. He looked at me and said, "Luke, if we're not writing, we're just selling dog food." Up early, tomorrow.

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Socio-economic mobility has always been central to the American dream. But our civic culture is actually carefully structured to keep us segregated. The wealthy lock themselves away in luxury vehicles and gated suburbs. The impoverished remain in blighted areas, obediently out of view.

The system is self-reinforcing. As the money concentrates at the top, less is devoted to those resources that are shared by all of us – parks, schools, community centers, subway trains – the very places where people of different classes might peaceably mingle.

The wealthy hire lobbyists and tax lawyers to game the system. They remove themselves, physically and psychically, from their duties to the poor. In this way, the interests of the few crush the interests of the many.

-Steve Almond on Occupy Wall Street over at the Rumpus

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The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

-Paul Krugman at NYT

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Killer first line of the moment:

You found it in wet dirt: blue parchment, slice

from "Feather" by Sally Rosen Kindred
(Cave Wall 10, 2011)

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Sherman Alexie has 3 beautiful little poems in the new issue of Narrative Magazine. And if you subscribe, you can read a wonderful poem by my Hollins-poet-brother Will Schutt. Do it.

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Although I am ashamed to admit to knowing almost nothing about Scandinavia's leading poet, whose books are regular bestsellers in his homeland, this does seem to be something of a regular occurrence with the Nobel. The committee makes a habit of bestowing its laurels on respected, worthy, but often fairly obscure writers who, even after they are anointed, don't exactly go on to become household names.

No doubt this attitude partly reflects my provincialism. It's true that British literary culture is shockingly closed to writers from those parts of the world which don't happen to speak the same language as we do. We translate far fewer titles than most other European countries, and publishers that specialise in literature in translation – fortunately there are some – struggle to get attention for their books.

-interesting take on Transtromer's Nobel, and the significance of the Nobel in Literature, over at the Guardian

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Have watched the first half of this 2 part HBO-doc--can't wait to watch the rest.

Penultimately, It Can Save You

Joined a group of other young poets to write 7 poems in 7 days. Very much enjoying writing again. Very much in awe of how many talented writers there are floating around right now.

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Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I’ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs.

-via Paris Review

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Well, here's what I used to hold dear. A truth is most comfortably received when preceded by an indefinite article—a instead of the unlocks the noun, makes the truth feel credibly small. Now I think that to make assertions using indefinite articles mostly serves to keep us from making fools of ourselves, and yet, sometimes, don't we have to risk this? Aren't the most memorable statements asserted boldly, like Flannery O'Connor's "The truth will make you odd," or André Gide's "It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written"? Actually, there are many things other than truth that are dear to me. The tone with which something is said, for one. My fear is Stendhal's: "I may have expressed only a sigh when I thought I was stating the truth."

-Stephen Dunn interviews himself over at Poetry Daily

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There is no need to fear the personal or the Confessional. For one thing, it is unavoidable. For another thing, it is all you have. Penultimately, it can save you. Lastly, you can never really, fully, and honestly tell the truth about your own life because a) you don't know the truth b) there is no one truth and c) you are always telling, and telling the truth is very different from the truth. Think of it this way: If you take your clothes off you are naked but are not a Nude, and certainly not a nude painting. The poem, no matter how bare, is a Nude, and never really naked. That said, you need to take your clothes off to know what your skin really feels like.

--Really enjoyed this essay on the nature of the "I" in poetry, by Rachel Zucker, from over at the Academy of American Poets.

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Killer first line of the moment:

Scatter my ashes at Six Mile Creek.

from Patrick Phillips' "Will"

(New England Review, 32.2, 2011)

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A really excellent project is going on in my home-neighborhood. Check out ballardsessions.com for some well-done videos of some of Seattle's best young musicians, such as the righteous Noah Gunderson featured below.

When There's Too Much Good Music, You Get Two

Last week, I received my contributor copies of the Threepenny Review. It's a knock-out, and I'm honored to share space with writers I've admired for a long time: C.K. Williams (on the same page!), Dean Young, David Wagoner, Anne Carson, Kay Ryan, Roberto Bolano, and too many more to name. Get yourself a copy! Or, better still, subscribe!

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In the spirit of football season, here's a great poem from Poetry Daily by Elizabeth Poliner, who just joined the permanent faculty at Hollins (lucky for Hollins, lucky for her). If you're in the thick of applying to MFAs, you should definitely consider Hollins. For me, it was perfect, and I'd be happy to answer any questions poetry applicants may have. And, while I value the spirit and intention of Seth Abramson's rankings, I think it'd be foolish to not look beyond them (and I'm not alone). I can't fathom some of the intricacies behind Hollins' recent movements in the rankings. The fact that we're ranked so high in non-fiction is evidence of how far the rankings are off the mark, not because Hollins doesn't have an excellent non-fiction program (it does), but because you can't find one writer on faculty who would classify themselves as an essayist (they'd likely all just call themselves writers, as they should, damn good ones, at that). And if you look at the last 5 years of graduates, you could probably count the 'non-fiction writers' on one hand. It's one of those situations where the perceived doesn't even begin to do justice to the reality. Okay, I'm off my soap-box. I just love that place so much, I want other people to have the chance to love it, too.

