April 2013
8 posts
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A Good Interview...
…HERE. Matthew Henriksen talks to Graham Foust about humor, translation, and the Midwest:
“I should say, too, that I always think of myself as a midwestern poet, as that’s the only place with which I feel a kind of existential kinship. If seven years in California taught me anything, it’s that. In his terrific essay ‘Good-bye Wisconsin,’ the insanely underrated...
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“I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the...”
– Linda Gregg, The Art of Finding (via haveapoemwithyourcoffee)
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“The body is the first writer of the poem. The mind is the caretaker who moves in...”
– D.A. Powell (via poetryeater)
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[PANK] :: February 2013 :: 8.2 :: Bret Shepard ::... →
pankmagazine:
At breakfast I can’t eat, so I draw a topographical map of where
your body was. I look for relief when you’re not here. Contour lines
down your side of the bed, then up the refrigerator door, its elevation
suggesting your torso, and inside it the eggs you’d break on yourself. Then the dip
in the couch where your body sat drinking coffee. Dark concentrations
...
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Rae Armantrout
GHOSTED
1
Long, loose,
spindly, green
stalks with their few
leaves, bug-eaten
tatters
on which
a black monarch
sits, folding
and unfolding
its wings.
2
A friend’s funeral has broken up—
or was that the last dream?
Now I’m struggling
between monuments,
looking for Chuck.
It’s getting dark
and I’m pissed off
because he won’t answer...
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March 2013
2 posts
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Iris Cushing
STATE REPORT
All I want to do today is sit around Wyoming
until it gets dark.
It must be the time of year: the angle of the sun
has shifted, and the leaves are finally Wyoming.
I flip through a picture-book
by the light of one long window.
Vincent Van Gogh gathered inspiration
while Wyoming through the South of France.
I think he captured especially well
the shadows that fall as...
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Two New Chapbooks
MULTIPLE CHOICES
A. It’s the sound of the absence of sound.
B. It’s not soundlessness.
C. It’s the decay after hitting the whole note.
D. It’s the sound of being heard.
—from James Shea’s Air and Water Show
THIS LAST TIME WILL BE THE FIRST
The world is perfect
and that’s the problem.
You can’t discover
the lost treasure
...
February 2013
4 posts
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Paulo Leminski
nothing the sun
could not explain
everything the moon
makes glamorous
no rain
fades this flower
—from *Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: 20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets*
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The Next Big Thing: Joshua Ware
The poet Joshua Ware asked me to post his self-interview. Check out his blog, and get his book Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley, which is great.
What is the working title of the book?
The title of my forthcoming chapbook is Imaginary Portraits.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
The title of this chapbook comes from Walter Pater’s book of the same name. The general concept of the...
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from Mary Ruefle's "Topophilia"
I study nature so as not to do foolish things.
For instance, in the worst windstorms
only the most delicate things survive:
a vireo’s nest intact on the lawn next to the roots
of a monstrous tree. Life makes so much sense!
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Two Poems by Steve Wilson
COUMEENOLE BEACH / CANCER JOURNAL 6
—Slea Head Grotto, Ireland, August 2010
From hurt the heart unwords itself.
Goes down to dark. Sits silent.
No breaks, I’d thought, were working
there. Then roar. Then seafoam blast:
a wound was waiting. Feeds to grow.
Now alters, rends. That one long strand,
like faith, curves out uncalmed, thinned
to a breath—just so at once...
January 2013
3 posts
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The Next Big Thing
The wonderful poet Nick Courtright tagged me for The Next Big Thing self-interview series that’s going around, so here goes.
What is the working title of the book?
Thought That Nature.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
Most of what I write is a reflection of my inability to understand my surroundings, which is true of the poems in this book. Though I didn’t have a premeditated...
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Cole Swensen: A Conceptual Introduction
1. Focus your life on the precise point at which perception turns to thought.
2. The base structure of both the city and the poem is the labyrinth…As in any maze, you can only see to the next corner, never around it.
3. One of the things that I’d like to manage to do when I write is to have the texts generate a sort of phenomenon of persistence, (like certain short pieces of...
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December 2012
8 posts
3 tags
Ernst Meister's "Winterly" (tr. Michael Hamburger)
I
Here, where the blood-stained
game track ends
the huntsman lies bound
and his dog eats snow,
a black dog,
my eyes have the power to see
crystals of the air.
