Attention lit mag lovers: The Mississippi Review’s print issue on literary magazines is out. The issue is made up of four parts: The Literary Magazine Today, The Editors Introduce, Writers on Lit Mags, and Lit Mag Miscellany. There's everything from editor interviews and roundtables to editors introducing new voices to meditations on the state of the lit mag to a history of the contributor bio. Sounds pretty awesome to moi. I plan to pick up a copy soon, but if anyone has already had a chance to check it out, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Oh, yeah: Happy Thanksgiving!
November 27, 2008
A Thanksgiving Treat
November 24, 2008
There is some poetry in him, yes.
It’s not the position (Chief of Staff! Secretary of State!! Attorney General!!!) that “mainstream” media outlets are overwhelmingly abuzz about, but it’s still pretty interesting to speculate: Who will President-Elect Barack Obama select to be his inaugural poet?
JFK had Robert “Dedication/The Gift Outright” Frost, of course. Jimmy Carter picked James “The Strength of Fields” Dickey. And Bill Clinton chose Maya “On the Pulse of Morning” Angelou (who admits here that—although she is writing a poem about the next president—she was “somebody else’s poet,” making it unlikely that Barack will pick her). George “I Don’t Read Books” W. Bush forebodingly picked nobody. So who *will* the incoming administration get to write the verse for this occasion? There has been some speculation that it might be Derek Walcott, or possibly Kay Ryan Would either of those be choices you’d like to see?
I also want to state for the record: Barack, if you are reading this, my January 2009 schedule’s looking pretty decent at this point, so I can do it if you need me to.
November 21, 2008
While we're on the meme train
I love this idea (again not a real meme just a post) -- our impressions of bloggers we know only through the Internet. According to Jimmy Chen of HTML GIANT, reading strangers' blogs is equivalent to stalking them.
My list is shortish because I've actually met the authors of many blogs I read.
C. Dale Young: Kind of a prima donna? Makes semi-snarky semi-snap judgments (e.g., of this blog, way back when).
Joseph Massey: Mr. Popular. Seems like the ultra-charismatic type that people will follow blindly into disaster. His blog persona is wildly different from his poetry. Not currently blogging.
Mary Biddinger: Seems like the kind of friend or coworker who'd make you cupcakes on your birthday, probably someone's favorite teacher.
Sandra Simonds: Comes off tough, like a girl who has been in a few fistfights. However is afraid of flying.
John Sakkis: Lives in SF area, blogs mostly about parties, shows, hot chicks. Lots of pictures of hipsters holding plastic cups. I.e., cooler than you.
John Gallaher: Radiates good manners and evenhandedness. Like Seth Abramson, posts YouTube clips I never listen to.
K. Lorraine Graham (whom I'll meet this spring): Pleasantly grouchy. Come to think of it, "pleasantly grouchy" is one of my favorite blog tones.
Shane Jones: Obsessive/neurotic type, drives editors crazy by querying often. Looks good in a v-neck.
Of course in the stalking way I like all these peeps or I wouldn't read their blogs. Take-no-offense disclaimer is part of the meme.
November 18, 2008
Appropriate Yourself
Memes. Where would we be without them? Wrangling improper pronouns? Trying to rebrand cosines? The mind boggles.
I know that Olena Kalytiak Davis didn’t mean to start one, but I thought I’d just jack it anyway. Because sometimes you get tired of gossip, and want to get linguistically solipsistic. Frankly, I never met an axiom I didn’t just love, if for nothing but its hinge.
Here is the substrate, followed by my elaborations:
1. what exactly does joel brouwer mean by: "the knowledge that dooms a marriage is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage"?
This is somewhat like Douglas Adam’s instruction to learn to fly by trying to hit the ground and miss. Conditionality and intent. In order to take a largely irreversible action, you must be aware of how easily reversible it can be, so that you are cognizant of the commitment and the impressiveness of same. Put more bluntly, you cannot gamble without being an expert on loss.
2. what exactly does seneca mean by: "this is the difference between us and the etruscans ... since they attribute everything to divine agency, they are of the opinion that things do not reveal the future because they have occurred, but that they occur because they are meant to reveal the future"?
I think it means that the present is either proof of the future, or evidence left behind by the future. The former requires the participation of the audience. The latter disdains it.
