Monday, July 30, 2007

The Price of the Ticket

The Guardian has an informative piece from Caryl Phillips exploring James Baldwin's expatriation in Paris, and the impact of his return to the states on his creative work. I'm not feeling Phillips' dismissal of Another Country (One of my favorite books), but it is interesting to think about what role an author can (and should) take on in the struggle for social justice. Baldwin had a profound influence on the way that Americans understood race, but Phillips' piece seems to suggest that his persona as a public intellectual (and all of the complications that came with it) crippled his creative work. I think that brings up a serious question for any writer.
Would you sacrifice the psychic space you need to create if it meant you could have a significant positive impact on social change like Baldwin? Hmmm...

--Abdel

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Indiana Review 1/2 K Prize

Congratulations to Greg Bachar, this year's winner of the 1/2K prize for prose poems and short short stories. Greg's piece, "Amsterdam, 1936" will be published in the 2008 Summer edition of IR and he will also receive a $1,000 honorarium. Stuart Dybek was our final judge. Thanks to all who participated. For more info, click here

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Jennifer Militello

Kudos to Jennifer Militello, who won Tupelo Press' First Book award. Jennifer has work upcoming in Indiana Review's 29.2 winter issue. She was also gracious enough to let us record her reading her poems, which we'll post in the coming months. Stay tuned.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Read anything good lately?


These days, it seems that most of us live a good distance from family and other loved ones. So how do we keep up with what they're reading? Good Reads offers a virtual peek-over-their-shoulders in a (not too) creepy way. Maybe better, you can check out what some authors are reading, too.

It's sort of like a book-lovers' MySpace, in which you can add books you've read, rate them, review them, and even discuss them--among some other neat options.

There are a couple things I'm ambivalent about, one of which you may have already discovered: you can't view some of the good stuff unless you sign up. But if the books compel you, you'll find yourself getting over your reservations quick enough.

--Jenny

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Bluecast: Tyrone Jaeger Pt. II

In the latest edition of the Bluecast, Tyrone Jaeger reads his poem, "The Third Flood," featured in our summer 29.1 issue. Remember, if you'd like to hear previous entries (from Sherman Alexie, Stuart Dybek, Wendy Rawlings, and others), just press "posts" and select the entry you want.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Three Strikes

One of my favorite writers, Martha Southgate (The Fall of Rome is awesome!), wrote an interesting essay in the New York Times Review of Books about the unique challenges faced by Black writers who try to build a career beyond a second or third novel. Southgate's piece also spawned a lively response from Ishmael Reed and some other writers in the Times' letter section. It's kind of spicy--check it out.

--Abdel

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Review of The Elephants Teach from 29.1

D. G. Myers. The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. $17.00 paper (ISBN 0-226-55454-6), 238 pages.

Reviewed by Abdel Shakur

Although creative writing as a subject is more popular than it’s ever been (over 400 programs world-wide, granting 1,000 degrees every year), it’s hard to see such explosive growth and not feel a nervous twinge. What standard of writing are these programs directing their students towards? Are they all being taught, as some critics would charge, to “write like Iowa”? Further, what does it mean to have so many studying writing at a time when society marches towards ever braver levels of illiteracy? In D.G. Myers’ The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, the author reframes these anxieties by addressing a more basic question: How did writing become creative in the first place? Instead of detailing all the ways that creative writing is “broken,” Myers promises a broad historical perspective on how creative writing was conceived to “work.” Covering a century and a half of history, Myers’ at times fascinating account helps us understand the institutions, personalities, and philosophies that shaped the current state of American letters.


Although creative writing as a subject is more popular than it’s ever been (over 400 programs world-wide, granting 1,000 degrees every year), it’s hard to see such explosive growth and not feel a nervous twinge. What standard of writing are these programs directing their students towards? Are they all being taught, as some critics would charge, to “write like Iowa”? Further, what does it mean to have so many studying writing at a time when society marches towards ever braver levels of illiteracy? In D.G. Myers’ The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, the author reframes these anxieties by addressing a more basic question: How did writing become creative in the first place? Instead of detailing all the ways that creative writing is “broken,” Myers promises a broad historical perspective on how creative writing was conceived to “work.” Covering a century and a half of history, Myers’ at times fascinating account helps us understand the institutions, personalities, and philosophies that shaped the current state of American letters.


