Tag: literature

Do you read poetry?

“In 2002, 12% of adults read poetry. 2008 it’s 8.3%.” 1

NOTES:
1) The Chronicle of Higher Education, accessed April 23, 2009, https://www.chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/article/?id=1312&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en (page no longer available)

// weird. fell asleep reading an ezra pound bio and woke up thinking i’m late for class.

// i didn’t know ezra pound had wisconsin connections… chippewa falls connections at that.

//decisions, decisions… eat lunch at my desk while editing audio recordings? or eat in the breakroom and read barzun’s house of intellect?

I’m embarrassed to say that since college… I’ve been so busy speechwriting for Kerry and then Barack that I haven’t been reading all the good literary stuff I used to read…

~Jon Favreau

NOTES:
1) Mark Warren, “What Obama’s 27-Year-Old Speechwriter Learned From George W. Bush,” Esquire, accessed December 20, 2008, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5339/barack-obamas-speech-writer-1208/

Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age?

A transatlantic debate is currently raging about whether a decade of staring at computer screens, sending emails and text messages, and having our research needs serviced instantly by Google and Wikipedia, has taken a terrible toll on our attention, until our brains have been reconfigurated and can no longer adjust the tempo of our mental word-processing to let us read a book all the way through.

NOTES:
1) Andrew Cowan, “Books special: Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age?,” The Independent, accessed September 18, 2008, https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/features/books-special-can-intelligent-literature-survive-in-the-digital-age-926545.html

A stack of books arrived


The magazine editor asked me to write reviews. Can’t wait to start reading… and then writing.

The elegant lie

Sunday, I had the opportunity to sit in the WPVM studios during a broadcast of WordPlay. Katherine Min read from Secondhand World; a lyrical novel of sorts. Sebastian Matthews discussed the autobiographical elements of the novel. Katherine Min responded, “Fiction is the elegant lie that leads to the truth.” And I wrote it down in my notebook along with other jewels I gathered from observing the recording of WPVM’s WordPlay.

What editors do

From The New Yorker:

Editing takes a variety of forms. It includes the discovery of talent…. It can be a matter of financial and emotional support in difficult times…. an editor ordinarily tries to facilitate a writer’s vision, to recommend changes… that best serve the work…. editorial work is relatively subtle, but there are famous instances of heroic assistance: Ezra Pound cutting T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in half when the poem was still called “He Do the Police in Different Voices”; Maxwell Perkins finding a structure in Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel” and cutting it by sixty-five thousand words.

Link.

Warren Wilson College reading — review

Brief review of last night’s Warren Wilson College MFA faculty reading.

Marianne Boruch read first and from her new book that she didn’t know had been published and available at the book store. Always a delight to hear her read. Poems read include: “Still Life,” “New Paper,” “A Musical Idea,” and others.

Charles D’Ambrosio read a lengthy, intriguing piece that I assume is the opening to a novel. When he finished, I wanted to shout, “What happens next?”

Van Jordan read about a half dozen poems both old and new (from his recent book). His personae poems and eulogies were delightful and haunting.

Michael Martone read one of his “contributor notes” from his book Michael Martone: fiction. You would have had to been there to understand the unique humor of his story. As one amazon.com reviewer put it, “Mind-bending multiple views of Martone’s real and/or imagined lives, written in 2-3 page faux contributor’s notes.” His piece was hilarious and a great way to end a rich reading.

Maurice Manning’s poetry lecture summary and thoughts

As promised, some highlights from yesterday’s Maurice Manning poetry lecture.

The lecture centered on “Some Thoughts on Sympathy.” Maurice began by defining sympathy. First, it is not the “I feel your pain” emotion that is manipulative, fake and inaccessible — a show of feeling rather than creation of feeling (i.e. the desire that you feel me feeling your pain). Sympathy defined as honest feeling, common understanding — as in “two beasts bound together” like oxen — of suffering.

