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October 29, 2012
A Device for Binding the Intellect
by Greg Schutz
The 2012 education platform released by the Republican Party of Texas last summer contains more than just a troubling attack on critical thinking skills in the classroom. Considered in a broad historical context, the GOP’s platform lays bare fundamental inconsistencies in the conservative thought that birthed it. The product of a grossly divided intellectual legacy, it represents an extraordinary cheapening of our American heritage.
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October 29, 2012
Against Writing Every Day
by Claire Skinner
Like most creative writers (especially us wayward poets), I don’t relish being told what to do. Perhaps this is why I bristle when I hear the dictum write every day. To me, writing every day doesn’t sound appetizing: it sounds like a dry piece of rye toast with no butter. It sounds Machiavellian. It sounds like a chore, replete with brooms and mops and green jars of Comet. As it is, my To Do List is already chock-full of this and that and a little more of this.
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October 3, 2012
The State of the Book and the Great Write-Off
by Gina Balibrera
Believing as we do that Michigan is a state where literature matters, we’d love to invite you, wherever you are, to visit our fine state this month to celebrate the written word. We’re hosting a day-long symposium, called The State of the Book, and drawing a crowd of writers and readers from around the world to talk books in Ann Arbor.
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October 2, 2012
POETRY BY CLEOPATRA MATHIS
INTERSTICE
1. Between Grief and Sorrow
Grief staggers around the house
some thief has emptied.
It wants to tell you everything
all over again; blame is the story
grief hammers, hammering until your leg shakes,
your right foot won’t stop tapping.
It’s a dance for the shaken,
strung out with waiting, and now look
who’s back to guard the door:
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October 1, 2012
Urban Poetics: a Call from (and To) the Wild
by Virginia Konchan
“Urban poetics” takes place at the ripped seam of these intersecting discourses of inside/outside, self/other, “objective”/”subjective” realities, which adhere on the level of individual cognition, spatial orientation, sensation, and judgment, and therefore can’t be codified or defined. It can, however, be reintroduced into poetic discourse, as a bridge to begin the work of looking “outward,” in terms of praxis or politics, rather than just “inward,” in terms of theory and aesthetics, again.
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