Lily Hoang—
Dana Levin is a poet. She’s super cool. She’s so cool that someone wrote a song about her. (Seriously, click the link, listen to the song.) How often do poets have songs written for them? Well, if you’re Dana Levin…
3
“I know you are reading this poem …”
It is June 1993 and I’m halfway through a roadtrip that will kill a friendship. I’ve fled the campground for the beach, trudging through the sandy tunnel under the highway with a notebook and a copy of An Atlas of the Difficult World. Because I can’t imagine spending fifteen dollars to tour Hearst Castle, my roadtrip companion has gone off to do it herself, in a huff. I take my chair, my notebook, my Adrienne Rich volumes and head out to the beach, free for two or three hours to read and write.
The trip is going very badly, and I can’t quite articulate why, even to myself. I am 29 years old, in the summer between a masters and Phd program. I’ve started a novel, and been admitted to a PhD program where I hope I’ll have time to finish it. I’m terrified of taking on more debt but stopping now means I’ll have to get a “real” job to pay off the MA I’ve just finished, and if I do that I doubt I’ll finish my novel. I’m betting on myself in a way that seems outrageous. I’m broke, but I’ve always been broke, so I’m used to it, but my friend is not, and although I told her before we started that I didn’t have any money, she seems startled by how little money no money actually is.
Sampson Starkweather Strips it Down to Just Chapbooks
The 2012 Chapbook Festival starts tomorrow. I call it “the good AWP.” In preparation, this year I’ve asked Sampson Starkweather, 1/5th of the Birds, LLC braintrust and chapbook enthusiast, some questions about the form. Go get a blanket–he links up some great stuff that is way worth the read.
Hey Sampson, what’s the deal with chapbooks?
Funny, that’s how I start all my stand-up comedy gigs. It kills of course. So I wanted to start with a quote from James Haug’s Why I Like Chapbooks (Factory Hollow, 2011), who waxes lyrical “Chapbooks are stealth books./ They can slip under a door./ They don’t impose. They suggest./ They’re not one thing or another. They don’t take much time. They’re sly and easy to ignore. They imply, insinuate, inquire./ They don’t expect an answer./ They have a long history; they have no history.” READ MORE >
Mike Young—
“My religion is Poetry, not a religion of kindness and love but one of absolute permission. If poetry doesn’t strip me naked in front of my enemies then nothing will.” — CAConrad, in an amazing (duh, it’s CAConrad) and even downright rousing interview with Thom Donovan at The Academy of American Poets, excerpted from A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, Conrad’s new book of (Soma)tic exercises out April 1st from Wave.
Noah Cicero interviews Elizabeth Ellen
Elizabeth Ellen & Kendra Grant Malone
Elizabeth Ellen writes in the classical sense: she focuses her energy on the story being told. She doesn’t two things most writers fall into: she doesn’t over styilize and use experimental weirdness to express emotion. Her stories are always very linear, have beginning/middle and end. But at the same time she doesn’t write in cliché language and have big explosive plots involving guns and beautiful people walking around. Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen takes the middle ground between alternative/experimental and popular literature.
The stories come out strange and unique, I think because Elizabeth Ellen is inspired by writers like Dave Eggers, but at the same time because of the circumstances of her life she did not get an MFA and go through many writing workshops, her writing turned to be a marriage of Bukowski and Eggers. The writing has some of that nice Eggers clarity and smoothness but at the same time covers Bukowski themes like humiliation, failed romantic relationships, divorse, raising a child in difficult circumstances, violent sex, drinking, weight gain, disapointment, in general about failure and hardship.
“To do this Biennial justice would require an encyclopedic, Baudelaire-style ‘Salon’ review”
Last week’s New Yorker (3/12) covers the Whitney Biennial. One passage that caught my eye:
“See, for instance, Gisèle Vienne’s mechanized boy mannequin wielding a hand puppet, with a chilling soundtrack by the Los Angeles poet and novelist Dennis Cooper. ‘I’m not dead,’ the boy muses, ‘unless this is death.’ The sinister-voiced, twitching puppet comments on things that the boy imagines, in what sounds like a game of exquisite cadaver: ‘decapitated head upon severed arms upon mutilated trunk-like logs and branches in a fireplace.’
‘Because I said so is the fairly witless way most images get you to look at them,’ the poet and performer Ariana Reines writes in an essay that complements, rather than addresses, the grotesque montage photographs and assemblages, satirizing high fashion, by the artist who styles herself K8 Hardy.”
RIP Whitney Houston / Whitney Houston On Writing
“God gave me a voice to sing with, and when you have that, what other gimmick is there?”
“It’s like, that’s my lair, and nobody messes with my lair.”
“I coulda been a rich man if I accepted all the bribes from the guys wanting to be in this room today.”
“I almost wish I could be more exciting.”
“I finally faced the fact that it isn’t a crime not having friends. Being alone means you have fewer problems.”
“I like being a woman, even in a man’s world. After all, men can’t wear dresses, but we can wear the pants.”
“I’m not crazy about arenas just because I can sell them out. It doesn’t do anything for my ego at all.”
“When I decided to be a singer, my mother warned me I’d be alone a lot. Basically we all are. Loneliness comes with life.”
“Sometimes you do have a good time. But when it gets to the point where you’re sitting in your home and you’re just trying to cover what you don’t want people to know. It’s painful. And then you want more just so that you don’t let anybody see you cry.”
“I have to pray it away.”
“I had the money. I had the cars. I had the house. Had the husband. Had the kid. And none of it was really that fulfilling. For a time, I was happy. I was happy, but I needed that joy. I needed my joy back. I needed that peace that passes all understanding.”
“I will fight you back with anything I can find.”
A Lesson on Not Apologizing
Ever written something salacious and regretted it? Well, you shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. Take pride, bitches. Badass Die Antwoord released this video for “Fok Julle Naaiers,” which uses the word “faggot” generously:
α language having a cΩω
Rembrandt, "Landscape with a Cow" (1650)
Amen
Richard Beck: “5.4: Pitchfork, 1995–present,” in the forthcoming n+1.
You know what Pitchfork has always most reminded me of? Ain’t It Cool News.