This year's Frost Medal--the Poetry Society of America's lifetime achievement award--was given to John Hollander, triggering a rash of board member resignations. The reason for the resignations has less to do with whether or not Hollander's career is deserving of such an award and more to do with comments he made concerning literature and race/ethnicity/culture, not to mention the fact that the PSA has awarded the Frost Medal to only three non-white poets since 1941.
When awards are doled out, should the criteria include the candidates' character? I think of my poetry gods (or my favorite artists in general) and very few of them were upstanding citizens (the article mentions Pound and his controversial politics). Should artists be judged for the art or their ethics? Is it better for the institution giving the award to allign with questionable humans but great artists or with great people but questionable artists?
September 28, 2007
The Poet or the Poetry
September 26, 2007
Taking it back
I once attended a workshop with the fabulous Beckian Fritz Goldberg, author of Body Betrayer and The Book of Accident, both of which dominate that particular shelf in my bookcase, where she off-handedly referred to Kenneth Patchen as an archetypal adolescent literary love. Much like Thomas Wolfe, Patchen was another angry young lyricist who had to tell things the way they really were, and risk caricature, bombast, and imagery for its own sake. So at 19, I adored them both, even if Wolfe’s character portraits did tend to acquire the exaggerated demeanor of an Al Hirshfeld sketch, and Patchen’s enraged direct addresses to the reader made me uncomfortable. But they were in a way, a playbill for how a young writer could work on style and imagery and dialogue without selling out, as it were, to The Machine, The Combine, The Authority, or what-have-you, since both of them would rather spit in your eye than admit some philosophical ambiguity or ambivalence in moral literature. They would have hated each immediately, I think. (Wolfe was a Romantic and Patchen was angry but hip. Funnily enough, though, they sometimes fell prey to poor impulse control, textually: Wolfe could shamelessly descend straight into de-facto poetry, as in the pivotal graveyard scene in Look Homeward Angel, much as Patchen does in The Journal of Albion Moonlight.) I suppose we all have our adolescent standard bearers that we avoid revisiting later on in order to protect our experiences of them, and the energy and the authority that they lent to us then, in spite of the flaws that would most likely be quite in evidence now. Still, in order to amuse myself, I often think of the social equivalent of literary steel cage matches (ala Philip Levine’s poem about Hart Crane meeting Lorca). Is this the academic version of celebrity gossip? There are worse vices.
September 24, 2007
The "best" American "poetry"
Autumn has officially arrived, and with it arrives a new Best American Poetry, this time "edited" by Heather McHugh. For the stat-happy, Jeffery Bahr provides a numerical breakdown of the new BAP and BAP over the years. This includes the average age of the poets in each volume and other fun facts. Ploughshares has contribued 10 poems to the series since 2000. "Journal" with the most contributions? The New Yorker. Oh, yeah. I read "great" "poems" in TNY every day.
The slap-happy can skip the stats and go straight to the toons.
In barely related news, Chris and I and someother illustrious poets (What's the collective noun for a group of poets? A murder of crows ... a stanza of poets? A ream? A sadness. A pensive of poets. Help me out here.) spent the weekend in a "cabin" in the "woods" (Chappaqua, NY ... highest property taxes in the U.S., rumor had it). It was our Walden.
September 20, 2007
Quickie Interview # 27: Brock Clarke
Brock Clarke is the author of The Ordinary White Boy, What We Won’t Do, and Carrying the Torch. He has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Fiction. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, The Believer, The Georgia Review, and The Southern Review, and has been included in the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best New Stories from the South, and NPR’s Selected Shorts. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati and is the fiction editor of The Cincinnati Review. This fall, Algonquin published Brock's latest novel, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.
Your first collection of stories, What We Won’t Do, was selected for Sarabande’s Mary McCarthy Prize. How many contests did you enter before winning Sarabande’s and what role do you think contests can play in the larger scheme of literary book publishing?
