It's often said that more people write poetry than read it.
Is Rosie O'Donnell one of those people? You be the judge.
December 30, 2006
Rosie O'Donnell: Actress. Talk Show Host. Celebrity Feuder. Poet?
December 29, 2006
Top Ten Literary Websites of 2006
According to Shauna McKenna at The High Hat, anyway. Out of the magazines on this list, the only ones I’d ever read were Hobart and The Mississippi Review, but checking out her other picks, it looks like Juked and Elimae have particularly good selections of fiction and poetry. And the issue of The Mississippi Review currently online, themed “Postmodern Pulp,” is pretty cool too.
December 28, 2006
December 21, 2006
Quickie Interview # 12: Denise Duhamel
Denise Duhamel was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. She received her B.F.A. from Emerson College and her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence. She is the author of over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, including Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel Editions, 2005), and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). Duhamel’s work has received the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, numerous inclusions in The Best American Poetry, and recently appeared in Brevity and Echo, an anthology of flash fiction from Rose Metal Press. She currently teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, FL, with her husband, the poet Nick Carbó, with whom she edited the anthology Sweet Jesus: Poems about the Ultimate Icon (The Anthology Press, 2002).
What are you working on right now?
I am currently on sabbatical—my first one ever—and am working on a series of visual poems. I am using found objects—wooden boxes, Venetian blinds, a defunct video camera—as “forms” for poems. The poems each have two versions—one for the page and one which is the actual object with words on it.
What’s the last book you read and admired?
I just finished The Best American Poetry 2006, guest edited by Billy Collins, and it is incredible! It is the kind of volume I would like to create if ever asked to guest edit anything. Collins has chosen really smart, funny, and accessible poems. I am all for play and experimentation, but the poems I like best also have, for lack of a better word, “heart.” I am included in the volume, but my poem is a minor one compared to many of the others. Mary Jo Salter has a brilliant poem, A Phone Call to the Future, about the past (rather than future) being like science fiction. Daniel Gutstein’s Monsieur Pierre est mort is a hilarious poem about high school French class and a teacher’s pet rock. Alison Townsend’s What I Never Told You About the Abortion is dark and wrenching and wonderful.
Can you describe your workspace? What do you have on your desk at the moment?
I am in Mojacar, Spain, in an apartment rental, for my sabbatical. My “desk” is actually a kitchen block that I rolled into the spare bedroom. I’m sitting in a plastic chair I’ve taken in from the balcony. It’s very minimal. I have a blue bowl filled with pens, a highlighter, and Sharpies (I love Sharpies). I also have a pair of earplugs for when it’s noisy outside or for when my husband, Nick, who is here with me, wants to listen to music. I write everything in here. To construct the visual poems, I usually work at the kitchen table so there’s more room.
At home, though, it’s a different story. I have a bunch of tchotchkes on my desk including crystals, a feng shui kitty, and a stuffed Rhode Island Red rooster. (I’m from Rhode Island.)
What’s your favorite recipe?
I’m not much of a cook—Nick’s the real chef of the family. But I like making ice coffee with soymilk. Does that count? It involves a spoon and stirring.
Who did you hang out with in high school?
My best friend was Nancy Lanctot, a Renaissance woman, who is an amazing visual artist and has been in various bands in Boston. She designed my husband Nick Carbó’s book cover for Secret Asian Man. I was very lucky to know her, as otherwise high school was pretty unbearable for me.
What's new on your iPod or CD player?
OutKast, Ana Belén (an amazing Spanish singer whose song “Luna” is based on a Lorca poem), and Norah Jones.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
Mysterious Object at Noon, a Thai movie in which the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul uses the surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse to make a collaborative film. He travels through Thailand asking ordinary people—ranging from school children to grandmothers—to contribute to a story about a boy in a wheelchair and his erratic tutor. The narrative makes astonishing twists due to free associations, as each new person or group advances the story without knowing very much about what came before. It is very similar to the way a poem written by more than one person unfolds.
Anything coming out soon?
Yes! I co-edited, with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007). It has been quite a long and complex journey putting that book together! It is a gathering of collaborative poetry from the 1950’s to the present and has all kinds of amazing poet-teams included. Neal Cassady/Allen Ginsberg/Jack Kerouac; John Ashbery/Kenneth Koch; Bill Berkson/Frank O’Hara; Ron Padgett/James Schuyler; Ted Berrigan/Anne Waldman; Eileen Myles/Alice Notley; Olga Broumas/Jane Miller; T Begley/Olga Broumas; and Stephen Dunn/Lawrence Raab…just to name a few.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
Starbucks, massages, Birkenstock sandals (which, I know, are the butt of jokes, one
of which is something like Birkenstocks are so unattractive they can be used as birth control—but they are also really comfortable and quite expensive).
