Proof of Blog

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

Jeanne Larsen is interviewed at the Southeast Review

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

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

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

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

-Ed Skoog over at Coldfront

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

-from The Paris Review

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Killer first line of the moment:

We learn to live without passion.

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

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

from NYT

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So, so, so good.

Liberating Ourselves from the Thrall

2011-12-30T17:15:00.000-08:00

2011 has run itself out. The world will not slow down. A whole sea of wonderful things happened this year, as did some not-so-wonderfuls, but that's the way it goes. I'm hugely grateful for all the kind and funny people in my life--and look forward to more in 2012, where ever it takes us. Thanks for stopping by--happy new year!

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Rookery, Traci Brimhall’s smart, sensual debut and the recipient of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s 2009 First Book Award, opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson: “Split the Lark—and you’ll find the Music.” If we read this as an imperative to find the muse in birdsong, it stands in useful contrast to the preface poem, “Prayer for Deeper Water.” In that poem, a man attributes his hatred of women to those who do not recognize “the frightened wingless birds” singing within their chests; he abhors their “stuttering” flutter against his body. The speaker gently resists, citing the blessings of the earthly moment—“Even the shape of your mouth is a miracle”—and her confidence in her own inner mystery. She asks him to “forget the beginning,” to move forward and embrace the real world and its flawed denizens.

-Sandra Beasley reviews Traci Brimhall's book Rookery in the new issue of Blackbird, which also has some of Traci's lovely poems, as well as excellent new work from Matthew Nienow, Erica Dawson, and Malachi Black. Go get you some.

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I am now going to proffer some little things that may combine in your mind to mean something, or not. They may mean something discretely, or not. They may combine better in an order I do not have the wit to determine, but that is okay, since you are having to hear them in the air where they are already subject to the Brownian motion of podium slur and so are already combining in the weird indeterminate order of the misheard and the partially heard. I grasped Brownian motion before flunking out of chemistry school. Had the mother-in-law who powdered herself so prodigiously spilled talc into the toilet, a distinct possibility given the liberality of the dusting of her cruller, you could have seen the talc move on the toilet water in what is called Brownian motion. If there is calculus to describe Brownian motion I mercifully flunked out still innocent of it. That one can even now utter the clause “if there is calculus” is an indicator of supreme naivete because there is calculus to describe everything, which is why, aside from reading Mr. Williams when I was supposed to read Mr. Morrison and Mr. Boyd, I flunked out of chemistry school. I am going on about this now not merely because of my giant reluctance to start the Craft Talk without Craft but also because remaining innocent of things is in my view an important part of writing, which will become clear if I ever start the talk.

-Padgett Powell's winding and wonderful craft lecture from a recent visit to Columbia University.

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In fact, I don’t want to consider erasing any of the poets she includes; since we’re in virtual space, for now, hurrah for abundance. Let them stay; we can simply agree to disagree about who the rising stars might be. I think Dove should, however, come clean about two categories she refers to – the too-expensive poems and the buried antipathies. It would be valuable for me to know exactly what poems and poets were disqualified for economic reasons. It must have been frustrating to know that, although she was engaged to render a personal, rather than a consensus, anthology, she would be constrained by inadequate funds. If she would reveal those expensive works, we could see more clearly what her ideal anthology would have looked like. I would really love to see her ideal Table of Contents.

-Editor R.T. Smith weighs in on the Penguin Anthology

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MONEY DERIVES ITS MEANING from society, not from those who own the largest piles of it. Recognizing this fact is the first move toward liberating ourselves from the thrall of concentrated capital. We need to desanctify money, reminding ourselves that it is not a god ordained to rule over us, nor is it a natural force like gravity, which operates beyond our control. It is a human invention, like baseball or Monopoly, governed by rules that are subject to change and viable only so long as we agree to play the game. We need to see and to declare that the money game as it is currently played in America produces a few big winners, who thereby acquire tyrannical power over the rest of us as great as that of any dictator or monarch; that they are using this power to skew the game more and more in their favor; and that the net result of this money game is to degrade the real sources of our well-being.

-Scott Russell Sanders, via Orion Magazine

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Powerhouse.

The Best Deal

2011-12-13T21:44:00.000-08:00

Woke up this morning to find my poem "Problems with the Dictionary," from the latest issue of the Southwest Review, featured on Verse Daily. Talk about a great Christmas present--I've had Verse Daily as my home page for about four years and have always admired their taste, their mission, and their simplicity. The poem comes from my manuscript-in-progress, and risks (near) rhyming couplets.

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More and more, though, the national perception of poetic loci is shifting; that is, the concept of real versus imagined and desired location is blurring due to the Internet; geography loses significance. When you can access poems, biographies, interviews, critiques, photographs and even, via video, "live appearances"with just a few keystrokes, a lyric poet from Anchorage becomes as immediate as the narrative wit from Philadelphia.

-a compelling conversation between Rita Dove and Jericho Brown, from the BAP Blog

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When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

via The Nation

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“There is no point in fighting them or explaining to them that we should be able to coexist civilly in the marketplace,” she wrote me. “I don’t think they care. I do think it’s worthwhile explaining to customers that the lowest price point does not always represent the best deal. If you like going to a bookstore then it’s up to you to support it. If you like seeing the people in your community employed, if you think your city needs a tax base, if you want to buy books from a person who reads, don’t use Amazon.”

Op-Ed by Richard Russo in NYT

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Best-selling poetry books of 2011

Horoscopes for the Dead / Billy Collins
Copies sold: 18,406
*Author’s est. earnings: $44, 177

Leavings / Wendell Berry
Copies sold: 2, 928
*Author’s est. earnings: $4,377

Come, Thief / Jane Hirshfield
Copies sold: 2,250
*Author’s est. earnings: $5,625

*Assumes a 10 percent royalty rate.

282,000 Copies of Tim Tebow’s autobiography, Through My Eyes, sold since its May release.

via New York Magazine

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This was an amazing night of music.

Takes Away the Luster

2011-12-10T13:45:00.000-08:00

Seattle is gray and cold, but mostly dry. Hard frosts in the morning. Great notebook-scribbling weather.

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This is a recording from 1959 of Flannery O'Connor reading A Good Man is Hard to Find at Vanderbilt University.

Probably one of the coolest things in the world right now.

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Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem—there has to be part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility.

-an interview with W.S. Merwin (which has sent me back to his books, which have me wide-eyed all over again)

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Killer first line of the moment:

Now close the windows and hush all the fields:

from Robert Frost's "Now Close the Windows"

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What They Say They're Fighting About: How we should analyze and grade poetry. It's pretty clear Vendler is more selective. Her argument being that letting everyone into the club, the list, or in this case, the anthology, takes away the luster from actually being included. And it's not unlike the same debates in the world of pop culture like the gripes with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or the selections process of an NCAA tournament, or a Michelin list. Dove's point obviously counters the notion that fewer is better, as she points out that Vendler loses out on diversity, and perhaps much more by focusing on her chosen few.

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How about some end-of-the-year lists?

NPR's Best Books of 2011

Paste Magazines Best New Bands of 2011

KEXP's John Richard's Top 10 Albums of 2011

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I Want to Care About It All

2011-11-15T20:42:00.000-08:00

A hard frost the last three nights. Rain in the mornings and the coonhound won't leave the porch. We're settling-in here. There's snow in the mountains and soon we'll be skiing. It's time for running in sweatpants, reading near the space heater, and getting dark early. Thanksgiving is a week away.

Let's say that again: Thanksgiving is a week away.

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Killer first line of the moment:

How I hope never to attend that party again.

from "Tercets for Naiads" by Ben Doyle

(Radio, Radio, LSU Press, 2001)

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There is a shooting in Norway. A troubled but popular singer dies. The U.S. economy implodes. Unemployment rises. Economies in other countries collapse. The earth cracks open on an island and then in another country and another country and another country. Floods wash away an entire town. A dictator is overthrown and another and another and another. A terrorist is assassinated. A dictator goes into hiding. He is found. He is killed. Everywhere, the earth is dry and when it rains, it is never enough. Children are starving. Their parents are starving. Women and their bodies and their right to make choices about their bodies are increasingly under attack. A starlet who never had a chance continues to spiral out of control. Real housewives act messy all over the place. A celebrity who is famous for being famous for making a sex tape gets married on television. Less than three months later, she divorces her made for television husband. An innovator dies and his life is bared for examination. A teenage girl’s sex tape goes viral and worse yet, people watch. Politicians start their campaigns and race each other to the bottom. The world moves at such a bewildering pace these days. Everything demands our attention. There is hardly time to breathe. Or think. Or feel.

I want to care about all of it, the atrocious and the admirable and the awesome and the absurd. I don’t want to feel numb.

-gorgeous and well-wrought essay by Roxane Gay over at The Rumpus

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We’ve turned a fine-tuned hunting animal, the wolf, into a wide variety of creatures, from the wolf-looking shepherds to the bizarre toy breeds. Before domestication, dog’s life was tough. But when people pulled specific wolves out of their packs and began breeding them, we changed everything. There were some traits that made this easy – the social structure of wolves, for example, made them predisposed to belonging to a community. Still, we opened up a number of genetic traits and allowed them to express variety that would have been fatal in the wild. We not only allowed these traits to persist, we encouraged them. We picked dogs that were less aggressive or looked unique. And in doing so, we spurred on rapid diversification and evolution in an unbelievable way.

-via Scientific American

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It was midway through the pregame prayer session that the gorge hit high tide. There is always something a little nauseating in large spectacles of conspicuous public piety, but watching everyone on the field take a knee before the Penn State-Nebraska game, and listening to the commentary about how devoutly everybody was praying for the victims at Penn State, was enough to get me reaching for a bucket and a Bible all at once. It was as though the players and coaches had devised some sort of new training regimen to get past the awful reality of what had happened. Prayer as a new form of two-a-days. Jesus is my strength coach. Contrition in the context of a football game seemed almost obscene in its obvious vanity.

-via Grantland

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Occupy protests complicate matters by bringing a segment of society—a white middle-class segment—into, what is for many, first contact with police authority. If you think of police as coming whenever you call for help, you may be surprised to learn that police do not work for you. Officers work first for the police department and then for the city that pays them. A force designed to maintain order and the status quo will never sing Kumbaya with protesters who combine a desire for change with a privileged sense of agency and entitlement.

-via Slate

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Everything Must Go

2011-11-11T11:34:00.000-08:00

In a purging state of mind. I'm thinking maybe it's safe to have less than 3 copies of the same literary journal (mostly contributor copies of the past few years) languishing on the shelf. These are great issues and they need great readers, so I offer to send them to whoever's interested (just shoot me an email and let me know which ones you want--try to limit it to 2/person) in the hope you might enjoy them and purchase a subscription (or better yet, a gift subscription!). Support these excellent and hard-working folks. I've got:

Birmingham Poetry Review 37 (featuring work by Richard Bausch, Claudia Emerson, Rebecca Morgan Frank, William Logan, Caki Wilkinson, and others)

Georgetown Review 11.1 (featuring work by Seth Abramson, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Ravi Shankar, and others)

Passages North 32.1 (featuring work by Traci Brimhall, Frank Giampietro, Bob Hicock, Sandy Longhorn, Matthew Nienow, Matthew Thorburn, dawn lonsinger, and others (!))

Hollins Critic XLVII.4 (featuring discussions on the work of Howard Frank Mosher by James Robert Saunders, Elaine Feinstein by Kelly Cherry, and Maxine Kumin by David Slavitt)

RATTLE 32 (featuring work by Laura Eve Engel, Colette Inez, Molly Peacock, David Wagoner, Tony Barnstone, Patricia Smith, and others)

Third Coast 29 (featuring work by Quan Berry, Jehanne Dubrow, Gray Jacobik, Tomaz Salamun, and others)

Tar River Poetry 49.1 (featuring work by Ross White, Gary Fincke, Michael McFee, Brittany Cavallaro, Michelle Boisseau, and others)

Beloit Poetry Journal 59.4 (featuring work by Peter Munro, Simon Perchik, Avery Slater, and others)

Poet Lore 103.3 (featuring work by Nin Andrews, Michael Boccardo, George David Clark, Alex Dimitrov, Jane Shore, Katrina Vandenberg, and others)

Roanoke Review 33 (featuring work by Caitlin Horrocks, Carrie Shipers, Wiley Cash, and others)

New York Quarterly 65 (featuring work by Dorianne Laux, Mark Bibbins, Donald Lev, Matthew Zapruder, Bruce Weigl, David Shapiro, and others)

First come, first serve. Thanks for stopping by.

