Incendiary Lit

Just to get a feel for this. We still have a relatively limited amount of viewers, so I guess the best way to give you what you want is to ask. Do you want more MFA profiles, more literary terms defined, more about literary journals and how to submit, more theory of putting together a book, more laughs of the day? Better quizzes? We’re about to do a massive guerrilla marketing campaign, well, massive in LA and Orange Counties… outside of that, any word passed along would be spectacular. Thanks guys, and please use that comment box.

Like, totally. Similes are easy, fun, and get across your point. Here’s a Sharon Olds poem that uses, *pauses to put on Count attire* One. Two. Three. Four, five-six-seven-eight. Eight! Eight Similes! HA-HA-HA!

Feared Drowned

Suddenly nobody knows where you are,
your suit black as seaweed, your bearded
head slick as a seal’s.

Somebody watches the kids. I walk down the
edge of the water, clutching the towel
like a widow’s shawl around me.

None of the swimmers is just right.
Too short, too heavy, clean-shaven,
they rise out of the surf, the water
rushing down their shoulders.

Rocks stick out near shore like heads.
Kelp snakes in like a shed black suit
and I cannot find you.

My stomach begins to contract as if to
vomit salt water,

when up the sand toward me comes
a man who looks very much like you,
his beard matted like beach grass, his suit
dark as a wet shell against his body.

Coming closer, he turns out
to be you - or nearly.
Once you lose someone it is never exactly
the same person who comes back.

Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio hypothesized, in their wonderful textbook The Poet’s Companion, that Sharon Olds has a simile-making machine in her basement. Despite many attempts, Ms. Olds’ basement vault has yet to be breached.

So why exactly would you use a simile? Usually if you’re describing something, and you picture it in your head, and you see, say the child’s safety blanket draped over his arm, and for some reason your brain flashes to that movie you saw last month about the hit man, and when he was dragging the dead body, and you think, hey, he was carrying his safety blanket like a fresh corpse. Relatively morbid, but don’t get on me, it’s your simile. Sheesh.

Another reason for similes is that whole pesky layering thing. You know, how what you say doesn’t just mean what it means, but means something else entirely as well. Meaning meaning meaning. A big pain in the ass. Even a blank page has meaning nowadays. You can’t get away from it. But if you want to venture into the whole, despicable making-your-poems-mean -something thing, then you can use a simile to tie your theme to the poem a little more securely. For instance, take your morbid little simile there. Say that was the first thing you thought of when you sat to write a poem. The kid with the safety blanket and the fresh corpse. This could go many places. How do you tie it together? If you want your poem to be about the loss of innocence, incrementally small (a pet toad died) or large, the use of the simile is one thing binding the theme and the narrative. Why not add a few more stitches. His footsteps on the stairs, slow as a death march, or his long hair shading his eyes like a widow’s veil. Over the top, perhaps… but you get the idea, right?

For further reading of the wonderful Sharon Olds check out amazon here, you can get many of her books for under $3, with shipping it’s cheaper than two gallons of gas, or a six pack of something imported. The difference between drinking 3 instead of 4 cocktails at the bar, depending on your drink. So just buy one of her books already. It’ll be worth it.

South Park’s Season 10, Episode 05 takes on the whole James Frey scandal in “A Million Little Fibers,” though it does turn from James Frey to strictly Oprah after about fifteen minutes, and gets a little crude, even for South Park standards, but it’s still pretty funny if you’re at all familiar with the situation. Check it out here and laugh. Or get offended, or think, no wonder this is the lowest rated episode on imdb. Or think it’s great. There are plenty of options. We’ll leave it wide open to your interpretation.

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai. It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States in the previous year and chosen by the Kansas City Star as one of the ten best books of poetry published in 2005. Laux is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, reprinted this year by Eastern Washington University Press, What We Carry (1994) and Smoke (2000). Red Dragonfly Press will release Superman: The Chapbook, later this year. Co-author of The Poet’s Companion, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and she’s a frequent contributor to Orion and Ms. Magazine. Laux has waited tables and written poems in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Petaluma, California and Juneau, Alaska. In 1994 she moved to Eugene where she’s now a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. She lives with her husband, the poet Joseph Millar.

Dorianne Laux’s poems Dust and Sunday Radio, and Joseph Millar’s Love Pirates and Telephone Repairman are set to music by singer Paula Sinclair on her new album Uncle Tumbleweed.

Zebulon Huset: What was the last book or poem you’ve read that you absolutely loved?
Dorianne Laux:The last book I read that I loved was the Wild Trees by Richard Preston.
The last poem I read that I loved was Beetle Orgy by Benjamin Grossberg.

