Hot, Young Poets!
I find it sometimes necessary, when recommending a poet’s work to a non-poetry reader to say, “I don’t read poetry, but…” and then plug whomever it may be. This is a half-true statement. I don’t read much poetry. I read a little and the little that I read (Berryman, Lasky, Flynn, Nelson) I absolutely love. But poetry, as a whole, seems to exist for poets. It’s something that poets read either in the hopes of being better poets or because they have a nice time reading it. I don’t know anyone who reads poetry who doesn’t also write it. True, there are exceptions. A lot of fiction and non-fiction writers read a little poetry (like myself) but for the most part, poetry is consumed by poets.
Which leads me to wonder: Do any poets read Oprah Magazine? And do any poets wear very simple, straightforward $341 shirts? Does this seem like an irrelevant question? And how could it not?
Oprah Magazine just published a fashion shoot in which young female poets are dressed up in very nice clothes. To make it obvious that they were poets, their words were scattered artfully around the image. Supposedly, this is part of Oprah’s “National Poetry Month” Issue, the Oprah empire’s attempt to get your mom to read some poetry, which I feel is a worthy, albeit fraught, endeavor. If every non-poetry reader (or non-poet) found at least one poet whose voice they liked, and if we all bought a book by that poet, I feel the effect could be tremendously positive. But is that what is really going on here?
Here we see full-color spreads of the young, female poets, their words lying disjointed around them. Some of these poets have not yet even published a collection, or if they do, they’re not mentioned in the little blurbs accompanying the shots. One is Anna Moschovakis, an editor at Ugly Duckling. One is modeling a style deemed ‘Perfectly Punk,’ and looking up at a line of (her own?) poetry that references a studded belt.
And it’s just a little depressing, somehow. Is fashion really a good way to sell poetry, to get the O-reading masses to read some poems? Or is this, as I suspect, just fashion for fashion’s sake, and the poetesses is just the unlikely vehicle for the clothing the needs advertising?
I really do want your mom to read poetry. I want your dad to read it to. But really, I will settle for them reading a book of any kind. Sadly, I think this fashion shoot is going to sell a lot more $995 jackets designed by ‘Haute Hippie.’ (I am depressed that I now know a clothing designer named ‘Haute Hippie’ even exists.)
What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Alexandra Chasin}
Alexandra Chasin is the author of Kissed By, a collection of short innovative fictions (FC2) and Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, a nonfiction/scholarly book (St. Martins). Chasin’s creative work has appeared in print in Unsaid, Hotel Amerika, Post Road, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, and Chain, and online in Exquisite Corpse, elimae, Diagram, and Big Other, among other places. Relevant bibliography for this piece includes inclusion in Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary XXperimental Prose by Women Writers, edited by Nava Renek. Chasin has a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford, and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College. She teaches at Lang College, The New School, and currently serves as Co-chair of the Literary Studies Department there.
Sean Lovelace—
Mainstream. University. Small press. Your own self. Where do you want your book to be born and why?
18
THIS IS WHAT REJECTION LOOKS LIKE
I just logged into the Brown application website to try to view my MFA rejection letter. It’s no longer there. I am wondering where it went. My status is simply “submitted” and no longer rejected. Could my rejection have been revoked? No, probably not. There is probably a demon in their system affording me this glimmer of false hope—like dreaming of your crush putting the moves on you. The first thing I actually thought was, “What am I going to tell my parents?” They are used to me always being “the best” and are far more invested in my success than I am. I told them not to get their hopes up. I put together a typo-filled portfolio the night before it was due because I was visiting my mom who was in the hospital from a suicide attempt and applying to grad school was the last thing on my mind. But I had an application waiver, so I sent it off with a statement that basically said, “I’m sorry this is bad. My life is a wreck right now.”
Luckily, I copy and pasted the rejection letter into my long poem before it disappeared:
READ MORE >
Two Deadlines Loom
The &Now Festival is a biennial festival, celebration, and conference that explores intersections between creative and critical praxis, examines innovative and experimental acts of writing, and advances a serious inquiry into theories of language and consciousness. The 2011 &Now Festival of New Writing: Tomorrowland Forever! will be held October 13-15, 2011 at University of California, San Diego, a research institution internationally renowned for imaginative experimentation in the arts, humanities, and sciences.
ALSO
Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize
Each spring, Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW Festival, sponsors emerging writers under forty years old—with no major book publication—to spend two months in residence at our campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs on the shore of Lake Michigan.
SMILES YOU CAN’T STOP: Winners
Pumpkins have long since rotted, and Massachusetts is trying to convince us that thirty-degree sunlight passes for bloomage. Which must mean the winners of the unstoppable smiles pumpkin caption contest are: Jeremy Bauer, Ted Powers, and Noah Falck. I know I said I’d only pick two, but I liked all three of their captions. Thanks to Ken Baumann for sponsoring the contest by accidentally buying two copies of Jason Bredle’s Smiles of the Unstoppable. Winners, email me at mikeayoung AT gmail DOT com with your mailing addresses to get your free books. Everybody else: the kid is bobbing for apples, not puking, but you shouldn’t let that stop you.
Pleasing the Spiders OR Google: Oprah+[current event], Facebook
<head>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”search engines, better than people, angry writer, depression”>
<meta name=”description” content=”Who needs fans when you have Google?”>
</head>
<div id=”post”>
<h2>Pleasing the Spiders OR Google: Oprah + [current event], Facebook</h2>
<div id=”context”>
<p>Google’s index is made up of billions of web pages, making it the largest web page database, and possibly the largest knowledge repository, in the world. Google currently handles 70% of all search engine queries. As of October 2010 Google has scanned over 15 million books. The term “what to read” is searched 60,500 times monthly. What happens when humans are no longer necessary tastemakers? Being a hipster will no longer mean having access to early Domino and the Cheese Willys tracks. Being a hipster will mean having access to something–anything–not catalogued by Google. (Don’t panic, hipsters; I made up Domino and the Cheese Willys)</p>
<p>Search engines utilize top-secret algorithms to provide users with relevant information based on search terms. Anything online is susceptible to Google’s search spiders, which includes every story, every poem, every essay ever posted online. Is the next step in creative writing then to produce content with the search engine in mind? Will meta-data be its own keyword rich bank to be used as bait for inbound links? Will every other word be hyperlinked in hopes of attracting returning links? What will this do to our already dwindling attention span? Or, more optimistically, have our attention spans evolved to properly accept so much stimuli?</p>
<p>But despite the obvious cringe factor (ads in eBooks frightens me), I am less pessimistic about what will come from the first author to truly tap into the growing eBook medium. Think what Mark Z. Danielwski would have done with House of Leaves if the eBook platform was viably open for development. Until something big happens, though, I fear we will have to endure a lot of failed attempts (no hyperlink necessary; use your imagination).</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id=”footer”>
<p>This is a gust post by Caleb J Ross as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. His goal is to post at a different blog every few days beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact him. He would love to compromise your integrity for a day. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb.</p>
</div>