Poetry meets autobiography. Doesn't like her.

File under truthiness. Meghan O'Rourke and Dan Chiasson are chattin' about "Autobiography, Narcissism, and Self-Invention" over at Slate for "Memoir Week." Let's hear Chiasson on the Confessional mode, shall we?:

Reading poetry chronologically, the way we do when we read forward in an anthology, for example, is like encountering a series of surprises: Suddenly somebody is talking about his cat in this extraordinary way! Oh my goodness, did she just compare Death to a chauffeur? Wow, I have just experienced what it must be like to be raped by a bird! Etc., etc. But you can't surprise a smart reader twice, and so the marvelous surprise of Confessional poetry benefited exclusively those who GOT TO IT FIRST! [...] As in the larger memoir culture, the feeling with Olds is of mass-produced individuality--not "personal" but precisely "personalized," like those coffee mugs you can buy in airports, with the names "Dan" or "Meghan" emblazoned on them. (I don't like Olds' work.)

Daaamn. I smell toast.

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Oprah Strikes Again

No dead authors or fabricated memoirs this time around. Oprah has selected Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for her book club. This story of a father and son struggling through a post-apocalyptic landscape is brutal, enigmatic, and stunning. Despite having a large readership—All the Pretty Horses was immortalized on the screen by Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz—McCarthy is notoriously reclusive, although he has said through his publisher, Knopf, that he will appear on a future episode of Oprah, which will reportedly be his first television interview. While I wonder if some people will complain about McCarthy selling out and going mainstream, I think the exposure this book is getting is great. McCarthy is a wonderful writer and The Road deserves as many readers as possible. And now he will get many more than he would have otherwise. The real question is if Oprah's readers will know what the fish mean at the end.

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Quickie Interview #16: Camille Dungy

Author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), Camille Dungy has received fellowships and awards from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the American Antiquarian Society. She is assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Dungy is Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

First Car?

A silver Saturn 4-door sedan, grey interior. More expensive than a Tercel, but the insurance was cheaper.

What was your favorite book and band in high school?

Jitterbug Perfume vs. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Prince, no vs.

Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?

I moved part way through high school and chose my friends individually (and seemingly at random). I didn't know I was part of a clique until my 10-year reunion.

First job?

A tour guide at Stanford.

Car now?

Found out the insurance was cheaper on the 1st car because Saturns stand up well to high-speed head-on collisions. So, I bought another Saturn. This time it's a red 3-door sports coupe, black interior.

Favorite book now?

Are you really asking me this question? I just got finished with a 30+ book buying spree, and that was just books and authors I really like. But even with that big pile of books to get through, I do find myself going back to Lucille Clifton quite a lot lately. And Robert Hass. And Carl Phillips. And...

What's new on you iPod or CD player?

I start to get excited for the This American Life podcast every Saturday (it releases Mondays). And Manu Chao's been in heavy rotation the last few days.

What's the best DVD you've rented of late?

Netflix hates me (or maybe they love me). I've been known to keep a DVD for 10 weeks. I finally watched, and enjoyed, Great Day in Harlem (it's about 12 years old and I've had the DVD for nearly 6 weeks).

What are you working on these days?

Poems. It's fun sometimes just to be writing poems rather than some big project.

Anything coming out soon?

What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison was out not too long ago. Also Gathering Ground, the anthology I worked on. Some new poems are just out in anthologies and online journals including The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, MiPOesias, and From the Fishouse.

What are you reading that's fun?

San Francisco Noir, ed. Peter Maravelis (Akashic Press), and also the Asheville Poetry Review Jazz Issue. (These both were part of the recent book buying orgy.)

What's your favorite exercise?

Capoeira.

What's your favorite piece of clothing?

I hesitate to play favorites with the clothes. That's when things go and irrevocably rip on you. Anyway, I'm often partial to the shoes above all else. The black pumps with the ankle strap. A girl can dance all night in those shoes.

What are some of your guilty pleasures?

I like getting too much sun, I like driving my Saturn faster than people think I should, I like eating Vietnamese sandwiches (roast pork) by the beach and feeding the seagulls the extra fatty bits.

Favorite recipe?

I make a tofu dish that caused a construction worker from Texas to ask for the recipe. I cook a lot, but that was a particularly proud moment.*

What's on your desk?

So much that I'm writing this from my couch.

Stones or Beatles?

George Clinton.

Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?

Cinders Angora Escudero

*ok, here's the quinoa:

2 cups quinoa
4 cups veg broth
1 onion sliced
1/2 lb. mushrooms sliced (white, baby portabella etc.)
1 tbs. olive oil
1 tsp. brown sugar
2 oz red wine (sherry or marsala)

bring veg broth to boil, add quinoa, stir, reduce to simmer,
cover, cook 15-20 minutes.

meanwhile heat oil in large skillet med. flame.
add onions, cook til soft. 5 minutes or so. Add sugar, cook
another 5 minutes. add shrooms and cook another 5-8 minutes.
turn heat to HIGH, wait a minute, add wine. Cook another few
minutes then turn into cooked quinoa.