Maurice cited the Romantic period as the historical place where sympathy in literature is born — where the outward reaching heart surveys the humanity of the world and returns to the mind where it is changed, sympathetic, and reaches outward again. “Isn’t that what we seek in poetry, to be changed?” Maurice asked. From there he presented the two-step machinery of Romanticism — heart and mind cycle — using the physics examples of sympathetic motion in plucked strings and pendulum motion.

This is the part of the lecture where I was deeply engaged. He went deep into physics and linguistics to make the point that sympathy occurs naturally — it is part of our nature. It is the transfer of energy from one property to another, one person to another, from the page to the spirit. This is the kind of lecture that challenges me, resonates with me, makes me want to go deep. I’m starved for it.

Maurice used Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” as examples of sympathy in poetry. After an in depth analysis of the linguistic patterns of “To a Mouse,” he concluded his lecture by stating that the poets he referenced found the self in these poems. “We’re always yoked to something…” he said. “The mysterious force of the poem stays with us even after we have closed the book.”

The applause was loud and seemed not to affect him as he paper clipped his lecture notes. As the applause subsided he quietly stated, “I guess it’s lunch now.”

Maurice Manning’s poetry lecture…

…was ARGH-sum!

I arrived at Warren Wilson College’s Fellowship Hall a few minutes early and waited for the earlier session to conclude. First one out the door was none other than Steve Orlen. I wonder if he read my prediction? More interesting, how did he make it from the front row of a packed hall to be the first one out into the bright, cold morning? He looked at me fidgeting with my gloves. As he fished a cigarette out of its package he told me I should put the gloves away and get in there so I won’t miss the lecture. I smiled, said thanks and headed into the bustling hall.

I’ll provide highlights from Maurice Manning’s poetry lecture later. Gotta get my mind back into work mode. Just discovered that after two rounds of proofreading the word “foreword” was misspelled on a manuscript that is en route to the printer. ARGH. So much for quality control. Then again, I’ve been looking at this manuscript for months and it wouldn’t surprise me if the author’s name is misprinted.

Did any of ya’ll out there make it to Maurice’s lecture?

Strange Familiar Place comic series

It has been awhile since mentioning a comic strip I’ve written and illustrated. The Indie has published the series since December. It is called Strange Familiar Place and features a magazine A & E editor (at least in the first two strips) and the main character Hudson Stillwater, a graphic designer.

Strange Familiar Place also features Heather (Hudson’s wife) and presents a slice-of-life drama of living and working (and losing a job) in a cultural creative urban mountain city (or at least a city that looks a lot like Asheville).

Published in The Indie, March 1, 2007
Published in The Indie, March 16, 2007

Beginning in mid to late April, Strange Familiar Place will be illustrated by someone else. I’ll still be the principal writer, but I hired an illustrator that I am confident will present the visual narrative with a higher quality of art.

Previous posts on this topic: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Review of last night’s public reading

A quick review of last night’s Warren Wilson College public reading at the Fellowship Hall behind the Chapel. I arrived early and chatted with a local poet who is enrolled in the MFA program. He let me read some of his poems as we discussed future Flood Fine Art Center poetry readings–more on that later.

I don’t remember the first reader. She is a novelist and, with all due respect, I couldn’t really get into her prose. It didn’t interest me in the least. I’m sure she is a good writer, but her story just didn’t engage me at all.

The highlight of the evening for me was Mark Jarman’s reading. He read from a forth coming book titled “Epistles” that evoked such lines as: “to some, bliss is when the body becomes words…” and “God has committed you to memory…” Jarman read each line as if delivering a homily; consistent, calculating the gravity of each word, line, poem. This is my first exposure to Mark Jarman so I don’t know if he always reads in that manner or not. But he reminded me of the way a clergyman reads a creed or prayer or scriptures. He doesn’t look up from his text until he is done. And in that case it is a quick glance to where his chair is located. I’m drawn to his new material and look forward to reading his book when it is made available.

I anticipated hearing Stephen Dobyns but there was a change in schedule. I notice Mr. Dobyns isn’t reading at all. I hope he is still doing his lecture on “The Nature of Metaphor.”

