jasmine beach-ferrara | arsenal & grand

A Poem for Tuesday, Winter: "A Small Love Letter"

Below, a sliver of a poem called "A Small Love Letter" by Abe Louise Young, a poet, teacher and activist. You can read the rest of this poem and other work by Young here.

A Small Love Letter

Will you meet me on the hardened lava?
Will you meet me on the blackened shore?
Will you find the fallow field and call it
“under-dreaming door”?
When I find the broken button,
when I cast the streaming line,
it’s your name I’ll thread so lightly
through lithography and brine.

. . .

A Poem for Saturday II, Winter

Poems by Yael Shinar, up on Drunken Boat, including this one:

 
In my old age I have become

In my old age I have become

something like the battalions who wore ironwork clasps round their
hearts and steel on their brows.

In my old age, old whale, old island turtle

etchings seem wise investments

not to hang

but to get to know the wrist

a solitary lovemaking

to time

One thing that passes steadily by me

is my appetite

for others' appetites

the strong coddling the stronger

a survival that trees know only as shade

the hours of                                                                

the absent world.  Would they stretch

for life? down?

Contrary to

ancients'  imagination                                             

of the future

I have a life

language has not become

sublimely simple

it has stayed

since the genitive clause made mammals

complex and

incomplete

How the world began

on a fingertip already pointed?

Something

has been misspoken

diction has tricked us

to look at ourselves

Welcome to the Neighborhood

For those of you in the Boston area, Saturday marks the official opening of 826 Boston, a literary arts center for kids. A satellite branch of 826 Valencia in San Francisco, 826 Boston is making its home at 3035 Washington Street. The Open House is scheduled from 12 -5. More details here.

A Poem for Sunday, Winter: "Que Sera Sera"

You can check out several poems by A. Van Jordan, including "Que Sera Sera" at this link. The poem is excerpted here:

"Que Sera Sera"

In my car, driving through Black Mountain,
North Carolina, I listen to what
sounds like Doris Day shooting
heroin inside Sly Stone's throat.

One would think that she fights
to get out, but she wants to stay
free in this skin. "Fresh,"
the Family Stone's album,

came out in '73, but I didn't make sense
of it till '76, sixth grade for me,
the Bicentennial, I got my first kiss that year,
I beat up the class bully; I was the man.

. . . "

Here, you can read an interview with Jordan about his new collection, Quantum Lyrics, in the American Prospect.

A Poem for Saturday, Winter: "Accounting for the Wren, the Rocket, & the Immaterial"

I just stumbled across the website of Daniel B. Johnson, a poet and friend. You can read his poem, "Accounting for the Wren, the Rocket, & the Immaterial," here.

American Short Fiction

A short story of mine called "Safe Enough" is out in the new issue of American Short Fiction. The issue also includes work by Maud Casey, James Scott, M.O. Walsh, and Naomi Williams; it can generally-but-not-always be found at Borders and Barnes and Noble.

Stephen King on the American Short Story

Stephen King, who edited the 2007 Best American Short Stories anthology, reports out on the current state of the American short story in this piece in today's NYT. He hits some interesting notes about the problems that arise when writers write for other writers. Some excerpts here:

Instead, let us consider what the bottom shelf does to writers who still care, sometimes passionately, about the short story. What happens when he or she realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily? Well, if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or she continues on nevertheless, because it’s what God or genetics (possibly they are the same) has decreed, or out of sheer stubbornness, or maybe because it’s such a kick to spin tales. Possibly a combination. And all that’s good.

What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.

Sullivan, Faith & Politics

Andrew Sullivan's ideological journey intrigues me, and this moment in his blog today caught my attention:

My own faith and my own politics have been rocked this past decades by two overwhelming facts. The church I loved was an international conspiracy for the abuse of children and the protection of their abusers; the United States government I trusted was responsible for the torture and abuse of military detainees, and its subsequent cover-up. What remains of religious and political faith after that? I guess I'm still trying to figure that out.

Hard-Wired for Narrative

This NYT article details research about how humans gravitate toward and craft narrative. Interesting stuff here:

Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.

Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.

The Blind Side of Michael Lewis

I have conflicted feelings about the writing of Michael Lewis. He is a gifted, charming story teller and often has his way with language. I have yet to buy one of his books, but when I see an article by him, I typically perk up and make time to read it. As I read, I'm usually swept along by the language and the unfolding plot. But, when Lewis writes about social issues, I'm also left with an empty feeling by the end of a piece. The writing doesn't falter from a technical perspective, but the point of view that Lewis favors begins to feel, often, thin and limited. Lewis has a blind spot when it comes to race and class and this would matter less if he stayed away from subjects like Katrina and the NFL.

Lewis' new piece in TNR is a good example of this. Titled "My Katrina Aftermath," the piece tells the story of Lewis' returning to his family's vacation home in Waveland, Mississippi, or rather the plot of land on which a second home once stood. I kept reading the piece, waiting for Lewis to talk more honestly about the devastation of the storm, waiting for him to move from Waveland to some other Gulf Coast community, where the word aftermath might have more gravity. But like Bush's myopic elegy for Trent Lott's vacation home in the immediate wake of the storm, Lewis stays focused on the vacation home, and sepia-toned memories of growing up in New Orleans.

Thematically, some of his points about ownership and trespassing point toward larger, meatier social observations. But Lewis doesn't go the distance and ultimately his musings sound like those of an aristocrat, fumbling for a foothold of meaning in one of the greatest domestic social disasters of recent times.

This isn't to begrudge Lewis his "Katrina experience." But one would hope that there'd be more self awareness in his voice, even a nod toward the bigger picture of the storm, toward what aftermath might mean to someone who lost family members, a primary house, a job.

Write what you know is a classic bit of introductory writing instruction. This is sound advice, certainly, and often leads to affecting writing. But sometimes this adage needs to be conjoined to another bit of advice: know more, and then write.

And this is where I'm puzzled by Lewis. He's a good, and thorough, researcher, and a sophisticated writer. These oversights on his part aren't the false steps of a novice. They're the habits of a seasoned writer who opts out of difficult subject matter.

This fall, an excerpt from his latest book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, appeared in the NYT Magazine. It was well-written, funny, imminently readable. And the story it told -- about a white family who adopted a black boy and helped him get through high school and into Ole Miss on a football scholarship -- was as riveting as it was layered. But by the conclusion of the excerpt, I felt the same emptiness that I did in reading the Katrina piece.

(For reasons described above) I haven't read the entire book, so let me be clear that I'm only talking about the article here.

In the family he profiled, Lewis found the human elements of his subject. What better way to tell the story of the evolution of the offensive line than through a tale about a poor, quiet black boy and the affluent, effusive white family that adopted him and then groomed him into a NFL prospect? Gripping stuff, this. And this is where the tensions, and the fatal flaw of Lewis' writing, emerge. This family's narrative was bigger, in the extreme, than the highly specific sports story Lewis is so adamant about telling. The family's story involved race, religion, class, questions about belonging, identity, the different kind of truths and lies we tell. But faced with this story, or with the larger story about Katrina, Lewis ducked. Keeping his gaze firmly on the football question, he failed, at least in the pages excerpted in the NYT, to rise to the moment as a chronicler of more than quirky Southern lives and the engines of profit in sports.

If Lewis were a lesser writer, it would be easier to just stop reading him. But he's quite good, and so I do keep reading. In my mind, he occupies the role of a frat boy with promise, the one who will inevitably be highly successful and who -- you just hope -- will have an experience sooner rather than later that cultivates a greater sense of empathy and moral engagement.  Katrina could well have been this experience, but apparently it wasn't.