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Students in Anonymity

2011-11-06T18:05:00.000-08:00

I ate the best cheeseburger of my life this weekend at this place. Here's a picture of it.

Small epiphanies.

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Which brings me to God Bless America, a collection that should be seen as part of a body of work intent on eviscerating and then forgiving our pitiful culture of excess, this social milieu in which we—our bodies bent to their “awful purposes”—run amok with the faintest grasp on reality and even less on our own motivations. We spout platitudes on the one hand, like Billy in the title story, about this “land built by opportunists,” and face painful truths on the other, as Sophie does in “Not Until You Say Yes”: “Nothing was ever done, it was always suffering some improvement. Were human beings really such factories of discontent?” Yes, we are, and Almond is a writer who is as painfully aware of the ludicrousness of our predicament as he is a believer in the possibility of our salvation.

-Ru Freeman reviews Steve Almond over at The Rumpus

(I want to read this book!)

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The poets had set the tone for the exercise by reading a poem they had written together, which uses startling, offensive language and has in its first three lines the harshest slurs against blacks and gays. The same slurs emerged on the cards, written by students in anonymity, then read out loud by peers who picked the cards at random from a pile stacked on a desk.

-via NYT

Not sure what to make of this--I think you have to blame the poets/instructors for not being more aware of the situation...oh, words.

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So that’s how and why, this spring, I found myself staring down a teetering stack of people’s poetic accomplishments (and hopes, and dreams), pages binder-clipped neatly together, manuscripts numbered so that each submission would remain anonymous. I learned a few things really quickly: most people front-load their manuscripts (aka, put their strongest 5-10 poems up front); many people are partial to really awful fonts (like Calibri or Arial or Gill Sans); generally, good manuscripts are not going undiscovered (as I later learned many of the manuscripts I chose had been pulled from the contest, as they had already won other contests and were slated to be published); and most importantly, I could only read about 20 manuscripts a day without slowly losing my will to live. This was not because the manuscripts were poorly written—quite the opposite was true: there were very few truly terrible manuscripts. I was sure I would be able to eliminate many right away, but that just wasn’t the case; most were at least serviceable, if not totally fine, and nearly all included at least a few compelling poems. And I had to choose between them.

-great essay by Erika Meitner on her experience as a contest screener

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Lumping together artistic work according to gender was, in Bishop’s opinion, detrimental to women’s writing. In a letter to Jean Keefe, she writes: ‘undoubtedly gender does play an important role in the making of any art, but art is art, and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art.’

-interesting article on Elizabeth Bishop's feminism over at Granta

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It’s what Alberto Salazar, for a while the world’s dominant marathoner and now the coach of some of America’s top distance runners, describes in mythical-questing terms as the "one best way"— not the fastest, necessarily, but thebest: an injury-proof, evolution-tested way to place one foot on the ground and pick it up before the other comes down. Left, right, repeat; that’s all running really is, a movement so natural that babies learn it the first time they rise to their feet. Yet sometime between childhood and adulthood — and between the dawn of our species and today — most of us lose the knack.

Great article on barefoot/minimalist running from New York Times Magazine. I've been using my Merrell Trail Gloves since last April and have never felt better about running...

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New favorite band-of-the-moment.

Very Human Dangers

2011-10-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

Happily undertaking a 7 poems in 7 days sprint with a few other folks. Draft, draft, draft.

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In order to stay alive as artists, we need to resist the very human dangers of resentment and bitterness. Resentment comes from attending to the injuries and rejections of the past, or to fears of the future. These difficulties are exacerbated by loneliness, and of course writers are perpetually alone with their work, no matter how embedded they are in communities. For many years I thought I needed to write in my quiet study, in a corner of my house where I could get away from anyone except a dog, and I’d be a little annoyed when people walked by talking on the nearby street – which was, after all, a good eight feet from my window. How dare they interrupt the process of my poem! After I moved to New York City I found myself not enjoying writing at home. I found a coffee shop congenial to writing (the location of which, as any urbanite would understand, I would never reveal). Soon I realized that in fact I liked having company. I liked some evidence of activity – milk steaming in the espresso machine, dishes rattling in the plastic bin where you’d put your empty coffee cup. These provided, as Frank O’Hara said about record stores, “some evidence that people do not entirely regret life.”

-Mark Doty's speech from the Whiting Awards Presentation (Heck yeah, Eduardo!)

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More transcendent music coming out of Seattle. Go Team.

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Pickwick - Blackout (Suzzallo Reading Room) from Tyler Kalberg on Vimeo.

Propositions of Any Religion

2011-10-22T12:59:00.000-07:00

Talented friends writing beautiful and important things:

Hollins-brother C.I. Shelton has an elegant essay on his experience with the Joplin tornado, in the Paris Review.

The awesome and omnipresent Ed Skoog has a poem for Occupy Seattle in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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The Rush Limbaughs of the world are very comfortable with a narrative that has Noam Chomsky, MoveOn and Barack Obama on one side, and the Tea Party and Republican leaders on the other. The rest of the traditional media won't mind that narrative either, if it can get enough "facts" to back it up. They know how to do that story and most of our political media is based upon that Crossfire paradigm of left-vs-right commentary shows and NFL Today-style team-vs-team campaign reporting.

What nobody is comfortable with is a movement in which virtually the entire spectrum of middle class and poor Americans is on the same page, railing against incestuous political and financial corruption on Wall Street and in Washington. The reality is that Occupy Wall Street and the millions of middle Americans who make up the Tea Party are natural allies and should be on the same page about most of the key issues, and that's a story our media won't want to or know how to handle.

via Rolling Stone

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Well it seems to me that if one takes the propositions of any religion seriously, there's going to be doubt in the experience, there's going to be intermittency and one is going, as D.H. Lawrence once said, "to be converted over and over." And I remember Mr. Eliot, T.S. Eliot, saying that doubt is inseparable from the experience of faith. It's something we shouldn't be ashamed of, and it's funny because, if I may digress, Eliot is also the person who said that fancy thing about how the spirit killeth but the letter giveth life. I guess he was objecting to a sort of hazy spirituality one finds sometimes with some people. But he seems there to be saying that you'd better believe every word in the creed, and he thus represents both ends of the doubt and belief pattern, he's saying wouldn't it be nice, really, to believe that whole marvelous Nicene concoction that we say in church, and at the same time he's saying that any energetic religious life involves doubt.

-wonderful interview with Richard Wilbur

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Lemony Snicket has some things to say about Occupy Wall Street, over at Occupy Writers.

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Dear Parents:

Thanks to their group e-mail, we now know that the families of Millie and Jaden M. recognize Jesus Christ as their Saviour. There still seems to be some confusion about why, if we want to celebrate life, we’re actually celebrating death. To better explain this “bewildering detour,” I’ve asked Adela, who works in the office and makes waffles for us on Wednesdays, and who was born in Mexico, to write you directly.

-Arrested Development writer Maria Semple over at the New Yorker

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Start this at 5 minutes and enjoy. Seattle music continues its amazingness.

Don't Speak the Same Language as We Do

2011-10-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

I've been finding poems in the morning, before going to work at the pet store. The poems are unsteady on their legs, but they're trying. Was happy to have one picked up fora future issue of Quarterly West, and to hear the excellent news that I'll be one of 62-Washington artists to receive a GAP grant from Artist Trust. It's a remarkable organization that educates, supports, and connects artists in Washington state, and they're another reason I'm proud to be living here. It's stuff like this that gets me to the desk an hour earlier in the morning, before hauling kibble and cat litter from the warehouse to the shelf, to carve lines in hopes that they might resound. Another writer works at the store, and we were talking about process. I told him about the butt-in-chair rule I stole from the righteous Sandy Longhorn. I asked him what got him to the page. He looked at me and said, "Luke, if we're not writing, we're just selling dog food." Up early, tomorrow.

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Socio-economic mobility has always been central to the American dream. But our civic culture is actually carefully structured to keep us segregated. The wealthy lock themselves away in luxury vehicles and gated suburbs. The impoverished remain in blighted areas, obediently out of view.

The system is self-reinforcing. As the money concentrates at the top, less is devoted to those resources that are shared by all of us – parks, schools, community centers, subway trains – the very places where people of different classes might peaceably mingle.

The wealthy hire lobbyists and tax lawyers to game the system. They remove themselves, physically and psychically, from their duties to the poor. In this way, the interests of the few crush the interests of the many.

-Steve Almond on Occupy Wall Street over at the Rumpus

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The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

-Paul Krugman at NYT

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Killer first line of the moment:

You found it in wet dirt: blue parchment, slice

from "Feather" by Sally Rosen Kindred
(Cave Wall 10, 2011)

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Sherman Alexie has 3 beautiful little poems in the new issue of Narrative Magazine. And if you subscribe, you can read a wonderful poem by my Hollins-poet-brother Will Schutt. Do it.

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Although I am ashamed to admit to knowing almost nothing about Scandinavia's leading poet, whose books are regular bestsellers in his homeland, this does seem to be something of a regular occurrence with the Nobel. The committee makes a habit of bestowing its laurels on respected, worthy, but often fairly obscure writers who, even after they are anointed, don't exactly go on to become household names.

No doubt this attitude partly reflects my provincialism. It's true that British literary culture is shockingly closed to writers from those parts of the world which don't happen to speak the same language as we do. We translate far fewer titles than most other European countries, and publishers that specialise in literature in translation – fortunately there are some – struggle to get attention for their books.

-interesting take on Transtromer's Nobel, and the significance of the Nobel in Literature, over at the Guardian

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Have watched the first half of this 2 part HBO-doc--can't wait to watch the rest.

Penultimately, It Can Save You

2011-09-20T17:44:00.000-07:00

Joined a group of other young poets to write 7 poems in 7 days. Very much enjoying writing again. Very much in awe of how many talented writers there are floating around right now.

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Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I’ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs.

-via Paris Review

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Well, here's what I used to hold dear. A truth is most comfortably received when preceded by an indefinite article—a instead of the unlocks the noun, makes the truth feel credibly small. Now I think that to make assertions using indefinite articles mostly serves to keep us from making fools of ourselves, and yet, sometimes, don't we have to risk this? Aren't the most memorable statements asserted boldly, like Flannery O'Connor's "The truth will make you odd," or André Gide's "It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written"? Actually, there are many things other than truth that are dear to me. The tone with which something is said, for one. My fear is Stendhal's: "I may have expressed only a sigh when I thought I was stating the truth."

-Stephen Dunn interviews himself over at Poetry Daily

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There is no need to fear the personal or the Confessional. For one thing, it is unavoidable. For another thing, it is all you have. Penultimately, it can save you. Lastly, you can never really, fully, and honestly tell the truth about your own life because a) you don't know the truth b) there is no one truth and c) you are always telling, and telling the truth is very different from the truth. Think of it this way: If you take your clothes off you are naked but are not a Nude, and certainly not a nude painting. The poem, no matter how bare, is a Nude, and never really naked. That said, you need to take your clothes off to know what your skin really feels like.

--Really enjoyed this essay on the nature of the "I" in poetry, by Rachel Zucker, from over at the Academy of American Poets.

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Killer first line of the moment:

Scatter my ashes at Six Mile Creek.

from Patrick Phillips' "Will"

(New England Review, 32.2, 2011)

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A really excellent project is going on in my home-neighborhood. Check out ballardsessions.com for some well-done videos of some of Seattle's best young musicians, such as the righteous Noah Gunderson featured below.

