Mayakovsky's Revolver: A Double-Take On Matthew Dickman’s Latest

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In my experience, the Dickman brothers and their poetry are polarizing topics amongst creative writers. Most people really do either love or hate them. I’ll admit that I was in the latter camp, – I was suspicious of the Dickman public image, which is very Portland, cool and offbeat, and this prejudice ruined what individual pieces of theirs I read or heard read aloud – until, like a critic should, I gave their work a fair chance.  When I actually read Matthew and Michaels’ poetry collections in full, I flipped.Flies won me over to Michael Dickman. Mayakovsky’s Revolver similarly convinced me of Matthew. The collection, which West 10th reviewed earlier this month, is full of surprising language and metaphor. My favorite example occurs in The Gas Station, when Matthew encounters a gunman: “this guy came out swinging / a gun, his face like an apartment / that no one had lived in for years, / the gun pointing just above my head when it went off, …”Due to its thematic content, Matthew’s collection may not be entirely accessible on the whole. Not every reader has been threatened with a firearm. Neither have most readers lost a sibling to suicide, a narrative that runs throughout Mayakovsky’s Revolver. Regardless of how foreign some of the collection’s content may be, most of its poems are believable and engaging.This is due to the fact that the emotion behind the language feels honest. Before Mayakovsky’s Revolver, I’d unfairly assumed that Dickman’s poetry relied more on gimmick than on art and was more striking for its cool, modern voice than for its sincerity. Mayakovsky’s Revolver, for the most part, proves both assumptions wrong. The collection is consistently both artful and passionate.Only one piece, entitled Dark, made me think that perhaps my original misgivings about Dickman’s poetry, which are doubts that a lot of haters share, carried some weight. Dark occurs in Mayakovsky’s Revolver’s second section, Elegy to a Goldfish. In general, I am less enamored of this section than of the rest of the book. But, I have a definite issue with the piece Dark.Dark includes bits of different stories – a line about an abused boy, a line about a self-abusive girl – in an arc that focuses mainly on Dickman himself.  Neither the story of the abused boy nor of the self-abusive girl is developed; neither the boy nor the girl is even named. These two characters feel inauthentic, like archetypes of other people that appear in the collection; the inclusion of their stories feels gratuitous. In Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Dark presents a disappointment. It lacks cohesiveness and, I think, the emotional urgency that makes the rest of the collection so compelling.--Lauren Roberts, Managing Editor

Poetry Review: Gerald Stern's In Beauty Bright

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In Beauty Bright, Gerald Stern’s latest collection of poems, is meditative, celebratory, intimately sad, and funny. Stern deals in terms of time, gathering up old years and sticking them in with new ones. Midway through a poem that seems to be taking place in the present, he’ll admit: “it is probably / April and it’s probably twenty, thirty / years ago” and then he’ll move along, keeping the focused, wild momentum that is so familiar in his writing. The span—temporal, geographical, tonal—of a Stern poem is immense. He moves from the Ruhr to New Jersey to the Mississippi; from 1936 to the American Revolution; from violence to a place where “everyone hugged / the person to his right although the left was / not out of the question”. He sorts through his personal past in the same lines that he grapples with the pasts of entire cultures and countries.Stern is 87 now, and has written seventeen collections of poetry. He writes about his age often—“for I am going in reverse / and my slow mind has ruined me”; “Too late now to look for houses / to give readings, to flirt, to eat blueberries / to dance the polka”—but he is also preoccupied with the fullness of things that have already happened. He recalls streets and people in clipped and intense detail, occasionally confessing “I don’t know what the year was” or musing “someone should mark / the day, I think it was August 20th”. The poems of In Beauty Bright are rich and strange, and they barrel forward with a strong, intuitive rhythm. Stern himself is as observant and  expansive as ever, naming what used to be around him with the same care as he names what’s still around, proclaiming “there is so much to say about him I want to / live again,” granting each small thing and year its due attention.--Maeve Nolan, Poetry Editor

