Here lives poetry that resembles a sticky dance floor. Poetry that is at once terraformed music and primal shout and wet kiss and sweaty palm. The "American" in Bettering American Poetry is a kind of ghoulish placeholder for whichever more rebellious, more enlivening world comes next.
-Billy-Ray Belcourt
PRESS Breaking the Ice With Pints and Poetry @Wall Street Journal The first hour involved cocktails at the Housing Works Bookstore and Café in SoHo. Then there were readings by Colson Whitehead (“Sag Harbor”), Emily St. John Mandel (“The Singers Gun”) and poet Amy King, who runs a popular poetry group on Goodreads. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 20…
We’re carving out a new discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry to nourish and give voice to a rising tide of female resistance—and you’ve clicked right into it. Click here to read more Ms. Muse. “There comes a point in everyone’s lives where we start to recognize that we are making choices, that…
Read more Ms. Muse: Amy King on the Power of Stories and the Weight of the Current Political Moment
All women welcome! This listserv exists to identify, discuss and support issues related to women in publishing, writing and related to the annual AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference. These issues include, but are not limited to, childcare, publishing, safety concerns, affordability / economic barriers, panel proposals, and more. The 2017 AWP Conference…
Developing the conversation on issues of diversity and pay equity is crucial today, especially in the publishing industry, which employs a large number of women and publishes books and articles for broad and diverse audiences. Four influential voices within the literary world will discuss the necessity of analyzing and documenting the make-up of the workforce,…
Read more Diversity and Pay Equity in Publishing: The Importance of Industry Surveys and Activism
EXCERPT: “Without volunteers, VIDA would not exist. In fact, we created a one-page handout for the release of this past count because ‘What can I do to help?’ has become a recurring mantra indicative of how much larger VIDA is than the faces the organization has come to be associated with. VIDA has tapped into…
The WOM-PO (Discussion of Women’s Poetry) List was started in December 1997 by Annie Finch with an invitation to a small group of poets, critics, and lovers of women’s poetry. These people in turn invited other people to join, and the list has grown into a well-regarded international listserve by spreading through these networks. In…
Authors on Artists: Amy King on Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and Frida Kahlo Paint Is the Abyss’ Law, Living the Accent: Marginalia on Absorption Paint Is the Secretion of Scene on Leonor Fini’s Set I now confer status on you. As in, everything is as good as the next thing. Better yet, in this season,…
Poem from I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press, 2011) Featuring (in order of appearance): Annie Finch Saeed Jones Daniel Nester Patricia Spears Jones Cole Swensen R. Erica Doyle Cate Marvin Brent Cuningham Danielle Pafunda Jamaal May GC Waldrep Ryan Doyle May James Yeh Matt Hart E. Tracy Grinnell Brenda Iijima Molly Gaudry Sina…
From “Leonora Carrington: A Retrospective Exhibition” (1975) – excerpts from Introduction by Edward James: “Leonora’s work is no pastiche of the 16th century. Its similarity is rather due to the fact that Leonora Carrington was endowed from birth with the versatility of a Renaissance man [Women’s Lib having not yet reared its head]. The fact…
With that in mind, I will be posting shorts a la Facebook posts. Little posts, little notes. Leonora Carrington died last year at 94. She was NOT a Surrealist. She associated with the group and was with Max Ernst for two years. The thinking person who does some research will discover that she was critical…
Words and Music by Metta Sáma EXCERPTS: “King’s book is not quiet; hers is an aesthetics of sound fractured, fragmented, compounded, mixed, remixed, sampled, jointed, yes, even anointed. (Check out the cover of this book, it’s sparseness of image, this blaringly red background, these glaringly gray figures, mouths open. Caught mid-pounce (whose in danger? (you…
SENTENTIA 4 What She Says: The All Women Writers Issue 164 pages edited by Paula Bomer, Amy King (poetry) and Jen Michalski (fiction) $10 (+$2 shipping) Including work by: Betsy Boyd, Ana Bozicevic, Mikita Brottman, Megan Calhoun, Ching-in Chen, Andrea DeAngelis, Kathy Flann, Sherrie Flick, Heather Fowler, Ana Garcia Begua, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jen Grow,…
