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Coral video to accompany story

Here is a video to accompany “The Floating Life” by Sarah Cornwell.

Professional & personal

Blog lexsterling’s post on Lisa Couturier’s nonfiction piece “Dark Horse” is professional and personal. It’s clear that lexsterling read Couturier’s piece carefully and spent time thinking about the issues it raised — and then lexsterling responded to what those issues meant on a personal level.

Pushcart author Lisa Courturier found lexsterling’s post on the Internet and responded the issues lexsterling raised. She also thanked lexsterling for “continuing the discussion.”

Maybe that’s the way to describe what you’re trying to do in your blog posts: you’re trying to continue the discussion that an author begins whenever he or she writes something and allows that piece to go out into the world.

Being professional doesn’t mean you can’t also be personal. You can write about the specific issues a poem, story or essay raised for you intellectually and emotionally — you just have to express your responses in a thoughtful manner that’s suitable for a public audience.

Literary Magazines

 
 
If you haven’t already found the literary magazine Narrative on your travels on the Internet, here is a link for the site. They have a wide variety on content available. For instance, you can read a story by James Joyce, along with a “retelling” by author William Trevor. The site allows you read a little of a work, but if you want to read an entire piece, you need to sign up with an email address. It is free to sign up.

Right now, Narrative is also featuring a story by Nickolas Butler. Butler had a story nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is a recent University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad.

If you are looking for other online literary magazines to discover, please revisit this post.

Poetry of Langston Hughes Set to Music

Musician Leyla McCalla has a project on Kickstarter.  She’s looking for help to produce Vari-Colored Songs, “an album of songs written to Langston Hughes’ poetry, Haitian folk songs and original compositions.” Click here for a link to her Kickstarter project.

If you want to hear more of Leyla McCalla’s music, click here. You can hear all of her song “Heart of Gold,” which is based on the poem “Vari-Colored Song” by Langston Hughes. Here is the poem:
 
Vari-Colored Song
 
If I had a heart of gold,
As have some folks I know,
I’d up and sell my heart of gold
And head North with the dough.
 
But I don’t have a heart of gold,
My heart’s not even lead.
It’s made of plain old Georgia clay.
That’s why my heart is red.
 
I wonder why red clay’s so red
And Georgia skies so blue.
I wonder why it’s yes to me,
But yes, sir, sir, to you.
 
I wonder why the sky’s so blue
And why the clay’s so red;
Why down South is always down,
And never up instead.
 
     –Langston Hughes

What’s wrong here?

I grew up in the seventies.

When I was sixteen and waiting tables at the restaurant in my hometown, I’d often pop some of my tip money into the jukebox and play music to keep me company on my shifts.  I usually listened to music by The Cars or David Bowie (even Cheap Trick), but the restaurant didn’t have much of that kind of music on hand. So I had to make do.

Here is one of the songs I sometimes listened to as I refilled the ketchup bottles:

Tanya Tucker:

If you can’t quite get your head around that, maybe you want to give a listen to  Johnny Cash singing the same song:

It’s 2012 and I still love “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)” — and it’s still wrong. Do you know why?

In truth, I don’t think Tanya or Johnny can do anything wrong, but I think you know what I’m getting at.

Rules on commas & lay/lie

A large American toad from my garden

Ok, it’s time to teach yourself the rules about commas and correctly using lay/lie.

Please go to the following pages at the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) for information and practice.

• Pages of info on commas.
• Info on lay / lie from the OWL. More from the OWL on lay / lie here.

There are many wonderful resources out there, but you have to take the time to use them!  Here’s a great web page on lay / lie.  It even includes tests!

When is a shepherd not a Shepherd?

My neighbor’s dog Whitepaw (who is not a German shepherd).

We made a change a little while ago to a poem we were publishing based on information we found on Google. Remember? We looked up German shepherd and found that the name of the dog was “officially” German Shepherd,  and so it is — in some places.
 
But in The New York Times, German Shepherds are German shepherds. That’s according to the style sheet the paper uses.
 
We are now back to German shepherd on our web site.
 
It’s important to remember that the first answer you find online may not be the right one. Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper. And if I’m going to pick a “style sheet” to emulate, I feel pretty comfortable choosing the NYT.
 
Other copyediting guides to follow include The Chicago Manual of Style and Words into Type, which is an older book, written long before computers; it is still an important source of information.
 
But even these two guides might not have answered our dog question. If the writer of this poem had wanted to use the phrase “german shepherd” with no capitalization, we could have made a case for printing it that way.
 
Poetry is a “privileged form” of speech to which standard copyediting rules don’t necessarily apply. Remember when we read Etheridge Knight’s “The Idea of Ancestry” and he chose to leave the initial letter on Mississippi uncapitalized? He wrote:
     “the brown hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric messages”
 
And that is how the University of Pittsburgh Press printed the poem.
 
