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My rent is exempt from increases
I, as a senior citizen, accept this
The devil who disguises himself as
A landlord does not
Certified mail to landlord
No response from Landlord
Lawyer calls him
No response from Landlord
Letter written to him
No response from Landlord
Is it personal?
I think not
Is it greed?
Absolutely
Housing court here I come.
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Write a story about the worst moment of your life (such as a loss or a betrayal) as though it happened to someone else. Instead of focusing on the moment itself, set the story the day before it happened and create a character very different from you to stand in for yourself. Write the story using a third-person omniscient narrator to exploit the tension between the reader’s knowledge of what’s to come and the protagonist’s complete lack of awareness of what’s to come. Consider ending the story before the impending doom arrives.
Chicago poet Steve Roggenbuck created this video in celebration of the "three-month birthday" of his self-published chapbook i am like october when i am dead. The surreal mix of video and sound features a reading of the e. e. cummings poem "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" and thirteen overlapping MP3s.
The International Jerusalem Book Fair has announced the twenty-fifth winner of the ten-thousand-dollar Jerusalem Prize, given biennially since 1963. Novelist and short story writer Ian McEwan will be given the award honoring "freedom of the individual in society" at the festival this February.
"McEwan’s protagonists struggle for their right to give personal expression to their ideas and to live according to those ideas in an environment of political and social turmoil," the prize jury said in a statement. "His obvious affection for them, and the compelling manner in which he describes their struggle, make him one of the most important writers of our time. His books have been translated into many languages and have enjoyed world-wide success—particularly in Israel, where he is one of the most widely-read of foreign authors."
McEwan, who lives in London, joins previous honorees—all male with the exception of Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag—including Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Haruki Murakami. Author of the Booker Prize–winning novels On Chesil Beach (Nan A. Talese, 2007) and Amsterdam (Nan A. Talese, 1999), his most recent novel is Solar (Nan A. Talese, 2010).
In the video below, McEwan discusses his latest work.
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I am
empy,
hollow,
no,
hollowed out,
scooped,
not ice cream scoop,
but derrick—
a shovel
with teeth
coming down hard
to make a hole:
I am to be a hole,
an important hole,
to base a footing
for an edifice,
a Grand Edifice,
a Grand Plan
for a construction.
I am to be
crushed with cement,
pierced through
with re-bars.
I am to be an anchor
for the cornerstone,
an anchor in dirt.
Checking out every single book in England's Stony Stratford library; today is Thesaurus Day; app is the American Dialect Society's word of the year for 2010; Black Ocean tattoos its customers with free lifetime subscriptions; and other news.
In this clip, produced by Emerson College, National Book Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes talks about his experience as guest editor of the Winter 2010 issue of the literary journal Ploughshares.
Poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built, including meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, Oliver gives clear instruction on how to approach poetry.