A Review of Das Energi by Paul Williams

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Sifting through second-hand paperbacks at a musty bookstore on the Upper West Side I stumbled upon Das Energi, a hippie-spiritual classic from 1974 that I’d heard my friend’s parents talk about when they would reminiscence about times when music was political and LSD was legal. It was one of those popular books that everyone eventually forgot about as the decade passed and the peace and love mentality of that generation faded into the 80s.Usually these kinds of “Feel the world, heal the world” narratives can be hard to get through, mostly because they are repetitive and almost always vague, but this one struck a somewhat different note. Paul Williams manages to weave lyrical prose with hard slang into a strong and thoughtfully structured manifesto, a mantra for a new way of living life. The structure of Das Energi follows suit, each page as varied as the voice. Some pages are run-on paragraphs, set in a conversational tone Williams asks an obscure “you” why fear is so potent, why we choose to ignore the metaphysical implications of our existence. Others are only a line, something short and thoughtful to be repeated over and over again. Though he traverses a number of topics, from guiltless sex to our obsession with efficiency to the potency of religion, the one line he refers back to constantly is: “You are God”.  Williams seems to believe that worshipping a separate and nonhuman entity is pointless and detracts from the self-evolution and discovery that is necessary to contribute to the energy flow of the world.In some ways Williams came very close to sounding like the stoned middle-aged gypsies you might bump into at Burning Man while waiting in line for beer, but it is his stylistic voice that separates him from the ‘wishy washy’ aspects of spiritual culture that mainstream society can’t seem to handle. He has a very forceful approach to his doctrine and often ends up sounding much more like Karl Marx than Gandhi. His constant reference to “shedding old skin”, “setting yourself free” and of “not seeking but finding” are dispersed between urgent didactic lines like “Here and now, boys. Or else spend infinite future fighting quarrels of endless past.” He pushes forward the importance of responsibility and even outlines three self-made laws of the economics of energy. Admittedly Williams’ inconsistency in writing is sometimes shaky—it is harder to sink into a piece that chooses not to commit to any tone or mood—but he is nevertheless an earnest and often charismatic writer with enough skill to pull off a book that could have been excruciating. His words are familiar the way an old jazz tune at a coffee store is; you know the basic melody but the vocal riffs and trumpet solo always take you buy surprise.--Michelle Ling, Art Editor

Poetry Review: Elaine Equi's Click and Clone

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Elaine Equi's newest collection, Click and Clone, is a clever, playful exploration of "the tone and timbre of American life as it has been colored by the new metaphors and images brought to us by our continuing technological revolution." Equi's poems are punchy and energetic yet intimate, and she displays a surprising breadth of form. From faux tarot readings to a sonnet comprised entirely of headlines written by consummate poets at the New York Post, Equi strives to overthrow the common and the fixed. In "Follow Me," she declares, "I don't stay / inside the line. / I don't go / outside the line. / I am the line itself."Whether writing about clones or consumerism or Haruki Murakami, Equi shamelessly exhibits her wit with wordplay and poignant aphorisms. Yet there are times when Equi crosses the line between clever and banal, when it seems like she tries too hard to elicit a few laughs. For the most part, however, she remains as fresh and modern as the title of the collection itself.Click and Clone is not for the timid or the steadfastly old-fashioned. As Equi puts it in "Side Effects May Include," "Warning: these poems may cause / headaches, hives, hard-ons in women, / . . . Do not read these poems if you are pregnant / or nursing without consulting a doctor first."--Jarry Lee, Assistant Poetry Editor