ZH: Are there any writers you just don’t get the attraction to?
DL: Yeah, some, though I don’t like to say as I may read them tomorrow and
suddenly get them. I didn’t get Dickinson for a long time, then one day
I read “There is a pain– so utter– it swallows substance up–” I got that.

ZH: What is your position on the semi-colon?
DL: Well, the late Kurt Vonnegut has said that semi-colons are “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” I’m not fond of them, especially in poetry. I think they look messy to me. I enjoy the simplicity and clarity of the comma and the period.

ZH: What is your favorite two-word color?
DL: I have a soft spot in my child’s heart for Crayola Inc’s burnt sienna. I read somewhere that the Japanese don’t have a specific word for brown and so use more descriptive names such as “tea-color,” “fox-color,” and “fallen-leaf.” In Sri Lankan, brown would be husked-coconut-color, bed-tea-color, water-buffalo-color, cinnamon-bark-color. I like those, too. I also like shit-brown, rust-brown, tobacco-brown, Fallen-down-been-around-for-a-long-time-redwood-fence-brown and peanut-butter-brown. Any brown in a shit storm works for me.

ZH: Do you have any guilty pleasure movies?
DL: For a poet, all movies are guilty pleasure movies. I can often get off on a Lifetime
made for TV movie, though I just heard The Channel for Women is going to change
over to a channel for men and young boys. There goes that guilty pleasure.

ZH: If you were stranded on a desert island with three books, what would they be?
DL: Shakespeare, Sappho, and How to Build an Elastic Raft with your Underpants.

ZH: Is there any particular popular songs that just irk you for some reason?
DL: Oops I’ve Done It Again? I assume that’s the title. I love Metaphors by Sparks.

ZH: Do you have a favorite presidential candidate for ‘08?
DL: Not yet. I like saying Obamarama.

ZH: If they made a movie of any period of your life, who would you want to portray you?
DL: Tom Waits. And if they couldn’t get him, Cher. Seriously? Lili Taylor.

ZH: What is the best title you’ve ever come across (the actual work notwithstanding)
DL: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn.

Links for tons of more about and by Dorianne Laux
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Check out this interview at Dee Rimbaud with Dorianne Laux, where she drops our name like it was hot, and after all, we are incendiary, so if we weren’t hot it’d be name brand infringement. Or something. This makes now as good a time as ever to repost the Dorianne Laux interview we conducted in our earlier days, when 2 people were visiting us out of kindness. Now that there’s like ten of you, haha, or millions, more people will be moved to tears by the touching interview.

Many out there have never heard of a rhaptzung poem, which is a loose formal poem with many variations. Here’s the official definition:

Rhaptzung– An urban-influenced poetry form that involves heavy concentration on musicality, generally in multi-syllabic rhyming (often slant) couplets with internal rhyme and assonance. The form originated in the late ’90s among hip hop listening poets frustrated with the sparseness and lack of depth in the music they loved. They took the sonic density of the better rap music and gave it quality content.

Those whose work is selected for publication in Rhaptzung will receive three complimentary copies of the magazine, and a small stipend yet to be determined. To submit send emails to Rhaptzung@gmail.com

Here’s an example, though maybe not the perfect example, but an example nonetheless of a Rhaptzung I’d written a number of years back, We Are Apache which was published in Acorn Review.
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John McNally is author of two novels, America’s Report Card and The Book of Ralph, both published by Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster. His previous collection Troublemakers (Iowa, 2000) won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award (2000) and the Nebraska Book Award (2001). His short story “The Immortals” was a 2005 National Magazine Award Finalist. He frequently reviews books for Washington Post and other newspapers.
He held Michener (U. of Iowa), Djerassi (U. of Wisconsin), and Jenny McKean Moore (George Washington University) fellowships. He’s also the recipient of a Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project fellowship, sponsored by Paramount Pictures, for screenwriting.
John has edited five anthologies: When I Was a Loser (Free Press, 2007); Bottom of the Ninth: 24 Great Short Stories about Baseball (Southern Illinois, 2003); Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by Writers of Color (Iowa, 2002); The Student Body: Short Stories about College Students and Professors (Wisconsin, 2001); and High Infidelity: 24 Great Short Stories about Adultery (Morrow, 1997).
He holds degrees from University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Ph.D.), University of Iowa (M.F.A.), and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (B.A.). A native of Chicago’s southwest side, John is the Olen R. Nalley Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He and his wife, Amy, live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

(On a personal note, Troublemakers is one of my favorite books of short fiction. Top 3 definitely. The Greatest Goddamn Thing is possibly the greatest goddamn thing I’ve ever read.)

