Marly Youmans's Blog, page 110

the acute Angle

Angle, that slanted-toward-the-formal poetry magazine edited by those industrious poets, Janet Alexa Kenny (NZ) and Philip Quinlan (UK) has leaped on often-metrical feet into the world with a great TADA! Should you be a person who cares about poetry, you just might like to visit. The issue is dedicated to poet and founder of interesting 'zines, Paul Stevens. You may download and browse the

Autumnal: my busy-bee day--

I scrubbed the front of the house (disgusting, dirty, buggly-uggly) under the porch and the porch ceiling and raked leaves and cut down my garden and weeded and planted cardinal flowers for next year and gave my daughter a driving lesson and just wrote a little story. Trala! Why can't every day be like this? Think I'll revise a few poems before midnight, maybe toss in a little meditation and

Waving, waving--

Here I am, gazing out the windows of the Latte Lounge in Oneonta, watching the Oneontans wander and a man dressed like Neil Gaiman wrestle a large black dog on the sidewalk... Ah, he has plunged upstairs with the dog in his arms. Quite strange. I'm waiting for my older children to get out of a loooonng driving class. So I shall go hang out at the Huntington Library and fiddle with The Book of the

A failure of imagination--

I may have more of a mixed crowd among my Twitter and facebook friends than most writers do; I'm not sure. But for a long time I have been bothered about the vehemence and hatred I see expressed by many of my e-friends about an amorphous "they." Usually this means liberal friends expressing anger or scorn toward conservatives or their beliefs, though occasionally I see the reverse. That tilt is

Janus-post: look both ways

Why do you feel that it is important that commercial fiction receive critical attention?

Jodi Picoult: Because historically the books that have persevered in our culture and in our memories and our hearts were not the literary fiction of the day, but the popular fiction of the day. Think about Jane Austen. Think about Charles Dickens. Think about Shakespeare. They were popular authors. They were

Good-by to all that--

Yesterday, the day of sad news and the giant Winnebago stuffed with yipping dogs (alas, parked directly in front of my house, which stands, like many old village houses, rather close to the street) is done. Heralded by two hungry cats kneading my prone and possibly edible body, one barking dog and many cheeping sparrows hopping about from the dripping giant rugosa to the hunch-backed lilac, the

Internal exile

What I find interesting this morning:


Writing is a temporary surcease from exile. It is not a search for one’s "voice" or "subject"; it is not the invention of a "self" nor even of a "world." These are the concoctions of critics, who study the scattered places where the writer momentarily relented from his unrelenting search for some place to relent from his unrelenting search. The word writing

Fool party

After yet another five hours spent in ferrying two children and then waiting in Oneonta while they drove around with Ted of Baxter's driving school, I am ready to party! Being a writer and hence capable of large amounts of peculiar behavior, I am working on the poems in The Book of the Red King for my reward. That means I am revising some, tossing some, slightly tweaking others, and patting a few

Poetry, fiction, hippos--

STRAY THOUGHTS, LITERARY AND OTHERWISE--
ANIMAL,VEGETABLE, NO MINERAL

1. When you buy a gigantic cauliflower, no one will notice and so somebody else will buy another gigantic cauliflower, and then there will be no room in the fridg inn.

2. When hippos poop in the water, they twirl their tails in circles and attract fish. (This sort of thing is what you learn when your husband goes to

My podcast (blush!)

I've had a book dedicated to me; never have I had a podcast dedicated to me. But it's fascinating, focusing on writer Andrei Sinyavsky's A Voice from the Chorus. John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, is probably the most well-read man on the continent, and if he says this book had a great impact on him, I'm going to read it. I suspect you should too.