If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I’d opened it a thousand times
to see if what I’d written here was right,
it’s all because I looked too long for you
to put in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want […]
Is it harder to write a sonnet than a great hip-hop verse?
The literal rules for writing sonnets, tankas, haikus etc. aren’t particularly hard to follow. It’s following the rules and actually saying something that’s hard. You can write a sonnet that makes no sense, and has no real power in the words. Likewise, you […]
Something to shoot for:
What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services:
1. Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read […]
Hamlet, the Facebook News Feed Edition. My favorite part: “Hamlet became a fan of daggers.” [via funkaoshi]
Did this one on the train from work—warming up for the Newspaper Blackout Contest.
Working from a Wall Street Journal I took from the office this afternoon.
George Orwell has a blog, or will starting on August 9, when each entry of the Orwell diaries will be put online 70 years later to the day. I think this will be awesome. [via maud newton]
I’ve been flipping through The Collected Prose of Robert Frost and came across this marvelous bit:
No one given to looking under-ground in spring can have failed to notice how a bean starts its growth from the seed. Now the manner of a poet’s germination is less like that of a bean in the ground than […]
Classical and pop reviews 2, Greg Sandow’s follow-up to his previous post on the topic:
Certainly we’re not immersed in classical music because we want to check whether the latest pianist to come along really knows what to do with Beethoven — whether her tempo in the slow movement of some sonata really is correct or […]
And I quote, HARPERCOLLINS TO PUBLISH COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS!, end quote.
How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, by Philip K. Dick:
The strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title “science fiction” is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star […]
I’ll call an end to the Stevens binge with this one. It’s been fun, especially for something that I took up on impulse. Sometimes it’s best to just pick something and start it and see where it leads.
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when […]
Going to a wedding this weekend.
The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and […]
Selections from a couple dozen pages of Googling…
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Super Mario Bros.
Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A. I linked this a while back (almost 2 years ago!). Very good essay.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ingmar Bergman
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetry Manuscript, some tips before you submit yours for publication.
Thirteen […]
I haven’t shared any of Wallace Stevens’ longer works that I like because it doesn’t seem like a good context for it. But I can’t overlook this one. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was the focus of one of my research papers back in college. I remember finding it when class was looking […]
Wallace Stevens reads The Snow Man. Jay Keyser reads it on NPR (less dreary, more enthusiasm) and praises it highly before dissecting a little bit. Keyser also has this crazy idea of writing the poem out on notecards and making a hanging mobile out of it a la Alexander Calder.
One must have a mind of […]
I have stolen
the idea
that I saw
in RSS
and which
you maybe have
already
seen today.
Forgive me
it is hilarious
and I
can’t help it.
[via austin kleon]
Alex Ross on Wallace Stevens:
Stevens’ grandeur is an inch away from absurdity, if not in the thick of it. This is by intention. He liked to deflate solemnity with silliness. His humor is his least noticed attribute, probably because it is so widespread. Even his titles—”The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”—undercut their […]
A good wake-up poem from Wallace Stevens:
The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.
Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.
The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.
Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.
That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave […]
I’ve been going back and reading Wallace Stevens lately. I first came across his poetry a while back in a college modernist lit class, and keep coming back every so often. For the next couple days I’m going to go on a little Stevens bender around here, sort of like my Frans Masereel festival a […]
What should we be without the sexual myth,
The human revery or poem of death?
Castratos of moon-mash—Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,
By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.
The whole race is a poet that writes down
The […]
Ira Glass curated this collection of nonfiction. The New Kings of Nonfiction is a selection of favorites that he’s had filed away for a while, articles that he keeps passing along to others. The focus is on good storytelling found in original reporting:
I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For one […]
“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
George Orwell’s essay Poetry and the Microphone talks about broadcasting verse over the radio, but I think there are some internet parallels here, another way to cross distances. People who are interested can find and enjoy just as easily as those who aren’t interested can move along. That combination of distance and intimacy affects how […]
Writers really do die young, especially poets, based on research in The Cost of the Muse [$, or use your library’s access]. [via maud newton]
Rob Giampietro is blogging via postcard this week. I got my first one this afternoon:
I tracked down John Haines’ poem, Return to Richardson, Spring 1981, which I first came across in the recent profile of composer John Luther Adams.
A short story written by the 6-year-old brother of one of my co-workers:
One day I woke up. I was haf chipmunk and bus. Then! I stareted to driv bep bep. Then I stareted to run wee. Thes is fun driving and runing. Then I crasht in to a treey. Ach
The third sentence is one of […]
There’s a really good, really funny interview with Richard Price in the Believer:
I have to be a little intimidated by what I’m writing about. I have to feel a little bit like I don’t think I can do this, I don’t think I can master this, I don’t think I can get under the skin […]
Today I spent some time sorting through a bunch of old documents, notes, letters, tickets, playbills, etc. I came across an old letter placed in the mailbox back home when I was away at college. A summer of cutting the grass earned me a bad reputation that Dad must have continued into the fall that […]
Based on some keyword research I did this afternoon. “ThunderCats, ho!” is a natural winner in Google search results. The long tail of enthusiasm extends to over 35 o’s, after which point I gave up.
The most interesting part is that HUGE drop in hits for the 3-o version. Among its neighboring easy-to-type competitors, “ThunderCats, hooo!” […]
A collection of 100 great opening lines. I wonder, for comics, what a collection of great opening panels would look like…? [via sbh]
The Well-Dressed Man With A Beard.
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a […]
Stefanie Posavec made a diagram of every sentence in On the Road organized by words per sentence. Here are more literary diagrams.
This fictional Paris Review Interview with “Constance Eakins” is a clever bit of promotion for The Mayor’s Tongue. Here’s a pdf of the interview [1.5mb]. Eakins started with comics:
Interviewer: Was it when you ran away from home that you began to feel that you were going to be a writer?
Eakins: No, I always wanted to […]
The Thurber & White send-up on the knee phenomenon:
Simply stated, the knee phenomenon is this: occasions arise sometimes when a girl presses her knee, ever so gently, against the knee of the young man she is out with… Often the topic of conversation has something to do with it: the young people, talking along pleasantly, […]
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