Lost Angeles, CA

April 29, 2013

“Riots Observed in Fiery Fragments”—David L. Ulin on the Literary Legacy of April 1992

by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times—April 22nd, 2012

One of my favorite pieces of writing to emerge from the 1992 Los Angeles riots is a poem by a writer named Nicole Sampogna, called “Another L.A.” In it, the poet traces the odd dislocation of living on the Westside while so much of the city burns. “They send us home early, again,” she begins, “supposedly for curfew sake, / but I know it’s to beat the traffic.” And then: “over there the smoke rises, / horns blare, streets scream, / shoot, loot, / bash windows, bash heads, / lights out / knocked out / by a black & white with a baton. / but, here / will the pizza man deliver after sunset?”

There it is, the dislocation that so often marks Los Angeles, and never more profoundly than when the not-guilty verdicts in the LAPD beating of Rodney King came down 20 years ago. Depending on where you lived or the part of town in which you found yourself, the atmosphere was static or chaotic, suspended or engaged. I remember, on the second afternoon of the conflagration, watching as a Fairfax district neighbor sunned herself on her small front lawn, while in the distance, sirens screamed. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, perhaps in the way it reflects Sampogna’s sense of the city as disoriented, in which we connect (or don’t) “to the other LA with the flip of a switch.” How in such a place do we evoke the larger story? How do we find common ground?

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January 27, 2013

POETRY AND THE POLITICAL: This Land is Our Land

by Sam Biespiel

from Poetry Magazine, April 30, 2010

In the squares of the city—in the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office—I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.

America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling—both for poetry and for democracy. Because when I look at American poetry from the perspective of a fellow traveler, I see an art invested in various complex, fascinating, historical, and sometimes shop-worn literary debates. I see a twenty-first-century enterprise that’s thriving in the off-the-beaten-track corners of the nation’s cities and college towns. But at the same time that poetry’s various coteries are consumed with art-affirming debates over poetics and styles, American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political, and public life.

This divide between poet and civic life is bad for American poetry and bad for America, too. Decade after decade, poetry slips into its fifteen-hundred-copy-print-run oblivion and scattered identities on the Internet, and we hear not one chirrup about it from the leading thinkers or writers who have access to a dialogue with the greater public. The culture-consuming audience that should provide poetry’s best readers has scarcely noticed its diminishment. Or if they have noticed, they have also come to feel excluded, unconcerned, and dismissive because they believe that American poetry has become so esoteric that figuring out the differences among the warring poets and styles is wholly unnecessary for leading a culturally rich or civically engaged American life.

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Filed under: poetry politics poets poetrymagazine poem land america literature longreads

January 6, 2013

DUE CONSIDERATION: ON THE REAL SOPHISTICATION OF TONY HOAGLAND

by Benjamin Paloff, Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2007

Over the last couple of years, I have been hearing complaints from a great many of my friends, poets and readers I respect and admire, about the essays of Tony Hoagland. And poor Mr. Hoagland. For these complaints, some of them rather fierce, gravitate more generally around certain kinds of essays and reviews, and about the kinds of mean or dismissive things that have appeared therein, and for which Hoagland has, for some, become an improbable poster boy. Here, then, is the first virtue of Tony Hoagland’s Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (Graywolf, 2006): these essays, which I have read piecemeal in such venues as Poetry and American Poetry Review with a mix of admiration, irritation, and amusement, and whose jaunty style and chummy intelligence will not save them from the universal decay of matter, have triggered such strong and lasting feelings in those whose judgment I value. And I suppose that my interest is more than a sporting one, since as someone who writes or edits a fair share of essays and reviews I always find it useful to know what will ruffle feathers, so that said ruffling might be more judiciously applied. Prose about poetry, after all, should be challenging and provocative. It should not, like gossip columns, estranged cousins, or American foreign policy, remind us of a drunk wielding a broken beer bottle.

