Arts & Society

A few weeks ago, the miraculous Metta Sama(~), master of , hosted a discussion under the Twitter hashtag #thethepoetics with editors from , , , , and , as well as a host of other poets. The discussion covered the life (and writing) of editors, the world of publishing, ebooks, and self-publishing. Download #thethepoetics small [...]

So what is possibility? It is certainly no whore of failure or success. It is a feeling that you may be on to something–in the midst of something whose worth you cannot exactly measure and whose results you cannot predict. This was poetry for me, and music, and ballet, and art. I never cared that [...]

“They imagine a future by practicing it.” – Michael Davidson, on the non-democratic and elitist writing communities So, I just got back from attending my first &NOW Festival of New Writing in San Diego. Overall, I enjoyed the balance of panels celebrating experimentation and panels attempting to engage texts or movements more critically. I am [...]

I can never hate the Susquehanna, not if it took my last dollar, not if it made me look like a grade z version of some extra who got lost on his lunch break from a remake of The Grapes of Wrath and ended up standing poised against the wrong unforgiving sky. I spent my [...]

1. The traditional book was based on a form that needed capital, influence, etc. This meant that gatekeepers were required. Getting through the gates endowed an author with certain benefits: editing, layout, publicity, and—perhaps most important—legitimacy. a. The system inevitably mistakes its own guardians of capital for guardians of true literary value. Certainly these interests [...]

Photo by . I always liked making things up, improvising, using my “imagination.” I do not remember my dreams because I spend the greater part of my day restructuring the past and fitting it into schemas of relationship and disrelationships, and not to any discernible end. In short, I am always in a dream. Perhaps [...]

Neither a memoir nor a novel, The Poetry Lesson (Princeton UP, 2010) by Andrei Codrescu measures the speed of our psycho-poetic times. It seems we are moving faster and faster knowing less and less where. On the sheen of it, the book runs through the first day of an Intro to Poetry Writing class wherein [...]