* * * * * * * * *
Ginger tofu

1/4 c. soy sauce
1/4 c. mild white wine
1/4 c. rice vinegar or mild white vinegar
2 TBS honey
2 TBS minced ginger
2 TBS sesame oil, toasted (heartier) or untoasted
1 tsp minced garlic
1 lb firm tofu, rinsed patted dry cut in ½” slices

preheat oven 350

mix soy, wine, vinegar, honey, ginger, oil & garlic in bowl

in a glass casserole dish arrange tofu in a snug single layer.

pour marinade over, let sit in fridge 2-4 hours.

bake 45 minutes, until golden brown and most liquid is absorbed.

eat hot or cold

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My buddy and me / like to write poetry...

After reading the thing in the NYTM on Coleridge and Wordsworth, I started thinking about the the phenomenon of poetry pals (Plath/Sexton, Lowell/Bishop, Spicer/Duncan, etc.). Not phenomenon really...I guess even poets have friends, right? I suppose what I mean is historically linked poets (who happen to have been friends) or something like that.

Anyway, then I started wondering about the idea of collaborations. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like they are, dare I say, en fuego these days. Down in Phlabbylanta at AWP we were treated to a Joshua Marie Wilkinson/Noah Eli Gordon duet during the So and So reading, and our very own Elisa Gabbert and Kathy Rooney (who also rocked that reading) have poems popping up everywhere.

I guess the idea of collaboration was brought to my dim attention when I came across the Ashbery/Schuyler book A Nest of Ninnies. My Romantic idea of "solitary artist" or "lone wolf thinker" was a little shaken to say the least (give me a break, I was a 19 year-old pre-med student in Raleigh, North Carolina ).

I suppose to some extent all poems are collabs. We can't help but be influenced and therefore our poems can't not be shaped by our poet friends and the poets we read and admire. But there are, it seems to me, inherent differences between poems written by "one" poet vs. poems written by "two" poets. I'm wondering what people think about the differences and how those differences (if in fact there are any) affect the art and how we view the art historically (ie there are relatively few poetry collab collections that I can think of off the top of my head that are big prize winners...are there any collab poems in the "ca(n)non?" (*BANG!*).

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No matter which way I fly, I myself...

One of the benefits of living in a society where it is very hard (especially in poetry, where nobody is watching, Amiri Baraka notwithstanding) to write anything resulting in censorship is... well, not being able to write anything worthy of censorship.

So transgression was on my mind this morning, and I don’t seem to be alone. Apparently Satanism is making a comeback inside the ivory tower. For my money, you just can’t have too many stories about fifth century monks trying to avoid a twelve-year lap dance by a succubus. I mean, if you haven’t wandered naked into a hyena’s den, only to be licked clean by them, and then tried to apply a recalcitrant asp to sensitive areas, then you haven’t really lived (or really tried to die, as the case may be). While such exploits seem rather sad, it strikes me that at least they got the glamour of The Adversary, as opposed to Buddhist monks, who, after keeping one hand closed for so many years that their fingernails grew through the back of their hands, could say they did it because... they serenely accepted the emptiness of existence. Doesn’t quite have the same snap, does it?

Yes, we Westerners really know how to repress with verve. Witness the lamentable Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) dreaming up mathematical “pillow puzzlers” to distract himself late at night from impure thoughts. Seems rather tame next to therapy-by-predator, but Victorians had to make do with what they had, I suppose. Any culture that could explain away epic levels of prostitution as an inexplicable epidemic of nymphomania could do serious violence in the world of ideas. Yet, as Victor Sonkin points out in an article about the popularity of Alice in Wonderland in the Soviet Union, Carroll’s fairy tales are unique in one crucial way: "Traditional fairy tales of that era--be they British, German or Russian--were rather fearsome, and the children in them were often afraid. Alice is different; there's no fear in it. I think that's very important."

Yet who could leave out the notorious Yukio Mishima (Kimitake Hiraoka in his civilian alter-ego)? His personal surgical theatre pretty much puts others repression strategies to shame (and whose drug of choice was nationalism, rather than religion or logic). And I’ve noticed that he tends to cause a singular amount of discomfort among writers and academics. Perhaps because of his John Brown-esque guerrilla take-over of a Japanese military barracks, perhaps because "Patriotism" (his short story about a couple committing ritual suicide) is exquisitely lyrical and flawlessly executed, and as such, thus fairly immune to the usual method of taking down troubling authors (i.e. looking for deficiencies in the text and ascribing them to the psyche of the author). Which is not to say that one has to look very hard beyond his final act for disquieting discoveries. According to quasi-biographer Christopher Ross, the closeted and married Mishima also derived a great deal of enjoyment from rehearsing sepukku, especially in the presence of attentive male witnesses.