3.how many poets could you actually sue for the tort of negligent infliction of emotional distress?
To quote Janet Burroway, “Anecdote is anguish recollected in tranquility.” Craft requires deliberate emotional negligence (for all parties: author, character, reader) in order to achieve the proper distance, and catharsis is distress (since dismay is required as a catalyst). Plot is necessarily abusive.
4. giving readings like giving head. right? you can do it even if you haven't written anything new. right?
Giving readings can be promiscuous recollections of being moved. If you’re a pro. Otherwise, they’re just stylized breath with overlong interruptions.
5. why have i not read most of these? i could never leave my house again and actually get an education.
An intellectual career is performativity. In the way an actor imagines the way something would feel, authors often triangulate the way they think ideas in a book will feel. I would be very surprised to meet another writer who had read all the books he or she had a throw-away line about.
6. i should never leave my house again. and get an education.
Calling a writer a shut-in is redundant. Nurturing one’s aesthetic (even a barren, non-productive one) involves a type of cerebral dysfunction that would summon the cognitive equivalent of DSS if bodied forth. I often think the perfect vacation would be a coma.
7. "i i i never told anyone about the time i slept with two guys at once cause...it never happened." i misquote myself, but, low and behold, we actually do mature and evolve. one of them was/is a girl!
Misquoting oneself is pleasurably transgressive. And essential to mass-producing a sense of neural strangers. Without them, we cannot believe in the possibility of a virtuous audience. Like Tiresias, characters become transgendered the instant someone talks for them. As with water, ambiguity finds its own level.
8. does EVERYTHING feel literal to the creator?
The purpose of art is make attitude into nouns, which (if you’re doing it right) hate each other. Once it becomes literal, you become wistfully irrelevant. This is the difference between poetry and rhetoric.
9. jesus! weston cutter's birthday! i was so gonna do an entry in his honor on OCTOBER 31-- day of birth of most emotionally something individuals (keats, too!) (but, shit! was running boxes and african dwarf frogs out of my old house (quick! into the garage) and missing and then catching a plane to meet my lovers). weston! i so need to send you a birthday shirt and some music! (do you have the new dylan bootleg?) mostly, two very corny beautiful songs: the feliz brothers' "radio song" ("don't you ever die, you ever die, you ever die, move me all of my life, all of my life, all of my life") ( yes, i Llove tripetition) and birdmonster's: "my love for you" (my love my love for you will never something it's something than the things i do, my love, my love for you will never stray it's stronger than the things i say")
[Here, the meme breaks down. Tweed clowns are called in. A calla lily is expected to perform. Someone sells jumper cables in the audience, promising large quantities of pneuma to the best student of cellular respiration.]
10. i am in the "surfwise" school of you must change your life rather than the "man on wire" school of you must change your life. (but you gotta love the french. don't you?)
I haven’t seen any either of these. Much in the same way I have not actually read of the Camera Lucida. But I’ll discuss them anyway (see No. 5). C.S. Lewis said (or did he?): “Prayer doesn’t change anything. It changes me.” French intellectuals don’t feel guilty about talking about process. It’s a lifestyle choice. Americans are agonistic or pugnacious about it. New money.
11. speaking of movies: the cool school: that is my dream: a LARGE group of guy painters and sculptors who are as competitive as they are creative. and me.
Writers being competitive is a lot like rats and hamsters trash-talking one another. Same maze, unique cheeses.
10. look! i have built in book shelves!
I once rented a basement room sight unseen for $200 because it had built-in bookshelves. I couldn’t keep the windows open because of the spiders, and the metaphor of the Blair Witch Project hit home the next morning in the stone shower. But it was worth it (as I’m sure your bookshelves are).
"Everything afterward dissolves into vague blather"
I read this article by Camille Paglia on how she chose the work she included in her anthology Break, Blow, Burn ("which may be the only book of poetry criticism that has ever reached the national bestseller list in the United States," she boasts) with much interest—that is, until I couldn't take it anymore.
