dumbfoundry

"Just now, an email came through my inbox venting about NaPoWriMo and its relatives. The writer feels that marathons like this 'trivialize' poetry. And I think that anything may be made trivial by someone who does it trivially — but the exercise of thinking about poetry every day is never trivial by nature.

posted by Ivy @ 1:33 PM

A poet's thoughts on knitting and Elizabeth Zimmermann

Thursday, April 04, 2013

AE Stallings: "For much of what she says, I can substitute 'poetry' for 'knitting'..."

posted by Ivy @ 6:00 PM

Why I’m Writing Poetry: The Diversity of NaPoWriMo

Saturday, March 30, 2013

by Maureen Thorson

posted by Ivy @ 11:14 AM

Samuel Beckett Reads Two Poems

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

…from his novel Watt

posted by Ivy @ 8:52 PM

Call for poems that respond to incidence of rape, violence and oppression against women

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Deadline 15 June 2013

posted by Ivy @ 1:50 PM

Thoughts on the long poem

Monday, March 04, 2013

Ellen Bryant Voigt: "Because I had this grant, because I had this room, I had all day long."

posted by Ivy @ 6:09 PM

BIRDFEAST

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

...is fresh.

posted by Ivy @ 12:48 PM

"Sometimes literature can catch the lyric of a place..."

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Mark Tredinnick, interview

posted by Ivy @ 1:22 PM

"I recall saris blowing in the wind, tied to a bridge."

Thursday, February 07, 2013

Poet Kathryn Gray travels to Santiniketan, West Bengal

posted by Ivy @ 7:11 PM

Dusie

Monday, February 04, 2013

... is fresh.

posted by Ivy @ 7:45 PM

"I wouldn’t change a thing about the publication path The Sounding Machine took."

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Patty Paine

posted by Ivy @ 12:01 PM

On Plagiarism: An Open Letter to Christian Ward

Friday, January 18, 2013

Paisley Rekdal: "When I first heard about this from the kind and extremely scrupulous editors at Anon, where you’d published my poem as yours, my curiosity was briefly, possibly academically, piqued; I thought that perhaps you were a conceptual poet."

posted by Ivy @ 3:00 PM

Gillie Harries, Poet in the Pool writer-in-residence

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

"Gillie will be writing a monthly Lido-inspired poem during her year’s residency..."

posted by Ivy @ 6:34 PM

"Making a living by writing seemed far from living a so-called happy life, in a secular sense, so I ran away from literature in horror."

Monday, January 14, 2013

"Accessing a Limitless Vein of Words": An Interview with Jeongrye Choi by Ruth Williams

posted by Ivy @ 7:14 PM

Call for Writing: Paris Lit Up Magazine

Friday, January 11, 2013

Deadline 28 February 2013

posted by Ivy @ 10:48 AM

Does writing about pain distance it or bring it closer?

Sunday, January 06, 2013

Does poetry, once finished, become about someone else?

posted by Ivy @ 4:21 PM

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Saturday, January 05, 2013

Megan Harlan:

Yes. Like any art form, poetry can make sense of the world, do our paraphrase-defying experience of it some justice -- if only for the length of a page. That, for me, is change on the order of a miracle.

posted by Ivy @ 2:39 PM

Navigate Melbourne by poem

Friday, January 04, 2013

...using the Melbourne Poetry Map.

posted by Ivy @ 1:25 PM

Ex-Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson to launch new poetry journal

Friday, December 21, 2012

The first issue of POEM magazine, described as an international English language quarterly, is due on 24 January.

posted by Ivy @ 5:17 PM

"…this engine swung and one piece nudged another"

Airfix by Jacqui Rowe

posted by Ivy @ 11:11 AM

Educating the Shih: A Filipina Poetics

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Eileen R. Tabios:

"From my recent work, an example is my newest book, 5 Shades of Gray — the collection's 30 poems were all written in a two-hour rush or energy. I hadn’t intended to write these poems. They just surfaced one afternoon. To do my job as a poet, I knew to heed their call and not be distracted away from sitting down on the table with pad and pen to write them out from the energy I had not willed but was suddenly feeling. I later would edit the collection but most of the poems remain untouched from their first drafts."

posted by Ivy @ 8:41 PM

The Next Big Thing

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Juan Luna's Revolver

Poet Luisa Igloria, whose latest book is Juan Luna's Revolver, invited me to participate in this self-interview blog meme called The Next Big Thing, where I get to share a little more about my next big thing, my second book.

Writers participating get to answer 8-10 questions (about their book/blog/their writing), and then tag 5 other writer friends to post their own "next big thing" the following Wednesday. Luisa's instructions were for me to post by or before Wednesday, 12 December.

Rather daringly, I've re-arranged the order of the questions from how it appears on Luisa's post.

*

What is the title of your book?
Disturbance

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Disturbance is about a man who kills his wife, son and then himself, leaving a daughter as the sole survivor.

What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry / verse novel / narrative-in-verse / what-have-you

Where did the idea come from for the book?
This kind of violent crime, of the complete annihilation of a family is, sadly, an all-too-common phenomenon. A friend once pointed out it has also only become more visible because of newspapers and the media.

