Thursday, June 28, 2012
Excuse Me, I Think You Dropped Your Dreams
Poet and multimedia artist Charly the city mouse Fasano to release an interactive book of poems using QR Codes in order to bring together print and digital media.
Excuse Me, I Think You Dropped Your Dreams is the newest book of poems by Charly the city mouse Fasano to be released by Fast Geek Press on June 28, 2012. It is a multimedia book that allows the reader to interact with the poems by scanning QR Codes with their “smart” phone to access Fasano’s self produced short films and recordings . Usually seen adorning billboards, print ads and concert flyers, the QR Code (otherwise known as “robot vomit”) is used by Fasano as a tool to bring his art together in one place by integrating print and digital media.
The poems, films and recordings included in Excuse Me, I Think You Dropped Your Dreams are Charly the city mouse Fasano’s examination of what he calls the “American mental recession.” Fasano explores the notion that the last decade has not only been economically recessive but dominated by cultural devaluation and self destruction. It is Fasano’s brain movie about how the world was and what it has become.
Charly the city mouse Fasano is a poet and artist from Denver, Colorado. He read his poems with and shared the stage with bands like Lucero, Drag the River, Crime in Stereo, Madson Jones, Land Lines and The Queers. He is the founder Fast Geek Press, Pretend You Can Reab audio zine, and As Well As Magazine. He has released a vinyl EP, a CD, two cassette tapes and two books of poems. Fasano's poems have appeared in Yellow Rake, Lubricated Magazine, Syntax Magazine, MovingPoems.com and Growing Strange Magazine. His latest book of poems, Next Analog Broadcast (2011) was published by Sunnyoutside Press.
This is a link to one of the short films included in the book
http://youtu.be/xRJQ9D6wHwE
Charly the city mouse Fasano's website
http://cmousefasano.com
Links to audio recordings included in the book
http://charlythecitymousefasano.bandcamp.com/track/cul-de-sacd
http://charlythecitymousefasano.bandcamp.com/track/pinched-2
Jen Hofer
Jen Hofer is a poet, translator, and bookmaker.
Her publications include Lead & amp; amp; Tether (Dusie Kollektiv, 2011); one (Palm Press, 2009); The Route, a collaboration with Patrick Durgin
(Atelos, 2008), sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre, a translation from Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2008); and lip wolf, a translation of Laura Solórzano's lobo de labio (Action Books, 2007).
CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN
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Jennifer Benka Named Academy of American Poets Executive Director
The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce that Jennifer Benka has been named the organization's next Executive Director. She will return to New York City from San Francisco, where she was most recently the National Director of Development and Marketing for 826 National. She will assume her new role at the Academy on July 16.
Looking for a book to take to the park this weekend?
Check out American Poet's round-up of notable books by Mark Doty, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Bhanu Kapil, Amy King, Alicia Ostriker, Bin Ramke, Ariana Reines, and others. On the web at: www.poets.org/summerreading
Carlos Fuentes: The Lost Interview
A conversation recorded on the road reveals the late author’s take on the role of the writer-as-activist. Read and listen.
Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti's work is constantly blurring the lines between art and literature, always producing interesting results. In her latest work, How Should a Person Be?, the interview editor from The Believer combined e-mails, transcribed conversations and a whole lot of fiction to tell the possibly autobiographical story of Sheila, who finds herself unsure of how to live and create after a failed marriage.
Read to Support Teach for America!
When 50,000 people pledge to read a book this summer, we will donate $5,000 to help Teach for America ensure that all children get the excellent education they deserve.
Vulture Gastronomy
The poem “Vulture Gastronomy” is taken from Fred D’Aguiar’s unpublished book-length poetry sequence entitled American Vulture. He teaches in the MFA program at Virginia Tech. His most recent novel was Bethany Bettany (2003). His most recent poetry collection, Continental Shelf (2009).
