Line tamer.
I’ve noticed some poet friends Wordle-ing (is that a verb?) their poetry manuscripts. I couldn’t resist. After I finished my first manuscript some years ago I made a list of words I felt I overused in it and then forbid myself from using them in the next manuscript. If only I had had Worldle! Anyway, Read More …
I finished Homer’s Iliad (Fagles translation) last night (it’s been my subway reading since the turn of the year) and had my hairs stand on end when I read these lines by the ghost of Patroclus speaking to Achilles: “So now let a single urn, the gold two-handled urn / your noble mother gave you, Read More …
I came across this fun article at HTMLGIANT cataloging the moves we contemporary poets like to make in our work. “This Is Not About Pears” was mentioned in #36 as an example of “Definition or description by negation” which, I admit, is something I do a lot of in my work. I guess if I Read More …
Christopher Hennessy picks my brain about the book award system over at ]Outside the Lines[. Though I’m one voice in the wilderness here, perhaps what I’ve learned from my experiences will help others if you decide to go that route with your manuscripts.
I’m not going to do a top ten list, or limit this to books published in 2009 as I discovered a lot of wonderful work this year published since 2007. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some books here (it’s hard to remember what you were reading back in January and February) so this is by no Read More …
On a bit of a whim last night I decided to calculate how much money I’ve invested with the poetry book award contests since I started sending out my manuscripts in 2004. Bless the organizational skills I inherited from my mother, I’ve actually kept spreadsheets with all this raw data. At first I wasn’t sure Read More …
Here’s a scan of the print I made at the Center for Book Arts letterpress class: Enjoy!
Our last day! It was primarily about distribution, the act of putting your type back into the case. It’s supposed to be this satisfying, closure-inducing task but I found it sad having spent two days putting something together and then having to destroy it. Here’s a pic of what it looked like on its galley Read More …
No speakers today or new notes, just work work work! Finished setting the text of my poem and transferred it to a galley where I started the process of adding leading to blank lines of quads for the stanza breaks between my lines. I did my name in the same Optima font as the text Read More …
Day two, but first a story from day one: in the 19th century towns held typesetting races where swifts from local newspapers and print shops would compete to claim victory as the fastest and then move on to bigger and bigger towns to challenge other swifts. Some became pretty famous nationally. The last race was Read More …