http://www.christopherhiggs.org/
Christopher Higgs recommends Tierra Whack's WHACK WORLD, Otomo Yoshihide's ANODE, Marlon James's BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF, and a lunch of cucumber, tomato, red onion, feta, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
Poet and OSU comrade, Andrew Brogdon, has created this nifty website The Internet is an English Sonnet, which creates English sonnets using Google search results. Here is the poem I “wrote” this morning. Take your time analyzing it with friends, family, and students. I will be sending this one and a few others out this afternoon, so you editors out there better put on your acceptance mittens!
Complex
Or shift as your insurance company
was not designed so damn big on about
developing on packet voice: chinese
thai, all lay over different, allowed
the commentary. featured a severe
financial hardship. Early days, install
it after shuffling of received, until
june date back! Copy. Open source. Control
my smart security on peak above
what fundamental part to sit, include
in manners, breath in under ground. Remove,
wherever funding. Would occur, into
how complex graphics package to obtain
the toilet, indicating that: diane.
Brion Gysin famously said, “Writing is fifty years behind painting.” And it looks like Kenneth Goldsmith would agree:
What I learned in the art world is that anything goes. The further you can push something, the more it is rewarded: to shoot for anything less in the art world is career suicide. The art that is deemed the most valuable is rarely the most finely-crafted, the most expressive, or the most “honest” works, but rather those which either attempt to do something that’s never been done before or those that synthesize older ideas into something new. Risk is rewarded. Those who follow tradition in a known, dogged, and obligatory manner are ignored. Unlike the poetry world, the mainstream of the art world since the dawn of modernism has been the avant-garde, the innovative, the experimental. The most cutting-edge work — the work with the biggest audience and historical import — has been the most challenging.
–from “The Tortoise And The Hare: Dale Smith and Kenneth Goldsmith Parse Slow and Fast Poetries” in Jacket 38
My brother sent me this link to the Denver Broncos Cheerleaders, along with a note saying: “one of the questions is what book are you reading?”
I began clicking through the profiles.
Check out this unbelievable treasure trove of audio material available for free:
Here are just a few of the talks I found that look especially interesting:
Michael Ondaatje (Discussion and readings of ‘Running in the Family’ and ‘Coming through Slaughter’)
Bohumil Hrabal and Julian Barnes, in conversation
Christine Brooke-Rose and A. S. Byatt, in conversation
Juan Goytisolo and Chris Rawlence, in conversation
Angela Carter discusses magical realism
William Gaddis and Malcolm Bradbury, in conversation
Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, in conversation
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the looking glass
New from BlazeVox Books:
THE CARCASSES
A FABLE
by
Raymond Federman
— but she knows from her experience on planet Earth that even if she denounces her comrades she will be thrown on the pile of carcasses known as the pile of eternally rejected carcasses — it is the worse condition — the most terrible fate for a carcass is to know that she will never be transmuted — that there is no hope of ever be transmuted — not even as an ugly vegetable — let’s say as a carrot — or as a ridiculous object like a chamber pot — meanwhile the secret forces of the authorities — known as the authoritarian militia — are in the process of arresting all those who are involved because even if the NAFC did not give their names — the OFCS denounced them — no need to say more about the pathetic failure of this revolution — what will happen in the zone of the carcasses will be told in a subsequent chapter — but as it is now said and repeated in every corner of the zone since the miscarriage of this revolt — the more things change the more they’re the same —
Blake’s recent post on Towering Literary Figures inspired me to consider a list of significant contemporary (living) women writers. By significant I mean significant to me: women writers who I admire and who I feel have significantly contributed to the advancement of literature.
Perhaps someone else on the Giant staff will take up this theme and focus on writers of color, or GLBT writers, or writers from Australia, or writers with children, or writers still living with their mothers, or etc.
For the record, I understand that what I am doing here is, to a degree, essentialist: by labeling a writer based on their gender I am furthering a world in which these distinctions exist. Furthermore, I completely sympathize with the position that argues that we should not see color or sex or race or whatever, that we should instead see only writers.
But, alas, differences exist.
So, with my disclaimer now fully realized, I give you my list of contemporary women writers that I think kick a lot of ass –(in black&white and in no particular order):
I understand some folks must write in silence, but for others – myself included – musical accompaniment helps lubricate the fingertips.
Do you listen to music when you write? If so, what kinds of stuff? Do you avoid music with lyrics?
How do you use music? Do you use the emotion of the music to help guide (or instigate) the emotion of your work? Do you ride beats?
Although I am constantly (obsessively) hunting for, acquiring, and listening to new/different albums, there are a few go-to favorites I throw on when it’s time to get down with the wordage. Here are just a few of my personal recommendations — I would love to hear from other people about their practices and/or their recommendations:
Glenn Gould – A State of Wonder: The Complete Goldberg Variations (1955 & 1981)
Poetry can thus be defined as the art of language, as distinguished from fiction which is the art of written narrative, from drama, the art of theatrical narrative, or from the essay, the art of written rhetoric.
There are only two modes in which any genre can be written, prose and verse. Prose is unmetered language; verse is metered language. Any of the genres can be written in either of the modes; that is, there are prose narratives and verse narratives, prose dramas and verse dramas, prose essays and verse essays. Likewise, there are prose poems and verse poems.
There is, thus, only one logical answer to the question “What is the difference between poetry and prose?” Poetry is a genre, and prose is a mode.
–from pages 4-5 of The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics (1986) by Lewis Turco
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