Did you know Bruce Andrews was once on the O'Reilly show?!?!?! This hilarity pretty much speaks for itself:
Bruce handles Bill's bullshit with much aplomb, methinks. Unfortch, the topic isn't Bruce's radical, far-far-left poetics, but rather his choice of text in a poli sci class at Fordham. I wish they'd gone head to head on L=A=N=G=etc. but I guess the liberal poetry media already has an O'Reilly-esque naysayer in Joan Houlihan.
April 28, 2009
You're either far left, or you're fair and balanced
April 27, 2009
The latest issue of Redivider...
...is hot off the presses with its usual mix of writers, both established (Cathleen Calbert, Joe Meno, Peter Turchi, etc.) and emerging (Carrie Messenger, Keith Montesano, Jennifer Percy, etc.).
Be sure to check it out--and order your very own copy--here.
April 22, 2009
It’s the Economy, Stupid
On the VQR blog, Waldo Jaquith confirms what I’ve long suspected. Blogging as a revenue stream is, shall we say, somewhat paltry. Maybe you should go back to shooting those 300 free throws before dawn.
Mark Penn (who was Hillary Clinton’s chief political strategist for her presidential campaign) came up with the incredible contention (in the Wall Street Journal, no less) that “more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers, firefighters or even bartenders,” and that “there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.”
You could fit what I know about blogging into a matchbox (a full matchbox), but even I know that is an extravagant error. In fact, this bring to mind the overblown claims of “trends” as breathlessly described by Time Magazine--in short, wishful thinking in the form of narrative.
Here are Penn’s claims:
20 million American bloggers
1.7 million bloggers making a profit
452,000 bloggers using bloggers as a primary source of income.
The internet is magical and all that (like King Midas, everything it touches turns to content, which is half-way between data and metaphor, either partaking of the most or least interesting aspects of both), but it’s not that’s magical. Pixel dust will not get you high enough to suspend the economic laws of physics.
Penn claims that it takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Jacquith points out that the average annual blogger revenue is more than $6,000, but that this figure is dependent on the top 1% of bloggers, who earn over $200,000. He does some other takedowns of Penn’s, er, methods, the least of which underscore the reality that net journalism needs infrastructure and review just like ground-bound print journalism. Which makes me feel both worried and comforted.
Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced
The 2009 Pulitzer winners have been announced, with W.S. Merwin taking home the award for The Shadow of Sirius and Elizabeth Strout winning for Olive Kitteridge. In some exciting Pshares news, Strout will be the guest editor for the Spring 2010 issue of Ploughshares.
And speaking of issues, the Spring 2009 Ploughshares, guest edited by Eleanor Wilner, is coming soon to bookstores and mailboxes near you! It's a great issue, one not to be missed. I'm particularly partial to Jess Row's story "Lives of the Saints." Row's story collection, The Train to Lo Wu, is also not to be missed.
Maintenance Note
Readers, we've disabled anonymous commenting for the time being to try to stem the small tsunami of spam we've been seeing. You can still comment using your OpenID or Blogger account. Sorry for the trouble!
April 15, 2009
The Lazy Man's Poetry Festival
Here's a poetry festival you don't have to leave your apartment to enjoy.
BC is streaming the festival live April 17th-19th. It's called "Poetries of the Stranger," sponsored by Boston Review and the Academy of American Poets. Former Pshares contributors and guest editors abound. So give it a listen...
... or, you know, go to the damn thing. It's free.
April 13, 2009
New Voices: Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina Marie Darling grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where she later attended Washington University for an undergraduate degree in English and graduate work in American Culture Studies. She is the author of several small press collections of poetry and nonfiction, including Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), Night Music (BlazeVox Books, 2008) http://www.blazevox.org/ebk-kDarling%20REAL.pdf , and, most recently, Strange Gospels (Maverick Duck Press, 2009). In addition to publishing creative work, Kristina is an avid reader and reviewer of contemporary literature, with critical writings appearing in The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, New Letters, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Prairie Center of the Arts, and the Centrum Foundation.
