Random
Remember Alone?
Writers:
Remember what it is to be alone?
Fifteen interviews after XXXX gets his book published by XXXXX XXXX Press. Constant promo. Constant talk. Talk about the work. ‘What brought this book out?’ ‘What were you thinking here?’
Use of words: Great, Beautiful, Amazing, Stunning, Remarkable.
After an hour of thought, I’d say that I’ve read two books that I would consider great in my proportion. Two books. I know it’s nice to be nice. That’s okay. But, please, as an excuse, do not use the ‘it’s tough to be a writer.’ No. It may feel tough, but it is not. Look around you.
To sum: I think that within the internet, writers can easily grab hold of a lot of pages and capitalize and gather attention.
Remind yourself: This is a psychic burden, this page. Is it worth it? Is it worth it for me and for the audience?
It is okay to be alone.
Have you ever said no to an interview? You can! You can, actually. It can be worth the gamble of pissing off the proposer. You don’t even need to tell them that it is because of you, because of your want to sit quietly and think, and work. Talk can be poison.
It’s a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to write or speak very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. –Henry Moore
It’s easy to feel the frenetic prompts that the internet–and within it the communities–create. Resist them. Action for action is not action at all. It is movement. (Marketing is often the endgame for this movement; you create burden. Burden. Think about what you want to play, what you want to ask. What you want to give. Think long term. Ten moves in chess deep long term. Anything less than that is lazy.)
Resist the movement. Revolution, now, is a withdrawal.
Remeber what it is to write. Remember the seed?
The seed is you. Alone.
This is, as it must be, as much for me as it is for XXXX. For you. For me. One in the same here.
thanks.
no, seriously.
thanks.
no, seriously.
It’s easier to say than to do. Today I’ve been “writing” since seven a.m., but I’ve also been checking email every twenty-five minutes, checking HTMLGiant every couple hours, watching a couple of homeless guys play chess, etc. And now you’re posting about withdrawing, and I’m commenting about withdrawing, and we both want space for our work, but we both must really want human connection more, or else we’d be working and only working, instead of working and also posting and/or commenting on HTMLGiant.
It’s easier to say than to do. Today I’ve been “writing” since seven a.m., but I’ve also been checking email every twenty-five minutes, checking HTMLGiant every couple hours, watching a couple of homeless guys play chess, etc. And now you’re posting about withdrawing, and I’m commenting about withdrawing, and we both want space for our work, but we both must really want human connection more, or else we’d be working and only working, instead of working and also posting and/or commenting on HTMLGiant.
And now I’ll be distracted by wondering if anyone responds to my comment, and at the bottom of all this is a motivation that’s probably not dissimilar from the reason a lot of people start writing, which is: “Love me, please Love me!”
And now I’ll be distracted by wondering if anyone responds to my comment, and at the bottom of all this is a motivation that’s probably not dissimilar from the reason a lot of people start writing, which is: “Love me, please Love me!”
i mean, in the spirit of mean week, easy for you to say.
how will looking around me indicate that it is not tough to be a writer?
it takes a lot of work to get to the stage of being asked to do interviews. once you are at that stage, it’s easy to say, “i want to do less of these interviews.”
there are plenty of writers who are all about being alone and do interviews. that does not mean they are no longer alone. interviews do not alleviate aloneness, i am sure.
i mean, in the spirit of mean week, easy for you to say.
how will looking around me indicate that it is not tough to be a writer?
it takes a lot of work to get to the stage of being asked to do interviews. once you are at that stage, it’s easy to say, “i want to do less of these interviews.”
there are plenty of writers who are all about being alone and do interviews. that does not mean they are no longer alone. interviews do not alleviate aloneness, i am sure.
I cannot say no to an interview. I don’t know why. I’ve only been interviewed like six times, so maybe it’s still too novel. maybe? I can be alone, though. I do it all the time
I cannot say no to an interview. I don’t know why. I’ve only been interviewed like six times, so maybe it’s still too novel. maybe? I can be alone, though. I do it all the time
7 a.m. Nice. I thought this was mean week.
7 a.m. Nice. I thought this was mean week.
I don’t think I left my house in 5 days.
