A chance encounter between two writers, one young, one older, develops into a wonderful friendship neither expected. Frank Conroy, author of the classic memoir Stop-Time, meets Tom Grimes, an aspiring writer and an applicant to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which Conroy directs. First as teacher and student--and gradually as friends—their lives become entwined, and through both successes and disappointments, their bond deepens.
]]>The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine are pleased to co-produce Printers’ Ball 2010 with Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Book & Paper Arts and the college’s Student Affairs Office. Founded by Poetry magazine and other independent Chicago literary organizations, the Printers’ Ball is an annual celebration of literary culture.
In addition to featuring thousands of magazines, books, broadsides, and other takeaways available free of charge, the Printers’ Ball will showcase live readings, music, and performances and host letterpress, offset, silk-screening, rubber-stamping, and paper-making demonstrations. Everything is FREE.
For more information go to www.printersball.org
“All of these authors are pushing the boundary of what poetry is and what one can do with the grace of a poetic license, making this an ideal evening for lovers of poetry or even the more chaste readers among us.” —McNally Jackson
]]>Make a short pilgrimage over to A Public Space's Carriage House and toast the launch of WritersHouses.com, a website that will catalog and document the houses of deceased authors around the world.
Founder and Editor A. N. Devers will present "A Short History of Literary Pilgrimages," and guests will be free to interact with the site throughout the evening, as well as peruse a collection of offbeat artifacts from writers' homes. Four exquisite, limited-edition prints from design partners M +E will be for sale, featuring the homes of Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O'Connor, Edward Gorey, and Emily Dickinson. Live music will be provided by The Dog House Band. Mark your itinerary!
Beer has been lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery.
IN THE FLESH
In 1999, Sam Stephenson discovered Smith’s jazz loft photographs and tapes; he has spent the last seven years archiving and editing Smith’s materials for The Jazz Loft Project. A PublIc Space, The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Swingbound, and Greenlight Books present CHAOS MANOR: A Night of Music and Stories from The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Ave 1957-1965. Afterparty: 8:00 pm @ Greenlight Bookstore
This event has been canceled because of weather. New date TBA.
"If he was a good boy, why are we wearing these?"
Kris Moran’s image of a masked woman, on the cover of APS 10, had many of our readers asking: Who is that girl? And then: That reminds me of…We decided to bring a group of APS contributors together and ask them right back. Part party, part prompt: Here is your chance to remember something, too. Join Glenn Kurtz and others on this Thursday, June 10th at The Kitchen.
]]>Mary-Beth Hughes delivers a seductive, deeply human, and sophisticated story collection about the universal need to be loved and the complicated imperfections that jeopardize the ties that bind us.
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It’s probably safe to say that you’re the only songwriter I’ve ever come across who’s thrown in a quote from Marilyn Hacker. I’m curious what your relationship is to contemporary poetry or writing in general.
Well, I listen to poetry when I can. I don’t really read it, because I don’t really believe in it as a written thing, to be honest; at least for myself. I don’t know how to read it. I prefer to think of poetry as an oral thing.
]]> How do you listen to it? Do you find stuff on the Internet? Or you go hear people read?When I first started listening to it, I worked in a library at the University of Cincinnati. This particular library was an audiovisual library, geared toward educators. I would just go through the stacks and there was a record collection, and I had started to make beats and stuff, so I’d look through records. I was just interested in music and records in general. I found these poetry records and I thought, Well, maybe I could get a cool vocal sample, you know? Then I started actually just listening to them and was kind of blown away.
Marilyn Hacker was one of those records. I had never heard of any of these poets, except for maybe Dylan Thomas, kind of. There was a record of his. But I just started listening to them, and kind of fell in love with that. And then when I went through all of those records (and many of them were pretty good), I started going to the public library in downtown Cincinnati, which had a really great A/V collection. I started pulling out tapes of poets reading their own work, sort of at random or based on the titles of the poems or something that seemed interesting. I found a lot of great stuff that way.