The Contenders: 61 Years of National Book Award Fiction Finalists
Special thanks to 5 Under 35 honorees Kirstin Allio, Matthew Eck, Amity Gaige, Asali Solomon, Josh Weil, Tiphanie Yanique, and Charles Yu for providing wonderful appreciations of the following Finalist books:
- 1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (Josh Weil)
- 1956: A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (Kirstin Allio and Matthew Eck)
- 1956: The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories by Eudora Welty (Kirstin Allio)
- 1958: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (Amity Gaige)
- 1959: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Matthew Eck)
- 1961: Rabbit, Run by John Updike (Amity Gaige)
- 1962: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (Matthew Eck)
- 1970: Going Places by Leonard Michaels (Matthew Eck)
- 1970: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut (Charles Yu)
- 1972: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories by Cynthia Ozick (Kirstin Allio)
- 1975: Guilty Pleasures by Donald Barthelme (Charles Yu)
- 1975: Sula by Toni Morrison (Asali Solomon and Tiphanie Yanique)
- 1975: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley (Kirstin Allio)
- 1976: Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories by Vladimir Nabokov (Kirstin Allio)
- 1980: Collected Stories by Paul Bowles (Amity Gaige)
- 1987: The Counterlife by Philip Roth (Charles Yu)
- 1988: Libra by Don DeLillo (Charles Yu)
- 1992: Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (Tiphanie Yanique)
- 1992: Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García (Tiphanie Yanique)
- 1993: Operation Wandering Soul by Richard Powers (Charles Yu)
- 1994: The Collected Stories by Grace Paley (Matthew Eck)
- 2000: The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter (Tiphanie Yanique)
- 2004: Florida by Christine Schutt (Josh Weil)
- 2007: Like You’d Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard (Josh Weil)
JANET GROTH
Published by Algonquin Books
$19.95(US)
Janet Groth, Emeritus Professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, has also taught at Vassar, Brooklyn College, the University of Cincinnati, and Columbia. She was a Fulbright lecturer in Norway and a visiting fellow at Yale and is the author of Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time (for which she won the NEMLA Book Award) and coauthor of Critic in Love: A Romantic Biography of Edmund Wilson. She lives in New York City.
Interview with Levi Montgomery
How many hours a day do you spend reading/writing? When I am actually writing, it may be ten to twelve hours, but I'm not always writing. I spend some part of every day doing the things that make me a writer, but that includes reading voraciously, following 200+ blogs, reading my WIP a million times, etc.
What inspires you to continue being a writer? I got an email from a reader who told me that Stubbs and Bernadette had inspired her to take the steps she needed to take in order to get control of her life. I got a comment once, on an online site, from a reader telling me that I had made her "cry so-o-o hard!" Zoe Winters said that The Death of Patsy McCoy was one of the most amazing things she had ever read. Readers. Readers are why I do all this. Thank you, readers!
If you could have been the author of any novel, which title would it be and why? I don't wish I had written any novel except my own. I wish I had written lines and sentences and paragraphs that I come across, things that make me deeply envious. "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." That is the opening line in Neuromancer, by William Gibson. I wish I had written that. Here's another: "Laurel had cried all her bones out and was too floppy to worry that she was red-nosed and puffy-eyed in front of a boy." Surely every writer on Earth reads that says "Wish I'd written that!" But only one of us got to it first, and that one was Joshilyn Jackson (the girl who stopped swimming, 2008). Do I wish I'd written those novels? No, just the lines.
Do you think you will ever change audiences? I write for whoever will read my stories. Maybe you'll like one and hate another, and really love the next, and that's fine.
What advice would you give anyone who wants to become a published author? Best advice I ever got was "Read. Write. Repeat."
And do you have a list of favorite books/authors? It changes all the time. Right now, I'm re-re-re-reading Iain Banks, The Bridge. Highly recommended for any writer or reader, or anyone who wants to become either. A case study in layered symbolism.
Oprah’s Book Club 2.0: Exclusive Webisode of the Week
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Artist/Teacher Institute (aTi)
July 29 - August 3, 2012Held at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey - Intensive residential summer program offering writing, art and performance workshops for artists and teachers. Educators can earn 40 hours of PD credit. Co-sponsored by Arts Horizons, Stockton & the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Learn more
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Excerpt from "Blood Bonds"
Standing back away from the blinds, almost hiding, Lucy watches his truck until she can no longer see the early sun flashing from the pitted chrome. She moves to the back door, the last of the morning’s coffee in her hand. She needs to clean the kitchen, do the dishes, make bread. Get the eggs in, turn the compost, hoe the eager weeds from the garden. She needs to go shopping. She needs to do all that, but first, she needs to stand here and gaze down the long gravel road into her childhood.
There was a time when things were simple. When life was friends and games and school, when even school was mostly the playground. There was a long, easy time of climbing trees and playing monkeys, chasing each other through the dusty leaves and the bitter green cherries. Then she looked down and saw Denny gazing up at her like there was something he wanted, something on a pedestal he could never climb high enough to reach, and life changed in that moment.
