Where we showcase the activities of our friends.
-- Joshua Mehigan (right) is poet of the week over at Brooklyn Poets. Head over to read his "Heard at the Men's Mission" along with his comments on the poem, poetry, and his life in New York's coolest burough.
-- Eduardo C. Corral is joining the faculty for the The Lambda Literary Foundation upcoming Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices (August 3010, 2014). Details on how to apply are available here.
--Andrew McCulloch introduces Tom Disch (below right) to readers of the The TLS. Here's an excerpt:
“On the Extravagance of Princes: a Letter of Advice”
by Tom Disch; introduced by Andrew McCulloch
The American Tom Disch (1940–2008) is probably best known in the United States as a science-fiction author, but he was also a children’s writer, librettist and playwright, poet and critic. Although genre writers with serious ambitions are often viewed with suspicion and condescension by the literary establishment, the fact that Disch was, as Dana Gioia puts it, “an illegal immigrant from across the literary Rio Grande” gives him a clear and often refreshing perspective on the precepts and practice of poetry. This emerges both in his verse-essays and his criticism. A review he wrote for the TLS in 1981 begins: “Poetry, like the more enthusiastic forms of religion, has a great potential for embarrassment. There is a calculated oddity to much of it that is liable to strike non-believers as silly, like opera capes or Dali moustaches”. There is nothing either operatic or surreal in Disch’s own work. Indeed, it may have been because of what Blake Morrison called his “affectionately debunking treatment of recent American practice” that he had to go to England to find a publisher for Burn This (1982), the collection in which “On the Extravagance of Princes” appeared.
Read the full piece and poem here.
How did we miss Poem Ending with a Phrase from Federico Garcia Lorca and The Killer, two poems by David Lehman published by The AWL last November? Find them here.
-- sdh
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