Extraordinarily Narcissistic Writer

Righteous Winter day in Seattle. Work, dog, poems, grade, repeat.

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Shortly after songs hit the internet, Ruder is playing them on his show. "That's the beauty of KEXP—we don't have to wait to see whether a song's test marketed before we add it to a playlist," Ruder gushes. "We have the freedom to play what we want to create an exciting show. I feel like the whole purpose of KEXP is to expose people to new music and enrich people's lives through the discovery of music. That's really close to what I'm passionate about, to have this station be a filter."

-The Stranger covers what surely is the best radio station out there, KEXP

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And so I do not outlaw slam. If slam becomes the new orthodoxy, then highly talented, highly gifted young poets will be forced to fit the mold and, being, forced, will subvert slam and change it from within. At least, I hope so. At any rate, my qualms against slam:

-Joe Weil on Slam Poetry over at THEThePoetry

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Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

-excellent essay on Joan Didion's work over at The Atlantic

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Northwest.

At Church and at Strip Clubs

Three beautiful poems:

"Discharged into Clouds" by Dean Young at Threepenny Review

"The Vista by C. Dale Young at the Poetry Foundation

"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" by Jack Gilbert (audio) at the Poetry Foundation

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I don’t want to be silent about issues that concern me because all too often, silence implies consent, but I also want to feel like we’re moving forward and making some kind of difference. Perhaps I want too much but that’s nothing new. I’m going to spend 2012 trying to figure out a better way to talk about these issues. I’m going to spend 2012 seeking out the kind of writing I know is out there but is not receiving the attention it deserves. I’m going to spend 2012 committed to great(er) expectations rather than surrendering to the status quo. We’ll see how this goes.

-Roxane Gay over at The Rumpus


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To say Southerners drink sweet tea like water is both true and not. True because the beverage is served at every meal, and all times and venues in between—at church and at strip clubs, at preschool and in nursing homes. Not true because unlike water or wine or even Coca-Cola, sweet tea means something. It is a tell, a tradition. Sweet tea isn't a drink, really. It's culture in a glass. Like Guinness in Ireland. Or ouzo in Greece.

-via Garden and Gun

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When I read the first summary of the new rules, what jumped out at me was that, to be eligible, a documentary had to be reviewed by either the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times. That puts enormous pressure on the critics of those papers (“Review my doc or I’ll shoot this dog”), but to qualify at all, a documentary must open and play for at least a week in both cities, so it’s fairly likely to be reviewed.

-Roger Ebert on the new Oscar rules over at Wall Street Journal

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The first person plural is an indexical pronoun, dependent on context for meaning, but the boundaries are often unclear even to the speaker. And there’s something not only ambiguous but also incoherent in the pronoun. As Franz Boas warned in 1911, “a true [first person] plural […] is impossible, because there can never be more than one self.” Poetry, though we associate it with “I,” is rather fond of “we,” and not only the intimate “we” of private I/Thou relations. But the best poets are also aware that it’s a shifty and treacherous pronoun. Surprisingly, poetry, the genre we most identify with private, subjective experiences, is far freer in its use of the first person plural than narrative prose, though there are a few bold examples in fiction, such as Kate Walbert’s Our Kind, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and, most recently, Justin Torres’ We the Animals, works that suggest a “we” prior to or stronger than the individuating psyche. But poetry has given much freer rein to the first person plural. At the same time, the pressures and perils of the pronoun “we” are registered with particular sensitivity in the genre with the most acute linguistic self-consciousness.

-via Jacket2

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My friend Noah writes and sings remarkable songs.

Strapped to the Top of the Car

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Even worse, she said, was “the élitism that passes itself off as inclusiveness.” She went on, “The rules are so esoteric, so hard to follow, that no one else could fit in. And what you’ll never admit to yourself is that you don’t want other people to fit in.” That’s a good summation of what “Portlandia” lampoons.

-via The New Yorker

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In fact, I spent 15 years in a similar city: Seattle. When I moved there in 1990, Seattle was enjoying a moment—everything from its coffee culture to its computer software and especially its music scene were suddenly the apex of cool. This was tricky for longtime Seattlites, who seemed simultaneously proud of and embarrassed by all the attention. The Seattle Times ran a regular column that rounded up every mention of the city in the national and international press, the way a proud mom might put together a scrapbook of her offspring’s science-fair achievements. (That booster columnist, Jean Godden, is now a member of the Seattle City Council.) At the same time, there was something like a conspiracy to keep quiet about the city’s awesomeness—and to exaggerate its flaws, such as the weather. (Yes, it’s often gray and overcast in Seattle, but there’s more annual rainfall in places like Atlanta, New York, and Washington, D.C.)

-via Slate

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In 1983, a 36-year-old Romney and his wife and five young boys piled into the family station wagon for a 12-hour drive from Boston to Lake Huron in Canada. As was the custom, Seamus, their Irish setter, rode in a crate strapped to the top of the car.

-via Chicago Tribune

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Bookshelf Porn

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Closer to the Eye of a Needle

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 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

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

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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