Month: September 2019

Oooh! A Carolyn Forché memoir!

I work hard to be progressive. I work hard to be forward-thinking. I work hard to find joy and worth in as much of life’s silliness as possible. That is the end of my commentary on this subject.

One might expect poets, given their interest in words, to prefer a social network that permits text-based posts, as Twitter and Facebook do.2 Instagram requires every post to be a picture or video. The Insta-poets’ counterintuitive choice of venue equips them to conjure feelings of intimacy with their many followers. Instagram encourages a visual rhetoric of personal authenticity. The most popular Insta-poets intersperse their poetry with conventional Instagram fodder: selfies, artsy nature shots, exotic travel pictures. Through the distanced intimacy of a social network, these images help us see the Insta-poets as authentic people. At the same time, these nonliterary posts can seem like confections of personality, too tidy to feel authentic.

Kirkus gives us their “best” picks for this fall’s spec/fantasy/horror titles. I am coming to hate the word “best”. But having been out of the genre world for 25 or more years, I appreciate the help getting back in.

I mean, besides the arguments in in the link, what would I use as coasters around the house?

Almost certainly more than any other media in our country, literary magazines model critical thinking and arrange an exposure to the unorthodox, both of which can provide inoculations against where we seem to be headed as a collective.  They assist in that crucial rear-guard holding action on both reading and writing’s behalf.

Our condolences to Margaret and family. A very lovely man. Gracious and kind. I once walked into a cafe seating area full of people and there were no empty seats. Gibson waved me over and bid me sit down. 99% sure he didn’t know who I was. Sweet.

Holy moly, if that isn’t the single greatest author name of all time. Remember when people set out to write poems then ended up novelists and that seemed wildly successful to us schmucks still writing poetry? Now it goes like this: people set out to write novels and end up writing screenplays. Welcome to our lifelong seat of morose envy, novelists.

Sonnet L’Abbe is another favourite around here. And the poems from her new book, Sonnet’s Shakespeare, are marvelous. Please buy and distribute widely. Here she gets the Beattie profile treatment in the Quill.

Compiled over the course of five painstaking years, the poems in Sonnet’s Shakespeare cover a broad range of themes and subjects: environmentalism, Canada’s fraught colonial history, feminism, the illusions of multiculturalism, the deaths of David Bowie and Prince. But on a metaphorical level, the entire project questions Shakespeare’s traditional centrality in the Western canon, interrogating the extent to which other, more marginalized voices have been silenced to carve out space for a dead white male voice that is frequently deemed universal.

Weinman is a big fav in this house, and I’m looking forward to reading this book.

This is the thing that I think that is really important to stress—and what gets lost because it’s Humbert Humbert’s narration and his perspective—is that this book was always about Dolores Haze. It was always about the choice she couldn’t make and the choices she could make and the tragedy that she couldn’t live long enough to make even more choices.

A smart writer keeps his overheads low.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Annie Dillard said once that the only advice any writer needs is to keep your overheads low. In our present epoch, this means you have to be very, very careful about where you choose to live. I live cheaply in the rural north west of Ireland and this means I don’t have to teach, I can just write. 

Stuart Ross has made a career of not getting awards he deserves. What will he do now? Sometimes you got to just keep showing up to work long enough. Congratulations, Stuart. I stand by my assessment of you (from a review in the Star many many years ago: If you were doing exactly what you do here, but in the States, you’d be rich and famous.

Note: Actually, DO buy his books.