March Gladness

Are you watching these basketball games? Holy moly.

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Though Patagonia caters to dirt bags, the company’s success—it will clear more than $500 million in sales this year—has for many years depended on a different kind of customer: the dog walker. The dog walker buys gear designed for the mountains and puts it to use in the canyons of midtown, the office park, the tree-lined streets of suburbia. He may aspire to the dirt-bag lifestyle, or even have lived it in the years before career or children intervened, but now he wears his fleece to keep warm during Spot’s evening constitutional. The dog walker takes comfort in knowing his Super Pluma Jacket is designed for the harshest conditions, but he’ll never rely on its gusseted underarm panels or harness-compatible pockets. He does, however, think those things look cool.

This state of affairs is not necessarily pleasing to Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard. “We outgrew our loyal customer base and increasingly were selling to yuppies, posers, and wanna-bes,” he told Inc. back in 1992. “These people don’t need this shit to get in their Jeep Cherokees and drive to Connecticut for the weekend.”

-Slate

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Let’s be real clear: however passionately right-wing news consumers believe the media’s a liberal moutpiece, owned and run by Rothschilds and Jews and commies and beholden to hippie leftist snobs and elites in power, there is, at present, no left-wing analog to Fox. Whatever your beliefs of the Big Three networks, not one of them takes part in the sensationalistic slanting of facts as does Fox. Further, no network besides Fox has such an unclear (or, better, permeable) barrier between commentary and news—bias and fact, basically. Hate Diane Sawyer, or Anderson Cooper? Fine, but at least they’re attempting to, without bias, cover, not create, news.

-Corduroy Books

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Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

-NYT

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Indeed, though soundscape ecology has hardly begun, natural soundscapes already face a crisis. Humans have irrevocably altered the acoustics of the entire globe — and our racket continues to spread. Missing or altered voices in a soundscape tend to indicate broader environmental problems. For instance, at least one invasive species, the red-billed leiothrix of East Asia, appears to use its clamorous chatter to drown out the native European blackbird in Northern Italy. Noise can mask mating calls, cause stress and prevent animals from hearing alarms, the stirrings of prey and other useful survival cues. And as climate change prompts a shift in creatures’ migration schedules, circadian rhythms and preferred habitats — reshuffling the where and when of their calls — soundscapes are altered, too. Soundscape ecologists hope they can save some ecosystems, but they also realize they will bear witness to many finales. “There may be some very unique soundscapes around the world that — just through normal human activities — would be lost forever,” Pijanowski says — unless he and colleagues can record them before they disappear. An even more critical task, he thinks, is alerting people to the way “soundscapes provide us with a sense of place” and an emotional bond with the natural world that is unraveling. As children, our grandparents could hope to swim in a lake or lie in a meadow for whole afternoons without hearing a motorboat, car or plane; today the engineless hour is all but extinct, and we’ve grown accustomed to constant, mild auditory intrusions. “Humans are becoming an increasingly more urban species, and so we’re surrounding ourselves with concrete and buildings” and “the low hum of the urban landscape,” Pijanowski says. “We’re kind of severing the acoustic link that humans have with nature.”

-NYT


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Slightly Mesmerizing

Still trucking out here in the Northwest. Working, writing, and revising. For the first time in what seems like ages, not submitting relentlessly. It feels good to let the poems breathe a bit, to let them shift and speak and grow. I'm writing 7 poems in 7 days with some tremendously talented folks, which has me energized and writing forward.

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For me, beautiful poems (or stories) are as we are all describing them: volatile examinations of the world. I don’t especially care what corner of the world is being examined, or in what tone or style or vernacular. The crucial thing is my unconscious sense that the speaker cannot stop herself. Whenever I have occasion to teach, I always inflict on my students stories and poems that reinforce this urgency, and broaden their sense of how language can be used. Barry Hannah. Emily Dickinson. Stephen Elliot. The freaks and obsessives who run howling toward the shame, with only their precision as a shield. I love to reach those moments in a piece where the reader is suddenly implicated in the madness. To be joined to the reader, made more common, less alone. It hardly ever happens for me, and never as a poet. But it does happen.