Zebulon Huset: What was the last book or poem you’ve read that you absolutely loved?
John McNally: I just re-read Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter. I think it’s a really good book. Maybe I have commitment phobia, because I rarely say that I “absolutely love” a book. That’s a tall order for me. But this past semester I did teach, for the sixth or seventh time, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, and I absolutely love that book.

ZH: Are there any writers you just don’t get the attraction to?
JM: Yes. One in particular. I’d rather not say in an interview, but people who know me know who it is. And in my next collection of short stories, a character named John McNally, after a night out drinking, expresses his opinion over this writer just before he sucker-punches the person he’s with – a person, I should note, who likes the writer in question.

ZH: What is your position on the semi-colon?
JM: I overuse it, but I can’t live without it.

ZH: What is your favorite two-word color?
JM: Steel-blue.

ZH: Do you have any guilty pleasure movies?
JM: Something Wild is in my top three of all-time favorites, but I’m not sure that’s a guilty pleasure movie because I’m convinced it’s a masterpiece. I’ve watched Michael Keaton in Pacific Heights about two dozen times. That movie, which is pure B-movie fare, must tap into something dark and deeply buried in my subconscious.

ZH: If you were stranded on a desert island with three books, what would they be?
JM: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis
The Unabridged O.E.D.

ZH: What’s your poison?
JM: Radiator fluid. It shuts down the kidneys, and if you’re lucky, you end up on dialysis; if you’re not so lucky, well… But if you mean what’s my favorite drink…vodka tonic (preferably with Absolut).

ZH: Is there any particular popular songs that just irk you for some reason?
JM: I hate the Barenaked Ladies song “Pinch Me” because I hate the line in it that goes “You’ll notice I’m not around/I could hide out under there/I just made you say ‘underwear.’” Why does that drive me crazy? I don’t know. I change the station (with a scream and a quick finger-jab at the radio buttons) as soon as I realize that the song playing is “Pinch Me.”

ZH: Do you have a favorite presidential candidate for ‘08?
JM: Not yet. It won’t be a Republican. I wish some new Democrat would emerge, some crazy motherfucker who wears a holster and pair of six-shooters that he or she fires into the air right after taking the stage for the stump speech. Someone who would walk onto the set of “Meet the Press” before his or her time-slot just to break Dick Cheney’s jaw with a nice right hook. I want a candidate who says “fuck you” a lot and isn’t afraid to taunt Bush by calling him a “pussy” and a “drunk.” I think that was the appeal of Jim Webb, but I want to see someone crazier than Webb, a candidate who’ll stand outside the gates of the White House with a bullhorn, yelling, “Get your ass out here right now, you pansy-ass mama’s boy.”

ZH: If they made a movie of any period of your life, who would you want to portray you?
JM: The Little Rascal’s Joe Cobb to play me as a child? I’ll have to think on this.

ZH: What is the best title you’ve ever come across (the actual work notwithstanding)
JM: RETURN TO A PLACE LIT BY A GLASS OF MILK by Charles Simic (It would be a terrible title for a novel, but it’s a brilliant title for a poetry collection.)

Check out BookofRalph.com for more info on John and his work.

Now they’ll be located in true crime as the Polish author, Krystian Bala, has been arrested for detailing a murder he committed in his ‘fictional’ crime novel Amok, which as of yet hasn’t been translated into English, but seeing as If I Did it is currently well up into the top 200 sellers on amazon.com while, say, Kurt Vonnegut’s last book, A Man Without a Country isn’t even in the top 7,750 books, lame, I have no doubt that some ambitious, but perhaps callous editor has already started the translation process to cash in on the controversy. Anyway, here’s the news story, with the somewhat cliche title Truth stranger than fiction as author jailed, when it’s really not that strange, if you’ve read, Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, but yeah, there it is for ya. People are still trying to write about their own crimes and not catch any suspicion or trouble from it.

Warning: Poet Laureate Loitering!

