Monday, April 16, 2012

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

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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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Thursday, April 12, 2012

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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-Bill Moyers interviews Christian Wiman


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


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Thursday, April 5, 2012

Astoundingly Low Profile


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


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


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-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.




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Mark Strand has a great Clint Eastwood voice.



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More music.