To mark the end of National Poetry Month, Natalie Diaz spoke to Michael Martin at NPR about how her involvement with the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program has influenced her work as a poet. “We have a word called cavanam (ph), which was lost for a long time, but one of my elders remembered it,” Diaz says. “And it’s a way that we heal and press and touch the body. And so that small, tiny word, cavanam – bringing it back into our lexicon and into our spoken conversations, it also led us toward touching one another differently. So I think that’s something that the language work has given me, is the understanding that poetry is physical, that language is physical, and it has a power of touch as we carry ourselves to one another.”
Natalie Diaz Seeks the Physical Power of Poetry
People Truly Engaged in Life Have Messy Houses
The Guardian interviews Year in Reading alumna Ottessa Moshfegh about her writing life, noir fiction, and her novel Eileen. As she puts it, “I’m interested in taking establishment genre and turning it on its head. I didn’t really set out to write a noir novel and I don’t know if I exactly have.”
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Disturbing the Book Reviews
Over at The New York Times, our own Garth Risk Hallberg reviews A. M. Homes’ May We Be Forgiven. And in October, so did we.
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Pinckney and Smith from the NYPL
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Hey, That’s My Thought!
“Why would a poet ever plagiarize? You’re not going to get famous, and you’re really not going to get rich.” Where does inspiration end and plagiarism begin? This piece at Electric Literature examines what happens when a poet steals a line.
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“As if they didn’t exist.”
Recommended Reading: This excerpt from Brian Warfield’s forthcoming novella Bridges No Longer Span These Waters.
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Beverly Jenkins on the Importance of Black 19th Century Romance
Beverly Jenkins, known as the queen of of Black historical romance, discusses the importance of the genre reflecting the identities of those who read it.
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Carpet Reading
Poet and antiwar activist David Shook is raising money on Kickstarter. What for, you ask? He wants to rain poetry on a city with the help of a drone. (h/t Poetry Foundation)
Two Takes on Red Doc>
If you enjoyed the profile of Anne Carson in the latest New York Times Magazine – fictitious “ice bats” notwithstanding – you’re going to really love Parul Sehgal and Nathan Huffstutter’s two takes on Red Doc>. The work, Sehgal writes, is “suspended between what it is and what we want it to be.” And also, writes Huffstutter, it’s a work that “courses with a wit shot through with intelligence and humility.”
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