tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22001523599491617802024-03-13T09:46:37.168-07:00Proof of Blog"I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way."-Carl SandburgLuke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.comBlogger263125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-75386375397950097112013-03-20T21:49:00.001-07:002013-03-20T21:50:38.530-07:00Robes and Crowns<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/the-inscrutable-brilliance-of-anne-carson.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">On writing: “we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with </span><em style="background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">accuracy</em><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">. i mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented. . . . i feel i am blundering in concepts too fine for me.”</span></a></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson" in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank">The New York Times</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;"><a href="http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/03/archie-ammons-and-the-poetry-of-hymns-by-roger-gilbert.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In Ammons’s humanist revision, we must provide our own robes and crowns, conferring sanctity on ourselves without the help of divine grace. The hymn’s shining river becomes the momentarily cooled glass within whose chinks and bubbles we conduct our lives. In a typescript of the poem, Ammons crossed out the word “robe” and substituted “tam,” a playfully eccentric touch that tempers the Biblical solemnity of the original line. As much as he loved the dignity and eloquence of the old hymns, Ammons often felt the need to set their language against other tones, some of them downright irreverent. At times a jaunty tam suited him better than a pious crown. </span></a></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"Archie Ammons and the Poetry of Hymns" at the <a href="http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/" target="_blank">Best American Poetry Blog</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.59375px;"><a href="http://therumpus.net/2013/03/lectures-i-will-never-give/#.UUIS44IAfsk.twitter" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Samuel Johnson said, “It is certain that any wild wish or vain imagination never takes such firm possession of the mind, as when it is found empty and unoccupied.” He was speaking of melancholy, and how idleness and solitude feed it, undeniably and uncontrollably feed it. We all know this is true, and yet it is equally true that such a state will fund creativity; as artists we understand the vital necessity of wasting time, of loafing and doing nothing, and I was wondering what it is that causes the free and idle mind to go one way or the other—into obsessive melancholy or into creative fervor. What tips the scales, so to speak?</span></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Mary Ruefle's "Lectures I Will Never Give" at <a href="http://www.therumpus.net/" target="_blank">The Rumpus</a></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.390625px; text-indent: 21px;"><a href="http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2013/spring/nash-business-literature/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It was a sign, almost one hundred years ago, of the book beginning to achieve what most technology will never accomplish—the ability to disappear. Walk into the reading room of the New York Public Library and what do you see? Laptops. Books, like the tables and chairs, have receded into the backdrop of human life. This has nothing to do with the assertion that the book is counter-technology, but that the book is a technology so pervasive, so frequently iterated and innovated upon, so worn and polished by centuries of human contact, that it reaches the status of Nature.</span></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"On the Business of Literature" from <i><a href="http://www.vqronline.org/" target="_blank">VQR</a></i></span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/2WmlUXsjSv8?rel=0" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-24335696043762358792013-01-02T15:05:00.002-08:002013-01-21T23:19:23.273-08:00There Is No One Else In Charge<br />
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">2013 is going to be an excellent year for Matthew Nienow, and it starts with his poems everywhere: <i>"</i><a href="http://www.versedaily.org/2013/oanchor.shtml" target="_blank">O Anchor</a>" on <i>Verse Daily </i>and <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-nienow#about" target="_blank">four new pieces in the latest issue of <i>POETRY</i></a>. Read these and be glad that there's much more to come from Brother Matt.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://therumpus.net/2013/01/the-rumpus-interview-with-zadie-smith/" target="_blank">I write against things, I suppose, and the thing that doesn’t interest me is gathering a cabal of people exactly like yourself to read what you write. The thing which I like about my writing—I don’t know if it’s a symptom of its generalness or whatever—but I have old ladies e-mail me, or write to me, more likely, who are age eighty-five and then I have very young people: sixteen, seventeen. I like the idea that the writing has no precise identity. It doesn’t block people, it doesn’t force them to think, “Oh, this is me in a very precise way.”</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-An Interview with Zadie Smith at <a href="http://www.therumpus.net/" target="_blank">The Rumpus</a></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/poem/2008/12/the_darkling_thrush.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em style="border: 0px; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Hope</em> is not an easy word to use well, in poetry or out of it. Evoking hope too easily can feel kind of glib or damp; saying there is none, though the opposite, can feel sentimental in a similar way. The right shade of belief and doubt can seem impossible to express.</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/poem/2008/12/the_darkling_thrush.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In his great poem for a new year, “The Darkling Thrush,” Thomas Hardy gets that kind of meaning right, I think. Hardy says he “could think” of a “blessed hope” of which he is “unaware.”</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Robert Pinsky on Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" at <a href="http://www.slate.com/" target="_blank">Slate</a></span></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ZQSuEIKlD1Y" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-59093584938986551352012-12-12T18:51:00.000-08:002013-01-20T15:18:04.139-08:00Curative Activity<span style="line-height: 23.983333587646484px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://jacket2.org/commentary/modern-poetry-effect-my-open-ness" target="_blank">My whole intellectual life as I've started to emerge from the misty darkness of autism has been an adventure in beauty housed in form and structure. My most favorite curative activity was listening to my father read Shakespeare and ask me to describe the symbols, poetic devices and structures which make the plays work, so I came to ModPo comfortable with close reading. I get my parents to take me to the Uffizi so I can study Botticelli, my music theory teacher shows me how Mozart is structured, so it is not surprising that until I took your class I thought poetry was words stuffed into forms. </a></span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 17.983333587646484px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-from <a href="http://www.jacket2.org/" target="_blank">Jacket2</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 17.983333587646484px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 17.983333587646484px;"><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2012/12/winter_solstice_john_donne_s_a_nocturnal_upon_st_lucy_s_day_being_the_shortest.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The language of absence, privation, nothingness has scientific, moral and emotional force. As dark is an absence of light energy, not an entity in itself, death too is an absence rather than a force or a being. That conviction underlies the statement that Love's alchemical limbec turned the leaden soul, with its “dull privations and lean emptiness” into the golden sense of being. The theology and science, the terms of nothing and being, absence and presence—it's all a way for the poet to sharpen the understanding of what he lacks, and what he loves. The poem's athletic feats of wit may entertain readers, or disconcert them, but it has a purpose beyond rhetoric: it is an act of mourning ... and, maybe, an act of self-heartening, too.</span></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Robert Pinsky on John Donne at <a href="http://www.slate.com/" target="_blank">Slate</a></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 21px;"><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/the-lure-of-the-writers-cabin/?hp" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Who has not fantasized about the books they would write if only the right conditions could be found! I have carried around just such a dream, sparked by a weekend alone in an austere mountain cabin in the Austrian Alps when I was a boy. Rumination was unstoppable, and poetry just poured out.</span></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-David Wood in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank">New York Times</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Anthemic.</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/G4cKnY87_qI" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-27500634179576020602012-12-06T15:39:00.003-08:002012-12-06T15:39:58.614-08:00This Is You<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />Hey, I think I finished my second manuscript. In this context, "I think" means that there are enough pages of poetry for a book, but that aforementioned pages aren't yet good enough. Ya dig?<br />
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<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/245074" target="_blank">These “massive open online courses” (MOOCs) have exploded on the American educational scene. The Washington Post dubbed them “elite education for the masses,” with universities like Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton offering free classes. Coursera, the for-profit company that offered Filreis’s poetry class among many others, is less than a year old and counts more than 1.7 million as students. Many of the courses offer certificates of completion, so while a degree from these schools may still cost upward of $100,000, you can theoretically—and that’s a big “theoretically”—get the education for nothing.</a></span><br />
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--Elliot Holt at <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/" target="_blank">The Poetry Foundation</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 23.75px;"><a href="http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/buy-art/Content?oid=15446392" target="_blank">This is you. You want to own something that means something to you. The pleasure of an original thing is that, like anything you truly love, it attaches itself to the original part of you and builds it like a muscle, makes you feel more like you. It also connects you to someone else, the artist—but you don't have to tend that relationship, it's just there, simple, pure. You never have to meet the artist if you don't want to, but if you want to, you can ask the artist all about this thing you now have, and you will find that the artist also wants to hear what you see in it, and eventually you will both agree that neither of you really penetrates what the thing fully is, which is maybe why both of you love it so much. Let's say you have a couple more criteria: Maybe you would prefer art by someone local, someone who does not have a leg up in the 1 percent game of the international art world. And: You do not have money to burn.</a></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">-Jen Graves at <a href="http://www.thestranger.com/" target="_blank">The Stranger</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/11/used-books/" target="_blank">The people who fret over the Future of the Book talk about the loss of the tactile, of the physical act of holding the book. Me, the only thing I worry about is no longer having used books.</a></span></span><br />
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-Michelle Dean at <a href="http://www.therumpus.net/" target="_blank">The Rumpus</a></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/v2/BR37.6/binary_thinking_poetry_marjorie_perloff.php" target="_blank"><span style="line-height: 20px;">Marjorie Perloff’s essay “</span><span style="color: #90150e;"><span style="line-height: 20px;">Poetry on the Brink</span></span><span style="line-height: 20px;">” in the May/June 2012 issue rekindled conversation about innovation and canonization in contemporary poetry. To continue and extend the discussion, we cast a wide net and invited 18 poets to address the following question: what is the most significant, troubling, relevant, recalcitrant, misunderstood, or egregious set of opposing terms in discussions about poetics today, and, by extension, what are the limits of binary thinking about poetry? Their responses range from whimsy to diatribe, with meditation, appraisal, tangent, touchstone, anecdote, drollery, confection, wit, and argument in between.</span></a></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20px;">-Opposing Terms: A Symposium on the Poetic Limits of Binary Thinking at <a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/" target="_blank">Boston Review</a> (featuring Ange Mlinko, Samuel Amadon, Matthew Zapruder, Annie Finch, Noah Eli Gordon, and many other excellent voices).</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Music for a rainy Thursday here in the American Northwest.</span></span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/uUHrU0WVpis" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-84936426897708581272012-11-23T08:19:00.002-08:002012-11-23T08:19:50.034-08:00Thanksgiving Prayer<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">Thanksgiving Prayer, 2012<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">It is
the day we give thanks <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">to be
at a full table, and outside<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">the
Olympics teeth the dusking<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">horizon.
