Adam Robinson
http://www.publishinggenius.com
Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he operates Publishing Genius Press. His book of poems, Adam Robison and other poems, will be published by Narrow House Books this year.
Adam Robinson—
VIDA has tallied the gender (im)balance in The Best American series. In their press release they ask, “What careers stalled because gender bias plays a role in preventing a writers’ work from reaching a national audience?”
It’s a scary thought. Is it also a fair question?
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Take two for wanting
1. Beecher’s Magazine is now available. Look at the list of contributors. I like how they show what’s poetry and what’s fiction.
2. Feast your eyes on the cover of Heather Christle’s new book, which will be available July 1:
Patience, an Asterisk, or the Kitchen
Not so Young today, eh Mike? Happy birthday to our gang’s torch-bearer. In truth if I could see it like any other I think it’d be like Mike Young. No one understands the elasticity of words like he does. No one births knowledge within me with the Other words like Mike. He tells me what I already know in such a way that I didn’t know I knew it. That’s how he usurps my brain. He makes me dumber and smarter while I thought I was looking for a spanking machine. He giggles a high titter. Until midnight tonight you can celebrate old boy’s birth with PGP by getting his poem book for just $6 which is $300 less than the perceived value of the poem “Let’s Build the Last Song and Sneak Away While Everyone Else Is Listening,” $100 of which you can watch below the fold.
Matthew Henriksen’s Ordinary Sun
“The great painter Degas often repeated to me a very true and simple remark by Mallarmé. . . . One day he said to Mallarmé: ‘Yours is a hellish craft. I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I’m full of ideas. . . .’ And Mallarmé answered: ‘My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words’.”
Paul Valéry in “Poetry and Abstract Thought” from The Art of Poetry, which is an essay I was supposed to read in college but didn’t. It’s good though, and Valéry is using this anecdote on the way to illustrating a distinction between poetry and “purposive language” such that the latter is akin to walking to a destination while poetry, by contrast, is dancing.
I’m reading Valéry now as fodder for a conversation I’m having with my mom, in which I hope to justify Matthew Henriksen’s abstruse but beautiful book, Ordinary Sun, out now from Black Ocean. It was a valuable challenge to have Mom read these poems to me because her disinterestedness problematized the book. She’s not willing to see the poems as incommunicative but lovely because she is only interested in this “purposive language.”
I emailed her and argued that clearly Henriksen cares about what he’s writing, “so these poems are a good place to start exploring the ineffable. Language — words on their own, without communicative meaning — is one of the essential things about being human,” and she agreed, saying that “yes, words ARE one of the essential things of being human, but it is so they do make sense/meaning with each other, in contrast to nonsense.” So take that, Henriksen. I don’t think my mom likes your book.
8 Comments
April 27th, 2011 / 10:49 am
April 27th, 2011 / 10:49 am
Metal Easter
As it’s my tradition at Halloween to listen to a Christian heavy metal song called “All Hallow’s Eve,” so it is at Easter that I commemorate the good news with this, from Barnabas:
The music is bad but at least the lyrics are an abomination:
I killed Jesus Christ
Yes I did it’s true
Oh I killed Jesus Christ
And you were with me too
My personal liturgy isn’t meant to be sacrilegious, though. For me its nostalgic; I really loved that song when I was 14, and anyway I think the Gospel, offensive in any time signature, is truly an amazing story. For God, having decided not to flood the world again, needs to save creation from our own evil — our sin this time not hating the truth but systematizing it — so he makes the smallest action possible. He becomes one of us, one whom we — recognizing his power for an actual justice — need to kill. In that death some of us would see horror and in that horror be baptized.
I don’t think my summary captures the story nearly as well as Cool Hand Luke (and if you want further evidence of our need for grace, just read the comments to this trailer).
Lotsa Action
HEY, there’s a new jubilat website! Heather Christle tricked it out with all kinds of good, including stuff from the archives, an A/V closet, and a wack index.
Excellent Dark Sky Magazine is doing a give for the excellent Brian Allen Carr’s excellent Short Bus. Yarta goget tha buk. On the now.
At Full Stop, David Backer points to Buzz Mauro’s Everyday Genius story and says that “dressed up with a few offhand observations, whimsical musings and flourishes of free association, ‘Delicious Noodles’ asserts itself as a convincing self-contained whole.” Then Backer points to a story by Matt Bell, from Conjunctions, that I overheard Matt talking about in a bar in DC on Saturday. “You’re supposed to do whatever you want with it,” he said (paraphrase).
Gabe Durham’s Fun Camp book will be out from Mud Luscious in 2013. If you’re an online literature reader, you’ve probably seen a piece from this here or there cuz they been everywhere man.
Also in new books: Publishers Weekly announces Melissa Broder’s Meat Heart, forthcoming from PGP in February. Also in PGP: Chris Toll’s The Disinformation Phase is now available for pre-order.
Also also: congratulations to Stephanie Barber, announced yesterday as a finalist for the Sondheim Prize.
At Tyrant Books, pre-orders are open for Michael Kimball’s renewed novel, Us, too.
