Your best guess: what percentage of books in your personal library that you have read do you remember enough to feel like you actually read them?

Your best guess: what percentage of books in your personal library have you read?

Three things. First: continent., which “maps a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new thinking, traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory, biopolitics and art.” Then: Edward Champion lists alternatives to every single closing Borders. Good man. AND: Dogs doing things. So weird.

“… poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action …” — (from Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” an essay Carolyn Zaikowski showed me during discussion of Sandra Simonds’s “Poor Poetry Mothers” which Roxane posted earlier).

“Passion in writing or art–or in a lover–can make you overlook a lot of flaws. Passion is underrated. I think we should all produce work with the urgency of outsider artists, painting and jerking off to our kinky private obsessions. Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let’s get rid of it.”
–Dodie Bellamy in Barf Manifesto

Sandra Simonds wrote a really fine essay about motherhood, poverty and poetry you might find interesting.

Does suffering over a manuscript make it more “authentic” or “better”? What about taking a long time to write it? If yes, why? If not, why not? Help me destroy some exhausted and exhausting writer myths, friends. Please.

What should I ask bell hooks about writing when I see her?

Help stop funding cuts to public broadcasting. That would be bad. Thanks!

do you have any poems memorized?

(how many poems do you have memorized?)