Very Human Dangers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.