Poetry Review: Percussion Grenade by Joyelle McSweeney

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Percussion Grenade (Fence Books, 2012), Joyelle McSweeney’s third full-length poetry collection, begins not with an explosion, but with a warning: she intends for her poetry to be read aloud. She likens you to a Looney Tune and to a flight attendant. This is the first page.The three that follow, however, are a waste, as are many throughout the book—blotted with Douglas Kearney’s illustrations. Kearney depicts the title images and obvious themes of the book’s sections. These depictions, however, are purely literal and lack an interesting perspective. They subtract from the otherwise extraordinarily dense block of text that is Percussion Grenade.Like fragmentation, McSweeney’s poetry violently rips through every thought that falls within its “killzone.” This killzone, however, is not grenade-sized. Her work is an atomic bomb. The thoughts are all but neutralized.And she’ll beat anything to death. Each poem relies on dozens, sometimes hundreds, of images. They appear, they reappear, they disappear—they are flung at the page from every direction. Consistency isn’t worthy of her writing. It speaks—or screams, rather—for itself:

Crescendo! MacCaw! I’m a magpie with a caralarm and an airplane a patented / genome a reinforced cockpit door and a poptab brain a vivisected aquifer / shunted and split ten ways between here and the San Fernando Valley and the / Rift valley and the Kusk Valley the Rhine and Tuscaloosa and South Bend and / St Marks Venice and St Marks / Opeeeeeeeeogalala! OpeeOrkneyIslanders! BushTwins! OpeeeeeeeeCree!

“Opeeeeeeeentropy!” Percussion Grenade is an unleashing of poetic chaos, literary terrorism. She warned us.-Beau Peregoy, Poetry Editor

Poetry Review: Matthew Dickman's Mayakovsky's Revolver

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The brothers Dickman, Matthew and Michael, found themselves thrust face-first into the world of poetry around 2009, when both had recently published their first full collections of poems from Copper Canyon Press. The two received mixed reactions to their collective worth, heralded as either a gimmick of hip, Portland poets, or as a sort of polarized harmony, where each poet’s distinctly different style pulled away from his twin’s, only to have each void filled with the other brother’s voice.With his newest collection, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Matthew Dickman has established himself independent of any of the gimmicks or cheap tricks. Mayakovsky’s Revolver is drenched in a sort of dark enlightenment, a world permeated with imagery that is at once visceral and hauntingly surreal. This is a world where the speaker’s third grade teacher wears  “a rosary of barbed wire underneath her white blouse,” a world where the speaker will try to pass notes to his dead brother on the day of his funeral, filled with an entire penumbra of emotion.Dickman is still jubilant, but he is also quiet, pensive. The elements and subjects of the collection are at once celebrated and mourned, as “blackberries will make the mouth of an eight-year-old look like he’s a ghost.” The poems in Mayakovsky’s Revolver take place in quiet moments, the shadows of memories that can only exist in the world of poetry. The collection laments the death of a dead brother, while embracing the life of a twin brother, staring right into the smallest of moments, and, in spite of everything, managing to find great love and great loss.--Eric Stiefel, Assistant Poetry Editor 

“A Voice… Apart from Me:” A Commentary on the ‘Poem Voices’ of Dorothea Lasky and Eileen Myles

