BK calls Dan Chiasson "Dangerous Dan the PoetryReviewer Man" -- ha! ha! I like Dan C though, precisely because he's not afraid to pull people's cards hard in his reviews. (Though I sure wouldn't want him reviewing my first book.)
(Idea for a website: amIknottornot.com, in which the public sends in imitation Knott poems to be pitted against the real things.)
August 31, 2006
Aside
A feud, a phony love letter, & a couple of anagrams
Check out the elaborate hoax perpetrated by one John Betjeman scholar v. another in the UK:
This is why we don't have fundraisers
n+1 had a little bad luck with their benefit party: In the Haze of a Magazine's Fund-Raiser, Someone Absconds With the Funds Raised. One of the editors said: "We've been much drunker than this, but the party was so nice that we were lulled into a false sense of security. Everybody was wearing jackets; there was classical music. We didn't think anyone was going to steal our money."
What are people's opinons about n+1? I've never seen the print version (ditto goes for the new Paris Review and A Public Space), but I've liked some of their articles online, mainly criticism. What's their fiction and poetry like?
August 30, 2006
Kakutani vs. Franzen vs. Foster Wallace
Michiko Kakutani takes it to Jonathan Franzen in the New York Times: "In his new memoir, 'The Discomfort Zone,' Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed." Hide the women and kids. Better yet, hide the men. Kakutani, often acid, can be laudatory. Check out her 1996 review of "Infinite Jest." So here's my question: In a battle of heavyweights, who wins, "The Corrections" or "Infinite Jest," and in what round?
Exercise:
Take a story or poem you have written and end every sentence with an exclamation point.
Or an ellipsis? Asterisk?
Or if you're naturally enthusiastic change all your exclamation points to periods, I guess. Reverse the italics and nonitalics. Try rewriting your backwards poem forwards this time.
August 29, 2006
How it ends
I sure hate that back-to-school smell in the air when I've got no school to go back to. My coworker just coined the best term: the 1:41 blues. I think I've had those all day. (You know what they say about a broken clock being more accurate than a fast/slow one, blah blah.) Has Emerson started yet? Is anyone brilliant?
I care more about the last line of a poem nailing it than the first line. Once John Skoyles had me flip through a book of poems and only read the ends. I should do that more. Sometimes it's fun to read the poem backwards, line by line or sentence by sentence. It's still surprising, just in a different way. And, if you're the kind of poet that thinks of the last line of your poem first (C. Dale Young always does, supposedly--he wrote about it in his journal for the Poetry Foundation), you can even try writing the poem backwards. Me and Kathy have!
Question of the Week: Take 2
Every week we'll select a question from our readers and try to answer it as a group--questions about submitting, contests, books, publishing, jobs, whatever. So start firing away, entering your question as a "comment" to this post. We'll select one and feature it next week.
August 28, 2006
August 27, 2006
Gary Paulsen: Cormac McCarthy for kids?
If you grew up reading Gary Paulsen, you may have suspected that the man behind The Winter Room, Hatchet, The Crossing, etc. might be a bit of a raging, anti-adult misanthrope.
On Saturday, the New York Times confirmed that this is so:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/26/books/26paul.html
August 25, 2006
DFW II
To continue unspooling a thread begun below regarding DF Wallace's early work vs. his later work, here's a link to a blogger who says DFW is "washed up."
Don't look at me, that's what he said. Washed up. "You'll never work in this town again, Wallace! You're through! Gimme your badge!"
So, is DFW washed up?
I don't think the author backs up the thesis on sturdy ground. You could make a convincing, valid argument that DFW's more recent work is self-parodying and emotionally colder than his earlier work and therefore lacking in some aesthetic qualities. But this isn't it, much less an argument that DFW should stop writing altogether.
Rather than considering that DFW has an idiosyncratic style he's comfortable using, one that worked for some people then and works for some people now, and that maybe the author is personally a little tired with it, he attacks DFW. He's "phoning it in" lately! Not sure how you "phone in" work of his girth or verbal complexity, but there you go. Or: It's the money! He's "only putting out these books or accepting these gigs to keep a little extra cash coming in." Because publishing strange collections of postmodern literary short fiction is a surefire ticket to riches, yes? No, wait! DFW just "secretly detests writing"!
