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Is there anywhere poetry can’t go?

Sea Things link to The Red Room CompanyHave you heard of the Sea Things poetry project? It is The Red Room Company’s new national poetry project and it was launched yesterday in Hobart. Sea Things is commissioning new works from four exciting Australian poets, and travelling around the country by sea to collect maritime poems from members of the public, writers and schools. ABC Radio National is their media partner. Join them and submit your poems of the sea. Visit pool.org.au ... read more

Written by Alex Skutenko on 2-10-2009, 2 user comments

Infinitely Superficial

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Blogging, and the internet in general, is infinitely superficial and trivial. Literature is deep, drill-like; the private and personal versus the public and anonymous. So said Wells Tower recently at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. He elaborated on the idea, creating an image of a computer screen that went on as far as the eye could see, but it could never be more than a few centimetres deep. The book is the opposite.

Most books suck though. I don’t know why people are amazed by this kind of statement. I’d sound like a fool if I said that all movies were wonderful. Or all musicians were saintly figures that as a collective should be treated as sacred. Somehow the same rules don’t apply to literature. It’s subjective of course, but I’ll stand by that comparison. Just as many awful books have been written as poorly acted, drunkenly directed, badly scripted films have been made. Maybe more. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 2-10-2009, 3 user comments

Reviewing in an age of change

Another cheery story about the emerging literary landscape.

Columbia English professor James Shapiro’s undergraduate seminar, “The Book Review,” which teaches skills necessary for students to make it as freelance literary critics, is on indefinite hiatus.

“There are intellectual reasons to teach the course again,” Professor Shapiro wrote in an email, when the Transom asked if a rumor that he’d discontinued the class was true. “But what’s no longer there is the possibility of training a generation of book reviewers, since, as you know, newspapers around the country are shedding their book reviews, or shrinking these sections.” ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 1-10-2009, No comments