And Dzanc just nabbed three by Stephen Graham Jones.
I feel like these roundups are of limited value. Is anyone still with me? There’s more goodness.
Like life. Ariana Reines remembers Paul Violi in a personal post that really blew me away.
If you’re not reading Bill Knott’s cranky blog, you don’t know what the Internet is.
What is the poetic equivalent of this throw from SS (Alexi Casilla, 4/18/11)? In what journal would it appear?
Chomsky on Ali G
I’m boning up for “The Poetic Sentence,” a panel I’m moderating tomorrow at the Conversations & Connections conference in DC, and I found this video pretty insightful.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zPHAhj_Cio
If you’re nearby DC and you’re a writer, you will probably want to cancel whatever you’ve got going on so you can attend this conference. For the $65 admission fee you’ll see Michael Kimball’s 1-Hr MFA lecture, which is worth twice $65. You’ll also get to attend my panel with Mel Nichols, Magus Magnus, Maureen Thorson, and our own fingerlickinggood: Mike Young. Other panels and lectures by a hot list of my faves. You’ll also get one of the featured books, a subscription to a magazine, speed-dating with an editor (an intellectual lap-dance, basically) and a kissing booth with Steve Almond. Maybe not a kissing booth, I don’t know, that’s unconfirmed, but he’ll be there so why not?
A Constant Froth of Expectation: Stephanie Barber Interview
The other day I “had a chance” to “sit down” with filmmaker, poet and performance artist Stephanie Barber to discuss her book, these here separated to see how they standing alone or six films by stephanie barber, which I published with PGP in 2008 then again a few months ago. As the title suggests, the collection features six movies on a DVD, packaged with the soundtracks printed in book form. The interview was a continuation of a lot of other conversations about art and life that she and I have had lately.
How did you come up with the idea to put this together? Since we’ve been talking about the origins of ideas lately, I’m wondering if this book was your idea or my idea?
I don’t know. That’s the first question? Your idea.
How did you choose the six pieces, out of all the many films you’ve made?
Um, these are the ones that have the most, uh, writerly soundtracks.
Writerly?
I don’t know, not writerly. Wordy.
What is something you want the audience to know about the book/DVD?
I can’t answer that question.
It seems to me that separating the text underscores the fact that you are working in two different languages — English and then the visual language. Which comes first?
They come together. They are conceptually one unit, one impulse, one art gesture, one art offering.
But when you’re thinking about a piece, such as–
I think about the whole thing together.
There are a lot of great videos on Youtube. Not yours though. Is that old fashioned or what’s going on there?
Um, this is a mean interview. Are you trying to be mean to me? READ MORE >
Dzanc rEprints
Random House found their start with a reprint series when they acquired the Modern Library classics. Now we know them as one of the biggest book companies in the world. Today, Dzanc Books announced their rEprint Series. Can we expect similar growth?
With the new line, Dzanc — who’s always out front on the technical aspects of publishing (see, for example their eBook Club or the Best of the Web which I’m particularly fond of) — will release eBook versions of literary fiction that’s recently gone out of print. That is, they aren’t just reprinting their own backlist digitally, but actively bringing in titles from major publishers like Knopf.
On the forthcoming list are books by HTMLGiant faves like Noy Holland, Michael Martone (3 books) and Ted Pelton. The books will be available for every digital format. The current list can be seen here, though the press release says hundreds more titles are on the way.
I asked Dan Wickett how big he sees this new series being for Dzanc, in relation to Random House’s reprint series 80+ years ago. “No idea to tell you the truth,” he said. “It fits into our mission of advancing great writing and championing such writers. We obviously hope that it brings their work to a large new readership.” Spoken like a CEO. And other professional attributes of the project, which anyone familiar with Dzanc has come to expect, include higher than standard author royalties (in this case, paying 50% cover on sales) and books designed for each platform, not just converted from previous files.
Dzanc isn’t just raising the bar for small presses; they’re changing the game across every level. I’m glad they’re out there, forging a path through the digital landscape.
“Sweet Potatoes” etc
My desk is messy but on Wednesday Joe and I did a lot of work around HQ. We took down the old artish and put up some new pictures and my favorite thing was finally figuring out a way to display my chapbooks in a rack. I kept putting in chapbooks that I had in boxes and getting excited and showing them to Joe. Like, JOE! LOOK AT THIS TITLE “FALLING STARS TO SMASH MOTHERFUCKERS IN THEIR FACE”! AH HAHA AND LOOK AT THIS ONE! “CONGRATULATIONS! THERE’S NO LAST PLACE IF EVERYONE IS DEAD” – okay so maybe those titles are kind of pessimistic but there are a lot of other ones that I liked. I kept also being like JOE! THERE’S A LOT OF CHAPBOOKS IN HERE A PERSON WOULD ACTUALLY WANT TO READ!
Life is moving too fast. I can’t keep up with things like the Internet. HTMLGiant is fast like the wind — beyond me. I don’t know what’s going on anywhere. I don’t like the feeling. I feel like I’m withdrawing into my own small world of rush. I can’t talk crap about people anymore because I don’t know what anyone is doing. READ MORE >