pshares blog

Free Friday Monday!

2009-06-01T17:32:00.003-04:00

Some news on the free front:

Fiction writer Shya Scanlon has posted his novel, Forecast, on his blog, to be read chapter by chapter or downloaded in its entirety.

(Applaud here.)

For the month of June, J.A. Tyler's ML Press is giving away free copies of A Field of Colors, by Charles Lennox. So far, 99 mailed. You can subscribe to these mini-issues as well.

(Applaud here.)

HTMLGiant, which we love around the pshares blog, has news of a free writing contest at Blake Butler's Lamination Colony. With, as prizes, more free stuff, like Shane Jones's pictured Light Boxes!

(Applaud here.)

I ask you, what's better than free?

Padel V. Walcott

2009-05-27T19:02:00.012-04:00

I’m a little late to the party with this news, but in case you haven’t heard, Ruth Padel, the first woman to become the Oxford Professor of Poetry, has resigned after word broke that she'd alerted a journalist to the past accusations of sexual harassment made against her main rival for the job, Derek Walcott, who had withdrawn from the contest after that news surfaced. Whew! You'd think this was a presidential election or something.

I feel a little mixed about this whole thing. If past sexual harassment claims against Walcott are in fact out there, then they should have been brought to someone’s attention—just probably not by Padel, who says she was “trying in a misguided way to address student concerns." Apparently Oxford University is planning to hold a new election at a later date, but Padel reports that she won’t be running in this second election. Whether Padel was part of some alleged “campaign” against Walcott or just had a moment of questionable judgment, we’ll never know, but it’s truly unfortunate that her historic appointment has been so completely tarnished by all this unsavory political maneuvering.

What do Christie's and the Herzl Jewish Camp newspaper have in common?

2009-05-24T12:42:00.018-04:00

An inability to distinguish a "poem" by 16-year-old Bob Dylan from lyrics by Canadian country music star Hank "The Yodeling Ranger" Snow, apparently, according to Reuters, which "discovered the lyrics matched the Snow song when alerted by a reader" and which then told Christie's about this discovery.

Here's what Christie's is saying about the screw-up: "Additional information has come to our attention about the handwritten poem submitted by Bob Dylan to his camp newspaper, written when he was 16, entitled 'Little Buddy.' The words are in fact a revised version of lyrics of a Hank Snow song [...] This still remains among the earliest known handwritten lyrics of Bob Dylan and Christie's is pleased to offer them in our Pop Culture auction on June 23."

What the article seems to suggest--but which no one seems to want to say--is that Dylan, back in his Bobby Zimmerman days, passed of this slightly tweaked Hank Snow song as his own original composition, much the same way that kid in that movie The Squid and the Whale succeeded for a time in convincing everybody that he had written the Pink Floyd song, "Hey You." Not to try to use this as evidence that Dylan is somehow a fraud/that the emperor has no clothes; he's clearly one of the most important creative figures of the 20th century--but what does this early piece of, um, borrowing without citation suggest about being a major creative figure in the 20th century? Also, if you're one of the people planning to bid on the item on the 23rd of June, does this plot twist alter the amount you're willing to shell out?

America's Former Top Internet Meme

2009-05-14T21:53:00.005-04:00

Because sometimes we need a break from the literary ... and TV is like reading for regular folks. Anyway, I really wanted Allison Harvard to win this "cycle" of America's Next Top Model, but it was not to be. Which in the end is probably better, because actually being America's Next Top Model is really pretty embarrassing. (Witness last cycle's winner, "McKey," shilling for Cover Girl in recent episodes. She seems both bored and brainwashed.)

What I love about Allison, besides the fact that she is totally adorable, sort of a female counterpart to Christian Siriano, is that she was once semi-well-known around these here Internet parts as "Creepy Chan," from her super-spooky-big-eyed pics on the Anime-heavy image bulletin board 4chan. Plus, she told Tyra and Co. in her initial interview that she has an obsession with blood. And they let her through anyway! And she almost won!

Coming to the end of a reality TV season is very like finishing a good book. I'm going to miss these characters. I'm going to miss you Creepy Chan.

Garrison Keillor likes poetry because it gets him laid…

2009-05-11T10:10:00.007-04:00

…or so he says in his National Poetry Month column, “Write a Poem. Get the Girl.” But why do people like Garrison Keillor?

Is it the worn-out jokes about caveman times? (“Back when our hairy-legged ancestors were living in mud huts and smelling of rancid grease and wood smoke, men were not attractive to women at all. Fighting with rocks and clubs made unsightly marks on men and left putrefying sores. They squatted around the smoking fires, put ashes on their wounds, exchanged myths, and felt a terrible ache for love and affection.”) The way he tries awkwardly to make rape comical? (“They longed to see women exhibit an avid interest in them for their own merits and not have to go marauding against enemy tribes and stand toe to toe with their warriors and hack at them and eviscerate and decapitate them and drag their women away screaming and sobbing.”) Or maybe it’s the sexism and heteronormativity? (“That's the real message of Poetry Month […] it's the month when you should write a poem and see how powerful this can be in winning the favor of women.”) Pshares readers, if any of you are Keillor fans, help a blogger out: what’s the appeal?

New Voices: Jess Row

2009-05-07T12:24:00.003-04:00

Jess Row was born in 1974 in Washington, DC. His first book, The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories set in Hong Kong, was published in 2005; in 2006 it was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. In 2007 he was named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta. His stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Ploughshares, Granta, American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Five Chapters, Ontario Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. He has also received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship in fiction, and a Whiting Writer's Award. He is currently at work on a new collection of short stories and a novel set in Laos during the Vietnam War. Jess is an assistant professor of English at the College of New Jersey, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife Sonya Posmentier, and daughter Mina. A longtime student in the Kwam Um School of Zen, he was ordained a dharma teacher in 2004.

Your story, Lives of the Saints, recently appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Eleanor Wilner. Can you talk a little about where the idea for this story came from?

