Momentous Initiative

Very happy to have a newer poem in the latest issue of The Journal, an all-poetry issue including some great work by Oliver de la Paz, Bruce Bond, Amanda Auchter, Martha Silano, and many others. Big thanks to the folks at OSU for putting together such a beautiful issue.

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In the eyes of most opponents and many supporters of easing pot laws, medical marijuana is supposed to be a slippery slope to full legalization. But in Washington, the opposite is happening: a momentous initiative to legalize marijuana for all adults, which will be on the ballot this fall, is being opposed by the medical marijuana industry that the previous initiative created.

-The Stranger writer Dominic Holden with an Op-Ed in the New York Times

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Readers will pay less. That's the bright side. The settlement gives Amazon carte blanche to discount the eVersions of popular titles, much as it used to. Of course, that also happens to be the dark side. Because that control over price is going to reinforce the monopoly power of the world's largest online retailer.

-The Atlantic

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The issue isn't simply money. Perhaps more important, the growth of high-school athletics has resulted in more time than ever spent by students in practicing and competing. Basketball games played on school nights (with travel time, if they're away games), swimming and gymnastics "invitationals" that draw kids from hundreds of miles and last all weekend. And the proliferation of summer sports camps. In one of his pleadings as president of the NCAA, even the late Myles Brand complained to The New York Times, "The youth sports culture is overly aggressive."

American higher education bears some measure of the responsibility for that. There are doubtless a number of reasons that high-school sports follows the lead of college sports in becoming more professionalized. Chief among them, however, is that kids and their parents increasingly believe that accumulating varsity letters is a better way to get to college—and certainly a better way to pay for college—than academic achievement.

-Chronicle of Higher Education

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I strongly disagree with the assertion that creative writing is a guild system. Many of those who make this assertion seem motivated by frustration -- perhaps that their own work is not getting published or, if it is getting published, that it is not getting enough attention. Ever since the advent of widespread literacy in the English-speaking world (starting around the middle of the eighteenth century), writers have been dealing with an unpleasant reality: there are usually more competent-to-excellent writers than readership to support all of them. Creative writing programs today may exacerbate this reality by putting a greater number of competent or excellent writers out there, but it does not follow that creative writing constitutes a closed and undemocratic guild system. Perhaps some who rail against creative writing programs should turn that critical attention toward our increasingly bottom-line-oriented publishing industry.

-MFA Round-table at Huffington Post

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If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

-Kurt Vonnegut's letter to Charles McCarthy, School Board Head at Drake High School, North Dakota


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Ramshackle Resiliency

Christ is contingency,” I tell M. as we cross the railroad tracks and walk down the dusty main street of this little town that is not the town where I was raised but both reassuringly and disconcertingly reminiscent of it: the ramshackle resiliency of the buildings around the square; Spanish rivering right next to rocklike English, the two fusing for a moment into a single dialect then splitting again; cowboys with creekbed faces stepping determinedly out of the convenience store with sky in their eyes and twelve-packs in their arms. I have spent the past four weeks in solitude, working on these little prose fragments that seem to be the only thing I can sustain, trying day and night to “figure out” just what it is I believe, a mission made more urgent by the fact that I have recently been diagnosed with an incurable but unpredictable cancer. How strange it is to be back in this place, where visible distance is so much a part of things that things acquire a kind of space, an otherness, a nowhere-ness, as if even the single scrub cedar outside the window where I’m working holds—in its precise little limbs, its assertive seasonless green—the fact of its absence.

-wonderful essay on faith and poetry by Christian Wiman, from Harvard Divinity Bulletin

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“When we think of our memories, they’re moments of intensity. Whether they were sorrowful or happy, moments of great loneliness or moments of great communion — we live for these moments in our life. And I do think poetry is a way of recognizing the moments in your life. But also a way of preserving them,” Wiman tells Moyers. “One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.”

-Bill Moyers interviews Christian Wiman

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William Carlos Williams once wrote: “It is difficult to get the news from poems.” After my first month on Facebook, I concluded that it was difficult to get the poets from Facebook. The poet bloggers I once thought I knew were but status updates of their former selves. They were no longer espousing on the great poetic issues of our time; instead, they were posting pictures of food porn! If these were the best minds of my generation, they were destroyed by Facebook.

-via The Poetry Foundation, and a great response by Reb Livingston, here.

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Read two of Eduardo's beautiful poems at Poetry Daily!

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Astoundingly Low Profile

Read, read, read. Write, write, write.

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When you're sitting on the airplane next to a man with a briefcase, and you're going to give a reading, and he's going to a business conference, and he says to you, hello my name is Herman Bluewinkle, and you say, my name is Ted Berrigan, and he says, I'm in electronics, what do you do? And you say, I'm a poet, and he says, holy shit, man. And his eyes get completely glazed over, and he's sure that you're going to whip out all of your poems immediately and read them all to him.

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This is my business. Poetry is my business. I don't know how many of you are interested in making poetry be your business, in the course of your life. It's my conception that it would be a good thing if everybody wrote poetry, in the world, because it seems to me that it's a natural human activity. Just like singing is for the birds. Birds don't sing because they think they're Neil Young, you know; I mean, they sing because that's what birds do. Writing poetry is one of the things that human beings do, and can do.

-A friend pointed me to this lecture by Ted Berrigan. I think it's really wonderful.

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At a time when the local food movement has inspired many consumers across the nation to, for the first time, consider the wines being made in their own backyards, no up-and-coming domestic region has received as much serious attention as the Finger Lakes of upstate New York. To be specific, it is the Rieslings of the Finger Lakes that have generated the most buzz.

-via The Atlantic

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Conceived on Wall Street, born in a Bellevue rental house, and based in a dozen buildings on the northern edge of downtown Seattle, Amazon has grown into one of the Internet's most-recognized name brands and a company so big that it holds staff meetings at KeyArena.

Its value in the stock market alone puts it ahead of Boeing and second only to Microsoft in the Northwest.

But as Amazon prepares to turn 18 this summer, it cuts an astoundingly low profile in the civic life of its hometown.

-via Seattle Times

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Once known as The Shakes, with "Alabama" tacked on as a tribute to the band's beloved home state, these musicians — Howard, guitarist Heath Fogg, bassist Zac Cockrell and drummer Steve Johnson — already possess the fully formed confidence of players twice their age. On Boys & Girls, out April 10, they find a way to fuse the impeccable professionalism of soul veterans to the youthful, raging fire they set on stage. Long may they burn.

-Another NPR First Listen

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Mark Strand has a great Clint Eastwood voice.

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More music.