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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.
What is something you are afraid to write about in your own poems, either because it is too personal, or because you feel it is cliché? Create a character—a swarthy bum, a baker, a dog—and write a narrative poem in which your character addresses this topic. Let the fact that the poem isn’t really about you be freeing.
Memorious, the six-year-old online literary journal, is open for poetry entries to its annual art song contest. One poet will have her work set to music by composer Luke Gullickson and performed at an event in Chicago, cosponsored by local group Singers on New Ground (SONG). The winning poem, along with a recording of the musical adaptation, will also be published in Memorious.
"The last quarter-century has seen an explosion of American composers writing art songs for our own time and nation," writes SONG director Eric Malmquist in an introduction to the genre of the art song—technically a poem set to music for voice and piano. "Composers are still setting poetry to music, but many are also setting non-poetic works, including newspaper columns, recipes, listings from 'missed connections' on Craigslist, and crazed writings found on a Chicago bus."
Inspired? Poets can submit via e-mail three to six poems, each of no more than thirty lines, or one long poem of no more than one hundred lines along with a brief bio (there is no entry fee). The deadline is February 12.
For more about the project, entry guidelines, and an audio-visual experience of the winning poem from last year—"Blackwater" by Jill McDonough with musical composition by Randall West—visit the Memorious blog.
Stieg Larsson's partner may finish writing the author's uncompleted last novel; Neil Gaiman will appear on an episode of The Simpsons; Las Vegas reckons with being the country's fifty-second most literate city; the Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers; and other news.
The nation's third poetry-only bookstore opens in Boulder, Colorado; new (and old) California Governor Jerry Brown proposes cutting the state's entire public library budget; an ancient letters app from the British Library; a European Commission report warns of a possible "digital Dark Age"; and other news.
Choose three people who you know well and write a detailed character description of each one. Now change the gender, name, and a few physical traits of each one. Begin a story with all three characters standing in the rain outside of a house on fire.
Michael McClure, whose poetry Allen Ginsberg described as "a blob of protoplasmic energy," performs one of his poems as well as one by Emily Dickinson in this clip from 2007. McClure's Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, which includes an introduction by the late Leslie Scalapino, is out this month from the University of California Press.
