Something Akin to Beef Jerky

Write, write, write. Read, read, read.


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We hear that rejection preys upon and depends upon the writer's ego; seemingly informed people tell us that successful writers appropriate rejection and use it as fuel, that they co-opt the editor's or agent's malice, stupidity, or worst of all, indifference, and they cure it until it becomes a kind of treat, something akin to beef jerky. And we hear that those who reject our work are not rejecting us, they're not rejecting our souls because if we could get our souls on the page, we wouldn't get rejected at all; instead we'd get flown first-class to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature. They say this because most writers, especially beginning or unpublished writers, freak out over rejection. To the good men and women offering this consolation and advice, I say, okay, yes, sure, but you've obviously never ridden a skateboard.


-Bret Anthony Johnson's "On Rejection; or, Dear Author, After Careful Consideration," an essay that originally appeared in Shenandoah


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I see many poems by many poets whose intentions are so rooted in story–in narrative–that they worry themselves away from the necessary conventions (such as they are) of the lyric, and I see many poems by those whose intentions are so rooted in the lyric that the planks and staircases of narrative have vacated the premises, and neither danger nor dramatic tension nor gloom of night curl their dark fingers into the tiny space between the windowsill and the just barely lifted sash.

Whether working through three or four dozen drafts en route to bringing a single poem to that place where it begins to breathe on its own, or whether merely dipping into the current, there is a certain order that nevertheless emerges, willed by the absence of will, but ordered by the writer’s divining rod (which is to say, by a whole lot of trial and error, c.f., luck) that informs every Grecian Urn, every idea of order, even in a place so orderly orderless as Key West (have you been?) From any angle, it is necessary in the process making art to be wholly unmindful of being in the process of making art. 

-This essay by Jeffrey Levine got my cogs turning.


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This is the story of a leash, a law and a city’s dueling definitions of compassion. It is a story of limits tested and stretched; of strife, threats and, possibly, compromise.

Mostly, though, it is a story about a dog named Blue who, this week, brought this small desert city together after nearly tearing it apart.

-NY Times

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In my daily work the habit of silence (I've been here 35 years) helps me to focus, even to put aside pre-occupying worries while I concentrate on a particular responsibility. That can be preparing the community's meal, typing the entries for our website, hearing confessions, preparing a class for the novitiate, chanting the psalms at community prayers when I have a cold, whatever. But I have learned that I started out with certain powers of concentration, so I may not be too accurate here; I grew up in NYC and it's second nature to me to block out background noise. But I can say that the habit of silence keeps me from seeking additional noise. I'm not uneasy when it's very quiet or when I'm totally alone. But I don't find silence making tasks easier to complete.

The silence does make me aware of my inner workings, however, what we call in the monastery, "self-knowledge." I can't pretend that I'm always a nice guy, always patient, always calm and receptive. I have to admit that I can be abrupt, cold to offenders, or would often prefer efficiency to the messiness of other people's moods. Silence seems to keep me from idealizing myself.

-Fascinating interview over at the The Awl with Trappist monks (who have taken a vow of silence)


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Dreaming of Fields

Snowstorms bring in more customers, earlier, to pass the time and watch the cars slosh past on Roosevelt. The bartender will make you a boilermaker, a martini, or an espresso, whatever you like, and even if it isn’t cheaper than any of the other dozen fine bars and cafes in the neighborhood, it feels cheaper. Most everyone tips well. I usually just get drip coffee from the afterthought coffeemaker beside the very nice espresso machine, a machine that probably used to be a Vespa. Some days there are several fleets of scooters out front, parked closely like sheep at a trough. Often there is a dog, a small one on the counter, a larger one somewhere in the building, curled up, asleep and dreaming of fields.


-via NPR, Ed Skoog reflects on Cafe Racer before the tragic shootings of last week.


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For Drew and Joe, our resident and beloved musicians, the heart and backbone of anyone who has ever graced the Cafe Racer's stage: Find one of their brilliant records (my personal favorite is A Beautiful Trainwreck, the soundtrack to this missive) and play it LOUD. Crack a Pabst Blue Ribbon or two (or seven), and tell the dirtiest jokes you know. It's okay to cry, but try to laugh more. I guarantee that's how the boys would want it. Remember, these are the guys behind the song "Gutter Uv Luv," which features the line, "Someday I'm gonna be a star." Drew wasn't lying when he sang that, and we should always celebrate the truth, singing it in the streets.

For Kim, our sunshine, our ray of light on a cloudy day, our girl with a heart of gold: Go to your favorite neighborhood bar, flash the bartender your prettiest, brightest smile, and order a Kimosa (that's champagne with cranberry and/or pineapple juice). Tell them that it's delicious (you won't be lying), and then talk to EVERYONE around you and do your level best to make them feel special. Again it's okay to cry, but try to smile; Kim had the best smile in the world, and now we need to pick up the slack.

For Don, our neighbor and friend, the all-around best guy that everyone should be lucky enough to know—the nicest, smartest man on the block: Order an Americano from your favorite cafe and proceed to tell the truest tall tales you can. Mean every single word of them. Try to shake everyone's hand and look them in the eye while you're doing it. Then make sure that everyone on your block knows and loves you, and that you know and love them right back. Also, learn the saxophone.

