Sundays 11am-12pm on 89.7 KRUI Iowa City, IA

Apologies for the late post!

Last week we had three college freshmen from the Iowa Writers Community. Upon entering the University of Iowa, avid writers are encouraged to apply for a spot on two floors of the Stanley dormitory. A graduate student in the famous Iowa Writer’s Workshop coordinates guided workshops for student’s pieces. Ben McFarlane, Charles Crawford and Kyle Laws shared pieces of prose and poetry.

Three students from the community visited us on Valentines Day to grumble about the English major and the apparent lack of serious writers on campus. “When we joined the floor, we expected a more conglomerate group of writers,” said Mr. Crawford, but he’s sticking with writing for the long haul.

I plan to write horrible genre fiction that’s awful, but makes the plebes smile.
-Mr. Crawford

Here is a selection from Mr. McFarlane,

‘Collecting’ is not ‘Building’

I have been waiting here for more parts to install onto you
but I didn’t send for any. I don’t think you are a full set
and now I don’t believe in Love.

A selection from Mr. Laws, the “black sheep of the writer’s floor”

“See Me Stand at the Top of This Flagpole and Throw My Underwear at You”

The Earth spins .003 degrees on its axis
and a shrinking sun passes close to home
crying out like baby’s momma.
I’ve received the sirens and refuse
and all the deer are still all dead.

Literati pushed the conversation further, how, as freshmen, typical college distractions like alcohol seem to intervene with the quality or quantity of writing around students. The three struggle through the love-affair with the English language internally regardless of outside diversions.

Trying to be a professional poet is like trying to be a professional chess player. -Ben McFarlane

Next week, we will have a representative from the Iowa Women’s Resources Book Group discussing Nicholas Kristof’s Half the Sky

Thanks for listening!

-Literati-

Three lovely ladies joined last Sunday’s show to read poetry from inspiring authors and their own collections:

Kathyrn Duffy, Editor in Chief of the literary magazine Earthwords

Amanda Kusek, Poetry Editor for the literary review Aberrant Parade

Kristin Anderson, Poetry Editor for Earthwords

Ms. Duffy read from Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Stephen Dunn’s The Insistence of Beauty and Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck. Duffy says she thinks ponders “Walk to my memory”, by Rich, every time she tries to write her own poetry. Duffy has already been published, she first submitted poetry to the non-profit Iowa City literary magazine, The Daily Palette, later receiving a request for her poetry in poem The Purple Scarf was accepted by a publishing company out of Pennsylvania!

Ms. Kusek loves F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and, like Fitzgerald, tries to capture her generation through poetry. Her poem, Eve’s Curse, is sub-titled Response to Adam’s Curse by W.B. Yeats. Kusek, in her first two drafts, the last word of each line in her poem matched a part of the Yeat’s poem. So, reading down the right hand margin, one could read his stanza. In the end, decided to “let the poem become what it wanted to be outside of these constraints”

Eve’s Curse
Response to Adam’s Curse by W.B. Yeats

You fill my red plastic cup, and I
strive to discover your name
to thank you and tell you that I love
the color of your jeans, the shape of the room.
Words flee my mouth
like ants in the rain.
I love the beanbag chair, the party you’re throwing,
I love what I’m drinking I love—
I find it hard to believe that
you have invited me upstairs
all the way up.
I feel like Alice on rollercoaster stairs
that don’t lead anywhere and that move
like the backs of whales underneath my feet.
I blink once only to find more blur, my nails digging in
to the railing there. I’m following you, hope you
won’t forget me back here. I drop the cup and watch it fall
streaming liquid against your walls, there is no bottom
no bottom at all but I turn again and we are there
an old attic room furnished with Sublime posters and issues of High
Times stacked in a corner. You push socks out of the way
brush them off of the bed along with a cat of
tabby color and milk eyes. I love
when you say my name, because that
means you know it. Though I never told you.
Do I know you? It feels
good but it must be 2 am and I’ve had
so much, too much, the walls are all
waving at me while I grit my teeth and this all seemed
like I believed it and you ask if I am okay, if I am happy.
The cat is staring, he’s staring at me with those
glazed over, coffee with drops of cream eyes.
My stomach flips and I’m sure it’s the gin and
beer wrestling over who is going to come up first and yet
I tell you I’m fine, I don’t know why. We’d
been stripped of clothes by now and the gin is rising rising I’ve grown
tired as your lips repeatedly press mine as
I pretend that I can hold my alcohol and I am weary-hearted
because I have seen you before and as
you slipped off my panties I realize it was in that
store where I bought a book about the hollow, empty night
and I hadn’t though of you again until I clambered down the stairs
and left with my head tilted far enough back I transformed the moon.

