A dream that leads to something real that I made up
I had a dream last night that today was National Prose Poetry Day. I just looked it up. Today is not National Prose Poetry Day. In fact, surprise surprise, there is no such thing as National Prose Poetry Day. That does not deter me. I, nobody Lily Hoang, declare today National Prose Poetry Day. In celebration, here is a prose poem by Mary Miller, published in Rose Metal Press’s awesome collection of flash fiction chapbooks, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves. READ MORE >
Fluxus For Free
Very excited to learn about this new free digital edition of the out-of-print Fluxus Reader, via Jacket 2.
What is Fluxus you ask? A few introductory examples after the jump…
Dogs vs. Birds
I like dogs. I’m what you might call a “dog person.” My dog, who my parents purchased somewhere in central Indiana in November 1999, is not only a great friend, but an important influence on my writing and art. Today, she sits approximately fifteen feet behind me staring out the window at the cold, gray earth. Did I mention she likes HTMLGIANT.
When I was growing up, a strong percentage of my favorite books were centered around dogs. There was Go, Dog. Go!—the second book I ever read. Then there were Marjorie Flack’s Angus books about a mischievous Scottish Terrier, not unlike the more popular The Poky Little Puppy, which as of 2001, was the single all-time best-selling hardcover children’s book in the country, selling nearly 15 million copies since its publication in 1942, according to Publishers Weekly. As I grew older still, I read Shiloh and, my favorite childhood novel, Where the Red Fern Grows. There was even a book narrated by a Pointer, read aloud in some public school setting, which has left an undying impression on me, years later. Needless to say, the dog books were a big part of my childhood.
Somewhere along the line, though, a shift occurred.
What is Experimental Literature? {Preview: Five Questions Vol. 2}
I’m excited to announce that the second volume of my ongoing series will resume in June.
If you missed any of the ten responses from the first volume, I’ve cataloged them for your convenience here.
The second round of questions come from answers given by the participants in the first round, and the people giving answers this time will be:
Dennis Cooper
Dodie Bellamy
Evan Lavender-Smith
Eileen Myles
Brian Evenson
Vi Khi Nao
Selah Saterstrom
Johannes Göransson
Sesshu Foster
Michael Martone
Stay tuned. It’s gonna be good!
Fables
Tarapaulin Sky has come alive again with a fistful of new release including Issue #17 of their journal & Johannes Goransson’s Entrance to a Colonial Pageant in which We All begin to intricate.
But I want to talk about FABLES, a new book by author & artist Sarah Goldstein. From TP website:
Sarah Goldstein
Fables
Dogs and such
I once felt compelled to finish everything I began. Not sure why. The tendency can be just as foolish as admirable. Today I was on page 188 of Peter Arnettt’s Live From the Battlefield (Yes, I know, a certain classic) and I came across yet another scene that had me off my feed. Ever have that friend who only tells stories where they personally come out on top? Here, the young reporter Arnett confronts an older established journalist for writing a too optimistic account of a military operation during the Vietnam conflict.
I felt he had misrepresented the action.
“Son,” he grinned bitterly at me, “I was doing this long before you were born.”
“Tom,” I responded angrily, “I’ll be doing this long after you’re dead.” He looked at me in startled shock and mumbled into his Scotch. Reddy didn’t say much to me after that.
Everything about this exchange felt phony to me. The adverbs. The older journalist as “startled” by the exchange, the mumbling into Scotch, The John Wayne/Noir mix of the comeuppance Arnett is recalling 30+ years later. He lost me. I stopped reading. I give myself permission. Because written words were doing their thing long before I was born and will be doing it long after I’m dead. I only have so many books I can read in my lifetime. I now stop a book when I’ve read enough to feel I need to stop. And then pick up another.
Watching The Twilight Zone
A few weeks ago, the lymph nodes along my neck suddenly swelled up. I had a doctor check it out and he determined I had strep throat, and then a week later, added mononucleosis to the diagnosis. Sort of a one-two punch of undergraduate illness. I didn’t feel that sick, and suffered little symptoms other than the inflamed globules along my jugular, but it became clear to me, getting drunk off three beers and exhausted at 5pm, that I should probably take it easy. My regular leisure, after school, work, and whatever other responsibilities I’ve lined up for myself on a given day, is to kick back with a few-to-several beers and do things on the internet. The doctor recommended I avoid this, so there was only one viable solution to passing time at the same rate and pleasure level: watch TV. I am one of those lucky enough to have acquired a password to my friend’s Netflix Instant Watch account, and, after watching The Larry Sanders Show, Archer, The Stand miniseries, My So-Called Life, and The League in their entireties, I noticed that The Twilight Zone original series had been recently added to the queue. Though perhaps the most referenced and acclaimed cult series in history, I must admit, I’d never seen one episode. I resolved, then, it would be my next big tackle in my imperial takeover of internet television.
When art and life mix?
Townspeople at a reading
I’ve been doing some readings lately for my new book. I’ve read at colleges, in the community, at art centers. I’ve sold a lot of books at these readings. I’ve watched people smile and cry at these readings. Sometimes people laugh at the right times, sometimes they laugh at the wrong times. Always, people seem to be hearing me. Except for the one deaf guy who told me I read too fast. People buy books for themselves, for their daughters, for their childhood best friends.
Poets talk a lot about how poetry is dead to mainstream culture. Nobody wants poems anymore. Well, I’m beginning to wonder about that. Have we, the poets, created an insular world for ourselves because we’re insecure about our words? Is it safer to keep ourselves sequestered in the academy–or even on the internet where we know the audience who reads our work will respond in a way familiar to us? Is it frightening to think that we might write something not quite as erudite as we imagined?
We Are Dead Unless We Do Something – a conversation between Brandon Shimoda and Matthew Henriksen
Matt Henriksen is the author of Ordinary Sun. Brandon Shimoda is the author of The Girl Without Arms. Both books are available now from Black Ocean. Both authors are currently on tour.
Adam Robinson recently had some good things to say about Matt Henriksen’s book, finding its poetic attempts at translating the incommunicable both frustrating, yet filled with meaning. As Johannes Goransson wrote at Montevidayo, “The ‘difficulty’ of Henrikson’s poetry is not about access but the experience it aims to put the reader/writer through.” So I invited Matt & Brandon to interview each other, to further collide those ideas of frustration and experience, and the poetry that comes out of it. What takes place amounts to late night cross-country trek talk, hallucinatory and winding, filled with shunned understanding and been-through truth. Enjoy.
My mom live-texted the James Frey Oprah Interview
5:01 PM: Oprah interviews James Frey again
5:20 PM: James Frey is such a whiner!
5:23 PM: Although he’s got a little contrite going on now.
5:28 PM: Nope. Whining again.
5:35 PM: Uh oh. He has nothing good to say about memoirists.
5:36 PM: He’s whining again. What’s for supper?
5:58 PM: Oh my! She’s doing a part two of this interview tomorrow! Wow.