It’s odd how quickly the desire comes over the reader to find a better reason for his suicide than Japan’s declining military might. Such motivation seems absurdly abstract (the way moving a sword through your vitals does not seem abstract). Yet scholarship, biography, and writing itself (even at its most transgressive) tends to become a normalizing act, in that it seeks to include the whole universe of concerns around a person or idea. The thought that something could be left out is what really terrifies anyone who tries to make a text or a life complete.

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Gilchrest Childers ITN Bill Knott

Like BK, Gil Childers claims dissatisfaction with/rejection by the publishing world at large, so he's posting his poems on his blog as he writes them. In celebration of St. Patrick's Day GC offers "From the Journals of Star Trek the Next Generation's Wesley Crusher." (Teaser: "I had to wait outside the holodeck / for like 3 hours waiting for [...]")

I don't know if this guy is kidding or not, but either way he's got the total makings of a new cult hero. The best thing is probably his Blogger profile. In response to randomly generated Blogger question "If you could peer far enough into the night sky, you'd see a star in any direction you looked. When would you sleep?" GC is all: "I would sleep when i was awake. Think about it."

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Who Do You Love?

Who are the literary celebs these days? Well, sandwiched between pieces on Madonna and Hollywood stylists and John Stewart, one can learn that literary power couple Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss recently purchased a $6.7 million Park Slope brownstone, reportedly citing a need for everyone in their family to “have their own floor.” And then scroll down a little further to find a report on Virginia Quarterly Review’s National Magazine Award nods and a Jorie-Graham-quoting response (okay, mock response) to the Dana Goodyear and David Orr standoff. Novelists and poets and a lit mag, all on little old Gawker! Forget the New York Times Book Review—an appearance on Gawker (and a humongous brownstone in Brooklyn) should be the new standard for having “made it.”

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To whom it may concern

Check out the new review site Open Letters. The first issue includes a review of two books from Tarpaulin Sky Press by yrs truly; a poem by Shafer Hall; a metastudy of the critical consensus on Martin Amis's new novel; and an essay by Steve Donoghue assessing all of 20th century literature. The verdict? Two enthusiastic thumbs down.

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The Old Gray Lady versus Eustace Tilley

Last month, Dana Goodyear of the New Yorker brought it to Poetry magazine.

This month, David Orr brings it to Dana Goodyear.

His piece is full of counterarguments and fun facts. Did you know, for instance, that "since 2000, Goodyear (who is 30) has appeared in the New Yorker more than Czeslaw Milosz, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Wislawa Szymborska, Kay Ryan and every living American poet laureate except for W. S. Merwin. She’s already equaled Sylvia Plath’s total." She must be, like, a really talented poet.

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Young, dumb & full of . . .

Granta names the best novelists under 40. I wonder how many of them are hot? That's what we care about around here. I know Nell Freudenberger is.

So is everyone past their AWP hangover? The mental-social-emotional one lasts longer than the physical one. So. sick. of. words.

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Frank Sherlock

from PhillySound which was brought to my attention via various other blogs and emails:

FRANK SHERLOCK EMERGENCY FUND benefit show 3/18 in Philadelphia
March 18th,2007
at FERGIE'S PUB (1214 Sansom St)
4pm to 7pm on the 2nd floor

$20 suggested donation
(BUT PLEASE GIVE WHAT YOU CAN!)
(Everyone paying the $20 donation will receive a raffle ticket, and for each additional $5 will receive an additional raffle ticket. All day long we'll be raffling off books, tarot card readings and other prizes!)

HOSTED BY Jenn McCreary
BANDS, POETS & FILMMAKERS INCLUDE: Goodbye Better, Don Riggs, Christina Strong, Jessica White, Chris McCreary, I Feel Tractor, Shanna Compton, Dorthea Lasky, Ish Klein, CAConrad

Our good friend Frank Sherlock was rushed to the hospital January 22nd with a sudden and mysterious illness which turned out to be a serious case of meningitis. He needed emergency surgery and also suffered a heart attack and kidney failure as a result of symptoms related to the illness. His friends have come together to help him at this critical time. We are reaching out to other friends and the poetry community on Frank's behalf.

and for folks unable to attend (also brought to you by PhillySound):

Thanks to the generosity of Juliana Spahr you can now send checks for the Frank Sherlock EMERGENCY FUND which will be tax deductible!

'A 'A ARTS
c/o J. Spahr
5000 MacArthur Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94613

CHECKS SHOULD BE MADE OUT TO "'A 'A ARTS"
and these checks will be tax deductible.
PLEASE MAKE A NOTE THAT YOUR CHECK IS FOR FRANK SHERLOCK.
Thanks so much! Your donations are very much appreciated!

THANKS SO MUCH FOR YOUR SUPPORT, AND PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD,
from the Friends of Frank Sherlock

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Bill Knott: defunct?

According Bill Knott's blog, the lease on said blog is about to expire and he's not going to renew it. Instead, he's opting to let it vanish.

If you want any pdfs of his books, it looks as though you'd better get them now.

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