In this case I had a kind of a vision of these two young people on the subway, the girl lying on the boy's lap, and I wanted to know what brought them there. At the time I was writing the story there was a lot of talk about artists and hipsters moving into the South Bronx—this may still be happening, though there's been less discussion of it recently—and I suppose I wanted to take that idea of urban "pioneering" (a disgraceful term, but people use it) to its furthest possible extreme. Which, in the case of New York, would be Hunts Point. And then overlapping that was the timeframe, a few years after September 11th, just far enough away from the event that it begins to be stylized and made a point of reference, an image-commodity.

Was there a particular aspect of writing Lives of the Saints that proved especially challenging?

I had a lot of fun writing this story, actually. It didn't feel like work. I love New York, but because I'm not from the city, I don't take the setting for granted, as some writers do (by necessity). And these two young people are very close to my heart, misguided as they are. They have a great deal of courage; in some ways I wish I had that kind of courage. But not the naïvete that goes along with it. Working on this story was really a refuge from other things I was supposed to be doing; not that it wasn't hard—writing any story is hard—but I didn't notice it at the time.

What is your favorite first line from a work of fiction?

I don't have an all-time favorite, but a great one that comes to mind is the beginning of Melanie Rae Thon's story Xmas, Jamaica Plain: "I'm your worst fear. But I'm not the worst thing that could happen."

Last line?

That would be from F. Scott Fitzgerald's story Babylon Revisited: "She would never have wanted him to be so alone."

I’ve read that you're currently working on a novel and a new story collection. Are you working on those manuscripts simultaneously? Can you talk a little about how the two projects are co-existing?

The collection is now finished; the novel is in its last stages, and I'm actually at work on a new collection (and thinking about a new novel too). There's really no good answer to that question other than to say that I have a short attention span and a lot of stories I want to write. It's not an approach I would recommend to anyone else, but at least it keeps life interesting.

Who are some of your all-time favorite writers? Some emerging writers that are catching your attention?

My all-time favorites list: John Banville, Nadine Gordimer, John Berger, Michael Ondaatje, Gina Berriault, Charles Baxter, John Edgar Wideman, Robert Stone, J.M. Coetzee, Paul West. As far as young writers go in this country, I think there's a real impatience, across the board, with strict distinctions between "realism" and "avant-garde"; you see that in the new fabulists, like Karen Russell, Kelly Link, and Judy Budnitz, for example. There's also a lot of new interest in regional particularity and in rural or at least non-urban life, sometimes with a gothic or fantastic edge: David Means, Ander Monson, Peter Markus, Jason Brown, Lewis Robinson, Charles D'Ambrosio. And then there's the enormous ongoing globalization of American fiction, as the definition of who is American and what constitutes "American experience" changes. A novel like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao would not have been possible ten years ago, and yet now to many of my undergraduate students it has defined the possibilities of fiction for the future. The distinction between "immigrant" fiction or "multicultural" fiction and the normative, white-male, canonical tradition is beginning to disappear. There's a huge amount of vitality in contemporary fiction, and I think mainstream publishing is just barely keeping up with it.

Bad Brains

2009-05-06T21:57:00.004-04:00

As with zombies and their recreational pursuits, ideas about our cognitive sufficiency have been occupying my thoughts lately. Someone asked me what I thought about when writing, and I struggled to characterize the extremely dull evidence of generative activity that I display. Occasional rhythmic rocking of some sort. A wide but minute array of fiddling. Scrutinization of the middle distance. A sort of verbal approximation of sign language. Feeling around the shapes of words without actually wanting to touch them, so as to transfer them to the page much the way one handles radioactive material through a wall with big rubber clown gloves. Needless to say, these comparisons didn’t feel particularly striking.

Others, though, have been pursuing plenty of scientifically transgressive thoughts about creativity out there. Mental illness itself is being rehabilitated, having attained, in some circles, Darwinian sanction:

It's now increasingly being argued that there are survival advantages to others forms of illness, too, because of the links between the traits associated with them and creativity. "It can be difficult for people to reconcile mental illness with the idea that traits may not be disabling. While people accept that there are health benefits to anxiety, they are more wary of schizophrenia and manic depression," says Professor Gordon Claridge, emeritus professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford University, who has edited a special edition of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, looking at the links between mental illness and creativity. "There is now a feeling that these traits have survived because they have some adaptive value. To be mildly manic depressive or mildly schizophrenic brings a flexibility of thought, an openness, and risk-taking behaviour, which does have some adaptive value in creativity. The price paid for having those traits is that some will have mental illness."

In contrast, one researcher is drawing less-than-flattering comparisons between less-than-ideal hemispheric activity and unsuccessful verse:

In a recent study, Albert-Jan. Roskam found that poems of mediocre quality and aphasic transcripts may be indistinguishable, especially for men. His findings raise questions on gender differences in the specialization of the left brain hemisphere in the context of poetry.

To test the hypothesis that poems of mediocre quality and aphasic transcripts cannot be distinguished, Roskam surveyed employees of a Dutch medical center and subscribers of a statistical newsgroup on the internet. Respondents were presented four pairs of poems and aphasic transcripts.

Poems were rated slightly higher than aphasic transcripts. Among men, there were no significant differences between ratings of poems and aphasic speech. Women rated poems slightly but significantly higher than aphasic transcript

I have no idea what the gender differential means. So many variables, so little useful verbiage. Going further afield, other researchers are stripping the already-diminished ego of cognitive credit:

A recent brain scanning experiment by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that jazz musicians in the midst of improvisation - they were playing a specially designed keyboard in a brain scanner - showed dramatically reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex. It was only by "deactivating" this brain area that the musicians were able to spontaneously invent new melodies. The scientists compare this unwound state of mind with that of dreaming during REM sleep, meditation, and other creative pursuits, such as the composition of poetry. But it also resembles the thought process of a young child, albeit one with musical talent. Baudelaire was right: "Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."