-Great conversation between Steve Almond, Timothy Donnelly, Matthew Zapruder, and Ange Mlinko over at APR

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If a politician can’t talk about dogs without sounding slightly deranged, what hope does he have? The crude familiarity in the way L.B.J. made a spectacle of himself with his dogs—the ear incident occurred when he was displaying them to the press—was shocking, but slightly mesmerizing, an echo of the way he used to bully and cajole legislators, and sometimes undermine himself. They also reveal an element of self-aggrandizement: one of the dogs was named Little Beagle Johnson. The demand for a pet-based normalcy test has since been ritualized, in tiresome but necessary books by or addressed to Millie, Socks, and their ilk.

-via The New Yorker

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Every 53 minutes, someone in Washington State gets arrested for pot. That could be a thing of the past before the year is out. Initiative 502, on the November ballot, is the whole shebang: legalization, taxation, and regulation of marijuana. We're not just talking about making pot possession punishable by, say, a $100 fine, like Massachusetts did in 2008. Instead, I-502 would remove all penalties for adults 21 and older who possess up to an ounce of marijuana. It would also license pot agriculture, allow trucks to drive around distributing pot like beer, and permit stores to sell pot over the counter.

-via The Stranger

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Mr. Gilbert’s career-embracing “Collected Poems” is, however, a revelation, almost certainly among the two or three most important books of poetry that will be published this year. His poetry is helped, not hurt, by this context and relative abundance. Around this book’s margins a scruffy and blood-warm autobiography emerges.

-Heading to Open Books this week to pick up my copy...


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Is there anything worse than watching yourself talk? Seriously mortifying. Still, huge thanks to 32 Poems for allowing me to read with such a stellar line-up, and to Smartish Pace for co-hosting and making the video. AWP was awesome and exhausting.

Silly, Joyful Tune

Living amid so much beauty is thrilling and exhausting.

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Over the next two years, Sugar’s fans—a devoted readership that includes more than fifteen thousand Facebook and Twitter followers—learned bits about who she was. She was a she. She had lost her mother far too early. She had children, a husband, student-loan debt, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of open-minded, honest advice. Her responses covered jealousy, the decision to have (or not have) children, drug addiction, and the unanswerable questions of life. On Tuesday night, at a coming-out party in San Francisco, Sugar formally introduced herself as Cheryl Strayed, a writer living in Portland whose new memoir, “Wild,” will be the Rumpus Book Club’s pick for March. She recently took time to answer questions on anonymity, intimacy, and her relationship with her readers. An edited version of the exchange appears below.

-An interview with Cheryl Strayed, who was recently revealed to be Sugar. You can watch the whole "coming out party" here. And here's a beautiful Cheryl Strayed essay from The Sun: "The Love of My Life"

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You died in winter and so the whole world was your elegy. Now spring comes with its silly, joyful tune, and I cannot hear the words.

-An elegy by Dave Lucas, in Granta

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Auden’s kitchen was long and narrow, with many pots and pans hanging on the wall. He preferred such delicacies as tongue, tripe, brains, and Polish sausage, ascribing the eating of beefsteak to the lower orders (“it’s madly non-U!”). He drank Smirnoff martinis, red wine, and cognac, shunned pot, and confessed to having, under a doctor’s supervision, tried LSD: “Nothing much happened, but I did get the distinct impression that some birds were trying to communicate with me.”

His conversation was droll, intelligent, and courtly, a sort of humanistic global gossip, disinterested in the machinations of ambition, less interested in concrete poetry, absolutely exclusive of electronic influence.

-an interview with W.H. Auden, from the Paris Review archives

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Lynn engages a prescient point: are literary magazines an end, or a means toward an end, for writers? From an economic standpoint, he reaches a practical conclusion, shared by most writers involved in the submission process: while publication in literary magazines might be an aesthetic end, it is no means an economic one. Since “many authors today hold academic positions… promotion in the academy often depends on generating vitae with lists of publications that otherwise have earned them little beyond the price of a meal or two.” The obvious irony needs to be unpacked. Scan the contributor notes of any contemporary literary magazine, and you will find Lynn’s statement true: writers are often employed by university English departments, or are students in MFA programs affiliated with those departments. Other than a few and often notable distinctions, the economy of literary magazines appears to be a closed system: writers publish in literary magazines that are often read by writers. Money is tight, payment is low, and subscriptions and institutional support appear to be the final hope for sustenance. Does it have to be that way?

-Nick Ripatrazone over at The Millions

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A Minister Will Build A Sermon

I'm excited about going to Chicago in March. Mainly because I'll get to stay in a hotel, eat deep dish pizza, and see old friends.