For this book, I had a cast of characters affected by the crime: everybody from estate agents and the police, to relatives of the criminal and his victims. The tragedy touches everyone in its path.

I was obsessed with the idea of writing about this crime from multiple perspectives. You know that line from the film Amadeus? "With music, you can have twenty individuals all talking at the same time, and it's not noise, it's a perfect harmony!" I wanted to know if I could do the same with poetry.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I first got the idea in 2004 and thought, "This is going to take me about five years to write." An underestimation. I finished writing it in early 2011. The book comes out in late 2013.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
A lot of silence surrounds this kind of crime. Victims are silenced. Those who are traumatised are busy trying to survive it. Those who have to deal with the aftermath are busy trying to fix it. But I desperately wanted to hear what they had to say. So I let them speak.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Disturbance will be published by Seren Books in 2013.

What other works would you compare this book to within your genre?
These works were my touchstones:

Dorothy Porter's The Monkey's Mask
Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
Sylvia Plath's "The Detective"
Ai's "The Good Shepherd"

Of course, I can only dream of my book being compared to these amazing works.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
This is such a good question. Apart from the main characters, there would be quite a few other roles to fill, too. There's a mistress, a priest, a police surgeon and several police officers, friends, grandparents and neighbours, a journalist... It'd be fantastic to have an international cast.

Still, I'm not sure who would play which character. Maybe once the book is out, readers would have more of an idea.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
As part of my independent research for writing sections of the book, I read up on ballistics and homicide investigation procedures, and enrolled in a short taster course for Forensic Science at the local university.

My site.

*

For more of The Next Big Thing, these shining stars will give their answers by 19 December 2012:

Jeannine Hall Gailey, with a third collection, Unexplained Fevers, forthcoming from New Binary Press.
Collin Kelley, with his latest collection, Render, soon to be released by Sibling Rivalry Press.
Emma Bolden, whose first collection, Maleficae, is coming soon from Gen Pop Books.
Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor, author of Pause Mid-Flight (Arkipelago Books).
Ashley Capes, with his latest collection Between Giants (Ginninderra Press) out now.
David Prater, author of We Will Disappear (Papertiger Media), gives his answers.

*

Should you wish to participate, answer the questions on your blog and leave your link in a comment.

posted by Ivy @ 9:13 AM

Birdfeast

Sunday, November 25, 2012

…is fresh.

posted by Ivy @ 10:07 AM

Keats the heart-throb and the ‘tender-taken breath’

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Katy Evans-Bush writes:

"This point of view is emphasised in the scene where they first kiss, in a glade, and something rather radical happens: instead of being behind his head, lingering on her lips coming in, the camera stays behind her, and it’s his mouth we’re seeing. It’s the girl’s-eye view of the kiss. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before and it taught me something right there, even at my advanced age, about the Male Gaze. So this is where the rest of the huskness comes in, because even while the film was flaying my feelings, it was making me think."

posted by Ivy @ 7:51 PM

"...not just run-of-the-mill surrealism."

Friday, November 23, 2012

Lantern Review interviews Brenda Hillman on translating Choi Jeongrye's Instances

LR: Did you notice any particular differences in the cultural transformation of bringing a contemporary Korean poet to an American audience?

BH: There’s a bringing forth of a feminist, politically motivated and more populist poetry that speaks to everyday experience and that’s also considered more linguistically radical. I think she fits into that too. There’s an effort that might be in keeping with some of what has gone on in American avant-garde poetry, a continuance of the engagements with modernist fragmentary forms, and also with the psychological and with women’s issues.

She’s a very precise writer. I found it really interesting because I had two different experiences with translating in a span of two years. The first was with Poems from Above the Hill: Selected Poems of Asher Etwebi, a collection of work from a Libyan poet that I co-translated with Diallah Haidar. My experience with Jeongrye had to do more with discussions of how literal to be with the Korean because it’s really hard to be literal when the grammatical structures are so different, even in the way the sentence is maintained.

posted by Ivy @ 8:56 AM

Offending Frequencies

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Bernardine Evaristo writes: "Out of 46 poets I have included 25 women poets, 21 poets of colour* and several ‘queer’ poems that explore, amongst other things, sexuality."

posted by Ivy @ 3:17 PM

"Two of the most important things I’ve learned from my daily writing practice over the last two years…"

Luisa A Igloria, on writing a poem a day

posted by Ivy @ 8:25 AM

Haiku on street windows, post-flood in Hebden Bridge

Sunday, November 18, 2012

'Reflected Lines' Haiku Trail for Hebden Bridge

posted by Ivy @ 8:52 AM

Book Ends podcast

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

A weekly podcast for writers and book lovers

posted by Ivy @ 11:07 AM

"'Prolific' sounds very similar to promiscuous...'

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Q and A with Christine Hamm

posted by Ivy @ 1:28 PM

"I once wrote a love poem to my thesaurus."

