CruelestMonth.com

Milosz: Selected

That's Czeslaw Milosz talking to reporters after winning the Nobel Prize in 1980.  Here's a link to some Bay Area activites in honor of Milosz.  The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on him, but I don't think it appears online.  Here it as an attachment.

"Bender of happiness"

Our very own Mary Karr receives a nice review from Dan DeLuca on philly.com

Snap!

"The Paris Review deplores that its name was used in a publishing scheme that resulted in the disappointment of honest writers, whose hopes and expectations upon entering—and in some cases winning—the Zoo Press's prize competitions have been dashed." The Paris Review

Perhaps overdue, please note that the poetry blog Eyeball Hatred has been added to our Poetry Blog list.  For the curious, consider the following: "I want to be like an apeman."

Paperback Originals

The beloved and brilliant CK of The Olive Reader offers Times writer Edward Wyatt a glimpse into the burgeoning marketplace for literary fiction as "paperback originals."  Check the article here.

Kansas City Star

"I can think of no writer a young poet should more often read to see writing as risk, as consent to following one’s leadings regardless of caliber." So says David Ray of The Kansas City Star.  His review of Slouching Towards Nirvana (which is not Bukowski's latest) runs on dangerous ground, sympathizing with critics dismissive of Bukowski: "Bukowski, who lived in Los Angeles, wrote too much, and too indiscriminately."

V (not for Vendetta)

Lame joke, I know, but I think it's important not to take movies too seriously.  Don't scoff and accuse film makers of ignoring the meaning behind things like Guy Fawkes Day (much like David Denby did in his New Yorker review of V, which, in terms of quality, was only so-so).  First line: "a dunderheaded pop fantasia that celebrates terrorism and destruction."

But on to the punchline...Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V., was published in 1963 when its author was 26 years old. Forty-plus years on, it’s easy to see V. and Pynchon as the highly influential—and influenced—novel and writer they are. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac are present in the fluid free association of Pynchon’s writing, while the novel is clearly a force field surrounding and influencing the likes of Richard Powers and Don DeLillo (especially with their interest in conspiracy) as well as T.C. Boyle and J.G. Ballard, to name just a few.  The full review here.

Better late than never?

Here's a link from poetryfoundation.org profliling the five finalists (one of which even won) of National Book Critics Circle Awards.

Born Into This

"Bukowski: Born Into This" released on DVD today.  The washingtonpost.com has an article about the film.  I can attest that it is a strange, often contradictory potrait of the man.  I viewed it on VHS when I was not as familiar with Bukowski as I am now.  The first 30 minutes made me hate him.  I thought he was some swaggering fraud that squinted for an all-too-obvious effect.  The tough-guy act tainted his poems, and I grieved.  As it were, however, the remaining 60 minutes offered the myriad dimensions of Bukowski, the big burly child.  He was gentle.  He was sad.  He cared for his cats.  He laughed at himself.  The initial portrait was offered only to be discarded by his true complexity.

The 2006 Ethnographic Poetry Award
"The Society for Humanistic Anthropology announces [their] annual poetry competition as a means to encourage scholars to use alternative literary genres to explore anthropological concerns.  These concerns may be any of those associated with the fields of anthropology: Archaeological, Biological, Linguistic, Socio-Cultural, and Applied Anthropology."

Cavafy

"What most powerfully struck me in her translations was how broadcast has become the work of this quiet man who long toiled in obscurity.  This is prophecy of another sort -- the emergence of a modern sensibility and tone that have become pervasive.  These days, you seem everywhere to hear his measured voice -- with its melding of fact and foreboding, lust and loss -- among not only writers who were under his spell but also others who may have spent little time with him..." (from Brad Leithauser's review of The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy translated by Aliki Barnstone, NYTBR 3/26)

VQR

As you may have heard, the Viginia Quarterly Review received six nominations from the ASME National Magazine Awards.  That's more than The New Yorker, Harper's, New York, and National Geographic.  Slate takes a look at the little mag that could.