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Filed under: tonyhoagland michiganquarterlyreview poetry craft essays poems poets graywolf longreads criticism

January 6, 2013

Borrowed Words: One poet’s words appearing in another’s poems is not necessarily plagiarism. A guide to hassle-free borrowing is offered. (Writer’s Digest, ‘95)

by Michael J Bugeja, Writer’s Digest, June 1995

Last year Writer’s Digest was the first to publish details of a plagiarism case involving Neal Bowers, whose stolen poems appeared in journals across the country. (See “Poetic Theft” in the April 1994 issue.) The Bowers story was later reported in such newspapers as The New York Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer and Des Moines Register.

Since then I have received several letters by readers concerned that they might be unintentionally plagiarizing poems, borrowing, a line or image from someone else’s work.

It’s one thing to steal a poem and another to borrow one. The latter is ethical as long as you:

* Acknowledge the other author in a dedication.

* Reference the original work in an epigraph or allusion.

* Compose within the genres of the reply or burlesque.

Before we discuss those terms and techniques, let’s first look at a less-intentional act of borrowing.

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Filed under: poetry plagiarism longreads writersdigest ritaschweitz tseliot rilke shakespeare longform sharonolds bugeja michaeljbugeja pantoums

November 8, 2012

Mark Royden Winchell on “the Southernness of Robert Frost” ( Sewanee Review, Winter 2011)

JOAN Didion once observed that “certain places seem to exist because someone has written about them. … A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.” By this standard Robert Frost can clearly lay claim to rural New England. The locale “north of Boston” lives in our collective imagination largely because he wrote about it. For that reason it may seem strange to argue that Frost’s sensibility was also shaped by other locations. We know that he was born in San Francisco and spent his first eleven years in California. As a young man he lived in England and published his first book as an expatriate. Above even these places, however, Frost felt a deep affinity for the American South. Not only was he a small a agrarian, but he also maintained important personal and professional ties with two members of the Nashville Agrarian movement - John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson. Moreover his view of the world (particularly the part of it that pertained to politics) put him closer to William Gilmore Simms than to Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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Filed under: longreads robertfrost sewaneereview poets poetry south americansouth newengland johncroweransom nashville articles awesome didion joandidion readthis

November 8, 2012

‘Bobby Was a Difficult Child’: My Cousin, Robert Lowell by Sarah Payne Stuart (NYT ‘94)

by Sarah Payne Stuart (New York Times, 1994)

MY first cousin once removed was Robert Lowell, the poet — a fact I just happened to mention on my application to Harvard University. The worst part was that I had to work it into the essay section. They had a section for listing family members who had gone to Harvard, but that was only for immediate family members. It was 3 o’clock in the morning and the application was due next day. So I started writing something dumb about my intellectual development — or was it my personal growth? — all the time saying to myself, “I can’t, I can’t,” when suddenly out of the blue came, “As I was having dinner last night with my first cousin once removed, Robert Lowell, the poet, I turned to him and said… .”

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Filed under: newyorktimes nyt nytimes robertlowell poets poetry harvard SarahPayneStuart longreads lowell

November 2, 2012

You, I, them: A confessional poet’s dissolution (by Jana Harris, Triquarterly ‘00)

Jana Harris talks about her choice to become, what she calls, a confessional poet. Harris feels it has something to do with the fact that one of her parents was suffering from mental illness and substance abuse, and her other parent was in denial.

by Jana Harris, (Triquarterly, Winter 2000)

My conjecture is that if you come from a family that has a strong “denial gene,” and if you inherit only trace amounts of this genetic material, your chances are greater of developing the compulsion to become a writer of the genus poet, species confessional. This phenomenon holds particularly true if one parent is substance-addicted or mentally ill and the other parent is the guardian of the secret. In the beginning, you start out innocently enough harboring a growing obsession to document your side of the story, something to serve as a sort of testament as to what you perceive as the truth. You are still very young at this point, so you still imagine that there is a truth, or only one truth, at any rate. Besides that, you can’t-due to the weak denial gene-contradict what your eyes see. Like all children, you are taught never to bear false witness. But early on you figure out that you don’t get punished for lying to keep the secret. You only get swatted, sent to your room, or threatened with foster care if you tell your truth, which is labeled a tale. And when you persist, you are branded Dirty Little Liar. Thus, you learn the art of subterfuge.