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It’s important for people interested in a teaching job in creative writing to get a sense of what you’ll be up against with your debt load and current publication record. There are a handful of jobs for hundreds if not thousands of job seekers who are all highly credentialed. Of the available positions currently listed, 4 are in fiction, 5 are in poetry, 8 are open and 4 positions are for visiting lectureships. It is early in the job season, so more positions will likely be posted but not many. I would guess there will be 40-50 available positions in creative writing. Some of these searches will be cancelled when funding is pulled. Some of these searches will be run even though there are inside candidates. (The wiki will often have this information, which is nice.) When you compare that to the number of graduate students going on the market in the next couple years, the imbalance is pretty stark.

-via HTMLGiant

This seems ever pertinent as I eye my first serious foray into applying for a job teaching creative writing at the university level. Let's just say, I'm hopeful, but not optimistic.

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From the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center resisted redemption. They were called "jumpers" or "the jumpers," as though they represented a new lemminglike class. The trial that hundreds endured in the building and then in the air became its own kind of trial for the thousands watching them from the ground. No one ever got used to it; no one who saw it wished to see it again, although, of course, many saw it again. Each jumper, no matter how many there were, brought fresh horror, elicited shock, tested the spirit, struck a lasting blow. Those tumbling through the air remained, by all accounts, eerily silent; those on the ground screamed. It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, "We're in uncharted waters now." It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted a woman to wail, "God! Save their souls! They're jumping! Oh, please God! Save their souls!" And it was, at last, the sight of the jumpers that provided the corrective to those who insisted on saying that what they were witnessing was "like a movie," for this was an ending as unimaginable as it was unbearable: Americans responding to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world with acts of heroism, with acts of sacrifice, with acts of generosity, with acts of martyrdom, and, by terrible necessity, with one prolonged act of -- if these words can be applied to mass murder -- mass suicide.

-via Esquire

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"I spent a lot of time thinking about contemporary Christianity, and obviously the rapture kept coming up," he says. "My first impulse was ... to laugh it off — it's sort of a funny idea, people just floating away. But I kept thinking: What if it did happen? ... I thought, I'm such a skeptic that even if it did happen, I would resist the implications of it, and I also thought that three years later, everyone would have forgotten about it. No matter what horrible thing happens in the world, the culture seems to move on."

-Tom Perrotta, via NPR

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I was already sold on Trombone Shorty because of his cameos in Treme, but after seeing him at Bumbershoot, I'm a fan for life. Thanks to Oliver de la Paz for hipping me to this most excellent video.

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Why don't millions of high-schoolers buy Macklemore records instead of Lil' Wayne records?

Only Things That Make Lots of Money Should Exist

Grateful to have my poem "Psalm for Third Base" featured over at THEthe Poetry. Big thanks to Brian Chappell for featuring the poem, and to C. Dale Young and the New England Review for first publishing it.

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Despite sounding like he's singing a blues song about the disappointing seats in his new Jaguar, an MFA grad does have the right to question and critique the value of his expensive education. Yet, when you question the intrinsic value of an arts education for everyone else, the cynical attitude is revealed to be very close to the neo-con belief that the arts don't pay so there should be no arts education. Of course, success being relative, it's always difficult to quantify the value of the arts. If, as its publisher claims, Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" sold 3 million copies, then it netted no more money than "Saw 3D." Now, according to the theory that only things that make lots of money should exist, and because the most critically discussed literary novel of the last decade--by an author with no MFA at that--only made as much money as an underperforming 3D sequel, we should rethink this whole MFA thing.

via Huffington Post

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Yet there is one manifestation of good manners that appears to have exactly the opposite purpose, a form of social lubrication that makes a mockery of everyone connected to it. I refer to the Facebook birthday greeting. The Facebook birthday greeting has become a symbol of all that is irritating about the social network. Every April 11 or June 7 or Sept. 28, your Facebook account suddenly chatters with exclamation-point-polluted birthday wishes. If you are a typical Facebook user, these greetings come mainly from your nonfriend friends—that group of Facebook "friends" who don't intersect with your actual friends. The wishes have all the true sentiment of a Christmas card from your bank. The barrage of messages isn't unpleasant, exactly, but it's all too obvious that the greetings are programmed, canned, and impersonal, prompted by a Facebook alert. If, as Facebook haters claim, the social network alienates us from genuine friendship, the Facebook birthday greeting is the ultimate example of its fakery.

via Slate

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SEATTLE — Already, a gender divide seems to be developing over the desirability of being launched into space, at least in the Bordian family, who were visiting the Space Needle here the other day, staring out at the cloudy cityscape and mulling the tower’s latest promotionalcontest — for a suborbital spaceflight, 62 miles above the earth.

via NYT. Our city is sending citizens into space, no big deal.

