Tag: Paris Review

It’s REALLY Hot Out

John Winkelman

Monarch Caterpillar on Milkweed

Like, seriously hot. The middle of the week hit the upper 90s by the thermometer, and over 100 by heat index. With that kind of heat any activity which requires any kind of energy is exceptionally difficult.

No new books arrived in the past week, so I have included a photo of one of the five (as of this past Monday) Monarch caterpillars currently munching their way through our small patch of milkweed. With the severe decline in the population of Monarchs overall, every one of these small beasts is precious.

In reading news, I have finished the first of the two dozen or so back issues of The Paris Review taking up space on my shelves. The past couple of weeks have been much busier than usual so I am not keeping up with my usual reading pace. Plus, much like the computers with which I have worked for well over half of my life, my brain doesn’t work so well when it is overheated.

I did manage to finish Githa Hariharan’s beautiful essay collection Almost Home. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the study and contemplation of cities and the experiences of immigrant, refugees, and those on the receiving end of colonialism.

With Almost Home complete, I have picked up Janelle Monáe‘s collection The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories From Dirty Computer. I have been looking forward to this one since I first heard of it at ConFusion 2022, back in January. The reviews are favorable so I have high hopes.

In writing news, other than journaling I haven’t done a lot. Too many other things going on in my life which are sapping my energy and competing for time. I don’t really expect the rest of the month to be any slower but I hope to make progress transcribing my poetry from two months ago.

So that’s it for this week. Work is crazy right now, as it always is in June as the next-to-last quarter of the fiscal year winds up and everyone heads to their own wherever for vacations. I have the first two weeks of July off, which I hope to use for more than recovery time. We will see how things shake out.

June, All At Once

John Winkelman

Voices 2022

I almost made it through the week without adding anything to the library, but at the last moment I attended the reading for the 2022 Dyer-Ives Poetry Contest. The winners and runners-up are collected in Voices, the annual magazine of the Dyer-Ives competition.

The event was wonderful! Over a dozen of the contestants read their pieces. They ranged in age from 7 or so to probably the late fifties, though the readers definitely skewed young, with all except maybe two being under thirty. The high school students had some of the most powerful poems, and the adult winner wrote a very pointedly anti-capitalist poem, which warmed the cockles of my aging heart.

I didn’t recognize anyone at the event, other than the coordinator Kelsey May, who I met in my capacity as editor at The 3288 Review, when we published a couple of her poems back in 2019. The readers made me feel, well, old. Then again, I consider this a good thing, because if after three years away I only saw the same people as in the Before Times, and they were all Millennials or Gen-X-ers, then something would be very wrong with the poetry community in Grand Rapids.

Yesterday evening Zyra and I wandered downtown to the Festival of the Arts and attended the Love and Peace Jam at the Calder stage. It was fantastic! Several local and regional poets, including Dyer-Ives Finalist Naiara Tamminga and Lansing poet Laureate Masaki Takahashi read and performed, and for the first time I had the privilege of hearing our own poet laureate Kyd Kane read her work at a live event. The event was coordinated by The Diatribe, with Foster (a.k.a. Autopilot) and Kyd Kane hosting.

In reading news, I am caught up to 2022 in my backlog of issues of Poetry Magazine. It still feels good to read such a variety of poetry in such a volume.

I am almost finished with Kameron Hurley‘s excellent collection Future Artifacts, which arrived recently from Apex Book Company. I really like Hurley’s work. Her writing is lush and gritty and I sometimes detect echoes of writers like Jack Vance and Robert Howard.

So now that I am reading poetry and short fiction, my next reading project is to work through all of my back issues of The Paris Review, which is a quarterly instead of a monthly, so I should be able to put a sizable dent in the backlog by the end of the year. The Paris Review publishes short fiction and nonfiction, poetry and interviews, so this should be an interesting, varied,  and enjoyable project.

In writing news, I am still typing up my poems from April. I would make much faster progress if my handwriting was not so terrible. One more thing to work on, I guess.

Poetry Resurgent and Resplendent

John Winkelman

Newly arrived in the week of March 20, 2022, and Poe

Early Satuday afternoon I drove to Garfield Park just south of downtown Grand Rapids, where I was interviewed as part of An Oral History of Poetry in Grand Rapids. I haven’t really been involved with the poetry community for a few years, thanks in no small part to the COVID pandemic, so this was a wonderful reintroduction to The Scene.