Here we’re surrounded<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">by certainty
in the midst of the uncertain:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">for
mountains will not move even <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">for superstorms
or homelands<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">in
upheaval: the incontrovertible danger<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">of
stepping outside: the losses we have<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">or
haven’t named to one another.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">But
here: there is a richness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">There
is a feeling of something complete:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">meats
waiting to loose the juices<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">that
have been simmering in smoke, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">lasagna
and stuffings and casseroles<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">that
are each a small history<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">of
ourselves. Let us be grateful in our faith<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">that
what is unseen is not unheard: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">that
families, ours and others, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">extend
beyond bloodlines, that we have arrived<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">here,
where recipes steam <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">from
memory at a place beyond <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">our
griefs. Let us remember<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">that
while we may be hundreds <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">of
miles from the places we were born, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif";">we are
not far from home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-82922921541600462422012-11-19T14:03:00.000-08:002012-11-19T14:03:08.123-08:00Serious Romantic<br />
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/books/jack-gilbert-a-poet-off-the-literary-grid-dies-at-87.html?_r=0" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jack Gilbert, a poet whose frank, forthright, emotionally fraught works observed the grand universal realities of love and death from a perspective off the literary grid, died on Tuesday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 87.</span></a></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-obit. from the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank">New York Times</a></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1170&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Gilbert’s work embraces what most poets have been trying for decades to subvert. A self-proclaimed “serious romantic,” Gilbert writes poems full of feeling, working to cultivate “something that matters to the heart,” a romantic notion approached these days with a strong inoculation of irony, if at all. While many poets working with such hot materials might seek a mitigating factor when casting them into verse — fragmentation and abstraction are two modes currently in fashion — Gilbert courts danger by pursuing a far more traditional approach. Crystalline imagery, direct speech, the language of place and the self are hallmarks of Gilbert’s style from his first poem to his final book.</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Jeremy Bass at <a href="http://www.lareviewofbooks.org/" target="_blank">Los Angeles Review of Books</a> </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px; text-indent: 22px;"><a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5583/the-art-of-poetry-no-91-jack-gilbert" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Later, I was living in the East Village and this one night there was pounding on the door and there was Cleve standing in the hall. He was agitated and said, They’re looking all over for you. I asked who, and he explained that somebody wanted to give me the Yale prize. I didn’t know what to do, how to express it. I took him out with my two friends and we had milkshakes. </span></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Jack Gilbert's "Art of Poetry" interview with <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/" target="_blank">The Paris Review</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Two poems:</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2012/05/a-poem-by-sherman-alexie" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"Pachyderm" by Sherman Alexie</span></a><br />
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<a href="http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15660" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"My Father's Soul Departing" by David Wojahn</span></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Life in the Internet age has undoubtedly helped a certain ironic sensibility to flourish. An ethos can be disseminated quickly and widely through this medium. Our incapacity to deal with the things at hand is evident in our use of, and increasing reliance on, digital technology. Prioritizing what is remote over what is immediate, the virtual over the actual, we are absorbed in the public and private sphere by the little devices that take us elsewhere.</span></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Op-Ed by Christy Wampole in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank">New York Times</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This flattened me:</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ruP0X_uJkwo" width="420"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-39462851993370406462012-10-22T14:56:00.000-07:002012-10-22T14:56:57.997-07:00However Falteringly<span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/10/29/121029taco_talk_editors#ixzz2A4DXkr10" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney—a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country deserves.</span></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-The Editors of <i>The New Yorker</i> endorse Barack Obama. It's worth reading the whole essay as it, to my eye, makes a compelling case.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/18730/poetry-by-mail.html#.UH2YwP-bcHQ.facebook" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I want to ask if you will join me in a small, inexpensive, but possibly life-altering experiment. Over the next thirty days, let’s all buy a favorite book of poems and send it to someone who doesn’t usually read poems. This could be a family member, friend, your local representative, whomever! I believe poetry enriches our lives and our hearts. I believe that by sharing poetry with others we are taking part in humanizing our culture.</span></a><br />
<a href="http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/18730/poetry-by-mail.html#.UH2YwP-bcHQ.facebook" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></a>
<a href="http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/18730/poetry-by-mail.html#.UH2YwP-bcHQ.facebook" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So that we may all share in the experience, you can tweet the book title you mail and whom you are sending it to with the #shareapoem hashtag.</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Matthew Dickman has good ideas.</span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/10/the-whole-world-opened-up/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We no longer have the luxury of disbelief, of being able to believe some ideas or practices are too strange to be true. We no longer have the luxury of curiosity, of wondering what life might be like for someone different. We no longer have the luxury of not being able to ever truly know.</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/10/the-whole-world-opened-up/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I miss such luxuries.</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/10/the-whole-world-opened-up/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I miss the quiet longing of considering everything I cannot possibly know.</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Roxane Gay at <a href="http://www.therumpus.net/" target="_blank">The Rumpus</a></span></span></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/dW2KJR4i-mM" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-9288458752520606032012-09-19T10:48:00.003-07:002012-09-19T10:49:41.321-07:00Red-Handed Babbling<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 25px;"><a href="http://myerspoetry.blogspot.com/2012/09/four-great-titles-from-new-york.html?showComment=1348010972134#c4726361315028781629" target="_blank">Johnson doesn’t give us a blow by blow account of the end of that marriage or of the end of his mother’s life; rather he invites us into the emotional landscape of a family’s collapse. The result of this technique is that we are moved along with the poet. He doesn’t dictate to us what he felt; he invites us along for the emotional ride.</a></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 25px;"><br />-Benjamin Myers discusses four of his favorite titles from <a href="http://www.nyqbooks.org/" target="_blank">NYQ Books</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><br /></span>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/neil-young-comes-clean.html?_r=1&hp&gwh=B147B4EFB29C8FFABE7D414D161034A6" target="_blank">The author of some of the spookiest, darkest songs in the American folk canon seemed jolly on this late-August day. Even if he was accompanied by a reporter, generally not his favorite species of human, the motion soothed him. “I’ve always been better moving than I am standing still,” he said.</a></span><br />
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-Wonderful feature on Neil Young in New York Times Magazine</span><br />
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<a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/09/super-hot-prof-on-student-word-sex-8-the-once-drunk-and-still-stoned-an-interview-with-half-mammal-george-singleton/" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;">Here’s what happened. In 2005 my copyeditor at Harcourt, David Hough, had to subcontract out </span><em style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Workshirts for Madmen</em><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"> to an eighty-five year old woman who lived in New York City. She kept changing sentences like “I only want to dig a hole and sit down in it” to “I want </span><em style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">only</em><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"> to dig a hole…” I wrote “Stet” in the margin. She kept changing these sentences, and I kept writing “Stet.” Somewhere along the line she wrote “Do you people in the South not know this rule of grammar?” When she changed it the next time, I wrote “I want only to kill you.”</span></a>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;">-George Singleton interviewed by Steve Almond at <a href="http://www.therumpus.net/" target="_blank">The Rumpus</a></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/21/ezra-pound-a-few-donts/" target="_blank">Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music. Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Don’t allow ‘influence’ to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of ‘dove-gray’ hills, or else it was ‘pearl-pale,’ I can not remember. Use either no ornament or good ornament.</a></span><br />
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-'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste' by Ezra Pound</span><br />