Kind of makes one want to adopt a Hippocratic oath toward o’erweening ideas about the brain. Speaking of o’erweening, I loved this profile of Frederick Seidel in The New York Times. I’ve struggled for years to explain some of my unease/impatience with the aftertaste of privileged disdain and perverse glee that I’ve felt radiating off his poems, and I think that “Laureate of the Louche” kind of sums it all up:

Meanwhile, from other corners of that world, Seidel has earned different and more complicated epithets: “sinister,” “disturbing,” “savage,” “the most frightening American poet ever” and even “the Darth Vader of contemporary poetry.”

[…]

“When he mentions East Hampton or the Carlyle or Le Cirque or Ducati,” the former poet laureate Billy Collins told me, “it doesn’t even seem like name-dropping. He does what every exciting poet must do: avoid writing what everyone thinks of as ‘poetry.’ ” Collins’s quotation marks around “poetry” are the keys that begin to unlock Seidel’s art. As Lorin Stein, an editor at Seidel’s publishing house, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and a friend of Seidel’s, explained recently, Seidel’s qualities as a poet are in direct opposition to the poetry of many of his peers. “A lot of ways that people gin themselves up to write poetry nowadays require a setting aside of certain crass realities,” Stein said. “Crass realities of everyday colloquial communication; crass realities of money and power and sex; crass realities of the ‘I’ in its filthier manifestations. A lot of contemporary poetry has manufactured these great machines for avoiding coarseness — the dream of an escape.” That Seidel’s poems embrace the crassness at the heart of modern living makes him sound a good deal more like a novelist in the 19th-century mode — Stendhal and his mirror walking down the street reflecting modern life.

Then again, I’ve never been much for satire, especially satire that carries with it the implicit air that the author is the only one who is qualified (and sophisticated enough) to make the critique. To me, Robert Lowell always seemed to be taking it for granted that the only reason he could criticize the Brahmin was because he was of the Brahmin. I find this strain off-putting in both Lowell and his heirs, with whom I think Seidel belongs, even though he is clearly concerned more with a private good, than a public good.
Finally, in the spirit of psycho- logy/analysis, I’d like to leave you with an excellent little Freud Quiz from The Best American Poetry:

One August day in 1909 Freud fainted in Jung's company because

(1) He was eating lunch with Jung and the schnitzel disagreed with him
(2) He felt a sexual attraction to Jung
(3) Freud had slept with his wife’s younger sister and Jung threatened to blackmail him after hearing him talk about it in his sleep on the trip the two men took to America
(4) They were having an argument about something trivial when Jung revealed himself to be a virulent anti-Semite. “You’re next,” he said with an evil laugh. He kept repeating, Jude Jude Jude.
(5) Freud said the father of monotheism must have hated his own father and Jung gave him a dirty look
(6) Jung said the spring weather made him feel like a young man. From this innocuous remark, Freud knew that Jung was an impostor. “You were never Jung!” Freud cried.

What is up with the HuffPo

2009-05-06T21:34:00.009-04:00

I hear people raving left and right about the Huffington Post all the time ... OK maybe not "raving" "left" and "right" but people do really like it, right? It's the new Slate, etc? The few times I've clicked over there (it comes perilously close to a news source for me) to read an article (usually linked from a blog or some such), I admit I am enticed to click on like five other links. The related articles splattered all over the page just freaking intrigue me. Like this one: "Why can't women sleep?" This headline is pushing all my buttons ... I'm a woman! Sometimes I can't sleep! Is this science or just sexism? Give it to me, HuffPo!!

If you actually read the article, you'll see the writing really sucks. I basically found something wrong or stupid in every sentence. The intro is based on nonsensical math. ("According to the National Sleep Foundation's 2007 Sleep in America poll, '67% of women say they frequently experience a sleep problem. Additionally, 43% say that daytime sleepiness interferes with their daily activities.' Add up those figures and you'll end up with a larger-than-life percentage." Uhhh, but toward what purpose are they being added? I'm guessing the 43% is a subset of the 67%, rather than 110% of women splitting between two nonexclusive camps.) The first subhead is actually "Sleep: What is it?"

UHHHH. Is the average Internet reader seriously this dumb now? The author goes on to say that she thought (before conducting extensive research for this piece, apparently) sleep was a "non-thing." But no. Turns out, it's "an activity."

Putting aside the fact that HuffPo is in dire need of a copy editor, check out the non-brilliance of this passage:

It seems responsible to stress about the effects of your sleep-deficient night. And yes, a body that's frazzled by lack o' sleep is more prone to fueling a freak-out. [...]

The first step to better sleep is to rethink our worries. The things we're freaking out about feel real. But are they really happening?

We worry about botching the big presentation, for instance. Was that "accurate or not?" Did we forget the kids at school (or the dog at doggy daycare)? If the answer is no, there's really nothing to worry about, really....other than our worrisome attachment to worrying.

Is it just me, or is that straight-up incoherent? "Was that 'accurate or not?'"??? Do some of those really's somehow cancel each other out like double negatives? Besides, don't we have conclusive evidence that lack of sleep makes people fuck shit up? I just heard that's what really caused the Exxon Valdez spill.

So what the hell people. Tell me what is up with the HuffPo. Is this just a crazy outlier? Because I'm starting to think that anything populist blows.

Short Story Month

2009-05-03T19:57:00.009-04:00

It might not be quite as official as National Poetry Month, but in case you didn’t know, May has been declared the month of the short story. In celebration of SSM, Dan Wickett at the Emerging Writers Network is aiming to “find three stories to read and blog about—one from a collection that maybe I've held onto a little too long, should have finished and reviewed by now, etc; one from a print journal; and one from an online journal. By month's end, if all goals are met, just under 100 short stories will have been read and commented upon.” Via his own posts and some guest contributions, Dan has already accumulated a great selection of story recommendations and SSM has also been noticed by notables venues like Poets & Writers and Larry Dark at the Story Prize blog, along with countless other writers, bloggers, and short story enthusiasts. So if you love short stories (and, really, who doesn’t love a good short story?), here are a few easy ways to celebrate SSM: blogging about a story you love, buying a story collection, recommending a short story you love to friends, making a donation to an institution or publication that shows particularly strong support for the short story, or subscribing to a literary journal.

