So this last month I have been spying on poets in a poetry classes, and I am blown away. To be honest I had always thought the difference between fiction writers and poets to be pretty marginal; maybe a shorter attention span, maybe a little bit more emotional than the average bear, or maybe just stronger affinity towards the avant garde. I mean all writers I know dabble in poetry no matter what their preferred genre is but prose writers tend to write poetry in notebooks and never show anyone. We say things like “I don’t really get poetry but I like it,” or “I can’t tell whether it’s good or not,” but we all have written poetry for fun at one point or another. So what is it that makes one writer a poet and one a prose writer? Read more »
I have a tendency to save everything: cards and books and jackets that fit sort of strangely but that I might one day discover are perfect, useful, irreplaceable. As if I’m afraid I might alter some killer memory just by getting rid of its evidence.
I also believe there’s nothing quite like throwing things away—and it’s best if you can shred or break those things before you finally sweep them into the recycle bin. It was easy when I lived in Philly and had an overgrown backyard, an alleyway, and an unending supply of empty wine bottles. But destroying things can take less formulaic paths, as I’ve discovered lately. Read more »
Why not? In a generation of tech-savvy writers, and youtube teenagers, animated poetry seems to be the way to “make it new” and give poetry a public presence. And it’s catching on. Billy Collins calls them action poems and Todd Boss calls them motion poems. But basically, it’s a poem, plus audio, plus film. Animated poetry is even making an appearance in college syllabi.
But what does animation mean to poetry? I’m worried that poets might not embrace animated poetry, arguing that it steps on the poem’s toes, forces a single interpretation, does the reader’s work for her and makes her lazy. To this I say it’s a new piece of art, a hybrid art that should be taken on its own merits—not given a poetic autopsy.
The charm of animated poetry is that it brings poems and the internet together. It gives us another way to engage in the art. It gives us a new kind of audience and something to do with a poem after it’s written. The point is that we write to engage with others, to make our work public, and animated poetry does that.
I was as the Port Townsend Writers Conference a couple of years ago, and because there wasn’t a hot tub, and because I was eating meals with people I didn’t know, I started asking asinine questions at dinner, making conversation, etc, and somehow the question, “Who’s the coolest person in the world?” came up, as it so frequently does. Being literary types, we kicked this around a little, established some parameters–Could it be anyone from all time? we wondered. Yes, we decided. What did we mean by cool? We weren’t going to answer that question. It was uncool even to ask it. And then we started throwing names around. Lou Reed came up. Dylan. Someone mentioned the Dalai Lama, but I said, while I thought he was great and everything, I wasn’t sure he was “cool,” necessarily, even if cool people tended to attach themselves to him. The conversation continued the next night at dinner, with a slightly different configuration of people. Again, there was no hot tub. Stephen Malkmus was mentioned. Dennis Cooper. De Niro. Someone wondered if Jesus was cool. I wondered about a new bracelet campaign: What Would Jesus Do, if He Were Cool? Denis Johnson was mentioned. So was Beckett. I realized we had no women on the cool list. I pointed this out and then asked if, all things being equal, men were cooler than women. It was a disastrous question, of course, and had the same effect farting at the table would have had. Look, I said, I’m not saying men are cooler than women, but when considering the coolest person in the world, we’re only naming men. Then somebody said, Patti Smith.
Right. Yes. Possibly the coolest person in the world.
Ms. Smith has a memoir out called Just Kids, reviewed in this week’s NYTBR. While the review isn’t very interesting, the book looks like it probably is. And coming from the coolest person in the world, I’m guessing it will probably be, well, cool.
Right around the time when eCommerce became the buzz word of the day, I worked with a girl named Angela at a software firm who contracted out full project teams to companies who had not yet trained their workforce to use web based technology. Angela and I considered ourselves artist, but avoided being the suffering kind by working as technical writers and HTML coders. Our personal usage of the internet was all about access to free information and cool stuff. The projects we worked on were all about how to make money on the web, which caused us to view all profit-interested companies as greedy and abusers of this new wonderful technology. We had a secret catch phrase that we emailed to back and forth and sometimes scribbled on each other’s note pads in meetings: “Use the internet for good, not for evil.” Our heroes in this emerging technology field were the founders of Google. Their philosophy seemed to be all about using the internet for good. Their mega search engine was free to use and originally had no favorite links in the search results.