I think I sent out the book to three contests the year before it was taken by Sarabande, and in that year I sent it out to three, too, if I remember correctly. It seems like contests play a pretty big role, especially for short story collections, which fewer and fewer commercial publisher seem to want to take chances on.
As the fiction editor of The Cincinnati Review, how do your editing and writing lives inform each other?
In not very surprising ways, I suspect, and in the same way teaching informs my writing and editing: it’s all part of the same interest, the same part of the brain, or same part of the lobe. It’s simply three closely related aspects of that which I care about, a great deal.
Can you describe the process of writing your new novel, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England? How long did it take you to finish a draft?
It took me five years to write the thing, once I knew I wanted to write the thing. It was initially a short story, She Loved to Cook but Not Like This, which appeared in my first story collection. I never was happy with that story; it always felt as though there was some undeveloped thought or theme therein. So, I kept pecking at it, seeing where as a novel it would take me. Initially, it took me to misery (the voice was too detached, the tone too mean), and then, eventually, to less misery.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
Catch 22. The Replacements
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
Crowd? Crowd? I hung out with one, maybe two people. We wore trenchcoats before it was starting seeming dangerous to do so. It was a lonely four years.
Favorite book of the moment?
Never Let Me Go, by Ishiguro.
What are you working on these days?
I’m working on a novel called Exley, about (in some way) the great fictional memoirist Frederick Exley.
Is there any advice you find yourself frequently repeating to your students?
I keep telling them they need to read my books, but they never do. And then I advise them not to tell me that they’re not reading my books, but they always do.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten? The worst?
Write what you know. It’s both the best and worst advice I’ve ever received. Finally, it gave me something to write about—what I know. The problem is is that I know so little.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
The US Open tennis tournament, which is to say, watching every minute of it. I’m doing it right now.
Favorite recipe? (the more specificity the better, so someone could make it if they wanted)
Roasted beets, with capers. Put the beets in tin foil in the over for forty odd minutes. Take then out, do not burn your hands on the tin foil, wait until it’s cooled some, then peel the beets, expecting your hands to look bloodbathy, slice then, serve them with capers (which you should saute for one minute, then drain).
What's on your desk at the moment?
So much crap—papers, notes for the new novel I’m working on, pictures, a Emily Dickinson doll. My computer. A copy of of each of Frederick Exley’s three books.
Stones or Beatles?
Stones.
Hemingway or Fitzgerald?
Fitzgerald.
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Rosie Fairfield.
September 18, 2007
Bright? Shiny?
With each passing season the publishing industry seems to move closer to an acknowledgement that books are not purchased only, or even primarily, to be read.
And I'm not talking about the OJ Simpson book. Oh, wait--I guess I am. But there's also James Frey's new deal with HarperCollins.
Frey and his agent, Eric Simonoff, "decided not to seek an auction despite the fact that 'in the past three days, quite literally every house in New York City called and asked to see it.'"
I'm sure Frey's manuscript is brilliant (cough, cough), but can anyone seriously doubt that what HarperCollins and other publishers were really bidding on was an established brand? His name recognition is better than Dennis Kucinich's (but Dennis, if you're reading this, I still love you).
Is it possible that Bright Shiny Morning is a major artistic achievement in American letters, or is James Frey rich for the same reason Paris Hilton is famous?
September 14, 2007
Kicking Bucket
It's a sad day over at Kate Greenstreet's Every Other Day. She has announced that she is no longer going to be conducting her first book interviews.
I'm a suckah for interviews and am a big fan of Kate's, so for me this is a loss. I am, in probably an unhealthy way, always eager to hear about poets' first book experiences. Even hilarious fake ones.
Kate says she'll be observing radio silence until November sometime, so you should definitely try to catch one of her readings while she's out on tour...I'm going to try to make the one in Providence later this month.