PS—Logo courtesy Steven Seighman

You're either far left, or you're fair and balanced

2009-04-28T20:32:00.005-04:00

Did you know Bruce Andrews was once on the O'Reilly show?!?!?! This hilarity pretty much speaks for itself:

Bruce handles Bill's bullshit with much aplomb, methinks. Unfortch, the topic isn't Bruce's radical, far-far-left poetics, but rather his choice of text in a poli sci class at Fordham. I wish they'd gone head to head on L=A=N=G=etc. but I guess the liberal poetry media already has an O'Reilly-esque naysayer in Joan Houlihan.

The latest issue of Redivider...

2009-04-27T14:23:00.006-04:00

...is hot off the presses with its usual mix of writers, both established (Cathleen Calbert, Joe Meno, Peter Turchi, etc.) and emerging (Carrie Messenger, Keith Montesano, Jennifer Percy, etc.).

Be sure to check it out--and order your very own copy--here.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

2009-04-22T23:15:00.001-04:00

On the VQR blog, Waldo Jaquith confirms what I’ve long suspected. Blogging as a revenue stream is, shall we say, somewhat paltry. Maybe you should go back to shooting those 300 free throws before dawn.

Mark Penn (who was Hillary Clinton’s chief political strategist for her presidential campaign) came up with the incredible contention (in the Wall Street Journal, no less) that “more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers, firefighters or even bartenders,” and that “there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.”

You could fit what I know about blogging into a matchbox (a full matchbox), but even I know that is an extravagant error. In fact, this bring to mind the overblown claims of “trends” as breathlessly described by Time Magazine--in short, wishful thinking in the form of narrative.

Here are Penn’s claims:

20 million American bloggers
1.7 million bloggers making a profit
452,000 bloggers using bloggers as a primary source of income.

The internet is magical and all that (like King Midas, everything it touches turns to content, which is half-way between data and metaphor, either partaking of the most or least interesting aspects of both), but it’s not that’s magical. Pixel dust will not get you high enough to suspend the economic laws of physics.

Penn claims that it takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Jacquith points out that the average annual blogger revenue is more than $6,000, but that this figure is dependent on the top 1% of bloggers, who earn over $200,000. He does some other takedowns of Penn’s, er, methods, the least of which underscore the reality that net journalism needs infrastructure and review just like ground-bound print journalism. Which makes me feel both worried and comforted.

Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced

2009-04-22T10:37:00.010-04:00

The 2009 Pulitzer winners have been announced, with W.S. Merwin taking home the award for The Shadow of Sirius and Elizabeth Strout winning for Olive Kitteridge. In some exciting Pshares news, Strout will be the guest editor for the Spring 2010 issue of Ploughshares.

And speaking of issues, the Spring 2009 Ploughshares, guest edited by Eleanor Wilner, is coming soon to bookstores and mailboxes near you! It's a great issue, one not to be missed. I'm particularly partial to Jess Row's story "Lives of the Saints." Row's story collection, The Train to Lo Wu, is also not to be missed.

Maintenance Note

2009-04-22T10:31:00.003-04:00

Readers, we've disabled anonymous commenting for the time being to try to stem the small tsunami of spam we've been seeing. You can still comment using your OpenID or Blogger account. Sorry for the trouble!

The Lazy Man's Poetry Festival

2009-04-15T17:04:00.005-04:00

Here's a poetry festival you don't have to leave your apartment to enjoy.

BC is streaming the festival live April 17th-19th. It's called "Poetries of the Stranger," sponsored by Boston Review and the Academy of American Poets. Former Pshares contributors and guest editors abound. So give it a listen...

... or, you know, go to the damn thing. It's free.

New Voices: Kristina Marie Darling

2009-04-13T09:53:00.001-04:00

Kristina Marie Darling grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where she later attended Washington University for an undergraduate degree in English and graduate work in American Culture Studies. She is the author of several small press collections of poetry and nonfiction, including Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), Night Music (BlazeVox Books, 2008) http://www.blazevox.org/ebk-kDarling%20REAL.pdf , and, most recently, Strange Gospels (Maverick Duck Press, 2009). In addition to publishing creative work, Kristina is an avid reader and reviewer of contemporary literature, with critical writings appearing in The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, New Letters, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Prairie Center of the Arts, and the Centrum Foundation.

You are 23 years old and the author of seven small press collections of poetry and nonfiction. Why have you sought to publish so much at such an early age, and do you ever worry about being too prolific? That maybe people won’t be able to follow your career as easily as if you were less productive?

When I started taking workshops as an undergraduate, I was certainly cautioned against being too prolific. But I think that it's also important for emerging writers to build an audience for their work early on. A piece of writing doesn't do anybody any good sitting in a desk drawer. For me, it's all about getting those poems and essays out there and finding readers.

In a particularly honest and funny first sentence, you open your essay “Thomas Pynchon’s Girlfriend” with “Because I’m a college student from the suburbs, I know very few things from experience,” and you follow it up with one that is equally as good: “I’ve never changed a flat tire, built a bonfire, or so much as set foot outside the state of Missouri.” Has any of this changed since you wrote that piece? Has your experience expanded considerably since then, and how do you manage to write such winsome personal essays within such limited confines? Also, do you consider yourself a Missouri writer, or even a Midwestern one?

Since I started graduate school, I've started traveling more in order to present papers at conferences and participate in artist residency programs. While I'm definitely glad to have a broader range of experiences, I've never felt that it's necessary to be well-traveled in order to write. One of my first poetry teachers, Shin Yu Pai, would challenge her students to find what's poetic about the everyday, even with things like work, bad pop music, or a trip to the grocery store. And this approach has really been influential for my poetry and nonfiction. For me, good writing comes from imagination and its ability to transform the mundane into something meaningful, and not so much from having unusual or exotic experiences.

