Akilah Oliver (1961-2011)

From the Poetry Project website:

We have just learned that our beloved friend, poet, teacher, performer, activist, mother, sister, Akilah Oliver passed away in her home in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Akilah Oliver was born in 1961 in St. Louis and grew up in Los Angeles. In the 1990’s she founded and performed with the feminist performance collective Sacred Naked Nature Girls. For several years, Akilah lived in Boulder, Colorado, where she raised her son Oluchi McDonald (1982-2003) and was a teacher, activist and beloved member of the community at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Recently, in New York City, Akilah taught poetry and writing at The New School, Pratt Insitute and The Poetry Project, where she also served as Monday Night Readings Coordinator in 07-08. She was a PhD candidate at The European Graduate School and a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative.

And a poem from A Toast in the House of Friends (Coffee House, 2009):

Destroyer on Fallon

Just in case you thought Destroyer was turning its back on those Thief days and finally giving in to the commercial music machine, NB leather jacketed back to the audience. Jokes!

“Having a Coke With You”

a Frank O’Hara celebration
for Court Green 8

Wednesday, February 16th
5:30 pm

at Hokin Hall
Columbia College
623 South Wabash, Rm. 109

Contributors to the Frank O'Hara dossier include:
Denise Duhamel, David Emanuel, Elanie Equi, Kimiko Hahn, Jennifer Karmin, Becca Klaver, D.A. Powell, Elizabeth Robinson, Larry Sawyer, Anne Waldman, and more.

There will be a slide show of New York photographs from the 50s complemented with Frank O’Hara reading his work. A selection of contributors will then take the stage to read their poems. As an added touch, the evening will close with a raffle of Coke key chains, candied cigarettes, and bottles of Coke.

This evening is free and open to the public. For more information, call 312.369.8139. If interested in purchasing copies of the journal while at the event, please have cash on hand.

Sponsored by
the Department of English
Columbia College Chicago
english.colum.edu/courtgreen

Claudia Rankine's Open Letter

From claudiarankine.com:

Dear friends,

As many of you know I responded to Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” at AWP. I also solicited from Tony a response to my response. Many informal conversations have been taking place online and elsewhere since my presentation of this dialogue. This request is an attempt to move the conversation away from the he said-she said vibe toward a discussion about the creative imagination, creative writing and race.

If you have time in the next month please consider sharing some thoughts on writing about race (1-5 pages).

Here are a few possible jumping off points:

- If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?

- How do we invent the language of racial identity--that is, not necessarily constructing the "scene of instruction" about race, but create the linguistic material of racial speech/thought?

- If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?

- If you don’t consider yourself in any majority how does this contribute to how race enters your work?

- If fear is a component of your reluctance to approach this subject could you examine that in a short essay that would be made public?

- If you don’t intend to write about race but consider yourself a reader of work dealing with race what are your expectations for a poem where race matters?

- Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history?

- Is there a poem you think is particularly successful at inventing the language of racial dentity or at dramatizing the site of race as such? Tell us why.

In short, write what you want. But in the interest of constructing a discussion pertinent to the more important issue of the creative imagination and race, please do not reference Tony or me in your writings. We both served as the catalyst for this discussion but the real work as a community interested in this issue begins with our individual assessments.

If you write back to me by March 11, 2011, one month from today, with “OPEN LETTER” in the subject heading I will post everything on the morning of the 15th of March. Feel free to pass this on to your friends. Please direct your thoughts to openletter at claudiarankine dot com.

In peace,

Claudia

openletter at claudiarankine dot com

Songs For Girls In Their 20s

is now a blog, and will be updated until July 1, 2011, when I turn 30.

1st Annual Justin Bieber Kontakion Contest

Judge: Daniela Olszewska

1. Write a kontakion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontakion). Preferably, the poem will be about Justin Bieber; but poems about other celebrities will be accepted as well.

2. E-mail the kontakion to: josephpatrickwood at gmail dot com by Tuesday, February 15th.

Submissions will be read blindly.

Winner gets a t-shirt or something nifty like that.

Roundup: The Count | Why Not Contemporary Recovery Projects? | Some Editors Who Are Gonna Try Harder

Alyss Dixson has done a great service by compiling many of the responses to VIDA's The Count and its dismal data.

There's a new response at Slate from Katha Pollitt today, too:

Both sexes see life through a gendered lens, after all. But while women are constantly reminded that their views are only partial, men have the luxury—in life as in grammar—of thinking they represent humanity, tout court. So while male editors may say they wish they had more women writers, women are always going to be an afterthought for them, an add-on, a specialty item—dance criticism. As in those studies that show men overestimate the number of women in a group—one-third feels like half, half feels like a majority—a big piece by a woman two years ago feels like it was published last week, and one or two pieces by women feels like half the magazine. [read the rest]

[The Count at vidaweb.org]

*

Scholars who study African American or women writers have been performing "recovery projects" in full force since the 60s and 70s, recasting the canon in a way that better represents the important literature that was forgotten, hidden, or repressed. For example, no one would argue, now, that Their Eyes Were Watching God shouldn't be regularly assigned reading in high schools and colleges. But of course, for many decades, no one had ever heard of Zora Neale Hurston.