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
An oversized black tee shirt with long sleeves. It’s originally from the pricey store Chico’s, but I bought it at a thrift store for $2.
Stones or Beatles?
The Beatles. I saw Yellow Submarine when I was seven and have been hooked ever since. I had an older cousin who had Beatle posters wallpapering her room. She actually saw them in concert (an event for which she straightened her curly hair with an iron and then flipped the ends by wrapping them around empty soup cans). Her friend fainted into her arms as the Beatles sang. I’ve recently been reading a lot about John Lennon as he was in Santa Isabel, Spain (very close to where I am staying now) in 1966 to shoot the antiwar film How I Won the War. He supposedly wrote Strawberry Fields here. I love that he turned his and Yoko’s honeymoon into a “bed-in” for peace, that he used such a private occasion as political performance art against the Vietnam war. I’ll leave you with a Lennon quote, which I really relate to and seems to still apply now: "I'm slightly cynical, but I'm not a cynic. One can be wry one day and cynical the next and ironic the next. I'm a cynic about most things that are taken for granted. I'm cynical about society, politics, newspapers, government. But I'm not cynical about life, love, goodness, death..."
December 18, 2006
Quickie Interview #11: Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein's most recent book is Girly Man, from the University of Chicago Press. More info can be found at his EPC author page.
First Car?
Eyes.
[1968 Volkswagen bug, red; or was it 1957 Chevy Impala, dark green? Or that orange Edsel of the heart?]
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
Henny Youngman, The Complete One-Liners.
Henny Youngman with strings.
[Bande à part]
[Country Joe and the Fish &/or Hootie and the Blowfish &/or Phish &/or Thing-Fish]
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
I just hang on, for dear life.
First job?
Get up.
[On graduating college, 1972: Sloan’s Furniture Clearance Center #45, 85th and Third, NY: floor sales at $2.50 per hour, then promoted to night office manager, $2.75 per hour. Walked out one day, unannounced, into the cloudy, wild, unpredictable New York night.]
Car now?
Ears.
[ATITV: All Terrain Imaginary Transport Vehicle]
[Blue Ford Taurus wagon with roof rack, hatch back, rumble seats, 2000 model, now discontinued. Good for transporting paintings up to 44 inches wide.]
Favorite book now?
I keep Mr. Emerson on my nightstand. He gives me comfort.
What's new on your iPod or CD player?
4'33" downloaded from PennSound.
[Note to editor: neither minute nor hours take smart quotes.]
[William Shatner’s sprechstimme version of “Mr. Tambourineman” (with girl chorus)]
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
I always return videos on time.
Now I am hooked on my DVR.
Boston Legal on tap.
What are you working on these days?
This.
Anything coming out soon?
I’m pretty sure this is coming out.
What are you reading that's fun?
You mean all that other stuff I have been reading isn’t fun?
[I read The Yellow Pages for fun, the white pages for information.]
What's your favorite exercise?
One person writes down a question privately; simultaneously, another person writes down an answer, also without showing it. Interview is formed by a series of these questions and answers. For example: First Car? The reason why it is so cold this week. // Favorite band? / “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion."
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
The hem.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
404 – Answer not found
The answer you are attempting to load may have moved or may not exist.
Favorite recipe?
It’s all about the ingredients.
[See “Cooking by Number.”]
What's on your desk?
Books and bills.
Buckles and bullets.
Boats and billows.
Bids and bets.
Boxers or briefs?
Boxers: Arthur Cravan
Briefs: “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion."
Stones or Beatles?
I prefer minerals to insects but have been working on this with my ontologist.
[Looking forward to Cirque du Soleil production of Their Satanic Majesty Requests.]
– Nina Simone (Ne Me Quitte Pas. Jamais.)
Porn name (first pet’s name + first street you lived on)?
I was never allowed pets.
The reason why it’s still cold this week.
[With thanks to Joel Kuszai & Susan Bee for the memories].
December 14, 2006
I got yr poetics right here
Dicussion over at Silliman's blog on a Poets & Writers (aside: aren't poets writers? I object to that distinction) profile of Alice Notley (not available online) in which she claims, "I don't have a poetics. I think that's bullshit." Silliman makes some kind of argument that not having a poetics constitutes her poetics (or was that the plan? not to have one?). This gets me thinking about what it actually means to "have" a poetics. I mean do you have to literally write a damn treatise on your aesthetics? Is it enough just to be able to articulate it to yourself? Is it enough if your readers can articulate it for you?
Pshares' favorite commentor Yeasties cries exasperatedly: "can't anyone in poetry use concrete specifics!?"