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Last Friday, sixty or so noir-clad poetry bugs gathered in the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House to hear two poets read.  The first was Dorothea Lasky, a bundle of whimsy with an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst and a head of distinctly Dr. Seussean curls. The other was Eileen Myles, an ageless wordsmith from Boston, author of countless poetry collections and possibly one of the coolest people this side of the Mason Dixon.  Both poets presented an assortment of new poems and also read from their most recent books, Thunderbird by Lasky and Snowflake/different streets by Myles.I attended this reading with the intention of writing a more standard review of each collection, but upon Ms. Lasky first opening her mauve-stained lips, I knew that the reading called for a different kind of commentary.Reading a book of poems alone, silently, is how we most often receive poetry.  We take note of the visual clues on the page that help to guide our rhythm and perception of the work; but ultimately, the poems enter our brains via this strange portal where how the words look truly affects how they sound, and finally what they mean, more than any other type of writing.  It doesn't always happen that the way you imagine a poem to sound will be how the poet actually presents it; and this surely didn't happen last night.  I was impressed that both Lasky's and Myles's poems became brand new, and I think better, thanks to each of their extremely different, equally evocative "poem voices."Dorothea Lasky has a speaking voice that is so high-pitched and clear, it seems as if she never smoked or cursed a day in her life (though, as of Friday night, I can attest to the fact that at least 50% of that is highly false... see pg. 4 of Thunderbird).  She is giggly and self-deprecating, making quips between poems to get the audience as comfortable as she seems to be.  The voice she assumes once she starts reading possesses the same high-pitched, almost child-like quality, but suddenly increases in volume by 10 fold.  Then most notably, her inflection takes on an alarming pattern where it sort of sounds like a 4th grader reading a paragraph about the solar system out loud to the class.  Hearing this voice read lines like "I care for monsters/But only because I am one" and similarly simple and hard-hitting lines that riddle Thunderbird, changes the work.  Lines that initially may appear dramatic or angry on the page, take on humility and occasional irony.  At first listen, Lasky's "poem voice" was so different from what I expected that I found it a bit jarring.  A few poems in, however, I wanted to immediately re-read her book, this time with an ear for how endearing and unique Thunderbird can sound.Below is a link to Lasky reading a poem from her book called Who To Tell.  I recommend reading the poem silently and then having a listen.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F4_42iMQ-kJuxtapose Lasky's high-pitched, performative "poem voice" with Myles's gravelly, colloquial one for a mesmerizing study on how different poets choose to present their work.  I attended a reading of Eileen Myles's over the summer where she revealed that she often writes poems in her head while driving; so, her process of putting the poem on the page is sort of a backwards translation from aural to visual.  I can't speak for Lasky, but for Myles, how the poem sounds is a huge part of the equation.  This becomes very clear when she reads.Myles's husky and understated speaking voice establishes upon first listen that this ain't her first West Village rodeo.  She reads her poems breezily and conversationally; you can tell she's used to interacting with her poems off the page.  She also reads quite quickly, but with such a cool self-assuredness, that even if her words flew by too fast for you to catch them, you find yourself nodding in comprehension.  Most distinctly, as Myles reads poem after poem, a strong Boston accent surfaces, which is uncharacteristic of her every day speaking voice.  This is not intentional, she admits.  The accent slips in and grows thicker as she gets deeper into the experience of reading.  This unique addition to her already colloquial voice gives simple lines like "For the most compelling birthday party I'd been to in a while I bought three cards," a jolt of charm, due to how those "ar" sounds so patently feature the Boston accent.Here is a video of Eileen Myles reading from Snowflake/different streets.  See if you can detect all the awesome qualities of her "poem voice," and how they add to your experience of the work.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV5bnSCcewMThis wasn't the case on Friday, but I have certainly heard and been disappointed by writers that read work, which I loved on the page, aloud to an audience (an example would be Augusten Burroughs... sad).  Not all experiences with "poem voices" at a reading will end well.  But the role of the "poem voice" does add a fascinating element to the medium, putting poetry at a crossroads between a visual art, a literary art, and a performing art.Below is a link to the schedule of events at the Writers House this year.  Free readings, free wine, free food for thought.http://cwp.fas.nyu.edu/page/readingseriesBy: Amanda Montell, Assistant Poetry Editor

Writer's Bloq

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Have you ever felt that, even in this brave new world of online sharing, you are lacking in options for online creative writing communities? Where is the Flickr of poetry? Writer's Bloq seems poised to fill this niche. The Bloq is an online community for MFA and Undergraduate Writing, English, and Comparative Literature students, professors, and alumni to share work, connect with peers, discover new writing, and uncover the literary events. Students, alumni, and professors from top programs such as Austin, Brooklyn, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, New School, Stanford, and Syracuse have already joined in creating a modern platform for writers.Writer’s Bloq is hosting its first event, “Unsolicited: MFA Mingle”, at the Strand on May 3rd. “Unsolicited” will feature the top writers from the site. To learn more about the event, check www.unsolicited.eventbrite.com. Interested in reading at the event, discovering the work of fellow writers, or showcasing your own skills? Join the Bloq today at writersbloq.com. Because writer's block isn't always a bad thing.