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Sort of obsessed with this right now.</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JyCXGCGZRfo" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-79501308868397721472012-08-30T10:41:00.000-07:002012-08-30T10:41:35.356-07:00Ignorance and Wonder<a href="http://www.onepausepoetry.org/explore/poets/profile/luke_johnson" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The One Pause Poetry mp3 Project is a national digital resource for teachers, students, readers, and listeners. Each poet is asked to record and submit three mp3 files to the site: one poem of his or her own, one by another poet, and one poem for kids.</span></a><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">If you're not familiar with One Pause Poetry, you should check out the website. You'll find excellent recordings of Charles Jensen, Malena Morling, Alfred Corn, Mark Cox, Keetje Kuipers, and many others. They're spreading and celebrating poetry in some truly wonderful ways. The link above takes you to my recording, which includes my poem "After the Ark," A.R. Ammons' wild and whirling "Coon Song," and Shel Silverstein's extra-sticky "Peanut Butter Sandwich."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"><a href="http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_jonesrodney.php" target="_blank">What I was getting at was the most important thing: originality, which might also be construed as character. We can't judge Rilke by the standards of Neruda. The greatest poets write from a necessity that forms style and carries from book to book, but their new poems fail to be the old poems. The poems that I'm writing now are to a large degree fictive and in third person, so I am working out of ignorance and wonder, and I hope to always do that.</a></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-An interview with Rodney Jones at <a href="http://poems.com/" target="_blank">Poetry Daily</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/08/close-reading/305038/" target="_blank">In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and reread the authors I most loved. I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue. And as I wrote, I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls “putting every word on trial for its life”: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma and putting the comma back in.</a></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Francince Prose at <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/" target="_blank">The Atlantic</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/08/the-slowest-reader/" target="_blank">Sometimes, when I am feeling high-strung or cross-eyed about something, I call Jess Walter. Forget, for a moment, that he drives a sports car and shops at the GAP: I like to think of him as a literary Gandalf, holed up in a cave in Spokane, wearing ragged gray robes and leaning on a warped staff. I trust him. Because he’s good-hearted. Because he works hard and writes enviously well. Because we grew up in similar circumstances. Because he has carved out a life for himself as a full-time writer. And because, over the past few years, he’s become a pal who knows how to share a whiskey and tell filthy stories and give good wizardly advice. On almost every occasion I have asked Jess what he thinks, his response has been, “Don’t be in such a rush.”</a></span>
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<span style="line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Benjamin Percy at <a href="http://www.therumpus.net/" target="_blank">The Rumpus</a></span></span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/bdJhLDA1d0s" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-58789866910259665252012-08-16T10:48:00.000-07:002012-08-16T10:48:36.526-07:00The Complexity and Terror<br />
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<a href="http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/i-am-in-state-of-shock.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.</span></a><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1403171835"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></a>
<a href="http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/i-am-in-state-of-shock.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Flannery O'Connor writes to a Professor teaching her stories.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/244354" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Imagine your audience. I may not know what reviews are for, but I know who they are for: their readers. And it behooves reviewers to keep those readers in mind. One reason I’ve enjoyed reviewing for Poetry is that I picture its audience to be pretty much my ideal one, knowledgeable enough that I can assume familiarity with poetic concepts and history, but broad enough to keep me on guard against the excessively technical or clannish. But not every reviewer for Poetry has imagined its audience in the same way, and it’s fascinating to hear how many different pitches echo through the archives.</span></a><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">-"100 Years of <i>Poetry</i>: Re-reading Reviews" from <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/" target="_blank">The Poetry Foundation</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;"><a href="http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/08/women-who-write-poetry-criticism-roundtable.html" target="_blank">I am in an extremely frustrated phase with poetry...what do I want out of it? I am feverishly tearing through stacks of books and not finding whatever that is, so I go back to what has stuck with me: Lisa Robertson, Juliana Spahr, Anne Carson, Alice Notley, Erin Moure, because the thinking is so well formed with these poets. Because I believe the thoughts. There is writing that knocks me out: Vanessa Place, many of the women in the Conceptual Writing anthology, but there is something I am longing for that I’m not finding either, and I guess I want to acknowledge that. It’s a longing for the world, the body, the emotive, the quotidian, intellect, play...and an expansive canvas, but also a sense of place, and an accurate representation of the moment. The complexity and terror of our moment. I may be identifying for myself a frustration of nostalgia. </a></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-"Women Who Write Poetry Criticism (Roundtable)" from the <a href="http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/" target="_blank">BAP Blog </a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/the-veil-of-opulence/?hp" target="_blank">The idea behind the veil of ignorance is relatively simple: to force us to think outside of our parochial personal concerns in order that we consider others. What Rawls saw clearly is that it is not easy for us to put ourselves in the position of others. We tend to think about others always from our own personal vantage; we tend to equate another person’s predicament with our own. Imagining what it must be like to be poor, for instance, we import presumptions about available resources, talents and opportunities — encouraging, say, the homeless to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and to just get a job, any job, as if getting a job is as simple as filling out an application. Meanwhile, we give little thought to how challenging this can be for those who suffer from chronic illnesses or disabling conditions. What Rawls also saw clearly was that other classic principles of justice, like the golden rule or mutual benevolence, are subject to distortion precisely because we tend to do this.</a></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank">NYT</a></span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XL7cE9oy2PY" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-65526222470051338612012-08-08T23:11:00.000-07:002012-08-08T23:16:59.634-07:00I Am Better At Not Knowing What I Am Doing<br />
<a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=825&fulltext=1&media=" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Poems are made of words that live in bodies — bodies shaped by line breaks, and fixed forever in space, on the page. Picture a gymnast in relation to the trampoline, the invisible line between the two driven equally by unseen forces of gravity and the gymnast’s own strength. When a poem is read aloud, it is a moment of flight. Its words are released into the air, into the spaces between breaths. Many poets, like Charles Olson and the Beats, see the line as an actual unit of breath. The white space left in the wake of the words is the breath materialized. When I was pregnant with my son, I had to re-lineate all my poems to shorten the lines, so I could speak them without becoming breathless.</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-<a href="http://www.erikameitner.com/" target="_blank">Erika Meitner</a>'s "One of the Components is How Long You Are in the Air: On Poetry and Trampoline" at <a href="http://www.lareviewofbooks.org/" target="_blank">Los Angeles Review of Books</a>. If you haven't been reading "We Can Be Heroes: Poetry at the Olympics," you've been missing out.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.thevolta.org/fridayfeature-mainpage.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I am forever telling my students I know nothing about poetry, and they never believe me. I do not know what my poems are about, except on rare occasions, and I never know what they mean. I have met and spoken to many poets who feel the same way, and one among them once put it this way: “The difference between myself and a student is that I am better at not knowing what I am doing.” I couldn’t put it any better than that if I tried.</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-<a href="http://www.thevolta.org/" target="_blank">The Volta</a>, On Mary Ruefle's (Hollins grad!) <a href="http://www.wavepoetry.com/products/madness-rack-and-honey" target="_blank">new collection of lectures</a>.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/15/why-i-still-write-poetry/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=May+15+2012&utm_content=May+15+2012+CID_9ccd0c89ba5194198aa445d18e1699d9&utm_source=Email+marketing+software&utm_term=poetry+and+perseverance" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Another question poets old and young are typically asked in interviews is when and why they decided to become poets. The assumption is that there was a moment when they came to realize there can be no other destiny for them but to write poetry, followed by the announcement to their families that had their mothers exclaim: “Oh God, what did we do wrong to deserve this?” while their fathers ripped out their belts and chased them around the room. I was often tempted to tell the interviewer with a straight face that I had chosen poetry to get my hands on all that big prize money that’s lying around, since informing them that there was never any decision like that in my case inevitably disappoints them. They want to hear something heroic and poetic, and I tell them that I was just another high school kid who wrote poems in order to impress girls, but with no other ambition beyond that. Not being a native speaker of English, they also ask me why I didn’t write my poems in Serbian and wonder how I arrived at the decision to ditch my mother tongue. Again, my answer seems frivolous to them, when I explain that for poetry to be used as an instrument of seduction, the first requirement is that it be understood. No American girl was likely to fall for a guy who reads her love poems in Serbian as they sip Coke.</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Charles Simic's "Why I Still Write Poetry" at <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/" target="_blank">The New York Review of Books</a></span><br />
