To kick off South Florida’s O, Miami poetry festival (which I’ve written about before), event organizers and WLRN staffers are asking local residents to snap photos of “a place in South Florida that means something to [them],” and “write a short poem about it including the phrase ‘this is where.’” Then, share the poems and photos on Twitter or Instagram for a chance to be featured throughout the month of April. Meanwhile, the New York Times is on it.
#ThisIsWhere The Sun Bakes Our Chancletas
Was the Soviet Union doomed to fail?
Francis Spufford’s fictionalized book Red Plenty looks to the 1950s-1960s “cybernetics” initiative to answer one of the main questions about the USSR: “Could the Soviet project to build communism have succeeded, or was it doomed to failure from the start?” In his review for The Hoover Institution, Marshall Poe contends the latter.
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Poetry for Dummies
“To fully understand poetry, familiarize yourself with the elements of a poem, such as meter, which is 3.28 feet.” Katie Burgess teaches us how to properly read a poem for The Rumpus’ Funny Women column.
7 reasons not to write a novel
Javier Marías cogently summarizes all the reasons to stop writing novels immediately, and adds only one reason to write them anyway: “Fiction is the most bearable of worlds.” We reviewed The Infatuations, one of his own twelve works (to date), last year.
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Smart Money
Colson Whitehead will be playing in next month’s World Series of Poker. He’s writing about it for Grantland, Bill Simmons‘ new ESPN affiliate. He’s also accepting sponsorships.
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On Formative Viewings
At The Guardian’s website, Joe Queenan examines a little-known film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, that “beguiled” Martin Scorcese when he was just twelve years old.
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Laura Miller on Self-Publishing
In Salon, Laura Miller discusses the brave new world of self-publishing: “You’ve either experienced slush or you haven’t, and the difference is not trivial.”
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