Anyway, this, along with what seems to be the end of Here Comes Everybody (please tell me I'm wrong about this), leaves me scrambling a bit for on-line interviews with poets. I'm sure there are tons of sites out there that have them. But most I've come across seem to have interviews as well as a bunch of other stuff. Here for example. And there and there (both w/ audio). Are there other blogs out there dedicated solely to interviews? Where do YOU go for your interview fix? My dealer is done.
September 12, 2007
Snip
Another one of the great divides that seems to come between poets and fiction writers is the issue of revision, which sometimes amounts to a dirty secret for poets. As my fiction professor used to say, everything held up Dylan Thomas as the spontaneous child of Pan, out of whom poetry just flowed. Yet when he died, they found over 200 drafts of “Fern Hill.” Still, it's rare to have a poet's editor or literary executor slice a page or a stanza out of an unpublished long poem (of which--let's face it--there must be many) and publishes it as a stand-alone piece, while Ralph Ellison and Ernest Hemingway have suffered the analogous effect. Similarly, no poet generates the same amount of controversy over whether or not their editor was largely responsible for their distinctive style (ala Raymond Carver’s minimalist “dirty realism”, or for the shape--or the manageability generated by 60,000 or 250,000 less words--of their novels (ala Thomas Wolfe). When I was editing Indiana Review, we would once in a great while ask for revisions of submitted poems (if the edits were distinct and severable, such as transposing or cutting stanzas or sentences), but almost never asking for newly generated content to fix old content. Generally, I’m in the habit of revising 50% to 85% of any given poem (aside from abandoned first drafts, of course), though this practice has often been met with bewilderment and astonishment from other poets, as if I had confessed to using a Ouija Board to guide my revisions. I’ve been asked twice for revisions of submitted poems (both times to the greater good of the poem), but I wonder how many poets get asked for revision in general, or if there are any great war stories out there. Anyone have any thoughts?
September 10, 2007
Shameless Sam-promotion
Friend of pshares Sampson Starkweather tells the Poetry Foundation, in a feature on the blogs and sites that poets frequent, why he likes us. Sam also likes Joe Massey's blog. Me too. A personal favorite is his "Things that scarred me for life" series. Check out the post about his first poetry reading. (Unless you're not interested in the poetics of projectile diarrhea. Philistine.)
Other poets recommend boring standards like Silliman's Blog and new standards like Bill Knott's and K. Silem Mohammad's blogs.
Me, I wish Sam Starkweather had a blog. How about it?:
transcontemporations.blogspot.com
lastsliceofhoneydew.blogspot.com
ifeeldrunkallthetime.blogspot.com
intenselydistracted.blogspot.com
forthcoming.blogspot.com
blodgesplotch.blogspot.com
September 6, 2007
Quickie Interview # 26: Robin Lippincott
Robin Lippincott is the author of the novels Our Arcadia: An American Watercolor and Mr. Dalloway, nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Lambda Literary Award, as well as the story collection The Real, True Angel. He has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Paris Review, Fence, The New York Times Book Review, The Literary Review, The American Voice, Provincetown Arts, The Louisville Review, The Bloomsbury Review, and other journals. He teaches at Harvard's Extension School and in the low-residency MFA program at Spalding University. His fourth book, In the Meantime, will be published this fall.
You’ve published with both a big house (Viking) and small presses (Sarabande Books and Toby Press). How have the experiences differed for you? Do you see one avenue as being preferable to the other?
The intersection of art and commerce is rarely pretty. With a big house you get more money and, generally, greater exposure (distribution, etc.) But I also found working with a big house so much more frustrating—for numerous reasons. With smaller presses you tend to get more attention and have more control, and given that I’m a control freak when it comes to my work….
Your prose style, especially in Our Arcadia, is beautifully impressionistic. Do you feel a particular connection to the visual arts?
Thank you; well, that was the form and the style of that particular book. But yes, I do feel a very strong connection to the visual arts, especially (but not only) the abstract expressionists. In fact, I’d love to be a painter; I’ve taken a few lessons with a painter friend. And my plan is—when I turn 70, I’m going to take up painting; I think I’ll care less then about whether or not I’m any good.
