dumbfoundry

Policy on reproduction of "Sometimes"

* it's OK to put it on personal blogs
* if you're a student, you can use it for coursework
* if you're an exam board, you cannot use it as an exam question
* if you want it for a non-charitable poetry anthology, the answer's no
* I will allow it to be read for charitable purposes (NB NOT medical ones which fund research on animals, and I won't change my mind on that for anyone, so please don't ask). But I would still refuse permission for actual reproduction, unless it was a charity I felt very strongly about.
* if you're an "inclusive language" fanatic who wants to replace "man" with "human being" and ruin the scansion, don't you dare!!! See below...
* and if you do quote or reproduce it, I would rather you left my name off. I really do hate it that much. The comedian Arthur Smith, who's been using it in a charitable/memorial context for some time, respects my feelings on this by never mentioning my name, and I very much appreciate that.

"Chasing up a writer recently, I got the reply: I thought I'd already sent it to you.

This leapt immediately into my top 10 of writers' reasons for non-delivery, assuming, of course, that they respond."

B. Croce (trans. H. Yepez): "At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, I suddenly found myself writing poetry and short stories in English, not Spanish. I think this is a very common thing among border teenagers. On the border, many of us define ourselves through our relationship with English, which is a significant part of our essence. I know this would sound really awful to a Mexico City ear, but that’s how things actually are up here. We are the Malinche (2) and we are glad of it (3)."

Be mindful of names. They’ll etch themselves
like daily specials on the window glass
in a delible medium. [...]

The ReBound Series from Seven Kitchens Press will select one to two out-of-print chapbooks each fall to publish in new editions the following calendar year. Each chapbook submitted for consideration must be accompanied by a 500-750 word nomination, completed by a writer other than the author. This nomination will be edited to serve as the introductory foreword to the winning chapbook(s).

...The Poetry Collaborative has something to do with creating a small community of poets who want to work collaboratively on projects large and small, from writing exercises to poem series to companion pieces to ... you name it.

Quarrel is a blog where five poets will share work from the very first rough draft and take you through their revision process to the polished poem. Come by and tell us what we should write!

Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has said that the job of writing verse for the Royal Family is "thankless" and gave him a case of writer's block.

"There are currently a number of women poets who locate “cuteness” in the realm of the female grotesque and, in extended poetic sequences, actively perform the dialectic between “cuteness,” violence, and female monstrosity (think Aase Berg’s guinea pigs, Ariana Reines’s cows, Anne Boyer’s “Dark Deer,” Danielle Pafunda’s peek-a-boo violence). These poets redefine female “cuteness” as a trope of self-willed (or culturally-willed) deformity. By appropriating and violently animating stereotypes attached to desirable female behavior, these poets are attempting to make an register of derogatory signification to collapse."

"I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw the cover of your September issue!

At first I thought some friend of mine was playing a joke on me--you know, like those 'special' issues of Time Magazine with YOUR FACE on the cover!

I am so enormously grateful to you and Jenni for doing me the great honor of featuring my interview (brilliant because of Grace Cavalieri's brilliant questions!).

This is, in all truth, the first time that my dance life and my writing life have come together in one place--and, surprisingly enough, I feel great about it. My two selves (this coming from a Gemini) have finally been integrated."

Antonia Fraser: "1971 was much more exacting. The most exciting thing that happened to me as a Booker Judge for the second time was not controversial. I shared a taxi back with fellow judge Saul Bellow on a long, long ride from somewhere in the City: he was nattily dressed in a pale green shantung suit, blue shirt, green tie with large blue dots on it; his silver hair and slanting, large dark eyes made him look like a 30s film star playing a refined gangster. Suddenly he leaned forward and asked: 'Has anyone ever told you that you're a very handsome woman?' I pondered on a suitable reply, modest yet encouraging. But having spoken, the Great Man closed his eyes and remained apparently asleep for the rest of the journey."

Ernesto Priego: "I believe that tattooing is a poetic experience. This is an open invitation to all the tattooed poets out there to contribute to this blog. For each entry we need a photo of one of your tattoos along with a piece of writing (prose, poetry, a dialogue, whatever) discussing your experience with tattooing."

The festival is over for another year and here is the complete list of bestselling books from the Readings Festival Bookshop that has been in the Atrium of Fed Square for the past ten days:

1. The Boat by Nam Le
2. American Journeys by Don Watson
3. On Rage by Germaine Greer
4. When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris
5. Stray Dog Winter by David Francis
6. The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
7. When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
8. On Experience by David Malouf
9. The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
10. The General: CHERUB Book 10 by Robert Muchamore

RULES:
1. Your poem must begin with:
She lay on the lounger, watching
the rabbit nuzzle the lobelia
2. There is no line limit

[...]

Kate Greenstreet: "I watched my reading copy (the very one I cut from its shrinkwrap the day that first package thumped onto our porch) continue to change, to age or 'ripen,' as the tour stretched back and forth across the country. A year and a half after the book and I had our initial introduction, I accidentally left my reading copy under a seat in the auditorium following a gig in Lincoln, Nebraska. I didn't notice it gone until Max and I got back to the motel at the end of a night of mild carousing with the Lincolnians, the hall long since locked up tight. I had a box of books with me and could've easily abandoned the old one, left it for a janitor to find. Instead we set off a couple hours later than expected on the next day's seven hour drive to Tulsa, having waited for a museum guard to arrive and let us into the Sheldon to retrieve that copy. As we traveled west on I-80 out of Lincoln and I held my lost book in my hands, it never looked so good. In a way, that was the day when I saw my book for the first time. And I felt great."

"An exam board is removing a poem about a knife-carrying violent loner from its anthology for GCSE English because of fears over teenage knife crime.

The AQA exam board has decided to withdraw the poem Education for Leisure written by Carol Ann Duffy.

The exam board is writing to schools to advise them to destroy the copies of the anthology -- and says it will send replacements not containing this poem.

The poem begins with the line: 'Today I am going to kill something. Anything.'"

Students had, as usual, already read and written notes on all the poems to be workshopped. So I got them into groups of two or three, assigned each group another student's poem, and gave them fifteen minutes to devise a performance around this work that would bring forward some aspect of their critical observations. They were allowed to make new versions of their assigned poem - to excerpt from it, to rearrange it, to make cuts or repetitions or extensions. They could perform together or have one group member perform. They had performance objects available to them that their lecturer had asked them to bring along.

The results were wonderful. I was unsure whether they would have enough performance vocabulary be able to communicate their critiques in this way, but almost every piece was incisive, two or three of the six startlingly so. The performance mode turned their feedback into a genuinely constructive - as in productive, creative - act - an act of the imagination & one of many possible - rather than a reduction or a correction.