She decided, late that night, the night of the day that she’d seen Denny watching her, to start a diary, and she carefully cut all the used pages out of a spiral notebook from school. She wrote “My Diary” on the front cover, and embellished it with hearts and flowers and a pony’s head, and then she put it in her top dresser drawer until she could decide on the best way to say “I saw Denny Martin watching me today, and something woke up.” She never did decide, and the “diary” got thrown away empty a long time later, but over the years since then, she’s picked and worried at that one entry a thousand times, and never gotten it any better. I saw Denny Martin watching me today, and something woke up.
At three in the morning on her first day as Mrs Dennis Martin, knowing no other way to voice the joy and fulfillment that had become her life in those moments the day before, she sat in the bathroom and sobbed as silently as she could, smiling so hard it hurt, the most joyous pain she’d ever felt. Mrs Dennis Martin. Lucy Martin. Lucy Springer Martin. Lucille Ball Springer Martin, actually, and she’d sworn him to secrecy three times in a row before she told him her middle name.
And now, nearly thirty years later, she still feels both, the pain and the joy, the longing and the fulfillment, every moment of every day. All she wanted, all she needed, was him, and all she wants and needs now is for him to be happy. There is no belief in her that a woman needs a man in any magic way, or that no unmarried woman can be happy or complete or fulfilled, only that she needed him, only that she could never be all of herself until he was half of her.
She begins to stack the dishes, running water, squirting soap, watching the tiny bubbles float in the strong light through the window. She stands there, not washing, not scrubbing, just watching the bubbles rise like prayers in the silent house.
Midway through the afternoon, she suddenly lays her hoe aside and heads for the house, walking fast, scrubbing her hands on the seat of her jeans. She ransacks the pantry with no particular thought in mind except make it nice, her face pressed together in something close to pain, something damp and edgy. She finds the last of her dried apples, vacuum-packed in glass jars, and a tiny smile dawns in the storm of her face.
Flour, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, butter, her mind calls out, answering itself check, check, check, check, check. Pork and potatoes and salad, and dried-apple pie, and she’ll wear that new dress, the red one he liked so much he couldn’t wait to get it off of her. A stack of 70’s rock on the CD changer and cranked loud, the house smelling of pie crust and pork roast, she begins to dust.
There was a time when things were simple. When life was friends and games and school, when even school was mostly the playground. There was a long, easy time of climbing trees and playing monkeys, chasing each other through the dusty leaves and the bitter green cherries. Then she looked down and saw Denny gazing up at her like there was something he wanted, something on a pedestal he could never climb high enough to reach, and life changed in that moment.
She decided, late that night, the night of the day that she’d seen Denny watching her, to start a diary, and she carefully cut all the used pages out of a spiral notebook from school. She wrote “My Diary” on the front cover, and embellished it with hearts and flowers and a pony’s head, and then she put it in her top dresser drawer until she could decide on the best way to say “I saw Denny Martin watching me today, and something woke up.” She never did decide, and the “diary” got thrown away empty a long time later, but over the years since then, she’s picked and worried at that one entry a thousand times, and never gotten it any better. I saw Denny Martin watching me today, and something woke up.
At three in the morning on her first day as Mrs Dennis Martin, knowing no other way to voice the joy and fulfillment that had become her life in those moments the day before, she sat in the bathroom and sobbed as silently as she could, smiling so hard it hurt, the most joyous pain she’d ever felt. Mrs Dennis Martin. Lucy Martin. Lucy Springer Martin. Lucille Ball Springer Martin, actually, and she’d sworn him to secrecy three times in a row before she told him her middle name.
And now, nearly thirty years later, she still feels both, the pain and the joy, the longing and the fulfillment, every moment of every day. All she wanted, all she needed, was him, and all she wants and needs now is for him to be happy. There is no belief in her that a woman needs a man in any magic way, or that no unmarried woman can be happy or complete or fulfilled, only that she needed him, only that she could never be all of herself until he was half of her.
She begins to stack the dishes, running water, squirting soap, watching the tiny bubbles float in the strong light through the window. She stands there, not washing, not scrubbing, just watching the bubbles rise like prayers in the silent house.