Fast forward to 2004. Google is now a huge company making loads of money, a lot of it through their online advertising. They announced that they are going to start a “library project” which involves scanning books from the public domain, creating a huge digital library that can be shared by the masses. By December that year, they started scanning books that were still copyrighted but defended the action by explaining that only snippets are going to be shown online (even though they scan the all pages of every book). Authors started to rumble and a law suit was filed in 2005. Read more »
Last summer, I was invited to attend a summer writer’s workshop, the kind that could expose my writing to agents and editors, decreasing the inevitable future of paying off student loans as a green-hat at McDonalds. As part of the acceptance packet, I received a card with a questionnaire about my living arrangements. With the exception of not being a vegetarian, or bi-curious, the questions seemed to define how much of a wannabe writer stereotype I am. Yes, I eat meat; yes, I smoke; yes, I drink alcohol; yes, I’m filled with angst. The last question asked me to rate, on a scale from one to five, how social I thought I was. Instead of being honest, I shaded the fourth box.
For the last few years, I’ve operated under the false assumption that an aspiring writer is a shut-in. As a matter of fact, what’s most appealing about the idea of being a writer is that it’s one of the few jobs you can do in your pajamas. With a computer, a television, a treadmill, and a trip to the grocery store, you too can live like hamster. Sweatpants and ugly T-shirts with things like ONE DOLLAR MAMOGRAMS can be your business casual. But that’s only partly true.
i’m one of those assholes who doesn’t really watch tv* and might casually slip that knowledge into a conversation to try to divert the talk back to books or something else more gay. which means i was pretty late to the game in learning about wieden + kennedy’s “go forth” campaign for levi’s. and i don’t mind saying—it knocked my socks off.
but because i’m a narcissistic american, after i was finished being in awe of this thing, i immediately asked myself: what does it mean that i heart this commercial?
i nearly get chills hearing that dramatic reading—and pairing it with those striking visuals just ups the kickass factor for me. but that may be because (a) i’m an idiot prose writer who can’t understand contemporary poetry and thus romanticizes 19th century verse, (b) i’m an idiot consumer who can’t separate the near mythological origins of levi’s jeans from the fact that 501s are now a fetish property manufactured in mexico**, (c) i’m just an idiot, or (d) all of the above.
i do wonder what whitman would have made of all this if he were alive today. maybe he would feel artistically compromised by having his life’s work co-opted to shift units for a mega-corp. maybe he would think that shit’s small potatoes, and been in awe of globalization. maybe he’d be happy people are still reading his stuff after all the work he put into it (he was reworking leaves of grass almost until his death). or maybe he’d just say “fuck it—it’s a beautiful day outside” and go run & play like those kiddies on the teevee.
* except for old episodes of “the wire,” “west wing,” and other things white people like.
**full disclosure: i am wearing a pear of 527s as i write this. god bless america.
Yesterday in the am/pm parking lot while I was putting air in my tires, a boy in his early teens asked if I would buy him a cigar. His hair was black and spiky and his eyebrows arched with hope.
“No way, Jose,” I said.
“I thought I might as well try,” he said. As he and his friends walked away, cigarless, I realized that one of these boys, in this Mexican-American neighborhood, could potentially be named Jose. I drove off to teach a class in which one of my students does have that name.
When I Googled “No way, Jose,” I was led to the www.phrases.org.uk website which has this to say about the phrase:
In Chapman and Kipfer’s Dictionary of American Slang ‘no way’ is listed as a 1960s phrase and ‘no way Jose’ as originating in Village Voice. Unfortunately, they don’t present any other details so I can’t check that assertion. The first verified citation I’ve found is from The Washington Post, December 1979:
”I’ve got nothing against robots. But no way, Jose, is this guy going to win.” Read more »
Just heard that J.D. Salinger, novelist, short story writer, and famous recluse beloved of twee independent-aesthete filmmakers and assassins, has died. Farewell, strange genius.
I have been told writers do not know where they get their ideas and, to a point, I think that’s true. But lately I’ve been reflecting on where I find my stories, where I look for them, and I think that being deliberate in this process aids me in creating the kind of pieces I’m interested in.
Often when you tell people you’re a writer, they follow up by wanting to help you find some stories to tell. They explain some anecdote that happened to them or note after an occasion with you, “Now there’s a story.” But I’m not interested in work that seems too plotted or pieces that would be better as stand-up jokes.
Maybe growing up in churches taught me to look for lessons everywhere, but when I started in undergrad creative writing classes I came with opinions and points I wanted to make in my work. Of course, I quickly learned didacticism ruins most art and now when I feel strongly about a political or sociological issue there is no reflex in me that says, “There’s a story.”
The last few years I’ve come to a story with the character already planned, the conflict decided. Sometimes I’ve spent time free writing their background before I start the story. But even this catalyst seems to take too much of the intuition or instinct out of the process. Read more »
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