Stranger than Fiction
Basketball, Poetry, and the Union of the Two
Inua Ellams wrote a poem entitled “Portrait of Prometheus as a Basketball Player” in which he imagined “the fire stolen from the gods to be shaped as a basketball, and Prometheus dunking light into the world.” [Note: Ctrl + F for “Portrait of Prometheus” at this link to read the poem.] Over at Magma, Ellams discusses “the process of composing a poem, as a coach might stitch a [basketball] team together.” Perhaps all of this explains Patricia Lockwood’s interest in Shaquille O’Neal?
“The Threadbare Art of My Eye”
As Robert Lowell put it: "sometimes everything I write / with the threadbare art of my eye / seems a snapshot." Poetry and photography.
“Rote lessons before the air raid drill”
At The Atlantic, Caleb Crain (of Necessary Errors and n+1 fame) writes about the galvanizing effects of memorizing his favorite poem. (If you’re wondering, the poem in question is W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone.”)
Time Traveling Stories
The Portable Story Series has announced their latest contest theme: time travel. Paul Levinson will be judging the contest, which runs from June 1st through July 29th.
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Boycotting Indies?
We are now over a week into Amazon's boycott of the indie press e-books distributed under the Independent Publishers Group. IPG is taking a stand against Amazon's hardline negotiations during the retail giant's annual contract review, and 5000 titles are no longer available through the Kindle store. Last week Jim Hanas, author of the digitally and independently published Why They Cried, spoke out against Amazon to champion other e-readers and e-book retailers. The renegotiations are taking place across the industry, though, as Melville House's Dennis Johnson puts it, "major industry figures at the big houses in New York — facing similar cutthroat demands from Amazon for their own annual contracts — remain silent... This isn't over yet."
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Different Times
Last week, I wrote about Josh Weil and Mike Harvkey’s joint book tour, which sees the two driving a Prius across America to promote their latest novels. Now, in their latest dispatch, they reflect on the differences between writers like themselves and midcentury writers like Andre Dubus and Norman Mailer.
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Patriotic Poetry
Writing for Vouched Books (of which I’ve raved previously), Tyler Gobble dedicates his “Best Thing I’ve Read This Week” column to Laurie Saurborn Young’s Patriot chapbook. The work collects thirteen poems – each entitled “Patriot” – which “craft as they go a sense of living, having lived, the naming as a startling mechanism to remind just how much there is here, right here, hello.”
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Does This Mean Lewis Lapham is Morpheus?
Picador’s Gabrielle Gantz is holding monthly conversations with bloggers, and she posts the results on the publishing house’s fantastic Tumblr. Here she interviews Aidan Flax-Clark, associate editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, and gets him to discuss the similarities between his research and The Matrix.
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I just finished reading Stoner, after having become interested in it from articles here. Gotta say: didn’t do a whole lot for me.
It’s possible I’m a philistine. I’m definitely not an academic (any more).