Paglia (who I've called an idiot before) believed, she writes, that there was a "potentially large audience for poetry" but that "general readers" don't know what to read; she was looking for "poems in English" she could "wholeheartedly recommend." But as she began reading she was shocked and appalled to find very few acceptable standalone poems for her imagined reader. Most of the essay consists of her rejecting one great poet after another on the shaky premise that they failed to write a single perfect and perfectly representative poem. For example Auden, Berryman, Bishop, and Ashbery all make this list of failures at the poem level. But when one celebrated poem after another fails to meet her impossible standards, she seems unwilling to re-examine her standards or her initial premise that exemplars of poetry must be perfect, wholly self-contained poems. It really becomes parodic:
I had glowing memories of dozens of poets whom I had avidly read (or seen read in person) after my introduction to contemporary poetry in college in the mid-1960s: Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and Galway Kinnell, among many others. But when I returned to their work to find material for Break, Blow, Burn, I was mortified by my inability to identify a single important short poem to set before the general reader. Live readings seem to have beguiled and distracted too many writers from the more rigorous demands of the printed page—the medium that lasts and that speaks to posterity. All of the above poets deserve our great respect for their talent, skill, versatility, and commitment, but I would question how long their reputations will last in the absence of strong freestanding poems.Could it be, Camille, that having a "single [eminently anthologizable] important short poem" to show for is not necessary or sufficient for poetic greatness? Maybe poets can't be fully understood and appreciated through a mere poem but only through their poetry, their larger body of work? Poems resonate with and speak to each other. As Jack Spicer famously said, "they cannot live alone any more than we can."
November 16, 2008
Benefactors
I've had this conversation too many times, but really...
what ever happened to benefactors?
Where are the rich and philanthropic art-lovers out there who will give a writer money to do his thing? Do they still exist? Are they only for painters? Maybe I just don't know the right people...
Well, over at a new lit mag called Flatmancrooked (they've got a giant robot, Ha Jin, and Borges), the editors were somehow able to score a benefactor. From this article, it sounds like talking about writing sometimes does pay off--a wealthy woman could hear you and join your cause. Why can't we all get someone to pay for us to create unprofitable but loveable magazines complete with robot? Or just to write? I wish...
November 13, 2008
The Truth Squad
In a post over at A Public Space, Keith Lee Morris, author of the The Dart League King, recounts a workshop he once had with Marilynne Robinson. An excerpt:
“This won’t work,” she says.
“What?” I say to her.
“All this cursing.”
“What?”
“No one talks this way.”
“What?”
“No one uses this much profanity,” she says to me. “No one talks this way.”
“What?” I say.
“What’s wrong with you?” Marilynne Robinson asks.
Workshop pet peeves have been coming up around here recently and reading this account reminded me of my biggest: the plausibility questions. Nothing was more frustrating to me in workshop than comments like: No one would ever do/say that! No one talks/thinks like that! No one would ever hold their fork/blow their nose/tie their shoe that way! Uh, really? No one? Out of all the billions of people in the world? Sure about that? Such points are usually well-intentioned and potentially helpful, but when couched in terms of “no one does this” or “this could never happen,” they strike me as small-minded and besides the point (in that literal plausibility has little to do with why something does or does not feel true; it's about what's plausible in the world of the story.)
I had a workshop once with Charles D'Ambrosio and he pretty much banned any discussion of plausibility, instead asking us to find the points where the language was failing the story (to paraphrase roughly)—so instead of projecting our own views of what is plausible onto the work, we were more successful in discussing the problems and offering our solutions in the language the stories had offered us. This approach also meant we were spared a lot of tedious conversation about whether it’s literally possible for one to, say, climb onto the roof of a house via the drain pipe or to successfully crash land a plane in a corn field.
Also, I’m curious: are the plausibility questions an issue for poetry workshops too? Or is this something that’s more particular to fiction?
November 12, 2008
Bad habits
Recently, my dear friend, reliable reader and fellow blogger Kathy told me that a line in a new poem seemed like a tic—I asked her to elaborate and she said it was too much of a “smart thing” in a poem with plenty of “smart things.” Which I took to mean I have a habit of showing off a bit with throw-away esoteric knowledge. Sure, I like to look smarter than I am, who doesn’t? Another thing I have to fight is ending on a slant rhyme. Quite often I do succumb to that, though I try to bury the “referent” (the first word in the rhyming pair; is there a real term for that?). My boyfriend has a habit of using all the ice in an ice tray and then just leaving it in the sink instead of refilling it. Okay, that one isn’t really literary. What are your (writing) bad habits?