That said, I would definitely consider myself a Missouri writer. There's no better place to appreciate the ordinary.

Why did you decide to publish your small collection of essays, Strange Gospels, a chapbook, really, with Maverick Duck Press? Who are they, and how did you find them, and are you pleased with the job they did with your work?

Maverick Duck Press is a small publisher of poetry edited by Kendall A. Bell. Strange Gospels is actually their first nonfiction title. I found out about the press three years ago when I submitted some poems to Chantarelle's Notebook, which Bell also edits and publishes with his wife Christinia. I decided to query about the possibility publishing Strange Gospels after reading some poems by authors who have chapbooks with Maverick Duck Press and seeing the same kind of humor and cultural commentary that I was striving for in the essays. It definitely seemed like an aesthetic match.

And they did a fabulous job with designing and binding the chapbook. I love the cover that they suggested, which juxtaposes more serious religious imagery with a court jester. It really matches the tone of the writing.

Same question about Dancing Girl Press which published your poetry chapbook The Traffic in Women in 2006?

Dancing Girl Press is a feminist publisher based in Chicago. The editor, Kristy Bowen, must have training in the book arts because does an outstanding job designing chapbooks. But what I like most about the press is that it also offers poetry readings, workshops, an online journal, and other writing-related resources for women who are interested in poetry. I think it's great that Kristy's creating a sense of community for female writers.

On your Goodreads profile, alongside “poetry” and “nonfiction,” you list one of your “genres” as “Women & Gender Studies”—do you consider yourself a feminist writer? If so, what does this mean to you?

I would without a doubt consider myself a feminist writer. But I think that the term is misused and misunderstood by a lot of people, even within the literary community. For me, feminist writing isn't about singling women out as an oppressed class, or devaluing traditional ideas about femininity. What's great about a lot of women's writing being published today--like the poetry from Switchback Books and Birds of Lace Press--is that it looks at the ways gender politics are negotiated in everyday life, which, for me, is a lot more interesting.

In your essay “The Flat Tummy Gospel,” you write about your struggle with being a fat young woman, and in the course of doing so, you mix personal reportage with research and statistics, as well as the poetry of Donna Stonecipher—how do you decide when to incorporate such outside elements and the words of others into your own writing? What kind of balance or blend are you aiming for?

When I incorporate things like statistics, research, and quotes in my essays, I'm usually trying to situate personal experience in a broader context for the reader. As someone who reads all kinds of nonfiction, my favorite authors are usually the ones who write from their own lives, but also use their experiences as a point of entry to larger questions about society, art, or culture. In my own writing, I've found that these types of journalistic strategies are a useful way to develop personal narrative into something a bit more universal.

Your essays can be pretty hilarious—how do you decide when to use humor to help make your points? Is it a conscious decision, or a more organic one, and do you do use the same technique in your poetry and other writing?

I actually have a very hard time writing “serious” nonfiction. I'll start an essay and tell myself I won't use humor at all, but it always creeps back in somehow. And although I don't think that my poems are ever funny, my imagery is usually very odd and quirky. Humor has definitely become part of how I see the world.

In the first essay in the collection, “Employee of the Month,” a kind of hilarious exploration of your disastrous experience working at a Target in Ballwin, Missouri, you describe yourself as a pre-law major—do you still want to be a lawyer, or has that dream been abandoned? If so, what do you want to do now?

When I first started college, I thought that I could be a high powered litigator if I studied hard enough. But during my second semester, a professor pulled me aside and told me that I'm too nice to be a lawyer. Looking back, I think that it was a blessing in disguise. I started majoring in English and really enjoyed it, even though well-meaning relatives still try to tell me there are fewer career prospects. I hope to eventually get a doctorate in English and either teach, work in arts management, or get involved in curriculum development at a college.

What motivated you to work on getting an M.A.? And why work on that as opposed to an M.F.A.?

I strongly considered pursuing an M.F.A., but didn't want to be limited to an artistic career. Even though I love writing, I wanted to have other interests and experiences in my life. And, from a practical standpoint, I thought a lot about how publishing, contests, and the job market are things that aspiring writers have absolutely no control over. I'm a big control freak, so it didn't seem like a good match.

After exploring a lot of options, I chose to work on an M.A. in American Culture Studies because it's an interdisciplinary program, so there are a variety of career paths that graduates can take. It's also great to be able to explore my interest in Modernist writing while taking courses in philosophy and history.

Who are your favorite and most personally influential writers?

The nonfiction I read is mostly humor writing, although there are also some more serious essays mixed in. I loved Poe Ballantine's 501 Minutes to Christ, which was published last year by Hawthorne Books. Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay and Jenny Boully's The Body are also favorites.

My most personally influential poets are for the most part contemporary ones—like Christian Hawkey, Elizabeth Hughey, Richard Siken, Simone Muench, and Joshua Clover—but I also read a lot of Imagist poetry. I think that it's important to learn from writers like Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and H.D. It's difficult for a writer to know where poetry is going if he or she doesn't know where it's been in the past.

Gift with Purchase

2009-04-08T21:06:00.003-04:00

It’s nice to see that April 1st did not go totally unobserved in the poetry world. And the focus of the rites was rather economic in nature. The Kenyon Review took advantage of the serious financial weirdness to acquire Random House, “a division of Bertelsmann AG, an international media corporation with its headquarters in a dormant volcano in Gütersloh, Germany.” And in a move that would give the-collective-rage-formerly-known-as-Foetry an aneurism, Graywolf decided that the Cave Canem Prize should really go to Tao Lin:

“I asked Komunyakka if it had occurred to him that perhaps Lin’s entry was not, in fact, unironic at all. “Yes, that did occur to me,” he said. “Some people on the Graywolf board were especially concerned about this, but I finally just said, ‘Listen, what does it matter? A good book is a good book, and this kid’s stuff actually sells.’ It’s the name of our prize--and your press--that will be on the cover of his book, which we expect he will promote with the same machine-like relentlessness that is his trademark–-which of course is how he ended up entering our contest in the first place. I said to them, ‘you want to see Cold-Pressed Organic Virgin Coconut Oil come out with that little Melville House logo on the spine instead of your wolves, be my guest. But this is the book I’m writing an introduction for.’”