I don’t think I left my house in 5 days.
I don’t want it to be mean anymore. I don’t like being mean anymore, either.
I don’t want it to be mean anymore. I don’t like being mean anymore, either.
i think the mean weak wave crested and broke last night
i think the mean weak wave crested and broke last night
solitude is not ‘okay.’ that’s like saying sleeping on a solid gold mattress, or drinking cognac out of a dead prince’s skull is ‘okay’.
let’s not be silly about this.
solitude is not ‘okay.’ that’s like saying sleeping on a solid gold mattress, or drinking cognac out of a dead prince’s skull is ‘okay’.
let’s not be silly about this.
I’ve, jesus.
I’ve, jesus.
this is good advice. it really is. as is stopping your writing and staring at the sea. as is stopping your staring and going to bed. but must there be in-fighting between those who sleep and those who stay up?
this is good advice. it really is. as is stopping your writing and staring at the sea. as is stopping your staring and going to bed. but must there be in-fighting between those who sleep and those who stay up?
Thanks for this. I have been thinking about this a lot. Seriously.
BTW, you suck.
[mean week]
Thanks for this. I have been thinking about this a lot. Seriously.
BTW, you suck.
[mean week]
Mean week is over on a Th? That’s cool. I was feeling bad about myself anyway.
Mean week is over on a Th? That’s cool. I was feeling bad about myself anyway.
solitude in moderation is okay. (maybe solitude in slightly-more-than moderation is okay too.)
solitude in moderation is okay. (maybe solitude in slightly-more-than moderation is okay too.)
i have jesus, too.
i have jesus, too.
it seems a little more than easy for a person like ken baumann, who has a contract with a hit television show and money to burn to talk of the easiness of being an author, to criticize people for the ‘tough to be a writer’ syndrome, to talk of the ‘worth of psychic burden’ etc. i would like to hear of someone who cannot afford internet (not because of bad decision making, but because of wage) speak with such confidence. this all seems like a too easy conclusion. really? can someone of this social standing write something of this nature and not be questioned? please explain how this has nothing to do with wage and class and all that is related.
it seems a little more than easy for a person like ken baumann, who has a contract with a hit television show and money to burn to talk of the easiness of being an author, to criticize people for the ‘tough to be a writer’ syndrome, to talk of the ‘worth of psychic burden’ etc. i would like to hear of someone who cannot afford internet (not because of bad decision making, but because of wage) speak with such confidence. this all seems like a too easy conclusion. really? can someone of this social standing write something of this nature and not be questioned? please explain how this has nothing to do with wage and class and all that is related.
New Issues Poetry & Prose published Jericho Brown’s first book, Please, in 2009. Mr. Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, he has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast and assistant poetry editor at Callaloo. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, Oxford American, and several other journals and anthologies. Mr. Brown teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego.
Green Squall, Jay Hopler’s first collection of poems, was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in numerous magazines and journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he has earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Mr. Hopler is also the editor of a literary anthology of writings about hit men, entitled The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder-for-Hire, and next year Yale University Press will bring out his Yale Anthology of Younger American Poets. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
Adam Johnson is the author of the story collection Emporium (Viking, 2002) and the novel Parasites Like Us (Viking, 2003), which won a California Book Award as well as earned him a Discover-a-Great-New-Writer Award from Barnes and Noble. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, Esquire, Harper’s, Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. He received his BA in Journalism from Arizona State University and his MA in English as well as MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University. He holds a PhD in English from Florida State University. He currently is a Senior Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University. He’s at work on a new novel that is set in North Korea.
Playwright Rajiv Joseph is the author of Animals Out of Paper, produced at the Second Stage Theatre and published by Dramatists Play Service; Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, produced at the Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theater in Los Angeles and named Outstanding New American Play by the National Endowment for the Arts; and Gruesome Playground Injuries, scheduled for production in 2010 at the Alley Theatre in Houston and at Washington’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre. He has received a Paula Vogel Award from the Vineyard Theatre and has been a Kesselring, a Lark Playwriting, and a Dramatists Guild fellow. Mr. Joseph received his BA from Miami University and his MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a founding member of the Fire Department Theater Company and lecturer in NYU’s Expository Writing Program. He served for three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal and now lives in Brooklyn.
