Dana Bisignani, a recent Purdue MFA in Poetry, has a poem, "Bankruptcy Hearing," which will be appearing in Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry" column.  Congratulations, Dana!  Those interested can be directed to American Life in Poetry by clicking here.

by David Blomenberg, Poetry Editor

Writer Elizabeth Stuckey-French is a finalist for storySouth's Million Writers Award. The award honors the best story published online during 2008. You can read and vote for her story, "Interview with a Moron," here.

Stuckey-French is a Purdue Creative Writing Program alum and founding editor of the Sycamore Review. "Interview with a Moron" was originally published in Narrative Magazine. It's set in Indiana in 1916 and one of the main characters -- the interviewer -- is a Purdue student. Take the time to read it. You'll be glad you did.

-Anthony Michael Cook

By David Blomenberg, Poetry Editor

Don't let the unpronouncability of the poet's name throw you off--this collection is worth looking into. This wonderful book came to us in the mail from those nice folks at Zephyr Press, who no doubt were pleased by the fact that this collection--in parallel translation--was shortlisted for best poetry translation of 2009. It appears to be the third in Zephyr's New Polish Writing series.  I'm certainly looking forward to their future publications.

The poems in this collection are spare, sinewy, and often disturbing in their sense of detachedness, both in a sense of remove as with a sense of having been, with a shocking blow, been severed from important connections, from loved ones, lovers.  they are a selevtion from Tkaczyszyn-Dycki's previously-unEnglished nine books of poetry, published beteen 1990 and 2005.  This sense of loss is underscored by the obsessive revisitation, of circling back to the same issues, the same events, that the speaker still has yet to come to terms with.

The speaker's voice is very often self deprecating--  "I use language with difficulty (I am/ a contemporary poet)", both in matters of writing, as well as in love. Often these two things are intertwined, as in poem XXVI, in which the speaker's other poet friends become objects of envy.  Rather it is their tongues, the "ever imperfect serpent in their/ / mouths that I envy when it comes to kissing/ because their tongue utters so much more/ than mine that is always slavering and pleased/ with itself when I thrust it in the mouths of others."

Bill Johnston, yet another greatly talented Indiana-based translator (see yesterday's Gunter Grass post)--has done a great service in bringing this Polish poet to an English-speaking audience.

Peregrinary, by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki

Translated by Bill Johnston

148 pp. ISBN 978-0-939010-97-4

$14.95

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Gunter Grass's virtuosic first novel, the author has authorized a new translation of The Tin Drum, due out through Houghton Mifflin.  The translatior is none other than Indiana-based Breon Mitchell, who is a professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. The publication information on Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt's website can be found here, and an interesting article on the translation can be found here.

By David Blomenberg, Poetry Editor

"And to have knowledge or insight, is that not to have instinctive possession?  Of material possession, what stays with you but an idea?  Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a man who can stamp all realities upon his thought, place the springs of happiness within himself, and draw uncounted pleasures in Idea, unsoiled by earthly stains.  Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares."

--Balzac, from The Magic Skin

Added by David Blomenberg, Poetry Editor

By David Blomenberg, Poetry Editor

The finishing touches are being put on our new issue, and it's something we're pretty proud of.  Erin Blakeslee wrote in an earlier post that we've got some stellar interviews--Christopher Arnold with debut novelist Nami Mun, as well as Erin's own interview with novelist Jane Hamilton. 

In addition, Sycamore has new work from G. C. Waldrep, two poems from Sherman Alexie, a wonderful poem by Jill Allen, and a piece by Barbara Claire Freeman, to name only four authors from our poetry section.  We've also got some exciting fiction by Paula Treick DeBoard, John Duncan Tallbird, Astrid Duffy, and Lauren Alwan, not to mention Birth Act, by Rachel Furey, selected by Tobias Wolf to be the winning story for the Wabash Prize in Fiction.  Our new issue features the artwork of Canadian artist Pol Turgeon, whose work proves a perfect contrast to the written works you're soon to read.

There's lots to look forward to--Keep an eye on your mailboxes!

By David Blomenberg, Poetry Editor

An advance copy recently came my way of Ernst Weiss' 1931 novel (in a new translation by Joel Rotenberg). Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer, due out at the end of the year from Archipelago Books. It is a massive (560 pages) novel that ranges from ships lodged in polar ice to equatorial villages. The novel has some unforgettable scenes, many of them involve rats, which are a main motif of the novel. Told in first person from the point of view of the title character, we get a sense of his upbringing, the hard lessons his embittered father taught him, and Georg Letham Jr.'s learned disavowal of love. Mankind, according to his father, shouldn't be classified as good or evil, or successful or unsuccessful, but rather he "asked me quite casually whether people might perhaps be classified as frogs or--rats." What follows is a series of chilling summings-up of others Letham meets, their classification as frog or rat, always an animal on which one routinely does experiments, vivisections--never a man.