Just recently, over the past couple of months, I’ve discovered this website that is just wonderful for me to listen to. I really enjoy it. I don’t know if it was set up as a podcast or if it was a radio thing but it’s a show put out by the Library of Congress called “The Poet and the Poem." Have you heard of it, with Grace Cavalieri as the host? She has a different poet on every show for an hour. They read their poems and they talk about the poems, and they talk about their lives and their process. She’s an interesting host. She almost reminds me of an intellectual Jerry Blank from Strangers with Candy. [laughs] Just the way she talks. She’s kind of halfway inappropriate but in a very intellectual way. I love her. So I discovered that and that’s been a new well, really. In just the last month or two I’ve been getting deep into it.
Did you used to write poetry, or do you still?
I don’t know what the difference is really, between poetry and song, except that I’m starting to figure it out. Some poems are easier than others to turn into songs in a way, based upon the rhythm and the text or whatever. But I think of it as being the same occupation really; I just think that a lot of songwriters get away with a lot of bullshit. So do poets.
I think of it more in the olden sense of you’re just someone who’s putting words together in a way that is meaningful and superdistilled. I think they shouldn’t necessarily be thought of as a different occupations. They are more or less the same thing.
Would you consider yourself a lyric-based songwriter?
Yes.
And then why? What’s the power in that?
I was just thinking about that the other day. I could talk about the world at large and what poetry is or whatever, but I can’t really be accurate like that. But for me personally I think there’s a large part of who I am that I have no other way to communicate except through this quiet, sort of meditative activity. Just thinking and boiling things down, really distilling the world into a few words that I believe to be true. It’s just a different form of communication. There’s that large part of myself that I can’t communicate or express to others without that thing, without writing. So it’s an important thing for me to do. That’s just how I’m wired.
There are others like me—I know that because I listen to them—and I’m touched when someone has come to some realization, or come to a realization that they’ve had no realization, and says something in a certain way that just hits the spot. It touches me. I think it’s an important thing for humans. All the arts are, and they have their own subtleties and intricacies and ways that they communicate; whether it be through the body or the mind or language, or just strictly sound for other types of music.
It’s an important thing and it’s one of the main differences between us and other species.
Yeah. What is it? It’s an important thing how?
It’s our attempt to try to express what it is to exist here, and sort through things in a way that is meaningful to us without necessarily being an intellectual pursuit; without trying to figure things out scientifically. I guess science is another way to do that through rationale, but to me, the arts are the flip side of that coin in a way. [They express those thoughts] through a different, less regimented or classifiable sense.
That’s why I like writing. It’s this gut form of communication. It’s really about those few true words that you feel express what it is for you as a person, as a creature, as a collection of molecules, to be here at this time.
]]>The University of Chicago
Committee on Creative Writing
Rosenwald Hall, Room 405
1101 East 58th Street
Chicago
May 25, 2010
4:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Free
Having spent seven years researching, writing, and, at last, triumphantly publishing a historical novel, I was dismayed to learn from Denis Donoghue’s essay in APS 8 that Henry James considered historical novels “fatally cheap.” Cheapness is clearly bad, and fatality worse; beyond that I’m not exactly sure what Henry James meant since I haven’t yet developed the stamina to read all the way to the end of one of Henry James’s sentences. ]]>
Yet, if historical fiction means a realist fictional work whose setting predates its author, then this category of fiction certainly belongs to a venerable tradition. War and Peace meets that criterion; so does The Red Badge of Courage. Shakespeare created many historical fictions and even the King David stories of the Hebrew Bible represent, as Robert Alter puts it, “the imaginative reenactment of history by a gifted writer who organizes his materials along certain thematic biases and according to his own remarkable intuition of the psychology of the characters.” 
