Another Info/Link Dump

"Many young writers, I think, are drawn to what is unkindly called 'purple prose,' and most find themselves pilloried for their efforts. This kind of lavish, ambitious language is easy to fail at and easy to make fun of. Almost all of my own early work was met with rejections, dozens and dozens of them, that began with the chilling phrase 'The prose is beautiful, but...' The typical response to this barrage of criticism seems, sadly, not to continue trying to write better, richly metaphorical, muscular prose, but to retreat into something flatter and less adorned. For fiction writers there's no way round having to write some fairly serviceable sentences—'Nina had spent the night in the living-room' (Alice Munro), or 'The house wasn't clean' (William Trevor)—but that isn't a reason to give up on the excitement and the possibilities of language. The notion of a painter who isn't interested in paint is baffling, but many writers (I exclude poets) don't actually seem that interested in language. They are convinced that the interest of their work lies in characterization, plot, and theme." —Margot Livesey



Anonymous telling Westboro to chill out.



Laura's cool Field Guide to one of my favorite prose writers, Blake Butler. 

OMG. I missed the Word on Wayne White. But I'M HERE NOW. This dude is a stellar artist.

This is from the next book on my To-Buy List: Methland by Nick Reding. 

  On a cold winter night, Roland Jarvis looked out the window of his mother’s house and saw that the Oelwein police had hung live human heads in the trees of the yard. Jarvis knew the police did this when they meant to spy on people suspected of being meth cooks. The heads were informants, placed like demonic ornaments to look in the windows and through the walls. As Jarvis studied them, they mumbled and squinted hard to see what was inside the house. Then the heads—satisfied that Jarvis was in fact cooking meth in the basement—conveyed the message to a black helicopter hovering over the house. The whoosh of the blades was hushed and all but inaudible, so Jarvis didn’t notice the helicopter until he saw the heads tilt back on their limbs and stare at the cold night sky. By then, Jarvis knew he had to hurry: once the helicopter sent coordinates to the cop shop, it would be only moments before they raided the house.

Sam Harris with a Real Ideas piece on gun violence/laws.
  

Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.

Big thx to Scott at Split Lip for talking to me about poetry and my silly efforts. Also, big high-five to David Tomaloff for saying the best thing ever about me: "When I think about T-Gob and his work, I imagine an America remixed by deejay saints in tank tops; I imagine trees growing ice cream that melts under the Midwest summer sun, dripping and forming text on the shells of silverback turtle-puppies, who then carry it off to his editors—and then that, my friends, is how cookies are made."

Christopher Newgent, one of the cool dudes and a stellar writer and a bourbon guy, writes a bourbon column for Hobart, bringing together these three awesome attributes. His newest post is total WOW.

Hellyeah to Vonnegut letters. 

This looks like a really interesting book about atheists/religious people relations. Check this excerpt.

Major woot-woot for my pals Mark Neely and Ashley Ford for their Pushcart nominations from Pank.

Maurice Manning on Conservatism

The poetry world lost a real deal in Jack Gilbert this week.

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon
by Jack Gilbert
Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods. Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt. But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down but the angel flies up again taking us with her. The summer mornings begin inch by inch while we sleep, and walk with us later as long-legged beauty through the dirty streets. It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing. We know the horses are there in the dark meadow because we can smell them, can hear them breathing. Our spirit persists like a man struggling through the frozen valley who suddenly smells flowers and realizes the snow is melting out of sight on top of the mountain, knows that spring has begun. Fire When Ready were one of the best bands no one has ever heard of.

BOOM MORE

I'm a huge fan of Sean Lovelace's blog. Like this new post. Just weird and wild and writing. MMMMMM w's!

I'm always for discussions of how poetry can be utilized better, especially in education. Good chattering, Dorothea Lasky! 

Supporting poetry in our schools is essential because it engages students’ thinking and it keeps language alive. Over the past 14 years, I have worked as a teacher in a variety of educational settings. I have found that all students can write. And one of the surest ways to awaken their love for language is poetry. 

The 60 students waiting patiently to get into one creative writing section at an elite private college where I taught loved writing poetry. The 2 year olds I used to teach over a decade ago in a wealthy day care loved poetry, too. Even in their pre-writing state, they recited poem after poem for me, and I wrote each one down for them to then illustrate. At an underserved elementary school, I read Merwin, Sexton, and Whitman poems out loud, and the 5 year olds in in the class loved to bounce around the rhythms and the sing-songy rhymes, along with the slanted ones. It was the music of poetry that they loved. The music of poetry is a delight for the mind.

Tis Pumpkin season! Make me this if you love me! 

Kanye Wes

One of my favorite Zapruder poems gets the Rumpus animation treatment.