Thursday, December 31, 2009
Evan Kennedy is the author of Us Them Poems (BookThug).He runs Dirty Swan Projects.
geese
by Evan KennedyA hem heralds fissures, diffuse threats. Of stillness, I swam in flocks, and coated. In Vs rise swelling marks. Of instigation, of of.
Mark another tally on lack lust crumple, ripen solace. For gauged polis, athletes flaxen, greasing crossings crowed. Accented and sloped along, better miners a glossy rave querulous. Diagonals fizzle and raise foul lines. A rotation taken to tongue, of viewers sunning central.
Among carriages sucked along, blithenesses swap places. Traffic mode yieldings, their chests bared to vanillas.
Dear Friend of Poets.org, Happy New Year! Before you ring in 2010, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Academy of American Poets to keep Poets.org ringing well into next year. We love to provide you with new poetry, essays, poet bios, audio, and video for free, and it's the generosity of friends like you that help us pay for bandwidth, servers, staff, and all other expenses that a huge and popular site like Poets.org requires to function. Plus, donations to the Academy are completely tax deductible. Don't miss this 11th-hour opportunity to receive a tax deduction for 2009. Please send a little holiday cheer in support of poets and poetry, then let's all raise a toast to a new decade! All of us at the Academy of American Poets wish you a happy and healthy 2010. Yours truly, Academy of American Poets
Tree Swenson
Executive Director
584 Broadway, Suite 604
New York, NY 10012
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A quick word from fellow reader Gina PK...
Dry: A Memoir
Augusten BurroughsTuesday, December 29, 2009
"I [heart] Strunk & White"
"I called him a world-wide mover and shaker."
Monday, December 28, 2009
A weekly video reading of poetry by the poet.
Welcome to poetryvlog.com
Click on the poet's name to view his or her video.
Diane Ackerman | David Amram | Philip Appleman | Philip Asaph | David Axelrod
*Go to the site above and see alphabetical links to all featured poets.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
table of contents
Don't Know Much About Literature:
What You Need to Know but Never Learned About Great Books and Authors
by Kenneth C. Davis and Jenny Davis
- Did a whale named "Mocha Dick" inspire Melville's masterpiece?
- Who was the first poet to speak at a presidential inauguration?
- Which French-speaking high school football star shook up the literary world?
Do you freeze when someone mentions Faulkner? When the conversation turns to the Odyssey, do you want to take a hike? Have no fear. For years, Kenneth C. Davis's New York Times bestselling Don't Know Much About® books have enlightened and enthralled us with a winning blend of fascinating facts and wonderfully irreverent fun. Now he sets his sights on our literary IQ in Don't Know Much About® Literature. With this rich treasure trove of knowledge and intriguing information about the world's great books and authors, Kenneth Davis and his daughter, Jenny, demystify Dracula, capture Kafka, and help you brush up on your BrontË in the inimitable and endlessly entertaining Don't Know Much About® style. (from back book jacket)
Kenneth C. Davis is the best-selling author of Don't Know Much About History, which spent 35 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold nearly 1.5 million copies, and gave rise to his phenomenal Don't Know Much About® series for adults and children. Davis appears frequently in the media, has spoken at the Smithsonian Museum and American Museum of Natural History, and has written for the New York Times and Newsday, among other publications. He has also contributed to NPR's All Things Considered. He lives in New York City and Dorset, Vermont.
A Trio of Shorts from Aaron Burch's forthcoming chapbook
Sunday, December 20, 2009
A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
*Great gift idea for the reader and writer in all of us.
Reading Like a Writer
By Francine Prose
Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose. In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot'sMiddlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted. | |
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Absurdistan: A Novel
The Unknown KnownsA Novel
Jim Rath's wife has grown tired of his hobbies: his immaculately maintained comics collection, his creepy underwater experiments, and his dreams of building a museum based on the Aquatic Ape Theory of Human Evolution. On the night that she leaves him, Jim thinks he has spotted an emissary from a lost aquatic race called the Nautikons. In truth, the man is a low-level agent of the Department of Homeland Security. What follows is a riveting story of two quixotic men who stalk each other toward a bloody showdown -- a spectacularly moronic act of terrorism at an aging water park.
The Unknown Knowns -- its title is a reference to a quote from former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- is a brilliant send-up of the insidious language and sometimes tragically comic focus of our country's Homeland Security Department. Combining the social satire of Kurt Vonnegut with the paranoid delusions of Thomas Pynchon, Rotter takes everyday domestic fixations and turns them into a hilarious assessment of the human condition. Fresh, imaginative, and deft, The Unknown Knowns marks the arrival of a unique new voice in literary fiction.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Write-a-Thon for Dzanc Books
A HUGE thank you to those of you that have responded to this already.
