eek!

The weird little Xtra Normal people and their robot voices freak me out a little, but this video made me laugh. I especially love the ending. J.K. Rowling had 700 rejections, you know!

There will be a memorial service for James Baker Hall on July 11 from 4-5 p.m. in Lexington’s Gratz Park. (In case of inclement weather, the event will move inside to the Jesse Stuart room of the Carnegie Center.) Afterwards, there will be a reception in the Carnegie Center, with food and drink and poetry. Folks are invited to bring along a poem to read.

James Baker Hall, former Kentucky poet laureate, writer, teacher, photographer (1935-2009)

This poem takes my breath away:

That First Kite

That first kite was made of newspaper and strung
with fish line. I was lying next to it, alone. Sunlight
in the bright shape of a window, X-ed once
with the shadow of the sash, moved

slowly across the floor toward
me. A way had to be found

to make it work. We were trying. All this
took place in the attic where the cat brought
the birds.
My mother was downstairs
or out back in the cornfield
with a gun.
I didn’t move. Who knew
where my father was.
Nothing ever worked.
I kept my eyes closed

whenever I thought
I was asleep
or flying. I awoke

when I felt the light touch
my feet, perfect, still

I didn’t move. When it touched
my eyes I opened. The crosshairs
were on my chest, breathing. I saw
my heart. A cold wind rattled
the kite.

An exhibit of his photography at 21C Museum.

Normandi Ellis invites memories of Hall.

Over on the Double X, Honor Moore has a great little article about the explosion of pioneering women poets after Sylvia Plath’s death and the publication of Ariel, When Women Blew Up American Poetry: Remembering the heirs to Sylvia Plath.

It is a different experience being a woman and a poet in the dawn of the 21st century. Our feminist experiences are different from those of our mothers and our grandmothers. But it’s useful and sustaining for me to understand the context in which our heroines worked and wrote. And, of course, some truths still hold:

Poetry is not a luxury, Audre Lorde had written in a 1977 essay about the movement among women poets. It is “a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

After thinking I had had it with poems for a while, I wrote a couple this spring and have done some decent revision and figured I would take a break and focus on my novel, which is still such a baby at this time I feel superstitious talking about it so much. But then I started thinking a bit too much about poems during the workshop I taught last month and now here I am thinking about manuscript shape and what I might do with what is shaping into my third collection. Sigh. Those darn poems, always coming back around. Not a treat as I had started to suspect, but a necessary part of my life.

It seems as though we never tire of asking “can creative writing be taught?” as if what we really need to be skeptical of in this world is the university creative writing program, as if it is some kind of wacky pyramid scheme, writers begetting writers begetting writers, with all writers eventually paying some central writing source (Iowa? John Ashbery? just who is making the big score?).

Seriously, it seems like someone writes an article like this every other year, at least. Like creative writing instructors are somehow getting away with something unseemly over there in workshop for which they must be called out, with their desks in a circle like the communists, with their scarves and silly hats. The articles always sound the same, sprinkled with alarming statistics, like how in 1982 “there were seventy-nine degree programs in creative writing in the United States. Today, there are eight hundred and twenty-two. Thirty-seven of these award the Ph.D.” [italics mine]. Can’t you hear the ominous, Law & Order-esque music thundering down? Oh, no! The writers are studying writing!

This article does end on a favorable note, which is nice and completely surprising:

For, in spite of all the reasons that they shouldn’t, workshops work. I wrote poetry in college, and I was in a lot of workshops. I was a pretty untalented poet, but I was in a class with some very talented ones, including Garrett Hongo, who later directed the creative-writing program at the University of Oregon, and Brenda Hillman, who teaches in the M.F.A. program at St. Mary’s College, in California. Our teacher was a kind of Southern California Beat named Dick Barnes, a sly and wonderful poet who also taught medieval and Renaissance literature, and who could present well the great stone face of the hard-to-please. I’m sure that our undergraduate exchanges were callow enough, but my friends and I lived for poetry. We read the little magazines—Kayak and Big Table and Lillabulero—and we thought that discovering a new poet or a new poem was the most exciting thing in the world. When you are nineteen years old, it can be.