Joan Kane’s first collection of poems, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, will be published by NorthShore Press in Alaska this fall and will include poems that have appeared in Barrow Street, absent, and The Northwest Review. She is Inupiaq Eskimo with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska and now lives in Anchorage. She received a B.A. from Harvard, and an M.F.A. from Columbia’s School of the Arts, which she earned with the assistance of a Columbia University Writing Fellowship. A winner of the John Haines Award, a semi-finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award recipient, and a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, she won the Anchorage Museum theater award for her first play, The Gilded Tusk. She is at work on a second poetry collection.
A native of Minnesota, Michael Meyer had a degree in education from the University of Wisconsin at Madison when, in 1995, he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to rural China. In 2005, following graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley and Tsinghua University, he settled in Beijing’s oldest neighborhood just south of Tiananmen Square in a shared courtyard home on a hutong, in the type of neighborhood being bulldozed as the city modernized ahead of the 2009 Summer Olympics. Mr. Meyer volunteered as an English teacher at the local elementary school and recorded the hutong’s vibrant life in his first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, published by Walker & Company in 2009. Meyer is at work on a second book, In Manchuria, which details changes in rural China, as seen through life on a family rice farm in the country’s northeast. A frequent contributor to The New York Times and other publications, Mr. Meyer currently resides in New York City, and is moving back to China this fall.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Nami Mun grew up there and in the Bronx, New York. Her first book, Miles From Nowhere (Riverhead, 2009), tells the story of Joon, a thirteen-year-old Korean-American runaway living on the streets of 1980’s New York, and was shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers in the UK. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, The Iowa Review, Tin House, 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology, and other journals. Ms. Mun, who has worked as a street vendor, an Avon Lady, a photojournalist, a bartender, and a criminal defense investigator, graduated from UC Berkeley, and has an MFA from University of Michigan. She currently teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.
Hugh Raffles is a professor of Anthropology at The New School. His first book, In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton University Press, 2002) won the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by The American Library Association. In March 2010, Pantheon will publish his new book, The Illustrated Insectopedia, a compendium of history, biology, geography and personal anecdote, which investigates human-insect interactions through a series of essays. He holds a BA from the University of Warwick, an MA from the University of London and a Doctorate from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Salvatore Scibona’s first book, The End, is a novel about a single day in 1953 as lived by six people in an Ohio carnival crowd. Published in 2009 by Graywolf Press, it was the winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Riverhead released a paperback edition earlier this month. Mr. Scibona’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Threepenny Review, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories. A graduate of the Great Books Program at St. John’s College, where he earned his BA, he also has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he administers the Writing Fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center.
The short stories of Vu Tran have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Review, Southern Review, Glimmer Train, and the Antioch Review and have been selected for inclusion in the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Mystery Stories 2009, The Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, and Las Vegas Noir. Born in Viet Nam and a refugee at the age of five, he and his family were relocated to Oklahoma where he grew up and earned a BA and MA from the University of Tulsa. Mr. Tran also has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD as a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He writes often of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans and of the immigration experience. Mr. Tran’s first novel is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. He currently teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and also works as a free-lance editor.
Copyright ©2009 Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation
New Issues Poetry & Prose published Jericho Brown’s first book, Please, in 2009. Mr. Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, he has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast and assistant poetry editor at Callaloo. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, Oxford American, and several other journals and anthologies. Mr. Brown teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego.
Green Squall, Jay Hopler’s first collection of poems, was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in numerous magazines and journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he has earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Mr. Hopler is also the editor of a literary anthology of writings about hit men, entitled The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder-for-Hire, and next year Yale University Press will bring out his Yale Anthology of Younger American Poets. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
Adam Johnson is the author of the story collection Emporium (Viking, 2002) and the novel Parasites Like Us (Viking, 2003), which won a California Book Award as well as earned him a Discover-a-Great-New-Writer Award from Barnes and Noble. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, Esquire, Harper’s, Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. He received his BA in Journalism from Arizona State University and his MA in English as well as MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University. He holds a PhD in English from Florida State University. He currently is a Senior Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University. He’s at work on a new novel that is set in North Korea.