Creative writing’s rise is especially striking when we learn from Myers’ account that English as a discipline itself is a relative newcomer to academia. Myers notes that as recently as the late 1800s, the predominant study of English was more linguistic than literary in focus, and had a much funkier name: philology. Definitions of philology varied, but according to Myers, “sometimes it meant historical linguistics; at other times, something like cultural studies.” According to Myers, philology broke important ground by considering English apart from the classical studies which had dominated university studies before. Philology was also significant to the development of creative writing for another reason: writers hated it. Myers traces the origin of the phrase “creative writing” to a speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson, where the writer belittles philologists as merely “the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomanics of all degrees.” Many writers resisted what they saw as an attempt to simply quantify and systematize literature. This reaction cracked the door to what Myers calls a “constructivist” approach to literary study. Instead of literature serving as anthropological record, scholarship was devoted to uncovering the techniques authors used to construct their texts.

Although teaching composition is seen as a necessary financial-aid evil for many graduate creative writing students, according to Myers, the subject opened the door for the modern approach to writing studies. With the fall of philology, composition presented the revolutionary idea that literature was not merely a dead thing, but was instead still being written. Myers introduces Barrett Wendell, an unheralded innovator in composition, who sought to teach writers to “recognize and grasp the individual nature of experience” and “develop habits of mind not unlike those required for literature.” Students didn’t write fiction or poetry in composition, but Wendell’s focus on sensory details has become a guiding principle in creative writing instruction.


Casual readers will probably find Myers large historical cast a bit daunting. Aside from challenging pedagological theory, there are several passages of near Bible-length lists of institutions and teachers that “begat” one another. However, Myers should not be faulted for his thoroughness. The Elephants Teach is primarily concerned with giving an authoritative account of creative writing’s history. The book has a wealth of interesting information, which in a less complete context might read as mere anecdote.


For instance, according to Myers, the staple of the contemporary creative writing class, the “workshop,” started off as an experiment to get junior high kids more interested in literature. Hugh Mearns, a former student of Barrett Wendell, developed the class as part of a progressive educational attempt to make students invest in the study of writing by getting them interested in their own self-expression. Later, Norman Foerster adopted Mearns’ system, giving special focus to literary criticism, and created the first graduate creative writing program in 1930 at the University of Iowa. By giving such a detailed rendering of this history, Myers helps his readers put Mearns’ contribution into proper perspective. Unfortunately, Myers’ narrative disappoints by lacking any significant mention of non-White writers and academics. These omissions are glaring in a book that seeks to explain how contemporary creative writing took shape.

However, throughout his book Myers does an excellent job of showing how market and academic institutional forces shaped creative writing, and how those forces perverted some of the principles the subject was founded upon. Although his focus is history here, Myers also keeps an eye towards the future of how creative writing will be taught. In this newest edition of The Elephants Teach, Myers writes that the major challenge to the subject is its lack of “subjective criteria for the production and evaluation of new work.” Established with a “subjectivist/expressionist ethos,” creative writing fails to offer its students concretely defined principles, which he says leads students to tread similar literary paths—read: “write like Iowa.” Myers claims that if writers don’t know the “rules,” they can’t be expected to defy them intelligently.


The rub, of course, to this line of reasoning is determining what the “rules” actually are, and who should make them. Ironically, Myers is vague when it comes to establishing these concrete principles, but that doesn’t completely undermine the value of what he proposes. The dialog about creative writing ideals may not need absolute resolution in order to be productive. By the end of The Elephants Teach, Myers wearily suggests that “creative writing may not be able to reform itself from within.” However, by providing a first-rate history of the subject, Meyers may have laid the groundwork for a provocative discussion of dynamic new approaches to writing, as well as its instruction.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

If a Canon Falls in a Forest...

Indiana Review is honored to be publishing a translation of some lovely work by Iranian poet H.E. Sayeh in our next issue, Winter 29.2.

Mehrnews (thanks, Literary Saloon) has an interesting article detailing a conference held in Tehran to both discuss the current state of Persian literature and wrestle with how that literature fits within the global literary community. According to the article, one of the conference's more important discussions highlighted the importance of translations in introducing a more varied selection of Iranian literature to the global market.





Thursday, July 5, 2007

Review of Horror Vacui from IR 29.1

Thomas Heise. Horror Vacui: Poems. Louisville, Kentucky: Sarabande Books, 2006. $13.95 paper (ISBN 1-932511-32-6), 84 pages.

Reviewed by Jenny Burdge

The poems in Thomas Heise’s first book reveal, explore, fill, and create the empty spaces left in the wake of a father’s death. The title of the book, Horror Vacui, refers to a fear of empty space in visual art. The term was also used in the Middle Ages to describe machines that operated by creating a void, which nature then rushed to fill. In this collection, the bereaved also rush to fill absence. Of the many voids that crop up, the central one is death, specifically the father’s death. Many of the poems are elegies and obituaries, and there is even a long epitaph whose speaker has died, leaving a void that the epitaph fills with his own words.



