Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:
“All art-making is about failure. We never get it right. But poems are not poems if they make people feel dead. I want people to feel alive—even if it is alive with grief. I want people to feel their blood moving by the time I’m done.” Poet Danez Smith in conversation with the Guardian.
There’s the beach read, the airplane read, the cabin read. What about the subway read? Adam Sternbergh searches for the best book to read on the subway. (New York Times)
Humanities looks back on the sixty-year career of poet W. S. Merwin, whose work is “marked, above all, by a vigilance for all living things.”
Scott Huler considers the role of the dictionary, in light of a recent petition imploring the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary to reinstate nature words such as acorn, cygnet, heron, and ivy, which were removed from the latest edition. (Washington Post)
Craig Morgan Teicher previews the most anticipated poetry collections of 2018, none of which are debuts or retrospectives, in the hope of offering “a view of poets in medias res, in the midst—of their careers, their adult lives and responsibilities, of their engagement with where their public and private lives meet during this trouble and troubling moment.” (NPR)
Libraries are devising new ways to offer local news to communities, especially those that have lost their local media outlets. (Atlantic)
“That’s usually how I start off. With an attitude and a tone.” Poet Morgan Parker talks about her writing process. (Rumpus)
For more insight from Parker on how to start writing, read her installment of Writers Recommend for Poets & Writers.
Thomas Mallon surveys the fiction and criticism of Martin Amis, “a novelist engaged in the scrupulous appreciation of others’ style.” (New Yorker)