Anyway, it was a pleasure to listen to Percival Everett read from a new manuscript–a non sequential novel. Mr. Everett displays a keen wit with ideas and words and reads through his work rather quickly–almost in a manner that suggests he is reading it more for himself that the audience–that sometimes I felt like I missed essential parts of his story. So it was profound when he stumbled over a word, paused for an long silence, and announced “sorry, I just found a typo and I don’t have a pencil to correct it.” He laughed and continued reading at the same pace as before the discovery of a typo. I’ve only recently been introduced to his work and am interested in reading more of it.

UPDATE: MFA Program Public Schedule

Updated schedule
As stated, the schedule is subject to change. However, Amy Grimm, of Warren Wilson College, just e-mailed me an updated schedule for the next two weeks.

I’ll post something about last night’s reading later today.

The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
Public Schedule – Winter 2007

The public is welcome to attend the morning lectures and evening readings in fiction and poetry offered during the Warren Wilson College Master of Fine Arts Program for Writers’ winter residency. Events last approximately one hour. Admission is free. For more information, call the MFA Office:
(828) 771-3715.

Readings will begin at 8:15 pm in the Fellowship Hall behind the Chapel unless indicated otherwise.

The schedule is subject to change.

READINGS – 8:15pm
by MFA faculty and graduating students

Friday, January 5
Jennifer Grotz, Kevin McIlvoy, Brooks Haxton, Danzy Senna

Saturday, January 6
Victor LaValle, Betty Adcock, Megan Staffel, Steve Orlen

Sunday, January 7—in Gladfelter, Canon Lounge
Rick Barot, Adria Bernardi, Marianne Boruch, Robert Boswell

Monday, January 8, 5:30-7:00pm
Reception and faculty reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café, 55 Haywood Street, Asheville

Tuesday, January 9
Charles D’Ambrosio, Tony Hoagland, David Haynes, Ellen Bryant Voigt

Wednesday, January 10
Maurice Manning, Debra Spark, Martha Rhodes, Peter Turchi

Thursday, January 11
Graduating student readings: Leslie Blanco, Thad Logan, Anna Clark, Kathy Alma Peterson,
Jason Githens

Friday, January 12 (4:30pm, followed by Graduation Ceremony)
Graduating student readings: Jeneva Stone, Catherine Brown, Catherine Williamson, Bora Reed

Faculty Lectures – Winter 2007
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
In the Fellowship Hall behind the College Chapel unless indicated otherwise.

Friday, January 5, 10:30am
DEBRA SPARK: Size Matters

Feel like you’re writing little stories—domestic dramas or workingman’s woes—when you should be attempting something…ahem…bigger? Something more in keeping with your political outrage and general horror when you read the daily newspaper? After all, isn’t the great fiction of our day about the great crises of our day? Or shouldn’t it be? Well, holy Mrs. Dalloway, maybe the problem isn’t your lack of ambition, but how you’re thinking about size. This will be a lecture on magnitude in fiction, on three, maybe four, novels in which the principal characters intersect with something significantly larger than their selves, and not in the way that all fiction does this—the individual as a representative of the whole, the world globbing itself in a drop of dew—but through a true intersection. How do the novels incorporate the big world and its big concerns, while avoiding the obvious pitfalls of a historical or overtly political novel?

Saturday, January 6, 10:30 am
ELEANOR WILNER: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,
a poem must ride on its own melting….” (Frost)

A talk about the crucible of the imagination, its transforming powers, how a poem finds its own way as it goes, and the different ways that poets may conceive of that “melting.”

Sunday, January 7, 10:30am
KEVIN McILVOY: Making, Masking, and
Gladfelter Hall, Canon Lounge Unmasking “God” in Fiction

In this lecture we’ll take up the uniquely challenging methods of portraying “God” as a figure in fiction. Leo Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” will be our primary focus, but we will also refer to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”

Tuesday, January 9, 10:30am
RICK BAROT: The First Herbert

At the January 2006 residency, Jen Grotz presented a wonderful primer on Zbigniew Herbert and his poetry of “stratagems” and “crimes.” In this lecture, I’ll discuss the work of George Herbert—the ingenious formal stratagems which are signatory of his poems, and the passionate crimes of doubt that is the subject of those poems. Herbert lived from 1593 to 1633, deep in the metaphysical current of English Poetry. He has often been thought of as the minor poet among the metaphysicals. He is not minor. The poems are feats of engineering, as inventively modern as microchips. And they seem modern, too, in their unruly interiorities. The believer in the full flush of his belief feels a “strong regard and awe,” Herbert says. We’ll look at how that “strong regard” led to Herbert’s rigorous, beautiful poems.