I hope that there were other shenanigans afoot out there. What good is the internet if not for ad-hoc, self-relexiveness? (I mean, besides instantly shrink-wrapping sentiment, merchandise, and data with the same dispassionate even-handedness one would show to a fruit basket.)

A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene

2009-03-30T20:59:00.009-04:00

Continuing my extremely casual exploration (see also “What is Flower?”) into what people are really reaching for when they reach for a reference to “poetry,” I came across an article about the Queensboro Bridge in yesterday’s New York Times. The piece is mostly about how said bridge turns 100 today, but in it, architectural historian Barry Lewis says, “Who lives in Queens? You’re going to have your newsstand guy, your doorman, the guy who runs the store around the corner, they all live in Queens. The people who live in Queens are really the people who make the city run in a basic, gritty way, and the bridge is exactly that. It’s not a bridge that you write poetry to.”

What is Mr. Lewis getting at here—do unassuming things not inspire poetry? Do “basic” and “gritty” people not read or write poetry? Is poetry not “gritty”? Also, Ploughshares blog readers, are there any poems out there that have been written to the Queensboro? Does all the ink get spilled on the Brooklyn Bridge instead? What are your favorite bridges and bridge poems? Or, since F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the Queensboro Bridge ("The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.") what are your fave writings on bridges generally?

Orange You Glad...

2009-03-26T00:28:00.001-04:00

that the 2009 Orange Prize longlist has been announced? Of course you are. This year, the list includes Ploughshares contributor Allegra Goodman and six of the longlisted books are first novels, which is way cool.

In other award news: Salvatore Scibona,
subject of Ploughshares Quickie Interview 34, has won the Young Lions Fiction Award for his novel The End. Congrats, Salvatore!

Glut

2009-03-24T19:56:00.003-04:00

It is nearly the time of year again for NaPoWriMo (started by the delightful Maureen Thorson), where various unfortunates will write one poem a day for the month of April and post it on their blogs.

I participated in 2006, writing two poems a day, and it nearly did me in. I hadn’t done a marathon like that since my undergrad thesis, when I had to write 32 poems in a month in half (all of which are now extremely defunct) during the fall semester, and then again during the spring semester. The latter-day NaPoWriMo was a lot more exhilarating: 40 minutes for two rough drafts in the morning, 40 minutes to revise them in the afternoon. I’d say that it’s nice to know I can do it if I have to, but I fail to come up with even one hypothetical situation in which it would be necessary. Revision, maybe, but that’s different. Poetry is easily the furthest afield of any of the written disciplines from such pressures, as our product is only minimally economically successful, and the market is blessed with a surfeit of practitioners. (Only the demand for skilled phrenologists is lesser, frankly.)

This year, you can participate in a pledge drive. This makes me feel obscurely disheartened. ("Money and poetry! A combination no one’s ever thought of!") I notice that NaNoWriMo has a Wikipedia entry, but NaPoWriMo has none. Fie. See earlier comment about marketability.

I’ve been trying to think of similar triathlon-style events in literature. I’m sure that somewhere out there are haiku marathons, and some kind of infinitely recursive sestina competition. (This has nothing to do with anything, but a “tanka” always sounds to me like some kind of explosive device.) Like everything else on the web, the mere absence of such things is often enough to serve as the catalyst for them. The internet is nothing if not a physicist’s wet dream of biofeedback.

New Voices: Fan Wu

2009-03-20T18:06:00.007-04:00

Fan Wu grew up on a state-run farm in southern China, where her parents were exiled during the Cultural Revolution. She came to America in 1997 for graduate studies and began to write five years later. In 2007, she left her job in high-tech to write full-time. Her debut novel, February Flowers, has been chosen as the inaugural book by Picador Asia and has been translated into nine languages. Her short fiction, besides being anthologized and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared in Granta, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Redivider, and Asia Literary Review. Her second novel, Beautiful as Yesterday, is forthcoming by major publishers in the US, the UK, Australia and Asia. Wu holds an M.A. in Communication from Stanford University and currently lives in Santa Clara, California. She writes in both English and Chinese. Her website: www.fanwuwrites.com

First of all, congratulations on your child's birth! Has this changed the way you write at all? How do you write? Can you walk us through when you sit down at your desk?

Thanks. I really enjoy having my daughter, though motherhood is quite exhausting. Before her birth, I was able to write several hours most days of the week and being a night owl, I was most productive in the evenings. But now I don’t really have a schedule and my writing time is fragmented, in between her feeding, sleeping and playing. I write whenever I can, which sometimes means 4 or 5 a.m.

What about writing in English? I've noticed an interesting rhythm in your stories, a kind of sharp, almost formal rhythm--it's so hard to explain these things. Are you conscious of this? I have wondered whether it comes from having Chinese as your first language? Sometimes writing in a second language seems to create such beautiful, surprising rhythms.

I began to write creatively in 2002, five years after I came to America, and I chose to write my first novel in English because I thought it could help me learn my new language.

Yes, I’m very much aware that my English has certain formality in it, which presumably resulted from my paying great attention to wording, grammar, sentence structure, etc., as non-native speakers tend to do. Also I was trying to learn English from writers whose styles seemed most accessible to me, such as Naipaul, Hemingway, Salinger, Alice Monroe, William Trevor, to name a few. I’m very attached to Chinese so even when I write in English, Chinese is always in the back of my mind and it can intervene with my English. That may explain certain surprising rhythms. I have to admit that writing in English doesn’t come natural to me and sometimes I’m maddeningly frustrated.

Do you think in Chinese, or English? Dream?

