In 2011, NPR's Terry Gross had a nice chat with Maurice Sendak.

You can check out her interview here.

The Vulture ranks Stephen King's work in honor of the publication of his 62nd novel, "The Wind Through the Keyhole."

Given King's voracious output, I've barely made a dent in his work. But I once read him somewhat voraciously, and my favorite King book is "It." "It" is over 1,000 pages long, and I've read it twice. The characters remain as vivid to me as those in "Anna Karenina" and "Moby Dick," and the story still mesmerizes. 

Anyway, click here to see the list.

The mammoth, Titanic-like opening of the movie version of the first installment of The Hunger Games series (in what has now become movieland tradition, the other two books will be coming to you as three more films) has catapulted the already best-selling books into the Harry Potter sales stratosphere and has got everybody in a Hunger Games frenzy. Being a guy who pretty much always follows the crowd, I also read the books, saw the movie, perused the articles and listened to the soundtrack album (well, it's not exactly a soundtrack album but we'll get to that). Will it be a passing fad? Well, maybe. If so, will it be a passing fad with an awful lot of fascinating content? No question.

Just like with Harry Potter, it's the books that remain the center of this cultural phenomenon. But this trilogy could not be more different than J.K. Rowling's seven books. Rowling created an expansive and wholly lived-in altered universe only slightly different from our own, complete with entire casts of characters in different locations, both micro- and meta-politics, plenty of humor mixed in with the gruel, and a heroic battalion grouped around “The Boy Who Lived” (who grew from an 11-year-old kid to high school senior over the course of the books). In literature terms, it was something on the order of “War and Peace," except, you know, sort of for kids, with wizards and stuff. Suzanne Collins' Panem is something completely different - an unremittingly dark, claustrophobic world (actually just a single country - there is no mention of the world outside of Panem, which is the former U.S. destroyed and reconstituted after a catastrophic war) where much of the detail is only cryptically (or allegorically) rendered, and there is just a small, closed circle of characters who stand in for various philosophical worldviews. And everything is filtered through the first-person narrative of the main character. A classical literature comparison might be more like “Moby Dick," without the whales (I find myself making these literature comparisons as an argument against people like Joel Stein, who wrote that adults should only read adult books in the New York Times).

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Over at the DG, I offer my thoughts on the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Olive Kitteridge."

Click here to read more.

A couple weeks ago I decided to check out a local open mike. I wanted to see what other people were writing, get a chance to meet some fellow writers, maybe even read some things I’d written recently. The open mic night was hosted by a local writing center, so I hoped it might attract a more literary crowd than a reading at any old café or bar.

I was running a little late as usual, and was worried when I climbed the stairs to the second floor that I’d be interrupting the first or second reader by barging though the double doors. But when I got to the small room with a podium and rows of chairs climbing to the back, a man stood waiting patiently for all stragglers to file in and take a seat. There were probably a dozen or so people, a few younger, most middle aged, seated in groups of two or three, black winter coats draped behind their chairs. Maybe another dozen came in by the time the night was over.

The host read some poems from his magazine and then opened up the floor by saying, “We haven’t had a sign in sheet for this reading yet, and though we might start one someday, I don’t see the need to do it now.” And he invited anyone who cared to read to come forward and do so.

I did not have terribly high expectations for the night, but considering what came next, I might have been asking to be ferried to the moon and back in the arms of a stuffed walrus.

I am surely revealing myself to be complete snob, but the reading fulfilled almost any open mic cliché you can think of. Ho hum Haiku? Check. Guitar players? Check. Long-winded, self-important old guys? Check. Random/angry bearded poet playing atonal ditties on the concertina between poems? Oh yes.

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After writing a piece about poets using Twitter I became fascinated enough to want to join in myself (though still no  Facebook!).

I’ve also always been fascinated with writer’s notebooks, what interests and obsessions writer’s had, and I have kept a writer’s notebook in one form or another since college when my Creative Writing 101 professor said we all had to keep one. After going to Twitter a few times, I wondered what a writer’s notebook might look like if it were online, and decided Twitter might be a good place to start such a project.

So I am announcing the first ever, (as far as I know) open source, collaborative poetry notebook at @poetrynotes. If you write, or if you don’t, you can read my notes, post a thought, observation, weird  bit of language, or anything that catches your eye or ear and could be fodder for a poem or other form of writing. I’m hoping to create a space where anyone can share the raw material of poems, and then transform it into whatever work they find fitting.

And here are some recent poetry blogs from the web as well:

The Onion: National Endowment For The Arts Funds Construction Of $1.3 Billion Poem

McSweeney’s: Poetry FAQ

Dan Schneider is a former high school English teacher who lives and writes outside of the Rochester, N.Y., area.

Previous Posts By This Author: The Trouble With Poets

Where are the Poetry Blogs?: Twitter Poets

It’s not too often that disagreements in the poetry world get reported in the greater press, but recently the Guardian wrote about how Geoffrey Hill, Oxford Professor of Poetry, tore down British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s idea that texting is a new form of poetry.

