this link is for Scott February 6, 2008

Poet David Lehman was recently included on the NY Times Paper Cuts blog’s Living With Music feature. And he’s got a great tribute to Frank Sinatra’s music there, which he calls the “Young Blue Eyes” playlist.

Aside: I ordered the “Best American Erotic Poems” anthology Lehman edited way back in October when someone kindly dropped off the Winter/Spring book catalogues on my desk at work. I cannot wait to see the look the product dept. lady will give me when she hands me my employee discounted book order next month.

Coverage of women in poetry (and poetry in general) January 22, 2008

Jilly @ Poetry Hut brought up an important conversation the other day:

So what’s the deal? Why do the mainstream media hardly ever do articles or reviews about women poets? It is often hard to find ANY article to link to.

Are there more men poets than women poets? (When I got my MFA, the poetry students were mostly women.) Are men poets simply better poets than women poets? More interesting? Better at self-promotion maybe? Do articles in which the subject has a penis make for increased sales or something? Are men poets more likely to get published by a large press? What? Is? The? Deal? Here?

and again today.

My response:

As someone who used to work for the MSM, I must say that in some ways, yes, they are responsible for our lack of information. But at the same time, a lot of reporters (I’m talking about your average newspaper reporter here, not the books editor, which we all know is a dying position) just don’t always have the time to go & seek out the news and profile stories. (They’re put on breaking news and PR releases instead.) Often are not in the know about who they SHOULD be covering. The best thing we can do as people in the poetry/writing community is to send word about local poets (especially women!) who win prizes/have interesting lives/work with local organizations/publish books/run local presses, etc. to the media and tell them we’d like to see them written about. So much of what goes into the news comes from tips from readers. I hope this adds some perspective to the debate. However, I do agree that there is an overall lack of women in the media (as makers of media and subjects in media), and that this is a problem.

Seriously, the only way I would go back to being a staff writer for a newspaper again is if I could cover books, authors, artists, films, and/or musicians ONLY. Every once in a while, I got to squeeze in a cool Q&A with a local poet, or an art review of a big gallery show (that the other arts reporters were not already covering.) But most of the time it was what church has had another fire and where should we direct traffic for NASCAR week and what new homeowners association was popping up, etc., etc. The true reason I left my job was not just the crappy pay, but the realization that it would take another 30 years of crappy reporting to ever get to cover what I really wanted to do full-time. This is why freelancing is so much better – if you can balance it with your other work life. But then again, I think I have put myself in a corner as far as that goes, too. Maybe when I move I will tackle the magazine article ideas floating in my head and stop settling for the absolute least amount of creative energy (although it is informative) for my pay.

Greensboro Reading Series January 21, 2008

Sometimes I’m a little too quick to complain about Charlotte not getting any good visiting writers, with the exception of those who come through Queens’ MFA program and the CPCC Literary Festival (and the latter is harder to go to now that I don’t have student hours, since most of their readings are at 11 a.m.)

But that doesn’t mean that the state of North Carolina is lacking in literary history or celebrity.

UNC-Greensboro has announced their 2008 Spring reading calendar, and it’s quite impressive this year. I was stoked to read that two of my favorite poets – Dean Young and Natasha Tretheway – are both reading at UNCG this spring! The readings are at 8 & 7 p.m., so perhaps I could manage leaving work a little early on those days and hauling butt to Greensboro to see them.

I’ve never roadtripped for poetry, but I think it’s about time that I did. After all, I’ve driven the 4 hours roundtrip to Greensboro to see Joanna Newsom and other musicians play live on a weeknight. So it can be done, and poetry is certainly deserving. (And those concerts cost admission – these readings, I believe, are free!)