II
Snow in the mouth
purifies
the word of love.
In the frost glimmer
eyes
of the sea-buckthorn.
There, as of
blue ore,
stars contain it,
is a taste
on the tongue—
scarcely affording
folly.
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TYPO 17 →
Another great issue of TYPO!
adamclay:
w/ poems by:
STEPHANIE ANDERSON MONICA BERLIN & BETH MARZONI MOLLY BRODAK HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL LAURA CARTER TINA BROWN CELONA JEFF ENCKE GRAHAM FOUST NATHAN HAUKE JENNY GROPP HESS KEVIN HOLDEN STEVEN KARL KAREN LEPRI LINNEA OGDEN ELIZABETH ROBINSON PATTABI SESHADRI PAIGE TAGGART JOSHUA WARE JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON
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“Some will tell you that in order to write you should nurture your obsessions,...”
– Nick Flynn (via mttbll)
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Matsuo Basho
Instead, I’ve worn out my body in journeys that are as aimless as the winds and clouds and expended my feelings on flowers and birds. But somehow I’ve been able to make a living this way, and so in the end, unskilled and talentless as I am, I give myself wholly to this one concern, poetry. Po Chü-i worked so hard at it that he almost ruined his five vital organs, and Tu Fu grew lean...
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heatherchristle:
Hey, did you know that Wave has...
November 2012
2 posts
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Michael Jeffrey Lee by Catherine Lacey →
bombmagazine:
Michael Jeffrey Lee on ugly writing and his short story collectionSomething In My Eye.
This is a good book and a good interview.
October 2012
11 posts
3 tags
PhD Exams
So I finally passed both of my PhD written examination portfolios. (Instead of more traditional, timed written exams, UNL offers a portfolio option, where each contains about 80-100 pages of various kinds of writing.)
But I won’t bore you with the details.
More interesting is the fact that I wrote the bulk of these almost 200 pages to only two records, played on infinite repeat.
Field...
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
– Pablo Picasso, born 131 years ago today. (via sfmoma)
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“The work I did is the work I know, and the work I do is the work I don’t know....”
– Philip Glass on the importance of staying uncomfortable – something every great scientist, great artist, and great poet can speak to.
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WatchJames Shea reading a poem.
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Nebraska newlywed accused of assaulting his wife... →
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from Bill Knott, "Poem for Irene Keller, Who Asked...
poetryeater:
If all your bones were candles, your face would still be a dark answer.
If your smells were wind-chimes, breezes would leave too late to reach their destination, would arrive at their predestination.
And if your skin were sheets of paper, my ashes blown over them would make the lines I meant not to write.
Chimera dressed in chimeras: if you were this poem I would not be its...
September 2012
13 posts
1 tag
“1. Make sure you enjoy writing.
Writers always like to say how hard the writing...”
– The first of Etgar Keret’s ten rules for writers echoes Ray Bradbury’s insistence on writing with joy. For more timeless advice on writing, see writing rules by:
Neil Gaiman
Zadie Smith
Kurt Vonnegut
John Steinbeck
David Ogilvy
Henry Miller
Jack Kerouack
Susan Sontag
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September Twenty Fifth in Two Thousand and Twelve... →
empirewithoutanemperor:
Last week Keith Montesano interviewed me about my little book Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound. A link to the interview can be found above. Thank you internet and Keith.
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Diane Williams Interview →
mulberryroad:
See this fine interview at the Killings blog:
You write stories that vaporise narratives and characters. You were a lecturer at Bard College, Syracuse University and the Centre for Fiction in New York. What principles of storytelling, of character and narrative, did you teach your students?
D.W.: Principles for the writing of prose fiction – hmmm. Language is the performative...
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NANO Fiction’s State of Flash (& Prose Poetry):...
these-summer-nights-in-december:
This summer, for NANO Fiction’s blog series The State of Flash, I surveyed some of my writer friends about why they write prose poetry or flash fiction. The responses I got were thoughtful, funny, insightful, sometimes frightening, and even lyrical.
The short essay was featured online yesterday, and you can read it HERE.
Thanks Kirby Johnson & NANO...
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Congrats to the Bobcats
Good discussion at the LA Times on Texas State’s recent upset over University of Houston.