You are 23 years old and the author of seven small press collections of poetry and nonfiction. Why have you sought to publish so much at such an early age, and do you ever worry about being too prolific? That maybe people won’t be able to follow your career as easily as if you were less productive?
When I started taking workshops as an undergraduate, I was certainly cautioned against being too prolific. But I think that it's also important for emerging writers to build an audience for their work early on. A piece of writing doesn't do anybody any good sitting in a desk drawer. For me, it's all about getting those poems and essays out there and finding readers.
In a particularly honest and funny first sentence, you open your essay “Thomas Pynchon’s Girlfriend” with “Because I’m a college student from the suburbs, I know very few things from experience,” and you follow it up with one that is equally as good: “I’ve never changed a flat tire, built a bonfire, or so much as set foot outside the state of Missouri.” Has any of this changed since you wrote that piece? Has your experience expanded considerably since then, and how do you manage to write such winsome personal essays within such limited confines? Also, do you consider yourself a Missouri writer, or even a Midwestern one?
Since I started graduate school, I've started traveling more in order to present papers at conferences and participate in artist residency programs. While I'm definitely glad to have a broader range of experiences, I've never felt that it's necessary to be well-traveled in order to write. One of my first poetry teachers, Shin Yu Pai, would challenge her students to find what's poetic about the everyday, even with things like work, bad pop music, or a trip to the grocery store. And this approach has really been influential for my poetry and nonfiction. For me, good writing comes from imagination and its ability to transform the mundane into something meaningful, and not so much from having unusual or exotic experiences.
That said, I would definitely consider myself a Missouri writer. There's no better place to appreciate the ordinary.
Why did you decide to publish your small collection of essays, Strange Gospels, a chapbook, really, with Maverick Duck Press? Who are they, and how did you find them, and are you pleased with the job they did with your work?
Maverick Duck Press is a small publisher of poetry edited by Kendall A. Bell. Strange Gospels is actually their first nonfiction title. I found out about the press three years ago when I submitted some poems to Chantarelle's Notebook, which Bell also edits and publishes with his wife Christinia. I decided to query about the possibility publishing Strange Gospels after reading some poems by authors who have chapbooks with Maverick Duck Press and seeing the same kind of humor and cultural commentary that I was striving for in the essays. It definitely seemed like an aesthetic match.
And they did a fabulous job with designing and binding the chapbook. I love the cover that they suggested, which juxtaposes more serious religious imagery with a court jester. It really matches the tone of the writing.
Same question about Dancing Girl Press which published your poetry chapbook The Traffic in Women in 2006?
Dancing Girl Press is a feminist publisher based in Chicago. The editor, Kristy Bowen, must have training in the book arts because does an outstanding job designing chapbooks. But what I like most about the press is that it also offers poetry readings, workshops, an online journal, and other writing-related resources for women who are interested in poetry. I think it's great that Kristy's creating a sense of community for female writers.
On your Goodreads profile, alongside “poetry” and “nonfiction,” you list one of your “genres” as “Women & Gender Studies”—do you consider yourself a feminist writer? If so, what does this mean to you?
I would without a doubt consider myself a feminist writer. But I think that the term is misused and misunderstood by a lot of people, even within the literary community. For me, feminist writing isn't about singling women out as an oppressed class, or devaluing traditional ideas about femininity. What's great about a lot of women's writing being published today--like the poetry from Switchback Books and Birds of Lace Press--is that it looks at the ways gender politics are negotiated in everyday life, which, for me, is a lot more interesting.
In your essay “The Flat Tummy Gospel,” you write about your struggle with being a fat young woman, and in the course of doing so, you mix personal reportage with research and statistics, as well as the poetry of Donna Stonecipher—how do you decide when to incorporate such outside elements and the words of others into your own writing? What kind of balance or blend are you aiming for?
When I incorporate things like statistics, research, and quotes in my essays, I'm usually trying to situate personal experience in a broader context for the reader. As someone who reads all kinds of nonfiction, my favorite authors are usually the ones who write from their own lives, but also use their experiences as a point of entry to larger questions about society, art, or culture. In my own writing, I've found that these types of journalistic strategies are a useful way to develop personal narrative into something a bit more universal.