Wednesday, January 10, 10:30am
BROOKS HAXTON: Else Lasker-Schüler

This lecture will locate the German Jewish poet, Else Lasker-Schüler in her time and place, present details of her biography, in its cultural and political context, discuss her vision, and offer new translations of a number of her poems.

Thursday, January 11, 10:30am
STEPHEN DOBYNS: The Nature of Metaphor

Friday, January 12, 9:30am
JENNIFER GROTZ: Flung Speech

Emily Dickinson wrote: Prayer is the little implement
Through which men reach
Where presence is denied them.
They fling their speech

By means of it in God’s ear;
If then He hear,
This sums the apparatus
Comprised in prayer.

“If then He doesn’t hear,” one could add, “This sums the apparatus /Comprised in poetry.”
My lecture will consider some similarities in the construction of poetry and prayer. There is no advanced reading required; a handout will be provided.

Friday, January 12, 10:45am
ADRIA BERNARDI: The China Night-Light and the Bottle-Tree: Visual Image and Noise in Eudora Welty

“. . . I know equally well that the bottle-tree appearing in the story is a projection from my imagination; it isn’t the real one except in that it is corrected by reality. The fictional eye sees in, through and around what is really there.”
“Finding a Voice,” in One Writer’s Beginnings

The movement between the inner and the outer, and the primacy of the visual image, are central to the poetics of Eudora Welty. The title of her collection of essays, The Eye of the Story, places the visual image and the act of seeing centrally to her creative process.

I’ve been considering Welty stories in terms of this progression from a Rilke poem, “And I would like to listen in and listen out into you, into the world, into the woods.” The progression, from “To Say Before Going to Sleep,” involves movement from the internal to the external on the behalf of the other. In the case of Welty’s stories, the progression involves a narrator looking into a character, looking out through that character, into the world, or into the metaphorical woods of that character. Rapidly, sometimes in the course a single paragraph, the reader will listen into the depths, only to then shift into or perceive an active world: maybe little gestures of kindness or bravery, more likely pettiness, half-truths, lies, mockery, cowardliness, cruelty—variations of behavior by, as Katherine Anne Porter called them, “Miss Welty’s ‘little human monsters.’” With another quick shift, the story may then enter that same character’s metaphorical woods. Welty’s narrators see and listen into in all of these four places on behalf of a wide spectrum of others.

I’ll be considering the visual images at the transition points where the point of view or level of consciousness shifts. I’m exploring whether the Rilke progression may be useful in considering one’s own work, and how it is that the visual image offers the opportunity to move into another way of seeing, thus finding another place within the story. I’ll be talking about the sensory images of sound in the Welty stories, specifically, those that relate to noise. As in the Rilke poem, visual and aural images sometimes occur together in the stories at key points. Primarily, I’ll be talking about “Death of a Traveling Salesman.” I’ll also refer to “No Place for You, My Love,” “A Memory,” “June Recital,” “Where is the Voice Coming From?” and her essay, “Place in Fiction.”

The MFA Program schedule of lectures and readings

The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
Public Schedule – Winter 2007

The public is welcome to attend the morning lectures and evening readings in fiction and poetry offered during the Warren Wilson College Master of Fine Arts Program for Writers’ winter residency. Events last approximately one hour. Admission is free. For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-3715.

Readings will begin at 8:15 pm in the Fellowship Hall behind the Chapel unless indicated otherwise.

The schedule is subject to change.

