During a reading at Carnegie Hall earlier this month, Harry Potter author JK Rowling announced that Dumbledore is gay.
"I always thought Dumbledore was gay," she said. If you've read the books, what did you always think? Did you see this coming? And, more importantly, how did you feel about her declaration, not so much in terms of its content, but rather in terms of the way it decisively shuts down discussion about a fictional character who should be the common proerty of the writer and her readers?
Does an author's willingness to dispel any ambiguity and/or complexity around a character seem a little off-putting? Or are you happy to have this issue laid to rest? Are there any other examples of an author making this kind of announcement about a character after the fact/interpreting his or her own work in this way? Are there any instances where you wish the author had pulled a Rowling and explained to you a character's motivation or identity more thoroughly outside the book than he or she did inside of it?
October 30, 2007
He's here, he's queer, get used to it.
October 26, 2007
"Did you just question my fanhood in front of the ladies?"
With the World Series shifting to Colorado, I thought now would be as good a time as any to talk baseball. And poetry.
The link between baseball is certainly historic; Here's an article that lists a bunch of poems about poetry. How in the hell Spicer got left out, I have no idea.
In any case, I have tons of poet friends that love sports, have played sports (some in college and even professionally), still play sports, have fantasy sports teams, and apparently dress their pets in sports gear...poor cat. Larkin, ever hear the one about your mum and dad fucking you up? That's what that hat is doing. Depressed? Isn't that a requirement for a Cubbies fan? Matt, you should get you a goat.
So what's with sports and poets/poetry?
For me it is due, at least in part, to the blend of the familiar and the surprising. The players and stats we know so well, the comfortable rhythm and ceremony of the game, the inflections of the announcers voice, etc. vs. what actually happens during the game. Will it be a blow out? A pitcher's duel? Will something sublime happen on the next pitch? Will f'n Matt Holliday wander like some drunk hobo off first base only to get picked off and ruin any chance for the Rockies to tie the game? I was born in Jersey. Sorry. I like the Yankees. The team with 26 World Championships. Suck it. I feel no guilt.
Anyway, same with a poem...will this poem about golden horseshit turn into an existential response to Rilke?
Do you hate sports? Why? Do you love them? Why?
October 24, 2007
Papers, Please
Just finished the title poem from Noelle Kocot’s exhilarating Poem for the End of the Time, which definitely breaks a lot of rules. As exhortation goes, it’s up there. Direct address targets NYC, America, various religious personages, God, etc, and the solid blocks of anaphora can break your kneecaps. Yet excesses aside, it’s great to read something that’s unabashedly transgressive, not titillating and edgy in an oblique, noodly sort of way (both in terms of sly content and form), but straight up. On the minimalist end, it seems like Cavafy with his brazen directness and simplicity is flanked by Alan Dugan’s cranky exhibitionism. On the high end, Anne Carson’s torqued annotations are matched with C.D. Wright’s cascade of particulate nouns. Kocot seems to raise the ceiling a little higher (at least in terms of rule-breaking). I’m aware that one’s awareness of what constitutes transgression against poetic practice is totally conditioned by resentment of one’s own limitations (and habits, which may or may not include the consumption of 5 books of poetry a week and 5 bottles of wine), but it’s great to encounter a poem has an air of the gauntlet. Anyone out there have their favorite scoundrels, verse-wise?
October 21, 2007
Why nobody reads poetry
John Lundberg for the Huffington Post offers three reasons why people don't read poetry. I can get on board with #1 -- the claim, "I've never understood it." I think a lot of people really do feel this way, and part of the problem is that they never learned how to read poetry in school and expect it to be like prose. When it's not, they feel frustrated, like they don't get it. #3 is "Poetry is for angst-ridden teens, hopeless romantics and the aforementioned weirdos in berets." This sounds like the words of a frat boy or whatever frat boys become when they grow up, kind of mildly homophobic. But sure, I can see what Lundberg's getting at -- people think poetry is too artsy or frivolous for them.
But I totally don't get reason #2: "I can't get past the whole rhyming thing." Huh? Who's saying that? Surely there's not still anyone around who hasn't been exposed to non-rhyming verse. And I've mostly found that when people who don't read poetry encounter my or other contemporary poetry, they seem dismayed that it DOESN'T rhyme -- like, if this is poetry why isn't it doing the poetry stuff? Are there seriously potential readers out there who avoid poetry because they think it all rhymes? Plus, almost all song lyrics rhyme and people seem able to "get past" that.
