Author Archive
Monday, April 19th, 2010
Fractal Performance
A confluence of events had me thinking a lot about the act of performing poetry last week. Between Rattle‘s feature on the Performance Poetry Podcast and our AWP panel “Stagecoaching for the Page,” in which a group of cowboy and western poets discussed the on-stage aspects of their craft, I found myself on a two-hour [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in american fractal by Tim
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Oh Contrarian
On Sunday, I sat on a panel of editors talking about “How to Stand Out in a Slush Pile.” Whenever I do these things, I can’t help feeling like an arrogant iconoclast. Like the class show-off, asleep with his feet on the desk, because he breezed through another mid-term exam. That was me in high [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in on publishing by Tim
Monday, March 8th, 2010
Open Letter to the Poetry Foundation
Dear Poetry Foundation and/or Christian Wiman: Does this count as an open letter, if I never actually send it to you? I probably won’t, which means you’ll probably never read this — but that’s fine. If you read this you might reply, and then I’d have to think about replying to your reply. I’m not [...]
15 Comments » - Posted in on publishing by Tim
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
Falafel Salad Soup
Back in the 1930s, magazines like the Yale Review or VQR saw maybe 500 submissions in a year; today, we receive more like 15,000. This is due partly to a shift in our culture from a society that believed in hierarchy to one that believes in a level playing field. This is good—to a point. [...]
22 Comments » - Posted in on publishing by Tim
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Ignorance as an Asset
I’ve always had a mild disdain for the literary industry. I’m not sure exactly where it comes from, but I can trace it as far back as my second semester of college, at which point I’d already realized that I preferred working with phonemes to working with phosphates, but was still resistant to declaring an [...]
