Memorial Marvels

Had a great weekend camping the middle fork of the Snoqualmie River. Hot dogs were impaled on pocketknife-whittled sticks. The dog splashed through eddies. Timed group-photographs were taken. What a place, this is. I'm thankful, all over again, to live in the Northwest.

I brought with me my contributor's copy of the latest issue of New England Review and am floored to be in such excellent company. Check out Traci Brimhall's "Somniloquy" from the new issue. Huge thanks to C. Dale Young for including some of my poems, and to the whole NER staff for putting together such a wonderful magazine. Go get you some.

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Gil Scott-Heron died on May 27, at age 62.As I write this, there’s no official cause of death. We’ll know soon enough. This is America, after all. Whatever the medical details suggest, I’m listing his official cause of death as grief.

-Steve Almond, over at The Rumpus

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Mr. Huibers, 60, the successful owner of a big construction company, has spent the last few years building an ark, identical in size to the one Noah is said in the book of Genesis to have built: 300 cubits in length, or 450 feet; 30 cubits high, or about three stories; and 50 cubits, or 75 feet, wide. The cubit of the Bible, Mr. Huibers said, was the distance between finger tips and elbow, or in his case roughly 18 inches.

He is building the ark out of Swedish pine, because some versions of the Bible describe the wood God ordered Noah to use as “resin wood,” which Mr. Huibers says is pine.

-via NYT

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In his newest book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, Bloom revisits the ideas that made him a star -- and explains, in a straightforward way, why he's spent his career trying "to build a hedge around the secular Western canon." Bloom argues that it's simply impossible to understand how literature really gets made unless you recognize that some books are head-and-shoulders above the rest. It's the genius of those books, he contends, that powers the whole of literary creation.

Just started Bloom's latest and have been enjoying it. I'm not sure there's a more cogent or eloquent writer when it comes to discussing the ways in which poems move and how the reader must move with them.

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As my last act as Chair, I would like to share with you my sense of the gravity of the situation we face. I spent most of my academic career doing what most of us do—teaching, writing, reading graduate applications and theses, having office hours, reading in my field, doing research. I didn’t pay much attention to the University and its administration. None of us have that luxury anymore. Budget cuts after budget cuts after budget cuts have left us all painfully aware of how the sausage is made, or not made

-Letter from Tom Lutz, Chair of Creative Writing at UCR, on the impending dilemmas of the Academy...

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Before And After: A Bird's-Eye View Of Joplin

via NPR

The images of the tornadoes in the midwest are devastating. Joplin is my grandmother's birthplace, was my great-grandparents' home.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"O Tommy Hearns, o blood come down."

from "Prayer in the Name of Saint Thomas Hearns" by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

(Apocalyptic Swing, Persea Books, 2009)

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Aloe Blacc - Loving You Is Killing Me from Stones Throw on Vimeo.

Mondays for Beauty

More music, more sunlight--the city is ravenous for Summer. Bring on the mountain ranges, the barefoot runs, the afternoons at Gasworks, the hot dogs with cream cheese.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"We didn't come Mondays for beauty,"

from "Open Mic" by Kurt S. Olsson
(What Kills What Kills Us, Silverfish Review Press, 2007)

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Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

-Noam Chomsky responds to the death of Osama bin Laden, over at Guernica

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The reasons for these trends can be expressed in a single word, or buzzword: efficiency. Contingent academic labor, as non-tenure-track faculty, part-time and full-time, are formally known, is cheaper to hire and easier to fire. It saves departments money and gives them greater flexibility in staffing courses. Over the past twenty years, in other words—or really, over the past forty—what has happened in academia is what has happened throughout the American economy. Good, secure, well-paid positions—tenured appointments in the academy, union jobs on the factory floor—are being replaced by temporary, low-wage employment.

-via The Nation

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Hippy jam-fest dance yawp.

Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner!

So, thanks to this random number generator, we have winners! I decided to give away 3 copies of my book, After the Ark, instead of 1, because you can never have too much poetry, and I hate seeing them sit on the bookshelf. I'm also giving away a copy of Seamus Heaney's superb collection District and Circle. So, without further pomp and circumstance...

1

33

12

27

Michelle Penaloza wins a copy of District and Circle by Seamus Heaney!

Tess Duncan, Mary Virginia, and Valerie win copies of After the Ark.

I'll be emailing y'all to get your addresses. Thanks to everyone for entering, and to Kelli Russell Agodon for setting this whole excellent celebration up. Poetry, what.