I want to remind you to a Dzanc Books' project coming up and hope that you might find the program worth participating in - our second annual Write-a-Thon. Last year we had a few dozen writers participate, saw a few of the pieces written get published, raised over $7000, and had one writer create a video showing her own participatory process.
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As you may know, Dzanc Books is a non-profit organization, established to not only publish great books, but to work nationally in set communities to provide writing workshops and year round programs for students and adults alike. These programs include our Dzanc Writer in Residency Programs, The Dzanc Prize, the Dzanc Creative Writing Sesions, author readings, single session and weekly session workshops which function in a slightly different capacity than our year-round DWIRPS.
With the economy still not up to speed, traditional means of raising funds - writing grants, corporate sponsorships, etc. - have become less successful. Here at Dzanc, we like to try and make raising money both as fun, and valuable, an experience as possible. With this in mind, last year we came up with an alternative and interactive plan which we believed not only furthered our mission but was something those participating in would enjoy. Based on the feedback we received, we were right.
DZANC BOOKS WRITE-A-THON
The link to this year's write-a-thon can be found here.
The idea behind the write-a-thon will be similar to bowl-a-thons, or walk-a-thons, or, well you get the picture - other a-thons that you've probably supported or participated in during your lifetime, only with writing being the catalyst to the raising of funds. For one day, people will volunteer to write to help raise money, and they will ask people to fill out a donation sheet to support their efforts.
For volunteers
1. Thursday, December 17 thorugh Sunday December 20, 2009.
2. Dzanc Books will provide a donation request email for those authors participating.
3. Your sponsors will be able to make donation pledges through our website via Paypal, or if they prefer to donate by check, an address will be provided. We will provide the sponsors with a tax receipt immediately this year - last year we used a mass emailing method after the event was over, and heard from some people well after the fact that they did not receive that email, so we will not use that same plan this year.
4. The mornings of the 17th through the 20th, we will send out a prompt or topic, and will post it on our website. Writers will then spend the day writing stories, or poems, or essays, using that prompt or topic (this will give those sponsoring an understanding that the work done was all done on during the write-a-thon dates).
5. Those donating will be sent proof of your participation via email. We will send out the proof of participation notices beginning on Monday the 21st.
Our goal for this event, considering there are over 2000 writers in the Emerging Writers Network, is $20,000, or, an average of $10 raised per person. To put this in a proper context, that would pay for just under 3 full Dzanc Writer in Residence Programs, or the Dzanc Prize plus approximately 2 full DWIRPs. We will obviously be thrilled to find out after the fact that we were shortchanging ourselves with that goal. We do hope each and every member of EWN, and those who have become fans of Dzanc, will participate in our inaugural Write-A-Thon.
Your support means everything to us. We at Dzanc are truly trying to make a contribution through our charity programs and the works we publish, and while we are dedicated and diligent and will not fail in our intent, without your support, our efforts become increasingly difficult. We thank you in advance for joining us in our Write-A-Thon and your continual support of our programs and authors.
Again, for those that wish to participate, or those who wish to donate but do not know of any writers that will be participating, please contact us at info@dzancbooks.org. Dzanc Books will also be giving a set of our Dzanc 2009 titles (from Mike Czyzniejewski's story collection through Laura van den Berg's collection) to the writer that raises the most money.
Thank you,
Dan Wickett
EWN/Dzanc Books
The 2010 Full Presse Subscription from Ugly Duckling Presse
SUBSCRIBE ONLINE: http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/subscriptions.html Ugly Duckling Presse at the Old American Can Factory 232 Third St., #E002 Brooklyn, NY 11215 |
One of China’s leading internet poets
Albania
Yang Li is one of China’s most prominent internet poets. A founding member of the Sichuan-based “Not-Not” Poetic Project, Yang Li has since forged a style all his own. Among his print publications is Canlan or Splendor, a 623-page tell-all chronicle of the avant-garde poetry scene in China during the closing decades of the last century.
Steve Bradbury’s poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Jacket Magazine, Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, Tinfish, and elsewhere. He has published three volumes of poetry in translation, most recently, Feelings Above Sea Level: Prose Poems from the Chinese of Shang Qin. He lives in Taipei, where he edits Full Tilt: a journal of East-Asian poetry, translation and the arts.