In a lecture entitled “Poetry, Policing, and Public Order,” Hill said, “When the laureate speaks of the tremendous potential for a vital new poetry to be drawn from the practice of texting she is policing her patch, and when I beg her with all due respect to her high office to consider that she might be wrong, I am policing mine.” Hill contends that texting is not a form of poetic compression, just abbreviation.

He then dismisses her poem, “Death of a Teacher,” which reads: “You sat on your desk / swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats // to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed / as it fell in love with the words and I saw the tree / in the scratched old desk under my hands, heard the bird in the oak outside scribble itself on the air."  Hill responds, “What Professor Duffy desires to do I believe – and if so it is a most laudable ambition – is to humanise the linguistic semantic detritus of our particular phase of oligarchical consumerism. And for the common good she is willing to
have quoted by the Guardian interviewer several lines from a poem by herself that could easily be mistaken for a first effort by one of the young people she wishes to encourage.”

Hill has previously written about his belief that “difficult” poetry is actually the most democratic since it assumes the reader intelligent enough to grasp its meaning, but this seems a little stinging. He does go on in his lecture to praise another poem by Duffy, but the whole poetry dust-up made me start looking into the idea of “difficult” poetry and what people mean when they say a poem is “difficult.”

My former high school students, of course, would say almost any poem is difficult, and they have a point. Poetry, even the most outwardly simple of poems, poses difficulties, since there are elements — line breaks, sound effects, visual effects — that cannot be captured by its paraphrase. This makes high school students and probably a good deal of the population nervous, perhaps because the poem is demanding that its reader give up control over what is making meaning. Many readers unfamiliar with poetry may not trust that the writer will take care to give enough sign posts directing how the poem should be read.

As I delved into online resources on difficulty in poetry, I found many writers who can do it greater justice than I can, so I now defer to some experts on the topic.

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For what would have been David Foster Wallace's 50th birthday, The Awl has helpfully compiled links to 46 DFW-related pieces of writing.

Click here to check it out.

The new book "The Lifespan of the Fact," which is based on seven years of email exchanges between a writer (John D'Agata) and a fact checker (Jim Fingal), has generated a lot of interesting commentary. My biggest question, based on the Harper's excerpt I read, essentially boiled down to: Is this writer really as huge a jerk as he appears?

Well, The Awl has answered my question, posting a new transcript of exchanges between D'Agata and a different fact checker. And D'Agata comes across as, yes, a big, fat jerk. Here's an excerpt:

"Darren: Hi, John. My name is Darren, and I'm the intern at Room Service that will be fact-checking your piece. It was a thrilling read. My concern is that the Chicago Cubs didn't win the World Series in 1987.

John: “Piece?” I’m afraid I’m not sure I know to what you’re referring. Little help?

Darren: Hmmm. The essay you wrote for us. It’s great. :) There are just a few questions.

John: Oh. Essay is... better? I prefer to think of what I do as an experience. At a minimum, I expect five-sense engagement with any competent reader. I’m talking taste buds. Smell. Otherwise I should hang it up. Or you should do some better reading. Either way, you won’t need to fact-check this, uh, “piece.” How adorable. Print it or kill it.

Darren: Maybe we can compromise? Everyone here wants to print it.

John: Is English really your first language?"

And so on.

Here are some other good links on "The Lifespan of a Fact":

Dan Kois in Slate

Laura Miller in Salon

The Awl has produced a great piece on the maps we wandered into as kids, i.e. the maps featured in children's fantasy books such as "The Princess Bride" and "The Hobbit."

Click here to check it out, and see how well you remember these magical lands.

In honor of Charles Dickens' 200th birthday, I am posting this New York Times Magazine story about Dickens World, a Charles Dickens-themed attraction located in the English county of Kent.

Here's an excerpt from the piece by Sam Anderson:

"Five years ago, I flew to England to see the grand opening of something improbable: an attraction called Dickens World. It promised to be an 'authentic' re-creation of the London of Charles Dickens’s novels, complete with soot, pickpockets, cobblestones, gas lamps, animatronic Dickens characters and strategically placed chemical 'smell pots' that would, when heated, emit odors of offal and rotting cabbage. Its centerpiece was the Great Expectations boat ride, which started in a rat-infested creek, flew over the Thames, snaked through a graveyard and splashed into a sewer. Its staff had all been trained in Victorian accents and body language. Visitors could sit at a wooden desk and get berated by an angry Victorian schoolteacher, watch Dickensian holograms antagonize one another in a haunted house or set their kids loose in a rainbow-colored play area called, ominously, Fagin’s Den, after the filthy kidnapper from 'Oliver Twist.' The park’s operating budget was $124 million.

Dickens World, in other words, sounded less like a viable business than it did a mockumentary, or a George Saunders short story, or the thought experiment of a radical Marxist seeking to expose the terminal bankruptcy at the heart of consumerism. And yet it was real. Its existence raised a number of questions. Who was the park’s target audience? ('Dickens-loving flume-ride enthusiasts' seems like a small, sad demographic.) Was it a homage to, or a desecration of, the legacy of Charles Dickens? Was it the reinvention of, or the cheapening of, our culture’s relationship to literature? And even if it were possible to create a lavish simulacrum of 1850s London — with its typhus and cholera and clouds of toxic corpse gas, its sewage pouring into the Thames, its average life span of 27 years — why would anyone want to visit? ('If a late-20th-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period,' Peter Ackroyd, a Dickens biographer, has written, 'he would be literally sick — sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him.')