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<a href="http://thewriterscenter.blogspot.com/2012/08/thorpe-moeckel-doubles-back-on-wild-ice.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While teaching at Hollins University for the last seven years, I’ve also been helping my wife and kids work a little Permaculture farm/homestead, where among the many food/soil building systems, we raise a Nubian goat dairy herd. We make cheeses, yogurts, kefir, and ice cream from that goat milk. We don’t get too crazy with the flavors, and I doubt we’ll get into milking gorillas anytime soon, but in every line of this poem are at least two things we grow, raise, or wild-harvest (and then process and eat) from our 18 acres and the surrounding fields, forest, streams, and rivers. Today there was basil and walnut in the pesto we mixed into a chevre spread for lunch. And the pawpaw will be ripe before too long.</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-<a href="http://fishousepoems.org/archives/thorpe_moeckel/index.shtml" target="_blank">Thorpe Moeckel</a> over at <a href="http://www.poetlore.com/" target="_blank">Poet Lore</a></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.350000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.kwamedawes.com/wp/1125-2/" target="_blank">#55: A part of the poet’s mind will always be elsewhere: sifting, prospecting, foraging for what must be kept. Pity her.</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.350000381469727px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.kwamedawes.com/wp/1125-2/" target="_blank">#56: To steal from the poet you must kill the poet–come to the page with your hands slick with blood and sweat…and tears</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.350000381469727px;"><a href="http://www.kwamedawes.com/wp/1125-2/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">#57: You never hear a carpenter complain of carpenter’s block, do you?</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Kwame Dawes' "Memos to Poets: A Twitter Journey"</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/D0UvF0MBH9M" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-50472480774458989002012-08-03T19:32:00.000-07:002012-08-04T12:25:32.656-07:00Peacock-Dazed<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Two micro-essays on craft by two young poets to whom you should be paying attention:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v11n1/features/tracking_the_muse/schutt_page.shtml" target="_blank">Recently I heard a Slovenian poet draw a distinction between two kinds of writers: those who write facing a wall and those who write facing a window. His point being: the writer who faces a wall engages in a tête-à-tête with the imagination, whereas a window gazer performs the diligent, all too loyal office of copying down the visible world. Clearly, this poet preferred—and considered himself a member of—the wall-facing variety.</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-</span><a href="http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v11n1/poetry/schutt_w/music_page.shtml" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">Will Schutt</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> at </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/" target="_blank">Blackbird</a></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.nereview.com/2012/07/26/at-the-edge-of-two-fields-by-matthew-nienow/" target="_blank">I’m trying to make it as a boat builder in a town full of boat builders. All around me are folks who can do what I can do, and who probably have more experience. But boats aren’t just a job for me. When I step up to a hauled-out 80-ft. schooner, I take in her lines, her tuck, the rake of her transom; I gather the details and have a sense of how she’ll handle in the water. When I climb the scaffolding to tear off a plank, or prod with an awl to see how deep rot runs, I become a part of the whole history of boats, of their myths and legends. Whether I want it or not, I am tied to the lineage of other shipwrights, from Noah to the Norse.</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-</span><a href="http://www.nereview.com/vol-33-no-1-2012/matthew-nienow-itsboa/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">Matthew Nienow</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> at </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.nereview.com/category/ner-digital/" target="_blank">NER Digital</a></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.600000381469727px;"><a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/08/seeking-grace-in-strange-places/" target="_blank">But. Religion, or at least the basic tenets and concepts of Judeo-Christianity, figure prominently in my writing life because, though I am not a religious person, some of my favorite poets were or are. I used to be a poet, so the writing fanning out in back of me, stretched out in a long haphazard peacock-dazed line, is largely still poetry. Some of my favorite poetry has the fire and fury of the Old Testament and some the sweet forgiveness of man’s sins the New Testament promises.</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-</span><a href="http://ambernoellesparks.com/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">Amber Sparks</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> at </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.therumpus.net/" target="_blank">The Rumpus</a></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/elaine_scarry_poetry_literature_reading_empathy_ethics.php" target="_blank">If we assume (on the basis of very incomplete evidence) that literature has in fact helped to diminish acts of injuring—not only during the Humanitarian Revolution, but also in other epochs—what attributes of literature can explain this? Three come immediately to mind: its invitation to empathy, its reliance on deliberative thought, and its beauty.</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-Elaine Scarry at </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/" target="_blank">Boston Review</a></i><br />
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<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/prizes_fellowship" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">The Poetry Foundation and <i>Poetry </i>magazine announced 29 finalists for the 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. They'll announce five winners, each receiving a $15,000 award, by September 1.</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I'm honored and amazed to have my name on the list of finalists. It's an astounding group of poets, and I'm thrilled to join so many young poets I admire</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. All we can do now is hope!</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/u1XMhdAGDgc" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-30434547406742353552012-07-20T21:02:00.001-07:002012-07-20T21:06:24.211-07:00The Peril<br />
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<span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/shooting-at-colorado-theater-showing-batman-movie.html?hp&gwh=8C1713A885AC07CB581A23DF8359BA90" target="_blank">Then, just after midnight on Friday, fantasy became nightmare, and a place of escape became a trap, when a man strode to the front in a multiplex near Denver and opened fire. At least 12 people were killed and 59 wounded, with witnesses describing a scene of claustrophobia, panic and blood. Minutes later, the police arrested James Holmes, 24, in the theater’s parking lot</a>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22px;"><u><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank">NYT</a></span></i></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/greg-ousley-is-sorry-for-killing-his-parents-is-that-enough.html?pagewanted=1&hp&gwh=35D1829B0E8F31E6E8AED2AF2759F9CD" target="_blank">Despite Greg’s age, his case was swiftly waived into the adult justice system. Facing the possibility of life in prison, he accepted a plea agreement of guilty but mentally ill. In early 1994, Greg, then 15, entered the Indiana penitentiary system to begin serving a 60-year sentence. He was one of the youngest adult inmates in the state’s history.</a></span>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/?8qa" target="_blank">NYT Magazine</a></span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_944918685"><span style="text-align: left;">The summer of 2012 offers Americans the best chance yet to get their minds around the problem. In late June, just as a sizzling heat wave was settling across much of the country—in Evansville, Indiana, temperatures rose into the triple digits for ten days, reaching as high as a hundred and seven degrees—wildfires raged in Colorado. Hot and extremely dry conditions promoted the flames’ spread. “It’s no exaggeration to say Colorado is burning,” KDVR, the Fox station in Denver, reported. By the time the most destructive blaze was fully contained, almost three weeks later, it had scorched nearly twenty-nine square miles. Meanwhile, a “super </span><i style="text-align: left;">derecho</i><span style="text-align: left;">”—a long line of thunderstorms—swept from Illinois to the Atlantic Coast, killing at least thirteen people and leaving millions without power.</span></a><span style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/07/23/120723taco_talk_kolbert?mbid=social_mobile_FBshare&t=Is+the+Heat+Wave+of+2012+What+Climate+Change+Looks+Like%3F+%3A+The+New+Yorker" target="_blank"><br /></a><br />-<i><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/" target="_blank">The New Yorker</a></i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719" target="_blank">Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.</a></span><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><br style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />-<i><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/" target="_blank">Rolling Stone</a></i></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://macklemore.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"More than anything, I am aware of how comfortable I (and many other straight people) have become in staying silent on this issue. If we choose to not speak on an issue of injustice out of fear, or how our peers might perceive us, we’re part of the problem. We know the truth, and vainly refuse to uphold it, when people’s lives are caught in the balance."</span></a><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/g1TBgcctcco" width="420"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-19700099726319713652012-07-12T18:14:00.000-07:002012-07-12T18:15:47.178-07:00The Straightforward Articulation of Suffering<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I'm grateful to Washington State's Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken, for <a href="http://kathleenflenniken.com/blog/?p=585" target="_blank">featuring one of my recent poems on <i>The Far Field</i></a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/244246" target="_blank">I remember reading John Berryman’s “Dream Song #14” in my twenties, with its famous opening words, “Life, friends, is boring.” I remember being struck by its wit, irony, playfulness, delight: it is the kind of poem students read aloud to each other in a pool of laughter and admiration, and there is nothing wrong with that, for it reinforces their sense of cynicism and superiority, and it is crucial at that age we find a like-minded group to whom we can belong. I remember rereading the poem, not for the second time, some thirty years later, and being struck by its excruciating pain, which is entirely without irony. Many persons who knew Berryman have remarked that he spoke, always, without irony, which means, simply, that he always meant what he said. If you are going through a particularly stable period of your life, and you encounter his bleakest statements, you will react with chagrin and disbelief, as if listening to the ablest jester. If you are going through a particularly unstable period of your life, the straightforward articulation of suffering that has already twisted and dislocated its bearer renders a tension that will very nearly kill you. But I did not know this then.</a></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-Mary Ruefle at <i><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/" target="_blank">Poetry</a></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/07/henri-cole-visits-hart-cranes-grave.html" target="_blank">A kind of brain fever moved through me as I drove across Ohio and Pennsylvania toward my home in Boston. It was as if I were coming to life, like an insect or tree. The raw fact of my body breathed again. And I felt joy thinking of the elms still standing in Massachusetts after a half century of their blight spreading across America. Hasn’t someone confected blight-resistant elms by now that spring up “like a fountain” (Longfellow)?</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-Henri Cole at <i><a href="http://www.thenewyorker.com/" target="_blank">The New Yorker</a></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px; text-align: left;"><a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/07/conversations-with-writers-braver-than-me-13-cheryl-strayed/" target="_blank">One thing I will say is that you don’t know what will happen if you write the truth. You don’t know what will happen if you decide to write what you feel really compelled to write. You think that there might be this consequence but there might actually be a different sort of outcome, and it could be a positive one.</a></span>