Right now I'm reading Quincas Borba by Machado de Assis (1839-1908) and so I'll recommend another of his novels, and one of my favorites, Epitaph of a Small Winner. Originally published in 1880, it seems to me a conversation with an eternal present. (And actually, I don't know what could be more relevant than that.) Here is an excerpt:]]>
My idea was really fixed, as fixed as—I cannot think of anything so fixed in this world: perhaps the moon, perhaps the Egyptian pyramids, perhaps the late Germanic Diet. Let the reader make whatever analogy pleases him most, let him make it and be content; there is no need for him to curl his lip at me merely because we have not yet come to the narrative part of these memoirs. We shall get to it. The reader, like his fellows, doubtless prefers action to reflection, and doubtless he is wholly in the right. So we shall get to it. However, I must advise him that this book is written leisurely, with the leisureliness of a man no longer troubled by the flight of time; that it is a work supinely philosophical, but of a philosophy wanting in uniformity, now austere, now playful, a thing that neither edifies nor destroys, neither inflames nor chills, and that is at once more than pastime and less than preachment.]]>
Relevant writers have their place, to be sure. But relevance seems to hold a despotic ascendancy these days—everybody wants to be relevant; everybody wants everybody else to be relevant. Relevance is not the only virtue! Irrelevance is also a virtue! The sun is not only a vector of cancer and vitamin D; the sun also makes my Pomeranian twirl. Here is a list of a few of my favorite irrelevant writers:]]>
Hafiz. There were probably current issues in fourteenth century Persia. A writer could have been relevant even then. However, Hafiz wrote poems about swapping jokes with the sun, the universe being a tambourine, rabbits playing cymbals, planets going crazy. Because of his profoundly absurd topics, Hafiz is now as irrelevant as ever. Hafiz is timelessly irrelevant. Here is part of a Hafiz poem, which appears to describe his own writing process:
The mule I sit on while I recite
Starts off in one direction
But then gets drunk
And lost in
Heaven.
Ovid. A charming girl turns into a charming cow; her miserably immortal father laments: “For me death cannot end my woes. Sad bane to be a god! The gates of death are shut; my grief endures for evermore.” (A.D Melville translation); All the cow can do is moo. Someone turns into an owl; someone turns into a mint plant. The real world is not this volatile. As for the origin of the sirens: they had been regular people but were granted feathers and feet of birds after they prayed for wings with which to go questing for Proserpine. Sirens are considered irrelevant today except as employed by Emergency Management Agencies to disseminate weather awareness.
God. Although for thirty-five chapters Job and his friends maintain a conversation relevant to the situation at hand—do humans or do humans not deserve the pain they suffer?—the last four chapters of the discussion are given over to an irrelevant speaker. God does not address the problem of suffering but rattles off references to “the treasures of the snow” and “the springs of the sea,” and “the sweet influences of Pleiades” and the thunder and lightning and hawks and ostriches and wild donkeys and the behemoth (perhaps a hippopotamus)—“Look at the behemoth, which I made along with you.” And unicorns (in the King James Version): “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? Or will he harrow the valleys after thee?” How enchantingly irrelevant, for God to ask serious theologians if they have unicorns plowing their fields.
The Anonymous Author of The Cloud of Unknowing. First of all, is there anything more irrelevant than anonymity? Furthermore, this fourteenth-century mystical Englishperson directs you, the reader, to pursue the absence of knowledge, to “concern yourself with no creature whether material or spiritual nor with their situation and doings whether good or ill,” to pitch all of your concerns into the Cloud of Forgetting and to pitch yourself into the Cloud of Unknowing and to make your home there. Irrelevant writers beget irrelevant readers.
Lewis Carroll. Relevance is relative. What is relevant to a little English girl (schoolroom society, impressive vocabulary, simple rules to avoid getting poisoned, being smarter than Mabel) may not be relevant to a crab or a walrus or an insane duchess. The atmosphere of Wonderland starts to scramble Alice’s relevant mind, turning her useful, didactic poems into nonsense: “How doth the little crocodile / Improve his shining tail.” Alice in Wonderland can show you, too, how to live so as to free yourself from the tyrannical hold of relevance. If you find yourself obsessively preoccupied with identity, technology, body politics, purchasing power, things like that, start a conversation with an eaglet, a duck, and a lory; attend a tea party with a dormouse, a hare, and a mad person; go croqueting with an unmanageable flamingo as your mallet. This will make a hash of your relevance, for it will not even register with your interlocutors. Or if it does they will violently misinterpret it.
“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”
“Which would not be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—”
“Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!”
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