-via The Stranger, An Open Letter from Cafe Racer

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First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

-via Letters of Note, a letter from Steinbeck to his son.

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Relentlessly Showcased

Headed to New York this week to visit old friends, and to read some poems at the Cornelia Street Cafe. Will be the first time in the city in over 10 years. Can't wait.

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Most authoritarian states treat the Internet the same way they do print media: They censor it. Azerbaijan has taken a more insidious route. They do not heavily filter or block the Internet but instead leave it open, allowing the government to better monitor and punish rebellious activities. In 2010, two online activists were arrested for posting a video satirizing government waste on YouTube. Their case was never mentioned in Azerbaijan’s print media—but was relentlessly showcased online, where it frightened the bloggers’ peers. As a result, Azerbaijan’s frequent Internet users became less supportive of activism, and online dissent has quieted.

This strategy worked quite well with elites. But after the events in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, the Azerbaijani government decided to adopt a more aggressive strategy to shield regular citizens from discussions of dissent or collective action. Azerbaijan has moved from intimidating users who are already online to keeping the rest of the nation offline by making social media use seem like a form of bad citizenship.

-via Slate

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At some point I decide to do something with this love—I trust it. I wholeheartedly believe that poetry can teach me how to live my life. I see that godawful earnestness in me and am embarrassed. I want so desperately to mean. When I make that choice, I accept that I will pass from the permitted to the forbidden. I’m not sure love is a descent, but I hope it is a move towards something deeper, something unknown. It not only asks for change, but for a willingness to accept whatever lies on the other side of the threshold. What can a poem teach you? A poem is not a poet, who is flawed and weak and sometimes cruel. But I trust the idea of poetry—that there is a way of living that keeps you wholly awake to the world. There is a power I can learn from, a consciousness I can inhabit that teaches me to face my life bravely. I want to deserve the life I’ve been given.

-Traci Brimhall in the new issue of Waccamaw

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That’s how adolescence works. It’s a place of tremendous pain and recklessness, a place where you have to pretend not to care about anyone or anything too much because to do so would release the chaos of your actual self into the world. It’s a place where tyranny resides as much in circumstance as in character, a place where our shadow selves emerge: ugly, ferocious, lit up by shame.

I remember every single cruelty I endured and inflicted, teasing a disabled teacher behind her back, grappling with a classmate and ripping open the stitches on his head, weeping in fear and confusion at the kids who bullied me in metal shop. Adolescence scrawls its crimes on the heart.

-Steve Almond is writing beautiful and true things again at The Rumpus


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Wasteland of Opportunity

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

-Washington Post


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Hall remembers the president talking about Robert Frost’s trip to Russia when Obama gave Hall the National Medal of Arts back in 2010. But he didn’t realize how deep the president’s interest in poetry ran: When Obama whispered a few sentences into his left ear — in which, Hall said with a laugh, he’s stone deaf — he didn’t think too much about what he was missing.


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This is a major problem in contemporary poetry. The young are not reading the older living poets as much as they should, but it’s also obvious to me that the older poets are also not reading the young. 

-A great conversation taking place over at John Gallaher's blog

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We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.

-NYT


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More than half of America's recent college graduates are either unemployed or working in a job that doesn't require a bachelor's degree, the Associated Press reported this weekend. The story would seem to be more evidence that, regardless of your education, the wake of the Great Recession has been a terrible time to be young and hunting for work. 

But are we really becoming another Greece or Spain, a wasteland of opportunity for anybody under the age of 25? Not quite. What the new statistics really tell us about is the changing nature, and value, of higher education.

-The Atlantic

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Momentous Initiative

Very happy to have a newer poem in the latest issue of The Journal, an all-poetry issue including some great work by Oliver de la Paz, Bruce Bond, Amanda Auchter, Martha Silano, and many others. Big thanks to the folks at OSU for putting together such a beautiful issue.

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In the eyes of most opponents and many supporters of easing pot laws, medical marijuana is supposed to be a slippery slope to full legalization. But in Washington, the opposite is happening: a momentous initiative to legalize marijuana for all adults, which will be on the ballot this fall, is being opposed by the medical marijuana industry that the previous initiative created.

-The Stranger writer Dominic Holden with an Op-Ed in the New York Times

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Readers will pay less. That's the bright side. The settlement gives Amazon carte blanche to discount the eVersions of popular titles, much as it used to. Of course, that also happens to be the dark side. Because that control over price is going to reinforce the monopoly power of the world's largest online retailer.

-The Atlantic

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The issue isn't simply money. Perhaps more important, the growth of high-school athletics has resulted in more time than ever spent by students in practicing and competing. Basketball games played on school nights (with travel time, if they're away games), swimming and gymnastics "invitationals" that draw kids from hundreds of miles and last all weekend. And the proliferation of summer sports camps. In one of his pleadings as president of the NCAA, even the late Myles Brand complained to The New York Times, "The youth sports culture is overly aggressive."

