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Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C. K. Williams delivered the Poetry Society's annual lecture at Newcastle University in the UK last summer. The seventy-five-year-old chose as his topic On Being Old, reading poems that explore his changing relationship with the great poets of history.
Judith Tebbutt, the wife of slain Faber & Faber executive David Tebbutt, was released after seven months held captive in Somalia; Joan Didion has canceled an upcoming appearance in California due to a fractured knee; Francine Prose on the making of Edith Wharton, and more.
In Sarah Manguso’s memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), the author writes, “suffering, however much and whatever type, shrinks or swells to fit the shape and size of a life.” Write about a time in which you experienced suffering—emotionally, physically, or otherwise—and try to focus on how that suffering fit into the shape of your life then, and how it has helped shape the life you know now.
Record the slogans you see on billboards and in other advertising as you go about your daily routine—Prescription Drug Misuse Is a Growing Trend; Forever Engagements; Truth & Honesty: That's the Manfredi Way! Choose one from the list you've gathered and use it as the opening line for a story.
"The act of feeling frustrated is an essential part of the creative process," says Jonah Lehrer in the trailer for his new book Imagine: How Creativity Works (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). "We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. Because it's only after we stop searching that the answer might arrive."
In three days following the recent release of the newest iPad, Apple sold three million units; novelist Geoff Dyer looks for the literary establishment; analyzing sales data, a business professor contends Oprah's Book Club may have caused industry-wide sales to drop; and other news.
Visit a museum or an art gallery. While looking at the art, transcribe fragments from the written descriptions and/or titles that accompany each work. Create a poem out of the fragments you've transcribed.
Check out the dope rhymes in La Shea Delaney and Annabelle Quezada's literary version of a song by Jay Z and Kayne West. "War and Peace, piece of cake, read Tolstoy in three days. / Straight through, no delays. / Didn't miss a word. Not one phrase." The song was recorded and mixed by Stephen Galgano.
This American Life retracted its popular episode featuring an excerpt from Mike Daisey's one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs; new brain imaging studies indicate the human mind reacts to fictional characters similar to real-life encounters; Laura Miller reveals how the Hunger Games franchise was launched; and other news.
Lukas Fiala and Nicole Schmitt recently partnered to create this animated look at Charles Bukowski's rather ecstatic poem, which appears in Burning in Water Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973 (Ecco, 2002).