When There's Too Much Good Music, You Get Two

2011-08-31T22:46:00.000-07:00

Last week, I received my contributor copies of the Threepenny Review. It's a knock-out, and I'm honored to share space with writers I've admired for a long time: C.K. Williams (on the same page!), Dean Young, David Wagoner, Anne Carson, Kay Ryan, Roberto Bolano, and too many more to name. Get yourself a copy! Or, better still, subscribe!

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In the spirit of football season, here's a great poem from Poetry Daily by Elizabeth Poliner, who just joined the permanent faculty at Hollins (lucky for Hollins, lucky for her). If you're in the thick of applying to MFAs, you should definitely consider Hollins. For me, it was perfect, and I'd be happy to answer any questions poetry applicants may have. And, while I value the spirit and intention of Seth Abramson's rankings, I think it'd be foolish to not look beyond them (and I'm not alone). I can't fathom some of the intricacies behind Hollins' recent movements in the rankings. The fact that we're ranked so high in non-fiction is evidence of how far the rankings are off the mark, not because Hollins doesn't have an excellent non-fiction program (it does), but because you can't find one writer on faculty who would classify themselves as an essayist (they'd likely all just call themselves writers, as they should, damn good ones, at that). And if you look at the last 5 years of graduates, you could probably count the 'non-fiction writers' on one hand. It's one of those situations where the perceived doesn't even begin to do justice to the reality. Okay, I'm off my soap-box. I just love that place so much, I want other people to have the chance to love it, too.

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It’s important for people interested in a teaching job in creative writing to get a sense of what you’ll be up against with your debt load and current publication record. There are a handful of jobs for hundreds if not thousands of job seekers who are all highly credentialed. Of the available positions currently listed, 4 are in fiction, 5 are in poetry, 8 are open and 4 positions are for visiting lectureships. It is early in the job season, so more positions will likely be posted but not many. I would guess there will be 40-50 available positions in creative writing. Some of these searches will be cancelled when funding is pulled. Some of these searches will be run even though there are inside candidates. (The wiki will often have this information, which is nice.) When you compare that to the number of graduate students going on the market in the next couple years, the imbalance is pretty stark.

-via HTMLGiant

This seems ever pertinent as I eye my first serious foray into applying for a job teaching creative writing at the university level. Let's just say, I'm hopeful, but not optimistic.

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From the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center resisted redemption. They were called "jumpers" or "the jumpers," as though they represented a new lemminglike class. The trial that hundreds endured in the building and then in the air became its own kind of trial for the thousands watching them from the ground. No one ever got used to it; no one who saw it wished to see it again, although, of course, many saw it again. Each jumper, no matter how many there were, brought fresh horror, elicited shock, tested the spirit, struck a lasting blow. Those tumbling through the air remained, by all accounts, eerily silent; those on the ground screamed. It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, "We're in uncharted waters now." It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted a woman to wail, "God! Save their souls! They're jumping! Oh, please God! Save their souls!" And it was, at last, the sight of the jumpers that provided the corrective to those who insisted on saying that what they were witnessing was "like a movie," for this was an ending as unimaginable as it was unbearable: Americans responding to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world with acts of heroism, with acts of sacrifice, with acts of generosity, with acts of martyrdom, and, by terrible necessity, with one prolonged act of -- if these words can be applied to mass murder -- mass suicide.

-via Esquire

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"I spent a lot of time thinking about contemporary Christianity, and obviously the rapture kept coming up," he says. "My first impulse was ... to laugh it off — it's sort of a funny idea, people just floating away. But I kept thinking: What if it did happen? ... I thought, I'm such a skeptic that even if it did happen, I would resist the implications of it, and I also thought that three years later, everyone would have forgotten about it. No matter what horrible thing happens in the world, the culture seems to move on."

-Tom Perrotta, via NPR

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I was already sold on Trombone Shorty because of his cameos in Treme, but after seeing him at Bumbershoot, I'm a fan for life. Thanks to Oliver de la Paz for hipping me to this most excellent video.

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Why don't millions of high-schoolers buy Macklemore records instead of Lil' Wayne records?

Only Things That Make Lots of Money Should Exist

2011-08-17T15:57:00.000-07:00

Grateful to have my poem "Psalm for Third Base" featured over at THEthe Poetry. Big thanks to Brian Chappell for featuring the poem, and to C. Dale Young and the New England Review for first publishing it.

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Despite sounding like he's singing a blues song about the disappointing seats in his new Jaguar, an MFA grad does have the right to question and critique the value of his expensive education. Yet, when you question the intrinsic value of an arts education for everyone else, the cynical attitude is revealed to be very close to the neo-con belief that the arts don't pay so there should be no arts education. Of course, success being relative, it's always difficult to quantify the value of the arts. If, as its publisher claims, Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" sold 3 million copies, then it netted no more money than "Saw 3D." Now, according to the theory that only things that make lots of money should exist, and because the most critically discussed literary novel of the last decade--by an author with no MFA at that--only made as much money as an underperforming 3D sequel, we should rethink this whole MFA thing.

via Huffington Post

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Yet there is one manifestation of good manners that appears to have exactly the opposite purpose, a form of social lubrication that makes a mockery of everyone connected to it. I refer to the Facebook birthday greeting. The Facebook birthday greeting has become a symbol of all that is irritating about the social network. Every April 11 or June 7 or Sept. 28, your Facebook account suddenly chatters with exclamation-point-polluted birthday wishes. If you are a typical Facebook user, these greetings come mainly from your nonfriend friends—that group of Facebook "friends" who don't intersect with your actual friends. The wishes have all the true sentiment of a Christmas card from your bank. The barrage of messages isn't unpleasant, exactly, but it's all too obvious that the greetings are programmed, canned, and impersonal, prompted by a Facebook alert. If, as Facebook haters claim, the social network alienates us from genuine friendship, the Facebook birthday greeting is the ultimate example of its fakery.

via Slate

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SEATTLE — Already, a gender divide seems to be developing over the desirability of being launched into space, at least in the Bordian family, who were visiting the Space Needle here the other day, staring out at the cloudy cityscape and mulling the tower’s latest promotionalcontest — for a suborbital spaceflight, 62 miles above the earth.

via NYT. Our city is sending citizens into space, no big deal.

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“They created this kind of world that was just the four of us, and they allowed us to be weird, as weird as we wanted to be without making us feel like we were strange,” he said. “And so I thought about a lot of that with the Fangs. The weirdness exists, but you don’t comment on it. It’s just the world that you’ve made for yourself. And it’s the same thing that Leigh Anne and I are doing with Griff, trying to build this weird world for him and see what happens.”

The family lives outside Sewanee on the edge of a one-acre pond in a thicket of woods teeming with rabbits, bats and deer. Inside the house signs of Griff, 3, were everywhere: a basket of toys near the wood-burning fireplace, a child-size canvas swing from Ikea hanging from the ceiling and a remote-controlled train set taking up most of Ms. Couch’s office upstairs, where she writes her poetry on a drafting desk in the corner.

-A great profile on Kevin Wilson from the New York Times. I'm currently flying through his novel, The Family Fang. It's the best book I've read all year and it more than deserves the attention it's been getting.

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Ballard, what.

The Negligent Blogger Returns, Hang-Doggedly

2011-08-10T16:01:00.000-07:00

I have been a bad blogger. Too many things have happened to try and compress and recapitulate them here. Suffice to say: life moves pretty fast. Summer is here, which means: good weather, good people, good poems. That triumvirate hasn't left much time for blogging, but I'm doing what I can to stay plugged in with you amazing folks. Onwards.

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I am not perfectly certain what our forefathers understood by “the pursuit of happiness.” Of the friends whom I’ve asked for an opinion, the majority have taken that phrase to mean the pursuit of self-realization, or of a full humane life. Some darker-minded people, however, have translated “happiness” as material well-being, or as the freedom to do as you damn please. I can’t adjudicate the matter, but even if the darker-minded people are right, we are entitled to ennoble the phrase and adapt it to the present purpose. I’m going to say a few things about the ways in which poetry might be seen as pursuing happiness.

Richard Wilbur on poetry and happiness over at Shenadoah, from a lecture he delivered in 1969

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Killer first line of the moment:

"Oil drunk,"

from Henry Hughes' "Skeleton Pirates of America"

(Moist Meridian, Mammoth Books, 2009)

I was lucky to share a cabin with Henry for the last few days at Fishtrap, when I came down from the rural Outpost workshop. He's a great guy, and a damn fine poet. Plus, he caught a ginormous fish while we were up there.

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On the other hand, Ammons wasn’t just a poet. He was a Southerner, and every Southerner understands the difficulty of holding on to an identity that is not, shall we say, always desirable. As C. Vann Woodward put it more than fifty years ago, “when [a Southerner] ventures among strangers, particularly up North, how often does he yield to the impulse to suppress the identifying idiom, to avoid the awkward subject, and to blend inconspicuously into the national pattern—to act the role of the standard American?” For a figure like Ammons, the temptation is to act not simply as a standard American, but as a standard American poet—which is to say, a citizen of Nowhere.

via Paris Review

A really nice exploration by David Orr of both Ammons (wonderful) work and what it means to be living a life hundreds of miles from home soil.

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Righteousness.

Unplugged

2011-07-07T22:03:00.000-07:00

July careens and summer swells. I'm off to Fishtrap Outpost tomorrow, where I'll be happily disconnected from phone and interwebs for 9 days. Looking forward to coming back with poems, pictures, and something worth telling you about. Be well, friends!

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I have a poem up this week over at Linebreak: "Months after the Mt. Cashmere Wildfire, with Meteors"

Big thanks to the editors for featuring the poems, and to my Sewanee friend Lisa Fay Coutley for such an excellent reading (she's up on Verse Daily! she has a new chapbook you should buy!)

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Eight years ago, I began traveling the United States to photograph senior dogs. Like the diverse human pageant that Robert Frank captured in his book, The Americans, back in the 1950’s, I found dogs inhabiting all manner of American life -- and with many years inscribed in their beings.

My interest in the world of the senior dog began as my own two dogs began to approach the end of their days. This was at a time when I had lived enough years to start imagining my own mortality. I entered a world of grace where bodies that had once expressed their vibrancy were now on a more fragile path.

-This is amazing.

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Heather Christle is a creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University whose second volume of poetry, "The Trees the Trees," is out now (her third book will be published by Wesleyan University Press). If you like her poems, you can call her during appointed (but generous) hours between now and next Thursday, and she'll read one just for you. It's as easy as dialing 413-570-3077.

-via Salon

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Box of Replenishments

2011-07-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

Bought books this week! 3 from the local indie (The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer, and The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter), 1 from a press website (In the Carnival of Breathing by Lisa Fay Coutley), and 1 from Amazon Marketplace (Robert Penn Warren's Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce). Looking forward to devouring them when I'm unplugged in Oregon next week.

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Killer first line of the moment:

Like a twentieth-century dream of Europe--all

from Laura Kasischke's "Time"
(Space, in Chains, Copper Canyon Press, 2011)

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New York Quarterly Books is the perfect example of the way a small poetry press should be run: editor Raymond Hammond solicits books from poets already published in the New York Quarterly (one of the most eclectic, well-rounded, and exciting journals I've seen--and I read them all!--with a mix of reviews, essays, and interviews along with very generous offerings of poetry); while the journal has been around for four decades, the book publishing program is new, getting started only in 2009 but already having picked up a lot of steam. Among their new poetry books, I've really liked Amanda Bradley's Hints and Allegations, Shelley Stenhouse's Impunity, Tony Medina's My Old Man Was Always On the Lam, Steve Henn's Unacknowledged Legislations, and Luke Johnson's understated After the Ark.

Anis Shivani features NYQ Books and After the Ark over at Huffington Post in his 4th of July post: "20 of the Best Books from Independent Presses You Should Know About."

Whoa. How bout that. Though, the last line of the poem quoted should read "exploring the sky, open and distant."

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Even with the band's tireless work ethic (or perhaps because of it), happenstance trails the Head and the Heart everywhere: The day Billboard met the band at a dimly lit New York diner marked the one-year anniversary of its self-released debut album. For the release show, the members returned to their birthplace: Conor Byrne Pub, where more than 200 friends and fans congregated in support. The show sold out easily, and during the next few months, the band members found themselves ordering box after box of replenishments for local record stores Sonic Boom and Easy Street. Fans were not only sharing the music-they were buying it multiple times over, as gifts for friends and family.