Yeah! What the hell is a poetics? Do all y'all seriously have poeticses?
December 13, 2006
Thomas Hardy = syphilitic freak?
In the interest of not limiting our gossip to post-WWII writers, check out how Thomas Hardy’s wife, Emma Lavinia, probably met her untimely demise.
Especially fascinating are the author’s syphilocentric interpretations of Hardy’s poems. Fascinating, too, is to think about what would have happened had he been alive and writing now, and how the poems would probably have been much more explicit and maybe even—as one commenter observes—landed him on the couch with Oprah.
December 12, 2006
The Lame Duck collection
A Harvard Square bookstore lost and then found two handwritten manuscripts by Borges worth about half a mill each.
I don't really do handwriting. I might jot down a line or two but once a poem feels even close to coalescing I move to my computer. I like to see how it looks en font, how long the lines are typed, etc., as I'm working. (Even then, I don't tend to save my drafts.) So my MS's will never be fetishized. Maybe my unwashed keyboard. Or else my grocery lists.
Quickie interview #10: Bret Anthony Johnston
Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories (Random House, 2004). Named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times, the collection has received the Southern Review's Annual Short Fiction Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, the Texas Institute of Letters' Debut Fiction Award, the Christopher Isherwood Prize, the James Michener Fellowship, and was shortlisted for Ireland's Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is a graduate of Miami University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has been a skateboarder for almost twenty years, competing professionally. Currently, he is a professor of creative writing at Harvard.
First Car?
Dodge Daytona
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
The Painted Bird by Jerzey Kosinksi. The Cult.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
Skaters, aka the crowd without girlfriends
First job?
I sold tickets in my neighborhood for a raffle to win a trip to Disneyland. There was no raffle, no trip to Disneyland. I just pocketed the cash.
Car now?
Nissan Frontier.
Favorite books now?
At this very moment, it’s The Great Gatsby. This will probably change before I’m done with this interview.
What's new on you iPod or CD player?
On the iPod, I’m listening to Forster’s A Room With a View. On CD, it’s Tool’s Undertow.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
See, what did I tell you? Now my favorite book is Lolita. Stay tuned.
What are you working on these days? Anything coming out soon?
I’m working on a novel. An anthology of creative writing exercises will be out next fall.
What are you reading that's fun?
Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.
What's your favorite exercise?
Skateboarding, but I don’t think of it as exercise. I think of it as masochism. I fall often and hard, that’s how you know I’m serious about it.
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
Sweater vests. No, really.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
The movie Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which is, and I want to make sure I don’t oversell this, the greatest film of all time.
What's the secret to Ollie-ing?
Timing. You have to start moving your front foot up toward the board’s nose almost as soon as you pop the tail.
What's the coolest move you've ever landed?
I’ve done a couple of 540 transfers from one ramp to another, but that was a long time ago. More recently, I’ve done backside smith grinds and feeble grinds to fakie around the corner of a bowl in Austin, Texas.
Favorite recipe?
The Great Gatsby takes the lead again!
What's on your desk?
What desk? How do you know I’m at my desk? Are you spying on me?
Boxers or briefs?
Boxers.
Stones or Beatles?
The Misfits.
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Andre Riley.
December 9, 2006
Literary Friendships
In the new issue of The American Poetry Review, David Trinidad has a great essay, Two Sweet Ladies, on the friendship between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, exploring how "Sexton's work opened doors for Plath" and, after her death, the way "Plath's work did the same for Sexton," suggesting Sexton’s wayward personality helped balance Plath’s “compulsive togetherness,” in turn making the trained poet (Plath) a little more intuitive and the intuitive poet (Sexton) a little more trained. Writing can be an insular and lonely vocation, and Trinidad’s essay speaks to the importance of encountering people that challenge our way of being and aesthetic values (especially if those encounters involve long afternoons spent swilling martinis at the Ritz). So, in the spirit of celebrating literary friendships, check out this program hosted by Garrison Keillor, in which writers talk about their closest literary pals: Donald Hall and Robert Bly, Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo, Michael Cunningham and Marie Howe, and more.
December 8, 2006
The Terrifying Numerology of Our New Issue
Normally I wouldn't bother blogging about our new issue (guest-edited by Rosanna Warren), since it's posted all over our website. But when an issue contains six stories and sixty-six poems, well, one wonders just exactly what's at stake. I, for one, don't mind a little devilishness in my literature. If anybody needs me, I'll be down by the crossroads with my walkin' shoes on, opening Rosanna's issue and challenging the Devil to a poetry showdown.
