Looking forward to the Shipman Agency’s Workroom Craft Seminar: Claiming Your Corner in Queer Narrative Nonfiction with Greg Mania, Edgar Gomez + Jen Winston!
I found out about this residency for women from Carolyn Forché: Story Knife residency for women near Homer, Alaska. They are now accepting applications for next year (until September 30th). It is, Forché writes, "a spectacularly beautiful place, with the necessary measures of solitude and community." Residencies are for two weeks or one month. Sounds like a fantastic opportunity. . . .
According to her Instagram post of August 5, 2022, Courtney Love’s memoir, THE GIRL WITH THE MOST CAKE, is finally finished. Originally slated for release is 2013, Love, one of the few lyric geniuses of the post-punk West Coast grunge scene, apparently had her hands full with other things. It sounds like she, along with ghost writer Alex Abramovich, finally gave over to the massive work it takes to write a memoir. Can’t wait to hear what she has to say about how she writes her lyrics, how she commands audiences that want to devour her, and how she stayed sane when the entire world seemed to hate her. One of the great musicians of our time.
Poet and critic James Longenbach died on July 29, 2022 of kidney cancer. I first read him in Poetry magazine—a remarkable essay called “The Music of Poetry”—and have since explored his ideas concerning lyricism and musical language. I will miss looking forward to his new works.
Congratulations to Ada Limón on becoming the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate!
June 13, 2022: Brian Broome’s riveting work, PUNCH ME UP TO THE GODS, wins the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Memoir and Biography.
Great news! Dana Levin, author of five books of poetry (most recently Now Do You Know Where You Are) will judge the 2023 APR / Honickman First Book Prize.
March 17, 2022: Diane Seuss wins the National Book Critics Circle Award for FRANK: SONNETS.
Congratulation to all of the poets whose work has been recognized by the Pulitzer Committee: Jericho Brown, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Tradition (Copper Canyon); Anne Boyer, author of the poetry books Garments Against Women and The Romance of Happy Workers, was awarded the Pulitzer for her memoir The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Ben Lerner, author The Lichtenberg Figures was a finalist in fiction with The Topeka School (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Congratulations to Danielle Gauthier and Caitlyn Erwin, my two thesis students who, despite the challenges of writing under the duress of the pandemic, have successfully completed their projects.
An essay by Jesse Lichtenstein, “How Poetry Came to Matter Again,” appears in the September 2018 issue of The Atlantic. “The face of poetry in the United States looks very different today than it did even a decade ago,” writes Lichtenstein, “and far more like the demographics of Millennial America. If anything, the current crop of emerging poets anticipates the face of young America 30 years from now.”
Poetry Is a Way of Being in the World That Wasn’t Made for Us
New work from 10 poets with disabilities, including Kenny Fries and Sheila Black.
Nation magazine poetry editors, apologizing for publishing “How-to,” Anders Carlson-Wee’s misguided dramatic monologue of homelessness.
As Grace Schulman writes in a New York Times Op-ed about the Carlson-Wee controversy, “The broader issue here, though, is the backward and increasingly prevalent idea that the artist is somehow morally responsible for his character’s behavior or voice. Writers have always presented characters with unwholesome views; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens and Shakespeare come immediately to mind. One wonders if editors would have the courage to publish Robert Lowell’s ‘Words for Hart Crane’ or Ezra Pound’s ‘Sestina: Altaforte’ today.”