I remember that show. How bout a picture of it?

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Violin-y

Bridges Hopes

2011-06-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

Have I told you how excited I am to go to Fishtrap Outpost this summer?

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The Dude has nabbed the rights to the influential novel The Giver by Lois Lowry. Bridges hopes to play the title role — the one person chosen to feel for the whole of a future community.

Okay, Jeff Bridges. I see you.

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106 of the most beloved Street Art Photos – Year 2010

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While there are many reasons to study the thinking ability of animals—devising better conservation strategies, opening new pathways in artificial intelligence—the great evolutionary question driving many researchers is this: Under what evolutionary pressures do different types of cognitive abilities tend to develop? If several entirely unrelated species turn out to have a given intellectual ability—mirror recognition in humans, dolphins, and elephants, for instance—are there common denominators in the conditions they confront (membership in complex social groups, for example) that might explain the development? Can the study of such examples of convergent evolution help us understand how and why higher intelligence arises in nature? Researchers have taken only the first steps toward finding definitive answers to both of those questions.

-via The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Gary Soto is known for poetry that depicts the visceral side of working-class Mexican-American life. Jobs in factories and fields have shaped his work, as has an apprenticeship under fellow poet Philip Levine. A winner of the Nation/Discovery Award and the Levinson Award from Poetry magazine, he has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Of his job as a writer, he has said, "My duty is not to make people perfect, particularly Mexican Americans. I'm not a cheerleader. I'm one who provides portraits of people in the rush of life." In addition to his poetry, Soto has written novels, short stories, memoirs, and over two dozen children's books. Here he shares the drafts of two poems, one from his 1985 collection, Black Hair, and one from a forthcoming volume, Sudden Loss of Dignity.

via The Atlantic

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When I’m going strong I can’t wait to wake up and start. Without having something promising to work on, life would be pretty boring. With nothing to do, with nothing I like doing, why wake up in the morning? What I like about writing is its incision, the fact that language is operating at its fullest. Words and poems exist on multiple levels. Poetry is a way of feeling deeply without being threatened. The other thing about poetry, why I like writing it, is I like making things up. I like writing a sentence or a few words and wondering where they’re going to go. How can I create meaning, or the illusion of meaning, out of these words, words that have never been used in this particular order ever before and may not be used so again.

-a nice interview with Mark Strand, via Eduardo Corral

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Kingdom of the Starr

2011-06-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

Glad to get my hands on the newest issue of Phoebe, in which I've got two poems. There's a ton of terrific work in there--big congrats to the editors, and big thanks for including some of my work. If you're so inclined.

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So here we are, citizens, back in the kingdom of the Starr Report, that sad realm where the Fourth Estate, in its desperation to enthrall and thereby profit, abdicates what the antique moralists among us might call a conscience.

For the past two weeks, actual grown-up Americans have risen from their beds and put on their grown-up clothes and driven their grown-up cars to their grown-up offices and pretended, collectively, that the most important event occurring on earth was not the possibility that the United States will default on its debt, or the mounting evidence that our planetary climate has gone kaplooey, or even any of the three and a half wars in which we are, as a nation, mired.

No, the big news was that a horny guy did some dumb shit.

-Steve Almond over at the Rumpus

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Compare this with the experience of the callow, inexperienced, unworldly writer who milks the system for all it’s worth; some good-looking guy or gal in their mid- to late twenties goes straight from Yale to the Writers’ Workshop to the Fine Arts Work Center to the Stegner fellowship, with stints at Yaddo and MacDowell in between, and very thin to non-existent (often just cranky online) publications to back it all up—all because the network functions purely on connections, a very corrupt, almost medieval exclusion. The writing world today is the antithesis of meritocracy. I imagined more than fifteen years ago that meritocracy would be more prevalent in the literary world compared to academia, but the situation is a thousand times worse than in scholarship. Oh, and by the way, I was a fucking rebel at Harvard too—you should ask some of the people who knew me then. The best minds of my generation fucked themselves up on Wall Street—or deconstructing literature for the always already privileged.

-An Interview with Anis Shivani over at HTMLGIANT

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Since he's widely considered the greatest writer in the history of the English language, we tend to think of William Shakespeare as well-educated and dignified, a true master of his craft. However, what you might not have realized is that he liked to toss F-bombs around like Tony Montana breaking his foot on a trampoline.

-8 Filthy Jokes Hidden in Ancient Works of Art

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Out June 28, Black Up is a sonic world made up of discordant beats, swirling synths, bouncing 808s and Butler's nimble, impressionistic poetry. Straight narratives are nowhere to be found, and rhythms emerge and then vanish just as quickly. The effect can be bewildering, and yet the album is far from unfocused. Butler's rhymes are lyrical and tight in the opening track, "Free Press and Curl," where he offers an ostensible mission statement: "I run on feelings, f—- your facts / Deception is the truest act."

-Shabazz Palaces album streaming at NPR--more righteous Seattle music...

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Obsessed with their new album.

Psychologically Neutral

2011-06-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

For the first time in about seven months, I'm writing new poems. Hallelujah Hallelujah.

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To eat in and around Seattle, which I did recently and recommend heartily, isn’t merely to eat well. It is to experience something that even many larger, more gastronomically celebrated cities and regions can’t offer, not to this degree: a profound and exhilarating sense of place.

-via NYT

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Why the government is involved in art is beyond me. I also think it's pointless for a human to paint scenes of nature when they could just go outside and stand in it.

Ron Swanson 2012

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Killer first line of the moment:

"It's not that Monet cared that much about stacks of hay."

-from Dean Young's "Opal"

(Fall Higher, Copper Canyon Press, 2011)

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My relationship with Twitter has never been as fraught, probably because being "followed" as opposed to "friended" is more psychologically neutral. I'm used to being followed by my enemies. The minimalism of Twitter also appeals to me—I fear the day its developers improve it so you can use it for CAD/CAM and to build PowerPoint decks. It gets to the point in 140 characters, out-Hemingwaying Hemingway. Unfollowing somebody who has become an annoyance is a one-click job. Another plus: Folks can't put their vacation photos directly on Twitter. Yet.

via Slate

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From the comments:

""The difference between a fiddle and a violin is that you can spill beer on a fiddle".--Tim O'Brien

Reading

2011-06-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

This was amazing. Grand Hallway is making incredible music. Go buy their new album.

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I could go on, but I'd rather pluck my own pubic hairs than read this fawning idiocy written by fools who have only read the press release of a novel they probably couldn't get through either.

Who is Ruth Fowler and why is she so angry?

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It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It's not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention.

-Conan O'Brien's commencement speech at Dartmouth

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Anthony Weiner went from a junior congressman to a politician of national significance, thanks in large part to his use of new media. By following back some of his most ardent fans, the way a teen idol might oblige his fans with signed photos, and otherwise working the apparatus of Twitter to drive up his followers and get a hearing for his issues, he managed to create an online persona using the same tricks — digital versions of gerrymandering, triangulating and earmark — that politicians use. Twitter handsomely rewards those with a capacity for risk and an aptitude for the social sciences, especially economics, game theory, psychology and sociology.

-via NYT

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Ledge of the Sandbox

2011-06-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

Body Politic

Out for stars he
took some
down
and we all
wondered if he might be
damned to such sinister
& successful enterprise:
we took him and
unfolded him: he
turned out
pliant and warm
& messy in
some minor way: then, not
having come to
much, we
lit into his stars which
declaring nothing dark
held white and high
and brought us down.

-A.R. Ammons (Collected Poems 1951-1971)

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When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. So that, in the beginning, writing, like reading, was less a solitary pursuit than an attempt to connect with others. I did not write alone but with another student in my class at school. We would sit together, this friend and I, dreaming up characters and plots, taking turns writing sections of the story, passing the pages back and forth. Our handwriting was the only thing that separated us, the only way to determine which section was whose. I always preferred rainy days to bright ones, so that we could stay indoors at recess, sit in the hallway, and concentrate. But even on nice days I found somewhere to sit, under a tree or on the ledge of the sandbox, with this friend, and sometimes one or two others, to continue the work on our tale. The stories were transparent riffs on what I was reading at the time: families living on prairies, orphaned girls sent off to boarding schools or educated by stern governesses, children with supernatural powers, or the ability to slip through closets into alternate worlds. My reading was my mirror, and my material; I saw no other part of myself

-Jhumpa Lahiri over at The New Yorker

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In pressure moments, he comes and goes … and when it goes, it's gone. He starts throwing hot-potato passes, stops driving to the basket, shies away from open 3s, stands in the corner, hides as much as someone that gifted can hide on a basketball court. It started happening in Game 3, then fully manifested itself in Game 4's stunning collapse, when he wouldn't even consider beating DeShawn Stevenson off the dribble. Afterward, one of my closest basketball friends — someone who has been defending LeBron's ceiling for years — finally threw up his hands and gave up. "It's over," he said. "Jordan never would have done THAT."

For real.

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Oh, internet: Kim Jong-il Looking At Things

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Holy moly.

No Small Amount of Heart

2011-06-07T19:58:00.000-07:00

Reading Ammons. Trying to write a long poem--hoping to get deep down in it when I spend a week here this Summer as a Fishtrap Fellow. Until then, notebook tinkering.

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Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that’s what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive. Stories can be true and documents can lie, of course, but there’s still a difference between them. Anyway, lately they both seem quaint, because now there’s hyperlore, which passes from one computer to the next, along a path best called hyperbolic.

Take Paul Revere’s heroic ride.

-via The New Yorker

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The recession that has ravaged Spain, along with much of southern Europe, has had an especially hard impact on the young, with unemployment rates soaring to more than 40 percent for 20- to 24-year-olds, about twice the national average and the highest in the European Union. Many of them see limited hope of improvement unless they reshuffle the political deck and demand a new approach to creating jobs.

“Suddenly people are talking about politics everywhere,” said María Luz Morán, a sociologist at the Complutense University of Madrid. “You go to have coffee or you are standing in the subway and you hear conversations about politics. It’s been years since I heard anyone talking about politics.”

-via NYT

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Hey poets, erase your way to 500 dollars and a trophy: Geist Erasure Poetry Contest. There need to be more trophies in poetry. For real.

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“This is a great day for illiterate authors,” Shteyngart said. “From Snooki, to Nicole Richie, to me. I prepared a speech, but I can’t read. USA!”

-via WSJ Speakeasy (quickly becoming one of my favorite internet places)

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But this is not an easy thing to do, this peering into darkness, this ruin-reading. It requires nuance, practice, and no small amount of heart. I cannot, however, endorse it enough. Given the state of our world—in which the very forces that place us in harm’s way often take advantage of the confusion brought by apocalyptic events to extend their power and in the process increase our vulnerability—becoming a ruin-reader might not be so bad a thing. It could in fact save your life.

-Junot Diaz at the Boston Review

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Sunday Evening Shenanigans

2011-06-05T17:43:00.000-07:00

The dog escaped the yard this afterrnoon. It was terrifying. He's back at the foot of the bed now, quite pleased with himself.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"When I set fire to the reed patch"

from "When I Set Fire to the Reed Patch" by A.R. Ammons

(Collected Poems: 1951-1971, W.W. Norton, 1972)

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Bikini-clad female visitors frolic under the Caribbean sun in an outdoor pool. Marijuana smoke flavors the air. Reggaetón booms from a club filled with grinding couples. Paintings of the Playboy logo adorn the pool hall. Inmates and their guests jostle to place bets at the prison’s raucous cockfighting arena.

-via NYT

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Hey Seattle Writers! Tomorrow is the deadline to apply for the most excellent Hugo House Writer in Residence gig...

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I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?” I could see that this was not only a perfectly legitimate question; it was a very interesting question. The students were asking me to justify the return on investment in a college education. I just had never been called upon to think about this before. It wasn’t part of my training. We took the value of the business we were in for granted.