As part of the interview my interviewer Toni Bal asked me to read a poem. I brought “Back-Road Labyrinth,” which I wrote in 2018 or 2019. This was the first time I had read a poem in about three years, the previous being “36 Views of New Orleans” at The Drunken Retort in (I think) 2018. Now that I have read it, maybe it is time for me to send it out to be published.

I donated most of the print run of The 3288 Review to the project, from the Caffeinated Press archives which occupy three banker’s boxes in my office closet.

The new issue of The Paris Review was the only arrival this week. Poe is earning her keep as a book rest, atop her panda blanket as she watches the porch for squirrels and birds.

In reading news, I finished Patrick S. Tomlinson‘s Gate Crashers. It was a lot of fun, with engaging characters and an interesting plot. Gate Crashers was Tomlinson’s first book, and it is a little rough around the edges. He mentions in the author’s note that he wrote it in response to the ending of the movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it shows in the sense of humor and turns of phrase. Then again, there are worse influences to wear on your sleeve than Douglas Adams.

I am currently reading I am the Brother of XX, written by Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy and translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff.

In writing news, I didn’t do much this week other than edit the poem I read for my interview. But I feel better than I have the past few weeks, so perhaps the changing of the month will bring renewed energy and I will be able to get back in the saddle.

March, Already and Still

John Winkelman

It was almost exactly a year ago that the COVID lockdown hit West Michigan and I began working from home. As the joke goes, this is not March 7, 2021, it is March 372, 2020.

A small pile of books and periodicals arrived here in the past week. On the left is volume 3 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. This was difficult to find, as it is a very specific volume 3 which is part of a set which was published in 1992. I picked up volumes 1 and 2 from the remainder shelf of Schuler Books and Music sometime around 1995. I kept hoping volume 3 would show up for cheap, and I left the bookstore in 1999 with that dream unfulfilled.

Next is The Best of Apex Magazine, which is volume 1 of a series, the other volumes of which have not yet been published. Apex Magazine went on hiatus in 2019 and has just recently come back, so future volumes of the anthology will hopefully be printed in upcoming years.

Next is Notes from Childhood by Norah Lange, translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Whittle and published by And Other Stories.

And last but not least is the latest issue of The Paris Review, which has managed to stay in print and excellent and relevant for over fifty years, which is admirable.

In reading news, I am well into Deepak Unnikrishnan’s weird and wonderful novel Temporary People (Restless Books), which started out as a collection of short stories in the literary fiction genre, but soon blew straight through magic realism into the realms of satire and surrealism. And it is really, really good.

In writing news, events of the mundane world sapped away much of my free time and emotional energy and I accomplished very little. I still feel the drive and desire to be creatively productive so perhaps next week will be more fulfilling.

Tune in next week for such thrilling tales as “Welp. Here I am again,” and “Here are some books,” and if time and energy allow, “Here is some stuff I have been thinking about.” See you next time, loyal reader(s)!

A Quiet Week

John Winkelman

It was a quiet week here at Winkelman Abbey, what with the latest polar vortex turning Grand Rapids into a wasteland of ice and snow. Not a lot of time or energy for complex tasks (or thought), so it is just as well that the new stack was small.

From left we have the latest issue of The Paris Review and the new Two Lines journal. Next is 77, the most recent shipment from my subscription to Open Letter Books. The last two are If This Goes On and Hope in This Timeline, books from a couple of Kickstarter campaigns which I backed some time ago. They will go nicely with the other resistance-themed anthologies which I have picked up over the last few months.

Speaking of such anthologies, I am still reading through A People’s Future of the United States, which remains amazing. Such consistently powerful writing from an exceptionally diverse group of writers! I expect to have it finished by the end of this week.

This issue of The Paris Review includes an interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who will turn 100 in a couple of weeks! The interview was conducted over several weeks in 2018, when he was 99. That he is still alive is remarkable, and that he is still active in the literary world is nothing short of astonishing! In the interview he offhandedly mentions regular occurrences from his early life in France, like occasionally seeing Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoer in a cafe in Paris. You know – trivial things.

Ferlinghetti’s book A Coney Island of the Mind was published in 1958, which means it has been out for over 60 years. I have the 50th anniversary edition, which I picked up at City Lights Bookstore this past June. Ferlinghetti has been doing great things in and for the literary world for a decade longer than I have been alive, and he is still going at it, with a new book, Little Boy, coming out on March 19. I was going to hold off on buying more books for a while, but I can see this is a lost cause.

For more on Sartre and de Beauvoir, I highly recommend At the Existentialist Cafe.