Prompt Poem: introductory statements by people in my MFA workshop
In my workshop this semester we were encouraged to write a poem a day and post the results on this shared website/forum/message-board thing called “Blackboard.” This was 100% optional and of course no one actually posted a poem everyday or even seriously tried to, I think. We were given numerous prompts and exercises throughout the semester to keep us going if we got stuck. What follows is a poem I made out of everyone’s explanatory/introductory/preface statements to their poems.
Prompt Poem
Hello! Here’s an opposite poem.
Here is a poem that is opposite of Laura Riding.
I started a poem inspired by Campbell McGrath.
See Ezra Pound’s “Alba.”
From today’s notebook entry.
After “Heart” by Gregory Orr.
Continuing what I started yesterday… READ MORE >
e-books all calorie suck
E-book assassin, etc. My first response was falling sky, or I am sick of people saying the e-book will garrote the book book. But then I read the article and found several points for possible discussion here:
1. Was the indie bookstore having troubles anyway? The e-book might be gaseous, but maybe the canary died from starvation?
2. One complaint is about “browsing.” You’ll do your browsing online, then just drop by the brick/mortar store and get the book you already know you want. You won’t browse at the store. To me, if you enter the store, all is good. Who cares why/how you entered?
3. But people sell their books online now, so don’t enter a used store to sell, and therefore another opportunity missed to buy.
4. Google ebooks allows indie bookstores to join/not beat the future.
5. All the ebooks in the world aren’t going to replace the “space” of a bookstore, readings, signings, coffee, conversation….
First Sentences or Paragraphs #1: Mary Miller Edition
[series note: This post is the first of five, in a week-long series examining first sentences or paragraphs. It’s not my intention to be prescriptive about what kinds of first sentences writers ought to be writing. Instead, I hope to simply take a look at five sets of first sentences for the purpose of thinking about how they introduce the reader to the story or novel to which they belong. I plan to post them without commentary, as one might post a photograph or painting, and open up the comment threads to your observations as readers. Some questions that interest me and might interest you include: 1. How is the first sentence (or paragraph — I’ll include some of those, too, since some first sentences require the next few sentences to even be available for this kind of analysis) interesting or not interesting on grounds of language? 2. Does the first sentence introduce any particular (or general feeling of) trouble or conflict or dissonance or tension into the story that makes the reader want to keep reading? 3. Does the first sentence do anything to immerse the reader in the donnee, the ground rules, the world of the story, those orienting questions such as who speaks, when and where are we in space and time, etc.? 4. Since the first sentence, in the wild, doesn’t exist in the contextless manner in which I’ve presented these, in what kinds of ways does examining them like this create false ideas about the uses and functions of first sentences? What kinds of things ought first sentences be doing? What kinds of things do first sentences not do often enough? (It seems likely to me that you will have competing ideas about first sentences. Please offer them here. Every idea or observation gets our good attention.) The sentence/paragraph sets we’ll be observing: 1. first sentences from Mary Miller’s Big World; 2. first sentences from physically large novels; 3. the first sentences from every book written by Philip Roth; 4. first sentences from the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; 5. first sentences from Best European Fiction 2010.]
There’s a leak, I told him, it’s right over my bed. He didn’t believe me. I was a girl.
– “Leak”
My sister is inside watching a movie and bleeding. I don’t bleed anymore. It’s not something I thought I’d miss.
– “Even the Interstate is Pretty”
He had an air gun, a beer box set up to shoot. We were in a hotel room in Pigeon Forge. READ MORE >
Lineage: justifiable matricide vs. I mothered you hoes
Do you feel a duty to read and acknowledge your literary, theoretical, and musical foremothers? Do you feel obligated to know the canon even though you don’t find it relevant to you? Do mothers really know what their daughters want? Are you angered by ignorant people of the younger generation who haven’t taken the time to read the foundational texts? Is Nicki Minaj arrogant for not acknowledging her debt to Lil’ Kim? Where do you fall on the questions of lineage and inheritance? Some ideas to chew on beneath the cut.
To MFA or to not: Reflections on utility
Are you tired of hearing this tired debate? To MFA or to not MFA? I am, but I’m writing about it anyway. If you’re bored with it, don’t bother reading this post. It won’t hurt my feelings any.
I’ve been thinking more and more about how “useful” my MFA has been. I went to a decent grad school (Notre Dame) and got my MFA in 2006 in prose. I knew walking into the program that I would have a hard time getting a job, that by the time I got my degree, I would be underqualified for certain jobs (the ones I wanted, mainly, professor jobs) and overqualified for just about everything else. Even though I knew this, I was deluded enough to think I was different, special maybe.
Letitia Trent Lives in Israel and Writes Poems About Oklahoma and Japanese Films
Letitia Trent
New Letitia Trent poems appear at As It Ought to Be. Here is the beginning one of them:
Ju On (dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2000)
Mother, when I return
you are still here, scuttling in the rafters, knees
busted, blue, blood
in your teeth READ MORE >
Les Figues’s 2011 TrenchArt Series: Recon
New & forthcoming from the always provocative Les Figues:
The 2011 TrenchArt series—Recon—is now available for new memberships and renewals.
For as little as $60, you can receive all five books in the series, individually mailed to you as they are published throughout the new year. This means you’ll receive:
- TrenchArt: Recon (aesthetics) Available now!
- Negro Marfil | Ivory Black, by Myriam Moscona, translated by Jen Hofer
- Tall, Slim and Erect: Portraits of the Presidents by Alex Forman
- By Kelman Out of Pessoa by Doug Nufer
- The Phonemes by Frances Richard
Each book is also the site of an unfolding articulation by visual artist Renee Petropoulos.Give more than $60, and receive a tax-deduction! See all member levels.Plus there’s more: the TrenchArt Recon series is designed by writer/artist Janice Lee. The covers for the aesthetic collection were letterpressed by the amazing Brian Teare. Each book is hand-stamped with an image designed by Renee Petropoulos. The stamping will continue throughout the year, which means, members only will receive specially stamped books!
The TrenchArt series also makes a wonderful holiday gift. Simply indicate “gift” in the comments box, and we’ll include a note in the package.
“It is a dangerous book.” – Glenn Beck Reviews The Coming Insurrection
The Coming Insurrection
by
The Invisible Committee
(MIT Press, 2009)
from the “dangerous book”:
“I AM WHAT I AM.” My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and something’s wrong. Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions – life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. […] Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, who’s fucking who… whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an “I”!
You can read the whole thing for free online here. After the jump, check out the concluding thoughts of this “dangerous book,” and watch Glenn Beck review it on Fox News.
“…philosophy is music, music is philosophy, and the other way round.” – Thomas Bernhard
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbPUkLrmzUA
Abner Jay reinverts the age-old ‘looking for a virgin’ myth in “Don’t Mess With Me Baby.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpjy0MOMn3Y
Anthony Braxton called Abner Jay an American master.
Random / Comments Off on “…philosophy is music, music is philosophy, and the other way round.” – Thomas Bernhard
December 11th, 2010 / 3:01 am
December 11th, 2010 / 3:01 am