American higher education bears some measure of the responsibility for that. There are doubtless a number of reasons that high-school sports follows the lead of college sports in becoming more professionalized. Chief among them, however, is that kids and their parents increasingly believe that accumulating varsity letters is a better way to get to college—and certainly a better way to pay for college—than academic achievement.

-Chronicle of Higher Education

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I strongly disagree with the assertion that creative writing is a guild system. Many of those who make this assertion seem motivated by frustration -- perhaps that their own work is not getting published or, if it is getting published, that it is not getting enough attention. Ever since the advent of widespread literacy in the English-speaking world (starting around the middle of the eighteenth century), writers have been dealing with an unpleasant reality: there are usually more competent-to-excellent writers than readership to support all of them. Creative writing programs today may exacerbate this reality by putting a greater number of competent or excellent writers out there, but it does not follow that creative writing constitutes a closed and undemocratic guild system. Perhaps some who rail against creative writing programs should turn that critical attention toward our increasingly bottom-line-oriented publishing industry.

-MFA Round-table at Huffington Post

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If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

-Kurt Vonnegut's letter to Charles McCarthy, School Board Head at Drake High School, North Dakota


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Ramshackle Resiliency

Christ is contingency,” I tell M. as we cross the railroad tracks and walk down the dusty main street of this little town that is not the town where I was raised but both reassuringly and disconcertingly reminiscent of it: the ramshackle resiliency of the buildings around the square; Spanish rivering right next to rocklike English, the two fusing for a moment into a single dialect then splitting again; cowboys with creekbed faces stepping determinedly out of the convenience store with sky in their eyes and twelve-packs in their arms. I have spent the past four weeks in solitude, working on these little prose fragments that seem to be the only thing I can sustain, trying day and night to “figure out” just what it is I believe, a mission made more urgent by the fact that I have recently been diagnosed with an incurable but unpredictable cancer. How strange it is to be back in this place, where visible distance is so much a part of things that things acquire a kind of space, an otherness, a nowhere-ness, as if even the single scrub cedar outside the window where I’m working holds—in its precise little limbs, its assertive seasonless green—the fact of its absence.

-wonderful essay on faith and poetry by Christian Wiman, from Harvard Divinity Bulletin

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“When we think of our memories, they’re moments of intensity. Whether they were sorrowful or happy, moments of great loneliness or moments of great communion — we live for these moments in our life. And I do think poetry is a way of recognizing the moments in your life. But also a way of preserving them,” Wiman tells Moyers. “One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.”

-Bill Moyers interviews Christian Wiman

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William Carlos Williams once wrote: “It is difficult to get the news from poems.” After my first month on Facebook, I concluded that it was difficult to get the poets from Facebook. The poet bloggers I once thought I knew were but status updates of their former selves. They were no longer espousing on the great poetic issues of our time; instead, they were posting pictures of food porn! If these were the best minds of my generation, they were destroyed by Facebook.

-via The Poetry Foundation, and a great response by Reb Livingston, here.

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Read two of Eduardo's beautiful poems at Poetry Daily!

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Astoundingly Low Profile

Read, read, read. Write, write, write.

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When you're sitting on the airplane next to a man with a briefcase, and you're going to give a reading, and he's going to a business conference, and he says to you, hello my name is Herman Bluewinkle, and you say, my name is Ted Berrigan, and he says, I'm in electronics, what do you do? And you say, I'm a poet, and he says, holy shit, man. And his eyes get completely glazed over, and he's sure that you're going to whip out all of your poems immediately and read them all to him.

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This is my business. Poetry is my business. I don't know how many of you are interested in making poetry be your business, in the course of your life. It's my conception that it would be a good thing if everybody wrote poetry, in the world, because it seems to me that it's a natural human activity. Just like singing is for the birds. Birds don't sing because they think they're Neil Young, you know; I mean, they sing because that's what birds do. Writing poetry is one of the things that human beings do, and can do.

-A friend pointed me to this lecture by Ted Berrigan. I think it's really wonderful.

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At a time when the local food movement has inspired many consumers across the nation to, for the first time, consider the wines being made in their own backyards, no up-and-coming domestic region has received as much serious attention as the Finger Lakes of upstate New York. To be specific, it is the Rieslings of the Finger Lakes that have generated the most buzz.

-via The Atlantic

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Conceived on Wall Street, born in a Bellevue rental house, and based in a dozen buildings on the northern edge of downtown Seattle, Amazon has grown into one of the Internet's most-recognized name brands and a company so big that it holds staff meetings at KeyArena.

Its value in the stock market alone puts it ahead of Boeing and second only to Microsoft in the Northwest.

But as Amazon prepares to turn 18 this summer, it cuts an astoundingly low profile in the civic life of its hometown.

-via Seattle Times

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Once known as The Shakes, with "Alabama" tacked on as a tribute to the band's beloved home state, these musicians — Howard, guitarist Heath Fogg, bassist Zac Cockrell and drummer Steve Johnson — already possess the fully formed confidence of players twice their age. On Boys & Girls, out April 10, they find a way to fuse the impeccable professionalism of soul veterans to the youthful, raging fire they set on stage. Long may they burn.

-Another NPR First Listen

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Mark Strand has a great Clint Eastwood voice.

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More music.