Our task is to assemble. Literary reviews provide no more viable standards than I.Q. tests or annual income. They are simply another alternative; an attempt to bind temperament and action through language. Without resorting to epilogues or manifestoes, we want to embellish those proper nouns and common verbs which have made our culture too often a vehicle for minor aspirations and mock debate. It will be a modern enterprise, perhaps embarrassingly so, in that we are justified by little save our own potential. We’re getting dressed up to celebrate the fact we’re still looking.

A Public Space, by the way, is a beautiful print journal. (And its web site is one of the few that takes care to style CLMP’s submissions manager to match the rest of its design.)

via The Morning News

Ida is generally a poet, as you can see from a recent poem at Unsplendid. She’s also good to have around when you’re looking for the 5th Avenue Apple Store in NYC at 2 a.m.

Q: [...] As someone who’s been writing for over 40 years, where do you still find inspiration?

A: The only resource, ultimately, is great works of art. The music or poetry or building or movie you love. Or will love. Art inspires art

Redheaded Stepchild’s guidelines are interesting: the editors only want poems that have been rejected by other publications. Also, the site displays a hit counter next to each poem in that issue’s table of contents.

A nut graph from Shirrmacher:

What did Shakespeare, and Kafka, and all these great writers — what actually did they do? They translated society into literature. And of course, at that stage, society was something very real, something which you could see. And they translated modernization into literature. Now we have to find people who translate what happens on the level of software. At least for newspapers, we should have sections that review software in a different way, at least the structures of software.

And a response from psychologist Daniel Kahneman:

The interview vividly expresses the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath.

The other day, I was talking with someone about all the original poetry you can find online now, and she asked me how I keep up with it all. And this was a sincere question, her assumption being (maybe because I do Linebreak and this blog and other such things, and because she knows me as a “computer person”) that keeping up with it all is even possible, possible for anyone, which of course it isn’t — not even in a field as relatively limited as contemporary English poetry.

In some ways, creating Swindle was an exercise in admitting this — that most days I don’t have time to even go and check the handful of places I trust to post new poems online, much less look for new ones — and in looking for a way for the Internet to help me solve a problem that the Internet itself created. Think about those old science fiction movies where people had robotic assistants — big, bulky machines that followed them around serving as maids or security guards, doing some kind of manual labor. The machine assistant I need isn’t a physical entity that helps around the house — it’s a virtual one that lives in Google’s cloud, monitoring the entire real time information stream, and letting me know when someone posts a Jack Gilbert poem I haven’t seen yet.

None of that is half as smart as the stuff waiting behind the link. Really, go read.

[Kate] Christensen, who works out of her home in Tribeca, says a lot of her writing time is spent “not writing.” Most mornings, she does housework, writes emails and talks on the phone to avoid facing her work. In the past, she’s played 30 games of solitaire before typing a first sentence.

How long, do you suppose, before this kind of editing is acknowledged as a primary rather than secondary creative act?

We drink like this everyday in the Linebreak office. Or would, if Linebreak had an office. (via Kottke)