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:
Poets, do not fear the tech-pocalypse just yet: Computers are not good at writing poems! Dartmouth College recently held a contest—a variation of the Turing Test—that pitted artificial intelligence against human poets; the judges were easily able to distinguish between sonnets written by humans and those produced by the algorithms, the latter which lacked poetic feeling and nuance—you know, the human aspects. (Associated Press)
Speaking of today’s tech, how does a fiction writer who chronicles contemporary society keep up with the times, while simultaneously attempting to achieve artistic timelessness? One tactic, fiction writer Teddy Wayne suggests, is to “anonymize the technology, lest it soon be replaced. Instead of having a character watching a show on Netflix or HBO Go, it might be more prudent to talk of generically ‘streaming’ it (a term that may someday look as needlessly silly as ‘word search’).” (New York Times)
“In the twenty-first century, Emily Dickinson has become very much about ourselves, an interpretation that has been allowed to flourish partly because of her anonymity.” At the New Republic, Alexandra Pechman considers how biographers of poet Emily Dickinson fail to show readers who she was, instead reading “Dickinson herself like a text,” and making her into a version of the biographer.
The New Yorker features an excerpt of a correspondence between Elena Ferrante and another Italian novelist, Nicola Lagioia. The full version of the interview will appear in Ferrante’s forthcoming book, Frantumaglia, which will be published in November by Europa Editions.
“Poetry is a bridge where we can meet and see one another clearly without shame or pause.” Poets Ocean Vuong and Camille Rankine, both whose debut collections were published by Copper Canyon Press, are participating in the press’s New Poets Project, a campaign to fund the publication of debut books.
Since Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for her novel The Vegetarian on Tuesday, searches for the term Kafkaesque spiked dramatically at Merriam-Webster.com.
Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press, discusses the “gatekeeper” divide between traditional and independent publishing (“where the role gets falsely propped up by supporters of traditional publishing and completely dismissed by those who favor the indie space”), and suggests that book distributors may the industry’s new gatekeepers. (Huffington Post)
