No ideas but in things

I'm the author of the chapbook "Call it a Window" (Midwest Writing Center, 2012). This is a collection of inspirations.

The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured -

“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 operates. Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the novel that tries to be equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture. This is why books such as JR and Harlot’s Ghost and Gravity’s Rainbow and The Public Burning are important—to name just four. They offer many pleasures without making concessions to the middle-range reader, and they absorb and incorporate the culture instead of catering to it. And there’s the work of Robert Stone and Joan Didion, who are both writers of conscience and painstaking workers of the sentence and paragraph. I don’t want to list names because lists are a form of cultural hysteria, but I have to mention Blood Meridian for its beauty and its honor. These books and writers show us that the novel is still spacious enough and brave enough to encompass enormous areas of experience. We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.”  — Don DeLillo

(Source: theparisreview.org)

Other stuff that happens.

For someone who is currently on an extended vacation, I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job of keeping busy, mostly by setting completely unrealistic goals and then working rather realistically towards them (I’m going to publish a book this summer! And run a half-marathon! Or at least I’ll try!). 

Of course there are setbacks. I was out of town for a few days, drank too much beer, and didn’t train (for the half-marathon), write/revise (my manuscript) or read more than, say, 10 pages of Underworld. Today I got back into the swing of things by going for a short run on the beach, and going to writers group where I worked on a poem.

But back to my goal of publishing: I’ve compiled a list of places to send poetry manuscripts (full-length and chapbook). The following is just the forthcoming June deadlines:

Read, revise, submit. Then read more and revise more. I think that this is applicable for many fields.

For breakfast, why not some lovely poems from the Futurist Cookbook as translated by Elsbeth Pancrazi? They’re featured on Loaded Bicycle, which recently launched. Be warned —  the site is beautiful, intricate, and wholly original. flapjacksal: Two of my translations from THE FUTURIST COOKBOOK are up on the beautiful new Loaded Bicycle! Check it.

For breakfast, why not some lovely poems from the Futurist Cookbook as translated by Elsbeth Pancrazi? They’re featured on Loaded Bicycle, which recently launched. Be warned —  the site is beautiful, intricate, and wholly original.

flapjacksal:

Two of my translations from THE FUTURIST COOKBOOK are up on the beautiful new Loaded Bicycle! Check it.

oh, and, in case you’re not intruiged enough by the link about people paying for first dates, here’s a poem about selling underwear on craigslist.

Traditions

My boyfriend and I always have sex
on the first day of my period, and never use a condom.
Sometimes I forget that the blood
is my period, and, when he pulls out,
another tide pulls my chest under
and tells me that this is the first time,
something has changed or broken.
This is not really the case, and fits strangely
in memory when I sell my underwear
at a love motel, no touching, for $75.
Even stranger when all I do with that money
is go to the mall and buy more underwear.
My boyfriend likes it. He likes the new cotton
under his hands, or a strap that rises up
when I sit down, and he likes when I tell him
the story of the turnpike and the motel,
the man’s shaven head and when he dropped
hints about a wife…just traveling through,
the man said, as though I was worried
that I might see him again.

Monica Wendel — originally published in Drunken Boat.

From the interview: “It’s like we’ve all signed this pact: we’re all supposed to believe that poetry is endangered, and poetry is the noblest of arts, and we must be very careful to only say nice things about one another, even if those nice things are not honest.”  flapjacksal: I just talked to someone really smart! (And wrote about it on the internet… read my interview w/ Michael Robbins on BOMBlog)

From the interview: “It’s like we’ve all signed this pact: we’re all supposed to believe that poetry is endangered, and poetry is the noblest of arts, and we must be very careful to only say nice things about one another, even if those nice things are not honest.” 

flapjacksal:

I just talked to someone really smart! (And wrote about it on the internet… read my interview w/ Michael Robbins on BOMBlog)

If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.