Kusek, Duffy, Anderson discuss poetic ethics...or was it jam hands?

Ms. Anderson says she normally writes fiction, but W.S. Merwin and her Modern Poetry class showed her that poetry can express things that fiction can’t like playing around with words and structure. This is one of her first poems:

Petals

Petals consider them
selves to be
overwhelmed by
the way we say
plastics
politics
sidekicks

old tics

Our perforated selves
Lincoln Long cells
Engrossed by the things
we wrote

rote.

et al (most there).

Some advice from the editors
When these three ladies receive poetry submission for their various magazines, they look for certain qualities. So, University of Iowa students, ponder these paraphrased comments before you submit your work!
Kristin: We look for common themes; angst and love are particularly rampant. You want a piece that teaches something new.
Kathryn: Something that makes me think, a piece that gives different feelings, images, whatnot every, single time.
Amanda: Bright images and strong voices!

Thank you to all of our readers!

Not Your Literati’s semi-weekly music pick
Home I’ll Never Be (Written by Jack Kerouac) cover by The Low Anthem

Yours truly,
NYL

Kurt Vonnegut taught at the UI Writer's Workshop in 1965

Greetings from the studio,

Not Your Literati spoke with Jordan Thomas, the creator of an undergraduate reading series in downtown Iowa City’s Public Space One. He read from a non-fiction essay entitled “Blood and Water and Fire,” a piece outlining Thomas’ past relationship with his family, namely his father. It is a gripping piece, especially when heard through Thomas’ earnest baritone voice. He weaves vignettes of his life through interchanges of pure, childish emotion and painful self-affliction.

A selection from “Blood and Water and Fire:”

“I don’t remember many things about my childhood; most of what I do remember is second-hand, stories told to me by my mother and my older brother. I don’t remember, for instance, the night my father threw me against the wall of our living room because I was awake past my bedtime. Nor do I remember him placing me on top of the refrigerator and refusing to let me down when I was young and small enough to fear even that short fall. I don’t remember why he did this, but I’m told it was because it amused him. I don’t remember many good things about my father.

This is what I do remember:

My father spanking me for breaking a vase in a furniture store. He took me behind the building, pulled my pants down, and spanked me so hard that I couldn’t sit down for hours afterward.

My father coming into the bedroom I shared with my brother, singing “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” to wake me up. “Rise and shine,” he’d say. And then he’d carry me on his shoulders down the stairs to the kitchen for breakfast, sunlight streaming through our patio door.

Working in his dental office and seeing him being friendlier and more civil with his patients than he was with me. I am still confused by this and can’t reason out why that was the case.

A road trip to Atlanta, just him and I. This was before I graduated high school, after my parents separated. He would tell bad jokes because I was the only one who found them funny. We would listen to NPR. He’d lecture me on the follies of my mother and her family.

Yells rattling the pictures hanging on the walls as he raged towards my brother for his poor grades or my mother about bills and finances. I would cry into my pillow when this happened. My older brother, in the bunk above me, pretended to sleep, offering no words to comfort me.

I also remember the funeral.”

Jordan’s Picks:
“Notes from No Man’s Land” by Eula Biss, A Selection of American Essays
Specifically: Back to Buxton and No Man’s Land

Buy it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Notes-No-Mans-Land-American/dp/1555975186

It’s late,
Literati