11/29: round-up
Hi & happy Monday!
What I have for you today:
Housekeeping
The month in review
What I read last week
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
As always, I’m selling 5 books for $30 to raise funds for The West Review’s contributors. Free shipping. You can tell me what you’re looking for or let me surprise you.
And it is ~the holiday season~ and I do, in fact, accept gifts. You can buy them for me here. Just click add-to-cart and you can mail them straight to me. (I’m only half-kidding.)
In case you missed any newsletters from the month of November, here they are again—always full of book recommendations (and the occasional insightful comment):
What I read last week:
(B)Aiiieeeee!: The Future is Femme and Queer, Franny Choi
Writing the Body, Dylan McCarthy Blackston
On Long Poems, Stephanie Burt
Apostasy, Katy Mongeau
ESOTERICA/ETHOS: CRITIQUE; FOR PERSONAL USE WHEN EDITING THE WORK OF OTHERS, nessi alexander-barnes
Quotations:
In order to endure the loss, and not to let it utterly overwhelm you and utterly take you away from the life, you have to find some way to let it be the thing that animates your attachment to things, and the animated attachment is the present. It's molecular—it's just a piece of the life.
Like many poets, I cannot become a polemical poet. And I'm not sure why that's true. It's just that I think the easy answer to that is that once you're a polemical poet, then all the people who listen to you are the ones that share your polemics, so what's the point? I mean, I think Ginsberg did a pretty good job of getting somewhere else in the culture, but I don't have that…I'm not a missionary in the way that he was; I have no real "message," I guess that's part of it. I have no solution. I don't have any wisdom about this stuff. I just have regret, of a kind, that I live in this world, and also I think a pretty profound despair that I don't know how to do anything about it, and I think I share I share that despair with many, many people.
If all students of poetry are told to look to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman as the founders of the American lyric […], then small wonder that it’s not straight boys inheriting this patch of earth.
-Franny Choi
Poetry is an act of the body, an internal, intestinal movement. Poetry moves like an interstitial cellular revolt, rattling up words and rhythms from the deepest secret stuff of us.
-TT Jax
what does the thigh want? to be touched.
-KT Herr, “Why Are My Hands Wet”
Give me your voice // please—for it is // the only gospel I ever had.
-Michael Wasson, “Thy Gifts, for which [I Am] About to [Devour]”
You wanted to // be holy and righteous because / this is one path to one kind // of heaven. I wanted to be holy / and righteous because life is short // and sad and we all deserve to be / loved.
-Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, “Gangrenous Love”
How many ghosts must I always carry with me?
-Chloe Rose, “Haunted”
Is all I am / a slur of passion / tempered words and tangents / of the limbs / unwieldy?
-Katy Mongeau
I was too beautiful // To be such a sinner.
-Jericho Brown, “Because My Name is Jericho”
Two girls lie in bed beside one another holding mirrors / under the mouths of their skirts, comparing wounds.
-Warsan Shire, “Mermaids”
Highlights of the nessi alexander-barnes article, for me:
i believe that the technical aspects of writing, such as grammar, are tools intended to do the work of conveying meaning to a reader;
[…]
i believe that language and grammar, and the control of one’s voice more broadly, have long been tools of violence and oppression, and that to address that brutal history, we must actively make room for multiple ways of being and writing and speaking;
i believe that ‘universal’ and ‘singular’ have limited applications, and that there is no one ‘true’ or correct form of writing—rather, there are multiple ways of writing, and vastly different contexts may require vastly different modes and styles to adequately address their needs;
[…]
i believe that it is important to be generous to one's audience, but that there is a difference between generosity and self-erasure, and that audience members are often smarter than they're given credit for, if one takes the time to be careful and patient and, indeed, generous.
[…]
they are also tools whose appropriate use has been governed by very different strictures according to temporal and cultural contexts, and whose governing strictures often have far more to do with the advertisement of social position on the part of those enforcing them.
[…]
it is my intention to advocate that more room be made at our tables, not that any who operate under more conventional constraints be excluded in our stead.
if this seems impossible, then it is our job to be more creative, with regards to our approach.
and possibly to get a bigger table.
Tweets:
this video of sondheim teaching not getting married today to guildhall students is my favorite because look at how proud he is that this student is nailing one of his most sadistic songs
i don’t need to put my mental disorders in my bio you can easily infer that there’s something wrong with me
I LOVE THE MODERN WORLD, ALL THE MAIL IS TRASH AND ALL YOUR PHONE CALLS ARE FROM NO ONE BUT ON THE BRIGHT SIDE YOU GET TO ASSEMBLE YOUR OWN FURNITURE REGARDLESS OF YOUR LEVEL OF CARPENTRY SKILL
i am begging straight editors to internalize the fact that queer people have lots of queer friends and it is not weird when everyone in a gay book is gay
Wait, so PhD programs are asking *student applicants* to submit diversity statements now? Shouldn't the program be telling students about its own commitment to diversity, not the other way around?? What is an undergraduate student even supposed to say in this?
Took the train to Syracuse instead of flying because I wanted the autumn in New York experience and the train hit a deer and someone is yelling You Done Hit Bambi and a drunk woman is threatening to strip if they don’t turn the heat down; my fault for not being more specific.
That’s all I have for you today. Have a good week!
-DB
Linktr.ee