Starting Out Late
I was talking to my friend A. at dinner last night about getting older as an artist & about the way age & reputation interact in the culture of the arts. A. is a sculptor. We started out by agreeing that in the current artistic culture, one has to “make it” at a fairly young [...]
Collage No. 2
This is a collage I’ve made over the last few days consisting of a two-page spread in the book I sewed together last week (with Carole’s help). The first page was not built up very much, but in these I did more layering. I’m still trying to work quickly without much premeditation using [...]
Reevaluating James Wright’s “A Blessing”
There is a poem in my second book that channels Wright’s voice so effectively that even someone who knew Wright’s work fairly well might mistake it for the real thing. James Wright’s poetry was once tremendously important to me, but these days, when I go back to it, the work feels sentimental to me. I’m [...]
Contemporary Short Stories, Music, Poetry
I really enjoyed this essay by Jean Thompson responding to Stephen King’s (predictable) take-down of the “literary” short story. The same argument about “elitism” & “difficulty” has been made (endlessly) about contemporary poetry. Not directly related, perhaps, but I was reminded of my old friend Davy Rakowski’s remarks about writing contemporary music:
I write music. Concert [...]
Writing a Paper
I haven’t written a conference paper in a long time. After I was promoted to full prof in 2003 I made a conscious decision to cut back on conferences, though in truth (with the exception of several years of AWP) I’d never been a big conference-goer. The MLA meeting always gave me the creeps. Too [...]
Online Fiction
Via the ever-loyal & reliable Riley Dog, I found this short story, “Flowers Pick Themselves,” by Scott Elmegreen, who appears to be a recent graduate of Princeton. It’s not hypertext (with the exception of one internal link), but it does make use of the computer screen as a space for reading. There is also a [...]
Best Name of a Place to Work
Donald Lamb is the fortunate soul who gets to print on his business card that he is the director of the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at the University of Chicago. I actually wrote a poem once about a cosmic gamma ray burst, though apparently this is a different phenomenon from the one described in [...]
Encouragement
The last three groups of poems I have sent out to journals have come back with the “This is not our standard rejection slip” rejection slip. I guess I should take this as a compliment, especially since I’ve gone quite a while without trying to publish poems, but it feels vaguely patronizing. (That’s not exactly [...]
Checking Things off the List
This morning I finished writing a proposal for a small grant. I also wrote the first sentence of a conference paper that I don’t have to deliver for five weeks. The first sentence is always — well, usually — the hardest.
Now I’m going to print out a bunch of my poems & look at them [...]
Critical Language
I finished my book review, at considerable psychic cost. It will appear in the next issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal. My problem with this sort of criticism is that it seeks to dominate the texts it studies. Though more subtle, I don’t see much functional difference between Blasing’s treatment of lyric poetry & [...]
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