February 2012
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AWP!
I’m leaving for Chicago tomorrow! I don’t know how this is going to happen yet, because about half of my stuff (a generous estimate) is still in boxes and I don’t know where my clean socks are and I don’t have a permit to park my car on my new street yet and!
(Also, I just discovered that if you Google image search “AWP,” you get a whole lot of pictures of...
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"Houdini," by Kay Ryan
Each escape involved some art, some hokum, and at least a brief incomprehensible exchange between the man and metal during which the chains were not so much broken as he and they blended. At the end of each such mix he had to extract himself. It Was the hardest part to get right routinely: breaking back into the same Houdini.
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“Let’s make something perfectly clear: Frances was not lobotomized.”
– Burn All the Liars
Gorgeous actress falls from grace (and into a sanitarium), dies in 1970. Author takes her story, twists it into fiction, sells it as biography in 1977. Movie studio uses this “biography” as the basis of a biopic starring Jessica Lange in 1982.
What happens to your...
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"Where The Hawk Pauses," by Matthew Rohrer
I have a heart it is too big for my clothes a word pulls it from its sleep some nights the city cannot contain it the bright blue continuously fills with you and your hair is in the bathtub where the hawk pauses near the playground to clean the blood off my heart goes to him every morning you travel the length and breadth of my heart and nowhere are you free often your train is delayed
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“I tried to edit the page again. Within 10 seconds I was informed that my...”
– The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia
A scholar attempts to edit Wikipedia to reflect newly verified truths about the Haymarket riot & trial of 1886 … and fails.
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"Words, what is the word, matter," by Bob Hicok
“You broke my kneecaps” makes more sense than “You broke my heart.” The jilted would recognize each other at the bus stop on crutches and gather their sniffling woe like a herd of tripods off to the side and smoke a communal smoke while writing country songs in their thoughts that begin with lines such as “Love is like shin splints.” My calling here’s to...
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Against Thinking: In Which Peter Stallybrass...
Thinking is what people like Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas’s character in Wonder Boys) do.
Working is what people like Benjamin Franklin do.
I spent this morning reading Peter Stallybrass’s article “Against Thinking” (from a 2007 issue of PMLA); he sets out a pretty neat defense of working over thinking—an attack on those academics and writers who hold thinking up as some...
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“Folger MS V.a.125, a manuscript headed ‘A booke of verses collected by mee...”
– Arthur F. Marotti, from Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric.
Sign That My Dissertation Writing is Already In Trouble: My first thought after reading this was not “Oh, do tell me more about the Donne poems found in this manuscript,” but “I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW TO...
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"A Very Valentine," by Gertrude Stein
Very fine is my valentine. Very fine and very mine. Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine. Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine.
_________________
from “Idem the Same, A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson.”
Life After Whitney Houston
The lines at the post office are still offensively long, but now there is a woman sitting by the You Mail It slot wearing all black and sporting old Sony headphones out of which “I Will Always Love You” is being projected on repeat.
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“I have devoted more hours than I like to recall thinking about the question of...”
– Man as Machine
Your Sunday read on Enlightenment France and freaky robots, courtesy Max Byrd.
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From "The Life of Explorers," by Fani Papageorgiou
I. On Patagonia The farther south they went, the colder it became. We travel among the same monsters and with the same longings. Many animals even eat their afterbirth. V. On Plans We are forever beginning anew the selfsame life. We are like small oval stones, pounded by the North Sea. Our aims rattle inside our minds like pennies in a can, but, like in childhood, an hour and a half has to pass...
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Towards a Conceptual Lyric : From Content to... →
Marjorie Perloff: genius and contrary, as always.
Michelle Obama begins by explaining her own interest in poetry:
I was a budding writer. Elizabeth [Alexander] doesn’t know this… but when I was young, I was a passionate creative writer and sort of a poet. That’s how I would release myself. Whenever I was struggling in school or didn’t want to go outside and deal with...
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“If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.”
– George Orwell’s example of a truly awful blurb, from the Sunday Times, pulled from The Millions‘ fascinating run-down of the past & future of blurbing.
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“2. At a poetry reading, you are approached by an attractive stranger who claims...”
– Which Poetry Editor Are You?
Over at the Poetry Foundation, Lucy Ives muses about the job of a poetry editor and makes up the best internet quiz ever.
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Places I Have Now Vomited In Toronto
The hotel bathroom
The bathroom of a restaurant called “Pho Orchid”
The hotel bathroom again
The 3rd floor bathroom of the Gardiner Museum, just after my husband’s ex-girlfriend’s wedding ceremony, and while she was taking post-ceremony pictures in her wedding dress about 5 feet away from the bathroom
This has been a great trip, you guys.
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Will You Be My Valentine?
I don’t know about you guys, but I tend to stress out about Valentine’s Day, because I a) hate the dinner crowds and the overpriced, crappy prix-fixe menus, and b) feel like there are a lot better ways to express my love than dropping $50 on some cheesy lingerie set or something that will probably get forgotten about in a month anyway. And I also think it sucks in general when...
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From "If There Is Something to Desire," by Vera...
7 If there is something to desire, there will be something to regret. If there is something to regret, there will be something to recall. If there is something to recall, there was nothing to regret. If there was nothing to regret, there was nothing to desire. 8 A beast in winter, a plant in spring, an insect in summer, a bird in autumn. The rest of the time I am a woman. 9 I broke your heart....
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