Playwright Rajiv Joseph is the author of Animals Out of Paper, produced at the Second Stage Theatre and published by Dramatists Play Service; Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, produced at the Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theater in Los Angeles and named Outstanding New American Play by the National Endowment for the Arts; and Gruesome Playground Injuries, scheduled for production in 2010 at the Alley Theatre in Houston and at Washington’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre. He has received a Paula Vogel Award from the Vineyard Theatre and has been a Kesselring, a Lark Playwriting, and a Dramatists Guild fellow. Mr. Joseph received his BA from Miami University and his MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a founding member of the Fire Department Theater Company and lecturer in NYU’s Expository Writing Program. He served for three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal and now lives in Brooklyn.
Joan Kane’s first collection of poems, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, will be published by NorthShore Press in Alaska this fall and will include poems that have appeared in Barrow Street, absent, and The Northwest Review. She is Inupiaq Eskimo with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska and now lives in Anchorage. She received a B.A. from Harvard, and an M.F.A. from Columbia’s School of the Arts, which she earned with the assistance of a Columbia University Writing Fellowship. A winner of the John Haines Award, a semi-finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award recipient, and a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, she won the Anchorage Museum theater award for her first play, The Gilded Tusk. She is at work on a second poetry collection.
A native of Minnesota, Michael Meyer had a degree in education from the University of Wisconsin at Madison when, in 1995, he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to rural China. In 2005, following graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley and Tsinghua University, he settled in Beijing’s oldest neighborhood just south of Tiananmen Square in a shared courtyard home on a hutong, in the type of neighborhood being bulldozed as the city modernized ahead of the 2009 Summer Olympics. Mr. Meyer volunteered as an English teacher at the local elementary school and recorded the hutong’s vibrant life in his first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, published by Walker & Company in 2009. Meyer is at work on a second book, In Manchuria, which details changes in rural China, as seen through life on a family rice farm in the country’s northeast. A frequent contributor to The New York Times and other publications, Mr. Meyer currently resides in New York City, and is moving back to China this fall.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Nami Mun grew up there and in the Bronx, New York. Her first book, Miles From Nowhere (Riverhead, 2009), tells the story of Joon, a thirteen-year-old Korean-American runaway living on the streets of 1980’s New York, and was shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers in the UK. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, The Iowa Review, Tin House, 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology, and other journals. Ms. Mun, who has worked as a street vendor, an Avon Lady, a photojournalist, a bartender, and a criminal defense investigator, graduated from UC Berkeley, and has an MFA from University of Michigan. She currently teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.
Hugh Raffles is a professor of Anthropology at The New School. His first book, In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton University Press, 2002) won the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by The American Library Association. In March 2010, Pantheon will publish his new book, The Illustrated Insectopedia, a compendium of history, biology, geography and personal anecdote, which investigates human-insect interactions through a series of essays. He holds a BA from the University of Warwick, an MA from the University of London and a Doctorate from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Salvatore Scibona’s first book, The End, is a novel about a single day in 1953 as lived by six people in an Ohio carnival crowd. Published in 2009 by Graywolf Press, it was the winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Riverhead released a paperback edition earlier this month. Mr. Scibona’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Threepenny Review, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories. A graduate of the Great Books Program at St. John’s College, where he earned his BA, he also has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he administers the Writing Fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center.
The short stories of Vu Tran have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Review, Southern Review, Glimmer Train, and the Antioch Review and have been selected for inclusion in the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Mystery Stories 2009, The Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, and Las Vegas Noir. Born in Viet Nam and a refugee at the age of five, he and his family were relocated to Oklahoma where he grew up and earned a BA and MA from the University of Tulsa. Mr. Tran also has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD as a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He writes often of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans and of the immigration experience. Mr. Tran’s first novel is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. He currently teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and also works as a free-lance editor.