The author is likewise PO'd that DFW shies from interviews ("Is it because Wallace wishes to isolate himself from the public?"). As if appearing in P&W or the New York Times more often would somehow improve his work. I say, some people don't like talking about their work. Deal with it. Secondly, it's ignoring a terrific radio interview he conducted with Michael Silverblatt of KCRW's Bookworm in March.
And I'm not sure exactly what degree of horrified I am at this: "[I]f he has nothing playful or interesting to contribute to the world of letters, I’d much prefer it if he threw in the towel and coasted on his past achievements." Horrified, not so much because I don't want DFW to stop writing, but at the idea that artists should silence themselves entirely if their newer work doesn't live up to the (subjective) standards of earlier work or the (even more subjective) standards of armchair critics.
More Literary Outlaws
While we’re in hoax-land, it’s worth mentioning the Sokal Hoax of 1996, where a physics professor submitted a spurious paper entitled, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the humanities journal, Social Text. The paper was “structured around the silliest quotations [Sokal] could find about mathematics and physics.” (Needless to say, Social Text had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review.) On the same day it was published, Sokal published an expose in Lingua Franca, terming the paper “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense.” His avowed intention was to “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” Hilarity ensued. Lingua Franca (which is now sadly defunct, but in its heyday consisted of awesomely readable “literary journalism”) has an essay about it in its tombstone anthology, Quick Studies, which I highly recommend for examples of academic writing that do not have a punitive attitude toward its reader. Click here for another deconstructionist paper hoax, which includes step-by-step instructions on how to deconstruct almost anything. It also includes a homework deconstructionist list, graded by levels of difficulty:
Beginner:
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea
Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers
this article
James Cameron's The Terminator
issue #1 of Wired
anything by Marx
Intermediate:
Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn
the Book of Genesis
Francois Truffaut's Day For Night
The United States Constitution
Elvis Presley singing Jailhouse Rock
anything by Foucault
Advanced:
Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
the Great Pyramid of Giza
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa
the Macintosh user interface
Tony Bennett singing I Left My Heart In San Francisco
anything by Derrida
Tour de Force:
James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
the San Jose, California telephone directory
IRS Form 1040
the Intel i486DX Programmer's Reference Manual
the Mississippi River
anything by Baudrillard
BAP
All my "titles" look like airport codes.
Advance complaints about the forthcoming Best American Poetry ed by Billy Collins.
I haven't seen a full list of who's included but I'm curious.
August 24, 2006
August 23, 2006
Tick tick tick
With this internet and all, it seems like we’re way overdue for something utterly ridiculous in the poetry world again, like the Araki Yasusada hoax, where someone (Wikipedia says probably Kent Johnson) fabricated a book of poems by a fictional (can one say that about a character in poetry?) Hiroshima survivor.
What I find fascinating about the whole thing was that the subsequent rejection of accepted poems and the retraction of the book. Wouldn’t it just be just as easy to put in a preface or appendix or cautionary note? In poetry, 99% of the time, there’s not really a significant financial reward (read "ill-gotten gain") if any, so the question becomes about how to handle phantom authorship. There is no designation of “non-fictional” poetry, and even if there was, would anyone trust it? To make a lyric world is to make it false, and no one speaks with the ambiguity and allusiveness of line breaks. Hell, the white space alone is suspect. (Plus, what does it say about an editorial decision if the question of authorship of a poem somehow is construed to negate or make irrelevant the quality of the language?)
Statistically improbable phrases?
This morning I saw this in some notes on a blog taken from a class w/ Thomas Sayers Ellis: "If this is poetry Family Feud, what are the top four ways/words into a poem?" They were "I," "A," "The," and "You." I write tons of "I" poems. Tons of "you" poems too. Some people are automatically resistant to I poems and especially I/you poems. I think, maybe worry, about this. Can I/one write a poem that has no I? Not a disguised or elided I but really no I?
A more fun thing to think about is the uncommon words that you use again and again. The word "ottoman" appeared twice in my thesis manuscript.
August 22, 2006
One of my fave interview sites.
Here. Keep your ear to the keyboard for a new one from Chris Salerno. He recently dropped his first book like it was hot.
