Blurb for Jill Magi's Threads from Futurepoem...
Some things can’t be understood without turning to poetry, the genre that allows observation, love, memory, confusion, and explanation to intermix and play. Jill Magi’s Threads stitches all these things together. It tells a complicated story of a father who is an Estonian refugee and of a daughter who attempts to understand what this means by moving through genres and mediums. It is a moving story of searching for meaning and of an eventual arrival at a place of many meanings.
November 28, 2005
Blurb for Padcha Tuntha-Obas's Trespasses, forthcoming from O Boooks....
Few things have changed the terrain of US literature in recent years as much as the global spread of English. The question that haunts much of this literature is less what it means to be an American and more what it means to suddenly be forced to be in dialogue with and in English, like it or not. Thai writer Padcha Tuntha-obas wrote Trespasses while she was living in the US for several years. And she takes up in this beautiful collection of poems what it means to be a Thai writer but one suddenly writing in English, what it means to be writing within the US but not as an American, what it means to be caught in a difficult embrace with what is foreign.
Few things have changed the terrain of US literature in recent years as much as the global spread of English. The question that haunts much of this literature is less what it means to be an American and more what it means to suddenly be forced to be in dialogue with and in English, like it or not. Thai writer Padcha Tuntha-obas wrote Trespasses while she was living in the US for several years. And she takes up in this beautiful collection of poems what it means to be a Thai writer but one suddenly writing in English, what it means to be writing within the US but not as an American, what it means to be caught in a difficult embrace with what is foreign.
November 14, 2005
Read Mark McGurl's "The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction" in recent issue of Critical Inquiry over breakfast today.
Interesting article to add to spare collection of articles about the impact of universities on creative writing. Will probably assign in future alongside Myers's The Elephants Teach. The article is written from the position of critic. (Also owes some obvious debts to work by Walter Benn Michaels on identity.) And mainly about the novel, especially the boy novel, that postmodern novel of Roth, Barth, Stephenson. Kept wondering what would happen if he was forced to look at writers like Acker as much as Roth. The article weakens when it moves off of the boy novel (although I kept thinking the real story about how universities have changed the way literature gets read has been the rise of the multicultural novel; McGurl acknowledges this but this is where the article slides into Michaels work a little and this part of the article doesn't feel as fleshed out; but this is super hard topic; not sure how to deal with it in any way without falling into traps of this discussion). While here is some messy slide between literature and creative writing in the article, most interesting thing about the article was reading his critic perspective. I think I would see the rise of ethnic novels, the Toni Morrison phenomenon, more a result of the literature parts of english departments and less the result of the creative writing parts of english departments (who tend to like to pretend as if that discussion around multicultural literatures never happened). And I probably would come down harder on MFA programs and the novel than he does in the end. I wanted to read the Morton and Zavarzadeh article that he sort of makes fun of in his footnote on how the fiction workshop keeps "intact the legitimacy of bourgeois values."
Interesting article to add to spare collection of articles about the impact of universities on creative writing. Will probably assign in future alongside Myers's The Elephants Teach. The article is written from the position of critic. (Also owes some obvious debts to work by Walter Benn Michaels on identity.) And mainly about the novel, especially the boy novel, that postmodern novel of Roth, Barth, Stephenson. Kept wondering what would happen if he was forced to look at writers like Acker as much as Roth. The article weakens when it moves off of the boy novel (although I kept thinking the real story about how universities have changed the way literature gets read has been the rise of the multicultural novel; McGurl acknowledges this but this is where the article slides into Michaels work a little and this part of the article doesn't feel as fleshed out; but this is super hard topic; not sure how to deal with it in any way without falling into traps of this discussion). While here is some messy slide between literature and creative writing in the article, most interesting thing about the article was reading his critic perspective. I think I would see the rise of ethnic novels, the Toni Morrison phenomenon, more a result of the literature parts of english departments and less the result of the creative writing parts of english departments (who tend to like to pretend as if that discussion around multicultural literatures never happened). And I probably would come down harder on MFA programs and the novel than he does in the end. I wanted to read the Morton and Zavarzadeh article that he sort of makes fun of in his footnote on how the fiction workshop keeps "intact the legitimacy of bourgeois values."
November 11, 2005
My travel schedule of last weeks:
Oct 10-14, NYC.
Oct 18-19 Medford Oregon.
October 21, Honolulu.
October 22-25, Lihue.
October 26-28, Honolulu.
October 28-30, Los Angeles.
October 31-November 4, Lake Tahoe.
November 6-7, Bodega Bay.
November 17-19 Los Angeles.
Thus not much reading. Took four books with me on Hawai'i/LA/Reno part of trip and make it through half of one. Although I did read a lot of magazines. I used most of my plane time to study Spanish instead of read.
Got back today and began to clean desk. Got sidetracked by batch of Tinfish books. Yunte Huang's Crib and Deborah Meadows Growing Still.
Also Jill Magi's Cadastral Map.
And Aaron Kiely's The Best of My Love.
It is the lesser thesis season also. Read three last week.
Once organized again I want to make a list of unfinished books and decide which to finish.
Oct 10-14, NYC.
Oct 18-19 Medford Oregon.
October 21, Honolulu.
October 22-25, Lihue.
October 26-28, Honolulu.
October 28-30, Los Angeles.
October 31-November 4, Lake Tahoe.
November 6-7, Bodega Bay.
November 17-19 Los Angeles.
Thus not much reading. Took four books with me on Hawai'i/LA/Reno part of trip and make it through half of one. Although I did read a lot of magazines. I used most of my plane time to study Spanish instead of read.
Got back today and began to clean desk. Got sidetracked by batch of Tinfish books. Yunte Huang's Crib and Deborah Meadows Growing Still.
Also Jill Magi's Cadastral Map.
And Aaron Kiely's The Best of My Love.
It is the lesser thesis season also. Read three last week.
Once organized again I want to make a list of unfinished books and decide which to finish.
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