Narrative poetry

“I have a friend whom I would praise.” – Max Beerbohm, “Laughter” I’ve known Jason Whitmarsh for a dozen years, have followed his progress as a poet, and have learned much from him. The publication of his first book,  Tomorrow’s Living Room — a tremendous collection, and rightly described by Billy Collins, in his foreword, as resembling “a big bass breaking the surface of a lake after a long spell of staring at the water” — makes me happy. Tomorrow evening Jason reads from tFarbrook, Urban Skin Stereopticon, 2008 / Suess, Photo from It It and the Gimme Box, 2009 October 22-November 28, 2009 Opening Event: Thursday, October 22, 2009 6-8pm About Nostalgia for Neverwas: The intent of my work is to explore the mirages that we create for each other and the limits of virtuality. By virtuality, I mean things such as countries, ownership, advertising, news media, the Internet and various communications by proxy. By recontextualizing reality from the viewpoint of aTwo newspapers review Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives , Charlotte Brontë being one of them, as you know. From The Independent : Here is Charlotte Brontë, laid low with fashionable hypochondria, but genuinely laid genuinely low, suffering "advanced torment in its most dramatic and richly-imagined forms seems even to have defined a late version of the Gothic imagination and a vision of the creative temperament stymied, isolated or in exile".

Photojournalist Maisie Crow's award winning pictures of seventeen-year old "Autumn" gave me serious pause when I first saw them and prompted this next round of discussion. After five years of reviewing teen fiction I have noticed that while many of us grew up reading books that highlighted the protagonist's socioeconomic background, contemporary fiction often seems to place teens in an artificial world where parents work for unnamed people at unnamed jobs yet receive either masses of money, orMichele Davis had a great post on her ninth grade blog the other day. It was for her students, but she didn't ask them to comment. Instead, she asked their parents to. Parents, one of our focuses this semester is writing persuasively. We start with an effective paragraph with strong topic sentences and move to a multi-paragraph persuasive essay, literary analysis essay, narrative writing, poetry, summaries, and online writing. We would love your input on how writing is important in your linNinja favourite Dan Nester , author of How to Be Inappropriate , writes on his experience of the NYC poetry scene , and how he got the hell out. There is a school of thought that holds that the poet’s job is to straddle the sacred and profane, to say and do the perfectly wrong thing at the perfectly right time. To do so, writing teachers and writing books tell us, is to act as a prophet, a truth-teller. This translates into some remarkable misbehavior on the part of poets. I, too, engaged

My pal Henry called the other day: “Hey, this is right up your alley. My friend’s been reading Finnegans Wake aloud since yesterday afternoon at the corner of Grove and Larkin. I was there until 2 am. Meet me there for lunch, eh?” First, let me make clear that one needn’t have conquered James Joyce’s seminal stream of consciousness story in order for the remainder of this blog to make sense. This is important to note, as roughly 4 out of 5 English Literature professors admit that “get thrPoetry magazine people: How many review copies of poetry books do y’all receive? It must be bargeloads, because I’m just one low-rent sometime-freelancer who writes maybe five or six reviews a year, and I get something like, I don’t know, probably six or eight review copies a month. Some from presses, some from the poets themselves. Let there be no doubt about this: I’m wildly grateful to receive this bounty. The sight of a book-sized envelope in my mailbox has always given me a thrill, and I d

Over the years I’ve developed a bad habit of going over sentences again and again in my fiction because they don’t quite sound right. By that I mean that the rhythm is off or the vowel sounds clash or an adjective is too bland or, worse, too “creative” in some overcomplicated or cutesy way that distracts from the flow of the story. Occasionally I nail what I want to say, in the end, but often I walk away at least partly unsatisfied.   Because I think so much nowadays about construction ofWriting and publishing a book has always been difficult. But  opportunities to be published by mainstream publishers are becoming more and more rare. The big houses are under great financial stress now. They’re going to be placing their bets on sure things. They’re going to be looking for authors who have a lot more to offer than just a great manuscript or proposal. Of course, they want those things too. But what they’re really looking for, increasingly, is an author with a platform: a heal

