Mitch Myers, nephew of Shel Silverstein, on sifting through 1,500 of the late author’s poems aloud to find the 145 that would be included in the posthumous collection, Every Thing On It: “We believe … that poems need to be read out loud. This is one of the joys of the book, and we really were able to determine if it really worked when we said it out loud.”
Now color-code your Keats, Shelley, Clare, Burns, and a host of other Romantic poets: check out Josiah Wedgwood’s designs for new editions of their work.
DIY + cloth + white paint + safety pins = wearable publication/awareness-raising for poetry.
The University of Auckland’s Denis Robinson on attempting to translate the world’s major philosophical ideas into sentences consisting of one-syllable words: “If each word was a word of just one sound, what could we do, when we did our work, and how would that fact bind us?”
Rae Armantrout: “One thing Language Poets do share with Marxists, however, is a belief that language is not a neutral medium. It is used by those in power to ‘frame,’ as they say now, the ‘debate.’ Anything that will make us all stop and do a double take on what we hear (and see) instead of accepting it as natural is a positive exercise. I think that is one goal of Language Poetry and I share it.”
If you liked Zone, Mathias Énard’s 517-page novel consisting of a single sentence, then you might like this story in Monkeybicycle.
Jim Behrle on how to get that love poem out.
On name-dropping books in The Simpsons, and, perhaps more usefully, brushing up on authors who—for whatever reason—have faded from view.