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In much the way that a minister will build a sermon upon a selected biblical text, I am today going to deliver what might be called a secular sermon or meditation on a sentence by Edgar Allan Poe from his essay "Peter Snook"—not the actual sentence, mind you, but an inaccurate version I quoted to Erin Pope, one of my students, the other day while we were discussing the way writing is written. I'll tell you what Poe actually wrote a bit later, but here is the sentence as I misquoted it at the time: "To originate is carefully, patiently, and lovingly to combine." I would like to use that newly minted (or recombined) Poe sentence to talk to you a bit this morning about the mysterious process of writing, reading, and the creation of meaning by writing and reading.

-R.H.W. Dillard's "Going Out Into the Crazy" from Blackbird

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"Relict organisms," Naskrecki writes in the introduction, "which I prefer to call simply 'relics' ... are often the last carriers of genes that have otherwise disappeared from the world's gene pool."

-via NPR

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This week, Brian Joseph Davis launched The Composites, a Tumblr that imagines the appearance of literary characters using both the text that describes them ... and composite sketch-rendering software used mostly by law enforcement. The resulting mugshots are as creepy and incredible as you might imagine -- IQ84 meets CSI.

-via The Atlantic

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Reading Didion was a revolution to me not only because of the beauty and depth of her prose, but because it also opened up the idea that I could be something more than what I was — a white girl from suburbia who had done nothing in college (or life) beyond pledging a sorority and getting drunk at frat parties. During my time at one of the most famous universities in the world, I had joined no causes, protested nothing. For this, I was deeply ashamed. Then I discovered that Didion and I had a few things in common. She was a self-proclaimed nobody from Sacramento. She pledged the Tri-Deltas at Cal and wasn’t sure what else to do with herself there. She famously writes that when she started reporting, she was so small and quiet, people forgot she was in the room. I wasn’t small or quiet, but I felt just as invisible most of the time. Reading Didion hinted at the possibility that I was perhaps more interesting than I realized, that eventually I might have something to say. It would take me years to manifest this idea, but in the meantime, I spent many afternoons staring out my bedroom window of my sorority at the Tri-Delt house across the street. I used to imagine Didion there, back she was lost and still a girl. I could almost see her hiding behind her signature sunglasses on the front porch, smoking cigarettes while absentmindedly smoothing out the wrinkles of her pale pink shift dress, waiting for the rest of her life to happen.

-The Rumpus (and a beautiful Didion essay, here)

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Just Before the Release

*Boone photo as a token of congratulations to Traci Brimhall*

Happy Super Bowl Sunday, folks! The sun is shining and deserving poets/wonderful people have been awarded money for their poems: www.dorothyprizes.org. You can read the prize-winning poems at the website--it's a treasure trove. Congrats to all my friends on the list!

I suppose I want the Giants to win, but mostly I just want the commercials to be good.

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A couple of winters ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Spokane, Washington, to interview the great Sherman Alexie just before the release of his latest book of poetry,Face. I was worn-out and deep into some dark winter months of making a record, and I couldn't wait to cross the continent to refresh my inspiration by meeting one of the people whose art made me feel brave enough to try to write things down in my own words. The fact that Alexie was going to be on home turf was extra special in my mind. Eastern Washington was a place I called home for much of my life, so to return there meant a great deal to me. The fact is, there aren't very many writers from Washington, and even fewer who speak the language of kids who grew up in poverty there, and probably less than a handful of those speak the poetry of our region. "Our" trees are not "their" trees, if you know what I mean.

-a wonderful interview between Neko Case and Sherman Alexie, at The Believer

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Killer first line of the moment:

We have no words for you.

from "Not Words But Hands" by Martin Espada
(The Republic of Poetry, W.W. Norton, 2006)

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Inside the great publishing houses — grand names like Macmillan, Penguin and Random House — there is a sense of unease about the long-term fate of Barnes & Noble, the last major bookstore chain standing. First, the megastores squeezed out the small players. (Think of Tom Hanks’s Fox & Sons Books to Meg Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner in the 1998 comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”.) Then the chains themselves were gobbled up or driven under, as consumers turned to the Web. B. Dalton Bookseller and Crown Books are long gone. Borders collapsed last year.

No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point? Such fears came to the fore in early January, when the company projected that it would lose even more money this year than Wall Street had expected. Its share price promptly tumbled 17 percent that day.

