A Million MFAs Are Not Enough

A Million MFAs Are Not Enough PDF Author: Charles Harper Webb
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781597097246
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Something is rotten in the state of American poetry. With respect to audience and artistry, poetry has shot itself in many portions of its anatomy, and keeps blasting. The fact that vast numbers of poems are published every year, and a large number of Creative Writing students and graduates combine to read a few of them, does not mean that poetry is on the right track. How has the erstwhile Queen of the Arts been consigned to the tiny corner of the cultural basement where she languishes today--and how can she get out? As an acclaimed poet and veteran teacher of poetry, Charles Harper Webb knows what it takes for a poem to grab a reader's attention and hold on. As a former rock singer/guitarist and a licensed psychotherapist, he understands how to connect with an audience. A Million MFAs Are Not Enough shows--with wit and style and concrete tips that working writers can use--how poetry can return to cultural relevance again.

A Million MFAs Are Not Enough

A Million MFAs Are Not Enough PDF Author: Charles Harper Webb
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781597097246
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Something is rotten in the state of American poetry. With respect to audience and artistry, poetry has shot itself in many portions of its anatomy, and keeps blasting. The fact that vast numbers of poems are published every year, and a large number of Creative Writing students and graduates combine to read a few of them, does not mean that poetry is on the right track. How has the erstwhile Queen of the Arts been consigned to the tiny corner of the cultural basement where she languishes today--and how can she get out? As an acclaimed poet and veteran teacher of poetry, Charles Harper Webb knows what it takes for a poem to grab a reader's attention and hold on. As a former rock singer/guitarist and a licensed psychotherapist, he understands how to connect with an audience. A Million MFAs Are Not Enough shows--with wit and style and concrete tips that working writers can use--how poetry can return to cultural relevance again.

Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges

Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges PDF Author: Frank Stewart
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824883284
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges presents nearly 100 poets and translators from China and the U.S.—the two countries most responsible for global carbon dioxide emissions and the primary contributors to extreme climate change. These poetic voices express the altered relationship that now exists between the human and non-human worlds, a situation in which we witness everyday the ways environmental destruction is harming our emotions and imaginations. “What can poetry say about our place in the natural world today?” ecologically minded poets ask. “How do we express this new reality in art or sing about it in poetry?” And, as poet Forrest Gander wonders, “how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics?” Eco-poetry freely searches for possible answers. Sichuan poet Sun Wenbo writes: ... I feel so liberated I start writing about the republic of apples and democracy of oranges. When I see apples have not become tanks, oranges not bombs, I know I've not become a slave of words after all. The Chinese poets are from throughout the PRC and Taiwan, both minority and majority writers, from big cities and rural provinces, such as Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture and Xinjiang Uyghur, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regions. The American poets are both emerging and established, from towns and cities across the U.S. Included are images by celebrated photographer Linda Butler documenting the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, on the Mississippi River Basin.

The Georgia Review

The Georgia Review PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 718

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Book Description


MFA Vs NYC

MFA Vs NYC PDF Author: Chad Harbach
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865478139
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Writers write—but what do they do for money? In a widely read essay entitled "MFA vs NYC," bestselling novelist Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding) argued that the American literary scene has split into two cultures: New York publishing versus university MFA programs. This book brings together established writers, MFA professors and students, and New York editors, publicists, and agents to talk about these overlapping worlds, and the ways writers make (or fail to make) a living within them. Should you seek an advanced degree, or will workshops smother your style? Do you need to move to New York, or will the high cost of living undo you? What's worse—having a day job or not having health insurance? How do agents decide what to represent? Will Big Publishing survive? How has the rise of MFA programs affected American fiction? The expert contributors, including George Saunders, Elif Batuman, and Fredric Jameson, consider all these questions and more, with humor and rigor. MFA vs NYC is a must-read for aspiring writers, and for anyone interested in the present and future of American letters.

Green Mountains Review

Green Mountains Review PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description


The Given World

The Given World PDF Author: Marian Palaia
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476777934
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In 1968, when Riley is thirteen, her brother Mick goes missing in Vietnam. Her family shattered, Riley finds refuge in isolation and drugs until she falls in love with a boy from the reservation, but he, too, is on his way to the war. Riley takes off as well, in search of Mick, or of a way to be in the world without him. She travels from Montana to San Francisco and from there to Vietnam. Among the scarred angels she meets along the way are Primo, a half-blind vet with a secret he cant keep; Lu, a cab-driving addict with an artists eye; Phuong, a Saigon barmaid, Rileys conscience and confidante; and Grace, a banjo-playing girl on a train, carrying her grandmothers ashes in a tin box. All are part of a lost generation, coming of age too quickly as they struggle to reassemble lives disordered by pain and loss. At center stage is Riley, a masterpiece of vulnerability and tenacity, wondering if shell ever have the courage to return to her parents farm, to its ghosts and memoriesresident in a place she has surrendered, surely, the right to call home.

The Creative Writing MFA Handbook

The Creative Writing MFA Handbook PDF Author: Tom Kealey
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826418432
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Guides prospective graduate students through the difficult process of researching, applying to, and choosing graduate schools in creative writing. This handbook includes special sections about Low-Residency writing programs, PhD programs, publishing in literary journals, and workshop and teaching advice.

Ursula Lake

Ursula Lake PDF Author: Charles Harper Webb
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781636280219
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In the fast-paced, sexy, and very scary literary thriller Ursula Lake, a husband and wife trying to save their marriage and a rock musician trying to get his career back on track find big trouble, natural and possibly supernatural, in the spellbinding wilds of British Columbia.

The Program Era

The Program Era PDF Author: Mark McGurl
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674266021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

Stand Up Poetry

Stand Up Poetry PDF Author: Charles Harper Webb
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Witty, sexy, gritty, outrageous, emotional, hilarious, honest, courageous. What do these words describe? A growing movement in American literary circles: Stand Up Poetry. Over twenty years ago, Charles Harper Webb discovered a vibrant and invigorating poetry scene in southern California. Featuring some of America's best contemporary poets, this scene, according to Webb, showed insight, imagination, craft, philosophical depth, but most of all, it was funny, and it was fun. Stand Up Poetry: The Poetry of Los Angeles and Beyond (1990) was the result of Webb's enthusiasm for this poetic genre. A decade later, the popularity of performance poetry, poetry slams, and poetry readings is on the rise, and Webb has expanded his anthology to include a greater sampling of poets from across the country. From Charles Bukowski to Billy Collins and Allison Joseph, the poets included in this collection are popular and emerging, classical and experimental, young and old; yet all exhibit the characteristics so important to Stand Up Poetry-humor, performability, accessibility, individuality. Most important, these poems are enjoyable when read silently or aloud, on the page or on the stage. Stand Up P