I love that enthusiasm! But discovering a new poem or a new poet can be pretty darn exciting when you’re 32, too. In the multi-genre workshop I taught during the May Spalding residency, one of my screenwriters (age: same as me) just about died when she read Kim Addonizio for the first time. This isn’t a phenomenon restricted by age.

Can creative writing be taught? Sure, just like you can teach physics and history. What these stories always seem to be asking, though, is can you teach an interested party how to become a genius, or at the very least a big fat talent. And the answer to that is a sensible “no.” You either have a gift or you do not, though for some reason this question is rarely asked of piano teachers, or art instructors, or acting coaches. You can take a novice artist and teach her how to improve her technique, demand some evidence of practice and mastering of certain skills, and oversee the development of the individual voice and talent through judicious selection of the next steps for her work. That’s all. And that’s a pretty amazing and worthwhile process in and of itself, I think.

Stay tuned until next year, when another magazine ponders the dangers of teaching writers to write!

Signature cocktails are a hit-or-miss concept. On one hand, they remind me of Shelby in “Steel Magnolias”: Pink is my signature color. An Elderflower is my signature cocktail. Kind of ridiculous, and there are so many ways they can go wrong, like selecting the cocktail based on a color scheme instead of appeal and taste. But they can lend a bit of fun flair to an event while keeping the overall bar tab to a dull roar. On Saturday, I went to Lexington’s Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning for a reception honoring the past and current Kentucky poets laureate, and the signature cocktail for the event was the Winchester: Ale-8-One, vodka and orange juice.

If you’re not from Kentucky, you might not be familiar with Ale-8-One, commonly called Ale-Eight even though the name is supposed to be pronounced “a late one.” We are kinda stubborn over here, so Ale-Eight it is. Ale-8 has been bottled in nearby Winchester since 1928, and I don’t know if Trader Joes or other purveyors of esoteric groceries stock this drink, but for the most part I don’t think it’s easy to find outside of Kentucky. It tastes like, well, Ale-8. If you put a gun to my head I would say it’s like an unholy union between ginger ale and Mountain Dew, but that’s not quite it, either. I don’t quite know how to describe it, except to say that it makes me vaguely uneasy.

So I approached the Winchester with some hesitation. I loved that the Carnegie Center honored a local beverage at its event, and I am always willing to go for the local option, so I took a chance. It was actually quite tasty - just enough orange juice to cut the weirdness of Ale-8, and enough vodka to pack a punch. They know how to throw a literary party down in Lexington and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Now you know what to do with that six-pack of Ale-8 you picked up on a whim at the Valu-Market but didn’t have the heart to drink straight through. And for you Ale-8 fans, now you can incorporate it into your home bartending repertoire.

That VC Andrews Summer Book Club idea I had wasn’t so original after all.

From 2006-2007, poets wanted to remember. Since then, poets have either forgotten or can’t make sense of anything at all. See the top 10 submission titles received in the past two years by The Virginia Quarterly Review and compare them to the 2007 list.

Also, they make a fun mash-up:

Untitling Remember

Then is nothing more than smoke,
but at the time it was revelation,
work, and grace. We were waiting:
insomniacs, voyeurs, a butterfly
reunion. Now we have nothing more
than prayer. It is night, and we are
drowning at home, nobody is coming.
Sleep gives way to aubade. Gravity’s
a loose sonnet holding us to the floor.

Here’s one by Greg Santos. It’s a fun exercise, try it!

New Southerner just announced the judges for their 2009 writing contest. Win $200, publication, and the admiration of the following fine folks:

Poetry: James Baker Hall, former poet laureate of Kentucky and author of Praeder’s Letters (and an amazing photographer!).

Fiction: Novelist and Kentucky native Janna McMahan, author of Calling Home and The Ocean Inside.

Nonfiction: Cathleen Medwick, author of Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul and contributing editor to O, The Oprah Magazine.

See the contest guidelines. New Southerner promotes environmental stewardship, so they strongly encourage electronic submissions (yay!).

So much of a city’s character depends on public fixtures and overlooked voices. Here’s a great little short from London Squared Productions, The Lost Tribes of New York City, in which urban anthropologists Andy and Carolyn London interview some of New York City’s more overlooked citizens. The friendly-faced phone booth phone is my favorite.