On the whole, the novel is good. Rotenberg's translation is fluid and shows a sensitivity to sound ('with a cannonlike crack an incandescent flame shoots out of the dense, slate-colored cloud of smoke"). In my opinion Weiss' manuscript would have benefited from a stronger editorial presence back in 1931, lost 100 or so pages and gained a sharper focus. At times, Georg Letham threatens to approach the bitter vindictiveness of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, but shies away at the crucial moments. This is good, in a way, in that it gives us a sense that redemption is possible in the man; something we don't get in Dostoevsky's bitter short novel.

She beat out Derek Walcott in the bid for the position, and--for however briefly--she was the first female Oxford Professor of Poetry since the establishment of the position in 1708, but she has since resigned under a rather dark cloud.  More here.

By David Blomenberg, Poetry Editor

It occurs to me that I love this site, and that I should really pass it on. If you follow this link, you'll be taken to DonorsChoose.org, an online charity website that allows you to browse through different requests by teachers of pre-k kids on up, give to the project of your choice, and see exactly where all the money is spent: the projects and materials that the teachers have in mind, whether the school is in a high poverty area, whether they have a big military population, where they are in the United States, etc. If you donate (any amount is welcome) the teachers send  you thank you notes and updates, and if you donate $100 or complete a project's funding, the kids send you paper thank you notes and pictures of the project.

Love poetry? Support a poetry project. Storytelling? Support a pre-k class getting a puppet set to tell their favorite stories. The requests might be anywhere from very modest (some shelves to get books off the floor, a rug for the kids to sit on) to more technology based (a computer for the kids to create pod casts to communicate with overseas parents, a "smart board" for wheelchair-confined kids to be able to show their classmates and teachers their work from where they're sitting.)

This is a very cool site, and while a lot of us don't have much money, a lot of us also have more than these kids and their schools do. We support our troops; why not show it by supporting their kids?

Really. It's because I ran into this AWESOME way to learn a little bit more about sonnets. Watch this video of Colbert introducing a show in the Daily Show/Colbert Report toss from some time ago in the form of a sonnet--they graph out the rhyme scheme for you, and you eventully find out if it's Petrarchan or Elizabethan! Oh, and of course it's funny.

One of the genres of writing most intriguing to me is speech writing: you may not always be absolutely sure who the author really is, but you're almost guaranteed that whoever it is, they're keeping their audience in mind. Here's a link to a whole bunch of other links over at the Daily Beast (a cool news & commentary hub with a great cheat sheet posted every day to the most interesting stories.) Here we have Ellen Degeneres, both the Obamas, Oprah Winfrey, and some other interesting-to-listen-to people giving this year's commencement speeches. I'm pretty sure Ellen wrote her own speech, while the others could very well be ghost writers or multiple authors. I like several of them--go see what you think.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

--Madeleine L'Engle

My only commentary on this is how much I love love love Madeleine L'Engle's children's/young adult books. Books written for younger people are often so much braver--maybe because many writers feel less need to protect themselves from the younger set?

Whenever I get the time (summer! finally you are here!) I pick up one of these: The Young Unicorns, A Ring of Endless Light, Arm of the Starfish, House Like a Lotus, or even her “Time Trilogy,” including A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Why these? Because it can be so hard to find books that are a blend of science and mysticism and a clear-eyed, multifaceted gaze turned on the world and the beautiful, complicated people in it. And it’s all imbued with the honesty with which only someone very new and very raw could think about things.

God, I miss her.

"[A] booke called Shakespeares sonnettes" was registered with the Stationers' Company 400 years ago yesterday by a book pirate called Thorpe, alias "T.T." Oh, yes, they used to steal literature Napster-style. And now we have the sonnets! Yay! (You know what I mean.)

Anyway, there's an article on NPR that you can link to here. Lynn Neary reflects on why Shakespeare himself didn't want to publish the sonnets, and the infamous "fair youth" comes out as the probable concern. I want to see THAT movie.

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

— Mark Twain

On a Stumble! quest today, I ran into this web page: How to Be a Successful Evil Overlord by Peter Anspach. Contained therein are 100 strategies and rationales that might defeat any hero on his/her own quest.

Or would they?

I think, for instance, that number 64, "I will see a competent psychiatrist and get cured of all extremely unusual phobias and bizarre compulsive habits which could prove to be disadvantageous," would open up the Evil Overlord to some unfortunate baits and switches or other stealth schemes.

So... can you foil the Evil Overlord? Check out the site and ferret out how this non-egomaniacal, conscientous and rather ruthless character might be taken down, question by glorious question.