Copyright ©2009 Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation
This has nothing to do with wage and class or television or whatever. What Ken is talking about is a condition general to any writer I’ve ever met. And I think you’ve misread him, anyway. What he’s talking about is the need to get some space to work instead of doing the easier thing, which is to get online and gab and play writer and talk writer and type writer. And as for the difficulties of actually doing good work that costs the writer something more than time and money, I don’t think anybody, wealthy or poor, famous or obscure, is exempt from them if they’re pursuing more than glibness.
(And, as targets go, I think Ken is a poor choice anyway. Here we have a guy who is working hard every day at writing as a second job, just like most of us are. He’s not netting money for it, and it’s not earning him glamour at his day job, I’m sure. There’s no guarantee it pans out for him, and yet he keeps pushing at it. That’s a work ethic, and that’s nothing to scoff at. That’s half the battle, and the other half involves intelligence and vision. If you read the stuff he posts around here, the intelligence is on display, as is a seriousness of purpose. I don’t think it’s wise to disqualify what he says just because of what he does for a living.)
This has nothing to do with wage and class or television or whatever. What Ken is talking about is a condition general to any writer I’ve ever met. And I think you’ve misread him, anyway. What he’s talking about is the need to get some space to work instead of doing the easier thing, which is to get online and gab and play writer and talk writer and type writer. And as for the difficulties of actually doing good work that costs the writer something more than time and money, I don’t think anybody, wealthy or poor, famous or obscure, is exempt from them if they’re pursuing more than glibness.
(And, as targets go, I think Ken is a poor choice anyway. Here we have a guy who is working hard every day at writing as a second job, just like most of us are. He’s not netting money for it, and it’s not earning him glamour at his day job, I’m sure. There’s no guarantee it pans out for him, and yet he keeps pushing at it. That’s a work ethic, and that’s nothing to scoff at. That’s half the battle, and the other half involves intelligence and vision. If you read the stuff he posts around here, the intelligence is on display, as is a seriousness of purpose. I don’t think it’s wise to disqualify what he says just because of what he does for a living.)
Kyle– Nicely said. It lines up with all I can glean about Ken (here and in a few kind emails) without really knowing him. I initially thought the actor Ken was a doppelganger, but no. Great that he can span all these worlds. I labor in much more obscurity yet his advice can be scaled down to orient and apply to other distractions and obsessions (I will not check my book’s sales at Amazon today. . . I will not check my book’s sales at Amazon today. . . .) that should be way off to the side of pouring blood on a page.
P.S. I am interested in the social distractions that can derail writing–from flirtation to book review swapping to insane fan email (which I haven’t had much of) to the idea of the “poet enemy” & literary wars in general. In poet enemy news this week, a Goodreads author named Lama Milkweed (really, you need to check out her Chainsaw books (which begin in violence and end in spiritual romps) and her book entitled MY FATHER, MY NAZI) said she disagreed with my poem (which was not meant as anything to be agreed or disagreed with) and that it was especially tragic that she was wasting some of her last moments on earth reading it on a computer that was also dying. A moment of silence please for Lama Milkweed (who has been writing that she’s dying for years) as she takes to the grave a burning imprint of the most disagreeable prose poem ever.
Kyle– Nicely said. It lines up with all I can glean about Ken (here and in a few kind emails) without really knowing him. I initially thought the actor Ken was a doppelganger, but no. Great that he can span all these worlds. I labor in much more obscurity yet his advice can be scaled down to orient and apply to other distractions and obsessions (I will not check my book’s sales at Amazon today. . . I will not check my book’s sales at Amazon today. . . .) that should be way off to the side of pouring blood on a page.
P.S. I am interested in the social distractions that can derail writing–from flirtation to book review swapping to insane fan email (which I haven’t had much of) to the idea of the “poet enemy” & literary wars in general. In poet enemy news this week, a Goodreads author named Lama Milkweed (really, you need to check out her Chainsaw books (which begin in violence and end in spiritual romps) and her book entitled MY FATHER, MY NAZI) said she disagreed with my poem (which was not meant as anything to be agreed or disagreed with) and that it was especially tragic that she was wasting some of her last moments on earth reading it on a computer that was also dying. A moment of silence please for Lama Milkweed (who has been writing that she’s dying for years) as she takes to the grave a burning imprint of the most disagreeable prose poem ever.
in a jar?
in a jar?