"Your Father on the Train of Ghosts:" A Review

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Lauren Roberts, Assistant Poetry Editor of West 10th, reviews Your Father on the Train of Ghosts by G. C. Waldrep and John Gallagher.

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallagher’s collaboration, YOUR FATHER ON THE TRAIN OF GHOSTS reads how an air vacuum surrounding one passing vehicle feels: the poetry can suspend time, steal breath from your lungs. Whether or not this effect is sustained across the collection’s 221-paged sprawl is debatable and depends entirely on the reader’s willingness, their ability to be surprised afresh with each variation of certain stock devices that appear throughout.Bridges, trains, windows and flames are some of the many, often revisited tropes that bind the collection together. These images serve as metaphors for many different things in turn: Bridges symbolize people; trains are relationships, weather, music. Windows are a very complex structural element that we’d prefer not to go into for brevity’s sake, and flames are what happens when you’re not paying attention. Bridges, trains, windows, flames; such reiteration establishes a rhythm like wheels on a track, signals an essential unchangingness even as the composition moves forward through varied landscapes.And to where, toward what end, are Waldrep and Gallagher driving? Nowhere, really. They’re less interested in a destination for YOUR FATHER ON THE TRAIN OF GHOSTS than in developing a concept: there’s art in “confusion / of desire and location, trust / and vector.” It’s a prettily wrought, if purportedly aimless trip that the poets invite us on. I’ll Decorate My House With You encapsulates this in its last couplet, the penultimate followed by an extended final line, “And then we invent something / for the dashboard that replicates the horizon, and we go for a drive.”

On the way to our version of the horizon, there are definitely things to marvel at. Especially in GHOSTS’ first third, where the collection’s central ideas are expressed with its most phenomenal lyricism. Poems here create and hold us flush against the skin of a weird, totally new atmosphere, inside of which the commonplace become unmoored, morph and blend together.Then, in the middle and beyond, every varied thing blends together almost too well. We’re no longer on the verge of any realization. Even awesome specificities, never before mentioned occurrences, have apparently happened before – “in Los Angeles / another designer wallpaper artist / dedicates her blog to / Krishna” ; “the hearses are circling the playgrounds again.”Another and again. These qualifiers occur until it becomes easy for a reader’s eyes to glaze over. Everything seems plain immutable, interchangeable; by page 87, one of GHOSTS’ narrators too falls sadly, dangerously deadened to what’s occurring as he perseveres with the collection’s theme. He sets the scene for On the Performativity of Grief As Ecstatic Culture, saying, “The curtains in the clown house were on fire again,” and doesn’t recognize the implications of that statement until “…the sirens approached. / Are they in there, / I remember you kept asking. Are they still inside?”It’s inconclusive whether any clowns died in the incident. The toll’s not important, anyway. The real potential tragedy is that maybe you couldn’t appreciate this startling and good poem because you were lulled into complacency after the last fire, pages back in the collection’s girth.

