After a hiatus, the Kenneth Patchen Award for writing is being revived. In the 1990s, The Kenneth Patchen Prize for Literature was a much-coveted prize administered by Pig Iron Press of Youngstown, Ohio, in honor of famous experimental fiction author, proletarian poet, and Ohio native Kenneth Patchen. Beginning in 2011, the Award will be reinstituted as the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, and will honor the most innovative novel submitted during the previous calendar year.
Kenneth Patchen is celebrated for being among the greatest innovators of American fiction, incorporating strategies of concretism, asemic writing, digression, and verbal juxtaposition into his writing long before such strategies were popularized during the height of American postmodernist experimentation in the 1970s. His three great innovative novels, Sleepers Awake The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, have long been a benchmark for beats, postmodernists, and innovators of all ilks, inspiring younger writers on to greater significance and innovation in their own work.
The Kenneth Patchen Award is back!
Claymation Wins Again
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (in clay) from Bullhead Entertainment:
Hotness: Here’s a toast to the douchebags! Here’s a toast to the vain!
Last night, as I walking home in -9 without wind chill temperatures (Celsius) and foot upon feet of snow, I heard the most fantastic (ironic) thing. Granted, I was mad at the weather, and because my anger would be futile against snow and cold, I steered my aggression onto three darling little assholes.
Here is the conversation I overheard:
Guy 1: You know, dudes, I only have one problem.
Guy 2: Not enough pussy?
Guy 1: Yeah.
Guy 3: (With a hint of jealousy and maybe irony) Fuck you.
Guy 1: Nah, really, dudes, my only problem is that I fucking hate fat. Like I can’t stand it if a girl’s fat.
Guy 3: Fuck, dude, like who likes fat chicks?
Then, they turned onto Princess street (our main “drag”) and I had to turn a different way to go home. Needless to say, I wanted to hear more! But given only the brief bit of friendly banter I witnessed, I dedicate this to them:
Reading as a Comfort
The suicides and untimely deaths of friends and family have been piling up the last ten years. I had a close friend when I lived in Florida who was a city utilities worker. He was into kung fu movies and karate and beach volleyball and very unlucky with women. He met a woman after he was diagnosed with leukemia, and they married, but it must have been hard to be married to a terminally ill person, and she left him in the end, but before the end. It seemed unexcusable to me that she left him before the end, but then she was the one who was changing the bedsheets and holding his head over the toilet and watching him turn skeletal and lose teeth. READ MORE >
Over at CNN they are publishing the poetry of the Arizona shooter. Here is the first poem, titled “Meat Head.”
Two Weeks: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry
The editors of Linebreak are creating an all-new, ebook-only anthology of contemporary poetry. Beginning today they are accepting submissions which they will compile and design as a multi-format ebook. On January 25th, they will publish it. Details, here. Send your submissions here. Hop to it!
January 12th, 2011 / 12:00 am
Michael Martone : Michael Martone : Michael Martone
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Michael Martone on William Gass, the most important contemporary fiction writer. Of the lessons he learned from “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”, he says: READ MORE >
the taking and passing along 11
11. For all you punk-asses that need writing prompts, there is a weird little flash contest coming up over at Flash Fiction Chronicles.
5. Oh, flash fiction is:
“…a place for writers to talk ABOUT fiction, and its feats in that weird mysterious way that fiction talks beyond the story on the page.”
Deb Olin Unferth
Take that, you flash-bastards. You’re the same people that don’t like olives, microchips, inward blushes, hall mirrors, and other small things.
1. Rock and Roll is finally dead.
99.
7. Back when a professor visited my MFA university and taught one class, a class about HER. She made us buy and read all of HER books. WTF? I thought divas were for music and acting. Memo to writers: No one gives a damn. Well…Nother time a reader visited and insisted we bring her ribs. She was all, “I’m in Alabama, you WILL feed me ribs.” A graduate student had to drive his turd-colored Ford Escort all night. There’s no rib place open way late in sleep-ass little Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Ends up they gave her Chili’s ribs, not ribs at all, unless you enjoy pale under-belly of cardboard. Diva behavior from writers? From writers! Do tell:
{LMC}: A Conversation with Terrance Hayes
Ploughshares has conversations with each guest editor. Below are two parts of the conversation between Kim McLarin and Terrance Hayes, the guest editor of the issue we are currently reading. Some highlights are Hayes discussing not expecting to win the NBA, how he enjoys his own company, universality and more. Terrance Hayes is a great writer, National Book Award winner, human being and all but I think we also have to talk about his fineness. Good lord. Enjoy. Also, later this month, I’ll post an interview with Ploughshares editor Ladette Randolph. In the meantime, what is your favorite piece, so far, in the Winter 2010/11 issue?
Part 1
A Conversation with Andrew Ervin, author of Extraordinary Renditions
MINOR: Extraordinary Renditions does a thing that some say fiction ought not do — it assumes the points of view of characters from different cultures than the writer’s. Writers used to do this all the time, but it seemed to get controversial around the time of the civil rights movement — the furor in some quarters over Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, to give one example, and the subsequent defense by James Baldwin on the grounds that Styron was doing a thing fiction writers have an obligation to do, by putting himself “in the skin of Nat Turner.”
ERVIN: It was never a question to me if I had the right to write from different cultural perspectives. As a writer of immense privilege, I felt it was my responsibility to do so. Not that I was trying to make some sort of grand, dogmatic political statement; there were simply some stories that for various reasons I felt needed telling. Yes, the second of these three novellas, “Brooking the Devil,” uses many of the tropes of the captivity narrative. The relatively new genre of the neo-slave narrative—begun in large part by Styron—is the single most important tradition in contemporary American letters. Where would we be without Beloved and The Wind Done Gone and Flight to Canada? For a white writer like myself to ignore race, and our nation’s racist history (and present) would be unconscionable. READ MORE >