So far this semester, each of the interns has been assigned one physical literary journal and one online-only literary journal to read, review, and present on. They have ranged from historic physical journals such as Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review to exclusively online journals such as storySouth and Blackbird.

However, I have found that these journals all feature the same sort of writing – fiction, poetry, nonfiction, reviews, and sometimes dramas and translations. While the writing published in these journals is always exemplary, it often isn’t particularly appealing to less serious readers. This is especially true among younger demographics, such as college students and young adults.

As a college student myself, I will be the first to admit that when I read for pleasure, I often don’t go for fiction, poetry, or literary journals. I open up my laptop and read blogs and websites. One of my most frequented sites is Grantland.com. Grantland, which is partnered with ESPN, was launched this summer by columnist Bill Simmons and is named after venerated sportswriter Grantland Rice (“For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, He writes—not that you won or lost—but how you played the Game.”).

Grantland is particularly interesting in relation to our class because of the content it publishes and because the first issue of its literary journal, Grantland Quarterly, will be be published in November.

In an ESPN press release, the site was announced as a “much anticipated sports and pop culture web site” that would offer “a mix of original columns, long-form features, blog posts, and podcasts.” Furthermore, that same press release name-dropped the site’s lead editor (Dan Fierman, current senior editor of GQ), two deputy editors (Lane Brown, former editor of Vulture.com; Jay Caspian Kang, fiction writer and contributor to theAtlantic.com and theawl.com), and three consulting editors. These consulting editors are all well-known, best-selling authors: Chuck Klosterman, Malcolm Gladwell, and Dave Eggers.

Even before the site launched, it established itself as more than just a simple sports blog. It aimed to be something more. Since its launch, audiences have responded quite positively. Grantland is ranked the 723^rd most popular website in America, according to Alexa rankings. And, unsurprisingly, the site appeals more to men, childless college graduates and those under the age of 35, according to Alexa.

Grandland’s popularity is likely due to its balance of lowbrow humor alongside serious sportswriting and pop culture criticism. The website blogs about stupid YouTube videos (“Today in Terrible YouTube Videos”), and publishes a weekly “reality TV fantasy league” column (in which sportswriters draft reality TV contestants who earn points for outrageous behavior) as well as legitimate articles that are both interesting and thought-provoking.

For example, a recent article on a CFL quarterback, “The Best Passing Quarterback Ever” could belong in Sports Illustrated or Esquire. Hua Hsu’s article on Radiohead and the Occupy Wall Street Movement is certainly suited for Rolling Stone or Spin. And Colson Whitehead’s four-part creative nonfiction piece about the World Series of Poker (“Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia”) could easily find itself in a literary journal comparable to Shenandoah.

McSweeny’s will publish Grantland Quarterly as a bona fide physical journal this November. Its publication is particularly notable considering the purpose of our class and internship.

Grantland Quarterly blurs the line between web and physical journal both in terms of content and presentation. While most online literary journals publish fiction and poetry pieces that would seamlessly fit into a physical journal such as Kenyon Review or the print edition of Shenandoah, most of Grantland Quarterly’s content was originally intended only for the web.

The physical presentation of the journal is original, as well. It will feature posters, pull-out sections, baseball cards, and mini-booklets. Furthermore, the cover will mimic the look and feel of a basketball with rubberized, bumpy skin. These features are far more reminiscent of a glossy magazine than any sort of literary publication.

Much like the website itself, the journal includes a mix of thoughtful articles and lowbrow gimmicks. However, it is unquestionably a literary journal. Included in issue one are Whitehead’s piece on the World Series of Poker, Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on the NBA lockout, Chuck Klosterman’s unearthing of a wild North Dakota junior college basketball game, and new fiction from Jess Walter. The writing is dead-serious and high quality.

The Shenandoah internship has helped me and my classmates understand the current landscape of literary journals. Grantland Quarterly is undoubtedly influenced by both traditional print journals and contemporary web journals, but it cannot be seen in the same light as either. Its publication is so exciting because of the new territory it explores in the world of literary journals. I am looking forward to it, and I hope you are too.

