Rule of Threes in which the author falls asleep standing up after 17 hours of poetry
Archibald's Bar-B-Q
1. And so we mark the success of Slash Pine Poetry Festival No. 2: The Year of the Laundromats. Lots of poems about laundry and laundromats.
I don’t really know how many hours it was. 40 readers at 10 minutes per over the course of the weekend. Then there were the overages (you can’t keep all 40 poets in line, can you?), the undergrad reading, the dinners and bars and making new friends, etc. etc.
Joseph P. Wood puts together a real shindig. There were art galleries, blues singers, bars, bands, poets of all shapes and sizes—and even some fictioners and essayists, though I think they crashed the party. Seats were packed for every venue despite the tornado warnings and thunder so loud I thought I could hear it inside my head.
On a maybe more important note, Joseph took Myron Michael and I to Archibald’s Bar-B-Q (see above) in Tuscaloosa, and I ate a plate of the tastiest ribs I have ever had. The sauce on these things was magical.
2. New issue of Sixth Finch:
3. I’m re-reading Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons. Here’s an interesting moment from the beginning of the book, in which the Marquis and a doctor called Abrenuncio discuss the Marquis’s daughter, Sierva María, after a rabies examination:
“She told you many falsehoods,” he said, “but that was not one of them.”
“She did not tell me, Señor,” said the doctor. “Her heart did: It was like a little caged frog.”
The Marquis lingered over the inventory of his daughter’s other surprising lies, not with displeasure but with a certain paternal pride. “Perhaps she will be a poet,” he said. Abrenuncio did not agree that lying was an attribute of the arts.
“The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry,” he said.
What a weird place for a treatise on poetry. I don’t think poets are liars, even when they’re lying. I have a friend who writes in a sort of confessional mode, but most of the facts of the speaker’s life are completely made up (meaning they’re not the author’s bio), and occasionally surreal and fantastical too. We don’t think of poetry as fiction, but why?
Tags: bar-b-q, gabriel garcia marquez, of love and other demons, sixth finch, slash pine poetry festival
Archibald’s has a painted window and a paved parking lot now? Brick pit used to be in the back of a house in Northport. Just carry-out. They gettin’ too fancy.
Fiction writers lie to readers. Poets lie to themselves.
Archibald’s has a painted window and a paved parking lot now? Brick pit used to be in the back of a house in Northport. Just carry-out. They gettin’ too fancy.
Fiction writers lie to readers. Poets lie to themselves.
we love sixth finch!
we love sixth finch!
One word for you — The Romantics. (Oh fuck. Two words).
One word for you — The Romantics. (Oh fuck. Two words).
Aw, thanks.
Alexis, it’s ironic that you put Márquez’s thoughts about poetry and lying in the same post as a link to Sixth Finch–we’re named after the sixth definition of “finch” in the OED: “a small lie.”
Anyway, I’m not even slightly offended by the link between poetry and lies. Lies keep us on our toes. Lies give us a way of contrasting the poetic world with the real world (if you even believe in the idea of some objective “real” world). If you replace “lying” with “imagining” (or even “re-imagining”), is this topic controversial at all?
Aw, thanks.
Alexis, it’s ironic that you put Márquez’s thoughts about poetry and lying in the same post as a link to Sixth Finch–we’re named after the sixth definition of “finch” in the OED: “a small lie.”
Anyway, I’m not even slightly offended by the link between poetry and lies. Lies keep us on our toes. Lies give us a way of contrasting the poetic world with the real world (if you even believe in the idea of some objective “real” world). If you replace “lying” with “imagining” (or even “re-imagining”), is this topic controversial at all?
You made it to Archibald’s? Thank goodness. And being one of the readers in hour 17 of 17 hours who had a mention of a Laundromat, the first mention of laundry in hour 2 was cute, the second mention was weird, and by the sixth mention I wish I had printed out something else.
You made it to Archibald’s? Thank goodness. And being one of the readers in hour 17 of 17 hours who had a mention of a Laundromat, the first mention of laundry in hour 2 was cute, the second mention was weird, and by the sixth mention I wish I had printed out something else.
[…] So, AWP, Hawk & Tide, and Slash Pine Poetry Festival. I think I slept fifteen hours the entire month. But it was exciting and exhilarating, especially the festival, where we were running away from tornado warnings and having rain so hard you couldn’t see directly in front of you while driving. Instead of rewriting the whole report here, just check the events out up in our events link and read over the reports. Alexis Orgera, one of the readers and just bang-up solid human being, wrote up a nice piece for us in HTMLGIANT. […]