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The Writer's News: December 2011 News Helen Vendler, Rita Dove, & Poetry of the 20th Century Following the Fall 2011 release of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, The New York Review of Books published a rather pointed review by Helen Vendler, renowned poet & professor at Harvard University. Vendler broadly decried the anthology for not including enough of the best & most varied poets from the past century, with regards to Dove’s agenda, or lack thereof, as Vendler sees it. This negative review prompted a heated response from Dove, also in the NYR, in which she staunchly defends her anthology while also engaging personally with Vendler’s attitudes. Vendler begins her review by declaring: “Rita Dove has decided, in her new anthology of poetry of the past century, to shift the balance (of what is considered most significant), introducing more black poets & giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more than is given to better-known authors.” In Dove’s introduction preceding the anthology she explains her troubles & concerns over what to include & how to do it without obliterating her publisher’s budget or misrepresenting the century’s poetry. The dispute, on both sides, tends to nitpick at some of the general statements Dove makes in her introduction about an entire century of poetry. Of course, readers may read her introduction with awareness that it is not easy to make summative & definitive statements about one hundred years of great poetry. However, Vendler finds fault throughout, describing Dove’s judgments as questionable, cliché, exclusive, rudimentary, & exaggerated. Dove concludes her defense of the anthology by writing, “(Vendler’s) language, admired in the past for its theoretical elegance, snarls & grouses, sidles & roars as it lurches from example to counterexample, misreading intent again & again.” Helen Vendler’s review can be read here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/.../nov/24/are-these-poems-remember/. And Rita Dove’s response, here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/.../dec/22/defending-anthology/. Article posted: 12/19/11
Need Help Finding an Agent? Since 1991, the Association of Author’s Representatives (AAR) has served to define professional ethics & standards for its members, primarily agents. Its website features a long list of services & sounding boards for agents & provides a fairly comprehensive list of nearly 500 agents & agencies, complete with contact information (e-mail & postal addresses) & descriptions of what each agent is particularly interested in. The site also allows users to search its agent/agency database by name, location, & literary genre. Though AAR functions primarily for the service of agents, it can also benefit writers by making the search for an agent a little less boundless & a lot more realistic. If you’re a writer seeking the right agent or an aspiring agent looking to get into the business, this site might be just what you need. Visit the Association of Author’s Representatives at http://aaronline.org/Find. Article posted: 12/19/11
The 2011 United States Artists Fellows Annually, United States Artists (USA) awards $50,000 grants to fifty artists from different disciplines including music, theater, dance, crafts, & writing, among others. This year’s fellows included five writers: poets Terrance Hayes, A.E. Stallings, & Campbell McGrath, fiction writer Karen Tei Yamashita, & playwright Annie Baker. According to a description on the USA’s website, over $15 million has been “invested in America’s finest artists” in the past six years. USA Fellows are nominated anonymously by a group of leaders in the arts; critics, scholars, & other artists. A celebration, hosted by actor Tim Robbins, was held on December 5 in Santa Monica, California to honor all fifty USA fellows. Learn more about the USA & the grant recipients at http://www.usafellows.org/celebration. Article posted: 12/19/11
Milkweed Editions' Shiny New Poetry Prize
“It ended up as the product of a two-year-long conversation with Lindquist and Vennum, a law firm headquartered in Minneapolis,” said Slager. “I was first approached by an owning partner. A friend of his had asked him if our foundation would like to do something for poets that would also give something to culture.” The two years of meetings and conversations resulted in five years of guaranteed funding and support of what became the Lindquist and Vennum Prize for Poetry: five winning collections of poetry, $10,000 to each winner, and no entry fees for five years with the hopes of building a significant new collective of talented, prize-winning poets. “They wanted to do something that would put poets in the kind of light they’re not always in, that will reward their excellent work,” said Slager. “I think it’s a really big deal that a law firm wants to support poetry. I’m not often in this kind of setting talking to lawyers about poetry.” The hope on the part of both parties involved (Milkweed and L&V) is that the cultural success of the prize, after five years, will be enough reason for Lindquist and Vennum to support it in perpetuity. “I think it’s likely to be an annual prize that just goes on and on. We want poets to look at our list of winners ten years down the road and say, ‘that’s a group of poets I’d love to be a part of,’” said Slager. Part of the decision to make the prize regional was the goal of setting it apart from all the other prizes. The upper-Midwest, including Iowa, considers Wisconsin, the Twin Cities, and Iowa City. As Slager said, that’s a pretty rich part of our literary culture. He wants to showcase that. “We’re not trying to make a parochial statement about regional literature. Our judge, Peter Campion, is not from this region. He’s from Boston. He asked us, ‘am I expected to pick something that represents this region?’ Absolutely not.” When asked why he went with Campion for a judge, Slager revealed that, although he’s publishing roughly half a dozen new poetry collections each year since coming to Milkweed about five years ago, he didn’t want to pick a judge from that stable. “I thought about and talked to a number of people and I just kept coming back to Peter. I think he’s going to be excellent.” “Three of the best literary presses in the country, Graywolf, Coffeehouse, and Milkweed, have great national success, though they’re very much set in an upper-Midwestern location. What Milkweed has always done is publish writers in this region.” For more information on Milkweed Editions and the Lindquist & Vennum Prize visit: http://www.milkweed.org/content/view/396/72/. Photograph of Daniel Slager was taken by Travis Anderson. Article posted: 12/16/11
Publish Your Book Today at Politics & Prose
Thor Sigvaldason, Co-Founder of OnDemand Books said everywhere he puts one of these machines, writers arrive “with a special glint in their eye saying, ‘Can you make my book?’” The answer is, of course, yes, for a setup fee, a $7 per book fee, and two cents per page. According to the Washington Post, the Opus, Washington’s first print-on-demand Espresso book machine, developed by OnDemand Books and Xerox, is one of only a handful operating in independent bookstores worldwide. Politics & Prose has a five-year lease on the Opus and it is hoped that this will help the store compete with Amazon and Barnes & Noble. “We’re getting lots of phone calls indicating strong interest in using the machine,” said Bradley Graham, Co-Owner of Politics & Prose. “We’re still persuaded this machine is going to fill a latent demand for access to out-of-print books and for those who want to publish their own works.” “Whether it’s a collection of short stories, a set of family recipes, or a town history, anything that’s a few dozen pages or longer can be printed on this machine,” said Graham. Article posted: 12/08/11
The Journal New Writing Delivers a Worldwide Report on Creative Writing as an Academic Discipline AWP is no longer alone. All around the world, writers who teach have established new associations to support teachers of creative writing. New Writing: The International journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing has just published a special issue, “Making Connections: Creative Writing in the 21st Century,” edited by Graeme Harper of Bangor University and the University of Wales. Providing analysis of the global status of creative writing, the issue includes essays from the directors of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) from Great Britain, the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the Society of Children’s Book Illustrators and Writers (SCBIW), the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership (APWP), the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes (EACWP), and, of course, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). In a discussion of the polemics of literary gatekeepers and writers in democratic cultures, AWP Executive Director David Fenza responds to Mark McGurl’s recent book The Program Era. The journal, New Writing, is published by Routledge and Taylor & Francis Online; digital subscriptions are available to university libraries. Here is an adapted excerpt from Fenza’s essay from New Writing: The Debauchery of Our Symbolic Environment Students are very hungry for what they deem to be authentic and true to them. For students, authenticity is hard to come by, amid all the hucksterism, simulacrums, lies, half-lies, seductions, and coercions of our culture. A successful literary work is a demonstration of the efficacy of the individual human will in a world that often seems indifferent to that will. The detractors of creative writing programs say that our programs are popular because they are easy courses of study, but this criticism denigrates the hopes of our students. The Higher Education Research Institute, at the University of California, conducts an annual survey of the attitudes of incoming college freshman in the U.S. The institute ranks, among other things, the students’ objectives “considered essential or very important.” In 2010, 16.2% of incoming students found an essential objective in “Writing original works (poems, novels, short stories, etc.).” This is not the indicator of slackers who merely seek an easy way through school, especially when “influencing social values” is an essential objective for 42.1% of them. The popularity of writing programs resides in their hopefulness to reshape our world, and if not our world, then at least our symbolic environment. In the U.S., our symbolic environment is a toxic mire. We live, the pundits tell us, in an age of cognitive dissonance, when politicians and corporations routinely espouse one truth and then betray that truth by their actions. A few years ago, in the U.S. House of Representatives, just before Mother’s Day, the Democrats had advanced one of those merely honorific resolutions, “Celebrating the Role of Mothers in the United States and the Goals and Ideals of Mothers Day.” 178 Republicans voted against it, since they had promised themselves to kill whatever bill the Democrats promoted. When the Republican Leader was asked why he and his party had voted against this compliment to moms, John Boehner said, “Oh, we just wanted to make sure that everyone was on the record in support of Mother’s Day.” He said this with a straight face, without hesitation. Another