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“They created this kind of world that was just the four of us, and they allowed us to be weird, as weird as we wanted to be without making us feel like we were strange,” he said. “And so I thought about a lot of that with the Fangs. The weirdness exists, but you don’t comment on it. It’s just the world that you’ve made for yourself. And it’s the same thing that Leigh Anne and I are doing with Griff, trying to build this weird world for him and see what happens.”

The family lives outside Sewanee on the edge of a one-acre pond in a thicket of woods teeming with rabbits, bats and deer. Inside the house signs of Griff, 3, were everywhere: a basket of toys near the wood-burning fireplace, a child-size canvas swing from Ikea hanging from the ceiling and a remote-controlled train set taking up most of Ms. Couch’s office upstairs, where she writes her poetry on a drafting desk in the corner.

-A great profile on Kevin Wilson from the New York Times. I'm currently flying through his novel, The Family Fang. It's the best book I've read all year and it more than deserves the attention it's been getting.

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Ballard, what.

The Negligent Blogger Returns, Hang-Doggedly

I have been a bad blogger. Too many things have happened to try and compress and recapitulate them here. Suffice to say: life moves pretty fast. Summer is here, which means: good weather, good people, good poems. That triumvirate hasn't left much time for blogging, but I'm doing what I can to stay plugged in with you amazing folks. Onwards.

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I am not perfectly certain what our forefathers understood by “the pursuit of happiness.” Of the friends whom I’ve asked for an opinion, the majority have taken that phrase to mean the pursuit of self-realization, or of a full humane life. Some darker-minded people, however, have translated “happiness” as material well-being, or as the freedom to do as you damn please. I can’t adjudicate the matter, but even if the darker-minded people are right, we are entitled to ennoble the phrase and adapt it to the present purpose. I’m going to say a few things about the ways in which poetry might be seen as pursuing happiness.

Richard Wilbur on poetry and happiness over at Shenadoah, from a lecture he delivered in 1969

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Killer first line of the moment:

"Oil drunk,"

from Henry Hughes' "Skeleton Pirates of America"

(Moist Meridian, Mammoth Books, 2009)

I was lucky to share a cabin with Henry for the last few days at Fishtrap, when I came down from the rural Outpost workshop. He's a great guy, and a damn fine poet. Plus, he caught a ginormous fish while we were up there.

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On the other hand, Ammons wasn’t just a poet. He was a Southerner, and every Southerner understands the difficulty of holding on to an identity that is not, shall we say, always desirable. As C. Vann Woodward put it more than fifty years ago, “when [a Southerner] ventures among strangers, particularly up North, how often does he yield to the impulse to suppress the identifying idiom, to avoid the awkward subject, and to blend inconspicuously into the national pattern—to act the role of the standard American?” For a figure like Ammons, the temptation is to act not simply as a standard American, but as a standard American poet—which is to say, a citizen of Nowhere.

via Paris Review

A really nice exploration by David Orr of both Ammons (wonderful) work and what it means to be living a life hundreds of miles from home soil.

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Righteousness.

Unplugged

July careens and summer swells. I'm off to Fishtrap Outpost tomorrow, where I'll be happily disconnected from phone and interwebs for 9 days. Looking forward to coming back with poems, pictures, and something worth telling you about. Be well, friends!

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I have a poem up this week over at Linebreak: "Months after the Mt. Cashmere Wildfire, with Meteors"

Big thanks to the editors for featuring the poems, and to my Sewanee friend Lisa Fay Coutley for such an excellent reading (she's up on Verse Daily! she has a new chapbook you should buy!)

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Eight years ago, I began traveling the United States to photograph senior dogs. Like the diverse human pageant that Robert Frank captured in his book, The Americans, back in the 1950’s, I found dogs inhabiting all manner of American life -- and with many years inscribed in their beings.

My interest in the world of the senior dog began as my own two dogs began to approach the end of their days. This was at a time when I had lived enough years to start imagining my own mortality. I entered a world of grace where bodies that had once expressed their vibrancy were now on a more fragile path.

-This is amazing.

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Heather Christle is a creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University whose second volume of poetry, "The Trees the Trees," is out now (her third book will be published by Wesleyan University Press). If you like her poems, you can call her during appointed (but generous) hours between now and next Thursday, and she'll read one just for you. It's as easy as dialing 413-570-3077.

-via Salon

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