That’s right, earlier in this month Charles Simic was named US Poet Laureate. If you keep up on the poetry news you already knew that, but on the odd chance that you weren’t, just thought I’d mention it. Simic’s a wonderful poet born in Yugoslavia, who immigrated to the US at 16, and has been producing wonderful poems since. He specializes in short, somewhat abstract imagistic poems… I know what you’re thinking… but sometimes you’re just in the mood to read a Simic poem, or book. I read Walking the Black Cat and Hotel Insomnia each in just one sitting, and have revisited both many times. Anyway, here’s the slightly fuller story from www.pw.org which I highly recommend browsing, as well as joining their message board at the speakeasy. There are some very knowledgeable, and helpful writers/editors who post there. And here’s a link to www.poets.org which has a great biography as well as some of Charles Simic’s poetry. He currently works as poetry editor for the Paris Review, and if you’re really on a knowledge/insight kick, here’s a link to his Paris Review interview titled “The Art of Poetry.” Below this line is one of my favorite Simic poems. If he happens upon this and would like me to remove it, at but a whisper it will be gone.
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Memoir writing is a risky undertaking. Although Augusten Burroughs’ widely-known memoir “Running with Scissors” was a critical success, even spawning a movie released last year by Sony Pictures, Burroughs’ novel was not without controversy. The Turcotte family, called the Finches in “Scissors,” brought a lawsuit again Burroughs and his publisher, which the family settled today. According to the Boston Globe’s article about the settlement, the suit “…had sought $2 million in damages for defamation, invasion of privacy, and emotional distress. It alleged the book is largely fictional and written in a sensational way to increase its market appeal, and demanded a public retraction and an acknowledgment that “Running With Scissors” is a work of fiction.”

As a result of the suit, Burroughs will change the word “memoir” to “book” in his acknowledgments note, and will also mention that the Turcottes “are each fine, decent, and hardworking people.” However, over at Gawker.com they have Burroughs’ statement on the matter, which asserts that the settlement is a “a victory for all memoirists,” as he wasn’t required to alter the text or cover of the book. Burroughs also mentions in the statement that the new acknowledgment will “point out the fact that they [the Turcottes] remember things differently.” Ha. I’m sure they do.

Laura Albert, aka JT LeRoy, a drug addicted male truck stop prostitute, has been living a lie! And it isn’t a little, “I wanted to look like more of a badass” sort of way, but a serious, intentional misleading of a publishing company, and the world. And not even terribly smalltime. Her most popular book Sarah was published by Bloomsbury USA, we’re talking the publishing house who prints Bono, man. “This food is for the stahrving chil-ren, Petah,” Bono. Also there’s that little English dear, JK Rowling with her little magic tales. Anyway, Laura had various people pretend to be her pretending to be him, and really really tried to make it work. At her court appearance she said it wasn’t a hoax because she “believed he was inside of her” which is something many people have said about male prosti… I should probably stop there. She was recently ordered to pay not just the legal fees of a production company working on a movie of her work. Here’s a little story about it.

They’re both LIARS!!! LIARS I tell you! They stretch the truth in their ‘memoirs’ to make them more interesting. It’s nice to know, I guess, that it’s not the truth, but damn, big deal? Bettis invented some running back controversy in his memoir that wasn’t really there, but is here, faked an injury supposedly, but what is more likely is he faked his memoiries. Haha, get it, a cross between memoirs and… anyway, people seem to get addicted to the ‘truth’ these days, and there’s always going to be people like James Frey, Laura Albert, Jerome Bettis, who will capitalize on that and then add some seasoning to their lives, big deal, right? If the story’s good, just be happy you were entertained.

From the great people at bookslut.com comes this interesting little essay by Weston Cutter called Choose Your Own Adventure about writing crossovers from fiction/nonfiction/poetry, as well as pointing out the major difference in pay between, in their example, poetry and book reviews. It’s not terribly long either, so go read it, you’ll be glad you did.

This intriguing essay on Alexander Pope is written so that it doesn’t feel like you’re taking a piece of sandpaper, and rubbing it against your eyes hoping to absorb the information through osmosis like so many essays about poetry do. As soon as I saw him list Nas and Atmosphere as his hip-hop examples I knew the author had spent a bit of time in Minneapolis, and sure enough, he had. And with a smart url like poetryfoundation.org this is a perfect source for a poetry paper, should you need to write a paper on a poet pauper, or any other Pope-r related subject. Click here for poetry essay goodness.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. the Great, lives on in his books, his art, and even in movies, based on his books. And this Wednesday, yes, two short days away, you can catch a double dipping batch of goodness known as experiencing Vonnegut on the big screen. Slaughterhouse Five, and Happy Birthday Wanda June. Check, check, check, a check it out, in the indispensable Elegant Variant.

It’s all the same as in the contest page, but looks prettier, right? Downloadable pdf version available by Monday, whee!!! Tell a friend, tell an enemy, just tell someone.