Well, I’ve done it again.  I’ve entered another writing contest, which means my bank account is $20 lighter and that I’ll receive a subscription to a journal that I’ll read later and remark upon turning the pages, “That’s it!  That’s the winning poem!”

Alas…  One of my M.F.A. colleagues (on staff at Willow Springs) says that if I review a batch of poems that have beens submitted and I provide reasons for it not to be accepted (or pursued further by my fellow editors), that must mean that my own verse is better.

Well, I’m not sure that it “must,” but for the time being at least, I am struck with how we rationalize by non sequiturs ad infinitum (and how we lapse into latin).  Nothing follows nothing:  good, better, best…  And the grand prize goes to… Subjectivity!

***

Jorie Graham has loads of fascinating things to offer about the poetics we practice, the poems we write and the poems we judge (ie., compare and contrast with other poems).  In this regard, the Poetess-in-Charge at Harvard U. even has her own rule named after her own controversial evaluation of various works in the University of Georgia’s 1999 contest.   The rule essentially stipulates that a judge must recuse her or himself if the potentially award-winning poems are penned by the aforementioned judge’s students, or her future husband.

Read more »

The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced today, and while the various winners in letters, drama and music celebrated, the internet freaked out because the fiction prize was notably not awarded.

The finalists, which are not announced before the award itself (unlike the National Book award, which announces them months before the announcement of the winner), were Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia and DFW’s The Pale King.

Here’s how it works, as I learned just now: three judges read over 300 books in a nine-month span, and then they, as a united panel, make a recommendation to the Pulitzer Board about who the three finalists should be. Then the board, which includes NYT columnist Thomas Friedman and fiction writer Junot Diaz, makes the final decision. Except that they decided not to hand out the award in fiction. No one won.

On one hand, who cares? If you didn’t know until today that your book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and then you found out in the next sentence that you didn’t win, would you really care that much? It doesn’t seem that insulting that a board of 21 people couldn’t decide on whether your book was “better” or “more important” or whatever rationale they supposedly use for the Pulitzer. Plus it’s just one (admittedly prestigious) award out of what seems like 1.2 million of them, and you can still put “Pulitzer Prize finalist” on your CV or dust jacket.  *

On the other hand, even if we all agreed that prize committees are probably full of well-intentioned people who take the job seriously, which I hope is largely the case, doesn’t it seem, well, a little douchey that they couldn’t just pick a damn winner? Read more »

… I’m trending.

How Did Poe Trend?

So, as far as my participation in this barking.com blog goes, I’m noticing a trend.

It’s nothing overt or thunderously apparent.  It’s comprised of no damning data.  It’s unlikely to make a dent in the Internet reading habits of emerging generations.  It’s neither a threat to national security, nor a subject of prurient interest that might be ruled on by the Supreme Court… It does not resemble the plain nose on your face…

It is, however, near and dear to my face, which has no business being saved from even the slightest of humiliating experiences.   But I have observed that for several weeks now, my unintelligible musings have received zero comments.   That is, 0.

Now, whether or not this lack of cyber-dialogue corresponds to a blanket dismissal of my prowess as a writer or of my genius as an aspiring artist — Ahhh! – that is beyond the scope and the purpose of this brief soliloquy.   In essence, all I have to say can be summarized with a modest paraphrase of Rene Descartes:  “I write, therefore I am.”   Or, to embellish on this purloined dictum just a bit, there’s no one better than the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton.   After turning away from a potentially lucrative career as writer, Merton became a priest, who morphed into a mystic, who eventually, in Seeds of Contemplation, understood his vocation like so:

“If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men–you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.”

Merton fans, of course, may speculate regarding the sequence of their hero’s syllogisms.  Why does he start with “God,” move to “men” (and presumably women), go to “world” and then to “self”?  And might there be a way of doing all of the above simultaneously?
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I heard about this growing controversy while surfing various blogs over the weekend. Some people in Britain are pushing to have a Literature Prize, since they argue that the Man Booker Prize rewards sub-par works of art. Two quotes from the article:

And yet there’s a consortium of people, headed by literary agent Andrew Kidd and supported by a host of literary types, who last week announced they were putting together a prize, to be known as The Literature Prize, for “writers who aspire to something finer.”

The Literature Prize is looking to do the literary equivalent of applauding houses built with staircases that require mountaineering gear to climb them.

If you read this blog often, you probably already know which side of the debate I fall on, but I’ll say it again anyway, mostly because I feel so strongly about this issue. Readable books are good books. The sense of inflated ego that comes from getting through a difficult book does not make that book more worth than one that is accessible. And books and literature should be accessible, on the whole. Isn’t that why we create art? To be read and enjoyed?