Mercurial Lamb: A Narrative of Collaborative Mutation

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Eric Kim reviews Matthea Harvey's "adult-children's book" Of Lamb, a new erasure put out by McSweeney's.In their new release, Of Lamb (McSweeney’s, 2011), poet Matthea Harvey and painter Amy Jean Porter collaborate on a story that haunts, delights and surprises all at the same time.  Through vibrant paintings that complement a dark, tilted narrative, Harvey and Porter have concocted, as Rae Armantrout calls it, an “adult-children’s book [...] each page like a Valentine’s Day chocolate with one drop of arsenic.”Inspired by Jen Bervin’s Nets and Tom Phillips’s A Humument, Harvey’s erasure of David Cecil’s A Portrait of Charles Lamb is eerie yet coherent, foreign yet familiar—in her own words, “an irreverent and warped retelling of the nursery rhyme.”  Mary, essentially, had a little lamb, but they did more than just go to school together: “They pin’d and hungr’d after bodily joy/ Lamb and Mary met in whatever room happened to be closest/ Who would not be curious to see the pictures?”  Carefully balancing abstract nuances undoubtedly facilitated by the erasure process (“Vacillating Lamb owed everything, owed nothing to love”) with concrete plot points that tie the whole thing together into a narrative (“Lamb found Mary crying in the hedge”), Harvey showcases through Of Lamb the innovative, subtle capabilities of erasure poetry to mutate the original for the better.The point here is mutation: it is not the mere recreation of the nursery rhyme that spellbinds readers; it is those remnants of the familiar story that have been warped in the most disturbing sense, from children’s song to bestial tragedy, from linear narrative to disjointed, kaleidoscopic experience—those moments are what make Harvey’s erasure a complete success, a modern chronicle of change through the seasons to an eventual coda: “He could not stop the clouds or the sun/ Lamb thought conclusions were all alike.”  The process of whiting out, of erasing significant portions of the original text in order to understand a different kind of narrative, simulates not only Lamb’s snowballing physical and mental disintegration by the end (“Lamb’s mind struggling, forgetting [...] His figure had grown dim”), but also Mary and Lamb’s mercurial relationship, the fragmental shift from love to loss.Porter’s paintings often highlight this mercuriality: Lamb is a different color in each drawing.  His fleece is not “white as snow,” but shades of burgundy, indigo and emerald, each reflexive of the mood of that specific page.  But the most curious moments in the book are when Porter’s paintings instead complicate Harvey’s text.  For example, to “Mary shut his eyes to the future and ardently turned to animal satisfactions,” Porter paints Mary devouring a piece of flesh behind Lamb’s back.  Meat eating, a strident motif in the book, is at first Porter’s interpretation of Harvey’s text: “animal satisfactions” does not seem to point to meat eating so readily.  But later, Lamb in fact reveals, “Should I tell you I watched her eating a bit of cold mutton in our kitchen?”  Porter’s accompanying painting illustrates Mary licking a pink lamb popsicle, then three pages later, lamb licking from the ground that very popsicle melted.  Harvey’s coupled text at this point is less obvious: “Year by year he appeared fatter, but Lamb was not full of fun.”  Such an impact of Porter’s paintings on Harvey’s seemingly abstract words, and vice versa, suggests the need to read Of Lamb not as a mere poem with accompanying illustrations, but as a collaboration of the two mediums, each as much a part of the narrative as the other.This duality makes it difficult to define what Of Lamb is about—because semantically the words say one thing while the paintings say another.  But they certainly work together, as Harvey puts it, “like a game of telephone, or an archeological site, each layer taking something from the layer before and transforming it.”  Harvey’s textual mutation interacts with Porter’s illustrations in a way that resists meaning-making and facilitates encountering, unexpectedly experiencing Mary and Lamb page by page.  Perhaps the point here, then, is not to inject meaning into Harvey and Porter’s chocolate, but rather to taste the injected arsenic, to enjoy the mutation as the drug it is.Eric Kim, Poetry Editor

It's Been Such A Long Time

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Hello there West Tenthers!  Forgive my inexcusable absence these past weeks.  In my defense, I am deep in preparations for finals and my summer abroad in Madrid.  Yes, you read that right...I know, I know, I'm excited to.  In the vein of so many great American writers I hope to find some inspiration among all those classy Europeans and...their very old buildings.I'd love to hear about your summer plans--what's crackin with you kids?  Summer reading lists anyone?And before the semester draws to a close I want to clue you guys into yet another exciting event (if you can forgive the shameless self-promotion).  Tomorrow night at 7:00, the NYU Bookstore will feature poetry readings from Deborah Landau, Kevin Prufner, Joni Wallace, and Tom Healy.  Deborah is not only the director of the Creative Writing Program, but also a not-too-shabby poet.  I highly recommend it!  And if you see a pretty fly looking dude in his purple apron scurrying to and fro in the bookstore tomorrow night, stop to say "hey."  Y'all know I love some recognition.