Canada's International Development Research Center and Harvard's Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development . Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and live-blogging the event. You can find out far more about who's around the table and what we're planning on talking about on the Global Voices special coverage pCanada’s International Development Research Center and Harvard’s Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development . Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and live-blogging the event. You can find out far more about who’s around the table and what we’re planning on talking about on the Global Voices special coverage p

Sep.22, 2009 in Uncategorized Amazon. com Review Do you sleep with the light on? Are you in the habit of checking your doors and windows before you go to bed? Maybe even checking under your bed? If you are about to crack open Joe Hill’s chilling thriller Heart-Shaped Box, you might want to rethink your nighttime habits–Hill’s story about an aging rock star who buys a haunted suit online will scare you silly. But don’t take our word for it. We askeThe particular brilliance of " Bright Star ", a new film by Jane Campion about the affair between John Keats and his neighbour Fanny Brawne, owes much to its cast. The lanky Ben Whishaw imbues the passionate, society-shy Keats with down-to-earth candour. And it’s Abbie Cornish ’s performance as Brawne that gives the film its charm. The Australian-born Cornish alternates between beguiling optimism and fatalism, reacting to love’s detours with the flightiness of a true first-timer. "BrighKristin here— We’re coming up on the third anniversary of our blog’s debut in cyberspace. In previous years, as a new school season starts, I’ve written up a summary of entries that might prove useful to teachers using our textbook, Film Art: An Introduction . By now, “Observations on Film Art” has accumulated almost 290 entries, adding up to an enormous amount of verbiage and images. We realize that it’s a real chore to search it for relevant entries. That chore will only get harder as we po

Last Tuesday, I posted that I would be the featured reader at the San Buenaventura Artists Union Gallery on Tuesday, Sept. 15, and I promised to post the links to my reading. So here we go–a virtual poetry reading! Since everything that I read that night has been written and then published in the past 18 months on this blog, I am linking to those posts along with some commentary. I hope you’ll stick around for my virtual reading!I started the reading by saying I’d be presenting 10 poems: two froTo paraphrase a recent Jewish organizational tagline, I’ve “hugged and wrestled with Israel” for 20 years now. At first, it was all embrace: Zionist songs and culture nourished me like mother’s milk, and on my first trip to Israel I kissed the tarmac at Ben Gurion, as did the other USY kids. Eventually, the wrestling came to the fore, particularly as I became more conscious of Palestinians, settlements and religious-secular divides. In 2002, I wrote about being “a left

Abide With Me by John H. Parker and Paul Seawright Hardcover: 112 pages Publisher: New Leaf Publishing Group/New Leaf Press; Har/Com edition Language: English ISBN-10: 0892216905 ISBN-13: 978-0892216901 ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Parker , Professor of English at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, has taught Shakespeare and other literary classes there for twenty-eight years. He holds the M.A. and Ph.DHooking you up with what's happening on the glossy media beat... - A flapper-esque Michelle Williams, 29, has landed the October cover of Anna Wintour's Vogue . The cover story , written by Sally Singer, is a narrative about "a young artist derailed by tragedy and public scrutiny", and condemns "the tabloids' banal, destructive intrusiveness" into the actress's life. Since the passing of Heath Ledger, Williams has been reluctant about giving interviews "of any sort, even to promote her What you missed on 3:AM recently: Fiction: ‘Sound Bites’ by John Barker & ‘Nature’ by Avital Gad-Cykman Poetry: ‘The Muse of the 21st Century’ by Maria Rezende & ‘Four Poems’ by Andrew Buchanan Jackson Non-fiction: Travis Jeppesen on Girls Against Boys for ‘Friday I’m in Love’ & Andrew Stevens spends ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’ with Heavy Metal Parking Lot Reviewed: A 3:AM mini-review of Jim Krusoe’s Erase