Last year I blogged here on Bark about how book trailers were essential–according to some publishing experts–to properly market your book. As expected, many authors didn’t agree and/or made trailers that made fun of the whole concept.

My favorite back then was Dennis Cass’s “Book Launch 2.0,” which won the 2010 Moby Award (The Oscars of the Book Trailers) for Best Performance by an Author.

Now I have a new favorite.

Here’s Max Barry promoting Machine Man.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEN10axDJtA&feature

I can’t stop laughing. It must be the Australian accent.

When I find myself becoming (more) neurotic, self-involved, or under threat of being pillow-suffocated by heartache, a story like this comes along and acts as a much needed slap in the face. A cold palm cracking against cheekbone. It’s something I welcome.

The most prestigious literary prize in Nepal, the Madan Puraskar, was awarded to Jhamak Kumari Ghimire. It was awarded for her book of autobiographical essays titled, “Is life a thorn or a flower?”

What makes her story particularly interesting are the challenges she has faced. A woman living with Cerebral Palsy, she is unable to speak, use her hands, and was uneducated as a child. She taught herself to write using her left foot.

Jhamak Kumari Ghimire: winner of the top literary prize in Nepal & left-foot-composer extraordinaire!

I fear this post could easily topple into the sentimental and/or political, so I’m not going to say a whole lot. I just thought it was a cool story & wanted to bring attention to her achievement, both personal and literary. Quite simply: she’s a badass.

• Here’s a link to an article in the BBC about her.
• Here’s a link to an article + some of her poetryin The Nepali Times.
• Here’s her facebook page is you want to “like” her.
• And here’s a link to United Cerebral Palsy’s website that answers frequent questions about CP, predominantly “what is Cerebral Palsy?”

All we can do in this fucked up world is pause & try our best to be grateful. Even if it’s for being just a little less neurotic today. There is still beauty.
Or, as Kim Addonizio puts it

For I am a poet. And it is my job, my duty
to know wherein lies the beauty 

In 1982, San Jose State University sponsored the first Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. To enter, you have to compose the opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels. The contest was created by Professor Scott Rice after he found the source of the line “It was a dark and stormy night…,” which is the opening sentence of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford.

For 2011, Sue Fondrie penned the shortest ever winning sentence:

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

According to The Guardian, Fondrie tweeted that one of her students wrote her: “I knew you were awful, so it’s great that you’re finally getting recognized.”

Two of my favorites are from the Romance category. Read more »

I’m enjoying a summer of poetry. Just the two words “enjoying” and “poetry” in the same sentence is new for me. Although I like hearing poetry, it’s not until recently that I discovered the joy of immersing myself in a book of poems on my own.

Summer is when I do most of my writing. I usually don’t sign up to teach summer classes, instead I grade AP tests or review textbooks to collect a paycheck. That way I can create long periods of time during the day when I do nothing but write.

I read a lot during the summer as well, but have trouble keeping my own voice if I read books close to what I’m currently working on. I never write poetry, so reading it keeps my voice true. It also makes me pay more attention to the line level details of my prose.

Currently, I’m reading Kathleen Flenniken’s Famous. She was in Spokane during Get Lit! and participated in a great poetry panel with Matthew Dickman, Lowell Jaeger, and Laura Tohe. I bought Famous because of “It’s Not You, It’s Me,” which Flenniken read during the panel. The book won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was an American Library Association Notable Book. Read more »

The last couple of days, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve done since I graduated from EWU’s MFA program. First there was Jaime’s post, which made me think about how lucky I was to spend two years completely immersed in writing. Part of me misses that environment, but another part of me is happy to be a writer out in the “real world.” I like working on my pieces without my internal editor second guessing what my fellow students will say in workshop. Not that I didn’t like workshop, but when I knew exactly who my audience/critics were, I often had a hard time staying true to what I wanted to put on the page instead of trying to please them.

Then there was the Willow Springs release party last Friday. A year ago, I would have been one of the people triple-celebrating the new issue with being done with the thesis and either about to or just finished defending. This year, instead of having read the issue several times through proofing galleys, I enjoyed the fantastic stories, poems, and essays in their finished form.

So overall, I’ve been thinking I’m okay with where I’m at in my writing career/journey right now. Then, I got a Facebook message from my former thesis advisor. Read more »

As you may have heard, Sir Vidia is underwhelmed by women writers.

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Austen he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”.

Now, I’m not going to get bent out of shape about this absurd sexism.  And I suggest no one else does either.  As Paul Theroux abundantly pointed out, Sir Vidia is a big-time douche.

But Naipaul also claimed he could tell within a paragraph if the writer was male or female.  The Guardian created a helpful little test to see if you could determine a writer’s gender based solely on a paragraph.

I scored one out of ten.  To make matters worse, I’d read most of the books from which the selections were taken, and count a few among my favorites of all time.