So if anyone wants to join me, I’m going to try to make it to these readings in April. We can split the cost of gas and pick up some BBQ along the way!

a definition of poetry January 9, 2008

Looks like Reginald Shepherd is joining the crew over at Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog. In his entry on translation, he offers his definition of poetry. Thought this would be good for anyone out there who toils with this idea, as a writer, a reader, or perhaps a teacher of poetry:

“What distinguishes a poem from a story or an essay or a letter or an op-ed column isn’t its subject matter (any number of these things can deal with the same subject) or its ideas (lots of poems, good ones even, have very little in the way of ideas), its imagery (after all, there aren’t any actual images in poems, or in stories or novels: just words, that don’t depict or resemble things) or even its emotional force or poignancy (I have much more often been brought to tears by pop songs that resonated with me than by the most moving poems). It’s the particularity of its language, the way the words interact with one another to produce rhythms and sonic patterns, what Ezra Pound called logopoeia. “

more on Queens readings in January December 20, 2007

More details provided by the Observer today (click link)

On poetry, Dylan, and ‘The Big Lebowski’ December 18, 2007

Check out this delightful Q & A with former poet laureate Robert Hass over at the Wallstreet Journal. I got a bunch of teaching ideas from it. He hits the nail on the head about what makes poetry transcend to the person who is new to it.

(Link courtesy of Poetry Hut)

domestic heroines in literature December 13, 2007

Continuing our conversation from yesterday, slightly, there is an interesting article up on Book Slut about how poet and author Jill Bialosky created her character for “The Life Room” (a book I have not read, although it sounds enticing!):

“When I was a young reader the models in literature for women protagonists who struggled between passion and domestic responsibility were Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Edna Pontellier, and Lily Bart. There were others but these destitute heroines were the ones that left an impression. Passion was terminal; female protagonists swept up in love affairs ended up killing themselves. The message was that abundance of feeling led to tragedy. If women in novels were not killed off by their creator, they struggled like Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady or Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch to define themselves against erotic desire and the confines of marriage. I wanted to create a contemporary heroine with deep emotional intelligence and intensity who could find a way to balance passion and selfhood.”

Free rice November 12, 2007

 I found this cool website through Jilly @ Poetry Hut.

Free Rice 

Test your vocabulary and donate rice to hungry people.

poetry group update October 26, 2007

Lindsey and I met up last Friday to have dinner and drinks at Creation to try to sort this whole poetry group thing out. As my earlier posts have suggested, I was feeling a bit doubtful about our ability to get this thing off the ground anytime soon. My schedule has been insane and so has hers, plus I was starting to feel weary about putting myself out there. Not only would I not have the time to dedicate to this to make it the next best thing in Charlotte, but taking on the role of a teacher was still something I wasn’t sure that I was ready to do. I’m not afraid of being a teacher – I think it’s something I could eventually do well one day, with a little training and more experience. But this would not be a classroom-like experience – it would be more like going on a blind date with 25 strangers and asking them to read their diary to you. Plus, I was afraid of starting this thing and then having a bunch of people latch onto me through it, and hence lose all control of my freedom, solitude and privacy (what little of it I have left in this city.) And most of all, one of the main reasons I was interested in something like this to start with was that I needed feedback on my work. If I’m leading a group, no one’s going to give me the honest criticism I need to be a better writer.

I was in the middle of my second glass of wine, working up my nerve to tell Lindsey all of this, when she started her own list of concerns. Turns out, she was having the same doubts I was. Then we (she) came up with something brilliant: let’s drop the public factor. Why not just get a group together of people we know – writers we know – and see if they want to meet up once a month to share work, have critique, and partake in writing prompts together? Yeah, why not? Yes, that’s what we decided to do, and I immediately felt the weight come off my shoulders. Then we had a laugh about how simple/stupid it was and how our perfectionistic tendencies got the better of us.

It will be kind of like a book club, except instead of reading a book, we’re all working toward writing a book. We still want to keep it poetry mostly, but we might stretch it a bit for a fiction friend or two.

And if it doesn’t happen before Christmas, then oh well. January’s still a good month to start new things.

The Great MFA Debate October 22, 2007

I recovered from several hours of driving all over creation to find (and not find) pieces for my Halloween costume yesterday by curling up on the couch with the latest issue of Poets & Writers.

For those who are in the same boat as me, applying to MFA Creative Writing programs, this issue of the magazine has a lot to offer. There’s a special section, “The Great MFA Debate,” with a few spotlights on newer and distinctive programs, plus three great articles:

• “In Defense of MFA Programs” by Joshua Henkin (who teaches at Sarah Lawrence)
• “Growing Diversity in Graduate School” by Rochelle Spencer (a hot topic I love)
• “Confessions of a Teaching Assistant” by Kelly Ferguson (a student in the University of Montana program, and also a former North Carolina resident – although a stranger to me!)