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
Football Book Club: Allie Brosh’s ‘Hyperbole and a Half’
This week, Football Book Club will be reading Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened — as well as chatting about Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse, bemoaning our empty NFL-free lives, and weeping about the shittiness of our respective teams.
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The Opposite of Homesick
“The legal protection the German government gave our American relationship is gone, now that we are back in America.” Alexander Chee on coming home from Leipzig with his partner.
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Demonstrate Uncertainty
The semester is officially in full swing, and sallying forth in the spirit of yesterday’s teaching theme, here is another list of rules for teachers–this time in the style of John Cage–from Anne Boyer over at The New Inquiry.
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Library Books About Library Books
“A colouring book, Colouring in the Lions, will head the list for children and feature vintage art from the NYPL archive. Also planned is a yet-to-be-titled picture book featuring Patience and Fortitude – the two lion statues that stand at the entrance to the library’s main building – and a YA novel based on the true story of a family who lived in the library.” The Guardian reports on a partnership between the New York Public Library and Macmillan publishers to produce five to eight books per year inspired by the library’s collections.
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Conferenceness
“Can a conference really transcend its essential conferenceness?” For a conference on Geoff Dyer, that’s the essential question, and the Los Angeles Review of Books has an answer. Pair with Dyer’s Year in Reading and Janet Potter‘s review of Another Great Day at Sea.
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The Latest in Obama Lit
Obama inclined readers looking for a swifter read than The Bridge should pick up the pithy new anthology of poems composed during President Obama’s first hundred days in office, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days.
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