Note: This article first appeared in the print edition of the Press-Enterprise on February 1, 2015, in the Inlandia Institute’s weekly column. If you spend enough time around poets, you’re bound to hear grandiose claims about self-discovery and poetic epiphany. And it’s true, our favorite poems tend to be surprising, even to ourselves. There are prosaic explanations for …
Note: This article first appeared in the print edition of the Press-Enterprise on February 18, 2014, in the Inlandia Institute‘s weekly column. In the time it takes to read this sentence, 50 English instructors will write the word “cliché†in red ink in the margins of a student paper. The admonition to “Avoid clichés!†has almost become a …
There was a great post yesterday on Wet Asphalt by J.F. Quackenbush, a former Rattle contributor, about the latest pox on literature, which he calls Writer as Lifestyle Syndrome (WaLS). Symptoms include valuing the artist over the art, referring to all publishers as “markets,” and seeing publication as the only means of legitimization. Wet Asphalt …
I just noticed again that the opening poem to my book, “The Body,” contains the phrase, “back east,” which I remember struck me as odd, even as I typed it out on the page. The poem was written in 2003, a full year before I would unexpectedly move from New York to California to start …
BACKGROUND For just over a year, we’ve been using a secret Gmail account to read and track submissions. It’s pretty simple: People email me submissions, I forward them to Gmail, and all the editors have the infinite storage and ultimate searchability at their fingertips. We can then use the labels to keep track of submissions …