I could have said, “You are reading these books because you’re in college, and these are the kinds of books that people in college read.” If you hold a certain theory of education, that answer is not as circular as it sounds. The theory goes like this: In any group of people, it’s easy to determine who is the fastest or the strongest or even the best-looking. But picking out the most intelligent person is difficult, because intelligence involves many attributes that can’t be captured in a one-time assessment, like an I.Q. test. There is no intellectual equivalent of the hundred-yard dash. An intelligent person is open-minded, an outside-the-box thinker, an effective communicator, is prudent, self-critical, consistent, and so on. These are not qualities readily subject to measurement.

-via The New Yorker

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I love this song, and this video, if only because the drummer totally flubs the first 30 seconds. The look on the guitarist's face says it all.

Memorial Marvels

2011-05-29T21:56:00.000-07:00

Had a great weekend camping the middle fork of the Snoqualmie River. Hot dogs were impaled on pocketknife-whittled sticks. The dog splashed through eddies. Timed group-photographs were taken. What a place, this is. I'm thankful, all over again, to live in the Northwest.

I brought with me my contributor's copy of the latest issue of New England Review and am floored to be in such excellent company. Check out Traci Brimhall's "Somniloquy" from the new issue. Huge thanks to C. Dale Young for including some of my poems, and to the whole NER staff for putting together such a wonderful magazine. Go get you some.

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Gil Scott-Heron died on May 27, at age 62.As I write this, there’s no official cause of death. We’ll know soon enough. This is America, after all. Whatever the medical details suggest, I’m listing his official cause of death as grief.

-Steve Almond, over at The Rumpus

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Mr. Huibers, 60, the successful owner of a big construction company, has spent the last few years building an ark, identical in size to the one Noah is said in the book of Genesis to have built: 300 cubits in length, or 450 feet; 30 cubits high, or about three stories; and 50 cubits, or 75 feet, wide. The cubit of the Bible, Mr. Huibers said, was the distance between finger tips and elbow, or in his case roughly 18 inches.

He is building the ark out of Swedish pine, because some versions of the Bible describe the wood God ordered Noah to use as “resin wood,” which Mr. Huibers says is pine.

-via NYT

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In his newest book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, Bloom revisits the ideas that made him a star -- and explains, in a straightforward way, why he's spent his career trying "to build a hedge around the secular Western canon." Bloom argues that it's simply impossible to understand how literature really gets made unless you recognize that some books are head-and-shoulders above the rest. It's the genius of those books, he contends, that powers the whole of literary creation.

Just started Bloom's latest and have been enjoying it. I'm not sure there's a more cogent or eloquent writer when it comes to discussing the ways in which poems move and how the reader must move with them.

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As my last act as Chair, I would like to share with you my sense of the gravity of the situation we face. I spent most of my academic career doing what most of us do—teaching, writing, reading graduate applications and theses, having office hours, reading in my field, doing research. I didn’t pay much attention to the University and its administration. None of us have that luxury anymore. Budget cuts after budget cuts after budget cuts have left us all painfully aware of how the sausage is made, or not made

-Letter from Tom Lutz, Chair of Creative Writing at UCR, on the impending dilemmas of the Academy...

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Before And After: A Bird's-Eye View Of Joplin

via NPR

The images of the tornadoes in the midwest are devastating. Joplin is my grandmother's birthplace, was my great-grandparents' home.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"O Tommy Hearns, o blood come down."

from "Prayer in the Name of Saint Thomas Hearns" by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

(Apocalyptic Swing, Persea Books, 2009)

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Aloe Blacc - Loving You Is Killing Me from Stones Throw on Vimeo.

Mondays for Beauty

2011-05-08T14:49:00.000-07:00

More music, more sunlight--the city is ravenous for Summer. Bring on the mountain ranges, the barefoot runs, the afternoons at Gasworks, the hot dogs with cream cheese.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"We didn't come Mondays for beauty,"

from "Open Mic" by Kurt S. Olsson
(What Kills What Kills Us, Silverfish Review Press, 2007)

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Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

-Noam Chomsky responds to the death of Osama bin Laden, over at Guernica

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The reasons for these trends can be expressed in a single word, or buzzword: efficiency. Contingent academic labor, as non-tenure-track faculty, part-time and full-time, are formally known, is cheaper to hire and easier to fire. It saves departments money and gives them greater flexibility in staffing courses. Over the past twenty years, in other words—or really, over the past forty—what has happened in academia is what has happened throughout the American economy. Good, secure, well-paid positions—tenured appointments in the academy, union jobs on the factory floor—are being replaced by temporary, low-wage employment.

-via The Nation

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Hippy jam-fest dance yawp.

Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner!

2011-05-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

So, thanks to this random number generator, we have winners! I decided to give away 3 copies of my book, After the Ark, instead of 1, because you can never have too much poetry, and I hate seeing them sit on the bookshelf. I'm also giving away a copy of Seamus Heaney's superb collection District and Circle. So, without further pomp and circumstance...

Michelle Penaloza wins a copy of District and Circle by Seamus Heaney!

Tess Duncan, Mary Virginia, and Valerie win copies of After the Ark.

I'll be emailing y'all to get your addresses. Thanks to everyone for entering, and to Kelli Russell Agodon for setting this whole excellent celebration up. Poetry, what.

Cry Again

2011-04-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the radio silence, blogosphere. Lots of things have been happening, for which I'm very thankful. It's been a veritable whirlwind. Boone (pictured above, loving life) has made his triumphant return the the dog park, I published an article on the writing life over at the Wall Street Journal (strange days), I've celebrated my 26th birthday, and, perhaps most importantly, my flag football team remains undefeated through week 3. The sun is slowly returning itself to the PNW and, boy, are we ready for it.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"2000 years and he's still rising."

from "Jesus, the Perfect Lover" by Catie Rosemurgy
(My Favorite Apocalypse, Graywolf Press, 2001)

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“I don’t know that there is a bigger story in human history than the improvements in health, which include height, weight, disability and longevity,” said Samuel H. Preston, one of the world’s leading demographers and a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Without the 20th century’s improvements in nutrition, sanitation and medicine, only half of the current American population would be alive today, he said.

-via NYT

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Harper Lee, the tight-lipped author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel “To Kill A Mockingbird,” issued a short statement through her sister’s law firm on Wednesday saying that she had nothing to do with a forthcoming book written about her by a former Chicago Tribune reporter.

-via NYT

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When people ask me what being a young poet is like, I give them that tired bit we’ve all probably heard of academia in general — it’s like Hollywood without the money. Every time I send a poem or manuscript out for publication, I enter into a huge lottery. The slush pile is like an open call: I study, write, practice a craft, and stand before a group of anonymous folk who dependent not only the quality of my work but hundreds of other unaccountable variables — how their day was, who they’re currently reading, whether or not they react to this certain style, whether or not they’re facebooking while going through the electronic submission manager, or whatever – decide on whether or not to publish a piece. But unlike nailing the audition of a lifetime, my payout is next to nil. The poem gets picked up by a journal I respect that has maybe circulation of 2,000, and sometimes, very rarely, I get a check for $15. With that check I buy a bottle and cry again about not going to law school.

-via Michigan Quarterly Review

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"In View of the Fact" by A.R. Ammons

2011-04-23T23:08:00.000-07:00

In View of the Fact

The people of my time are passing away: my
wife is baking for a funeral, A 60-year-old who

died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it's
Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:

it was once weddings that came so thick and
fast, and then, babies, such a hullabaloo:

now, it's this that and the other and somebody
else gone or on the brink: well, we never

thought we would live forever (although we did)
and now it looks like we won't: some of us

are losing a leg to diabetes, some don't know
what they went downstairs for, some know that

a hired watchful person is around, some like
to touch the cane tip into something steady,

so nice: we have already lost so many,
brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

address books for so long a slow scramble now
are palimpests, scribbble and scratches: our

index cards for Christmases, birthdays,
halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

at the same time we are getting used to so
many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

to the ones left: we are not giving up on the
congestive heart failures or brain tumors, on

the nice old men left in empty houses or on
the widows who decide to travel a lot: we

think the sun may shine someday when we'll
drink wine together and think of what used to

be: until we die we will remember every
single thing, recall every word, love every

loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to
others to love, love that can grow brighter

and deeper till the very end, gaining strength
and getting more precious all the way ....

-A.R. Ammons
found in Till I End My Song; A Gathering Of Last Poems, Ed. Harold Bloom (Harper, 2010)

"V" by Adrienne Rich (from "Twenty-One Love Poems")

2011-04-17T17:05:00.000-07:00

This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you’ve loved—
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children—
women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,
Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts—their hands, clasped for centuries—
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

-from The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich (W.W. Norton, 1978)

"That Saturday Without a Car" by Stephen Dunn

2011-04-15T21:22:00.001-07:00

That Saturday Without a Car

for Ellen Dunn (1910-1969)

Five miles to my mother’s house,
a distance I’d never run.
“I think she’s dead”
my brother said, and hung up

as if with death
language should be mercifully approximate,
should keep the fact
that would forever be fact

at bay. I understood,
and as I ran wondered what words
I might say, and to whom.
I saw myself opening the door—

my brother, both of us, embarrassed
by the sudden intimacy we’d feel.
We had expected it
but we’d expected it every year

for ten: her heart was the best
and worst of her—every kindness
fought its way through damage,
her breasts disappeared

as if the heart itself, for comfort,
had sucked them in.
And I was running better
than I ever had. How different it was

from driving, the way I’d gone
to other deaths—
my body fighting it all off, my heart,
this adequate heart, getting me there.

-from New and Selected Poems 1974-1994 by Stephen Dunn (W.W. Norton, 1994)

Dog-Eared Pages, Underlined Sentences (#2)

2011-04-12T20:59:00.000-07:00

“There are of course additional reasons to read poems, and reasons to learn to read them well even if they may seem at times to be written in a baffling or unnecessary code. One is, you will feel less lonely. In the company of the world’s poems a reader discovers that the terrain of a life, its core griefs and core exhilarations, are not traversed entirely alone. Others have cut paths through the same thickets, found passes through the same mountains. This evidence of companionship may sometimes bring practical assistance along the way, at other times it may only help the walking feel less hard. At still other times, though, a poem can become the single point of light in a vast darkness—a small, infinitely distant, and yet still-sufficient star to steer by.”
-Jane Hirshfield, from “Telescope, Well Bucket, Furnace: Poetry Beyond the Classroom”

“We will discover that God made not only the parts of Creation that we humans understand and approve but all of it: “All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” And so we must credit God with the making of biting and stinging insects, poisonous serpents, weeds, poisonous weeds, dangerous beasts, and disease-causing microorganisms. That we may disapprove of these things does not mean that God is in error or that He ceded some of the work of Creation to Satan; it means that we are deficient in wholeness, harmony, and understanding—that is, we are “fallen.””
-Wendell Berry, from “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”

“As if to say that all boundaries are necessary evils and that the truly desirable condition is the feeling of being unbounded, of being king of infinite space. And it is that double capacity that we possess as human beings—the capacity to be attracted at one and the same time to the security of what is intimately known and to the challenges and entrancements of what is beyond us—it is this double capacity that poetry springs from and addresses. A good poem allows you to have your feet on the ground and your head in the air simultaneously.”
-Seamus Heaney, from “Something to Write Home About”

“But writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.”
-William Stafford, from “A Way of Writing”

“People do want to, and I include myself in this, hide behind some kind of comforting illusion and it’s not because they’re stupid, it’s not because they’re less fully alive, it’s just that they’re terrified and need reassurance that they have some control over what’s happening to them, or that there’s some kind of, oh I don’t know, some kind of purpose to things that often feel as if they have no purpose. That all suffering can be redeemed. And so I have respect for people’s resistances to the truth [laughs]. Because I feel it in myself, but the job of poetry is partly to resist that resistance, and look at the world, the best and worst it has to offer, as unflinchingly as possible. And if poetry transforms experience into beauty, it has to be the kind of beauty that doesn’t falsify the reality that it’s pretending to represent.”
-Alan Shapiro, in an interview with RATTLE

"April" by Louise Gluck

2011-04-12T20:37:00.000-07:00

April

No one’s despair is like my despair—

You have no place in this garden
thinking such things, producing
the tiresome outward signs; the man
pointedly weeding an entire forest,
the woman limping, refusing to change clothes
or wash her hair.