OMG
I LOVE people who aren't afraid of the caps lock key! I'm NOT JOKING!
Cute interview with poet CAConrad.
August 21, 2006
"Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business."
A month or so ago, apropos nothing, I had a lonely yen to reread some Thomas Pynchon, like a depressive episode that makes you want to chat up your most distant and peculiar friend. After I get the idea, suddenly the guy's all over the place. True:
a.) I don't watch "The Simpsons" anymore, haven't in a long time, but right after I got the Pynchon itch I happened on a rerun wherein Lisa S. is speaking at a cocktail party to a man with a paper bag over his head. "What do you think, Thomas Pynchon?" she asked. Then, improbably, this: "These wings are V.-licious!" I held my breath and waited for the credits. It was Thomas Pynchon. Come to find out, he's been on the show twice. And it's pronounced "Pinch-on." I've been calling him "Pinch-in" all this time. I could have met him at some point and embarassed myself—I just don't know.
b.) The next day, I stopped into my local library for unrelated reasons. There's a sales rack near the door where you can buy old books cheap. Taking up four or five paperbacks worth of shelf space was Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. Fifty cents. A hardcover in wonderfully unmolested condition. Per page, 0.06378 of a penny. It appeared no one had ever cracked it open. I seized it and literally pressed it to my chest. Like other people were after it. The librarian said, "I just put that out there today. I was wondering who'd want to buy it." She was referring to the bulk, not the author—she didn't know who Pynchon is. Summarizing seemed pretty difficult, so I said, "He's, like, a hermit."
c.) Two days after that, the Associated Press reported that a new Pynchon novel will be published. It's a sign. How often does a thing like that happen?
Amazon.com's info page for Against the Day features (appropriately) no cover image and the least snappy blurb ever written, by Pynchon: "As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them." Yes, this prose, from a National Book Award winner. Then he gets a smidge defensive: "If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction."
Anyway, since I can't seem to shake him, I'm taking his hints. I'm right now rereading The Crying of Lot 49 and as of this writing am at the part where some occurrences occur. It's hard to be any more specific. On deck, my four-bit copy of Mason & Dixon. Then, rereading Gravity's Rainbow. Batting cleanup, Against the Day. Then maybe he'll leave me alone again for a while.
Ha, ha
Bill Knott gets all up in arms in this post from his blog about being included in an encyclopedia entry on the sonnet. I love how he paradoxically disputes any nod of respect toward him because it interferes with his image of himself as a poet that gets no respect. I also love that he googles himself. He must, right?
There should be some formula for the optimum number of days to wait before re-googling yourself, based on how famous you are, so that the results will have changed since your last googling. Except I don't know how to scientifically calculate fame.
August 20, 2006
Artist Colonies
This will make you want to go. Either to get married or write a book. Or I guess you can do both. At Emerson these seem to be mutually exclusive.
August 18, 2006
Even more notes on the legit and not legit
From a column by Reb Livingston on the Happy Booker: "I have countless poet-pals struggling to place poems and manuscripts in the questionable contest system many feel beholden to for reasons of perceived legitimacy and CV-filler needed for teaching and grant opportunities. Sure, everyone has to eat, but you shouldn't have to spend $1000 for a hotdog. [...] Some of them post their poems on their websites and blogs and self-publish their own books. Self-publish? Isn't that code for crap? Yes. No. Not as often as you may think."
A Conversation with Marilynne Robinson
Here's a link to a fantastic interview with Marilynne Robinson, which appeared in the most recent issue of Willow Springs: http://willowsprings.ewu.edu/Robinson.htm. Hope you enjoy!
Let's Get Ready to Rumble
I was just wondering this morning if anyone besides me ever thinks about poetry books going head to head (i.e. books that seem overtly oppositional or in response to another book).
Just finished reading Forrest Gander’s Science and Steepleflower, which is my favorite of his (with Deeds of Utmost Kindness and Rush to the Lake following), and admiring his diction (both technical and colloquial). It seems very much a companion to C.D. Wright’s fabulous Translations of the Gospel back into Tongues.
And of course, there’s Jack Gilbert’s Monolithos and Linda Gregg’s Too Bright to See, a pairing which generates the coolest divorce frisson ever.