October 18, 2007
Carver Country
Oh, the woes of a dead author. Tess Gallagher is trying to publish a volume of original Carver stories, as opposed to the heavily edited versions published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, as she claims those stories weren't printed in the form Carver wanted. Meanwhile, Gary Fisketjon at Knopf was, to say the least, less than pleased by Gallagher's proposal. “I would rather dig my friend Ray Carver out of the ground,” Fisketjon said. “I don’t understand what Tess’s interest in doing this is except to rewrite history.” Fisketjon points out that he worked closely with Carver on Where I’m Calling From, which, for some stories, includes both the Lish-ified versions and Carver’s fuller, revised versions. “When we put together ‘Where I’m Calling From,’ these were the stories that he handpicked from his work to live in posterity in the versions that he wanted them to live in,” Fisketjon said. “If that is not the end of the story, I don’t know what that would be.” But apparently, Gallagher just wants to correct Carver’s legacy: “I’m just looking forward to the time when some wonderful reader doesn’t rush up to me and say, ‘Did Gordon Lish write all of Raymond Carver’s stories?’”
I can kind of see both sides of this issue, though I would argue Carver’s legacy isn’t as jeopardized as Gallagher suggests, especially since it's common knowledge that Carver revised many of his stories post-Lish. Does anyone out there really think Lish is solely responsible for Carver’s genius? He's a gifted, influential—and perhaps somewhat problematic—editor for sure, but in order for an editor to sharpen and refine a work into brilliance, there has to be something pretty good there in the first place, right? It's one thing to say Lish influenced Carver (and what great writer wasn't influenced by somebody?), but to contend that he could actually take credit for Carver's artistic achievements just seems a bit silly to me.
October 16, 2007
The German public likes to be read to for hours at a time?
Yes. Or so we're told by John Freeman's entry on Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors.
Evidently, Germany has become the playground for young writers, able to live off the hefty fees they can charge bookstores for giving readings. Can this possibly be true? And could it ever happen here in the States? Would we want it to?
Does this raise the specter of an economy for literature that resembles the worldwide economy for music, i.e. writers who earn their money through gigs rather than through book sales, who can afford to give their stuff away for free, a la Radiohead and who will swiftly put publishers out of business?
October 12, 2007
And the nominees are...
So, the National Book Award finalists have been announced.
Great. The best poet on the list is nominated for fiction.
Are there people out there that still get excited the night before major awards are announced? If so, chime in, because I'm starting to not believe in Santa Claus anymore. I mean, he keeps bringing us stuff we already have. I have to admit, though, that I was kind of hopeful about this year's list after last year's nomination of Lerner's Angle of Yaw. Turns out I'm a suckah.
Bill Knott, have a field day.
October 10, 2007
Thinking It Through
Back in grad school, my fabulous instructor’s stipend meant I got to live in a basement room right on the campus for $200.00, utilities included. Of course, I kept the windows closed for two years, due to the fact that sizable wolf spiders would congregate on the inside of the screens if they were open. The shower had rough rock walls and the drain was a hole in the concrete floor. The steps down to my room were very steep (being right underneath another set of stairs), and one day, when it had been raining outside, I leaned back in my customary way as I went down, and my feet went out from underneath me. I remember my head hitting the back of the stairs and I wound up sitting on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, as the cleaning lady stared at me curiously. She asked if I was alright, I said something garbled, and then I apparently passed out, and fell back, hitting my head again on the concrete floor, and had a small seizure. Later there was an ambulance and x-rays and an EEG, and nothing appeared to be amiss, but my physician did pause at one point, and say something sympathetic (but not comforting) about the ramifications of head injuries for “knowledge workers” like ourselves. This I found to be the scariest part of the whole incident, though there appear to have been no after-effects nor any damage. (I couldn’t multiply more than two digit numbers in my head before, and I still can’t.) So heart attacks don’t nearly frighten me as much as strokes and the like.
So I have to say that I wasn’t sure how to react to Diane Ackerman’s introduction to her husband Paul West’s piece about suffering brain damage and the resultant aphasia.