Do you suppose I care
if you speak to one another?
But I mean you to know
I expected better of two creatures
who were given minds: if not
that you would actually care for each other
at least that you would understand
grief is distributed
between you, among all of your kind, for me
to know you, as deep blue
marks the wild scilla, white
the wood violet.

-from The Wild Iris by Louise Glück (Ecco Press, 1992)

Apologies and Insect Wings

2011-04-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

Two poems accepted by the most-excellent folks at Phoebe. Recommended five most-excellent poetry collections at 32 Poems Blog. Ate a most-excellent venison stew. Seattle blooms, most-excellently.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"You crawl into bed, apologies and insect wings"

from Traci Brimhall's "Aubade with a Fox and a Birthmark"

(Rookery, Southern Illinois University Press, 2010)

***********

Average faculty salaries rose 1.4 percent from 2009-10 to 2010-11, even though average pay decreased at 30 percent of colleges and universities, according to the annual pay report being released Monday by the American Association of University Professors.

-via NYTimes

***********

For literary journals, the arrival of the Internet has not caused nearly the same kind of consternation as it has in book publishing or mainstream magazines — mainly because the profit motive has never really driven these boutique publishers.

-via NYTimes

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"Ars Poetica" by Charles Wright

2011-04-05T22:17:00.000-07:00

Ars Poetica

I like it back here

Under the green swatch of the pepper tree and the aloe vera.
I like it because the wind strips down the leaves without a word.
I like it because the wind repeats itself, and the leaves do.

I like it because I’m better here than I am there,

Surrounded by fetishes and figures of speech:
Dog’s tooth and Whale’s tooth, my father’s shoe, the dead weight
Of winter, the inarticulation of joy…

The spirits are everywhere.

And once I have them called down from the sky, and spinning and
dancing in the palm of my hand,
What will it satisfy?

I’ll still have

The voices rising out of the ground,
The fallen star my blood feeds, this business I waste my heart on.

And nothing stops that.

-from The Southern Cross by Charles Wright (Random House, 1977)

Marvels

2011-04-05T20:52:00.000-07:00

It's National Poetry Month! I'll be participating in two separate but equally excellent celebrations courtesy of Deborah Ager at 32 Poems and Kelli Russell Agodon at Book of Kells. For the former, I'll be recommending five poetry collections that are important to me and saying a little bit about why. My picks will go up on April 11th. For the latter, I'll be giving away two books as part of the Big Poetry Giveaway! Leave a comment on the Giveaway post to be entered! I'll also be posting poems I dig throughout the month, as well as poetry-related snippets that seem worth sharing--not much rhyme or reason there, and likely something that will continue past April...

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The earth is often perceived as a foolproof Google map — not very large, easily accessible and knowable by any finger-drumming geek with a computer. In some respects this is true. Distance is no longer a problem. You can nip over to Hong Kong or spend a weekend in Dubai, or Rio. But as some countries open up, others shut down. And some countries have yet to earn their place on the traveler’s map, such as Turkmenistan and Sudan. But I’ve been to both not long ago — one of very few sightseers. And along with oppression and human rights violations, I found hospitality, marvels and a sense of discovery.

-via NYT

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Killer first line of the moment:

"It's strange what the past brings back."

from "Driving Through Tennessee" by Charles Wright
(The Southern Cross, Random House, 1977)

**********

So Beautiful or So What is Simon's first album since 2006's Surprise. It's also his best sinceGraceland, from the opener ("Getting Ready for Christmas Day") to the closing title track. "The Afterlife" echoes Graceland's world fusion, graced with syncopated African rhythms and guitarist Vincent Nguini's mellifluous guitar playing, while "Dazzling Blue" incorporates Indian rhythms and highlights Simon's own wonderful guitar playing, which is so often overshadowed by the strength of his lyrics.

-listen to the entire new Paul Simon album over at NPR

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A generational shift is taking place in which longer forms of writing are being replaced with shorter ones, and sustained thought with shallower forms of multitasking. Those skills have value, but a growing percentage of students are arriving at college without ever having written a research paper, read a novel, or taken an essay examination. And those students do not perceive that they have missed something in their education; after all, they have top grades. In that context, the demands of professors for different kinds of work can seem bewildering and unreasonable, and students naturally gravitate to courses with more-familiar expectations. Without a carefully structured curriculum with required courses and regulation of standards across comparable courses, it's possible to graduate without acquiring foundational skills. Lacking proper preparation for college-level work, it's no wonder that so many students resort to plagiarism and paper mills, particularly since untenured college teachers—more than 70 percent of the faculty and growing—do not have the support needed to counter rampant cheating. And students know it.

via Chronicle of Higher Education

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The 2011 National Magazine Award finalists include 54 titles. Twenty magazines received multiple nominations—led by The New Yorker with 9—and 6 magazines were nominated for the first time.

Dog-Eared Pages, Underlined Sentences (#1)

2011-04-04T18:50:00.000-07:00

“One of the reasons I write poems is that they make revelation possible. I sometimes think I ought to spend the rest of my life writing a single poem whose action reaches an epiphany only at the point of exhaustion, in the combustion of the whole life, and continues and renews, until it blows away like a puff of milkweed. “
-Stanley Kunitz, an interview with Paris Review

“It is the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world—to close the gap between ourselves and things, and we suffer from doubt and anxiety as to our capacity to do so because of the limits of language itself.”
-Lyn Hejinian in “The Rejection of Closure”

“The thing that obsesses me is always beyond language. Language is almost an inconvenience. I have a feeling that no matter what kind of art we’re practicing, at some point we become hyper-aware of our medium. If we’re painting it’s paint and if writing it’s the language. But if we don’t at some point move beyond our hyper-consciousness of language, we’re stuck in the land of the medium. On that plane, only the relationships of words to other words is available, while the relationships of words to their ground, mother-silence, on the one hand, and to the concepts they name, on the other hand, gets abandoned…The beautiful Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, said something like—the difference between prose and poetry is that in prose you use language and in poetry, you yield to language. It feels like there’s this weird dialectic between us and the language. I can’t tell whether we just yield to it or we bend it. Maybe both. Sometimes it feels like we’re bending the language. Maybe it’s a process of self-making. I can’t tell.”
-Li-Young Lee, an interview with The Writer’s Chronicle

“What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality. I give to this word its naïve and solemn meaning, a meaning having nothing to do with philosophical debates of the last few centuries. It is the Earth as seen by Nils from the back of the gander and by the author of the Latin ode from the back of Pegasus. Undoubtedly, that Earth is and her riches cannot be exhausted by any description. To make such an assertion means to reject in advance a question we often hear today: “What is reality?”, for it is the same as the question of Pontius Pilate: “What is truth?” If among pairs of opposites which we use every day, the opposition of life and death has such an importance, no less importance should be ascribed to the oppositions of truth and falsehood, of reality and illusion.”
-Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Prize Lecture (1980)

“In short, whatever the work is supposed to be,
Let it be true to itself, essentially simple.”
-Horace (trans. David Ferry) in “The Art of Poetry: Notes for Aspiring Poets and Playwrights”

“And reject the angel, and give the muse a kick in the seat of the pants, and conquer our fear of the violet smile exhaled by the eighteenth-century poetry, and of the great telescope in whose lens the muse, sickened by its limits, is sleeping.”
—Federico Garcia Lorca (trans. Christopher Mauer), in “Play and Theory of the Duende”

“Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift, absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their “oeuvre”…”
—Wislawa Szymborska (trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh), Nobel Lecture (1996): “The Poet and the World”

“From all this, my friends, there arises an insight which the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song—but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.”
—Pablo Neruda, Nobel Lecture (1971): “Towards the Splendid City”

“Aristotle, I have been told, has said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature…”
—William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”

"Triphammer Bridge" by A.R. Ammons

2011-04-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

Triphammer Bridge

I wonder what to mean by sanctuary, if a real or
apprehended place, as of a bell rung in a gold
surround, or as of silver roads along the beaches

of clouds seas don’t break or black mountains
overspill; jail: ice here’s shapelier than anything,
on the eaves massive, jawed along gorge ledges, solid

in the plastic blue boat fall left water in: if I
think the bitterest thing I can think of that seems like
reality, slickened back, hard, shocked by rip-high wind:

sanctuary, sanctuary, I say it over and over and the
word’s sound is the one place to dwell: that’s it, just
the sound, and the imagination of the sound—a place.

-from The Selected Poems by A.R. Ammons (W.W. Norton, 1986)

Haven't Made It to the Mountaintop

2011-03-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

To be jealous, obviously, is natural and common, particularly in the arts. Italian poet Dante Rossetti feuded with his sister Christina for years because he believed she unfairly received more recognition than he. Bands of every genre, from the Fugees to Van Halen, have all been reared by jealousy’s ugly head. And everyone seems to take shots at Jonathan Franzen since his mug made Time, whether or not they’ve actually read Freedom.

In a small city like Seattle where each of us writers and artists are a degree or two of separation from one another, simple jealousy goes farther than the stem of an empty wine glass. What you say over that glass only rears more jealousy, fooling yourself into believing you haven’t made it to the mountaintop because of someone, something, else — but really it’s just you.

-Brian McGuigan writes about Jealousy in the arts over in CityArts

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The signs of the coming apocalypse are many, but none are starker than this Web headline in the April issue of O: The Oprah Magazine:“Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” Yes. Spring fashion. Modeled. By rising young poets. There follows a photomontage of attractive younger women — some of whom are rising poets mostly in the “I get up in the morning” sense, but all of whom certainly look poetic — in outfits costing from $472 to $5,003. This is all part of O’s special issue celebrating National Poetry Month,edited by the noted verse aficionado Maria Shriver and includinginterviews with “all-star readers” like Bono, Ashton Kutcher, the gossip columnist Liz Smith and someone named James Franco, who is apparently an actor.

via New York Times

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In his first major address since ordering American airstrikes on the forces and artillery of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi nine days ago, Mr. Obama said the United States had the responsibility and the international backing to stop what he characterized as a looming genocide in the Libyan city of Benghazi.

-via New York Times

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I'm applying to residencies for this coming fall/winter. This will be the first time I've ever applied to these sorts of things and I'm not sure what expectations I should have. I know I've already missed deadlines for some great places, but figure I'll apply to three or four amazing-seeming places and see what happens.

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Matt Nienow!

Big Poetry Giveaway!

2011-03-28T19:26:00.000-07:00

I'm way stoked to participate in the most-excellent brainchild of Kelli Russell Agodon, the 2011 Great Poetry Giveaway. Comment on this blog-post (make sure to include your email address, so I have a way to contact you!) anytime between now and April 30th, and you'll be entered to win one of the the two books below as a celebration of National Poetry Month. I'll choose two commenters using a random number generator and mail those folks a copy of one of the following books. A little info on the books and why they're here:

After the Ark is my first collection of poetry, published in January of 2011 by NYQ Books.

District and Circle by Seamus Heaney is the other book I'm giving away. Heaney is my favorite living poet and is one of the reasons I love poetry. This book is full of superb sonnets.

Comment on, blogosphere! Happy poetry month!

Seattle Spring

2011-03-22T08:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks for showing up, sunshine.

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Go here, download the recording, fall in love with an amazing band I've been telling you about forever.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional"

from Jack Gilbert's "Highlights and Interstices"

(The Great Fires, Knopf, 1996)

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D.A. Powell is the guest editor for Best New Poets 2011.

Great choice for a great annual anthology. Looking forward to seeing the 2011 edition, for certain.

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via Hayden's Ferry Review Blog

"Memory" by R.H.W. Dillard

2011-03-15T21:35:00.000-07:00

MEMORY

Now, Julie, at last, you know “what kingdoms
Come,” farewells past, wary to the end, but took
Too long, who, like Adam, knew the names
Of things so well, “lilac, forsythia, orange,
Sharon rose,” whom T.R. taught bone’s dance,
In turn so many taught to sing that tune,
Argued with Wordsworth, also everyone else,
Old crank, plagued by demon alcohol, older,
More dangerous demons, too, led hurt, wounded
Young into that dark, “You are a poet,” once
To bright student, “God help you,” but did not,
Injured yourself, know how deep the shadow
Cast, so smart, unaware, tough, ambitious, then
Told by editor, too old, poetry is for the young,
Yet hard lines, bare words, incantatory, strong,
Those poems remain, alone, God help you, yes.