There are so many reasons why high-quality work gets forgotten. Taste, as we know, is subjective. (I can say "high-quality" knowing very well that to certain editors, "high-quality" simply means "looks like the rest of the stuff we publish mostly by white guys.") The numbers, on the other hand, are objective data. Just as much as being a tastemaker, it is an editor's job to make sure his or her publication includes diverse voices, includes work by people who don't look and talk and write just like him or her. If the literary canon can be rebuilt by scholars getting their hands dirty in archives and cemeteries (see Hurston link above), why shouldn't today's editors see it as their job to do the same for their contemporaries? It is their job, after all. I and many small press or literary magazine editors I know work for free, but for (probably) all of the editors of the magazines counted, editors are getting paid to make these choices.

I'm happy that several editors of magazines that VIDA counted have already expressed their determination to try harder. As Pollitt points out in the article above, it may only take an editor 20 minutes a week to redress imbalances and make sure that the voices of women and other underrepresented groups are heard in important venues. Moving toward these changes will only make their magazines that much richer.

Rob Spillman at Tin House:

The bottom line at Tin House is that we are aware of the gender disparity, we are concerned about these numbers, and we are committed to redoubling our efforts to solicit women writers. Personally, I am deeply tuned into the reality of gender inequality: I am married to a short story writer, and my fifteen year-old daughter is a drummer in a feminist punk rock band. Since the start of Tin House twelve years ago, I have been committed to publishing the best work I can find. Agents of female writers, publishers of female writers, and especially female writers, please send us your work. We really want your work.

Christian Wiman at Poetry magazine:

We might have ten poems by ten men in one issue and one twenty-page poem by a woman. Who is getting more attention in that instance? The main point we’re trying to make is that we are very conscious of the distribution between men and women poets, but we think more in terms of space devoted to the work rather than simply a tally of names.

Still, it’s not equal, and it ought to be. The VIDA results seem to us a useful and necessary warning. For our part, we’re going to begin trying even harder.

SAY YES

so i don't forget all the good things happening all at once

1. The Presses With a Mission panel, with Switchback, Ugly Ducking, Action, and RedBone, is well attended, although scheduled for 9:00 a.m. Thursday!

2. Switchback (re-)unites in DC from homes in Chicago, Denver, and Brooklyn, and co-hosts a fabulous reading at Madam's Organ with Coconut and Horse Less!

3. The international publishing world responds to VIDA: Women in Literary Arts' THE COUNT, which reveals gross (as in GRODY) gender disparity in bylines and book reviews in national publications.

4. Daniela Olszewska gets sick and misses AWP and we miss her, but that doesn't stop her new chapbook, Citizen Jane (-X) Trains for Many Different Kinds of Careers, from bursting onto the scene!

5. Arielle Greenberg & Rachel Zucker's HOME/BIRTH is released and gifted to my sister!

6. The "I Am A Natural Wonder" buzz has finally built to this: Lily Ladewig and Anne Cecelia Holmes's chapbook, free to read at Blue Hour Press!

7. Michael Leong writes a supersmart review of the first print issue of Bone Bouquet!

8. Small Desk Press & Switchback Books bunk together at AWP and then co-host fabulous reading THIS WEDNESDAY 2/9.

9. The little nonprofit football team that could, the one owned by 12,000 more people than live in its 100,000-person town, wins the Súperból!

I Who Am Now Published Author

D. Dubs Lichtenberg of The Ancient Book of Hip fame was kind enough to ask me to participate in his We Who Are Now Published Authors series over at We Who Are About To Die.

You can read it here!

Dan asked me what some of the pillars of LA Liminal were and I said:

Debunked fables, Santa Ana winds, crossfires, underworlds, beer, self-implication, spectacle, quitting smoking, dreams are poems, Manifest Destiny, superimposition, Southern California Gothic, American Beauty, Arrested Development, down-home midwestern elitism, playing with shards/matches, tropicalia-loves-melancholia, why can’t we all just live in one big house together.

Lizzy Acker's contribution to the series is already up! You should buy her book Monster Party from Small Desk Press! It has a piece called "Futurism" and a piece called "Shark Week" right afterward, whatta one-two punch, and she stayed at the same hostel-slash-inn at AWP as me and Small Desk editors M&M, Marisa Crawford and Matt Rohrer.

Along with Jennifer "JT" Tamayo and Sarah Fran Wisby, we're all reading together on Wednesday in Brooklyn; please come!