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<span style="line-height: 19px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-An interview with Cheryl Strayed over at <i><a href="http://www.therumpus.net/" target="_blank">The Rumpus</a></i></span></span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wBkmD-5bmCo" width="420"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-88969005709457286762012-07-10T10:36:00.003-07:002012-07-10T10:38:56.250-07:00Inveterate Doodlers<br />
<span style="line-height: 21px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/lib_nobel.html" target="_blank">Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.</a></span></span><br />
<br /><a href="http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/lib_nobel.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;" target="_blank">He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.</a><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;"><br />-Faulkner's Nobel Speech; listen to him deliver it </span><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2012/07/william_faulkner_reads_his_nobel_prize_speech.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;">. </span><br />
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<a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/the-fires-this-time/?gwh=EF6E7C447385ABCC3EDBB4A00005D09C" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;" target="_blank">The pines flame and hiss, shooting sparks on the house next door, a fortress no more. The oaks tumble and crush roofs. Almost 350 homes burn to the ground, and nearly 5 million people lose all electricity in sweltering heat. Lobbyists and congressmen curse at mute cellphones and sweat through their seersucker. The powerful are powerless.</a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br />-</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank">NYT</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /><span style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://imprint.printmag.com/steven-brower/the-visual-art-and-design-of-famous-writers/" target="_blank">Less well-known is that the world’s literati also are cross-talented—that in addition to writing works that have shaped our culture, many poets and authors have practiced visual art as a vital component of their creative output. From William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski to Henry Miller and Sylvia Plath, renowned writers of the twentieth century made paintings, drawings, and collages. These creative outpourings enhance our understanding of their authors’ written works, and stand on their own merits as well. Some of the art is whimsical; Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, were inveterate doodlers. Other examples—such as the work of e.e. cummings—is astonishing in its mastery. Here is a look at the visual output of 19 literary greats.</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-<a href="http://imprint.printmag.com/" target="_blank">Imprint Magazine</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/07/the-age-of-girlfriends.html" target="_blank">The raw thrill of both “How Should a Person Be?” and “Girls” (and let me acknowledge here that I am hardly the first person to compare the two) is in the way they treat heterosexual coupling as secondary, and how they depict the profundity of female friendships, not to mention their real perils—which are quite different from the competitive jockeying that is so often imagined. It is other women, not men, Dunham and Heti seem to be saying, who most impact the evolution of girls into women. Other women, not men, who provide the opportunities for self-expression and self-discovery. Other women, not men, who bear witness to the triumphs and tragedies of young womanhood. Other women, not men, in whom we both find and lose ourselves.</a></span><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span><span style="text-align: left;"><br />-<i><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/" target="_blank">The New Yorker</a></i></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />I have a </span><a href="http://www.quarterlywest.utah.edu/iss_75/iss_75_weddingnightthatwasntwiththunder.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">new poem</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> in the latest issue of </span><a href="http://www.quarterlywest.utah.edu/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank"><i>Quarterly West</i></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. The whole issue is dynamic and well set. There are knock-out poems by </span><a href="http://www.quarterlywest.utah.edu/iss_75/iss_75_lovepoemwithoardockanddog.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">Casey Thayer</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, </span><a href="http://www.quarterlywest.utah.edu/iss_75/iss_75_ruins.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">C. Dale Young</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, </span><a href="http://www.quarterlywest.utah.edu/iss_75/iss_75_underwearpastoral.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">Sally Wen Mao</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, and others. Big thanks to </span><a href="http://lisafaycoutley.blogspot.com/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">LFC</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> and the gang over at U of U for seeing fit to include me in such righteous company. </span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/bjfTK7jSkYU" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-17849996482218404912012-07-05T14:10:00.003-07:002012-07-05T14:10:22.382-07:00Histrionic Exhaustion<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">After a weekend in the DC swelter, I'm back in the Pacific Northwest. Read Denis Johnson's <i>Train Dreams</i> on a layover. Read it again on the plane. Now I can't stop thinking about wolves and Idaho and wildfires. I wrote a new poem the other day (which contains all of the aforementioned obsessions). I'm thinking about moving back East. I'm thinking about the Blue Ridge. I'm glad the days are so long.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;"><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/" target="_blank">Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.</a></span>
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<span style="color: #333333; line-height: 21px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank">NYT</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/06/06/fact-checking-ray-bradbury/" target="_blank"><span style="line-height: 21px;">Ray Bradbury was, by then, eighty-nine years old. He’d had a stroke in 1999, and it showed in the interview manuscript: he misremembered dates, names, years; he attributed books to the wrong authors; the quotes he offered from memory—I remember one in particular from </span><em style="line-height: 21px;">Moby-Dick</em><span style="line-height: 21px;">—were nine-tenths invention. It made for a lot of work. But what I found in the interview were things that had escaped me for much of my undergraduate and graduate years—years spent earning a supposedly literary education. He promotes friendship, love, self-discovery, the daily intake of poetry. He instructs us to read from every kind of literature we feel drawn to. (Speaking about his own influences, he calls himself a “conglomerate heap of trash.”) He talks about the “fiction of ideas,” a term he uses to describe the need for literature to engage with major developments in science, art, and contemporary culture at large. He warns against the dangers of intellectual snobbery (“If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me,” he says, “I’d have killed myself”). He asserts the primary importance of public libraries. In the early days of e-books and Kindles (“Those aren’t books,” he says. “A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hand and pray to it.”), he makes a case for the printed page.</span></a>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/" target="_blank">The Paris Review</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Singers like Cold Specks make it easier to believe.</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EUDWLK5RhGM" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-27503860090869056342012-06-16T00:43:00.001-07:002012-06-16T00:56:50.312-07:00Something Akin to Beef Jerky<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Write, write, write. Read, read, read.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.bretanthonyjohnston.com/extras/doc_onrejection.html" target="_blank">We hear that rejection preys upon and depends upon the writer's ego; seemingly informed people tell us that successful writers appropriate rejection and use it as fuel, that they co-opt the editor's or agent's malice, stupidity, or worst of all, indifference, and they cure it until it becomes a kind of treat, something akin to beef jerky. And we hear that those who reject our work are not rejecting us, they're not rejecting our souls because if we could get our souls on the page, we wouldn't get rejected at all; instead we'd get flown first-class to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature. They say this because most writers, especially beginning or unpublished writers, freak out over rejection. To the good men and women offering this consolation and advice, I say, okay, yes, sure, but you've obviously never ridden a skateboard.</a></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px; text-align: justify;">-Bret Anthony Johnson's "</span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">On Rejection; or, Dear Author, After Careful Consideration</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px; text-align: justify;">," an essay that originally appeared in </span><i style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://shenandoahliterary.org/" target="_blank">Shenandoah</a></i></span><br />
