January 2012
38 posts
3 tags
Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest winners... →
And another one! Iowa is now my second-favorite state.
3 tags
Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest Winners... →
I made the news again, this time in West Scott County, Iowa. You can see a picture of my smiling face there, too.
4 tags
Cory Booker:
“I shudder to think what would have happened if the civil rights gains, heroically established by courageous lawmakers in the 1960s, were instead conveniently left up to popular votes in our 50 states. … Equal protection under the law – for race, religion, gender or sexual orientation – should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day. Marriage equality is not a choice....
1 tag
“The connection was good. I could hear her breathing in the spaces between our...”
– Sherman Alexie, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” — I taught this story yesterday, and for the first time really noticed this moment.
5 tags
Who is in the news? -- →
I made the Quad City Times! Or, well, my book did.
2 tags
4 tags
Iskandariya
It was not a scorpion I asked for, I asked for a fish, but maybe God misheard my request, maybe God thought I said not ”some sort of fish,” but a ”scorpion fish,” a request he would surely have granted, being a goodly God, but then he forgot the ”fish” attached to the ”scorpion” (because God, too, forgets, everything forgets); so instead of an edible...
4 tags
8 tags
Things I am doing with my life:
Soon I’ll have poems in the Brooklyner, Catch-Up, and Nimrod. “Soon” in this context means “at some point before 2013.” Much thanks to Adam and Elsbeth for their patient, patient help with the poems accepted by Nimrod and the Brooklyner. Oh, and Big Bell! Which as far as I can tell, doesn’t have a website.
A poem of mine is being performed by puppets in two...
4 tags
2 tags
Call it a Window
I just got another blurb for my chapbook. I’m filing this under “shameless self promotion.”
Ann Hudson, the national judge, wrote: “The poems in Monica Wendel’s collection don’t flinch – they examine the gritty world with care and attention. ‘Punch a hole through the house,’ they promise, ‘and we will call it a window.’ Wendel’s voice is...
3 tags
work-in-progress:
I rose from this earth without knowing what I was rising from and when I returned, the iron in my blood pulling me to ore, the noise of a blast knocked me from my shoes. Know that I would dig down with my mouth if you let me. Know that I long for dark dirt under my nails, that pressure in my hands. I can feel it, now. Trust in the tunnels, my father told me. Beyond everything we’ve even known...
1 tag
4 tags
I just got waitlisted for a residency at Millay Colony for the Arts!!
!!!!!!
5 tags
2 tags
“There are certain words in the technical vocabulary of every academic discipline...”
– MLKJR
How can this not be the quotation that I post today?
(via amereoxymoron)
8 tags
Call for Submissions: New York City Poets
Sweet poets,
No, Dear is inviting you* to submit your finest poems to our upcoming spring issue - #9.
For this one, the theme is: NINE. However you interpret this theme is up to you.
Submit up to three pages of poetry (no more than one poem per page) and include a brief bio and your neighborhood of residence. Send as a word doc or pdf attachment by March 15 to nodearmagazine@gmail.com.
...
4 tags
4 tags
5 tags
7 tags
In which David Foster Wallace's self-help becomes...
“There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation, of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is gonna be,” he [David Foster Wallace] said. “It’s a very precious asset that really needs to be turned off sometimes. My guess is that writers probably make fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate partners for other people....
3 tags
“Anyone who has been in a bad marriage [relationship?] knows that its defining...”
– Dominique Browning
3 tags
5 tags
Human Condition
“…the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different—we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so...
2 tags
2 tags
“To those who dimly perceived something wrong, something that could not be put on...”
– Verily. (via rustbelts)
7 tags
poetry & translation & history
Dante, Joachim du Bellay, Alexander Pope, Ludwig Tieck, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Jacques Roubaud, Robert Lowell, C.K. Williams — think of a great poet, and you’ve almost certainly thought of a translator, too. In the Western tradition there is no cutoff point between writing poems and writing translations or writing poems in...
3 tags
On Dictionaries
“To try to capture ‘all the words of a language’ is as futile as trying to capture all the drops of water in a flowing river. If you managed to do it, it wouldn’t be a flowing river anymore. It would be a fish tank.” - David Bellows, Is That a Fish in your Ear?
1 tag
4 tags
Call for Submissions: Love Poems (?!)
Greetings from Hell Yes. We’re reading submissions for our next project: an anthology of love poems on cassette.
Why love poems? Because they never go out of style. Your poems can be pro-, anti-, or ambivalent. Why a cassette? Because we like art that makes you work a little bit. We like the idea of you scrounging up an old Walkman, sitting in your car, or going to the local library to...
2 tags
1 tag
fashionable friends
“Leggings are a puritanical conspiracy to take the fun out of short skirts.” - Dan Angello
1 tag
3 tags
“Before history and politics, there’s language. And it’s language, the sheer...”
– Don DeLillo
December 2011
34 posts
8 tags
“Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not—examine...”
– Don DeLillo
6 tags
Call for submissions: queer teaching anthology
Sibling Rivalry Press is seeking submissions for an anthology scheduled for publication in August 2013. This assignment is so gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching, edited by Megan Volpert, will be the first-ever anthology to feature an international roster of LGBTIQ poets writing about and from the teacher’s perspective. Whether elementary or collegiate, public or private, the school is...
5 tags
DeLILLO: ... If writing is a concentrated form of thinking, then the most concentrated writing probably ends in some kind of reflection on dying. This is what we eventually confront if we think long enough and hard enough.
INTERVIEWER: Could it be related to the idea in Libra that—
DeLILLO: —all plots lead toward death? I guess that’s possible. It happens in Libra, and it happens in White Noise, which doesn’t necessarily mean that these are highly plotted novels. Libra has many digressions and meditations, and Oswald’s life just meanders along for much of the book. It’s the original plotter, Win Everett, who wonders if his conspiracy might grow tentacles that will turn an assassination scare into an actual murder, and of course this is what happens. The plot extends its own logic to the ultimate point. And White Noise develops a trite adultery plot that enmeshes the hero, justifying his fears about the death energies contained in plots. When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book’s plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot, makes it less fearful by containing it in a kind of game format.
6 tags
The novel's not dead, it's not even seriously...
“The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured, but I do think we’re working in the margins, working in the shadows of the novel’s greatness and influence. There’s plenty of impressive talent around, and there’s strong evidence that younger writers are moving into history, finding broader themes. But when we talk about the novel we have to consider the culture in which it...
1 tag
3 tags
“As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.”
– Don DeLillo, being prophetic as usual.
5 tags
INTERVIEWER: How do you imagine your audience?
DeLILLO: When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.
INTERVIEWER: I’ve read critics who say that your books are bound to make people feel uncomfortable.
DeLILLO: Well, that’s good to know. But this reader we’re talking about—he already feels uncomfortable. He’s very uncomfortable. And maybe what he needs is a book that will help him realize he’s not alone.
2 tags
6 tags
“When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary...”
– Don DeLillo
4 tags
“Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about...”
– Don DeLillo
1 tag
long bus trip thoughts
Before leaving for Boston I was flipping through old notebooks and found a page that had been signed by Lorrie Moore. It said, “Dear Monica, What are you going to do with this page?”