The cover is an excellent introduction to the challenges of this collection. The image is taken from a 15th century prayer book in which the pages are covered with black ink. The page is blank only within the space of each letter. The conundrum of the cover as it relates to many of the poems in this collection is in the confusion of what is empty and what is not. Spaces that appear to be empty may in fact be filled, and some that appear to be filled are empty. This is because a void can only be filled so much before the filling itself appears to be empty. On the cover, an appearance of emptiness is achieved with a wash of black ink. In the collection, the appearance of emptiness is achieved with an endless layering of images. This appearance of emptiness is an emptiness. The paradox is that there is always a void, and no way to fill it.

Many of the poems in Horror Vacui seem to struggle with this paradox. It is first apparent in the forms. Most of the poems in this volume are double-spaced center-justified blocks of text, with a right margin that reaches only halfway across the page. This leaves a great deal of empty space—both to the right of the block of text, as well as between the words of the text. Even while the poems themselves explore empty spaces, they create them. They allow the reader to encounter empty space, and given the context of the terrible void, proliferation and organization of empty space provokes uneasiness. Each space seems like a grave to be filled.

“Obituary [first draft]” is one of these poems. Additional empty spaces are introduced directly into the poem through blanks, which fill the page in one way and yet leave it empty:




Mr. William Thomas Heis, ______,
has finally left us from ______
[ the year unknown ]





The bracketed text is another way of introducing empty spaces. Even though the space is filled, there’s an absence of information. Just as nature—and human nature—would dictate, these empty spaces are filled in the subsequent draft, “Obituary [revised]” with all the desired information: age, date, place:




Mr. William Thomas Heise, 29,
entered into rest from massive heart
failure on Friday, September 22nd,
2000.

For all the portent of writing an obituary for oneself, playfulness—through puns and syntactic invention, among other things—introduces some humor here. Yet, instead of creating any real levity, the humor serves as a foil, thereby enhancing the darkness of what is, for the most part, a dirge. It also provides the opportunity for some unexpected things to happen, as they do in “Obituary [translated].” The version that was ostensibly put through an electronic translator ended with the following lines:



Entombment will be celebrated
at the Mausoleum of Flowers
by the ocean. Friends welcome.
His father is expected to play
the organ.

These lines are transformed, and the results are simultaneously playful and disconcerting:



The setting with the tomb
celebrated with the Mausoleum
of the Flowers by the ocean.
Welcome friends. One expects
his / her father will play the body.

The fallout from the last line and a half is tremendous. The ambiguity of play is responsible. There’s a creepiness to the father playing the body, as if it were a musical instrument. Another possibility for play is that the father will perform the roll of the body. This obituary is then, in effect, an obituary for the father and son both— there’s been a death in the son who feels the emptiness his father left.

Silence too is an absence. Heise uses alliteration and assonance to combat that absence, but the most powerful tool he employs is repetition. The table of contents introduces the reader to the repetition before a single poem is read. Two poem titles are repeated wholesale several times, “Examination” and “These New Days,” as if they were a kind of refrain. Other titles serve as repetends, such as the obituary poems. The effect is almost that of a drone trying to fill the silence.

The repetition of words within and across poems also serves to give the impression of rewriting, both within and across poems. Such is the case in the title poem, which is about a father’s death:



What shelter shall I assemble against
this? Could I hammer a narrow boat
from this old barn’s frame? Could I
assemble an empty boat from this
old hammered frame? Could I frame
an empty boat for this old body’s
frame? I could frame an empty body
in this old broken frame? Shall I
break an old body to fit this narrow
old frame?

In the acknowledgments, Heise writes, “My father: these poems are you.” The book embodies the father, and one absence is filled. However, the book also creates a multitude of smaller voids, which expand the original absence, and the conundrum persists. This rewriting, then, both within and across poems, might be the only way to defeat the fear of empty spaces—to always be filling them, over and over again, saying the same thing multiple ways. In doing so, even should empty spaces remain, nothing would be left unsaid.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

United States of Poetry

It's impossible not to be inspired by the spirit of goodwill, fellowship, and forgiveness demonstrated by our Decider-in-Chief when he recently commuted the sentence of public servant Scooter Libby. Perhaps this will motivate cartographers and poets to set aside their decades of petty grievances. Can we all admit that whether you love maps or you love rhymed couplets, we are all sisters and brothers?

As a first step, poets.org has posted a US map of poetry. You can find out more information about each of the 50 states' poetry friendly local bookstores, famous authors, and reading habits (Indiana appears to have excellent taste--no surprise!). Let the healing begin.

--Abdel