Meg Pokrass Damn Sure Right Interview!
Q: Sans enunciation/emphasis or other context, your title Damn Sure Right is open-ended: braggadocio or bluster, surprise or satisfaction—and so on. The person on the cover photo is “dressed to kill” (my words), yet is also more than half hidden. What is your idea concerning the title and the cover image?
A: The title comes from an utterance in the story “Damn Sure Right”. The full utterance is, “He didn’t need to hurt her, damn sure right.”
My characters are often groping for a concrete way to see things in order to feel better.
To me, the cover photo reflects vulnerability mixed with stalwart determination. Press 53 publisher, Kevin Morgan Watson found the image, ran it past me and we were in instant agreement.
Q: Will you discuss “The Serious Writer and Her Pussy”?
Blake Butler—
Hot shit flies in this fly shit at Interview where Will Oldham interviews R Kelly: “It’s like you go to parties and they give you these little bags. I got everything I can ever want, and I’ve been blessed, but I want that little bag, you know? I want what’s in the bag. You’re like, “Where my bag at, dawg?” And they’re like, “Ah, we ran out, man.””
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Concept Flash
The Concept Flash is not about an emotion (that would be expressionism, aka Kafka), but rather something larger, an idea.
The idea is then set, into concrete.
The logic of the idea follows the dialectic of the concept. This can assist you, in a structural sense, or even with the setting, characterization, narrative, etc. The attributes of the concept can be appropriated for technique within the flash. The concept flash is infinite in its manner. You could write a lifetime of these: ideas in our lives represented as things. Stop digging holes with your fingers. I am offering a type of shovel. OK, a spoon.
Will you shut up and provide an example?
Yes, I will provide an example.
Cube by Amelia Gray.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Retrospective Birthday Celebration
I’m sad I can’t make this. Because I don’t live in New York.
Belladonna* and Kundiman Celebrate: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Saturday, March 5, 2011; 2 – 3:30 pm
On the weekend of what would have been Cha’s 60th birthday (a full life cycle event in the Chinese/Korean lunar calendar), Belladonna* and Kundiman gather nine poets to perform a staged reading from Dictee. Cha’s best known written work, Dictee focuses on the life of several women framed with the art of the Greek muses, yet in the cosmos of Shamanism and Daoism. Their struggle to speak and overcome suffering is enacted through a mixture of media which destabilizes the notion of a progressive and seamless history.
Participants to include: Anne Waldman, Tamiko Beyer, Sarah Gambito, Laura Hinton, Cathy Park Hong, Soomi Kim, Nathanaël, Alison Roh Park, Sina Queyras, Jen Shyu, Zhang Er
Join us for an afternoon of projected images, voices, pictorial characters, scholarly contextualization, a birthday cake, and surprises.
Event is being filmed for Woo Jung Cho’s documentary on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, The Dream of the Audience.
Curated by Cara Benson and Sarah Gambito
When: Saturday, March 5
Door: 1:40pm; Show: 2pm to 3:30pm [PROMPT]
Where: Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, NYC
Cost: $8
Roxane Gay—
It looks like Open City is closing its pages—a real shame. Issue 30 will be their last and it’s only $10.
Touch a little extra on the rough parts
This is great. Baby on the Safe Side. A collection of poems written by Sarah Bartlett and Emily Kendal Frey, available for free reading from Publishing Genius. Add them to your Tuesday reading list. These 20 poems are funny and trenchant like crazy, and they make for a fast read. I laughed a lot, then cracked my knuckles and said “ex-cellent.” The kids are all right. Aren’t they?
Nicholson Baker Interview
Have you checked out the Writers at Cornell interview series? The latest installment is twenty-five minutes of Nicholson Baker answering to J. Robert Lennon’s questions about formal experimentation, John Updike, libraries, Human Smoke, and so on. Also worth your time (all of these interviews are downloadable MP3’s): Lydia Davis, Julia Alvarez, Terrance Hayes, Patrick Somerville, Alison Bechdel, George Saunders, and Junot Diaz.
What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Bhanu Kapil}
Bhanu Kapil teaches in The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and at God(d)ard College. She has a blog with a loyal following in Croatia, Mongolia, and Pakistan: “Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi? [A Day in the Life of a Naropa University Writing Professor].” She has written four books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press), and Schizophrene (forthcoming, Nightboat.)
Read Away Your Tuesday
Nine short stories (from Kvashay-Boyle, Kwon, Mikesch, Lacher, Campbell, Gay, Traverse, Kesey, and Danticat), an interview with Harry Mathews, and an e-chapbook of poems by Letitia Trent. Here they are:
1. “Saint Chola,” by K. Kvashay-Boyle.
An excerpt:
Skater. Hesher. Tagger.Lesbo-Slut. Wanna-be. Dweeb.Fag. Prep. What-up.Nerdy. Trendy. Freaky. In a few weeks it’ll be solid like cement, but right now nobody knows yet. You might be anything. And here’s an example: meet Mohammadee Sawy.
2. “Superhero,” by Reese Okyong Kwon.
An excerpt:
When she was very young, her mother had explained her name to her. “You were named after one of the youngest saints,” her mother told her as she brushed her hair. “A martyr. She believed in God, but her father was a strict Roman nobleman and forbade her from praying under pain of death. When she persisted, her father had her whipped until she died. She was twelve or so.