The William Carlos Williams poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” has a kind of staying power, even if only because people so often collar me and ask (probably grabbing other poets and teachers, too) some version of, “How is that a poem”?  The text is as follows, for those who need a nudge:
***
The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens
***
No period.  So where’s the art in it all?  What depends upon them?  What’s he doing, and conspicuously not doing?  If you separate it as he does, what’s a “barrow”? Why poultry?
Wade in and provide some suggestions.

The Woodberry Poetry Room, based at Harvard University, boasts what their website claims is “an unparalleled collection of 20th and 21st century  English-language poetry materials.” Indeed, the collection of works available in audio on the website and brings literature into the 21st century.

To visit the site, please go to: http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/

There is an unspoken relationship between artwork and its viewer, as we discussed during an earlier entry.  Therefore, the delivery of art, whether literary or design based, effects and may interfere with that “threshold” between the art and the viewer.  The words in a poem are meant to entice the audience, therefore leaving the entertainment aspect unnecessary.  The poet’s intentions behind their creation are intended for an individual as well as an audience.  It is the multifaceted aspects of poetry that make it enjoyable for many.  Every viewing or reading of a poem may develop another, deeper and richer meaning.    How a poem is delivered and by whom effects the performance poetry.  I feel that the authors themselves, who have soothing, gentle voices that make me crave the next word, do most meaningful poetry readings.  Therefore, unless performed correctly the entertainment of performance poetry has the ability to distract the viewer from the heart of the work, the words.

David Orr’s article on performance poetry in the NYT this week stirred me to revisit the issue.  I have been to over 150 poetry readings, only 3 of which were advertised and executed as “performance,” none of which I enjoyed.  In the others (not all of which I enjoyed, either), poets were at least striving – as far as I could tell – to render or deliver language constructed primarily to be read from the page by a solitary reader, though perhaps aloud, to allow the whole body to be involved in a different fashion from listening.  Sometimes, the poets I’ve heard have been more than a little theatrical (Dickey, Billy Collins, Sharon Olds), elfin (Muldoon), aw-shucks (you name ’em; some are my literary neighbors), but the best of them still seemed in the spell of the text more than in the spell of the occasion, the audience, intoning in the glamour of the spotlight.

“Intoning,” “chanting.”  The Anglo-Saxon folk had a word for it, mathalode, except that they didn’t use all the same letters we do.  The scop Widsith was said to render his lines to audiences in this fashion, to open up his word hoard.  I like to imagine a recital like that of Demodokos in The Odyssey and maybe Homer himself, just like a good hearthside yarner (but with a harp).  This doesn’t mean that the reciters are not personable, but that they moderate between audience and text, instead of grandstanding.

In the mead hall, around the campfire, in the campus common room or lecture hall – I’m sure there’s an ambiguous zone, a wide and uncertain threshold between delivering the language in an intimate way which is the public counterpart to spellcasting the written word, and performance with a different emphasis, using face, body, and all the interactive options to privilege the moment of broadcast rather than the many moments of composition.  Orr cites Charles Bernstein’s insight that a poem has a plural life, which makes sense to me.  I would call the two aspects of the poem’s life the communal and the meditative, and I truly enjoy and am more stimulated and provoked by the latter, though I’ve sometimes heard master readers like Dove, Komunyakaa, Carolyn Kizer and Heaney who made the listening experience at once immediate and reflective.  How did they do that?  A resonant voice helps, command of the text, but the poets who engage me most at a reading know how to create the illusion for me that they are reading not to a group but to one listener, an auditor who prefers nuance to flourish, suggestion to expostulation.

[A note: Over breakfast my wife and I agreed that, though we prefer the intimate rendition, we’d rather hear a theatrical poet than be bored, yet we’d rather be bored than condescended to, harangued or invited to endorse a sow’s ear paraded about like a silk purse or even a pork chop.  Many evenings, the actual pork chop is perhaps the best option of all.]

[Another note: I’m aware that bards, scops, rhapsodes and the like probably had leeway to extemporize.  They worked within a normative rhythm like a strong baseline, and employed established epithets, catalogues, digressions and set pieces, but they did like, performance-oriented poets, have license to extemporize.  I wonder if it led them to soggy sentimentality, bantam struts, weeping fits and transgressive rants?  I’d love to know.]

