“Stop / fucking posting about / Klonopin, or cutting yourself / or throwing up—Save it / for a shitty poem like a normal / wretch.” On the anger and joy of Tommy Pico, a Native-American poet in Brooklyn, over at The New Yorker.
I Don’t Want to Be the One Onstage
Uncharted Story Space
How do we map our experiences? Where You Are (our review) attempts to answer this but ends up raising an interesting relationship between print and online story space. At Music & Literature, Reif Larsen traces the history of interactive books and contemplates the future of online story space. “Considering print books have been around for over five hundred years, online publishing is still in its infancy. Much of the map remains blank.” Pair with: Larsen’s essay on the power of the infographic.
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Iowa’s Free Online Poetry Workshop
A new MOOC from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is scheduled to begin on June 28. “How Writers Write Poetry” is free and open to the public, and it will feature craft talks from poets such as Robert Hass and Kwame Dawes. A fiction-writing course is also scheduled for September. (Related: Read how several Iowa MFA students describe a typical day in the program.)
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We Stand Accused
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Baseball and Poetry: America’s Pastimes
Celebrate the start of baseball season and the beginning of National Poetry Month at the same time by reading Hobart’s annual Baseball Issue. This year, the site plans on rolling out “daily baseball stories, poems, essays, and other baseball miscellany,” so it’s pretty much the Venn diagram overlap of all of your April needs.
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“Life is not personal.”
“This notion of investigation offers an alternative to confession. Its goal isn’t sympathy or forgiveness. Life is not personal. Life is evidence. It’s fodder for argument. To put the “I” to work this way invites a different intimacy—not voyeuristic communion but collaborative inquiry, author and reader facing the same questions from inside their inevitably messy lives.” Year in Reading alum Leslie Jamison writes for The Atlantic about alternatives to the confessional mode in literature.
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Much Ado about Journalism and Fact-Checking
Chris Rose laments the erosion of his former employer, New Orleans’s Times-Picayune, in the pages of Oxford American’s New South Journalism issue. Meanwhile, James Pogue discusses the art of fact-checking, which he says “has recently become a voguish topic among the New Yorker-reading and NPR-listening set.” This is of course to say nothing of the London Review of Books-reading set across the pond as well, much less the Onion-reading set located far and wide.
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