Just Before the Release

*Boone photo as a token of congratulations to Traci Brimhall*

Happy Super Bowl Sunday, folks! The sun is shining and deserving poets/wonderful people have been awarded money for their poems: www.dorothyprizes.org. You can read the prize-winning poems at the website--it's a treasure trove. Congrats to all my friends on the list!

I suppose I want the Giants to win, but mostly I just want the commercials to be good.

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A couple of winters ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Spokane, Washington, to interview the great Sherman Alexie just before the release of his latest book of poetry,Face. I was worn-out and deep into some dark winter months of making a record, and I couldn't wait to cross the continent to refresh my inspiration by meeting one of the people whose art made me feel brave enough to try to write things down in my own words. The fact that Alexie was going to be on home turf was extra special in my mind. Eastern Washington was a place I called home for much of my life, so to return there meant a great deal to me. The fact is, there aren't very many writers from Washington, and even fewer who speak the language of kids who grew up in poverty there, and probably less than a handful of those speak the poetry of our region. "Our" trees are not "their" trees, if you know what I mean.

-a wonderful interview between Neko Case and Sherman Alexie, at The Believer

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Killer first line of the moment:

We have no words for you.

from "Not Words But Hands" by Martin Espada
(The Republic of Poetry, W.W. Norton, 2006)

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Inside the great publishing houses — grand names like Macmillan, Penguin and Random House — there is a sense of unease about the long-term fate of Barnes & Noble, the last major bookstore chain standing. First, the megastores squeezed out the small players. (Think of Tom Hanks’s Fox & Sons Books to Meg Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner in the 1998 comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”.) Then the chains themselves were gobbled up or driven under, as consumers turned to the Web. B. Dalton Bookseller and Crown Books are long gone. Borders collapsed last year.

No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point? Such fears came to the fore in early January, when the company projected that it would lose even more money this year than Wall Street had expected. Its share price promptly tumbled 17 percent that day.

-NYT

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These guys will be in Seattle on March 26th!

Exceed Anything

Local news bulletin:

The National Weather Service is calling for a historic snowstorm to move through on Tuesday and Wednesday. “Snowfall amounts at Seatac could exceed anything seen since November 1985, a top five record 24-hour snowfall amount,” writes the NWS on this forecast discussion. How much? Anything from 6 to 14 inches in the immediate Seattle area.

Get out the mittens and the wool socks. Make sure the dog gets walked. Read a poem, write a poem, go sledding make snowballs and be safe.

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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. I don’t see that as playing a role. It’s just appearing in public.

-brief interview with Joan Didion

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Fishouse started entirely by accident. It started as a way for me to memorize poems on my commute to work. I asked my friend Camille Dungy if she’d record for me. Honestly, at this point, I forget exactly how we came to it, but we decided it’d be cool to get a couple of recorders and send them around to other poets to do the same thing. Then we thought, well, other people will want to hear these recordings, too, so let’s post them on a website. That was 2004, and it was still a little unusual to have online recordings of poets, especially poets early in their careers.

-interview with From the Fishouse's Matt O'Donnell over at 32 Poems

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Topics include: Haiti, Ayiti, the pronunciation of “Ayiti,” Omaha, immigration, Phillips Exeter Academy, television, tiger moms, soap operas, sugar cereals, Victor Newman, 90210, architecture, Yale, dropping out, cracking up, road trips, chat rooms, love affairs, older men, Montpelier, Michigan Tech, technical writing, Eastern Illinois, Indianapolis, respect, advanced degrees, titles, online literature, Sean Penn, sugar daddies, insomnia, and philanthropy.

-an interview/podcast with Roxane Gay

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Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.

-The Rumpus

If I lived in San Francisco, I would go to this.


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Can we talk about how there's no radio station in the world like KEXP?

Also: this song is great.

Babe?

In his office, Plumly told me I was too talented to throw myself into this crazy world of poets and critics at the age of twenty-two. “What are you doing here? You’re so young. Come back when you’re thirty and divorced like everyone else.”

“But when I’m thirty I want to have my first book out, to be teaching, settled, you know… not in a writing program.”

Stanley pulled his chair closer to me, his cowboy boots click together in my memory and he said with his warm or belittling smile, “Babe, come back when you’re thirty and tell me that.”

-New City

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So we’ve known Steve a long time, and we were thrilled to be able to publish his poem “Bargain” in our latest print issue. We’ve always been a little curious, though, exactly what was happening in that head of his (insert smiley face here). So we asked him to annotate “Bargain” for us, and as you can read below by mousing over the underlines, what’s happening in Steve’s head is interesting — dark, confessional, frank, funny, opinionated with regard to classic rock icons — pretty much, to be honest, exactly what we thought it was like in there.