The first section, “Fleet,” has some of the recursive daffiness of poetry (“One way of trying extra hard is to imagine one dimension of the universe coated in either black velvet or a blue that no one has reported outside the province of Baffinland”), and one senses a lot of syntactical navigation through neural back alleys throughout (“It was a matter of looking always on the bright side, until you were looking no longer; in this way, unless you were singularly unfortunate, you always had something to admire.”). Cerebral trauma has been on my mind recently, having just watched Joseph Gordon-Leavitt’s, The Lookout, a modest thriller about a brain-damaged ex-hockey star and a bank heist, and I am still haunted by Floyd Skloot’s essay. “Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain” (published in Best American Essays 2000), and its painstaking reproduction of the mental gymnastics involved in just cooking something.
Apparently, there is a Crippled Poetics, as well as debate about whether “autism poetry” is being co-opted by non-autistic poets. Of course, one of the possible side effects of identifying the functionality of the mechanisms of language with poetic/personal identity is the disabling of critique, though in West’s case, any linguistic functionality itself is a vindication of the brain and its plasticity. Yet, as always, when it comes to the page, all bets are off. As a medium, printed matter has its own laws of physics, and while there are wormholes between form and content, signifier and signified, ultimately a text only has recourse to its own First Principles.
October 7, 2007
Blog crush
I have a bit of a crog blush on the author of Do Gummi Bears Dream of Rubber Passion Fruit? C.f. this "WHAT I WILL DO TONIGHT" list from a couple weeks ago, which begins with "drunk blogging" and self-praising and ends with:
~Do some pushups.The working life of a poet. Telling it like it is.
~Maybe sing weepily along to Sam Cooke and My Morning Jacket, and other such bands and singers.
~Feel lonely.
~Close the blinds.
~Go to bed feeling all empty inside except for my good cheap wine.
~Maybe fall asleep to ORIGINS, a documentary series on how stuff started.
~Feel infinitely smaller and even more insignificant.
This blog also doubles as an advice column:
Btw, quitting smoking is seriously easy. I don't know why y'all bitch so much when you try to quit.Logan Ryan Smith blog-claims to be looking for love. Could this be because single guys live in LA, single girls live in NYC? LRS, perhaps you are on the wrong coast.
It's EZ-PZ-one-two-threezy.
Cake, man. Cake.
October 4, 2007
Saving the Story Story?
Stephen King, the most recent guest editor of Best American Short Stories, recently published an essay in the NYT, What Ails The Short Story. While a part of me, as a story writer, is always happy to see the form discussed and debated, the more I considered the “prescriptions” King offered, the more I felt he was taking the very easiest of shots: “Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers….What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big, hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky.”
In essence, I agree with King (and, incidentally, was thrilled by a number of his BASS picks); nothing is worse for me as a reader than work that is boring, ordinary, and familiar. I too am always on the lookout for “big, hot meteor” stories, but in the context of this essay--the point of which was, presumably, to articulate what, exactly, "ails" the story--his points seemed annoyingly vague and superficial. What makes for astute critical writing is the ability to take the abstractions apart and really address what’s behind those more unfortunate trends in literature. To say fewer stories should be “airless" and more should be like a “big, hot meteor” is the most obvious of assertions, and so I suppose what I'm really taking issue with here is this kind of faux-critical writing that seems all too predominant when people attempt to diagnosis problems with poetry, the novel, etc.
Did anyone else read this essay? If so, what did you think?
October 2, 2007
All the ladies in the place, I'm callin' out to ya.
So I had dinner the other night with two lovely and talented Chicago poets and editors, Sam Wharton of Sawbuck and Brandi Homan of Switchback Books. Sam voiced the concern that he's not getting nearly the number of submissions from female poets that he'd like, and asked that I please post something here asking the ladies to submit to his journal. Ladies! Submit to his journal! Brandi, whose press publishes only female poets, is not having this problem, though she did offer that her first full-length book, forthcoming from Shearsman next year, was submitted in the first place in response to a similar lament on that press's part. The submissions that Abby and I have been getting over at Rose Metal Press have been approaching gender parity so I was a little surprised to hear this.
How about it editors: is there a poetry submission gender gap? Are any of you contemplating Ladies' Night at your journals and/or presses? Are you running into equality issues? If so, is it occurring at the submissions level, as in one gender heavily out-subs the other? Or is it at the quality level, as in one gender out-writes the other?
