“What happens when everyone’s a poet?” asked Marjorie Perloff in the Boston Review. Now, Mike Chasar and Jed Rasula debate what that popularity might actually mean for contemporary poetry.
Populist Poetics
40 Towns, An Experiment in Literary Journalism
Jeff Sharlet had a challenge for his creative nonfiction students at Dartmouth College. Sensing that journalism had become too “dull,” too mired in a “culture of professionalism” divided “between reporting and ‘storytelling,’” Sharlet asked his students who didn’t “know [any] better” to create a magazine of their own. The result, 40 Towns, embraces “the right conditions” of literary creation – immersion, journalism, regionalism and “a term of revision” – to present a “collection of documents, artifacts of real life” about the Upper Valley.
●
●
The Night I Am Heading Into
In Case You Missed It: This email exchange between playwright Sarah Ruhl and the late Max Ritvo, whose Four Reincarnations is out next week: "I think my mind is a set of lapis lazuli steps falling apart, and all I want is to be told 'it’s alright, we rebuild it every day' But what is the it? What is it? And if I was vaporized by a ray gun but was then replaced instantly by an identical person with an identical filigree of nerves shot through with identical sparks cased in an identical skull—would it still be me? I don’t think so. I don’t know if even a perfect Reincarnation would be a Reincarnation to me, in my heart. I’m starting to feel like Theseus and I just want my fucking ship out of the dry-dock and back on the water."
●
●
Who You Calling “Late,” Buddy?
Behold the launch of Bloom, a fabulous new website (founded by our own Sonya Chung) that pays attention to older writers who meet her definition of “Late Bloomers.” (In case you’re wondering, the site spun off from our own Post-40 Bloomers series).
●
●
“Sing About Me”
"Good kid m.A.A.d city is a memento mori haunted by dead and living ghosts...When they are pieced together as a sequence they act like Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope: they give us the impression that from these clips we are watching a black boy learn to fly above it all." Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah looks at hip-hop, Kendrick Lamar, and the tradition of the black blues narrative.
●
●
Next Step: Skynet Becomes Self-Aware
James Harriman-Smith wants to know what humans can learn from a computer's reading of Shakespeare's plays. As it turns out, there's quite a bit.
Notable News Items
I've got another post up about Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers at the LBC Blog. I've been going back and forth with Sam (of Golden Rule Jones), so check out his posts, too.Calvin Trillin talks turducken and other things Cajun in the most recent issue of National Geographic. The piece is typical Trillin, funny and featuring mouth-watering descriptions of various regional delicacies. (Much like the articles collected in a favorite book of mine, Trillin's Feeding a Yen)Jim Crace discusses his Guardian column, The Digested Read, "The idea of rewriting a book in the style of the author in just 500 or so words is a gift to any satirist, and it remains the only outlet in the print media where publishers' hype always gets treated with the irreverence it deserves." A collection of the columns is out in EnglandThe CS Monitor takes a look at the self-publishing craze: "IUniverse, which prints several thousand books annually, reports submissions are up 17 percent in the first six months of this year."A couple of new McSweeney's offerings that you may or may not have seen already. Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things... is anthology for young adults, edited by Lemony Snicket and with stories by Nick Hornby, John Scieszka and Neil Gaiman, among others. Meanwhile Issue #17 of their Quarterly Concern is also out. According to Amazon: "Issue 17 is not an ordinary issue of McSweeney's. It is, however, an ordinary bundle of mail, stacked and rubber-banded, containing the usual items: a recent issue of Yeti Researcher, a sausage-basket catalog, a flyer for slashed prices on multi-user garments, a couple letters... the usual. Also: the debut of a DVD quarterly, featuring never-before-seen work by Spike Jonze and David O. Russell. Also: stories."
●
●
Forty-Four
To mark the end of the Obama years, the crew at n+1 rounded up their best writing from his presidency. Head on over to read Aziz Rana, George Blaustein, and more.
●
●