On a more pugilistic note, I found myself envisioning a steel cage death match between Satan Says (Sharon Olds) and Cemetery Nights (Stephen Dobyns), as it seems like their projects are mildly inimical. Though both invoke the otherwordly, Olds throws down pentagrams as opposed to the monuments in Dobyns, and the speakers in Satan Says seem more like bare-knuckle brawlers. Edge: Olds.
Anybody else out there with books you find have a lot of backchatter?
Question of the week
Every week we'll select a question from the public and try to answer it as a group--questions about submitting, contests, books, publishing, jobs, whatever. So start firing away, entering your question as a "comment" to this post, and we'll feature it next week.
August 17, 2006
Amusement and Mild Use
Stumbled across Poem Hunter, which can be good to see a large spectrum of poems from some "classic" poets (kinda makes 'em sound like a Thunderbird, doesn't it?) for use in classroom and such. Of dubious note: the option to "manage" your poems on the site. Number 500 on the "Top 500 Poets List" is katt nasty. Also amusing: the ability to search poems by purple, shopping, chicago, and money.
(via Metafilter)
More self-pub linkage
Another discussion on the "psychology" of self-publishing at Simon DeDeo's blog.
Either/Or
Elisa tipped me off to Adrian Blevins (sample poems here and here) and Cathy Park Hong (sample poems here and here) mixing it up on the Poetry website in a debate about whether the sentence was anemic or omnipotent, Blevins arguing for narrative puissance and Hong arguing for a kind of balkanization of sense and coherence.
For myself, I think the line can do both. Witness Lynn Emanuel’s Then, Suddenly, and Lyn Hejinian’s The Fatalist, which are to me sterling examples of a mixture of the lyric and the self-conscious, and refreshingly free of anxiety or dogmatic ideas about where they fall in the spectrum. Interesting brains will produce interesting work, regardless of whether or not your poems subsist on a diet of cicadas or circuitry.
In workshop, nothing made me itch more to write poems that could do both than people stubbornly saying, That’s your school or your aesthetic (meaning, and this is mine, and don’t step across that line or I’ll capture your flag).
Gotta say, though, that I think Adrian Blevins went to town in this particular debate, which is not to say that one thesis is more valid than the other.
(Speaking of Bill Knott, here’s Adrian riffing on one of his poems.)
August 16, 2006
Booker Longlist
The longlist for the Booker Prize was announced on August 14th. Sadly, I haven’t read many of the books that were listed, but I was particularly happy to see that Peter Carey and the very awesome David Mitchell were included. Also Claire Messud—I haven’t read “The Emperor’s Children,” but “The Hunters,” a pair of novellas, is a wonderful book. The shortlist will be announced on September 14th, the winning book on October 10th.
Find the full longlist at http://www.themanbookerprize.com/.
Will this year bring the return of publicly bad reviews, jury member resignations, haughty acceptance speeches, and the divide between “populist” and “literary” writing? Let the games begin….
For more on the events of Booker 05, check out this profile of the winner, John Banville: http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookerprize2005/story/0,,1590052,00.html
Might as well face it, I’m addicted to blogs
So, the, or a, hot topic on the po-biz blogs this month has been self-publishing, in its various forms. Bill Knott is posting his life’s works on his blog, while shunning “real” publishing as a waste of (his) time. That combined with our own Rob Arnold’s Memorious interview with Knott sparked a lot of conversation, much of it vitriolic. (i.e., “Bill Knott sucks,” etc.) A review of Jessica Smith’s self-published Organic Furniture Cellar (from her own press, Outside Voices) on Ron Silliman’s blog also set off a shitstorm of comments and debate. People are arguing: is this "okay"???
Personally, I wonder if self-publishing is just a short step away from getting your book published by a friend/someone you know (which is pretty damn common). I can’t bring myself to work up a strong opinion on the matter, somehow. Maybe because being “published” in the world of poetry is largely inconsequential no matter who’s doing the publishing. I don’t know. What do you guys think? Anybody feel vehemently one way or the other?
More death knells for fiction
The Minnesota Star Tribune has some startling stats comparing fiction and nonfiction sales. It's hard to believe that T. C. Boyle's latest novel has only sold 5,000 copies since its release last month. Is that a misprint? If I recall, it got quite a bit of publicity.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