Click here to read the whole thing.

Over at Salon, Laura Miller argues that stories don't need morals or messages to be worth reading, and that the whole "reading is good for you" philosophy taps into this weird Puritanical strain in mainstream American culture.

My sense is that this is probably true, although I would argue that books can be fun and meaningful, and that it's perfectly fine to read for pleasure rather than personal growth.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from Miller's piece:

"What is the purpose of reading stories, especially made-up stories? That’s the question lurking behind a recent posting to the New York Times’ education blog, SchoolBook. Ann Stone and Jeff Nichols, the parents of twins, wrote about taking their kids’ third-grade English Language Arts test with some friends as a party game on New Year’s Eve. The group read an inane little story about tiger cubs learning to tear bark off logs, but, to their surprise, couldn’t agree on a single answer to the multiple choice question that followed: 'What is this story mostly about?'

Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students 'a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.' The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a 'banal' story like this tiger-cub number admits 'multiple interpretations,' and the prod to 'reduce the work to a single idea' does a disservice to both reader and text.

I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her 'Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,' 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference)."

Click here to read the whole thing.

Over at The Poetry Foundation website, Albany-based writer Daniel Nester has an interesting piece up on literary tourism. Reading it, I realized that I am a literary tourist, because when I travel I like to visit the homes of famous writers. In Key West, I visited the Hemingway house, and in California I visited the National Steinbeck Center, which is located in Steinbeck's hometown of Salinas.

Of a trip to the Brook Farm Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in Lenox, Mass., Nester writes:

"Years ago, one dream I carried into the world was that I wanted to be a poet. And so it came to pass that I entered the MFA program in poetry at New York University. If there was a secret language poets spoke, I wrote in my application’s statement of purpose, I wanted to speak it. And so for a year, I spaketh and workshoppeth, and then, in my second year, my teachers and fellow students journeyed north here, to Brook Farm Inn, to write poems and break bread together.

That was in 1996. Fifteen years later, I am back, not as a poet but as a literary tourist.

'Literary tourist?' you say. 'I’ve never heard of such a term.' Watch closely, because here’s where we pivot from personal anecdote to microtrend thinkpiece lede. Ever make a special trip to a used bookstore? Visit Shakespeare's home in Stratford-upon-Avon? Pilgrimage to a writer’s house or grave? Friend, you are a literary tourist."

One of the great things about Nester's piece is that it makes you feel like visiting the homes, graves and various institutions associated with famous writers is a fun and popular thing to do. Everyone's a literary tourist!

I consider myself a fan of Edgar Allen Poe, but I'm not as obsessed with him as his most devoted fans. For instance: the mysterious fan who visits Poe's grave each year on the anniversary of his birth, and leaves behind three red roses and a bottle of cognac.

But this mysterious figure, known as the "Poe Toaster," hasn't shown up for the past two years, and now Poe fans are worried the tradition is over. I'm a little worried myself. It's a good tradition, and it would be a shame if it came to an end.

To learn more about the Poe Toaster, visit this Wall Street Journal article.

Just before New Years I contemplated joining Facebook, a social media step I never before had been tempted to take. My wife walked me right up to the edge, filling in a username and password for me on the new user page. Her logic: It would be great to be able get the news from friends and family that sometimes was only broadcasted on Facebook. I might even get more readers for my writing. And she wouldn’t have to be the one with the Facebook page.

Contemplating the jump into social media made me wonder how writer are using it. I was curious about Facebook still, but more fascinated by Twitter. Would a tweeting writer mostly post updates about new books, readings and publications, or do some writers use the medium as a way to take notes and share ideas for work? Maybe I could find some micro-novels and pint sized poems in the Twitterverse (Twittersphere? I’m still not sure what to call things these days).

So as I was poking around the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, I was pleased to be introduced to D.A. Powell and Arda Collins, via a piece on poets who tweet posted on the Lit Pub by Tiffany Gibert, a Brooklyn writer and reviewer. She compares the tweeting writer to the metalsmith, whose “work becomes more difficult and more intricate with smaller objects.” She continues:

The writers I love tweet about nonsense. They tweet because it’s amusing. They tweet stories and dreams and observations that succinctly demonstrate why they write, that they must. They tweets shards of wisdom so sharp that I feel the dullness of my own tweets, and I hope that my RTs do not debase their gracefully worded morsels.  

As I hadn’t really ventured into Twitter before, it took a minute to adjust my verbal focus to the #hashtags and @replytopreviouspost Twitterese. (Whoever came up with the name Twitter knew something about how words catch hold and recombine!) But like Shakespearean verse - if one can at all compare the two - once I got the feel of the way things are put and the terseness of a 140 character statement, it got easier.

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