November 11, 2008
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
It’s Veterans’ Day. Thus, a poem by Edward Thomas from January, 1916:
Rain
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
It’s one of my favorite war poems, I guess because it’s not especially war-y.
November 10, 2008
Cocktails and prostate jokes
John Gallaher wants to know what's so good if anything about Kim Addonizio's essay "How to Succeed in Po Biz," originally in New Letters and reprinted by Poetry Daily. He writes, "Will someone please explain this essay to me? I read it awhile back in New Letters, and wondered what they saw in it then, and now I see it’s been reprinted on Poetry Daily. So someone must like it. Probably many someones. And I really just plain don’t get it."
I found the essay weird and uneven as well. I saw it quoted somewhere and assumed from the quote ("It is crucial not to win the major award, because then you might feel too great a sense of achievement. Be a finalist, but not a winner. This will keep you forever unsure of the scope of your talent, and you will be able to continue the habits of excruciating self-doubt and misery that stood you in such good stead during the many years you received no recognition at all.") that the essay would consist of genuine, if hard-bitten, advice for beginning writers. But I ended up abandoning it the first time when it seemed to vacillate between mean-spirited satire and self-flagellation (like the bits about drinking vodka in the middle of the day ... that reads like memoir; it's not a poet stereotype). So I'm with Gallaher here. Anyone who liked it care to chip in?
I have mixed feelings about Kim Addonizio in general. I read her book Tell Me for a class in college and found it pretty self-indulgent and sentimental. However, I really liked her poem "November 11" in a recent issue of Pleiades. A much more successful kind of dark humor going on there.
November 5, 2008
Forbidding... lots of stuff
Um, yeah, so everyone has some electoral aftermath, I imagine. Mine consists of 4 hours of sleep. But the fact that my ass is flat doesn’t compare to the numbness of 2000, when I was stranded in a very red state (blue today), watching the gutless campaign that Gore ran bear fruit. Nor the weariness of 2004 (after an equally somnolent effort from Kerry), when I was alone in a hotel room in D.C., and I knew exactly what type of stuff was coming down the pike for the next four years, and it fell to my free copy of good ‘ol banal USA Today to confirm the next morning that it was all going to suck.
But today is not then. No more hunkering down in a cultural bunker with all news forbidden except the New Yorker, Fresh Air, and the local independent weekly, venturing out only for arts podcasts and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. (Sorry, guys. I know that Obama and Biden will be less rich material than McCain and Palin.)
So, as a sort of valedictory gesture (and to take advantage of an extraordinarily rare opportunity to make our magazine name literal for the moment), I thought I’d round off your afterglow with a poem from William Carpenter’s Rain (ridiculously out of print, but grand) that handily summarizes the presiding spirit of what we didn’t choose last night:
Military Secrets
This morning we drive over the blueberry barrens,
the downeast landscape cold even in August,
the workers bent over their orange or yellow rakes.
From the high ridge, we can see Cutler Harbor
and the transmitter towers, ranged in a circle
on the shore, like Stonehenge, like something left
here by aliens, so they could control us
from their own planet, making us sing Don Giovanni
or destroy ourselves with little particles,
whatever happens to please them at the time.
Our guide wears the chic uniform of today's Navy.
His speech is relaxed and easy, slightly southern.
The most powerful transmitter in the world, he says.
It can reach submarines at fifty fathoms.
Its waves do not travel through the air, but through
the earth itself. With this we could speak to a man
in the Pacific Ocean. We could tell him now, or not yet,
and he would hear us as if right in his own room.
Dogs go insane from this frequency. Their mouths foam.
They try to climb trees or lamp posts to escape.
Even some people hear these vibrations as sound:
one in a hundred thousand. To them, the air fills
with a hum, or cry, as of a great migration of birds,
and they look up, expecting to see something,
perhaps a brightening of the entire sky, or,
out on the water, a shape, not a Poseidon missile,
but a human hand. To these few people it would
look like that, the way the arm reached up
in Malory's Morte Darthur, and caught the sword,
whirling, out of the air and took it down.
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