Schomburg Takes America
Author of the award-winning and best-selling collections, The Man Suit and Scary, No Scary, is traveling the United States in his special vehicle. Check out the dates:
St. Louis, MO. 4.14. Stirrup Pants. Exploding Swan Night. A poetry collaboration w/Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra, a sound presentation by David Weinberg, and intermission crooning by Jaffa Aharanov. Time TBA.
Cincinnati, OH. 4.15. 9-10:30 pm. The Comet. w/Michael Hennessey
Bronxville, NY. 4.17. 3:30 pm. Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival. Also, on a panel about publishing the following day, 4.18.
New York, NY. 4.19. A house party. w/Curtis Jensen. Details TBA
Stockton, NJ. 4.21. Stockton College. Lecture & Discussion about poetry translation. Philadelphia, PA. 4.23. New Philadelphia Poets. w/ Sasha Fletcher. Screening of poem-films. Details TBA.
Cleveland, OH. 4.25. 6:30 pm. Sunday Roast at The Cafe at Arts Collinwood. w/ Michael Dumanis and Eric Morris.
South Bend, IN. 4.28. 6:15-7:15. Notre Dame University. O’Shaughnessy Hall Room 106. w/ Johannes Goransson.
Chicago, IL. 4.29. 5:30 pm. Columbia Poetry Review new issue release party. Ferguson Hall. 600 South Michigan, 1st Floor.
Baton Rouge, LA. 5.4. LSU. Reading/workshop. Judging the MFA poetry manuscript prize.
New Orleans, LA. 5.5. The Goldmine Saloon. Details TBA.
Miami, FL. 5.8. University of Wynwood. Reading/workshop. Gallery Diet. 174 NW 23rd S. Time TBA.
Athens, GA. 5.13. w/Joshua Marie Wilkinson. Details TBA.
Atlanta, GA. 5.14. Eyedrum. Reading followed by a screening of 60 Writers, 60 Places, a film by Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball. Other reader TBA.
Conway, AR. 5.17 to 6.4. Hendrix College. Poetry Workshop.
Lincoln, NE. 6.12 to 6.18. Nebraska Summer Writer’s Conference. Reading and panel.
Two Things
On his blog, Jason Sanford asks if online genre fiction is all powerful.
Here’s a video about online literary journals.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPBp2GGjcyg
Hypothesis: Collaboration and Alienation
There is a split in experimental fiction, it would seem, which is hardly a split: a duality which is hardly dual. Articulating it, in addition, will not add to or subtract from what I’m provisionally calling “experimental fiction.” I am not going out of my way to break open or unmask a binary which has, till now, subsisted in relative silence. The following is a brief and incomplete diagnosis–neither positive nor negative, or else both at once. Most importantly, perhaps, these are not two distinct regimes (again, a split which is hardly, or is not, a split). Nor should this be taken as a statement of fact, but as a condition which I’ve begun, more and more, to see in what I read.
Salesmen
I really don’t understand the hard sell approach used by certain authors/vendors in aggressively trying to push their goods. Though you may be able to cajole me into forking over $$ for your book at the bookfair (I am a pushover, often), you sweating and awkwarding me into doing so will only guarantee that though I have your book inside my house now, I will never read it, and will likely think of you only often thereafter in a gross light, thus netting you perhaps one book sold but a whole trajectory made mushy. Come on. Relax. Be cool. Things go around. Invest in yourself. Not all sales happen at the point of purchase, and better things are friends.
On a side note, in one instance this past weekend at the Denver book fair when I was shown a book and didn’t buy it, the presenter told his friend passive-aggressively toward me, “Oh, check out HTMLGIANT… it’s a great site, if you like sex and hyperbole and death.” I think he thought it was an insult. I got it tattooed on my thigh.
This one never gets old:
Blake Butler—
Three new titles out now from FC2: The Fixed Stars by Brian Conn; In the House by Lynn K. Kilpatrick; Passes Through by Rob Stephenson.
8
Joe Hall’s Pigafetta Is My Wife
I spent about $400 on books in Denver. This was the first I read the second I got home: Joe Hall’s Pigafetta Is My Wife. It is gorgeous, mysterious, and moving, in a way I haven’t felt of a book in a long time. I’m keeping it by my bed.
Pigafetta Is My Wife enters the crisis that is the love between the colonizer and the colonized. These poems fragment the journals of Antonio Pigafetta, a 16th Century traveler who recorded Magellan’s hellish circumnavigation of the globe, while tracking a present-day speaker and his beloved as they are distanced and reunited across the map. Along the way we visit historical moments including a botched circumcision as performance art, the Rape of Nanking, and 17th century missionaries in the Philippines. Through this intertwining of narratives the book reveals how the past and present are visceral beasts caught in a cycle of passion and destruction. Like an epic murder ballad, Hall moves from collage to epistle, suffering to ecstasy, while pinpointing what is at stake in the pursuit of love and the dismantling of the self.
Praise for Pigafetta Is My Wife:“A genuinely fine work, moving beautifully between Magellan’s voyage—the ethics therein, with language informed by discovery literature—and a series of epistles, taking the notion of circumnavigation to an unforeseeable confessional level. I like the work very much—that making necessary of history—and see it as one of lyric poetry’s responsibilities. The epilogues, too, are beautiful.”—Dan Beachy-Quick“Almost impossibly grand in scope Pigafetta Is My Wife is a rare achievement and quite a debut. Hall’s poetry crosses contemporary love and ancient epic, folding inward and out by motion derivative of the sestina and pantoum, so that whether via image or address, beautiful shards fall: ‘A chrysanthemum blossom sails across a bowl of milk.’ Emotion accretes in accordance with ambition. A treatise on the action of discovery, this is a book to be taken in whole.”—Sally Keith
Read some poems from the book here.
Read a poem not in this book here.
Buy this book direct from Black Ocean here.
Seek to seek.
Okla Elliot: What should young writers today study or do in order to improve their craft?
Christopher Higgs: Become intellectually polyamorous, cultivate an insatiable curiosity for knowledge and experience in as many different guises as you possibly can, question everything, always challenge, learn that failure and rejection are positive things, subscribe to at least three non-literary magazines in three completely different fields (for me, right now, it’s National Geographic, Juxtapose, and Wine Enthusiast – last year it was Seed, Esquire, and Art in America), forget politics: it has nothing to do with you and any time or energy you invest in it is wasted time and energy you could be using productively to learn and experience and create, do not choose sides, do not agree or disagree, embrace contradiction, watch cinema from as many different countries and time periods as you possibly can, seek out unclassifiable music, spend time in unfamiliar locations, expose yourself to new activities, go to the opera, go to the ballet, go to the planetarium, travel a lot, observe as much as you can, pay attention to the way people talk and the way people listen, eat strange food, watch at least one sporting event but instead of thinking about it as entertainment think about it as narrative, ABR = Always Be Researching, carry a notebook and pen at all times, remember it is more important to ask questions than give or receive answers, seek to open up and never close down, seek to seek, do not seek to find, fall in love with language, think obsessively about language, about words, about sentences, about paragraphs, about the sound of words, the weight of words, the shape of words, the look of words, the feel of words, the placement of words, and most importantly be your biggest advocate, think of yourself as a genius, think of yourself as an artist, think of yourself as a creator, do not despair, do not listen to criticism, do not believe naysayers, they are wrong, you are right, they are death and you are life, they destroy and you create, the world needs what you have to say.