Kathleen Ossip on Why Poetry Matters

Kathleen Ossip offers a perceptive comment in Electric Literature on the importance of poetry. I love her observation that "After all, the New York Times never asks 'Does football matter?' or 'Do restaurants matter?' or 'Does television matter?'”  

Tree-climbing Goats!

Here is a link to a great NPR story about tree-climbing goats in Morocco. Their intrepid pursuit of fruit even to the edge of upper tree limbs is inspiring. And according to witnesses on the scene, they never fall. Let their nimbleness of hoof be a model for us all.

Interview with Francisco Aragon, Freedom Plow Award finalist

Here is a link to an interview with Francisco Aragon (author of Glow of Our Sweat from Scapegoat Press) about his bridge-building work between Latinx artists and poets and non-Latinx students and with confronting the erasure of Latinx GLBT identity. This interview ran last month in Split This Rock's Blog This Rog and in Harriet at the Poetry Foundation.

Cultural appropriation in the news

The issue of cultural appropriation is getting some significant press attention this week. On Canadian Broadcasting, two writers faced off concerning the editor of Write Magazine’s flippant call for a cultural appropriation prize to encourage writers to imagine subjects outside their own cultures—and how some of Canada’s most influential editors actually pledged money for this award. In the Washington Post, George F. Will dismisses what he calls “the left’s obsession with cultural appropriation” as “authoritarianism leavened with philistinism.” But I think that to countenance cultural appropriation, which almost invariably traffics in lazy stereotypes and factually baseless fantasies, is itself a form of philistinism.

Great list of recent Latinx Lit compiled by Ruben Quesada

Ruben Quesada has assembled a comprehensive list of Latinx books published since 2013. I confess to a real weakness for bibliographic lists (I am one of those people who upon first picking up a nonfiction title will open it to the back and browse the bibliography and citations.) So I enjoyed reading this list and feel energized to hit the ground reading this summer!

A Century of Hogarth Press

Hogarth Press, the publishing house founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, celebrated its 100th anniversary last week. The Guardian ran this fine article that takes a look at Hogarth's legacy. Although it is now part of the Penguin/Random House empire, its improbable emergence is one of the great publishing success stories of the 20th century. Virginia and Leonard printed and bound the early books themselves. They ended up bringing Sigmund Freud into print in English and other works on psychoanalysis, other works in translation, and many giants of literary modernism and the Bloomsbury group, including Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, and many others. J. H. Willis has written a fascinating book about the history of Hogarth's origins.

New Poet laureate chosen!

It's not April Fool's Day anymore, but this is still funny. Read more here:

http://http//ofkells.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-poet-laureate-named.html