Note: This article first appeared in the print edition of the Press-Enterprise on December 15, 2013, in the Inlandia Institute’s weekly column. Last month San Antonio, Texas, opened Bibliotech, America’s first bookless public library, which allows patrons to borrow inexpensive e-readers and download electronic books from home. For us writers and lovers of literature, the mission before us …
Once a week, on average, I receive a request to blurb someone’s poetry book. For the last five years, I’ve been saying no. For a while it was a hedged no; I’d say that I probably won’t have time, but feel free to send the manuscript, anyway. A few dozen consecutive failures and that evolved …
AFTER READING FIFTY POEMS FROM THE BEST LITERARY MAGAZINES 1. Either I have very good taste or very poor taste or there’s no such thing as taste at all. 2. Most poems are bullshit pinned with apocalypse and pinafore lit up like a damn beer sign but this poem says it’s bullshit which means it’s …
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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 …
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. …