Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review has published a long-lost text by the poet Walt Whitman: a health manifesto entitled, “Manly Health and Training.” Graduate student Zachary Trupin discovered the forty-seven-thousand-word series last summer while browsing through a digital database of newspapers. The text, which had been published under one of Whitman’s pseudonyms in an obscure newspaper, had been lost for more than a hundred fifty years. In the series, Whitman offers advice on everything from diet, shaving, gymnastics, baseball, and footwear. (New York Times)
As National Poetry Month winds down, poet Jericho Brown discusses why he writes and the difficulty of waiting for the next poem. “Somehow in the act of writing, the tree, the shoestring, the molestation, the mother, the beating, the burial, and the musical become the same. Each item of one’s life—from experience or from imagination—merges until anything becomes material we can use to make the gorgeous and enduring thing.” (Boston Review)
In March, the University of Pittsburgh—under the leadership of poets Dawn Lundy Martin and Terrance Hayes—launched the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, or what Hayes describes as a creative think tank for poetics in “all things American, all things African, all things in that little hyphen.” (Pitt News)
At the New Yorker, Daniel A. Gross considers the practice of weeding a public library of its least-read books, and the popular blog run by two Michigan librarians, Awful Library Books. The blog features books that have been collecting dust on the shelves, such as Be Bold With Bananas, A Definitive Study of Your Future as a Dental Hygienist, and Big Bob and the Magic Valentine’s Day Potato.
“When I talk to novelists, we tend to talk about movies. It’s true. It’s much easier to talk about. I just don’t talk much about my work with other writers, and I don’t talk much about their work. A few sentences. We’re like two characters in an old Western movie in which the main element, the main audio element is to be very laconic.” Novelist Don DeLillo—whose latest novel, Zero K, comes out next week—talks with the Los Angeles Times’s Carolyn Kellogg about writing on a typewriter, old Western movies, and the reality of fiction.
In honor of the late Harper Lee’s ninetieth birthday, biographer Linda H. Davis recalls her correspondence with the author, and how “Harper Lee told me—graciously—to leave her alone” when she approached her to write a biography. (Washington Post)
Amazon sales show no signs of slowing: The company posted a $1.1 billion profit for the first quarter of 2016, which is a $255 million increase from the first quarter of 2015. Amazon partially attributes the increase to the success of its cloud service and increased sales of Fire tablets. (Publishers Weekly)
“The weirdness of revising is that you don’t know what you’re looking for. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, how do you know when it’s right? That already puts you in a trance-like state, where you’re unearthing something that you don’t even know what it is. So, how do you recognize it? Recognition is a puzzle. Something I worry over. When I feel the poem is done, it’s both that I’m just sick of it and tired of it, but also that I’ve made the discovery, I’ve found the thing that I didn’t even know I was looking for.” Divedapper interviews poet Fanny Howe.
