Sunday, January 29, 2012

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!


Monday, January 16, 2012

Exceed Anything


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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-brief interview with Joan Didion

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

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-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.


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.


Saturday, January 14, 2012

Babe?


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Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Extraordinarily Narcissistic Writer

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

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

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-Joe Weil on Slam Poetry over at THEThePoetry


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


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Northwest.


Tuesday, January 10, 2012

At Church and at Strip Clubs

Three beautiful poems:




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-Roxane Gay over at The Rumpus


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-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.


Sunday, January 8, 2012

Strapped to the Top of the Car


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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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Wednesday, January 4, 2012

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


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



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-Ed Skoog over at Coldfront

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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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from NYT


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So, so, so good.