Month: September 2019

Eh, throw it on the pile. We’ll figure it out later.

Todd Nakamura says you don’t need much equipment to be a cowboy poet. An instrument can help — but if you need to plug it in, you’re probably not one.

….

What is the genre?
It’s very simple. Like, there might be a guitar. There might be a harmonica. It’s all the instruments that you might have found on the range back in the old days.
A lot of the new country music is all about percussion and horns maybe and amplifiers and electric guitars. Most of our stuff is done acoustically.

A Canadian cowboy poet named Nakamura. What an amazing time to be alive.

Another one of the good ones gone. And more here.

Remember back in the old days when the print magazines and papers were acquiring digital outlets? The worm has turned, my dear pulp and paper industry. Now what? (Side note: I’ve always for some reason considered New York to be the dumb little brother of the New Yorker. Like, gets more tail and people like him more, but lets be honest…)

A favourite in this house is interviewed and speaks on success and failure.

It was a funny thing to throw a book out. People seemed much more upset about it than I was. Some people said, It must be like a death! It was nothing like a death. It was like burning a cake. You know that feeling? Oh, hell, I burned the cake. Then you cut the cake open and eat the little pieces in the middle that aren’t completely ruined, then you bake another cake. It’s not what anyone wishes for, and it’s hardly the end of the world.

A group of Amazon employees pushing for change within the all-consuming retail amoeba seem to have scored a victory. At last report, Jeff Bezos was probably instructing his emotionless assassinbulters to “release the hounds.”

The Amazon Employees for Climate Justice group only came together last October, when the group managed to present a shareholder resolution at the company’s annual shareholders meeting. That resolution, which asked that Amazon use its unfathomable weight to support innovations that would reduce its carbon footprint and combat climate change, did not get passed. Thousands of employees later signed a letter to Bezos making similar demands, however. While the letter was circulating, Amazon announced Shipment Zero, a plan to bring its carbon emissions to zero at an unspecified date in the future.

Certain that “Amazon could do better,” says Naidu, the group planned today’s protest. They announced their intentions a few weeks ago, perhaps hoping that Bezos would preemptively respond to their three demands:

1. Zero emissions by 2030: Pilot electric vehicles first in communities most impacted by our pollution
2. Zero custom Amazon Web Services (AWS) contracts for fossil fuel companies to accelerate oil and gas extraction
3. Zero funding for climate denying lobbyists and politicians

What should you expect (and not expect) out of an MFA. (Answer: a fruition of your investment in the pyramid scheme that leads to a teaching job at a tiny liberal arts college in a town with more flavours of latte than pickup truck gun racks, but still, I’d take that.)

I teach in a graduate art school. I teach in a graduate art school where I used to be a student, and where I think a lot about giving my students as much value, as much strength and confidence as writers, as I can give them as each new semester starts. There has seemed to me perhaps no greater impediment to students’ learning than when they expect a workshop to give them things it does not have the capacity to give.

I like knowing what the young people are up to. It’s invigorating and affirming to know they’re out there doing the hard work of becoming something. Here’s the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35. Ah, 35. It’s like 25, but with the first tantalizing fingers of existential doubt.

A great list with some great names, and even a debut novelist thrown in for good measure. Stuff to discover, people! Glad to see Michael Crummey back in it all.

Posting this for my friend Lisa who is a ballet teacher that has been known to engage in AoGG tourism. I could personally take it or leave it. Though it might be fun to get a peek at Gilbert’s package in a leotard.

One of Elizabeth Warren’s strategists is a poet. Not just like your uncle Clem who has a vast collection of occasionally-specific limericks. Like a real, honest-to-goodness genius. Matches Warren, frankly (I’d vote the hell out of Warren if I were American, fyi).

Another reason to be pro-Warren: she supports (and is supported by) poets. Turns out that one of the poets up for the National Book Award this year, Camonghne Felix, is also the Director of Surrogates & Strategic Communications at Elizabeth Warren for President.
Felix has been longlisted for the National Book Award for her collection Build Yourself a Boat, which Morgan Parker described as “a thrillingly new form of storytelling, as much investigation as it is song, as broken as it is doused in genuine strength.” I will personally be rooting for them both.