-Barrelhouse

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And now, finally, I’ve applied the analysis to Poetry.

Some people don’t like rankings, and I can sympathize with their view. But I maintain that the Pushcart Prize is a reasonable proxy for quality, and I think many writers hope to place their work in the best possible magazine. If I were a poet, I’d want to see my work in Poetry, the clear “winner” in this ranking. But I also acknowledge that the Pushcart Press has been slow to recognize the work that is appearing in online magazines, and these magazines, some of which are excellent, are under-represented on the list. Writers should keep this in mind.

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I am a devotee of William Blake, Frederick Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and Jim Morrison. Each maintained that the highest state of self-actualization is to be achieved by merging internal opposites into a dynamic state of awareness transcendent of these alleged dualities. Blake called it "the marriage of heaven and hell." Nietzsche contemplated a state "beyond good and evil." Carl Jung simply called it "the third thing," and Jim Morrison called it "break[ing] on through to the other side." Creative people are walking paradoxes; both shrewd and naïve, libidinous yet prudish, and so on. I believe that this paradox forms the basis of the creative tension so essential to artistic triumph—the friction of opposites setting fire to that "third thing," which goes by yet another name: the Sublime.

-Glimmer Train

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It’s true that the mid-20th century was a heyday of sorts for American poetry. Poets were published and reviewed in daily newspapers and general-interest magazines, and their book releases were significant events. The poetry scene that most people knew was made up of a few highly celebrated poets (with notable exceptions, usually white and male) writing a few kinds of poetry (“the raw and the cooked,” as Robert Lowell famously described it).

-Washington Post

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Extraordinarily Narcissistic Writer

Righteous Winter day in Seattle. Work, dog, poems, grade, repeat.

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Shortly after songs hit the internet, Ruder is playing them on his show. "That's the beauty of KEXP—we don't have to wait to see whether a song's test marketed before we add it to a playlist," Ruder gushes. "We have the freedom to play what we want to create an exciting show. I feel like the whole purpose of KEXP is to expose people to new music and enrich people's lives through the discovery of music. That's really close to what I'm passionate about, to have this station be a filter."

-The Stranger covers what surely is the best radio station out there, KEXP

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And so I do not outlaw slam. If slam becomes the new orthodoxy, then highly talented, highly gifted young poets will be forced to fit the mold and, being, forced, will subvert slam and change it from within. At least, I hope so. At any rate, my qualms against slam:

-Joe Weil on Slam Poetry over at THEThePoetry

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Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

-excellent essay on Joan Didion's work over at The Atlantic

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Northwest.

At Church and at Strip Clubs

Three beautiful poems:

"Discharged into Clouds" by Dean Young at Threepenny Review

"The Vista by C. Dale Young at the Poetry Foundation

"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" by Jack Gilbert (audio) at the Poetry Foundation

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I don’t want to be silent about issues that concern me because all too often, silence implies consent, but I also want to feel like we’re moving forward and making some kind of difference. Perhaps I want too much but that’s nothing new. I’m going to spend 2012 trying to figure out a better way to talk about these issues. I’m going to spend 2012 seeking out the kind of writing I know is out there but is not receiving the attention it deserves. I’m going to spend 2012 committed to great(er) expectations rather than surrendering to the status quo. We’ll see how this goes.

-Roxane Gay over at The Rumpus


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To say Southerners drink sweet tea like water is both true and not. True because the beverage is served at every meal, and all times and venues in between—at church and at strip clubs, at preschool and in nursing homes. Not true because unlike water or wine or even Coca-Cola, sweet tea means something. It is a tell, a tradition. Sweet tea isn't a drink, really. It's culture in a glass. Like Guinness in Ireland. Or ouzo in Greece.

-via Garden and Gun

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When I read the first summary of the new rules, what jumped out at me was that, to be eligible, a documentary had to be reviewed by either the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times. That puts enormous pressure on the critics of those papers (“Review my doc or I’ll shoot this dog”), but to qualify at all, a documentary must open and play for at least a week in both cities, so it’s fairly likely to be reviewed.

-Roger Ebert on the new Oscar rules over at Wall Street Journal

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The first person plural is an indexical pronoun, dependent on context for meaning, but the boundaries are often unclear even to the speaker. And there’s something not only ambiguous but also incoherent in the pronoun. As Franz Boas warned in 1911, “a true [first person] plural […] is impossible, because there can never be more than one self.” Poetry, though we associate it with “I,” is rather fond of “we,” and not only the intimate “we” of private I/Thou relations. But the best poets are also aware that it’s a shifty and treacherous pronoun. Surprisingly, poetry, the genre we most identify with private, subjective experiences, is far freer in its use of the first person plural than narrative prose, though there are a few bold examples in fiction, such as Kate Walbert’s Our Kind, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and, most recently, Justin Torres’ We the Animals, works that suggest a “we” prior to or stronger than the individuating psyche. But poetry has given much freer rein to the first person plural. At the same time, the pressures and perils of the pronoun “we” are registered with particular sensitivity in the genre with the most acute linguistic self-consciousness.

-via Jacket2

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My friend Noah writes and sings remarkable songs.

Strapped to the Top of the Car

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Even worse, she said, was “the élitism that passes itself off as inclusiveness.” She went on, “The rules are so esoteric, so hard to follow, that no one else could fit in. And what you’ll never admit to yourself is that you don’t want other people to fit in.” That’s a good summation of what “Portlandia” lampoons.

-via The New Yorker

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In fact, I spent 15 years in a similar city: Seattle. When I moved there in 1990, Seattle was enjoying a moment—everything from its coffee culture to its computer software and especially its music scene were suddenly the apex of cool. This was tricky for longtime Seattlites, who seemed simultaneously proud of and embarrassed by all the attention. The Seattle Times ran a regular column that rounded up every mention of the city in the national and international press, the way a proud mom might put together a scrapbook of her offspring’s science-fair achievements. (That booster columnist, Jean Godden, is now a member of the Seattle City Council.) At the same time, there was something like a conspiracy to keep quiet about the city’s awesomeness—and to exaggerate its flaws, such as the weather. (Yes, it’s often gray and overcast in Seattle, but there’s more annual rainfall in places like Atlanta, New York, and Washington, D.C.)

-via Slate

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In 1983, a 36-year-old Romney and his wife and five young boys piled into the family station wagon for a 12-hour drive from Boston to Lake Huron in Canada. As was the custom, Seamus, their Irish setter, rode in a crate strapped to the top of the car.

-via Chicago Tribune

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Bookshelf Porn

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Closer to the Eye of a Needle

To me, the best thing about my MFA experience was not learning how to write, but learning to live as a writer. Observing the habits and attitudes that can sustain and enrich a long-term pursuit of language (from my understanding: it's deep reading, frequent scribbling, and occasional foolishness). It's important to surround yourself with people you admire, and I was able to do that in spades at Hollins. How about some words from those folks?:

Jeanne Larsen is interviewed at the Southeast Review

I will say this: a view of experience that encourages attentiveness to how things are and to the consequences of our actions, that discourages sensory gluttony even as it opens you up and loosens the neurotic ego’s lockdowns, any view that says “things change. this body, too. now breathe”—well, I find it helpful.

And the incomparable mind of Richard Dillard on display at Blackbird:

Poetry is, I could say, in the eye and ear of the beholder, and perhaps it is. I believe, for example, the black and marbled pages in Tristram Shandy to be among the most meaningful poems I have ever read. I was particularly convinced that great poetry is where you find it with Wittgenstein who, in the midst of war and anguish and suicide, said that philosophy should be written like a poem, and who, while struggling with the failure of the word, found the Word. If he’s not a poet, who is?

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Rural, archaic musics have been persistently popular, rediscovered by every generation and newly imagined. In thirty years of following music obsessively, I’ve seen the rise and fall of musicians and movements, revivals and retirement, promising debuts, slow disappearances. I have spent a lot of time in the country, in small towns of Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, California, Washington, Oregon, Oklahoma, Alaska, Virginia, New York, Mississippi, and Alabama. I have only heard “rural music” and its fans in big cities and college towns. In the small towns, the soundtrack is more hip-hop than hillbilly, which is magnificent for them, but reminds me that folk, country, and bluegrass music are just a fantasy.

-Ed Skoog over at Coldfront

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Last year the writer Denis Johnson came to Wilmington, North Carolina, where I live, for a conference. Ben George, who edits the magazineEcotone and was hosting him, graciously asked me to tag along. There were memorable days. Granted, I would file a trip to Food Lion with Denis Johnson under fairly interesting life events.

-from The Paris Review

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Killer first line of the moment:

We learn to live without passion.

from "The Danger of Wisdom" by Jack Gilbert
(The Dance Most of All, Knopf, 2009)

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Frost understood poets need all the help they can get, and it is a pleasant surprise to discover the magazine currently grappling with success. Its circulation has nearly tripled to 30,000 since Christian Wiman, a poet and critic, took over as editor eight years ago. Poetry receives 100,000 submissions a year and publishes 300 — the open door now closer to the eye of a needle.

from NYT

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So, so, so good.