The finished copies of Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures arrived at the office. Lots of squealing was involved. We had a brainstorming session of what it felt like to hold. “Excalibur” and “a burger” were mentioned.
Hardcovers and paperbacks 50% off through June 6th. Holy moly, now that’s a deal.
A book I very much want to read.
“‘Wave is putting out fantastic stuff,’ [Jeffery] Lependorf adds. ‘CAConrad, Beckman, Eileen Myles, Anselm Berrigan — those are great poets. And if I tell you I just bought a title from Wave Books, if you’ve read another book from Wave, you already know what kind of reader I am. And you can spot a Wave title a mile away.’”
Aw shucks…
Now you can listen to all of the recordings from the 2009 3 Days of Poetry Festival, including readings from Dorothea Lasky, Mary Ruefle, Joshua Beckman, Matthew Zapruder, Rachel Zucker, Noelle Kocot, Jon Woodward, Anthony McCann, Matthew Rohrer, Geoffrey Nutter, Richard Meier, Maggie Nelson, Dara Wier, and Eileen Myles.
“In New York City’s Madison Square Park, hundreds of people attended a ‘Free University’ hosted by Occupy Wall Street, where professors gave free classes to May Day protesters.” There’s also a transcript of the video. Happy learning!
Rad! We’re excited to release Hoa Nguyen’s next book, As Long As Trees Last, this September.
read it all here at Like Starlings
JMW
Some Visitant
Attendants were low in
the scenery-ed
encaustic bluing:
so told, so visited
unloved, so crossed
as if weather could vex
that backlit stage in the—-
How many of you is gonna
come by tonight?
I said, how many monsters
of you is…
FIRST STOP: MAGGIE NELSON
The first stop on my cross-country pilgrimage to Emily Dickinson’s house was Los Angeles, to visit 39-year-old writer and thinker Maggie Nelson. She’s the author of four books of poetry and four books of non-fiction. The first time I ever saw Maggie Nelson, she was reading from a series of poems written about The Gowanus Canal called “The Canal Diaries” from her book Something Bright, Then Holes. Later I read her book Jane; then The Red Parts about her aunt’s murder, and most recently, the exquisite Bluets. I interviewed her on the lawn of The Getty museum in the sweltering heat. - Ali Liebegott
AL: Do you think of yourself as a poet?
MN: It’s been a little odd recently because my first four books were poetry and I came into the world as a poet, and then my last four books have all been non-fiction. So I have yet to theorize exactly what shift has occurred, but when I grew up I was just interested in being a writer. The feeling I had reading Rilke in high school was very important to me becoming a poet. And I had a very good friend in high school and a fellow Rilke lover who was probably one of the best people who lived on this planet in my opinion. She died of breast cancer at 37 last year. Her name was Lhasa de Sela, she became a world famous singer, but she and I were poetry friends and she was a Rilke lover, and loved the same line you have tattooed on your arm—you must change your life. It was just a feeling about Rilke, it was a lyric inhale. I’ve taught “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” and had smart people deconstruct these poems in class, but it doesn’t approach what I was feeling. Paul Celan later occupied the place that Rilke occupied, which was whenever I read Paul Celan, I thought being a poet was the right thing and the best thing to be.
