Chris Lydon at Open Source Radio interviewed me last week and the results are up: he’s a Real Radio Person– and a reader, too. It was a pleasure. Check out his conversations with Helen Vendler and Rosanna Warren, too.
Before it was a completely absorbing, charming, memorable, entirely recommended graphic novel, Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds was a newspaper comic strip.
I’m still speaking with Donald Revell, and he’s speaking with me, at UNLV this Thursday at 7:30pm. I see from the website (scroll down for the event info) that Chris Arigo, whom I met at Colorado State University ten years ago, is now a fellow in poetry-writing there. Cool!
If you’re not already an admirer of Stephen Fry, you will be when you read this letter he wrote to a stranger who needed these words.
And here is the sort of multimedia, couldn’t-be-anything-else very short film of a microfiction that makes me wonder why I don’t write about video art all the time. It’s a wonder, and it’s apparently also a book trailer for an upcoming book of flash fiction, or microfiction, or prose poems, or whatever the kids are calling such things these days, by Joseph Young. The same webmag, HTMLGiant, said something about me a while back, and now says something haunting about Lydia Davis.
Speaking of which, or of whom, is there any difference between microfiction and prose poetry any more, other than what it says on the spine and whether the publishers send it to “poetry people” or to fiction reviewers? Because as I start to think seriously about whatever prose poems now do and mean (Waldrep, Benis White, Guess, Johnson, Clary, Lerner, &c &c) I’m thinking that Lydia Davis does most of those things too. (No wonder poets tend to admire her.) I realize that it’s hardly a new question: I’m just wondering whether I’ve missed some cool answers.
Did you know that you can reach a human being at almost any megacorporation that deals with consumers, even the ones that try very hard to connect you only to automated computers when you dial their 800 number, and even the ones that try hard to get you not to call? There’s something like a figure for 21st century lyric poetry right there. Stay tuned.
Up late doing laundry for our upcoming trip to MN and the Twin Cities Book Festival. Maybe we’ll see you there.
I’m on a panel re: the future of poetry at the Twin Cities Book Festival next Saturday morning Oct 10. Also on that panel: Joyelle McSweeney, Ed Bok Lee, Elizabeth Robinson (who has a new book now), Matvei Yankelevich and Alexs Pate.
Also at the festival: Nicholson Baker, Robert Olen Butler, and Lorrie Moore!
I’ll be conversing with Donald Revell in public at the Univ. of Nevada-Las Vegas Thursday Oct. 15; he will read some of his poems. I might read some of mine. I’ve been reading his new book of poems. It’s stunningly good. Sometimes it reminds me of this older book of poems.
I describe D. A. Powell in last week’s London Review of Books, also known as “this week’s” if you live in North America and prefer print to screen (alas, the screen version requires a subscriber login).
According to the Current, it’s 48 degrees and about to rain in downtown St. Paul. Why couldn’t the Book Festival take place, not in October, but rather during the State Fair? (We miss the State Fair. We like it here, but we do miss the State Fair.)
I hope soon to report on some of the best things I’ve been reading, especially those I won’t get to write on elsewhere: I just got (hurray!) a new chapbook from Allan Peterson, and am waiting on others (reviewed, by the way, in the new print issue of Rain Taxi from Jordan Davis and perhaps Mathias Svalina. Things to read, surely, as soon as we’re done watching the playoffs.