If you could be alive during any time period, what would it be and why?
This is something of a trick question. I guess I’d have to say now—or that would seem to be the healthiest response anyway. But I could just as easily answer Paris or London in the 1920s (because of the cultural scene) or Manhattan in the 1940s and 50s (ditto).
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
I was not a big reader back then. It was probably a library book I’d read as a child (and kept rereading), The Lion’s Paw by Robb White, about a brother and sister in Florida (where I grew up) who run away from their orphanage and stow away on a sailboat. I own a copy of it now.
Janis Joplin saved my life.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
I didn’t.
Favorite book now?
Just one? I can’t. Something like Woolf’s The Waves would be emblematic of my favorite book now—the difficult and eccentric.
What's the best movie you’ve seen lately?
The Lives of Others.
What are you working on these days?
A short story. And a long fiction.
Is there any advice you find yourself frequently repeating to your students at Harvard and Spalding?
Less is more.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten? The worst?
“Keep a low overhead,” which was said not to me specifically but to an audience of young writers. From beloved Grace Paley.
If you can’t say what your story (novel) is about in one sentence, then you shouldn’t write it. That’s pure (formulaic) bullshit; Flannery O’Connor said just the opposite.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
I love to read biographies, particularly of artists of any stripe (including actors). I’m also something of a political junkie. I used to enjoy Hollywood gossip, but with the likes of the Hilton/Lohan/Richie triad dominating these days, I am less and less interested.
Favorite recipe? (the more specificity the better, so someone could make it if they wanted)
It’s one I invented and it’s simple (and spicy); I call it “Drunken Pasta,” because it makes you feel drunk. Sprinkle a couple of teaspoons or more of hot red pepper flakes in a skillet of already hot olive oil—let cook for maybe 30 seconds or a minute. Now add broccoli florets (say 2-3 cups) and cook over medium high heat, just for a couple of minutes, until they’re emerald green. Then stir in a pre-mixed concoction of one can of tomato paste, several cloves of minced garlic and a cup of red wine. Cook and cover for a few minutes, then mix in with a pound of cooked pasta, preferably rotini. Stir well (not letting it overcook; you want the broccoli to remain bright, emerald green) and serve hot, with a glass of red.
What's on your desk at the moment?
A lot of reference books (12). Cees Nooteboom’s Rituals (which I’m reading) and Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark, a favorite book I bought to give to some friends. Some unanswered letters. My passport and some Euros. My gym card. My keys to the Writers’ Room. A calendar. A jar holding pens, pencils, scissors. My laptop and printer. A couple of small art works friends have made and given me. A reproduction of Joan Mitchell’s great painting "Hemlock." Also a reproduction of a John Marin painting—Maine blues and greens. And still another postcard I picked up at the Art Association in Provincetown, a gorgeous painting of sea and sky, all in blues (by Denny Camino). A stapler. A mail scale. Two paperweights former students have given me. A writing pad (spiral). A legal pad. And a manuscript. It’s always over-crowded.
Stones or Beatles?
Stones—because I prefer bad boys, and because of their proximity to Marianne Faithfull, one of my favorite singers now.
Hemingway or Fitzgerald?
Surprisingly, this is a tough one for me, but I’d have to go with Fitzgerald, because of Gatsby, even though I love some of Hemingway’s stories, particularly A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Fluffy Elm—a member of the Bush family, no doubt.
September 4, 2007
80-year-old MTV Poet Laureates & 18-year-old HarperCollins Poets
So by now, we've probably all heard that MtvU is going to run 18 short promotional ads for the poetry of John Ashbery
But have we also heard that, "In another first, mtvU will help sponsor a poetry contest for college students. The winner, chosen by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, will have a book published next year by HarperCollins as part of the National Poetry Series"?
John Ashbery was 29 when Auden selected his first collection, Some Trees, for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. How beneficial is such an accolade as the one MTV plans to offer? To the potentially very young winner? To poetry itself, whatever that is?