Don't be macabre
Gore Vidal has finished the memoir he began in Palimpsest. Sort of. It has everything one usually expects from Gore: gossip about movie stars; arch and fastidious political invective from an insider, and, of course, his specialty: the epitaph. (Or at least various versions of antiquity; contemporary ones are frequently compromised, irrelevant, or beneath contempt.) The novel is dead. Theatre is dead. Television is dead. The American Republic is dead.
Reading Gore is like skimming People Magazine in an expensive, highback leather chair. You’re definitely getting away with something. You find out that Fellini was devoted to overdubbing. Paul Newman hurried past woman because he made them faint. Eleanor Roosevelt had an unrequited “Sapphic” passion for Amelia. Gore got Coppola hooked on wine. The right-wing Grace Kelly thought FDR and the New Deal silence her playwright uncle, and got out of movies when her makeup call was moved back earlier to allow them more time to work on her. Tennessee Williams could not write without a character for whom he did not feel sexual desire.
The price for all this dirt is that you have to put up with an occasional snark that implicates your own self, such as when Gore makes fun of someone who doesn’t know what “coeval” means (which, Dear Reader, I did not). So there’s a continual sense that you are reaching above your station. In fact, I can’t think of another contemporary who so adroitly manipulates class anxiety in the reader, though Gore certainly doesn’t claim to be populist or democratic. Like Robert Lowell, one intuits that he feels like he can criticize the monerati because he is of the monerati.
I’ve read criticism of Gore that his memoir neglects his private affairs (read: sex) in favor of pontifications or gently chiding the zeitgeist for getting it wrong on historical events. Maybe. Whether or not it is in good taste to describe liaisons or circumscribe a series of daguerreotypes of one’s personal disappointments, needs, and recriminations decade by decade, Gore certainly does reveal his obsessions, even obliquely. In this book, death sends up its freight of steam on the horizon. There’s a faint aftertaste in his rebuff of Tennessee Williams:
“Once in New York, when Tennessee and I had been prowling together one summer night, without success, he said, ‘Well, I guess that just leaves two of us.’ To which he claims I replied, ‘Don’t be macabre.’”
It hangs over his excavation of suppressed history:
“[Pope Pius XXII] was something of a faddist when it came to medicine. The ultimate fad proved to be his embalmment by what seems to have been an amateur taxidermist. As a result, while he lay in state in the basilica, he turned, according to viewer, ‘emerald green.’ Then, in response to the summer heat, he suddenly exploded. This was kept from the world for a long time until someone (a Jesuit)? passed on the information. It is reported that many sturdy Swiss guardsmen fainted during this holy combustion.”
And, it delivers the book’s most pitilessly clinical and certainly costly image (he has to repeatedly invoke both the authority and presence of a ghostly Montaigne to guide him through it) that he chooses to reveal about the death of his partner, Howard Auster:
“During the wait [for the ambulance], I pulled back the sheet for last look at those clear grey eyes—could they still see?—but the substance of the eyeballs had collapsed and two gelatinous streaks of the sort snails make had coursed down his cheeks.”
Easy to see why he admires Paul Bowles’ own summary of his raison detre: “A spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into death. Then he can be given a mythic personality.” No wonder Gore’s intelligence about 20th Century personages has a clandestine feel.
December 7, 2006
Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
I wanna go on a long walk with Will Self.
The things he says! “There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It’s because America has such an ideology of success.” And “Actually, instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, ‘This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.’”
In addition to the anecdotes you’d expect—“During Britain’s general election of 1997, he set a new standard for journalistic infamy by getting himself bounced off John Major’s campaign plane for snorting heroin in the bathroom”—there’s also an interesting but not really explained reference to psychogeography.
December 6, 2006
Absent is here
Go read Absent, why don't you. Look for new work by Pshares staffers and contributors including Simeon Berry, Kathleen Rooney, Julia Story, Beth Woodcome, and Peter Jay Shippy, among other poetical pleasures.
"Why McEwan Is No Plagiarist"
A group of prominent writers, including Thomas Pynchon, have come to Ian McEwan's defense amid accusations that he plagiarized parts of Atonement from a romance novelist's memoir. I find the NY Times article this week complaining about the use of bibliographies in novels ironic. With all these plagiarism claims, of course fiction writers now want to cover themselves and cite their sources, and I imagine publishers are encouraging them to do so.
December 2, 2006
Iain Hollingshead wins Bad Sex in Fiction Award
This week, Iain Hollingshead was the proud (?) recipient of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel Twenty Something, beating out well-known writers like David Mitchell, Mark Haddon, and Thomas Pynchon. Hollingshead received his statuette and bottle of champagne from Courtney Love (with any luck, she can present an award at the NBA ceremony next year instead of boring old David Remnick) in London, where he announced his ambition to "win the award every year." If you were a judge for a Bad Sex in Fiction (or poetry) Award, who would make your short-list?
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