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Literary Arts
Political Poetry at the Sacrifice of Art
Sam Hamill’s newest book, Measured By Stone, comes to us from a press devoted to political creative writing. Curbstone Press describes itself as “a publishing house dedicated to multicultural literature that reflects a commitment to social awareness and change,” a place that publishes “creative writers whose work promotes human rights and intercultural understanding.” It should not be surprising, therefore, that Hamill’s book brims with barely contained -- sometimes outright angry -- political lyrics. More
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Literary Arts
"It’s So You" at Black Oak Books
Adolescence reviles containment. Put more precisely, uniforms are anathema to every teenager. Fashion is, after all, self-expression -- and no demographic rejects limits on its self-expression more arduously than youth. San Francisco poet and activist Michelle Tea recalls with unrepentant vigor her own version of the classic struggle against the schoolyard powers in the introduction to It’s So You, the Seal Press anthology she edited. More
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Literary Arts
Long Live the Gadfly!
The Gadfly, as described by Plato in reference to Socrates ’critical stance toward the Athenian political scene, represents, perhaps, the earliest articulated example of a Muckraker. Though the term "muckraker" didn’t come into the language until American writer Upton Sinclair burst on the scene with his industry-busting The Jungle in 1906, a long tradition of Gadflies -- both before and after Sinclair -- have combined the illuminating light of the whistleblower with the prose of good letters. More
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Literary Arts
The Uses of Enchantment
It’s late fall in the Boston suburb of West Salem. There’s snow and cloud cover and so it’s hard to say what time of day it is exactly. Two teams of girls playing field hockey shiver on their respective sidelines, waiting for school officials, as they inevitably will, to call the game and let them go home. Just before that happens, though, one of the girls slips off, allegedly to go to the bathroom. Instead she makes her way to the parking lot, where she taps her hockey stick on the glass window of a car idling there. More
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Literary Arts
Verbatim Theater
James Baldwin believed fervently in the salvific power of literature -- and in the power of a writer to affect change. “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” There were limitations to that power, he believed, but had no other course than to address whatever corrupted principalities permeated the day. More
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Literary Arts
Joe likes Nancy
For Joe Brainard love hit like a freight train the first time he spied Nancy: “The first time I saw Nancy she was eating a chicken salad sandwich at Joe’s, just around the corner from my father’s hardware store. I didn’t know what to do, she was just so beautiful. So I just stood there, looking. Bright red lips. White oval face. (Soft) big black eyes.” To be clear, Brainard’s talking here about the cartoon character Nancy and the year is 1963. More
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Literary Arts
I Go Searching For Music
Katie Ford and I crossed paths for the first time on a sultry day in Iowa City. I was quickly enthralled by her keen sense for what makes good poetry, her urgent probing of every line of verse she encountered, her willingness to push further into the heart of things, to carry conversation about the art to fresh and exhilarating levels. Ford’s own poems are durable and elliptical and lovely. Her work, like the work of so many poets of this generation, eschews easy categorization into school or style pigeonholes. It is neither inaccessible nor easy -- and thank goodness on both counts. More
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Literary Arts
poem
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Literary Arts
Once a whimsical Berkeley lit mag devoted to dogs, The Bark is now cutting more mainstream teeth on service journalism, publishing a book, and spawning a litter of imitators.
Somewhere between Dog Fancy and Harper's there was a void, and Claudia Kawczynska and Cameron Woo found a way to fill it. Devoted dog lovers, the couple started The Bark, a quarterly magazine based in Berkeley that in seven years has grown from the newsletter of an offleash advocacy group into a circulation of 75,000. More
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Literary Arts
Local erotica purveyors Greenery Press carry on the Bay Area's smart smut tradition
If you were to peek into the bedroom of a local literate pervert, it's quite likely at least one title from Greenery Press would be on the nightstand. Since 1992, the Bay Area-based erotica, kink, and how-to manual publisher has been capturing and promoting "responsible, respectful, safety-oriented nonfiction and fiction." It's easy to imagine this was the vocation of choice for cofounder, president, and frequent author Janet Hardy, who describes herself as a "writer, perv, pain slut and educator who has been fantasizing about S/M since she was too little to wrap her hand around a whip handle." More
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