Rigoberto Gonzalez on Eduardo C. Corral

"The sophistication of "Slow Lightning," however, is that its stunning imagery, its serious treatment of craft, as well as its homage to a Southwestern culture and landscape that predates its life as a U.S. territory, will endow the book with a timeless quality. This is indeed a classic in the making." 

Suburban Gothic

Have you picked up Claudine Moreau's Dark Machines yet? Go get yrs!

The Practical Uses of Poetry

"Take note, Imogene, and spit out your gum!"

*

♥

Closet High School Girlfriend, by Brent Goodman

*

♥

I know it’s not easy being an artist. I know the gulf between creation and commerce is so tremendously wide that it’s sometimes impossible not to feel annihilated by it. A lot of artists give up because it’s just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that by and large does not support its artists. But the people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They’ve taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists, that keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone else who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too.

Wow

Tonight!

...a full Moon of rare size and beauty will rise in the east at sunset. It's a super "perigee moon"--the biggest in almost 20 years.

*

Can I get a witness?!

There are skeptics, of course, including some parents, many preschool teachers, and even a few policy-makers. Shouldn't very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity—abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run? Two forthcoming studies in the journal Cognition—one from a lab at MITand one from my lab at UC-Berkeley—suggest that the doubters are on to something.

♥

"Eduardo C. Corral graciously agreed to answer a few questions in the wake of his recent good news. Letras Latinas Blog sent him six question..."

*

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

I cannot recall a novel written by a man that was described as domestic, as if the male life within a family and household necessarily transcends the bounds of the family home, means something more profound about life itself perhaps. I have had conversations with young women writers about their fear that their novels will be considered “Chick Lit”. They are concerned about whether their titles will doom them to the category. What is the male equivalent? “Rooster-Lit?” “Dick-Lit?” And who fits the category? Who would want to? There used to be “tough guy” fiction, “hard-boiled” fiction, but somehow those are not pejorative. It’s little like the way that the culture has no male counterpart to the term slut. I suppose the closest thing is stud, but that’s not such a bad thing in most circles, however sad that might be.

It goes to the larger question about how women writers are viewed and treated on the American literary landscape. As I mentioned at the onset, I live a rather isolated artistic life, away from that world, so I’m no good source for statistics and verifiable claims about anything. But my friends at Vida, an organization of women writers, were kind enough to supply me with their numbers, numbers that I will not recite here. Except to say that my biggest wonder is how it is that, with women being seventy percent of the book buying audience, women writers receive only twenty percent of book review attention. Read that previous sentence again. I won’t get into the language of reviews and discussion of books by women, because of my own ignorance, my admitted lack of travel though the book world. But much of the language is so ubiquitous that even I can’t miss it.

A Play by Play of Claudia Rankine's Response to Tony Hoagland at AWP Washington, DC

The audience clapped—many people in the audience clapped—and Rankine began her remarks. She said, “I don’t like to use the word ‘racist.’” She discussed how using that word immediately catapults the speaker, if black, into an “angry black person” stereotype. She described her first experience of reading the poem as one of not even anger or offense but of shock, bewilderment; as she read she asked, “What? What?” If the “what” is a rhetorical question, it can end there, in the silence that answers it. But Rankine mobilized the question: Where was she supposed to locate herself in relationship to this poem? Was she the “big, black girl”? She contacted Hoagland, a colleague of hers at the time, to ask him about the poem. He said, “This poem is for white people.” And next in my notes I have the line, which Rankine may or may not have said immediately following Hoagland’s statement: “Who let America in the room?” The conversation was now about much more than an individual, offending poem.

The Count 2010 - Vida

The truth is, these numbers don’t lie. But that is just the beginning of this story. What, then, are they really telling us? We know women write. We know women read. It’s time to begin asking why the 2010 numbers don’t reflect those facts with any equity.

Who assigned you that rank?

