dumbfoundry: April 2012

Liza Monroy: "I felt an instant connection to Flynn the first time I read Another Bullshit Night in Suck City after it crossed my desk when I worked for a literary agent in 2004. I too had a father who was alcoholic and homeless, and it’s not every day you encounter someone else who shares that experience. “If I went to the drowning man, the drowning man would pull me under,” Nick wrote (it’s a line that made it into the film). I had also resisted trying to save a troubled parent. Nick grew up in Boston and lived in Rome; I grew up in Rome and lived in Boston. I drank within the walls of the same Boston bars he writes about in the memoir, and started down a similar path with drugs before pulling back. The book spoke to me like an intimate conversation. Taking a one-night memoir workshop he taught at The New School in 2006, and meeting him there kicked off a series of Flynncounters over subsequent years around New York City, though I never told him of our shared father-narrative, figuring he must hear it all the time..."

posted by Ivy @ 10:59 AM

Two forms unveiled during NaPoWriMo

The Sweetelle by Allison Joesph and the Abnominal by Andrew Philip

posted by Ivy @ 12:37 AM

VIDA decided to count "the rates of publication between women and men"

Monday, April 09, 2012

"We decided to count as what we frequently heard people say about gender discrimination in the publishing world was entirely anecdotal…" Check out those pie charts at the end.

posted by Ivy @ 9:53 PM

Writing for the page vs the stage

Nathan Curnow:

The page and stage are two very different spaces and filling them successfully demands different skills, but they’re also related, just as the line and the breath are related. The blank page can be unforgiving and expose the weaknesses of a poem whereas the stage can throw up so many variables on the night that you have to be on your toes.

posted by Ivy @ 2:59 PM

Quoted and misquoted

Kate Middleton writes:

"Last week I quoted myself. This week I got quoted by Andrew Bolt. If there’s one thing weirder than quoting one’s self, it’s ending up in a Bolt column. And perhaps more sobering than appearing in Bolt’s column was the verb with which he introduced my words: Kate Middleton confessed."

posted by Ivy @ 11:31 AM

Simon Perchik in Jacket magazine

Sunday, April 08, 2012

David Baratier: Why the asterisk (*) as a poem title, out of any symbol available?

Simon Perchik: It could have been anything. Actually, I saw the asterisk in an anthology of Italian poetry and this guy had an asterisk as a title and I said, "Hey, that's nice." So I stole it (both laughter). I was going to use numbers; well, I use them now for bookkeeping because I'm writing so much now I can't keep track of it, and whenever I get an acceptance I ask the editors to change the number to an asterisk. The editors are just as happy because they are bewildered by numbers anyway. To them and to me an asterisk is better than a number. The title has always been a sore spot, even the first chapbook used all asterisks, even in those days I never titled a poem.

posted by Ivy @ 11:23 PM