The Lay of the Land

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.