The Sycamore Review, in cooperation with public libraries in the Greater Lafayette area, is sponsoring the Looseleaf Writing Workshop Series this Winter and Spring for particpants of all ages.  If you would like to learn more about these or past workshops in the series, please go to the navigation bar on the right and click on Looseleaf Writing Workshop Series.  Our volunteers from the Creative Writing Program at Purdue are excited to be running these focused hour-and-a-half long workshops, and we all hope for a great turn out from the community.

Liberating: the best word I can come up with for the experience I had reading Geoffrey G. O'Brien's second collection of poems, Green and Gray.  What else could I say about a poem that declares this victory over life's demands: "So much for problems and their solutions."?  What else could I say that would be more accurate than O'Brien's own commentary on the book and its methods, embedded throughout this self-aware collection?  As one poem puts it, "The feeling is / of the other side of the beginning of a bridge, / imaginary numbers, scratches on a table"; and these poems are "cold coals / of wildflowers, wars / at their centers, they go on for years / burning near the front / and from below."  Brilliantly conceived and executed, O'Brien has managed to be abstract and engaged in fairly lofty ideas without coming off as pretentious.

There is this warning for readers, though: if you're looking for perfect poems, you should probably look somewhere else; O'Brien doesn't write those.  He begins "The Nature of Encounters" by "already screwing up the end of the poem / with a hopeful form of forgetfulness."  If you're looking for poems that connect with you emotionally, that speak urgently to you, the reader, and bring comfort or mild epiphany to you in difficult times, this book might not be what you're looking for.  As O'Brien writes in “This Partly Imagined Tale,” "It may be / that feelings haven't been accurate / instruments for some time now."

What this book does take as its major concerns are the social, the intellectual, and the political; but especially, it addresses "the problem of senses confined to a head."  The focus on the perceiver, the senses, and the objects of perception keeps the poems from becoming didactic or sentimental by putting everything on the level of phenomenology.  His avoidance of a poetic voice as it is usually conceived of in the mainstream contemporary lyric also keeps him free of such pitfalls.  At the outset of "Objects in Portraits," he writes that, "In the uncertain light of the first person / anything made is embarrassing."  He has chosen an interesting way around such embarrassment; he has decided to compose many (possibly all) of these poems with the language of other texts: not his own expression, but the expressions of words moved and rearranged into new contexts.  In this way, the words do not follow an author's intended meaning so much as they precede it and give rise to it.  This reversal of the standard order of events or process is featured prominently in the poem “Hysteron Proteron” (the rhetorical term for such reversals).  It contains some of the most politically dangerous moments in the book.  O'Brien manages to cover bombs (think cruise missiles), toppled statues (think Lenin, think Saddam Hussein) and 9/11 with an intelligence and care to the nuances of connotation that allow him to get away with lines like “the fortuitous encounter on a sky / of two planes and two towers” and “911 Is a Joke, How Can I Move the Crowd, Police and Thieves, The Ocean.”  [Just for clarity's sake, “911 Is a Joke” is a song written by Public Enemy in 1990, here used as an example of how eerie hysteron proteron can be.]  Another poem, "They Met Only in the Evenings" (as a brief note at the front of the book explains), was composed using only language from the USA PATRIOT Act and Jean Genet's Querrelle.  "The New" was composed by extracting phrases that mark time from Dante's La Vita Nuova and arranging them into a meditation on causality.

The real achievement of this book is in the unexpected and often unexplainable moments of clarity that O'Brien arrives at through the expert use of these compositional methods.  "In Re Others" pulls this off better than any other poem.  One of many in the collection organized around anaphora—a technique which O'Brien employs to great effect—the poem moves along steadily on the repeated phrase, "There is this to say."  And much is said about the self and the “other”—those it coexists with—much of which “can be said with a ship / and a wave, with only and also."  But what it comes down to in the end is this: "a bee in a well, the edges of islands, / any meeting place of the one life and the other / and the rekillable flowers that grow there / as though to say: there is this."  The tail of the anaphora, "to say," has fallen off, and there is only "this" left, naked and glorious: a thingness that is beyond any of the poem's things, an awareness that is not confined to any sum or part of those who are aware, an imperceptible hum that can even resist the word silence.  I suppose this is what I mean when I call this book liberating.

-- Reviewed by Eric Scovel 

(University of California Press, 2007; $19.95)

After a month-long spam attack, we have finally won, it seems.  Your comments will go up right away, as long as you're human.

By Jess Mehr, Nonfiction Editor

So my friend Matt put me on to http://www.freerice.com and I dig it. It's a vocabulary quiz that uses its advertising cash to buy 10 grains of rice for starving nations for each word you correctly define. Basically it's targeted squarely at educated twenty-somethings who have a vague sense of liberal guilt and don't mind showing off their erudition.

By Daryll Lynne Evans, Contributing Blogger

Last week was Slate's Fall Fiction Week, and one fun fiction adventure is the article "The Great Novel I Never Read", which features novelists revealing their "sins of omission"--in their reading history, that is. Amy Bloom's confession? Moby Dick. Angie Cruz? Middlemarch. Authors are also asked to reveal their guilty pleasures.

Some other offerings on Fall Fiction Week: "Stephen Metcalf reviews Philip Roth's Exit Ghost; and Michael Wood dissects Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. Joshua Glenn solves an academic debate about Henry James' The Ambassadors; Sarah Schulman challenges the myth of merit-based publishing; Nathan Heller takes on Robert Hass; and much, much more."