[Last note:  Worst reading I ever attended?  The poet bragged about his/her awards and famous friends, told jokes, rambled, preened, explained how s/he would teach a course the school offered and asked to be asked back.  Best?  Hard to say, but two of the best four or five times the reader was Merwin.]

Plenty of poets can be viewed on Youtube, but anyone who likes to HEAR poets read without actually seeing them should visit the fine audio archive at Harvard’s Woodbury Room: http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/.  (Thanks to Philip Belcher for the reminder.)

“What the hell are you listening to?”

It was late August, and my dad had just brought my car home from the auto repair shop. Apparently, my catalytic converter needed to be replaced before I made the six hour journey from South Carolina to the Shenandoah Valley (I say apparently only because I have no idea what purpose a catalytic converter serves. Sounds fancy though). On his drive home, the poor man was exposed to whatever I had left in my CD player. That particular evening, it was the bombastic lyrics and thundering beats of rapper extraordinaire Kanye West’s first album, College Dropout.

My dad, who reared me on a heavy diet of the Beatles and the Stones, the Doors and the Who, Bobs Marley and Dylan, Hendrix, Clapton, and every other heavy hitter of his own musical generation, was more or less appalled by the hip-hop that had weaseled its way into my CD changer. I was reprimanded for my poor taste in a “thumpity thump” excuse for what masquerades as music. I was reminded of this exchange recently, when I stumbled upon this video of West performing, slam poetry style, the lyrics from one of College Dropout‘s biggest hits, “All Falls Down.” The clip is devoid of a beat or any real vocal punch, and West’s rhythm feels raw and imperfect. And yet, it’s a mesmerizing reminder of why hip-hop has persisted despite its critics.

Marginalized as a lesser form of music by classic rock purists (um, hi Dad) and Grateful Dead loving hippies, rap’s lyrical narrative is often unfairly overlooked. But here, what Kanye does, what he writes is pure poetry, a contemporary reinterpretation of American life in the Ellisonian tradition of continually redefining black identity, of “blues-toned laughter-at-wounds,” of survival through song. According to Ellison’s invisible man, “You curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And alas, it’s seldom successful.” Fifty-nine years later, Kanye, with his bravado, sick beats and slick rhymes, forces the elusive “them” to sit up and pay attention. So much so that he received a Grammy in 2004 for “All Falls Down.”

Carrying over from our discussion of Linda Pastan’s “Ethics” and the value of art, I’d be interested to know how our readers define poetry, and whether or not music can transcend artistic genres.

Killing Lincoln: Collateral Damage, a Fit in Two Spasms, Spasm Ducks

[Read yesterday’s post before this one, unless you want to be even more confused and irritated than I am.]

But perhaps O’Really and Druid, seemingly aiming to write the facts as far as they know them and extrapolate from there, may be hoping to let us in on the hard truth that the actual world ignores the novelist’s obligations to the plausible, even in matters of syntax and diction. The epilogue announces that “America is a great country” but “influenced by evil,” which sounds pretty candid and rousing, but maybe they’re pulling our legs just a little, though not for nothing, of course. Americans need to be reminded how in our greatest hours of crisis our citizens and leaders behaved – wild and noble, shameful and vigorous, human. It is a good story, even if we don’t have to look to the past, if we want to find dark and depraved behavior in leaders and pundits. But seriously . . . . [faux transition]

I confess to bewilderment as to why worldly and intelligent men would so heavily rely on the worn rags of cliché, the amusing conventions of moustache-twirling melodrama, hyperventilated romance novels and tabloid journalism, non sequiturs and stumblation (stumble-ation? stumble-nation?) surely wrought by the dark of the moon. Probably they understand their agenda and target audience better than I do. If this element of their style attracts you (as a moth to a flame, perhaps), here are a few of the phrases of breathless, lifeless prose in store for you: “the downward spiral of mental instability” (twice, both referring to the same person), “But evil knows no boundaries,” “ soldiers. . . have been shot through like Swiss cheese,” “As blood flows in Virginia, wine flows in Rhode Island,” “these cannonballs are the slap in the face that Washburn needs,” “Men fall and die all around as Washburn rides tall in the saddle,” “euphoria now floats through the air like an opiate,” “tears streaming down his cheeks, their salt mingling with the blood of his still-fresh wounds.”  [Zounds!] AND: “any chance of Lee snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.”  Hold, enough! [Exeunt fighting. Alarms.]