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<a href="http://jeffreyelevine.com/2012/06/14/put-the-phone-down-on-lists-and-the-insolence-of-loss/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I see many poems by many poets whose intentions are so rooted in story–in narrative–that they worry themselves away from the necessary conventions (such as they are) of the lyric, and I see many poems by those whose intentions are so rooted in the lyric that the planks and staircases of narrative have vacated the premises, and neither danger nor dramatic tension nor gloom of night curl their dark fingers into the tiny space between the windowsill and the just barely lifted sash.</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://jeffreyelevine.com/2012/06/14/put-the-phone-down-on-lists-and-the-insolence-of-loss/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Whether working through three or four dozen drafts en route to bringing a single poem to that place where it begins to breathe on its own, or whether merely dipping into the current, there is a certain order that nevertheless emerges, willed by the absence of will, but ordered by the writer’s divining rod (which is to say, by a whole lot of trial and error, c.f., luck) that informs every Grecian Urn, every idea of order, even in a place so orderly orderless as Key West (have you been?) From any angle, it is necessary in the process making art to be wholly unmindful of being in the process of making art. </span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-This essay by Jeffrey Levine got my cogs turning.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/16/us/in-new-mexico-a-city-divies-and-unites-for-a-dog-named-blue.html?hp&gwh=408ED2616D7065C1F1F2B9B7A2915FBD" target="_blank">This is the story of a leash, a law and a city’s dueling definitions of compassion. It is a story of limits tested and stretched; of strife, threats and, possibly, compromise.</a></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/16/us/in-new-mexico-a-city-divies-and-unites-for-a-dog-named-blue.html?hp&gwh=408ED2616D7065C1F1F2B9B7A2915FBD" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 22px; text-align: left;" target="_blank">Mostly, though, it is a story about a dog named Blue who, this week, brought this small desert city together after nearly tearing it apart.</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />-</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">NY Times</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2012/06/how-silence-works-trappist-monks" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In my daily work the habit of silence (I've been here 35 years) helps me to focus, even to put aside pre-occupying worries while I concentrate on a particular responsibility. That can be preparing the community's meal, typing the entries for our website, hearing confessions, preparing a class for the novitiate, chanting the psalms at community prayers when I have a cold, whatever. But I have learned that I started out with certain powers of concentration, so I may not be too accurate here; I grew up in NYC and it's second nature to me to block out background noise. But I can say that the habit of silence keeps me from seeking additional noise. I'm not uneasy when it's <i>very</i> quiet or when I'm totally alone. But I don't find silence making tasks easier to complete.</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2012/06/how-silence-works-trappist-monks" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The silence <i>does</i> make me aware of my inner workings, however, what we call in the monastery, "self-knowledge." I can't pretend that I'm always a nice guy, always patient, always calm and receptive. I have to admit that I can be abrupt, cold to offenders, or would often prefer efficiency to the messiness of other people's moods. Silence seems to keep me from idealizing myself.</span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-Fascinating interview over at the <a href="http://www.theawl.com/" target="_blank">The Awl</a> with Trappist monks (who have taken a vow of silence)</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4-oAY8FhCV0" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-68368315727657100512012-06-04T23:45:00.000-07:002012-06-04T23:48:04.304-07:00Dreaming of Fields<a href="http://www.kplu.org/post/what-cafe-racer-was-killings" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 16px;" target="_blank">Snowstorms bring in more customers, earlier, to pass the time and watch the cars slosh past on Roosevelt. The bartender will make you a boilermaker, a martini, or an espresso, whatever you like, and even if it isn’t cheaper than any of the other dozen fine bars and cafes in the neighborhood, it feels cheaper. Most everyone tips well. I usually just get drip coffee from the afterthought coffeemaker beside the very nice espresso machine, a machine that probably used to be a Vespa. Some days there are several fleets of scooters out front, parked closely like sheep at a trough. Often there is a dog, a small one on the counter, a larger one somewhere in the building, curled up, asleep and dreaming of fields.</a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 16px;">-via <a href="http://www.npr.org/" target="_blank">NPR</a>, Ed Skoog reflects on Cafe Racer before the tragic shootings of last week.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_1220889410"></span>For Drew and Joe, our resident and beloved musicians, the heart and backbone of anyone who has ever graced the Cafe Racer's stage: Find one of their brilliant records (my personal favorite is <em>A Beautiful Trainwreck</em>, the soundtrack to this missive) and play it LOUD. Crack a Pabst Blue Ribbon or two (or seven), and tell the dirtiest jokes you know. It's okay to cry, but try to laugh more. I guarantee that's how the boys would want it. Remember, these are the guys behind the song "Gutter Uv Luv," which features the line, "Someday I'm gonna be a star." Drew wasn't lying when he sang that, and we should always celebrate the truth, singing it in the streets.<span id="goog_1220889411"></span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/06/02/an-open-letter-from-the-cafe-racer-staff" target="_blank">For Kim, our sunshine, our ray of light on a cloudy day, our girl with a heart of gold: Go to your favorite neighborhood bar, flash the bartender your prettiest, brightest smile, and order a Kimosa (that's champagne with cranberry and/or pineapple juice). Tell them that it's delicious (you won't be lying), and then talk to EVERYONE around you and do your level best to make them feel special. Again it's okay to cry, but try to smile; Kim had the best smile in the world, and now we need to pick up the slack.</a><br /><br /><a href="http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/06/02/an-open-letter-from-the-cafe-racer-staff" target="_blank">For Don, our neighbor and friend, the all-around best guy that everyone should be lucky enough to know—the nicest, smartest man on the block: Order an Americano from your favorite cafe and proceed to tell the truest tall tales you can. Mean every single word of them. Try to shake everyone's hand and look them in the eye while you're doing it. Then make sure that everyone on your block knows and loves you, and that you know and love them right back. Also, learn the saxophone.</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-via <a href="http://www.thestranger.com/" target="_blank">The Stranger</a>, An Open Letter from Cafe Racer</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/nothing-good-gets-away.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/nothing-good-gets-away.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-via <a href="http://www.lettersofnote.com/" target="_blank">Letters of Note</a>, a letter from Steinbeck to his son.</span></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0XQBDvbNQL0" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-46499188734868395782012-05-13T21:47:00.002-07:002012-05-13T21:49:26.085-07:00Relentlessly Showcased<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Headed to New York this week to visit old friends, and to<a href="http://www.nyqreadings.org/"> read some poems at the Cornelia Street Cafe.</a> Will be the first time in the city in over 10 years. Can't wait.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/05/11/azerbaijan_eurovision_song_contest_and_keeping_activists_and_citizens_off_the_internet_.html">Most authoritarian states treat the Internet the same way they do print media: They censor it. Azerbaijan has taken a more insidious route. They do not heavily filter or block the Internet but instead leave it open, allowing the government to better monitor and punish rebellious activities. In 2010, two online activists were arrested for posting a video satirizing government waste on YouTube. Their case was never mentioned in Azerbaijan’s print media—but was relentlessly showcased online, where it frightened the bloggers’ peers. As a result, Azerbaijan’s frequent Internet users became less supportive of activism, and online dissent has quieted.</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/05/11/azerbaijan_eurovision_song_contest_and_keeping_activists_and_citizens_off_the_internet_.html">This strategy worked quite well with elites. But after the events in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, the Azerbaijani government decided to adopt a more aggressive strategy to shield regular citizens from discussions of dissent or collective action. Azerbaijan has moved from intimidating users who are already online to keeping the rest of the nation offline by making social media use seem like a form of bad citizenship.</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-via <a href="http://www.slate.com/">Slate</a><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><a href="http://www.waccamawjournal.com/pages.php?x=427">At some point I decide to do something with this love—I trust it. I wholeheartedly believe that poetry can teach me how to live my life. I see that godawful earnestness in me and am embarrassed. I want so desperately to mean. When I make that choice, I accept that I will pass from the permitted to the forbidden. I’m not sure love is a descent, but I hope it is a move towards something deeper, something unknown. It not only asks for change, but for a willingness to accept whatever lies on the other side of the threshold. What can a poem teach you? A poem is not a poet, who is flawed and weak and sometimes cruel. But I trust the idea of poetry—that there is a way of living that keeps you wholly awake to the world. There is a power I can learn from, a consciousness I can inhabit that teaches me to face my life bravely. I want to deserve the life I’ve been given.</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-Traci Brimhall in the new issue of <a href="http://www.waccamawjournal.com/">Waccamaw</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /><a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/05/the-week-in-greed-6-to-behave-like-the-fallen-world/">That’s how adolescence works. It’s a place of tremendous pain and recklessness, a place where you have to pretend not to care about anyone or anything too much because to do so would release the chaos of your actual self into the world. It’s a place where tyranny resides as much in circumstance as in character, a place where our shadow selves emerge: ugly, ferocious, lit up by shame.</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/05/the-week-in-greed-6-to-behave-like-the-fallen-world/">I remember every single cruelty I endured and inflicted, teasing a disabled teacher behind her back, grappling with a classmate and ripping open the stitches on his head, weeping in fear and confusion at the kids who bullied me in metal shop. Adolescence scrawls its crimes on the heart.</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">-Steve Almond is writing beautiful and true things again at </span><a href="http://www.therumpus.net/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Rumpus</a><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/OI3shBXlqsw" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-91758412622508045512012-05-03T13:07:00.001-07:002012-05-03T13:14:30.170-07:00Wasteland of Opportunity<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_print.html" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_print.html">The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.</a></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_print.html" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /><a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/75861.html#ixzz1tq35bHrc">Hall remembers the president talking about Robert Frost’s trip to Russia when Obama gave Hall the National Medal of Arts back in 2010. But he didn’t realize how deep the president’s interest in poetry ran: When Obama whispered a few sentences into his left ear — in which, Hall said with a laugh, he’s stone deaf — he didn’t think too much about what he was missing.</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: #332200; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /><a href="http://jjgallaher.blogspot.com/2012/04/marjorie-perloff-on-dominance.html">This is a major problem in contemporary poetry. The young are not reading the older living poets as much as they should, but it’s also obvious to me that the older poets are also not reading the young. </a><br /><br />-A great conversation taking place over at <a href="http://jjgallaher.blogspot.com/">John Gallaher's blog</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?pagewanted=all">We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?pagewanted=all"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/53-of-recent-college-grads-are-jobless-or-underemployed-how/256237/">More than half of America's recent college graduates are either unemployed or working in a job that doesn't require a bachelor's degree, the Associated Press reported this weekend. The story would seem to be more evidence that, regardless of your education, the wake of the Great Recession has been a terrible time to be young and hunting for work. </a></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/53-of-recent-college-grads-are-jobless-or-underemployed-how/256237/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 19px;">But are we really becoming another Greece or Spain, a wasteland of opportunity for anybody under the age of 25? Not quite. What the new statistics really tell us about is the changing nature, and value, of higher education.