Getting to Know the Bounties of the CWP Website

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Hello! Long time no blog. I blush. And I digress. So right to business:The NYU Creative Writing Program website is chock full of fun things to listen to when putting off homework/studying. I want to bring two such gems to attention.Did you know that NYU CWP and Slate magazine collaborated to create the Open Book series of videocasts with famous writers? People you admire and envy? Intelligent, intelligent folks? You can now listen to them and SEE them moving and breathing and being alive and successful right in front of your eyes, being interviewed by our own Fearless Leader and Director Deborah Landau, along with Slate's (and now NYU's as well) Meghan O'Rourke. The likes of John Ashbery, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Junot Díaz reside in the link below.Check them out here.And this I did already know about: the CWP has been putting up lovely podcasts of the past couple of semester's reading series. If you missed out on catching your favorite writer visiting NYU--or if you desperately want to remember that astonishing turn of phrase that writer said and you without your writing implement repeated over and over on the walk back home but forgot right at the door--your problems are solved.Check the podcasts out here.Perhaps you have already discovered such corners and gems. Alack (changin' it up). You super sleuth.

Poem-a-day and Prompt

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Hello all!Am I the only one who gets ecstatically happy at the prospect of receiving a new poem every day in my inbox? Ah, thank you, my ears are tingling with the echo of that resounding "NO! Tell me more!"If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe (for free!) to The Academy of American Poets poem-a-day email list. In 2009, the blissful poem-a-day routine only lasted for the month of April (National Poetry Month! I know, as if anyone needs a reason to love April more) but since April 2010, the Academy decided--with the help of internet voters--that the poem-a-day extravaganza should last year round. Hear, hear.So sign up, sit back, and start every morning by reading a new poem by an author you may or may not have heard of before. LOVE IT!And, to sign off, a prompt:Write a poem made solely of observations. As in, not putting you or your mind in there--just what you see/hear/smell/taste/touch. For example: I saw a blue wool coat lying across a cream-colored quilt. Not: I saw my roommate's coat lying across my bed. 10-20 lines. See what kind of scene you can create using these sparse images.

Oh Canada

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This week's post, by necessity, will have to be very short...though, I hope, not overwhelmingly sweet.  I find that it's often difficult for writers, when trying to craft a solid poem, to boil their language down to the precise images the poem needs.  I'm going to go ahead and give out a great poetry prompt, stolen (with the best of intentions) from Deborah Landau.  She once asked our class to write in the style of (Canadian!) Anne Carson's "Town Poems" from Plainwater.  This one in particular may prove helpful:Town of the Death of Sin "What is sin?You asked.The moon stung past us.All at once I saw you.Just drop sin and go.Black as a wind over the forests."Yep, that's it...powerful stuff huh?  I wish the best of luck in all penned adventures this week!

Ten Minutes to Submit to West 10th Print Journal

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It's Monday, what are you doing? Sitting in your jammies trolling the webs, procrastinating writing your term papers? Me too.But here's a more productive way to procrastinate: submit your prose or poetry to West 10th Journal! The deadline is today, Decemeber 6th, but with ten more minutes left in the day, it's not yet too late.Maybe you're computer is stuffed with short stories you've penned, but have been too nervous to show to anyone, or maybe you have the uncanny ability to write a haiku in seconds. Or maybe, you're so excellent at procrastinating that you've developed the ability to speed-write. Whatever the case, you've got nothing to lose.Plus there's a prize!Editors select one fiction and one poetry piece as "The Best" and the authors get $200, eternal bragging rights, something to put on their resumés, and to read they're stories at the West 10th launch party where Darin Strauss will probably shake your hand and then you'll feel pretty cool.So get your submission form here. And START WRITING!