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From Stephen Elliott
...moreAll class is a privilege, even the lowliest have a vernacular that is all their own that they use to keep people in and keep people out. I like to use a lot of vernaculars next to each other in awkward ways because we all deal with the filters of the larger culture which is always trying to decide if you know what you’re doing.
One of the more mind-blowing get-togethers to take place in the last ten years occurred in Havana, Cuba, when Fidel Castro led a unique international conference that brought together participants in the Cuban missile crisis from the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and Cuba to discuss the events of October 1962.
...more“Let me say and I probably mean this in the most manifesto-ing way that genres don’t exist. They don’t exist at all. They serve the needs of marketing, of academic specialization, even as modes of work, but in terms of meaning or content or associative formations they are like traffic lights—not so interesting and most adamantly not what we are doing today.”
The New Inquiry conducts a five question interview with Eileen Myles.
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From these two new books, the reader can gather that it isn’t just the day that is strong and can withstand change, but the same words can be applied to the speakers of these poems and to Myles herself.
Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.
15 minutes
the beaming sun
sun
out there
CA Conrad and Eileen Myles have an extensive conversation over at BOMBLog. Topics include Myles’ new “poet’s novel” Inferno, how memory’s role differs in composing poetry versus fiction, and writing as a woman or queer. Plus much more.
“…When you admit the presence of a choosing, intervening mind in your writing, if the writing itself lurches a little, stops and starts at irregular intervals, and if in that same time you also look at something ugly or sad for too long—be it femaleness or queerness or age, or poverty—well, people will very likely have to put your book down and you with it.
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In the early ’90s, when I was in high school, I listened to songs from bands that got played on the radio.
“I think we’re always a little bit in hell. Like how hot New York is in the summer. Or an intense, wonderful, hard, hard relationship could be hell, and you think, I will stay here forever, because I love you.”
...moreI don’t think of anyone specific while writing, and I don’t want to get caught up in imagining what a reader might think because I do think that can get distracting. But I just think it has become clearer to me that writing is making a vessel to send to a reader.
...moreOver at The Awl, Eileen Myles shares her thoughts on seeing the VIDA pie graphs. She tells us that writing by women is inherently more interesting: “Why? Because the female reality is still largely unknown. And language is the thrill that holds the unknown in its vague and shifting ways.
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This week, Rumpus books reviewed a novel, a short story collection, and a graphic novel. We also featured interviews with Eileen Myles and McSweeney’s publisher Oscar Villalon. Come catch up.
In New York this week, James Frey and Maira Kalman at the CLMP Spelling Bee, members of The National collaborate with visual artist Matthew Ritchie in The Long Count at BAM, Sherman Alexie and Chuck Klosterman read, Guernica Magazine turns 5, Performa 09 begins, Literary Death Match returns to New York, and Lawrence Weschler presents Halloween Wonder Cabinet.