-NYT

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These guys will be in Seattle on March 26th!

Exceed Anything

Local news bulletin:

The National Weather Service is calling for a historic snowstorm to move through on Tuesday and Wednesday. “Snowfall amounts at Seatac could exceed anything seen since November 1985, a top five record 24-hour snowfall amount,” writes the NWS on this forecast discussion. How much? Anything from 6 to 14 inches in the immediate Seattle area.

Get out the mittens and the wool socks. Make sure the dog gets walked. Read a poem, write a poem, go sledding make snowballs and be safe.

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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. I don’t see that as playing a role. It’s just appearing in public.

-brief interview with Joan Didion

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Fishouse started entirely by accident. It started as a way for me to memorize poems on my commute to work. I asked my friend Camille Dungy if she’d record for me. Honestly, at this point, I forget exactly how we came to it, but we decided it’d be cool to get a couple of recorders and send them around to other poets to do the same thing. Then we thought, well, other people will want to hear these recordings, too, so let’s post them on a website. That was 2004, and it was still a little unusual to have online recordings of poets, especially poets early in their careers.

-interview with From the Fishouse's Matt O'Donnell over at 32 Poems

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Topics include: Haiti, Ayiti, the pronunciation of “Ayiti,” Omaha, immigration, Phillips Exeter Academy, television, tiger moms, soap operas, sugar cereals, Victor Newman, 90210, architecture, Yale, dropping out, cracking up, road trips, chat rooms, love affairs, older men, Montpelier, Michigan Tech, technical writing, Eastern Illinois, Indianapolis, respect, advanced degrees, titles, online literature, Sean Penn, sugar daddies, insomnia, and philanthropy.

-an interview/podcast with Roxane Gay

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Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.

-The Rumpus

If I lived in San Francisco, I would go to this.


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Can we talk about how there's no radio station in the world like KEXP?

Also: this song is great.

Babe?

In his office, Plumly told me I was too talented to throw myself into this crazy world of poets and critics at the age of twenty-two. “What are you doing here? You’re so young. Come back when you’re thirty and divorced like everyone else.”

“But when I’m thirty I want to have my first book out, to be teaching, settled, you know… not in a writing program.”

Stanley pulled his chair closer to me, his cowboy boots click together in my memory and he said with his warm or belittling smile, “Babe, come back when you’re thirty and tell me that.”

-New City

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So we’ve known Steve a long time, and we were thrilled to be able to publish his poem “Bargain” in our latest print issue. We’ve always been a little curious, though, exactly what was happening in that head of his (insert smiley face here). So we asked him to annotate “Bargain” for us, and as you can read below by mousing over the underlines, what’s happening in Steve’s head is interesting — dark, confessional, frank, funny, opinionated with regard to classic rock icons — pretty much, to be honest, exactly what we thought it was like in there.

-Barrelhouse

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And now, finally, I’ve applied the analysis to Poetry.

Some people don’t like rankings, and I can sympathize with their view. But I maintain that the Pushcart Prize is a reasonable proxy for quality, and I think many writers hope to place their work in the best possible magazine. If I were a poet, I’d want to see my work in Poetry, the clear “winner” in this ranking. But I also acknowledge that the Pushcart Press has been slow to recognize the work that is appearing in online magazines, and these magazines, some of which are excellent, are under-represented on the list. Writers should keep this in mind.

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I am a devotee of William Blake, Frederick Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and Jim Morrison. Each maintained that the highest state of self-actualization is to be achieved by merging internal opposites into a dynamic state of awareness transcendent of these alleged dualities. Blake called it "the marriage of heaven and hell." Nietzsche contemplated a state "beyond good and evil." Carl Jung simply called it "the third thing," and Jim Morrison called it "break[ing] on through to the other side." Creative people are walking paradoxes; both shrewd and naïve, libidinous yet prudish, and so on. I believe that this paradox forms the basis of the creative tension so essential to artistic triumph—the friction of opposites setting fire to that "third thing," which goes by yet another name: the Sublime.

-Glimmer Train

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It’s true that the mid-20th century was a heyday of sorts for American poetry. Poets were published and reviewed in daily newspapers and general-interest magazines, and their book releases were significant events. The poetry scene that most people knew was made up of a few highly celebrated poets (with notable exceptions, usually white and male) writing a few kinds of poetry (“the raw and the cooked,” as Robert Lowell famously described it).

-Washington Post

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