So, in order to find out a little more about the mysteries of copyediting, you can poke around the following web sites

• Wikipedia’s definition of copyediting.Take some sample copyediting tests from Dow Jones.
• A much different kind of copyediting test from The Subversive Copy Editor. (She’s the one who says the first rule of copyediting is DO NO HARM.
• Questions that only copyeditors will be able to answer.
• Grammar quizzes galore!

Your own poetry anthology

part of the poetry bookshelf

 
Today you are going to create your own virtual poetry anthology.
 
Your goal is to find 5 poems on the web sites listed below (and only those web sites, at least for now) and create your own poetry anthology on your blog. You should list the 5 poems, provide links to them, and say a couple of sentences about why you chose the poem. Your explanation should say something other than, “I liked it,” or “I connected with it.”
 
First, I’m going to send you to a web site sponsored by The Academy of American Poets to read poetry. WARNING: This site was down for part of the morning, but I hope it’s up by the time we have class.
 
I respect this organization because I know the kind of work The Academy does. I also care about it because I worked there from the time I was 17 until I was about 25 years old, all throughout my BA degree and beyond. I started out stuffing envelopes and answering phones (“Hello, this is The Academy of American Poets”) and gradually worked myself up into a position that I think was called Program Assistant — though I still stuffed envelopes whenever needed.
 
The Academy has a wide range of poems available online. You can put in the name of a poet and search to see what poems are available on the web site, or you can put in the title of a poem and search for a poem that way. I typed this is just to say into the “poem” field and was taken directly to William Carlos Williams’s poem by the same name.
 
When I did a little experiment and typed plums into the “poem” field, I was taken to Catherine Savage Brosman’s poem
 
If you want poems that mention plums anywhere in their text, you have to go to the advanced search page and type plums into the keyword field. If you do that, you will turn up many hits.
 
On the advanced search page, you can also look up poems by theme or by movement (Harlem Renaissance or Beat, for instance). Or, you can use the menu on the side of the page and search for poems by “occasion.” Some of the categories there include Farewell, Loneliness, Trees, Night, Dreams and Animals.
 
Second, go to the web site Poem Hunter. I know less about this web site, but they did have one of my favorite poems by Robert Francis available, “Summons,” as well as Louise Glück’s “All Hallows.”
 
Finally, let me send you to the web site for the Poetry Foundation. By now you’re getting the trick, but I’ll direct you to one poem I’d like us to discuss as a class next week. It’s Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear,” and I’ll warn you, it’s probably unlike any poem you’ve ever read. Which is good.
 
So poke around!
 
And here’s a link to one of my earlier blog posts about one of my favorite poets, Linda Gregg and what her books have meant to me. If you want to read one of Gregg’s poems, “The Apparent” is available on The Academy site.

Professional blogs

Tree frogs hunting on my window.

Today we’ll continue immersing ourselves in the publishing world by looking at book reviews and blogs related to the publishing industry. Most people probably know that The New York Times has a Sunday book review. Each week you can read about new books from many genres.
 
If you haven’t looked at it recently, check out this week’s reviews of Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her and the review of Salman Rushdie’s Josef Anton.  (Josef Anton is Rushdie’s account of the years he spent in hiding after publishing The Satanic Verses.) I was also captivated by the review of the Jason Chin’s children’s book  Island: A Story of the Galápagos. 
 
The New York Times does have a paywall in place, but if you can read 10 articles a month for free, and if you access the site from the BSU campus, you should be able to read as much as you want with our library’s subscription. 
 
Another source for book reviews that comes directly from the publishing industry is Kirkus Reviews. This is how they describe themselves:  “Founded in 1933, Kirkus has been an authoritative voice in book discovery for almost 80 years. Kirkus Reviews magazine gives industry professionals a sneak peek at the most notable books being published weeks before they’re released. When the books become available for purchase, Kirkus serves the reviews to consumers in a weekly email newsletter and on KirkusReviews.com, giving readers unbiased, critical recommendations they can trust.” 
 
To see a more locally-produced book review, check out Rain Taxi. It’s published in the Twin Cities and always has an interesting round-up of books. You can access their archive by clicking here.
 
Several other sources for book reviews can be found on my Literary Blogs blogroll, there on the right side of the page. Check out Bookslut and Book Ninja. 
 
Other blogs related to publishing are also on the Literary Blogs list — but there are many reputable blogs out there offering book reviews and insights into the publishing industry. 
 
After you check out all these great sites, please create your own blogroll or list of literary and professional blogs and websites you recommend and want to follow. This listing should be added to your wordpress site..  You will need to learn to create links on your dashboard to do this.  You can organize your links by creating good categories.