I’m all in favor of filling in some shadowy gaps left by history, occupying the territory and throwing up huts, even digging latrines. Poetic license (though you have to pass a rigorous background test and take a safety course). But it’s important that a work of non-fiction (or maybe even non-non-fiction, also called “creative non-fiction”) provide some key, even if a little cryptic, to let the reader know where the records leave off and the fantasizing begins. Without leaving a trail of crumbs, R and D go where angels fear to tread – into the pillow talk and thoughts of Booth and his financy, the bedazzled brain of Adzerodt, the hearts and minds of Grant, Seward, Stanton, Lincoln, Blinken and Nod. These flights of fancy might be harmless, if they’d only help us guess the point of liftoff. I won’t actually suggest that Lee never “boast[ed] that his Army of Northern Virginia can hold out forever in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” but since he was not particularly keen on boasting, guerilla warfare or “forever,” I’d love to hear when and how he said that. As Housman wrote,” Three minutes’ thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome, and three minutes is a long time.”

I’m of two minds – which is close to no-mind, a Zen thing –  about the insinuations of larger, wraithlike conspiracies running through the book.  We all know that the results of assassination investigations are murky: how much did Dr. Mudd know and when?  Did Mary Surratt, who had heard about kidnapping aspirations, ever overhear whispers of murder most foul?  Was John Surratt on the grassy knoll?  How badly did Stanton want to be president?  Or king?  But scholars usually approach the muddle of evidence head-on.  Dugard and O’Reilly like to weave those cryptic fibers into the fabric of their own narrative, offering a wily tonal wink (if I had an editor, here’s where s/he’d say I was past the point of no return, solipsistic and alone on the bismuth azimuth) even as they indicate that the governmental dark network theories of scholar Ray Neff are widely “repudiated and dismissed.”  They seem hospitable to some of the far-fetched connecting of dots (and dashes, Abe would have added; he was addicted to the telegraph and might have been fond of texting), but they never quite let the reader in on the overall reasoning of any of these popular, sometimes outrageous but occasionally provocative theories.  I, too, have been on the holodeck, and recognize the allure of the phantoms of delight that therein dwell.  Even in the volume in question I have found all the letters to form the sentences, “Booth was railroaded” and “Vick was innocent.”

In a less hyperventilating, more academic account, registration of these wilder surmises might be the signs of responsible reportage, reminding us that this is one very cold case under discussion, but importantly still under discussion. But here they seem akin to horror film cliché in which the last scene quietly suggests that, despite relief on the wan and weary faces of the survivors, a dangerous sequel is already slouching toward Bethlehem.

O’Reilly’s and Dugard’s primary purpose here is likely to reach a large audience who would find reading Shelby Foote laborious.  I suspect that target is well struck (a hit, a palpable hit), though there’s nothing new in KL but the presentation, and the collateral damage involves credibility.  The omissions and slippery facts, the mercurial shifts in tone and the simple gaffes and contradictions are enough to diminish any reader’s trust.  And after all, so many books, so little time.  For accuracy, context and insight, I recommend (and in, fairness, the authors suggest a splendid list for those who want to know more):  Manhunt,  American Brutus and American Gothic, to get started, and I’m happy to report that none of the three is either a sluggish “scholarly” read or a wobbly thriller.

Nota bene: Auden says it’s dangerous to review bad books because it’s tempting to have fun at the author’s expense, only to find it turning back on you.

Which is why

Spasm the First:

Booth’s plot to assassinate Lincoln began with a plan to kidnap the president, but exactly why the actor and his henchmen wanted to capture Lincoln is one of the essential elements of the story that seems to escape Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, the perpetrators of the new “thriller” Killing Lincoln.  I had planned a quick hit-and-run post on the manner and matter of this historically well-timed volume, but I’m something of a Civil War buff and have recently read a few books on both Booth and Mary Lincoln, so I got caught up in the book’s style, structure and presentation of facts, opinions and accompanying balderdash.