</a><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/U6gKOKO484w" width="560"></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-90945344834495975652012-04-16T21:11:00.003-07:002012-04-16T21:39:11.046-07:00Momentous Initiative<div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; "><span><span style="line-height: 20px; " >Very happy to have a <a href="http://thejournalmag.org/archives/1367">newer poem</a> in the <a href="http://thejournalmag.org/archives/tag/36-2-spring-2012">latest issue of The Journal</a>, an all-poetry issue including some great work by <a href="http://thejournalmag.org/archives/1377">Oliver de la Paz</a>, <a href="http://thejournalmag.org/archives/1350">Bruce Bond</a>, <a href="http://thejournalmag.org/archives/1341">Amanda Auchter</a>, <a href="http://thejournalmag.org/archives/1391">Martha Silano</a>, and many others. Big thanks to the folks at OSU for putting together such a beautiful issue. </span></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " >********</span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><span style="line-height: 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/opinion/smokeless-in-seattle.html?_r=1">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.</a></span></span> </span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; "><span><span style="line-height: 22px;" >-The Stranger writer Dominic Holden with an Op-Ed in the New York Times</span></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " >*********</span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><span style="line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/the-justice-department-just-made-jeff-bezos-dictator-for-life/255811/">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. </a></span> </span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; "><span><span style="line-height: 20px; " >-<i><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/">The Atlantic</a></i></span></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " >*********</span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; "><span><span style="line-height: 20px;" ><br /></span></span></div><div><span><span style="line-height: 20px; " ><div><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/In-College-Classrooms-the/131550/">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."</a></div><div><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/In-College-Classrooms-the/131550/"><br /></a></div><div><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/In-College-Classrooms-the/131550/">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.</a></div><div><br /></div><div>-<i><a href="http://www.chronicle.com/">Chronicle of Higher Education</a></i></div></span></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; "><span><span style="line-height: 20px;" ><br /></span></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " >*********</span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephanie-vanderslice/mfa-creative-writing_b_1414225.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false">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.</a></span> </span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; "><span><span style="line-height: 20px; " >-MFA Round<i>-</i>table at <i><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/">Huffington Post</a></i></span></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >*********</span></div><span style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; " ><br /><a href="http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html#.T4w-nOq-OoI.facebook"><span style="line-height: 19px; text-align: justify; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">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.</span> </a></span><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><span>-Kurt Vonnegut's letter to Charles McCarthy, School Board Head at Drake High School, North Dakota<br /></span><br /><br /><span>*********<br /></span><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UsuHjufNs-U" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></span></div>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-26182992313900959362012-04-12T14:57:00.003-07:002012-04-12T15:07:29.112-07:00Ramshackle Resiliency<div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><a href="http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/harvard-divinity-bulletin/articles/by-love-we-are-led-to-god" style="line-height: 21px; font-size: 100%; ">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.</a></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 21px; "><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 21px; ">-wonderful essay on faith and poetry by Christian Wiman, from <i><a href="http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/harvard-divinity-bulletin">Harvard Divinity Bulletin</a></i></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 21px; "><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 21px; ">**********</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 21px; "><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span><span style="line-height: 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span><a href="http://billmoyers.com/segment/poet-christian-wiman-on-love-faith-and-cancer/">“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.”</a></span></span> </span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 21px; "><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 21px; ">-Bill Moyers interviews Christian Wiman</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 21px; "><br /><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 21px; ">**********</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 21px; "><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/i-saw-the-best-minds-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-facebook/#.T4Om3ypcKUA.facebook">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.</a><br /><br />-via <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/">The Poetry Foundation</a>, and a great response by Reb Livingston, <a href="http://reblivingston.blogspot.com/2012/04/yes.html">here</a>.</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">*************<br /><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Read two of <a href="http://lorcaloca.blogspot.com/">Eduardo</a>'s <a href="http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15442">beautiful poems</a> at Poetry Daily!</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br /></span></div><span style="line-height: normal; "><br />*************</span><br /><br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/djUMsKh1E1Q" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-14471390668807833122012-04-05T14:45:00.003-07:002012-04-05T15:10:18.581-07:00Astoundingly Low Profile<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br />Read, read, read. Write, write, write.</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >************</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berrigan/incredible.html"><span ><span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">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. </span> </span></a></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berrigan/incredible.html"><span ><br /></span></a></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berrigan/incredible.html"><span >....</span></a></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berrigan/incredible.html"><span ><br /></span></a></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berrigan/incredible.html">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></span> </span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >-A friend pointed me to this lecture by Ted Berrigan. I think it's really wonderful.<br /><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >**************</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><span style="line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/new-yorks-finger-lakes-the-next-great-wine-region-in-america/255037/">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.</a></span> </span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >-via <i>The Atlantic</i></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >**************</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; "><span><span style="line-height: 19px; " ><a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017883663_amazonmain25.html#.T3kfiZJvVoA.twitter">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.</a></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; "><span><span style="line-height: 19px; " ><a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017883663_amazonmain25.html#.T3kfiZJvVoA.twitter">Its value in the stock market alone puts it ahead of Boeing and second only to Microsoft in the Northwest.</a></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; "><span><span style="line-height: 19px; " ><a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017883663_amazonmain25.html#.T3kfiZJvVoA.twitter">But as Amazon prepares to turn 18 this summer, it cuts an astoundingly low profile in the civic life of its hometown.</a></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; "><span ><br /></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; "><span >-via <a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/index.html">Seattle Times</a></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; "><span ><br /></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; "><span >************</span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; "><span ><br /><a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/04/01/148918546/first-listen-alabama-shakes-boys-and-girls">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.</a></span></p><p></p></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >-Another <a href="http://www.npr.org/series/98679384/first-listen">NPR First Listen</a></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >************</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >Mark Strand has a great Clint Eastwood voice.</span></div><span ><br /> <iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/38381880?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></span><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >***********</span></div><div><span ><br />More music.</span></div><span ><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5voyBg9CU9s" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></span>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-49676163993549649152012-03-29T14:28:00.002-07:002012-03-29T14:39:15.392-07:00Even the Best Voices Have to Mumble Through<div style="line-height: normal; "><span >A very sad day for language and stories, losing Adrienne Rich, Earl Scruggs, and Harry Crews all on the same day. Rich was one of my mother's favorite poets and eventually, one of mine:</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><b><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; ">V<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; ">This apartment full of books could crack open<br />to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes<br />of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face<br />the underside of everything you’ve loved—<br />the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag<br />even the best voices have to mumble through,<br />the silence burying unwanted children—<br />women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.