READINGS – 8:15pm
by MFA faculty and graduating students

Wednesday, January 3
Maud Casey, Debra Allbery, Alexander Parsons, Eleanor Wilner

Thursday, January 4
Stacey D’Erasmo, Mark Jarman, Danzy Senna, Stephen Dobyns

Friday, January 5
Jennifer Grotz, Percival Everett, Brooks Haxton, Kevin McIlvoy

Saturday, January 6
Victor LaValle, Betty Adcock, Megan Staffel, Steve Orlen

Sunday, January 7—in Gladfelter, Canon Lounge
Rick Barot, Adria Bernardi, Marianne Boruch, Robert Boswell

Monday, January 8, 5:30-7:00pm
Reception and faculty reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café, 55 Haywood
Street, Asheville

Tuesday, January 9
Charles D’Ambrosio, Tony Hoagland, David Haynes, Ellen Bryant Voigt

Wednesday, January 10
Maurice Manning, Debra Spark, Martha Rhodes, Peter Turchi

Thursday, January 11
Graduating student readings: Leslie Blanco, Thad Logan, Anna Clark, Kathy
Alma Peterson,
Jason Githens

Friday, January 12 (4:30pm, followed by Graduation Ceremony)
Graduating student readings: Jeneva Stone, Catherine Brown, Catherine
Williamson, Bora Reed

Faculty Lectures
by Warren Wilson MFA faculty follows:

The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
In the Fellowship Hall behind the College Chapel unless indicated otherwise.

Thursday, January 4, 11:15am
MARIANNE BORUCH: Is and Was

Friday, January 5, 10:30am
DEBRA SPARK: Size Matters

Saturday, January 6, 10:30 am
ELEANOR WILNER: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, a poem must ride on its own melting….” (Frost)

Sunday, January 7, 10:30am
KEVIN McILVOY: Unmasking “God” in Fiction

Tuesday, January 9, 10:30am
RICK BAROT: The First Herbert

Wednesday, January 10, 10:30am
BROOKS HAXTON: Else Lasker-Schüler

Thursday, January 11, 10:30am
STEPHEN DOBYNS: The Nature of Metaphor

Friday, January 12, 9:30am
JENNIFER GROTZ: Flung Speech

Friday, January 12, 10:45am
ADRIA BERNARDI: The China Night-Light and the Bottle-Tree: Visual Image and Noise in Eudora Welty

Jaye Bartell poetry reading at The New French Bar

Jaye Bartell

Here’s some images from last week’s farewell poetry reading at The New French Bar. Sorry I didn’t post these sooner. I have been cur-AY-zee BIZ-ee (that’s listless lingo for “crazy busy”).

Audrey Hope

If you missed it… too, bad. The place was packed–standing room only! The entire Asheville literary scene was there… OK, maybe not the entire literary scene. Jeff Davis, Keith Flynn, Sebastian Matthews (BTW, congrats on your Pushcart nomination), Chall Gray and many more came to enjoy a night of poetry and say good-bye to poet Jaye Bartell.

Ingrid Carson

Jaye invited several local poets to read and then he closed out the evening by reading from his chapbooks and yes–his beer coaster poems. His beer coaster poems are scheduled to be published in April 2008 by someone who I can’t remember. Anyone remember?

Carolina Mountains Literary Festival

Carolina Mountains Literary Festival
15-16 September 2006
Burnsville, NC

Density of Poetry

Malaprop’s Gig in 4 days!

At supper tonight, a friend was telling me that she is looking forward to attending Thursday night’s poetry/music gig. But she couldn’t understand why I chose to read/write poetry.

“Why not stories?” she asked.

I told her that I do write in other genres but I chose poetry as my concentration because it required deep thought to write and read. Not that prose is easy to write, but poetry buries textured truths in metaphor which require those who seek it to search deliberately. What may be investigated in a novel is compressed in 32 lines of a poem.

The German word for poetry is Gedichte or Dichtung. The definition of poetry in German encompasses the idea of compression or density–to condense a thought or theme. The English understanding of poetry embraces beauty and harmony–graceful elegance.

My hope is that in four days I present condensed ideas in a lyrical framework.