JULIA RANDALL: “To William Wordsworth from Virginia,” “For T.R., 1908-1963,” A Winter Gallery”
THEODORE ROETHKE: “The Waking,” “I Knew a Woman”

R.H.W. Dillard's long-awaited seventh collection consists of a sequence of fifty-two poems, each sixteen lines long, each addressed to a dead poet or several times to more than one dead poet. Each is a meditation of sorts upon that poet's work, secondarily that poet's life, and ultimately, all together, upon the life of poems themselves in a continually violent and inherently unjust world. The syntax of these poems is shattered, interrupted by bits and pieces of other poems, memories, reflections, echoes, dates, journal entries, explosions, &c., &c., constituting in part a "demonstration" of how the mind actually deals with poems (and, for that matter, with the business of living).

Number 2

2011-03-04T13:52:00.000-08:00

There are a number of amazing, inexplicable, surreal things happening all at once: I had a poem accepted to appear in Southwest Review; I found out my book was the number 2 bestselling poetry title in February at Small Press Distribution (and, in turn, the Poetry Foundation's bestseller list for Small Press titles); an interview and review have been posted over at The Fine Delight featuring myself and After the Ark (Many thanks to Nick Ripatrazone for his excellent project and careful attention); and I'm preparing to fly to North Carolina next week, where I'll be reading and visiting classes at my alma mater, Elon University.

I'm not sure how I got so lucky--but I feel incredibly blessed to have such a warm and generous response to the poems. Wowzas.

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His productivity, never high to begin with, has slowed with age. He finishes poems at the rate that Antonio Stradivari constructed a violin. "I often don't write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let's say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper," he told the Paris Review in 1977. "Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia."

-Great piece on Richard Wilbur from the Wall Street Journal

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Rhythm isn't just decorative. It serves a purpose even in a book like "Moby-Dick," which aspires to social realism. Melville could well have made his opening line "Call me Richard"—it was a popular American name then as now—but it lacks the tragic Old Testament resonance of Ishmael. It also doesn't sound as good as Ishmael, whose two gentler stresses balance out the sentence's strikingly stressed first word. What's more, "Call" and "el" chime off each other, resulting in a sentence that's as sonorous and inviting as "Call me Richard" plainly isn't.

-WSJ

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Fiction-making media (not just movies and TV but, as Season Five makes clear, newspapers too) fumble into drippy sentimentalism or stiffen into overly righteous emotion when dealing with grief. The Wire contains moments of grief uncompromised by special pleading or “framing,” though the purity of feeling can’t be separated from ambiguity. Nothing matches the elegiac grandeur of the solo spiritual, “Jesus On the Mainline,” sung—fieldshouted—at D’Angelo’s funeral. Never mind it’s mourning for and by a drug-running society. The song doesn’t ask us to sympathize, only to witness grieving. And much later, the mere sight of the abandoned boarded-up houses where Marlo has stashed bodies is an image of loss, of houses not as beds of culture but dumpsters for dead human beings: the houses represent all the species of concealment, misdirection, and devaluation of the human that every social order in The Wire engages in.

-W.S. Di Piero writes elegantly about The Wire

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Beyond stoked to see Macklemore tomorrow night--it'll be his last show in Seattle before he hits the national tour and blows up in the rest of the country.

The Lay of the Land

2011-02-25T09:14:00.000-08:00

What Your Favorite Classic Rock Band Says About You

via McSweeney's

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For me, like I said, I’ve only been studying contemporary poetry seriously for, I guess, two and a half years now, so I still feel like I’m just learning the lay of the land. I don’t know the extent of it yet. We’re using this kind of cinematic frame that I’m much more familiar with to approach poetry.

Oscar host James Franco discusses poetry and Hart Crane over at the Poetry Foundation

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I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today... A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future.

Such a cool project.

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Following is a list of the 100 best first lines from novels, as decided by the American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University.

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"But do not hurry the journey at all, better if it lasts for years, so that you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained along the way, not expecting Ithaca to make you rich. Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey. Without her, you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithacas mean."

A Hearty Sextet

2011-02-13T17:28:00.001-08:00

Boone was bit by a geriatric German Shepherd at the dog park. The dog was named "Gator." I got the guy's information, but it's a pretty clean, superficial bite (though, Gator took about a quarter-sized chunk with him), so there's not much than can be done other than keeping it clean and letting it heal. Letting it heal means a cone. A cone. It makes an already sad-looking dog look mighty, mighty sad.

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Eduardo wins the Yale Younger! Eduardo wins the Yale Younger! Those of us paying attention are not surprised. Couldn't go to a more deserving poet. I've read a draft of Eduardo's winning manuscript and cannot wait to hold the book in my hands. The poems are damn-excellent. This is good.

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"The National Endowment for the Arts is targeted for a $22.5 million cut in the legislative proposal, and it is quite possible members of the Republican Study Committee will offer amendments to fully eliminate the NEA during floor consideration. We need you to send a message to your Members calling on them to reject these cuts to the NEA."

Follow the link above. It only takes a second to remind folks with briefcases that we still live in a country that believes in and supports the arts.

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Campfire OK is now a hearty sextet, but that fact is easily concealed during the band's more delicate moments. The title track from Strange Like We Are quickly bursts open with a forceful chorus: "All we see are blue pastels and deep V-necks / so why don't we go somewhere we all know / where everyone we meet is strange like we are." It's not clear whether Goodweather is lamenting Seattle culture, the indie-rock dress code or something else altogether, but his words and melody are fun and memorable, regardless. "Strange Like We Are" grows as it goes, with its many layers, including handclaps and three-part harmonies, culminating in more powerful choruses.

via NPR

My friend Melodie Knight, who took my author photo, sings in Campfire OK. She's awesome and they're excellent.

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Perhaps this is overly hopeful, but even in the relentless Iowa winter, I am hopeful. Many of my students seem to be responding to the dark edges of literature in a way I have never seen before. One class seems much more talkative than usual, more willing to accept the fact that life, politics, morality—all these things—hover mostly in the gray areas rather than in the black and white. Their insights often trump mine.

It could be that the continued economic malaise, endless wars, hateful political rhetoric, and senseless violence of the past decade have made their mark on this new crop of students. They don’t need to be convinced of life’s unfairness (they’re soon to enter the worst white-collar labor market ever), of the horrifying randomness of violence (school shootings have always been part of their landscape), and of the real dangers of climate change (their campus has endured epic floods twice in the past three years.) This generation might understand complexity better than I ever imagined they could.

"How Reading Junot Diaz Can Help the Heartland" from Wall Street Journal

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Huge thanks to Sandy Longhorn for taking this video!

Madison looks bored.

Part Cliffhanger

2011-02-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

I have a poem in the newly released issue of Unsplendid. There's also audio of me reading the poem, which I always think is dope. It's a great issue they've put together, with poems by Sherman Alexie, Adam Vines, Stephen Kampa, and others. Vale.

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Capitol Hill rapper Macklemore is Seattle's best shot at mainstream pop stardom right now.

via Seattle Times

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Killer first line of the moment:

"Who ever knew that light could be so blue—"

from C.Dale Young's "Windows"
(TORN, Four Way Books, 2011)

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Those who know The Wire might recognize my “vision” as a loose interpretation of a scene in the last episode of Season Four. These days, this scene with Michael appears almost every time I think about ending poems. It’s part cliffhanger, part resolution, and part realization. We know what happened to Michael before the scene, but don’t know exactly what’s going to happen to him next because unlike some of the other characters on The Wire, his impetus for being in the game has little to do with his own needs. It’s all about the well-being of his brother.

Michael’s situation is connected to the idea of ending poems for many reasons, not the least of which is that a poem’s ending has very little to do with the poet’s needs. Since the universe of a poem continues in absentia, efforts to end poems in a tidy way are mostly futile and contrived. I think it’s because these kinds of efforts adhere to the poet’s wishes, rather than the poem’s.

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"Did you ever worry that the Whole Ten Yards was going to be too good?"

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Bruce Willis from Bruce Willis

Traded for Six and Bought One

2011-02-07T21:45:00.000-08:00

AWP has come and gone. It deserves a full update--an amazing weekend, to be sure. That said, exhaustion wins out--so this will be far too short. It was great to encounter po-folks from the blogosphere (Sandy at the bookfair! C. Dale at his signing! Josh working the Grist table! Eduardo in the hotel bar! Professor Plum with a candlestick! Oliver on the plane back to Seattle!). It was great to celebrate Hollins. It was great to see my book into so many folks' hands. It was great to surround myself with wonderful and talented people for three days, but the best to still want to go home at the end. Until next year, blue curtains.

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A convention hotel is, to misquote and half-elide a friend of mine, a humorless place. Good Saturday morning to you, then, friends and fans of weather, from the edge of Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, home of this year's beret-and-cheek-kiss festival of penmanship. A writer's conference. This you want no part of. Witness the six quasivirginal boys downstairs wearing semihispter t-shirts staring at the grad school girl who's come down for breakfast barefoot and wearing a tiny tank top and still tinier shorts. And we know who she is already, is the problem: She's the one who's already been in the program a year by the time you get there, the one everybody falls for, the one who leaves a kind of scorched earth in her wake. Students, teachers, teachers' pets—she's equal opportunity. You know better. Everybody does. Doesn't matter. She knows who you are, too: You're the next one she's trying to shock. As another friend said over an eight-dollar hotel bar beer last night: The less people pay attention, the bigger it gets.

Drew Perry elegantly blogs AWP. There's a sentence I never thought I'd write.

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Man, oh man.

Ten Below

2011-02-01T08:53:00.000-08:00

It is bad enough crying for children
suffering neglect and starvation in our world
without having on a day like this
to see an old cart horse covered with foam,
quivering so hard that when he stops
the wheels still rock slowly in place
like gears in an engine.
A man will do that, shiver where he stands,
frozen with false starts,
just staring,
but with a man you can take his arm,
talk him out of it, lead him away.

What do you do when both hands
and your voice are simply goads?
When the eyes you solace see space,
the wall behind you, the wisp of grass
pushing up through the curb at your feet?
I have thought that all the animals
we kill and maim, if they wanted to
could stare us down, wither us
and turn us to smoke with their glances—
they forbear because they pity us,
like angels, and love of something else
is why they suffer us and submit.

But this is Pine Street, Philadelphia, 1965.
You don't believe
in anything divine being here.
There is an old plug with a worn blanket
thrown on its haunches. There is a wagon
full of junk—pipes and rotted sinks,
the grates from furnaces—and there
is a child walking beside the horse
with sugar, and the mammoth head lowering,
delicately nibbling from those vulnerable
fingers. You can't cut your heart out.
Sometimes, just what is, is enough.

-C.K. Williams

from Collected Poems

(Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 2006)

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If the horses can brave the cold, then so can we. Let's do this, DC.

Ferris Bueller Would've Been Too Cool for Facebook

2011-01-26T18:57:00.001-08:00

Flights booked for DC. Had a poem accepted by Threepenny Review. Working on interviews for two excellent literary blogs (uno and due). Got the new Kweli album (better than Eardrum and Beautiful Struggle, not quite Quality or Train of Thought...). Life moves pretty fast...

