Yoni Wolf Listens to Poetry
A Q&A with Scott Rosenberg

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.

Posted on April 29, 2010 | Comment | Permalink

I wonder what Henry James would say to Toni Morrison
by Austin Ratner

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.

Posted on April 22, 2010 | Comment | Permalink

On Irrelevance: Part IV
by Tom Drury

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:

Posted on April 5, 2010 | Comment | Permalink

On Irrelevance: Part III
by Amy Leach

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:

Posted on April 1, 2010 | Comment | Permalink

On Irrelevance: Part II
by Tim O'Sullivan

I'm not up on the current argument, but it seems like an old one. A taste for topical relevance is cool. There are better places to look than fiction. Newspapers maybe. On TV, pundits speak provocatively on topics of the day. Fiction can handle these topics too, but I suppose people will always argue whether it’s the most appropriate tool and/or for how long the relevant topic will remain relevant.

My suggested irrelevant writer, Robert Walser, comes from beautiful, irrelevant Switzerland.

Posted on March 31, 2010 | Comment | Permalink

On Irrelevance: Part I
by Mary-Beth Hughes

To call writing relevant or irrelevant seems to indicate that there is a hierarchy of things: certain moments (in many advocates for relevance this time is our very own time—the present moment) are more important than other moments in history; certain places or people need more attention than others. A writer could become irrelevant, like Shen Congwen (APS10), when he writes not about the class struggle but a love story between an orphan girl and a local military officer, but is relevance just another way of confining writers and their work according to one's limited position in time and space?

Earlier in the year, while we were working on Shen Congwen’s letters, a writer who was accused of irrelevance in his time, this article came out. Which got us thinking about what makes a story or a novel or a poem relevant, and we asked some APS contributors to recommend a favorite irrelevant writer.

Around Halloween, I packed up my mother’s books and brought them home. She was a committed public library patron, so I’d love to know the books she liked enough to buy and keep, what she saved to go back to. But before I unpack boxes, I’m looking to my own shelves to remember some of what’s been essential to me. This week I’m reading Lisa Shea and Grace Paley.

Posted on March 30, 2010 | Comment | Permalink

Stet?

What goes on in the final weeks as we're closing an issue? Lots and lots of questions, from the profound to the mundane to the incredibly nit-picky. And sometimes it's the smallest questions that provoke the most interesting answers. In APS 10, it was a question for Ed Roberson about a space in his poem "Moon Jar, Century Unclear." We asked if we could post the exchange here.

Hey Ed, I hope you're well. We're finishing up the new issue, and my proofreaders keep querying the space in the fourth stanza of your poem, so I thought better safe than sorry. Attached are your proofs—would you confirm that the space in the line "down from the outer layers inward into—" is supposed to be there? Thanks! Anne

Hi Anne, No problem, yes, the space belongs there, but it is probably better to explain why it is so necessary to be there by showing what it does:

Posted on March 3, 2010 | Comment | Permalink

An Irrelevant Writer: Shen Congwen
by Yiyun Li

Loved then attacked then forgotten then revived, the Chinese writer Shen Congwen was rumored to be on the short list for the Nobel Prize for Literature before his death in 1988. Acclaimed before the rise of Communism, in later years Shen was criticized for being an apolitical (and therefore irrelevant) writer; his books were banned and burned; and he was largely erased from the modern literary record for many years. His letters, collected and edited by his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, in Family Letters of Congwen, were published in China in 1995, and are available for the first time in English—introduced and translated by Yiyun Li—in APS 10.

Great books are never abandoners—they don’t betray us; they don’t turn away from our candid admiration or criticism; they don’t die. More often than not, my attachment does not extend to their creators—I do read biographies, the correspondence and diaries of certain writers, but they come secondarily, anecdotally.

This, however, is not the case with Shen Congwen’s letters. Family Letters of Congwen was among the few Chinese books I brought with me when I came to the U.S. in 1996. Shen, who was considered one of the most important writers of his generation, had stopped writing, in the prime of his career, when Communism took over China, and his letters, though inadequate, offer the only available glimpse of those stories he might have written.

Posted on February 28, 2010 | Comment | Permalink

Sam Stephenson & the Jazz Loft Project

The Jazz Loft Project Radio Series debuts this week on WNYC: "In 1957, photographer W. Eugene Smith moved into a loft at 821 Sixth Avenue. It became a hangout for artists, writers and especially jazz musicians, who rehearsed and jammed there. By the time Smith left the loft more than a decade later he had documented the activity there through 40,000 photos and roughly 4,000 hours of audio tape."

The project—in addition to the radio series, there is a book and an exhibition—started thirteen years ago, when Sam Stephenson's wife bought him a camera for Christmas. The camera shop owner introduced him to Smith's work, and then Sam discovered Smith's archives at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona: "Two eighteen-wheel trucks delivered 44,000 pounds of his things there when he died in 1978, at fifty-nine, according to his doctors of “everything” (cirrhosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, an enlarged heart). There are hundreds of 10,000 word letters to friends as well as people he barely knew, 25,000 vinyl records, as many as a million negatives and contact sheets, thousands of 3x5 cards filled with chicken-scratch notes to himself, along with brilliant fragments from the unfinished Pittsburgh project and 1,600 reels of tape from his Manhattan loft—two bodies of work that have kept me busy for ten years. His work has become my work."

Read the rest of Sam's piece about Smith's archives, from APS 3.

Posted on November 17, 2009 | Comment | Permalink