In 1964, a twenty-three-year-old poet was arrested by the Leningrad K.G.B. and charged with the crime of “malicious parasitism.” His name was Josef Brodsky. One Communist Party newspaper denounced his poetry as “pornographic and anti-Soviet”; another noted archly that he wore “velvet pants.” The authorities permitted him to testify in court, but they soon regretted their decision, and their failure to prevent a brave woman named Frida Vigdorova from taking notes on the proceedings. Vigdorova wrote down this exchange—the most famous legal exchange in Russia since Stalin’s show trials—and the transcript was smuggled to the West:

JUDGE: And what is your profession?
BRODSKY: Poet. Poet and translator.
JUDGE: And who told you that you were a poet? Who assigned you that rank?
BRODSKY: No one. (Non-confrontationally.) Who assigned me to the human race?
JUDGE: And did you study for this?
BRODSKY: For what?
JUDGE: To become a poet? Did you try to attend a school where they train [poets] . . . where they teach . . .
BRODSKY: I don’t think it comes from education.
JUDGE: From what, then?
BRODSKY: I think it’s . . . (at a loss) . . . from God.

The judge sentenced Brodsky to five years of internal exile. Living in a village near the Arctic Circle, he crushed rocks and hauled manure by day. At night, he wrote, and he improved his English by reading Auden and Frost. Brodsky’s mentor, the great Silver Age poet Anna Akhmatova, laughed at the K.G.B.’s shortsightedness. “What a biography they’re fashioning for our red-haired friend!” she said. “It’s as if he’d hired them to do it on purpose.”

Read more

Happy Birthday, Emily!

Poem 580: Split the Lark

*

2010 Poetry Collections by Latino/Latina Poets

LETRAS LATINAS BLOG: A year in Poetry: 2010 (in no particular order:

*

Word

THAT’s what’s really unacceptable, and I believe that’s what MFA students are continuously flogged for, even by other writers, even by fucking FACULTY MEMBERS of MFA programs! Other writers flog the MFA’ers to keep that charge from coming back to them. It’s the capitalist culture at large that wants us to think Art is unjustified, or must be justified, and that to spend a few years on Art is somehow evidence of sloth, indolence, or unacceptable self-indulgence....

All writers, all Artists, those in academia and those outside, should all stand shoulder to shoulder in pursuing the useless expenditure of Art, whether that uselessness takes the form of MFA studies, or community workshops, or slams, or presses, or Youtube reading tours, or anarchic in-house performances, or library reading series, or self-published blogs,or just writing a poem in your notebook, crumpling it up and trashing it, if $65million dollar jets is what ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’ and ‘usefulness’ and ‘care for form and function’ look like.

Me too

One thing that was so wonderful about starting to blog back in 2004 was that it felt like being part of a movement, writers taking to keyboards to connect with each other and exchange ideas. Of course, this was before Facebook, before annual conferences became huge and numerous, before our world decidedly changed. But what I miss most about that time is the openness--we were all in this together, creating together, encouraging each other.

The Madness of Motherhood, Erica Jong

Giving up your life for your child creates expectations that are likely to be thwarted as the child, inevitably, attempts to detach. Nor does such hyper-attentive parenting help children to become independent adults. Kids who never have to solve problems for themselves come to believe that they can't solve problems themselves. Sometimes they fall apart in college.

Quick

Here's my facebook status from yesterday:

home and still beaming from her wonderful experience at William Paterson University -- such insightful students, so curious, such great questions! Teaching the graduate workshop was amazing. I confess, I never really understood the vocation to teach, but I get it now.

An accurate summary and it still applies today.

__

I came home to Simmons Buntin's new book, Bloom. It's a beautiful book, beautifully made. I'm looking forward to reading and reviewing it.

__

I'm so ready for the weekend.

__

And, yes. Exactly:

A couple of thoughts about winning & recognition, occasioned by some of my less literary passions. First, Gretchen Jones won Project Runway with a show of what could politely be called Sedona-Wear, highly commercial but yawningly predictable southwestern casual clothes. Mondo Guerra, the pint-sized Pinocchio of Denver, came in second with a show that demonstrated infinitely greater range, sophistication and creativity. Even third-place finisher Andy South’s collection, a little too safe to be as avant-garde as some of his warrior women costumes had been in the past, put on a better show than Jones, who might not have made in it to Fashion Week at all had the judges not applied an unwritten “one finalist must be a woman” rule, thereby dropping the effortless chic of Michael Costello. A poll in the LA Times showed viewers preferring Guerra’s collection with about 80% of the vote, Jones in second with just under 12% and South at 7%.

Watch This: "My Own Eyes"

Max Greenstreet's movie is a work of art about art.

As well as the most amazing book trailer I have ever seen.