2 bits

a review of hoodwinked by david hernandez.
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rigoberto gonzález is the judge for the 2011 bloom creative nonfiction chapbook contest. mark doty is the poetry judge.

queer, latino fiction in the new yorker!! you go, justin torres!!!

We stayed on the phone. I stayed in the back. Nigel walked toward the train. The man on the bicycle waited. I pleaded and apologized and pretended I did not want to break up as much as I really did want to break up. All the while, I felt such anger; I was so tired of apologizing. Nigel was always finding discarded plants and taking them home to regenerate. Everywhere in our apartment were plants, thriving. This, too, infuriated me—and when Nigel instructed me not to come home that night, when he told me to come by the next day, while he was at work, and remove all my shit and never come home again, I thought of those plants, of a space in the world without them.

Hi, John H.!!!!

Upcoming Reading (Boston friends, mark your calendars!)

LATINO/A POETRY NOW: Rosa Alcalá, Eduardo C. Corral & Aracelis Girmay (via Poetry Society of America)

Tuesday, Nov 8, 6:00pm

Join us for the premiere event in a reading series that will travel the country, beginning in Cambridge, MA, and proceeding on to Washington, D.C., Saint Paul, MN, South Bend, IN, and beyond. The inaugural event will feature readings by three distinct and dynamic voices in Latino/a poetry, followed by a public conversation moderated by Francisco Aragón (director of Letras Latinas).

Co-sponsored by Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the Poetry Society of America, and the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.


Free and open to the public.

Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street.

2011 Omnidawn Open Book Poetry Contest

Carl Phillips Will Judge the 2011 Omnidawn Open Book Poetry Contest.

Electronic and postal submissions will be accepted from August 1, 2011 to October 31, 2011.

Full guidelines here.

I've never heard of Carl Phillips. Have you? I'm going to Google him right now. :)

sean singer on tim dlugos

The poem that expresses these ideas most forcefully is the incomparable “G-9,” which was written in 1989 when he was admitted to the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital. Written in a narrow, column-like form of one long gasp, the poem is political, unsentimental, unflinching, sensitive, and disturbing. The reader uses her breath and body in the present to connect to the poets’ mind in the past. The poem is the bridge between health and sickness, two points in time, the memory and its embodiment.

Interview: Benjamín Alire Sáenz

...I think back on my Stanford days and being with the Stegner Fellows, who were my colleagues–fiction writers and poets. In terms of raw talent, I had the least amount of it. I’m probably now the most published because I think I wanted it so badly. And the other thing I think is very important to becoming a writer is can you be alone? A lot of young people can’t be alone. You have to be able to enjoy your own company and not want to run from yourself, because you just have to spend so much time alone.

hottie of the week: william levy

bits

i sent some photographs to the good people over at yale press earlier this week. just found out the book designers loved the photographs. yeah! so i might have a vivid photograph on the cover!
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the latest installment of diode is up and running. sigh. if only they would take one of my poems.
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snakes!
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funny: i always thought my first book would have a painting on the cover. but the minute i saw these photographs online, i knew they would make a great cover.
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the new york times briefly reviews michael dickman, c. dale young, chris martin and ross gay.
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ophiophobia: an ophidiophobic would not only fear them when in live contact but also dreads to think about them or even see them on TV or in pictures.
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ha.

Good Poems

Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye

Every city in America is approached
through a work of art, usually a bridge
but sometimes a road that curves underneath
or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel—

you don’t know it—that takes you through the rivers
and under the burning hills. I went there to cry
in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle
through fire and flood. Some have little parks—

San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque
is beautiful from a distance; it is purple
at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,
especially from the little rise on the hill

at 14-C; it has twelve entrances
like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,
has two small floating bridges in front of it
that brought me in and out. I said good-bye

to them both when I was 57. I’m reading
Joseph Wood Krutch again—the second time.
I love how he lived in the desert. I’m looking at the skull
of Georgia O’Keeffe. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye.

He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city
in every sense of the word; he wore a library
across his chest; he had a church on his knees.
I’m kissing him good-bye; he was, for me,

the last true city; after him there were
only overpasses and shopping centers,
little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper
with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf

where whores couldn’t even walk, where nobody sits,
where nobody either lies or runs; either that
or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,
a flower sucking the water out of a rock.

What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores
lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick
turning the bricks up, numbering the shards,
dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left

with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial.
I put it in my leather pockets next
to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,
my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there

beside his famous number; there is smoke
and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter
is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting
is taking down his words. I’m kissing Stieglitz

good-bye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos
are making me cry; we’re walking down Fifth Avenue;
we’re looking for a pencil; there is a girl
standing against the wall—I’m shaking now

when I think of her; there are two buildings, one
is in blackness, there is a dying poplar;
there is a light on the meadow; there is a man
on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.

Gerald Stern

colgate love!

Congrats to Molly Beer and George David Clark! They are the 2011-12 Olive B. O'Connor Fellows in Creative Writing at Colgate University.

CantoMundo 2011 Pics (2)

Kundiman Recap

I shared during Closing Circle (the final, reflective gathering of the weekend) that—as cliché as it may sound—the retreat felt like a gift to me. I came to New York expecting to take a step back from the world in order to write and to be in the presence of other writers; to expend great swaths of time developing projects; to workshop; and to make some engaging new friendships with other Asian American poets. But my experience of the retreat was, in fact, more like a step deeper into the experience of being a writer in the world—of being a poet in context.

CantoMundo Fellows Reading: Austin, TX: July 8, 2011