Ash Bowen's poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. He lives and works in Texarkana, AR.
Jennifer Jabaily's poetry has appeared in Mannequin Envy and Fickle Muses. She's a second-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Ashley Anna McHugh is a third-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure, DIAGRAM and Memorious as well as other publications.
Johnathon Williams's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2009, the Pebble Lake Review, and Unsplendid. He lives in Fayetteville, AR, with his wife and daughters.
Today we’re happy to announce our nominations for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. This was our first year to nominate work, so we’d like to say thanks to all of the poets we’ve published in 2009, and to those of you who helped us choose our nominees.
A profile of small press publisher Jon Beacham, who handcrafts letterpress editions of American poetry from the 50s and 60s: “Beacham hand-sets every edition, aligning each individual letter into words, paragraphs and pages. A page can take up to two hours.”
Having taken a sudden interest in poetry broadsides, I went Googling last night for examples of good broadside design, but found instead these beautiful letterpress greeting cards from Sycamore Street Press. They’re enough to make me want to start my own print shop.
Something I’d like to see, from Deborah or any publisher of a print journal, is more specifics on the economics of print. How much, for instance, does it cost to print and distribute an issue of 32 Poems?
Ever wondered how much a writer makes from a bestselling mass market paperback? More than a year after the publication of her novel Twilight Fall, Lynn Viehl says she’s netted less than $25,000.
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.
A new ad campaign launched by Hyundai Card in subway stations in Seoul features mostly blank spaces. The company says the ads are a response to the loud, hectic nature of most subway advertising. Each ad is composed of a huge white panel that includes only a small icon and logo. More photos are available in this scan from Monocle.
Actor, writer, and illusionist Ricky Jay is interviewed about his many film projects at The A.V. Club, where he shares a charming anecdote about the time he almost put Pierce Brosnon’s eye out with a playing card.
Reading a poem entails, to a special degree, the act of paying attention; we are required to concentrate our minds, not only to the extent we do habitually on words as they pass in ordinary life but as we are impelled to do on words in the intricacies, frictions, and evasions of lyric form. That so much in contemporary life encourages us to do otherwise — to accept things as they are, whether for the sake of ignorance or convenience — suggests, finally, why it is that poetry matters. Although Coleridge may have been referring specifically to poetry when he devised the phrase, might “a more continuous and equal attention” offer not just a way of reading but of living as well?
This American Life’s Ira Glass advises beginning artists not to give up when their taste exceeds their ability — even if it takes a long, long time to get better. The part where he reviews and mocks his own early work is priceless. A good thing to watch on those days when the muse abandons you.
Banning the book isn’t going to change children’s behavior or somehow save them from the hard truths of teenage life–I find it very hard to believe that a child would hear a swear word for the very first time in the book, or that he or she would be made aware that teenagers sometimes have sexual relationships or smoke cigarettes. The only thing that can make an impact in the way children act is communication, and this book provides a platform for that.
As much as this is a milestone for VQR’s reporting, it is also a test. Will readers embrace something of this length online? Will compelling life-and-death scenarios told in spare, gripping prose be enough to bring new readers to our website—and keep them coming back for subsequent installments?
Allen Ginsberg’s 83 “mind writing slogans,” a list of writing tips that he famously shared with his friends and students, are now available online, thanks to Amy Hertz at The Huffington Post.
I have been sharing these slogans with the writers I’ve worked with over the years in different publishing houses, and for many authors, they have acted as catalysts, breaking through anything from solving a structural conundrum to bringing a long case of writer’s block to an end. When we started the books page, I contacted Ginsberg’s literary estate to see if we could post the slogans, and happily, the answer was “yes.”
At least half of my reading now takes place on my iPhone, mostly within Stanza (an eBook-reading application) or Instapaper (a wonderful app for saving and reading long articles found on the Web). Which is why I was surprised to see this quote from an Amazon exec:
But in the meantime, Amazon executives say that the limitations of the Kindle actually make it more attractive for reading.
“The Kindle is for people who love to read,” Mr. Freed of Amazon said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”
Perhaps I’m strange, but my habits are the exact opposite. I use my phone first for reading, second for email, and third for music listening. Phone calls are a distant fourth. In fact, the phone part of the iPhone is my least favorite function. All it ever does is interrupt my use of the device for other things.
O everyone's dead and the rain today is marvelous!
I drive to the gym, the streets are slick,
everyone's using their wipers, people are walking
with their shoulders hunched, wearing hoods
or holding up umbrellas, of course, of course,
it's all to be expected -- fantastic!
My mother's friend Annie, her funeral's today!
The writer Iris Chang, she just shot herself!
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you use the exclamation point. Click through for the full poem.
(via Ron Charles, who you should follow immediately)
Also, check out the breadcrumb trail that led me to that link: Ron Charles twittered two of the books on the list, so I asked Ron for a source link, to which Ron replied no sorry no link but it came from Harper’s index for December, whereupon I Googled for Harper’s index only to discover that Harper’s doesn’t post magazine content to the Web (if it’s behind a paywall, it’s not really on the Web — although the magazine will let you search old issues of the index), my resourceful self turning then to the Ebsco and LexusNexus Academic databases and discovering to much chagrin (what the hell, Harper’s?) that the most recent issue of Harper’s isn’t available in those very locked down, proprietary databases either, but finding instead a mention of the same information being available from the Christian Science Monitor, so Googling the Christian Science Monitor and finding this blog post, which itself linked to the original source.
In the spirit of “On Writing,” “Under the Dome” takes a lucid, commonsense approach that keeps it tight and energetic from start to finish. Hard as this thing is to hoist, it’s even harder to put down.
In a long interview at The Morning News, Tobias Wolff talks about the past and future of the short story, including the perennial question of why short stories aren’t more attractive to the modern attention span.