Both, sometimes in Chinese, other times in English. It depends on which language I’m writing in at the moment. These days, I’m writing a novel in Chinese, so I think mostly in Chinese. I tend to dream in English, don’t know why, but when I dream of my family, especially my late grandma who raised me, they usually speak Chinese.

It must have been a great honor to have February Flowers chosen for the first book by Picador Asia. What was that like? Can you tell us a little about the imprint and the publishing industry in Asia?

I was lucky to be chosen as Picador Asia’s first author. The imprint was then looking for an Asia-based book, preferably in English, for its launch in the autumn of 2006, and my agent presented my debut novel, February Flowers, at the right time. I did book tours in Australia, Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore, and the UK, and had more than 80 events and interviews. It was a great pleasure working with the people at Picador Asia, who are dedicated, professional and friendly.

Picador Asia is backed by its parent company Pan Macmillan, an effort to publish Asian writers in the global market. In the past, many Asian writers were mainly read locally and their books rarely gained international readership. Of course, translation was a big challenge (it still is and will always be), but lack of marketing also hampered their successful reach outside Asia. Picador Asia has opened a new territory in the publishing industry in Asia, and hopefully many more Asian voices will be brought to the world in the years to come.

Do you have readers that write to you from China?

Yes, some are Chinese, some are foreigners living in China. A reputable Chinese publisher called Hua Cheng is going to publish February Flowers in China, which I’m very excited about.

You translated February Flowers yourself. What was that like? What were the greatest challenges? Did the rhythm of the sentences change?

When I began to write, I was determined that I would write in both Chinese and English, a promise I later found naïve. It took me three years to write February Flowers, my first creative writing piece in English, and upon completion, I realized that my Chinese was getting rusty, so I then spent half a year translating it into Chinese to keep up with my mother tongue. It wasn’t a direct translation, but more a rewriting, which was inevitable because the two languages are utterly different, different flows, rhymes, ways of saying things. A language is not just about vocabulary and grammar; it’s about the mindset. A British translator, Esther Tyldesley, once said that translating Chinese to English is like “putting Chinese clouds into an English box.” Translating English into Chinese renders a similar dilemma.

By the way, I wrote my second novel, Beautiful as Yesterday, in Chinese, then translated it into English myself. As for my third novel, I'm also writing it in Chinese first.

I love the cover for February Flowers. How involved were you in the other facets of publishing?

I assume you mean the US version. I’m glad you liked the cover. I have to say I didn’t like it the first time I saw it. Too sexy, too feminine, and too commercial in my taste, though I thought it was a beautiful cover. The cover I had in mind was more of minimalistic Zen style, like a Chinese ink-brush painting. I told my editor so and she explained to me how marketing worked. I figured I’d better focus on writing and leave the marketing to professionals.

I was quite involved in the process of publishing, especially while I was working with Picador Asia/Australia/UK and Simon & Schuster. From editing, galleys, jacket designing, blurb soliciting, to publicity scheduling, I was always updated with the latest and my input was always considered. I was less involved in the book’s publication by regional publishers but I had good communications with my translators.

I read in an article once that when you came to America you could finally acknowledge your "rage." What kind of rage did you feel?

I actually don’t remember ever having said that.

You live in California and said once that you didn't have much contact with other writers. Do you wish you had more? What do you think are the pros and cons of writing groups?

I was working in a stressful high-tech environment for many years before devoting myself to writing, so it hasn’t been easy for me to find time to socialize with other writers. Also, writing bilingually means that I have to spend a lot of time learning English while keeping up with Chinese, a very difficult language and you get rusty very fast if you don’t use it. Yet another obstacle is that I live in Silicon Valley, where literature is probably the last thing on people’s minds. Yes, I do wish I could hang out with other writers more but I have to accept reality too.

I rarely go to writing groups, so I cannot say much about them. Based on my limited experience, I think they can be very useful if you’re lucky enough to meet good critics and you know how to take criticism. And of course, it’s always nice to be with likeminded people. Writing is a lonely passion, so support is very much needed. But for people with thin skin and who want to please everyone, writing groups can be damaging.

Have you ever had someone tell you something about your writing that you hadn't realized, or articulated, yourself?

I was told that my writing was poetic in English, which I wasn’t aware of. I was also told that February Flowers should be made into a movie, directed by either Ang Lee or Wang Jiawei (known as Wong Kar Wai in the west).

Do you plan your novels out beforehand?

Yes. I have to feel excited about my stories and characters before I start to write and during those preparation days, I pretty much live with my main characters, trying to get to know as much as possible about them. Writing a novel to me is like designing a maze, every passage, twist, and turn needing to be planned in advance. There’ll be surprises here and there to demand alterations and modifications, but key plots usually remain mostly unchanged. Knowing the ending, even a tentative one, is a must for me to start a novel, though with my first two novels, I’ve changed both of their endings.

Can you tell us about your revision process? How do you go about revising?

I typically put aside my manuscript for two to three months before I start the revision. But it stays in the back of my mind all this time and I jot down notes whenever I have any, questions about each character, each scene, each chapter, and of course, the beginning and the ending. The day before I start revising, I read the book from cover to cover in one sitting as if it were new to me, then I go through my notes to see if they still make sense. After I deliver a manuscript to my agent or publisher, they’ll send me suggestions and questions, which will become the foundation for the next round of revision.

With February Flowers, how much changed as you went through subsequent drafts? Anything you look for in particular?

I had two big revisions and many small ones, changing both the beginning and the ending, adding several characters and incidents, deleting quite a few scenes I deemed unnecessary. I was mostly looking to see how well developed my characters were, and how tightly knitted the story was.

Lastly, do you think are there any particular challenges to being Asian and publishing in America? And, not to sound negative, any advantages?

