Category Archives: Studio

For many unestablished artists, the business of staying alive and attempting to provide for the future can be so exhausting there’s little strength left for the exercise of one’s art, especially if you think of your art as work (which, in some sense, you need to, if it is ever to become anything more for you). In the past month, in addition to my full-time teaching, administrative, and household duties, I wrote a paper for an international conference to which … Read the excerpt

Students in a poetry workshop recently asked me some questions about publication that led us to an unexpectedly detailed discussion of the low demand for (and inordinate supply of) poetry in the current, American, literary marketplace. They asked me pointed questions about my own relative rates of success getting different genres of writing published. I dutifully answered their questions, noting that approximately half of the fiction and nonfiction I write gets published, while less than ten percent of my poetry … Read the excerpt

I enjoyed recycling Moby-Dick chapters into “haiku” so much that I’ve decided to do the same to chapters from another American bible… The King James Version of the Bible. Though I was prepared to modify my technique for the new text, I’ve found myself falling “comfortably” into essentially the same method I used for Moby-Dick: read a chapter for overall impression; read the chapter again, making note of compelling words, images, concepts, etc. that could generate high levels … Read the excerpt

I am often struck by the similarities between biological and cultural reproduction, how genes and memes reproduce themselves with or without our conscious assistance, how, for example, a concept or phrase can spread through a population’s cultural psyche in much the same way that, say, the ability to produce a digestive enzyme might spread through its genome (at different rates, of course). In fact, on a purely structural level, there seems to be no substantial difference in the process. In … Read the excerpt

I’m speaking, of course, of cultural cannibalism. The results of it are most apparent in music, where the artists seem to have a keener taste for the “flesh” of their forebears, and have already led to the healthy tradition of sampling that has been driving music industry capitalists and copyrighters mad for decades, but it’s also begun to creep more intentionally into literature, in the work of experimental writers like Susan Howe and Rosemarie Waldrop, for example, or in the … Read the excerpt

I’ve been inspired, by a recent debate I had with relatives, to try to articulate my stance on the issue of “science” and how it relates to other realms of human knowledge such as poetry. First off, I have to say that I find the term “science” to be so vague as to be nearly useless in any thoughtful conversation. Nevertheless, in an attempt to resuscitate a dying word (as writers often find themselves tragically compelled to do), I will … Read the excerpt

The recent political climate in the US has gotten me thinking about the relations between politics, economy, and poetry. With a handful of notable exceptions, it seems that most American poets have mostly avoided engaging with public issues even glancingly in their verse. I’m aware of a number of explanations for this, my favorite being the idea that technological, artistic, and market factors have unwittingly conspired to delegate to poetry the domain of private experience. I don’t think this isolation … Read the excerpt

Underlying much of our Western writing is a mostly unconscious assumption that humans and nature are two different things, at odds with one another. We think of it as “wilderness,” or a cornucopia of “resources,” or some kind of utopia, among various other metaphors, and we think of ourselves as, well, something else, something that usually stands in contrast to the definition of nature that we picked up at the cultural resale shop. Most of these metaphors hark back to … Read the excerpt

In our apprenticeships as writers, we are often taught to subject ourselves to the currently perceived masters of our craft, to tie the wild shoots of our imagination to canonical, or at least publishable, forms. I do not think this is an insensible approach, as long as it isn’t considered the only approach. Any technique that might be helpful should be welcome. However, the notion of mastery becomes counterproductive when seemingly idiosyncratic writing desires are considered dismissible, or even dangerous … Read the excerpt

I identify as neither poet, essayist, novelist, dramatist nor fiction writer, though I practice to varying degrees in all these genres. I prefer to refer to myself as simply a writer. In doing so I don’t intend to cast judgment on writers who do identify more specifically. It’s true that I don’t like stereotypes, which abound in even this area, and it’s true that I’m anxious about being typecast and having my future planned for me, but the main reason … Read the excerpt