Gardening always calms her. It centers her, it reminds her of everything she’s ever loved, of why we’re here, of how our days are supposed to pass. Except today. Today her eyebrows keep drawing together, today her jaw keeps tightening. Today, the hoe loses its rhythmic scuffle and begins to chop angrily. Halfway through each row, she has to stop and breathe. She has to stop and pray.
Midway through the afternoon, she suddenly lays her hoe aside and heads for the house, walking fast, scrubbing her hands on the seat of her jeans. She ransacks the pantry with no particular thought in mind except make it nice, her face pressed together in something close to pain, something damp and edgy. She finds the last of her dried apples, vacuum-packed in glass jars, and a tiny smile dawns in the storm of her face.
Flour, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, butter, her mind calls out, answering itself check, check, check, check, check. Pork and potatoes and salad, and dried-apple pie, and she’ll wear that new dress, the red one he liked so much he couldn’t wait to get it off of her. A stack of 70’s rock on the CD changer and cranked loud, the house smelling of pie crust and pork roast, she begins to dust.
The latest book from Levi Montgomery, a prolific author of a variety of genres including YA, literary and general fiction.
About Blood Bonds:
“I vow never to take my blood brother’s woman…”
“…and I vow never to leave him in trouble…”
“…and I vow never to take anything of his…”
“…and I vow never to lie to him…”
“…so help me God.”
Immortality is the birthright of youth.
The young are going to live forever, and they know it. When you’re young, you can cut your hand with a dirty piece of bottle glass from the town dump, and it’s okay, because you’re going to live forever. There will be no pain and no blood. There will be no regrets. You can lie to your best friend, you can steal the very substance of his dreams, and pay no price, because you’re immortal.
When the shadow finally sweeps you up in its slow omnipotent crawl, it is not life that you are leaving behind. It is youth. It is the immortality of belief, of knowing that you can cut your hand, you can kiss a girl, you can steal from your blood brother and never pay a price.
How many of us go our entire lives and never see the evil that waits for us under our skins, behind the thin veneer of neckties and fingernail polish?
Learn more about the author at: http://levimontgomery.com/
Those able to write well are shaping the present and future.
Guest Post: This post was written by Solveigh Soderman.
The resource I created --English Degrees in the 21st Century: The Role, Importance and Power of Words -- discusses how the landscape of language today is unprecedented due largely to the egalitarian nature of the Internet and how, as a result, those able to write well are shaping the present and future. Webster University and Dickinson State University, among others, have listed the project as a resource link for their students.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Anne Valente Named Winner of Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest
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Angela, From Wisconsin By Jill McDonough
The cute waitress at the Alembic has
hair red as Ann Margaret’s, eyes liquid
lined like Marilyn, Sophia Loren. She’s
beautiful, always looks high.
Peonies and poppies, koi and flowering
vines on her soft shoulders, American thighs.
She has freckles, a little lisp. Angela,
from Wisconsin, who was in the Army
eight years. This is what a veteran looks like
now, I keep telling myself, on the sidewalk
after her shift while she drinks, talks
about driving trucks into Baghdad, rolls
her eyes about the VA, being brave. She laughs
about self-medicating PTSD, how the earthquake
the other day made her think IED.
I light her cigarette, laugh with her,
squeeze her elbow, thinking Fucking A.
Press here to play the MP3.
Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough’s first book is Habeas Corpus The recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Library of Congress and elsewhere, she teaches at UMass-Boston and directs 24PearlStreet, the online writing program at the Fine Arts Work Center.
The above information was taken from Guernica, a magazine of art & politics.
hair red as Ann Margaret’s, eyes liquid
lined like Marilyn, Sophia Loren. She’s
beautiful, always looks high.
Peonies and poppies, koi and flowering
vines on her soft shoulders, American thighs.
She has freckles, a little lisp. Angela,
from Wisconsin, who was in the Army
eight years. This is what a veteran looks like
now, I keep telling myself, on the sidewalk
after her shift while she drinks, talks
about driving trucks into Baghdad, rolls
her eyes about the VA, being brave. She laughs
about self-medicating PTSD, how the earthquake
the other day made her think IED.
I light her cigarette, laugh with her,
squeeze her elbow, thinking Fucking A.
Press here to play the MP3.
Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough’s first book is Habeas Corpus The recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Library of Congress and elsewhere, she teaches at UMass-Boston and directs 24PearlStreet, the online writing program at the Fine Arts Work Center.
The above information was taken from Guernica, a magazine of art & politics.
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