I didn’t know anything about the publishing world until I began to seek representation. I approached many agents and got rejected many times, some telling me that though they liked the novel they didn’t think it would be viable in the US because it was too subtle. Stereotypes and ignorance (sometimes arrogance) towards foreign cultures, I think, are some of the biggest challenges minority writers face here. The situation has been improving though, which is encouraging. As for the writers themselves, staying true to self is always most rewarding.

At least one advantage I can think of: your work stands out because [of] who you are.

What is Flower?

2009-03-16T21:58:00.007-04:00

According to Chris Suellentrop of Slate, it is a videogame “set in an asphalt city, inside a room where all that can be heard is the rush of the traffic outside. In this grim landscape, the blur of car lights on the road seems to be the only man-made creation that doesn't come from a palette of grays. Sitting on a table in the room is a splash of color: a yellow flower. The instructions are simple: ‘[T]ilt the controller to soar; press any button to blow wind; relax, enjoy.’ So you do.”

The game’s publisher, thatgamecompany, describes “Flower” as “another concept that challenges traditional gaming conventions” because of how “the surrounding environment, most often pushed to the background in games, is pulled to the forefront and becomes the primary ‘character,’” and explains that “hopefully by the end of the journey, you change a little,” which sounds kind of like a desirable effect of literature, too, no? Which is maybe why Kellee Santiago, the president and co-founder, says it is intended to be “the video game version of a poem.”

If it is in fact like a poem—which I am wiling to entertain because Santiago has pink hair and seems cool—then how and why? “Flower” sounds like something that would relieve stress in the same way that New Age music might, but also in the same way that Windows Minesweeper might. If that is an accurate assessment of the game, and the game DOES resemble poetry, then what does this suggest about poetry? It is interesting especially that Santiago does not identify herself as a poet necessarily, but reaches for poetry as a way to describe the thing she has helped make. What’s that about?

Flannery

2009-03-12T01:17:00.023-04:00

Flannery O’Connor is one of the most visionary writers to ever walk the land, but there hasn’t been a major biography of her until now, with the arrival of Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, which I'm anxiously awaiting in the mail.

When I first read O’Connor, in college, I was knocked-out by her tragi-comic stories. I'd never read anything quite like it before and have read few things like it since. And behind her fantastically strange art, there was quite a peculiar life, one I’d known little about except for the more famous details: devout Catholicism, young death from lupus, love of peacocks. So I was happy to hear about Gooch’s book and also to come across a review by the ever-awesome Joy Williams in the NYT, where I learned that O’Connor sewed outfits for her chickens as a child, referred to her novels as “Opus Nauseous,” once sent Robert Lowell a five-foot long peacock feather, and believed “a writer with Christian concerns needed to take ever more violent means to get her vision across to them.” Those details alone were enough to make me hop over to Amazon and add Flannery to my virtual shopping cart.

But back to the NYT review. I was intrigued by the way Williams eschewed writing a review in the traditional sense—rather she conjured a wonderfully idiosyncratic and moving portrait of O’Connor, though if you read between the lines, she seemed to be dissing the book a little. Given all the conversation we’ve been having around here about reviewing, I’m wondering what people thought of her approach. Needlessly coy? Smart and artful? None of the above?

This paragraph never happened

2009-03-11T21:34:00.003-04:00

The recent discussion about the merits of public take-downs of poetry has put me in mind of a friend of mine who does music reviews for an online music company. His method of entertaining himself is to write the reviews of the CDs he doesn’t like in such a way as to subtly alert those who can read between the lines. I have idly read the blurbs on the back of poetry books for years in a like manner, searching for hints at the blurber’s true feelings about obligated blurbage. I think this aspect of poetry merchandizing would be more attractive if blurbs occasionally sunk to (or rose to) such heights:

As I said to my dry-cleaner, I, Correlative is so furiously irrelevant that it makes subatomic particles look torpid.

These poems took me back to my favorite dissociative episode with the surgical theatre soundtrack.

I predict that Metastic Chicken will have a longer shelf life than plutonium-infused jerky.

Postulate Agency formalizes head trauma and the power of its complicated oratory.

Never has the omission of personal pronouns been so electrifying.

The 3 and a half syllable lines of Five Quints have the delicate tint and ineffability of a Faberge egg executed in Silly Putty.

Nodule of Lower Forks gives gender all the subtlety and breadth of a Bazooka Joe comic strip.

The inverted ghazals of Tripoli Communiqué made me forget the sizzling line breaks of TV Guide.

Hatchet Job

2009-03-04T14:47:00.002-05:00

A fair amount of debate on this blog has centered on whether or not it’s “worth it” to write negative reviews, particularly of poetry. “So many people don’t read poetry anyway,” goes the (kind of lame) argument of those who say it is NOT worth it, “so why bother telling them not to?” I think you bother telling them not to because an art that cannot judge itself in an honest and clear-eyed fashion can never be taken seriously. So that is why I had to share this, the best negative review I’ve read so far in 2009, and one of the most well-executed negative reviews I’ve ever read period: “The Anti-Whitman or Out of Many Me, Me, Me : Matthew Dickman’s All-American Poem” by Michael Schiavo over on The Unruly Servant.

Contrary to the title of this post, it’s not a hatchet job, really. The writer isn’t writing it because he has some kind of personal vendetta or because he gets off on being mean. Schiavo likes to like things. But from where he sits, “The phenomenon of the Dickman twins, Matthew and Michael, and specifically Matthew’s first book, All-American Poem, is too powerful to ignore. The collection is so very bad and the method by which the Dickmans have foisted themselves upon the American poetry establishment—and, in turn, by which the poetry establishment has foisted them upon the American public—should be looked at closely.”

Agreement or disagreement with his assessment of Matthew Dickman’s critically acclaimed book and career aside, I admire the way he articulates his belief not just that Dickman’s book—and his attitude toward poetry itself—is essentially offensive and dangerous, but also how and why it is this way, and how and why it is bad not merely in and of itself but Bad for Poetry in General. As one of the commenters, Matthew W. Schmeer puts it, “You know what I like about this review? That fact that you went to great lengths to essentially say ‘this is shit.’”