Harriet @ Poetry Foundation remarks, “you’ve got to check out Esque Mag Issue 3 … It’s beautiful.” Announcing Esque (click!) For the third issue of esque, REVOLUTIONESQUE, we asked you to tell us about the revolution. We didn’t define what we mean by that. Whether it lives in your home, in the financial district, or the district…
Read more 108 Beads per Rosary + 108 Poets per REVOLUTIONESQUE
CLICK: * Support Small Press Distribution * Litmus Press * The French Exit on “The Strange Power of Lying to Yourself“ “Rarely have the nude and the cooked been so neatly joined” as in Amy King’s I Want to Make You Safe. If “us,” “herons,” and “dust” rhyme, then these poems rhyme. If that…
Congratulations to all of those New Yorkers who exercised their long-overdue civil rights yesterday and got married! Especially the Manhattan couple, Phyllis Siegel, 76, and Connie Kopelov, 84, – together for 23 years! I hate to break the news though, the U.S. Federal Government doesn’t think you’re actually a couple! Neither do my relatives in the south…
Articles (click titles) on The Count @ VIDA: 1.) The Lack of Female Bylines in Magazines Is Old News – Katha Pollitt @ Slate 2.) Being Female — Eileen Myles @ The Awl 3.) How To Publish Women Writers: A Letter to Publishers about the VIDA Count — Annie Finch @ Her Circle 4.)…
Lorna Simpson talks about her career, including her recent practice of appropriating and restaging mid-20th-century photographs. * Why Black History Month Still Matters * Pollitt speaks on women’s equality struggles * Women Stage Massive Protests Across Italy: ‘The Sexism Is Intolerable ‘ (Video) * Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and “Fun” Feminism * Hatem addresses emergence of…
Women don’t travel and write about it, or so the New Yorker’s Bill Buford might have us believe via the Best American Travel Writing 2010. Actually, the truth is that one of the 20 essays included is written by a woman. My bad. We’re still watching what the rest of the 2010 “Best of American”…
What Would Woolf and Whitman Do? (A Practical Primer) “This is the beauty of the new media. There is no way to control it.” –Srdja Popovic What would Woolf, Whitman, Stein, Eliot, Pound, and countless other self-published writers do in the face of the monolithic publishing industry today? Which new and contemporary writers should consider…
Read more Your Own Revolution: Poetry, Publishing & the Internet
NEW REVIEW OF SLAVES TO DO THESE THINGS @ WET ASPHALT — …while ultimately what I think King is concerned with here is the nature of becoming by moving against time as a sort of point of resistance, what she is not interested in is sustaining such artificial constructs as the Master Slave dialectic itself,…
NEW REVIEW OF SLAVES TO DO THESE THINGS by Bobbi Lurie @ Jacket Magazine” Amy King’s poems are dense and energetically written. They are often fragmented collages of narratives which are in no way narratives in the usual sense. They express a great deal of movement of the mind, written with a strong imagination and…
“But What About the Nipples?” A Nice Conversation (Pt. 1) From Roxane Gay: Blake Butler, Kate Zambreno, Amy King and I recently had an interesting and lengthy conversation about gender, publishing and so much more, prompted by lots of things including the recent, and largely excellent discussion in Blake’s “Language Over Body” post about the…
“Fuck the Corporate Media” – Students *Love* Discussing This Analysis ~~ Alanis Morissette Honors Her Feminist Foremothers “I wouldn’t even tell people I was black in Mississippi!” ‘Boobquake’ Spurs Feminist Infighting Sometimes people think I’m Gertrude Stein [GRT! Video] Gender, fucked Reclaiming the ‘B-Word’ In the Name of Feminism “Click”: The feminist eureka moment The…
“Best of 2009″ and “Historical Count” BEST OF 2009 Amazon – Top 100 Editors’ Picks 2009 77 Men 23 Women ~~~ The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation 2009 5 Men 5 Women Lifetime Achievement Award – 1 Man ~~~ Christian Science Monitor — Best books of 2009: Fiction 5 Men 7 Women Christian Science…
“…Pound praised H.D.’s writing by saying that it was ‘straight as the Greek’ and with no ‘slither.’ It took me awhile to see the gynophobia behind such rhetoric. I wanted my Imagism and my slither, too. My precision and my doubleness. … There is a way in which I am all of these…
AMY KING 