An Ode to the King of Writerly Tools

posted by Ivy @ 11:19 AM

Marjorie Evasco explores "a musical configuration"

Saturday, November 10, 2012

"As a translator of poetry from English into Cebuano, and lately from Spanish to English or Cebuano, I have deepened my respect for the intrinsic untranslatability of a poem’s musical body."

posted by Ivy @ 9:57 AM

UK Poetry Awards and Gender

Thursday, November 08, 2012

Rob A Mackenzie: "There are various conclusions we might draw from these statistics."

posted by Ivy @ 9:29 AM

What was the process like assembling the book?

Christopher Hennessey:

"In more than one case, he asked me to push a poem beyond where I had ended it. I did. Those poems now end with lines that are some of the most successful lines (if I can say that!) in the book."

posted by Ivy @ 3:59 AM

Kim Hyesoon's poetry

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Pam Brown writes, "Her poems are not ironic. They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic."

posted by Ivy @ 11:36 AM

Poetry the new tool of soft diplomacy

Friday, October 26, 2012

"...redefining poetry as the new people-to-people contact between India and the world."

posted by Ivy @ 12:22 PM

Anonymity and selection

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Jon Stone: "Of course, anonymity doesn’t necessarily mean that the playing field is level."

posted by Ivy @ 1:41 PM

"I had been thinking of what my future books would look and feel like since I was about ten years old…"

Thursday, October 04, 2012

Quinn Latimer: "…so it was really just extraordinary and reassuring and strange, in this very normal way."

posted by Ivy @ 10:03 AM

Stirring

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

…is fresh.

posted by Ivy @ 9:15 AM

Our Own Voice

Friday, September 21, 2012

... is very fresh.

posted by Ivy @ 12:15 PM

Ruth Padel: the truth of poetry

Friday, September 14, 2012

Prize-winning poet Ruth Padel speaks to thinker Jonathan Ree about the truth of poetry and the mystery of philosophy. [via http://iai.tv]

posted by Ivy @ 1:24 PM

The Brunel University African Poetry Prize

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Now open for entries until Nov 30

posted by Ivy @ 8:21 AM

"They were pulling a thread with the poems they accepted, and my poems would have unraveled the tapestry."

Friday, September 07, 2012

Donna Vorreyer on rejection notices

posted by Ivy @ 1:54 PM

'The noblest prize…'

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

The inaugural citizen-led Queensland Literary Awards replaces sbandoned Premier's Prize.

posted by Ivy @ 10:57 AM

Free 10-week course on Modern & Contemporary American Poetry

Tuesday, September 04, 2012

This [online] course is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, from Dickinson and Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly "difficult."

posted by Ivy @ 11:31 AM

"Reading poetry on facebook"

Friday, August 31, 2012

by Rae Desmond Jones

posted by Ivy @ 11:15 AM

Horse Less Review

Thursday, August 23, 2012

…is fresh.

posted by Ivy @ 3:14 PM

The Medulla Review

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

…is fresh.

posted by Ivy @ 3:19 PM

Poetic Liner Notes for David Bowie: an interview

Sean M Whelan

'I’ve always been a big fan of music and poetry so this seemed the perfect way to combine those two great loves. I loved the idea of it being vaguely built around the model of a tribute night, but unlike other tribute shows all this original material comes out of it.'

posted by Ivy @ 9:49 AM

Poetica on ABC Radio National

Monday, August 20, 2012

From the archives

posted by Ivy @ 2:38 PM

BOXCAR Poetry Review

Sunday, August 19, 2012

…is fresh.

posted by Ivy @ 11:30 AM

What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

"…when I'm not sipping champagne and having my feet pedicured in gold dust, I sojourn to Monte Carlo by flying unicorn…"

posted by Ivy @ 9:00 PM

An engagement with Donna Vorreyer's 'ordering the hours'

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

'I don’t need to know or analyse the details to love, but I’m delighted it travelled well.'

posted by Ivy @ 12:54 PM

Gwyneth Lewis poems win 2012 National Eisteddfod Crown

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

'Gwyneth’s winning work was inspired by the story of Branwen, in the second branch of the Mabinogi.'

posted by Ivy @ 4:45 PM

Janice M Bostok Haiku Prize

Monday, August 06, 2012

Entries close 15 September 2012.

posted by Ivy @ 2:59 PM

First Book Interviews

Thursday, August 02, 2012

Anne Shaw:

Poets aren’t always the best at titling. It isn’t something we learn formally. I’ve been making a study of titles and titling for a number of years now. I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of it.

posted by Ivy @ 7:36 PM

PoetsArtists

…is fresh.

posted by Ivy @ 11:07 AM

"The slightest bit of narrative gives me footing in a poem…"

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Hayden Saunier writes:

I stopped thinking about fruit and juxtaposition in favor of sharp, silver, fractured, gleam, and allowed the real conversation between observer and observed to begin. I found the first door into the poem through the cheap green plastic stem; it opened directly into childhood’s first world and my older brother’s army men. The poem was off—with its exploration of violence and savagery, real, imaginary, sublimated; surface beauty, shine, and shimmer; piercing, torture, and the gloriousness of bling with its sexiness and dazzle.

[via ]

posted by Ivy @ 6:18 PM