Later in college when you take a freshman creative writing class, the assignments seem almost effortless, because you’re already an adept storyteller. Besides, it’s the late sixties and every bumper sticker yells at you to let it all hang out. This message cleaves to you like a religious text and becomes your mantra. Sophomore year you get a little lazy and don’t make anything up. Voila, you discover that you get points for your confessions, your depictions of altered states of reality, your dramatic moments which more and more often take the form of lines of uneven length scrawled across the page, unhampered by the restraints of punctuation. Unfortunately for you these narrative efforts aren’t entirely off the cuff sketches ripped from the pages of your diary. One problem is that you are told to include a lot of what feels like boring, insignificant detail. The other is that the story of your life and the people around you seems so mundane that it hardly feels interesting. Who would want to read something about a person whose life has been slightly southwest of normal? Then, during your junior year, it dawns on you that not everyone had a Joan Crawford or a Marie Antoinette or Joseph Stalin or Henry VIII as a parent. Okay, so you suspect one or two of your good friends did-which is probably why they’re your good friends-but not everyone sees their parents in a clear critical light and still fewer feel compelled to write about them. Better to call up what strength you can from the recessive denial gene, bury the past (or invent a new one), and move on.

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Filed under: longreads confessionalpoets poetry poets onwriting writing triquarterly literature mentalillnes substanceabuse growingup MFAs

November 2, 2012

LIBERAL FATHER, RADICAL SON: Adam Kirsch on the relationship and conflicts between Lionel Trilling and Allen Ginsberg

LIBERAL FATHER, RADICAL SON: Lionel Trilling and Allen Ginsberg

Author: Kirsch, Adam.

Publication info: The Virginia Quarterly Review 85. 3 (Summer 2009): 199-VIII.

In the spring of 1944, as the Second World War neared its turning point, the first skirmishes of the generational battle that would define postwar America were taking place in a lecture hall at Columbia University. When Allen Ginsberg, then a seventeen-year-old freshman, signed up to study the Great Books with Lionel Trilling, neither one of them could have suspected that they were about to begin a lifelong friendship that was also a mortal combat - over literature and politics, morality and maturity, liberalism and radicalism. The Sixties, historians have variously said, started with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or Elvis Presley’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. But a good case can be made that the Sixties really began when Ginsberg walked into Trilling’s classroom.

June 14, 2012

THE GULF: A Meditation on the Mississippi Coast after Katrina by Natasha Trethewey (VQR,’08)

by Natasha Trethewey

In 1956, just two years after Brown v. Board of Education, Robert Penn Warren set off on a journey south to explore the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision. The slim volume he produced, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, offered insight into the people caught in what the Saturday Review later termed “a storm they can neither conquer nor fully comprehend.” Now, a half century later, the Gulf South struggles in the wake of another storm, Hurricane Katrina, and faces a rebuilding effort not unlike the effort to rebuild the culture of the South after the legal walls of segregation had been struck down. The plight of the people, post-Katrina, is still mediated not only by class but also by color, the future is uncertain, and the ongoing identity of the Gulf South will be determined not only by how it will be rebuilt but also by how its past will be remembered. The region stands as a test for the whole nation. Are we hopelessly divided? Or can we still bridge …

Where you come from is gone,

where you thought you were going to never was there,

and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

-Flannery O’Connor

June 14, 2012

Getting to Know Natasha Trethewey Through Her Writing: On Whitman, Civil War Memory, and My South (VQR, ‘05)

by Natasha Trethewey

O magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! my South!

O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all dear to me!

-Walt Whitman

I. The New South

A few years ago I was interviewed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution-a newspaper whose slogan used to be “Covering Dixie Like the Dew”-and later, when the article appeared, the headline read, “Poet Digs at secrets in Her South.” Not long after that, I received several e-mail and phone messages from a marketing representative who wanted to get a few lines from me about “my South.” In the messages, he said it wouldn’t take long and that his firm couldn’t pay me for my comments. Well, I was busy, and besides that, I figured he didn’t want to hear what I really think about the South. Most likely, he probably wanted some sound-bite clichés about how I like my grits, sweet tea, or barbecue, about how we southerners like sitting on porches and after-church visiting.

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