Your essays can be pretty hilarious—how do you decide when to use humor to help make your points? Is it a conscious decision, or a more organic one, and do you do use the same technique in your poetry and other writing?
I actually have a very hard time writing “serious” nonfiction. I'll start an essay and tell myself I won't use humor at all, but it always creeps back in somehow. And although I don't think that my poems are ever funny, my imagery is usually very odd and quirky. Humor has definitely become part of how I see the world.
In the first essay in the collection, “Employee of the Month,” a kind of hilarious exploration of your disastrous experience working at a Target in Ballwin, Missouri, you describe yourself as a pre-law major—do you still want to be a lawyer, or has that dream been abandoned? If so, what do you want to do now?
When I first started college, I thought that I could be a high powered litigator if I studied hard enough. But during my second semester, a professor pulled me aside and told me that I'm too nice to be a lawyer. Looking back, I think that it was a blessing in disguise. I started majoring in English and really enjoyed it, even though well-meaning relatives still try to tell me there are fewer career prospects. I hope to eventually get a doctorate in English and either teach, work in arts management, or get involved in curriculum development at a college.
What motivated you to work on getting an M.A.? And why work on that as opposed to an M.F.A.?
I strongly considered pursuing an M.F.A., but didn't want to be limited to an artistic career. Even though I love writing, I wanted to have other interests and experiences in my life. And, from a practical standpoint, I thought a lot about how publishing, contests, and the job market are things that aspiring writers have absolutely no control over. I'm a big control freak, so it didn't seem like a good match.
After exploring a lot of options, I chose to work on an M.A. in American Culture Studies because it's an interdisciplinary program, so there are a variety of career paths that graduates can take. It's also great to be able to explore my interest in Modernist writing while taking courses in philosophy and history.
Who are your favorite and most personally influential writers?
The nonfiction I read is mostly humor writing, although there are also some more serious essays mixed in. I loved Poe Ballantine's 501 Minutes to Christ, which was published last year by Hawthorne Books. Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay and Jenny Boully's The Body are also favorites.
My most personally influential poets are for the most part contemporary ones—like Christian Hawkey, Elizabeth Hughey, Richard Siken, Simone Muench, and Joshua Clover—but I also read a lot of Imagist poetry. I think that it's important to learn from writers like Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and H.D. It's difficult for a writer to know where poetry is going if he or she doesn't know where it's been in the past.
April 8, 2009
Gift with Purchase
It’s nice to see that April 1st did not go totally unobserved in the poetry world. And the focus of the rites was rather economic in nature. The Kenyon Review took advantage of the serious financial weirdness to acquire Random House, “a division of Bertelsmann AG, an international media corporation with its headquarters in a dormant volcano in Gütersloh, Germany.” And in a move that would give the-collective-rage-formerly-known-as-Foetry an aneurism, Graywolf decided that the Cave Canem Prize should really go to Tao Lin:
“I asked Komunyakka if it had occurred to him that perhaps Lin’s entry was not, in fact, unironic at all. “Yes, that did occur to me,” he said. “Some people on the Graywolf board were especially concerned about this, but I finally just said, ‘Listen, what does it matter? A good book is a good book, and this kid’s stuff actually sells.’ It’s the name of our prize--and your press--that will be on the cover of his book, which we expect he will promote with the same machine-like relentlessness that is his trademark–-which of course is how he ended up entering our contest in the first place. I said to them, ‘you want to see Cold-Pressed Organic Virgin Coconut Oil come out with that little Melville House logo on the spine instead of your wolves, be my guest. But this is the book I’m writing an introduction for.’”
I hope that there were other shenanigans afoot out there. What good is the internet if not for ad-hoc, self-relexiveness? (I mean, besides instantly shrink-wrapping sentiment, merchandise, and data with the same dispassionate even-handedness one would show to a fruit basket.)
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