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August 2010

A Letter to the Editor from Gary Lutz, 1988

A letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 8, 1988, from Gary Lutz:

Behind the Scenes / 35 Comments
August 21st, 2010 / 4:53 pm

Blake Butler—

Zach German’s books i read in 2010 blog is pretty funny or fun, e.g. “how did i like it: i didn’t like it. i really didn’t feel like i got anything out of it. i guess i learned the names of a lot of people, whose wikipedias i looked at after not recognizing them in the poems. i feel like with killian’s style of poetry it is difficult for me to know whether it is good or bad; like i assume killian is a ‘good’ writer, but i feel even if a ‘bad’ writer wrote some poems in this book’s style i would probably take them the same way, idk. that being said i feel like i would like him if i met him….”

Mike Young—

While we’re on the subject of suggestion, why not check out shiny new online poetry mag Vinyl, edited by Gregory Sherl and K.MA. Sullivan. Cherry trees on fire, writing the saddest letters of your life on a train, a girl from northern Maine becomes a lip balm model, a gun in locker F8 at the gym, and much more. Including Bob Hicok’s grocery list, which deliberately instructs him not to buy raining hips.

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Mike Young

Everything Is Quietly Descriptive Love

Scrambler Books—which (like Flatmancrooked) manages to be awesome despite being based in turd-haven-of-a-city Sacramento—is releasing two upcoming books of poetry that I’m stoked about: Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything Is Quiet and Matthew Savoca’s long love poem with descriptive title. You can get these books separate or together, or together in a hardcover edition, which is pretty fancy for indie lit, right? Click here and here for sample poems from Malone and here and here for Savoca poems. These are sure to both be tender and exhausted collections that feel like drinking the wrong beverage at the wrong time and somehow having that be the only thing that makes you feel better. Can’t wait.

Author Spotlight & Presses / 4 Comments
August 21st, 2010 / 12:52 pm

Blake Butler—

Every time you complain about literary magazine submission response times a little baby in heaven gets its hands chopped off.

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Evelyn Hampton

Interview with Brian Conn

At Raintaxi, there’s an interview with Brian Conn, author of The Fixed Stars, a really wonderful novel—an anthropology of late capitalism, its language and myths. Conn answers Jedediah Berry’s questions about writing the book–structural choices, influences (including Cosmicomics, Marie Redonnet, Brothers Grimm), the interplay of language and math.

Conn wrote about half the book during a summer alone in Hawaii. Of that time he says,

After I finished a section I would wander around for several days trying to think of some event or voice or revelation that would, in some poorly comprehended yet very particular way, contradict everything that I’d already written. I’d discard idea after idea, and then at some point I’d think of an idea and laugh out loud, suddenly and involuntarily, and this idea would be the basis of the next section.

I now think of that summer as a time of intoxicating creativity, and simultaneously of terrifying confusion and despair. I’m sure these two impressions are closely related. I can see the causality flowing in either direction: maybe creativity is actually deeply terrifying, maybe confusion and despair forced me to abandon my usual thinking and reach for something new. Maybe both.