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The human habit of overestimating other people's happiness is nothing new, of course. Jordan points to a quote by Montesquieu: "If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are." But social networking may be making this tendency worse. Jordan's research doesn't look at Facebook explicitly, but if his conclusions are correct, it follows that the site would have a special power to make us sadder and lonelier. By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people's lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles' heel of human nature. And women—an especially unhappy bunch of late—may be especially vulnerable to keeping up with what they imagine is the happiness of the Joneses.

via Slate

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Suddenly, what had seemed awfully productive to me now seemed like pure laziness and inefficiency. This person wrote 3 million pages of a novel yesterday. That person stayed up all night long writing six essays for various prestigious publications. This friend was somehow interviewed by three publications while managing to read and review four books simultaneously and dash off a few dozen short stories and her sixth novella to boot. They’re giving readings! They’re planning readings! They’re selling books! They’re stacking up publication credits like cord wood! The as-of-late familiar feeling came rushing back, and I found myself panicking, thinking, I’m so behind! I need to catch up! I found myself thinking about pulling a few all-nighters myself (as if my old-ass body could handle that anymore), about all the books I still need to read, about the growing list of story ideas and the novel that I have no time for and the short story collection I need to put together–and then I glanced at my giant, mutating to do list for work and I was totally overcome by the whole thing.

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Jordan boxes all over my closet...

Getting It Right

2011-01-24T10:42:00.000-08:00

Great week: book launch reading in Seattle (standing room only, sold out of books: a world gone gonzo), had some of the new poems provisionally accepted by one of my favorite journals, and found out I'll be having a book-signing at AWP (2:00-2:30 on Friday at the Greensboro Review table). Can't wait for DC...

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The 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2010

(on the list: Paula Deen, Christine O'Donnell, and LeBron James)

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Here’s a leap. Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants” is many things: perfection of his minimalist style; an example of excellent dialogue; a snapshot of two people that reveals their entire lifetime; imagery that resonates in its depth and emotion; and of course, being a “teachable” story that often requires an explanation that the young couple is talking about an abortion. But the story’s staying power is in its tragedy: it’s a story about not being able to see the world in metaphor, a story about the crushing of a woman’s imagination.

via Terry L. Kennedy

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Kelly Cherry of Halifax County has been named poet laureate for the state of Virginia, Gov. Bob McDonnell has announced.

Hooray Kelly!

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I applaud Luke's generous work for managing to be both religious and domestic, without being high-handed or overly sentimental. Above all this book is an honest account of difficult love.

-Many thanks to Sandy Longhorn, for her incisive and generous review of the book. If you haven't read her work, do yourself a favor and buy this book.

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"Since I started writing poetry as a child I’ve had one object: to see clearly. There are moments of my life that I keep returning to, writing about, and never getting “right,” so I return again and again. A few years ago I wrote a chart of a hundred moments that my mind drifts back to, or that still puzzle me, and I spent the last year relistening to them, some deep listening, that was more of a meditative practice than a writing process, but much of my second book,Migratory Restlessness, (coming out in a few years from Copper Canyon Press) has arisen from this re-seeing, re-listening."

Great interview with Ed Skoog from over at the Ploughshares Blog

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And now for something completely different. You're welcome.

Poems By Heart

2011-01-24T00:53:00.000-08:00

Discovered this video the other day, via the righteous poet Mark Brewin. It reminded me of Frank Giampietro's excellent website Poems by Heart. All these things cheer me.

On New Things

2011-01-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

There's only 2 copies of the book left on my shelf. I cannot adequately describe how grateful I feel to all of y'all who have ordered copies. Thank you. I hope you find something in the poems. Should have more copies in the next few days...

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Killer first line of the moment:

"till the face of the oceans, plow wild"

from Jeanne Larsen's "Hurricane Gardens"

(Why We Make Gardens (& Other Poems), Mayapple Press, 2010)

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Found out this morning that my book will be featured at the Small Press Distribution table at AWP. This is great news as NYQ Books won't have a table, so this way the book will still be available at the bookfair. The press website has also been updated with some sample poems and links to all the major online book retailers. Spooky.

Starting to get super-stoked about AWP. Very much looking forward to reading with Jeanne Larsen, Madison Smartt Bell, Jill McCorkle, and David Huddle to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Hollins University program in Creative Writing. Just as much looking forward to reconnecting with old friends, encountering blogfolk, and discovering new poets and ways to look at poems. Who's going? Who do y'all want to see? (Me: Terrance Hayes, Sandra Alcosser, Stephen Dunn, Junot Diaz, Charles Wright...)

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We will hear much talk in the weeks to come of the Lone Gunman, an archetype useful to those of us who wish to absolve ourselves.

Sober news people will soberly shrug their shoulders and whisper into microphones about the mysteries of the human heart. It will be as if there was no motive for the crime, as if the murderer were a machine that malfunctioned rather than an American who mistook sadism for an expression of his beliefs.

The more hysterical reactions will come from those who feel themselves implicated, who fear the great con of their professions exposed. They will react with absurd rituals of denial, as if, after all their violent agitation, they are the ones being fired upon, the victims of some vast and unending conspiracy.

This operatic indignation is what I meant when I spoke, a few months ago, about the American descent into a shame culture.

It has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with the capacity for moral self-reflection. What happens when a large and well-armed portion of our citizenry can no longer apologize? When humility becomes another form of humiliation? Their heroes exhort them: Never retreat. Reload.

-Steve Almond (I'm not sure there's a more cogent and eloquent writer/thinker, when it comes to social commentary)

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We need to face up these new challenges-- not just as individuals or separate interests, but as a nation with a national purpose. The world of the next generation will change too rapidly for political parties to focus too narrowly on the next election. And the 21st Century can be another American century-- but only if we restore a larger sense of responsibility and replace the clattering cacophony of the perpetual campaign with a wider discussion of what is best for our country.

via The Washington Post

What I thought was a truly excellent speech by John Kerry, regarding our nation and the dire dangers we face as a society if we continue in this polarized political state. Watch it at the link.

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If you're prepared to forgive Bill Murray for being the lone impediment to the progress ofGhostbusters 3, all you have to do is read his speech introducing Sofia Coppola at the National Board of Review Awards last night. The event was full of charming introductions and thank-yous (even Christian Bale came off well — he joked that he's found his The Fighter role so hard to shake that the actresses he's about to screen-test opposite for The Dark Knight Rises "will be the first to get to see Dickie as Batman"), but no one had the crowd roaring like Murray, who introduced his Lost in Translation director with a delightfully deranged speech delivered while sucking on candy. Here it is in its entirety.

-via Chad Temples

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There's so much amazing music in Seattle right now. Macklemore and The Head and the Heart are both doing incredible things, and it seems as though the rest of the country is beginning to notice. Feeling incredibly fortunate to be living in this city right now, and proud to call myself a Seattleite. Go Seahawks!

A Box of Books in Spokane

2011-01-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

The UPS tracker says I'll have a big 'ol box on my porch tomorrow evening. This is craziness. There are fish dying and birds falling from the sky. I worry that my book's release has triggered the apocalypse. Still, just in case, I've added a PayPal button to the blog, for anyone who'd like to buy the book directly from me (free shipping, yo). I'd be happy to sign copies, just let me know when you make your order. The book should also be available on Amazon and Small Press Distribution by the end of the weekend (or so I hear). I'll be walking around with copies at AWP, too, though NYQ Books won't have a table so you'll have to find me (you could just come to the Hollins 50th anniversary reading, featuring me, Madison Smartt Bell, Jill McCorkle, Jeanne Larsen, Karen McElmurray, and David Huddle, just sayin'). The folks at NYQ have added page-previews on the book's site, if you're so inclined.

Thanks, again, for your interest. It's remarkable to me that I have so many excellent folks with which to share this. Go team.

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We create art because we create art. In all art, no matter how we like to deny this in the postmodern world, there is a glimpse of the afterlife, of the communal power of the human mind. So, my friend, we continue on. We draft our poems. We move commas and line breaks. We listen. We watch. We live. We write. To some, our need to do this is silly. To others, it is something they wish they could do. But this life of making art, this devotion, is one I would never trade in for anything. And something deep inside me tells me this is true for you as well. Again, I know I am being forward having never met you in person. But I have met your heart and your mind in your poems, and I know full well you share in this terrible devotion.

-C. Dale Young responds to my last post over at Avoiding the Muse.

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Josh Robbins was kind to give me a shout out and post three poems from my forthcoming book on his blog. Having seen Josh's poems around in journals, online, etc., I don't think it will be too long before I can return him the same favor.

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On What's to Come

2010-12-29T20:33:00.000-08:00

"I mean that I don't quite trust your motives for writing poetry."

"Motives?" Certainly, it was a worthy question. How many other things could all of them be doing at that moment, other than arguing and moaning and dissecting and growing more passionate about an activity that mattered to virtually no one and would likely never earn them a living? ... What did his motives matter to her? Was not the power of the poems themselves all that mattered?

"Why do you want to write poetry?" he asked. "Why does anyone?"

"Why do we want to fall in love? Why do we want to pray?"

--A scene from Lan Samantha Chang's gorgeous book All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (required reading for any poets who have ever been in or around an MFA program, or for anyone vaguely interested in the dilemmas of artistic purpose), in which a distinguished professor is speaking with one of her graduate students.

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I spent five years writing and revising After the Ark, which will be released next week by NYQ Books. During that time, I've graduated from two universities, been engaged and un-engaged, lost one good dog and taken on another. I've lived in a tent in West Virginia, a boarding school in the rural Blue Ridge Mountains, and in a basement studio in Seattle. I've moved away from the people I love most and discovered a new home, with new wonderful people. Throughout, these poems haven't been far from the front of my mind (this may explain the 'un-engaged' part). Any day now, I expect a box on the porch. The arrival of this box signals that these poems are finished (right?), or at least abandoned. But, what exactly have I done? Five years moving commas and cutting loose language, reworking images and hoping that through this unending and slightly-rational alchemy I'll have made something worth reading aloud. And at some point I have to ask why. Why did I write it? Why do I care that anyone reads it?

I rarely go to church. Growing up, as the son of two ministers, I attended multiple services just about every week, but much more time was spent not in ceremony, but waiting for my parents to finish whatever it was they were doing in their offices (I never understood why ministers needed offices, though I suppose it's the same reason poets need offices). There were hours when I would wander my parents' churches (my father's Sage Chapel at Cornell University and my mother's United Ministry in Aurora, NY). I knew these places intimately, the choir loft in Aurora and the Tomb of Presidents in Sage, how one candle could bring a flash to the gold-trimmed ceiling mosaics, how the wooden beams looked like something you'd see on the Ark. I'd fallen asleep in the pews, hidden with a puppy in the cloister, and memorized damn-near every piece of stained glass. It was a different place for every hour of the day--the quiet and light never the same, but always present.

I wish I knew why I've kept writing poems. I don't. I do know this: whenever I write a poem, I wonder how it would sound if delivered from one of my parents' pulpits. There needn't be beeswax candles or widows slumped praying in the front pews, but there has to be that feeling of reverence, of being at once elsewhere and at home. I am addicted to the space a poem creates. Poems are sanctuary and mystery, like an empty church to a child, a place in which attentiveness and clarity mix with memory and belief. Poetry, like church, is an act of community, a sharing of blessings and burdens, and maybe that's why I want so badly for people to read the book. Maybe it's vanity. I hope it's not. I worry that this is a tired and overly-grandiose analogy, but it's too late in the year for anxiety (New Year's Resolution: Stop comparing Poetry to Church. Stop using these two words in a context in which they should be capitalized.).

There was a plaque in the back of my father's church, a dedication to E.B. White, member of the Sage Chapel Choir and author of Charlotte's Web. The plaque quotes the end of White's book: "Life in the barn was very good--night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of the swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, and the glory of everything."

How lucky we are to be here, how lucky to worry and wonder over words. Thanks for stopping by, for indulging this ramble, and for caring, if only peripherally, about language and the way it moves us. Happy new year, everyone.

Quick Links

2010-12-16T14:57:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a lot of consuming. Books, movies, music. I'm determined to make January a productive month. It's been too long since the last new poem.

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"The poem is ground down from a mumbled joy."--Charles Wright

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So these guys just played 3 nights with Dave Matthews, then signed with Sub Pop Records, the same Seattle record label that originally signed Nirvana and Soundgarden, and currently works with folks like the Fleet Foxes, Flight of the Conchords, and The Shins. I hate to say I told you so, but...

They're touring right now, all over (including the East Coast). Go see them.

A Van Session with The Head and The Heart from Dylan Priest on Vimeo.