In a vain attempt at equanimity (the old “fair trial first, then the noose” approach), I should say what I found to like in KL.  The big name co-author – his name on the cover dwarfs that of his accomplice – tells us in a brief prefatory note that the book is “written as a thriller,” and he’s right about that.  Some important historical scenes are abbreviated or omitted, others emphasized.  Working in the tradition of both historical novelists and scholarly historians, the authors cull, select, orchestrate, amplify.  The result here is a rousing tale about the horrific last battles in Virginia (Saylor’s Creek, High Bridge), the rising hope among the Union leaders, the assassin’s simmering enmity, the plot thickening, the infamous murder, the manhunt and its climax, then the aftermath.  The short chapters and a canny filtering out of many of the technical aspects of troop movements, investigation and politicking keep the story moving.  It’s a page turner, a barn burner.  I was reminded as I read it of the night I read The Exorcist, impressed (content and lack of density notwithstanding) by Blatty’s management of suspense and dread, hope and distress.  The effective passages in KL about the lethal chess played by Lee and Grant between Petersburg and Appomattox and the villain’s flight suggest that this team of crack wordsmiths might have written a substantially more accurate and stylish book, had they taken the time.  And the book has good maps, very good maps displaying troop disposition and movements, routes, topography and geography.  Trust those maps.

But there’s a major problem with the lickety-split style and glib manner.  If you know much about the historical period (that it was, for instance, customary for Victorian widows to absent themselves from funerals of their husbands) or the principals (Boston Corbett was likely maddened by mercury long before the war, not after he killed Booth), you’re likely to start doing a little fact checking on the details.  This way lies madness.

Which is why . . . .  I had never seen anyone begin a written paragraph this way before, so I thought I’d try it.  No soap.  You’ll have to go to KL to see how it’s done.

In the hands of these authors, the ship John S. Ide gets abbreviated as the Ides (they’re working a Roman ides theme already); the warriors who dispatched Custer all become Oglala Sioux, for brevity’s sake, presumably.  Mary Surratt did not, as the book claims, “run” the tavern she owned.  Twain, in their view, helped write, rather than encourage and promote, Grant’s Personal Memoirs.  (As if he had the time, but you should read how he defended Grant’s style against Matthew Arnold.  Ron Powers tells it well in Mark Twain: A Life.)  “Daft and unbalanced” isn’t a fair epithet for the deeply depressed Mary Lincoln, and though she was prone to tantrums and grudges, the accusation that her “intellect does not match her considerable capacity for rage” seems phrased to suggest that she’s not particularly bright.  If she were here to defend herself to the authors (a séance might produce her), she could shame and skewer them deftly, and in French, if she so wished.  Michael O’Laughlen’s testimony in the conspiracy trial is not dependable; nor are his observations those of a sober man. Booth didn’t “steal” the motto of Virginia; we still have it.

To borrow one stylistic thread from the narrative in question: But are these the mere quibbles of a hot-headed rake?  Maybe so.  I like that “rake.”  But here’s a variation or (as the poets of “practiced experts” and “retreat back” would have it) different variation.  Speaking of Booth’s paramour Lucy Hale, our wily narrators say, “Lucy has no idea that her lover has assembled a crack team of conspirators.”  That crack team, the “A Team” of American assassination, is a crackpot team, as the authors themselves will gradually disclose.  George Atzerodt is a tippler and a “simple-minded drifter.”  Twenty-six-year-old David Herold, whose Georgetown pharmacy training is not the education it would be today, is woefully immature.  Several witnesses at the trial testified that he was still a boy, one insisting that he had the mind of an eleven-year-old.  Lewis Powell/Payne has been “mentally impaired since that long-ago mule kick to the head,” and proves it more than once, despite the authors’ claim of his lucidity.  Booth himself has by 1865 become a binger dedicated to brandy (not whisky), and his zealotry has left him resembling Poe’s Montresor in both shrewdness and narrowness of purpose.  If this band of misfits killed Lincoln only in a novel, it would fail the test of plausibility.

[I don’t want to bore you to death at one sitting, so I’ll finish this anon.]

Here the Huffington Post comments on some of the errors in Killing Lincoln.