“The very best way to read a poem is perhaps to be young, intelligent, and slightly drunk.” The Atlantic offers 20 strategies for reading poetry, and they pair well with Leah Falk‘s look at “Performance Anxiety: When Poets Read Aloud.”
Reading Poetry
The Brooklyn Bridge
Brooklyn Poets wants to build The Bridge, a social networking site aimed at connecting student poets with mentor poets. The idea is that students could find mentors for less money than a workshop or writing program might cost, and that mentors would be able to get paid without having to locate a hard-to-find teaching job. You can get a fuller idea of the plan on the organization’s IndieGoGo page.
●
●
“Young at Heart”
A new YA series spun off from The X-Files explores Fox Mulder’s teen years, and you can read the first chapter here. You may also be forgiven for feeling like the entire premise is a bit fraught. Not only is the mental image of Spooky Mulder with acne a tad jarring, but on a more existential level, as Zan Romanoff has written for our site, “there is no such thing as the young adult novel.”
How the Nobel Odds Are Made
Ladbrokes, the popular bookmaker, has correctly predicted the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature with “a 50 percent accuracy rate” over the past eight years. This remarkable record is noteworthy because the oddsmakers do not actually read any of the books, and they do not go about “forming an opinion about the relative merits of each author.” Instead, the folks responsible for each year’s odds “appl[y] a numerical value to things like industry chatter, an author’s nationality, historical precedent.” So, that in mind, how confident do you feel about Haruki Murakami’s chances?
●
●
“Against Explanation”
“I don’t know how to give more of myself than a poem. Every poem I write is more accurate than anything I can ever tweet about it: my interior life, and its struggle and desire to converse with the exterior world.” Tarfia Faizullah writes for Poetry‘s blog about why she doesn’t want to explain her poems, the power of breath, and the frustrating implications of the question, “did it happen to you?”
●
●