Amelia Gray (AM/PM, Featherproof Books) initiated a dialogue with me about the role of the teacher. Please visit her blog and contribute.
Thanks.
You are what you read:
A Dialogue Re: Flash Fiction, etc.
At her blog Green City News, Molly Gaudry opened up a forum about flash fiction, among other things, in an entry entitled “Flash fiction, Indie Lit, and the Beats.”
Here’s my quick response:
“It’s a tremendous challenge you face regarding defining, compartmentalizing, speculating about, teasing apart, questioning a form that’s reared in, or at any rate, results in a feeling of immediacy, poignancy, intimacy, connection, something that may act like a virus, a germ, that assaults, coerces, teases, a form having, at its best, haiku’s cogency, a stand-up comic’s delivery, the speed of telling the news but not the weather, a form that stings like a slap, purples like a bruise, a form that at its worst sounds like some drunk dude flapping his gums (it sounded funny or clever at the time, but was really just some guy being dumb), a form that because of its democratic impulse, has opened the floodgates for all kinds of detritus, making it all the more difficult to ascertain quality, importance, significance. Maybe time will tell. But then again what tale does time really tell anyway?
And so now I ramble.
As for demarcating lines between flash, micro- and short fiction, mini-prose poems, etc., I think it’s critical to consider that while hairsplitting results in two hairs, it also results in one original hair diminished. But then again, who’s to say split-ends don’t have their own kind of beauty? Ah, it’s all pretty hairy anyway.
So then, disjointedness and confusion is one possible, if not viable, approach.”
Please feel free to join in the dialogue.
Posted in Molly Gaudry
Silverfish for Bookworms #3
Show Your Work! A poet calls for a new kind of poetry criticism, and a new kind of critic.
By Matthew Zapruder
www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=186047
Enthusiasts mark centenary of modern poetry: One hundred years ago today, a group of poets rebelled against Romanticism in a London cafe and changed the course of poetry
By Mark Brown
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/25/hulme-modern-poetry-ezra-pound-imagists
Line by Line, Poets Capture the Immigrant Story, New Jersey Style
By Peter Applebome
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/nyregion/29towns.html
Author says poetry saved life: Iraqi poet tells her tale of censorship, exile
By Andrew Arnold
http://www.uecrescent.org/articles/stories/public/200903/27/4nrr_news.html
Palestinian poetry: On the waste land
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13361064
Pun for the Ages
By JOSEPH TARTAKOVSKY
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/opinion/28Tartakovsky.html
World’s End by Pablo Neruda: The poet’s odyssey of self is splendidly captured in this translation by William O’Daly.
By Richard Rayner http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-pablo-neruda29-2009mar29,0,707173.story
Craig Raine’s Arsehole: Variations on a theme by Helen Farish
By John Tranter
http://jacketmagazine.com/37/craig-raines-arsehole.shtml
The Writing Life: Maureen Freely
In which the translator of Orhan Pamuk’s works finds herself interpreting more than a language.
By Maureen Freely
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/17/AR2009031701998.html
Why books won’t change your life: Publishers love to say a novel is unputdownable, or life-changing. I can’t imagine anything worse
By Alastair Harper
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar/23/life-changing-books
Dickens vs. America
Matthew Pearl
http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/dickens-vs-america
In times of trouble, fiction thrives
By Carlin Romano
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_top_stories/20090324_In_times_of_trouble__fiction_thrives.html?viewAll=y
The Parables of Flannery O’Connor
By Joyce Carol Oates
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22532
Posted in Uncategorized
Silverfish for Bookworms #2
New FC2 Podcast with Brian Evenson
Click HERE.
Lingo: What Child is This?
By Ange Mlinko
Click HERE.
3rd Language Creation Conference: Presentations, Posters, and Further Reading
Click HERE.
Kent Johnson’s Homage to the Last Avant-Garde reviewed
By Peter Davis
Click HERE.
The ultimate French intellectual: The thought performances, the love life and the bank statements of the well-connected Paul Valéry
By Paul Gifford
Click HERE.
Ron Padgett’s How to Be Perfect
Reviewed by Jack Cox
Click HERE.
Annie Finch on Listening to Poetry
Click HERE.
George Oppen and Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy and Poetry of Gelassenheit, and the Language of Faith
By Burt Kimmelman
Click HERE.
The Private Barthes: Posthumous publication of the theorist’s journals draws disapproval
By Benjamin Ivry
Click HERE.
Virginia, Jean, and Flannery: A Good Role Model Is Easy to Find
By Carlin Romano
Click HERE.
A Tale of Sadness and Forgetting
By Michael Weiss
Click HERE.
Preserving Languages Is About More Than Words
By Kari Lydersen
Click HERE.
Writers Recommend
Click HERE.
All My Senses, Like Beacon’s Flame: Fulke Greville’s eloquent path to confused arousal
By Robert Pinsky
Click HERE.
Catching up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti
By Heidi Benson
Click HERE.
Posted in Uncategorized
JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher 