Archive for November, 2008
Travis Nichols
An Emphasis Falls on Reality
Wesleyan University Press has just released the Collected Poems of Barbara Guest after months (years?) of anticipation. It was listed as a great “summer read” by UCLA Magazine back in June, and Publisher’s Weekly gave it a plug in May, but no matter. It’s here now and hopefully it will be for a long time.
Guest’s work has remained on the outside looking out over the years, even as her peers have risen higher and higher in critical estimation, cult status, and Amazon sales rankings (in the past two years Knopf has put out a new selection of Frank O’Hara’s poetry to general clamor, the Library of America has released its collection of Ashbery poems, and FSG has re-released their selected Schuyler).
While there are many reasons for the delay and separation, I’m sure, I’m happy to see Guest arrive.
Don Share
Information, Thy Nemesis is Reverie
Quoth Ange Mlinko -
Just three years ago I was sitting in a room of a Madison Avenue office tower, listening to my boss make a pitch to his boss, a hedge fund manager. Normally, during my spotty career as “content specialist” in various capacities, meetings were an opportunity to get hopped up on coffee and doodle. This was not to happen in front of a man whose day was micro-scheduled in fifteen-minute increments. Instead I listened dutifully to a plan to build a mirror site for the hedge fund’s server “outside the blast zone,” in the blueberry fields of New Jersey. At least the information would survive, even if we didn’t.
Information, thy nemesis is reverie. The reverie I used to fall into, for instance, when I didn’t care to listen in meetings. The reverie of great poetry, for another instance. But when I reflect that the most contemporary-sounding poems sound the least lonely, I wonder where reverie, as a mode of poetic thinking, is going. I also wonder if the store of knowledge unique to the poetic tradition of reverie will survive—or if it will morph into something at all recognizable to, say, Sappho…
Forrest Gander
Uruguay: Don’t Look Away
Melisa Machado
For many of the people reading this website, the three best-known poets from Uruguay might be Comte de Lautréamont (born Isador Lucien Ducasse in Montevideo, 1846), Jules Supervielle (born in Montevideo in 1884), and Kent Johnson (lived in Montevideo 1961-1971 and in 1978), three men who gained renown after leaving Uruguay and writing in languages other than Spanish.
Kent Johnson as a youth in Montevideo
Olena Kalytiak Davis
POETRY (IN MY LIFE) THIS WEEK
my god, there was actually a lot of poetry in my (new) house this week! (no, i’m not talking about my shelves again, and, no, nothing got written, but why is everything always about stupid that?!) i mean, poems (not mine!) were read aloud!
Lavinia Greenlaw
Tune thy music to thy heart
In Berlin this week, I wandered into a dark room next to this building site and found myself not in a silent disco but a silent singalong.
‘Tune thy music to thy heart,’ Thomas Campion proposed. These people sure did.
Javier Huerta
2008 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Awards
Oakland, the city in which I live, is home to two national book awards—the American Book Award and the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award—that challenge the hegemonic judgment of the literary establishment. The force behind these awards is multiculturalism, a belief that “sweetness and light” is multiple and diverse. I tend to trust the Oakland awards more (though I suppose I still hold a mistrust for all awards, for that Lehman Tendency to rank the best of the best of the best) than the Big Three because they seem to be more accurately representative of what’s being published in the United States today.
Here is an announcement of the 2008 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Awards:
PEN Oakland & The Oakland Public Library Announce the Winners of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles 18th Annual National Literary Awards & 12th Annual PEN Oakland Censorship Award Saturday, December 6th, 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM in Oakland Free To The Public
On Saturday, December 6th, come celebrate well-known and emerging Bay Area and international authors who will be honored for excellence in multicultural literature at the 18th Annual PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Awards.
PEN Oakland, A Bay Area Chapter of the International Organization of Poets, Essayists, and Novelists, was founded in 1989 to address multicultural issues, and educate the public as to the nature of multicultural work. These award-winning authors address the diversity and uniqueness of American culture, and represent the new voices of American literature. The late Josephine Miles, in whose honor the awards are presented, was a highly regarded poet, critic, and professor of English at the University of California in Berkeley.
Cathy Park Hong
It’s the economy part II: scattered thoughts
*An article that echoes my previous post on the recession and how it might affect artists.
* Travis helpfully mentioned an old NEA article on artists in the workforce. On that note, isn’t the risk-averse Bush appointee Dana Gioia stepping down to do some soul-searching in Aspen? I’m curious to see who Obama will appoint as Gioia’s successor (Art funding will probably be #70,455 on Obama’s to-do list). Perhaps the NEA will return to its pre-Piss Christ days and dole out individual grants to visual artists and launch more cutting-edge programs that promote innovative work by artists and not just arts education. This might be wishful thinking.
*Lavinia asked if the election will inspire more political poetry. I hope so. But I would think that the war, deregulation of corporations, Katrina, the pillaging of the environment, Abu Ghraib, and other corrosive abuses of power within the last eight years would be plenty reason to spur political poetry but has it? At the top of my head, I can think of a few poets whose latest collections have held a tuning fork to the world: Juliana Spahr, Ed Roberson, Claudia Rankine, Rodrigo Toscano, Barbara Jane Reyes, Dennis Nurkse, Matthea Harvey, and Aracelis Girmay. I’m sure there are many others who I’m forgetting…
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Anselm Berrigan
Abigail Deutsch
Tonya Foster
Melissa Friedling
John S. O'Connor
Barbara Jane Reyes
Amber Tamblyn
Edwin Torres
STAFF WRITERS
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
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RECENT POSTS
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