<br />Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books<br />so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;<br />yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift<br />loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,<br />Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,<br />and the ghosts—their hands, clasped for centuries—<br />of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,<br />centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;<br />and we still have to stare into the absence<br />of men who would not, women who could not, speak<br />to our life—this still unexcavated hole<br />called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; "><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; "><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; "><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; "><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; ">-from <i>The Dream of a Common Language</i> by Adrienne Rich (W.W. Norton, 1978)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; "><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 14px; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; "><br /></span></p></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span >**********</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span ><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span><a href="http://therumpus.net/2012/03/a-place-where-we-are-everything/">When Trayvon Martin was killed, he was wearing a hoodie and somehow, this hoodie has become one of the focal points of the growing and necessary conversation about this young man’s death, the justice he deserves, and the racial climate in this country that makes a grown man with a gun perceive a 17 year old holding Skittles as a threat because of his skin color. I will admit to having not known that a hoodie was some kind of universal symbol for criminality. I teach on a college campus and I see probably five hundred hoodies a day on young men and women from all walks of life. In my world, a hoodie is a useful piece of clothing. That is a privilege, too, I suppose. When it comes to discussing Trayvon Martin and race, it is important to remember that the hoodie is beside the point. Discussing the hoodie is the same as discussing what a woman was wearing if she was raped. What was George Zimmerman wearing when he shot Trayvon Martin? Did his outfit contribute to his paranoia and vigilantism? Discussing the hoodie is as ridiculous as trying to come up with an answer to that question.</a></span></span> </span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " >-Roxanne Gay at <a href="http://www.therumpus.net">The Rumpus</a></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " >***********</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span ><a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/03/25/149062982/first-listen-of-monsters-and-men-my-head-is-an-animal"><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Each song on </span><em style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">My Head Is An Animal</em><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "> — out here on April 3 — demonstrates Of Monsters and Men's wide-eyed, openhearted exuberance. It's an album that rings with unbridled joy, just in time for spring.</span></a> </span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span ><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " >***********<br /><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span ><span style="line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/a-slow-books-manifesto/254884/">I'm all for efforts like these. But why so much emphasis on what goes into our mouths, and so little on what goes into our minds? What about having fun while exerting greater control over what goes into your brain? Why hasn't a hip alliance emerged that's concerned about what happens to our intellectual health, our country, and, yes, our happiness when we consume empty-calorie entertainment? The Slow Food manifesto lauds "quieter pleasures" as a means of opposing "the universal folly of Fast Life"—yet there's little that seems more foolish, loudly unpleasant, and universal than the screens that blare in every corner of America (at the airport, at the gym, in the elevator, in our hands). "Fast" entertainment, consumed mindlessly as we slump on the couch or do our morning commute, pickles our brains—and our souls.</a></span> </span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span ><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " >***********</span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 17px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span ><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/03/28/hemingway_kills_a_cat_in_newly_public_letter.html">I still had the rifle and I explained to them they had come at a bad time and to please understand and go away. But the rich Cadillac psycho said, ‘We have come at a most interesting time. Just in time to see the great Hemingway cry because he has to kill a cat.</a></span></span> </div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " ><br /></span></div><div style="line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 24px; text-align: -webkit-auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " >***********</span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></div><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/De3moqGPIlU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2200152359949161780.post-53542258017742215752012-03-18T19:37:00.002-07:002012-03-18T20:15:06.542-07:00March Gladness<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span >Are you watching these basketball games? Holy moly.</span></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span ><br /></span></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span >************</span></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span ><br /></span></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/fashion/2012/03/patagonia_yvon_chouinard_s_company_makes_technical_climbing_gear_how_d_it_catch_on_with_the_rest_of_us_.html"><span ><span style="line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; ">Though Patagonia caters to dirt bags, the company’s success—it will clear more than $500 million in sales this year—has for many years depended on a different kind of customer: the dog walker. The dog walker buys gear designed for the mountains and puts it to use in the canyons of midtown, the office park, the tree-lined streets of suburbia. He may aspire to the dirt-bag lifestyle, or even have lived it in the years before career or children intervened, but now he wears his fleece to keep warm during Spot’s evening constitutional. The dog walker takes comfort in knowing his Super Pluma Jacket</span><span style="line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "> is designed for the harshest conditions, but he’ll never rely on its gusseted underarm panels or harness-compatible pockets. He does, however, think those things look cool.</span> </span></a></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/fashion/2012/03/patagonia_yvon_chouinard_s_company_makes_technical_climbing_gear_how_d_it_catch_on_with_the_rest_of_us_.html"><span ><br /></span></a></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/fashion/2012/03/patagonia_yvon_chouinard_s_company_makes_technical_climbing_gear_how_d_it_catch_on_with_the_rest_of_us_.html"><span style="line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; ">This state of affairs is not necessarily pleasing to Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard. “We outgrew our loyal customer base and increasingly were selling to yuppies, posers, and wanna-bes,” he told </span><em style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span ><span style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 255, 153);">Inc.</span></span></em><span style="line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto; "> back in 1992. “These people don’t need this shit to get in their Jeep Cherokees and drive to Connecticut for the weekend.”</span></a> </span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >-<i><a href="http://www.slate.com">Slate</a></i></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >*************</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><span style="line-height: 22px; "><a href="http://corduroybooks.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/problems-of-solipsism/">Let’s be real clear: however passionately right-wing news consumers believe the media’s a liberal moutpiece, owned and run by Rothschilds and Jews and commies and beholden to hippie leftist snobs and elites in power, there is, at present, no left-wing analog to Fox. Whatever your beliefs of the Big Three networks, not one of them takes part in the sensationalistic slanting of facts as does Fox. Further, no network besides Fox has such an unclear (or, better, permeable) barrier between commentary and news—bias and fact, basically. Hate Diane Sawyer, or Anderson Cooper? Fine, but at least they’re attempting to, without bias, cover, not create, news.</a></span></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >-<i><a href="http://corduroybooks.wordpress.com/">Corduroy Books</a></i></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >*************</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="line-height: 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hp"><span >Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.</span></a></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><span style="font-style: normal; ">-</span><i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com">NYT</a></i></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span >*************</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/magazine/is-silence-going-extinct.html">Indeed, though soundscape ecology has hardly begun, natural soundscapes already face a crisis. Humans have irrevocably altered the acoustics of the entire globe — and our racket continues to spread. Missing or altered voices in a soundscape tend to indicate broader environmental problems. For instance, at least one invasive species, the red-billed leiothrix of East Asia, appears to use its clamorous chatter to drown out the native European blackbird in Northern Italy. Noise can mask mating calls, cause stress and prevent animals from hearing alarms, the stirrings of prey and other useful survival cues. And as climate change prompts a shift in creatures’ migration schedules, circadian rhythms and preferred habitats — reshuffling the where and when of their calls — soundscapes are altered, too. Soundscape ecologists hope they can save some ecosystems, but they also realize they will bear witness to many finales. “There may be some very unique soundscapes around the world that — just through normal human activities — would be lost forever,” Pijanowski says — unless he and colleagues can record them before they disappear. An even more critical task, he thinks, is alerting people to the way “soundscapes provide us with a sense of place” and an emotional bond with the natural world that is unraveling. As children, our grandparents could hope to swim in a lake or lie in a meadow for whole afternoons without hearing a motorboat, car or plane; today the engineless hour is all but extinct, and we’ve grown accustomed to constant, mild auditory intrusions. “Humans are becoming an increasingly more urban species, and so we’re surrounding ourselves with concrete and buildings” and “the low hum of the urban landscape,” Pijanowski says. “We’re kind of severing the acoustic link that humans have with nature.”</a></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><span >-<i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com">NYT</a><br /></i><br /><br />************</span><br /><br /><br /><span ><span style="font-size: 100%;"><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/AmZJUfcxrvc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></span></span>Luke Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01485195273934420368noreply@blogger.com0