Arrivals and Departures
Inspiring new projects! Amusing diversions! Profound loss! This week was all over the place.
ARRIVING: Want to do some late-summer traveling? Poets & Writers assembles an e-guide to “literary cities.” Yes, it includes Los Angeles. And Zach Dodson has a refreshingly populist take on our own Chicago turf.
ARRIVING: Speaking of the CHI, if you happen to be here this weekend, remember that you can still crash slam poetry’s 25th birthday bash and see the subculture’s founders in person. Oh, and we’re also throwing a little wingding: the Printers' Ball. So there’s that.
DEPARTING: In what certainly seems to be a global trend, the massively troubled UK Poetry Society has lost its funding. Meanwhile, California, in the wake of the UC Press 86ing its acclaimed New California Poetry Series, also mourns Len Fulton, one of its most beloved and colorful small-press characters, who passed away this week at 77.
ARRIVING: Hope springs eternal, or at least it springs for now, thanks to Wesleyan University Press, which, in seemingly buoyant health, announces a stacked collection of critical essays on Spicer. We’re critically pumped.
LAYOVER: Some call us old-fashioned, we buffs of the ballad and keepers of the couplet. It probably doesn't help that, lately, we've been super into landline telephony.
ARRIVING: Two innovative publicity campaigns. There’s a video agony column by Wayne Koestenbaum, offering his wordy wisdom to the panicked, including one gentleman with profoundly disturbing penmanship. And an ambitious Kickstarter initiative from Jibade-Khalil Huffman, seeking 700 frogskins for his multimedia project “TEEN WOLF/TEEN WOLF TOO.” There are a few days left to vote with your dollars.
ARRIVING: Looky! It's a new Yeats play! Relax with the latest 2Pac record and prepare to squint.
DEPARTING: Now that advertisers don’t even bother seducing most of us anymore, we’re particularly melancholy about losing copywriting giant John Chervokas, who dabbled in verse and crossword puzzles but will likely be remembered for warning housewives to stop squeezing the Charmin.
ARRIVING: More Brodskymania! The cramped Leningrad flat Joseph Brodsky shared with multiple familes will become a museum of all things Brodsky. This works, especially since certain of Brodsky’s essays are brilliant time-capsules on issues in Soviet real estate.
DEPARTING: In a rich interview, Ben Mirov addresses his ideas about death and the “ghosts” in his poetic machine.
ARRIVING: Broseidon, king of the brocean, is pleased. We’ve mentioned “broetry,” a poetic Renaissance for dudes, before. It is now officially a subgenre. “Broet Laureate” Brian McGackin bros down with Shakespeare and Frost on NPR, touting the great taste of "literary chili cheeseburger." Broverload!
DEPARTING: Poetry lost a very close friend this week, contributor Wilmer Mills. Thanks for everything.