Seeking higher residuals for new media (Internet downloads, streaming, etc.), the Writers Guild of America (both East and West) went on strike this morning. This includes over 12,000 film and television writers.

Up-to-date information is available here.

By Jordan Bradford, Contributing Blogger

Remember, remember V for Vendetta?:

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent

To blow up King and Parli'ment.

Three-score barrels of powder below

To prove old England's overthrow;

By God's providence he was catch'd

With a dark lantern and burning match.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

By Mary Godwin, Contributing Blogger

Travis Alber and Aaron Miller have developed a new way to share and comment on digital writing. Their site,  Bookglutton.com, launched its private beta this week. The web site is comprised of two pieces. The first, the main BookGlutton website, is a catalog and community where users can upload work or select a piece of public domain writing, create reading groups and tag literature. The second part of the site - its centerpiece - is the Unbound Reader. It has a web-based format where users can read and discuss the book right inside the text. The Unbound Reader uses "proximity chat," which allows users to discuss the book with other readers close to them in the text (thus focusing discussion, and, as an added benefit, keeping people from hearing about the end). It also has shared annotations, so people can leave a comment on any paragraph and other readers can respond. By encouraging users to talk in a context-specific way about what they're reading, Bookglutton hopes to help those who want to talk about books (or original writing) with their friends (across cities, for example), students who want to discuss classic works (perhaps for a class), or writers who want to get feedback on their own pieces. Naturally, when the conversation becomes distracting, a user can close off the discussion without exiting the Reader.

Additionally, BookGlutton is working to facilitate adoption of on-line reading. Book design is an important aspect of the reader, and it incorporates design elements, like dynamic dropcaps. Moreover, the works presented in the catalog are standards-based (BookGlutton is an early adopter of the International Digital Publishing Forum's .epub format for ebooks), and allows users to download a copy of anything they upload in this format for use elsewhere.

BookGlutton plans to open the beta to the public in the next month. This video introduction is an excellent way to "take a look around" before signing up for your beta invitation.

By Erin Blakeslee, Editorial Assistant

If you've made it to SXSW or other independent film festivals these past few years - or have added the films of said ilk to your Netflix queue - you may have witnessed the emergence of a new cinema movement, dubbed "mumblecore" by reviewers and critics.

By Erin Blakeslee, Contributing Blogger

I may be a latecomer to the show (after all, the magazine in question has been in publication since 1974), but I read through my first sample copy of The Sun today. Cover to cover. I couldn't put it down.

For those who, like me just hours before, are uninitated, The Sun is an advertisement-free mag that publishes essays, interviews, fiction, and poetry that are politically challenging and philosophically provocative. It's clean, intimate layout is seductive: there's no fat on this baby, and no distracting margin ads listing MFA-program faculty, seminar dates, or book blurbs.

The October 2007 issue of The Sun features a moving, in-depth interview with poet and translator Coleman Barks, who discusses the enduring influence of Rumi, the 13th century Persian mystic poet. Part of the interview can be read here.

If you're hooked, you can order a free sample of The Sun (new reading material with nothing to lose!).

By Patrick Nevins, Managing Editor

From Guardian Unlimited, Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature.  At 87, she's the oldest author ever to take the prize.  And, according to the Yahoo News story, her agent said she was out shopping when the announcement was made!

By Jess Mehr, Non-Fiction Editor 

There's a great essay entitled "What Ails the Short Story" by Stephen King, which the New York Times has posted on its web site. In it, he details his experience of going into a bookstore searching for good short fiction on the rows of magazine racks, only to discover that he can't reach literary journals like The Iowa Review and Glimmer Train "without going to my knees like a school janitor trying to scrape a particularly stubborn wad of gum off the gym floor." It's an experience I think most of us have had, squatting or kneeling in Border's or Barnes and Noble until finally your legs hurt so much you just sit on the floor right there in periodicals. Stephen King sees a larger significance in this posturing, asking: "What happens when a writer realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily?"

The result, according to King, is stories that feel "show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers." He chalks this problem up directly to the "bottom shelf." He comments: "It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ."

King's final conclusion? While the short story isn't dead, it's certainly ailing.

The Sycamore Review blog has been experiencing a massive amount of spam comments since some time this morning. Until this problem is better addressed, comments will been held back from posting until administrator approval. Please, continue to leave your comments. I hope this will not be a problem for very long, at which point comments will again post immediately.

Thank You,
Eric Scovel, Web Editor

By Mary Godwin, Contributing Blogger

Since signing on to blog a bit with others at the Sycamore Review, I've been paying more attention to poetry. Of course, poetry isn't the only or even the main focus of Sycamore Review, but it seems to be what has happened to me as I paid more attention to literature online.

I was lost for a few delicious hours the other day in recorded poetry readings read by the authors themselves at The Poetry Archive. Here I watched and listened to Patricia Beers, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, and Spike Milligan (this last, at first, only because his name was so inviting). Even poets Tennyson, Yeats, and Browning can be heard reciting their own works, though the recordings bear witness to the passing of time as you might expect. Poke around in "historic recordings" to discover a favorite of your own.

Taking an otherly turn, I came across works I found to be called "animated poetry" and fell down a particularly wonderful rabbit hole with Billy Collins (44th U.S. Poet Laureate) and the series of his poems available on YouTube. Picking a favorite among these just won't work, but "Sweet Talk," "Forgetfulness," and at the top of my list, "The Best Cigarette" found more than one viewing with me.

From comments left on one of the Collins poems, I wandered on my way to this amazing bit of fun, work the writer called "graphic poetry." It starts slow, but give it a chance: "Harder, Better, Faster, and Stronger."