low point in rhetoric from the other side of the aisle was President Clinton infamous parsing of what “is” means to the grand jury during the Monica-Lewinsky scandal: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true." Unfortunately, the purveyors of cognitive dissonance are just as expert as exhaling this kind of fog when it comes to our most important concerns. Our symbolic environment has become a disabling confusion, the babble of Technopoly, as Neil Postman has called it. On the far left, the young culture-jammers would tell us: We are all victims of MTDs (media transmitted diseases) of the corporate cluster-fuck, and we need to strengthen our immune systems. (See any issue of Adbusters for illustrations.) In the 1960s, the average hour-long American TV show was actually 48 minutes in duration, diluted with 12 minutes of commercials. Now the typical hour-long show is six minutes shorter, to make room for more advertising. TV has become a punitive medium—7 minutes of show interrupted by 3 minutes of loud commercials, 6 times an hour. Product-placement in movies has increased, too, according to Brandchannel, which quantifies such things. An average of 17.9 products appeared per film in the 33 films with the greatest ticket sales for 2010. That song you loved in high school—the tune inseparable from your recollection of your first romantic intimacies? You can be sure somewhere there is an advertising maven seeking to strip-mine your subconscious by affixing that song to an advertising slogan. The engineers of commerce will not stop until every one of our synapses flickers with a corporate logo. Consumerism is a temple, full of moneylenders, corporate flacks, flashing screens, the numb, and the over-leveraged. Many of the young have deserted TV and radio for other media. A love of reading and writing is another form of resistance. Not all goods are good, of course, though they are sold with the promise that they are super-mega-extreme-good. Where does one go to find the authentic goods in a life well lived? For some, the destination is the church, the mosque, or the temple. Others head for mountains, the surf, the charities, the arts, and higher education. And some, of course, go to writing programs. In the creative writing program, one shapes a literary identity, not with what one chooses to buy, but with what one chooses to read, to study, to believe, to espouse, to represent, and to write. The program provides moments of clarity within a generally polluted symbolic environment. Poets and writers add to the stock of available reality, and students emerge from their engagement with literature replenished, at least for a while. No wonder students flock to the creative writing program. A place where people insist on words and images as harbingers of truth! A respite from the usual exhalations of fog! In an age of cognitive dissonance, the program is a sublime aviary, although it remains unseen and unheard to those critics who have no idea what it is to be young in this cultural moment. Article posted: 12/02/11
The 2011 National Book Award Winners: Nikky Finney Shines
Two of the four award winners, Nicky Finney and Jesmyn Ward, are African American women whose work addresses issues of race and politics. According to Northwestern University’s NewsCenter, Finney is the daughter of a civil rights lawyer and a teacher in South Carolina. She helped found Affrilachian Poets, a group of African-American poets against the notion of an all-white Appalachia, and she is a professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky. “Black people were the only people in the United States ever explicitly forbidden to become literate,” said Finney as she accepted her award. “I am now officially speechless.” According to the Huffington Post, actor John Lithgow, host of the awards ceremony in New York City, commented that Nikky Finney gave “the best acceptance speech I’ve ever heard for anything in my life.” “Listen to Nikky’s words,” said Jane Bunker, Director of Northwestern University Press, publisher of Head Off & Split. “Listen to her speech that brought the house down. Most importantly, read the poems.” Video of Nikky Finney’s speech can be seen here, starting at the sixteenth minute: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/18565428. Featured in photo: Nikki Finney. Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths Article posted: 12/01/11
HooPalousa: Writers Playing Basketball
Players and coaches included former National Book Award finalist Jess Walter, Coeur d’Alene Tribe Chief James Allan, fiction writer and Editor of Willow Springs, Sam Ligon, and author and co-host for the television series DECODED on the History channel, Buddy Levy, among many others. Alexie’s team, the Dirty Realists, defeated the SuperSonnets and took home the inaugural HooPalousa trophy. Poet Robert Wrigley was the in-game announcer. “Sherman Alexie, who is Spokane-Coeur d’Alene, says he also belongs to the tribes of bookworms and basketball players, and that is what this game is about,” said Kim Barnes, creative writing professor and one of the masterminds behind HooPalousa. “It is an affirmation of that magical place where writing stories, playing basketball, and Native American culture converge.” “It’s just the beginning of our effort to create this fellowship,” said Alexie. “We’re going to keep doing this kind of thing to make sure the scholarship comes to life.” Featured in photo are Kim Barnes and Sherman Alexie, celebrating the Dirty Realists' victory. The game ball was signed by the players and presented to Barnes after the game. Photo Credit: University of Idaho Article posted: 12/01/11
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