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Prepared Poets

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The NYT looks at inaugurals and poets, and the work Elizabeth Alexander has cut out for herself:

She is going about making a poem for Mr. Obama, she said, by casting an eye back. “I have read the previous inaugural poems, as well as many others,” she said. “The ones that appeal to me have a sense of focus and a kind of gravitas, an ability to appeal to larger issues without getting corny.” One thing Ms. Alexander wants to do, she said, is speak clearly but artfully. “I don’t want the poem to talk down to some imagined audience,” she said. Among the poets she has been reading for guidance are Virgil, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Is she prepared, I asked, for a Robert Frost moment? What if her manuscript catches fire or blows away? “I am going to have many copies of the poem tucked away,” she replied, laughing. “I really am. In a boot. I’m serious. I will have backups. I’m a mom.”

I'd never heard the Frost anecdote, but, boy, those few lines they quote from "Dedication" are stinkers.

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What She Said

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Erica Perl writes a spirited defense of the Newbery's track record for Slate, which has lately been under attack all over the place:

Is a Newbery winner right for every kid? No—but what book is? Some kids will give the tougher tomes a try and come away with a richer vocabulary and a deeper appreciation of a world beyond their experience. Other kids will ditch them and dig right back into R.L. Stine (which, after all, is reading, too).

It's a good piece and I couldn't agree with her more. But I must admit that it also pleases me greatly that people in the children's literature field are invested enough to fight about this kind of thing. That in of itself speaks volumes about the Newbery's historic (and I'd argue continued) importance — and also about the general passion of the readers, writers, librarians and others who keep an eyeball on the latest kerfluffles and goings on.  (Link via tweety Sarah.)

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Have I Been Asleep?

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Girl So I'm breezing through the Book Bloggers Top 10 of 2008 in various categories over at Literary Escapism and the top children's book and one of the top vote-getters overall is The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum.

Okay, so the title alone would be enough to grab my interest, but it's also by Kate Bernheimer (with illustrations by Nicoletta Ceccoli). Why did I not know about this book? Which, I might add, got a starred review from PW.

What else have I missed this year? Please, let me know!

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Bright Friday

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Excuse me while I SQUEE for a moment, as I just sent in the PDF of my creative thesis (novel, abstract of critical thesis, and full bibliography) and have been informed it's all formatted appropriately.  (All I have left now is the residency, and all I have left to do in preparation for that is send some emails begging for wisdom from a few people for my lecture, select a passage for my reading, and some miscellaneous stuff for various graduating student traditions. We are big on the traditions, we Vermont College types. But then, after all that, I will have mastered the fine arts!)Black Ships

Anyway, earlier this week Orbit sent along a lovely advance copy of Jo Graham's The Hand of Isis, which reminded me I hadn't read Black Ships yet. So I pulled out Black Ships and, boy, this is the perfect novel to read when you're just leaving the headspace of your own contemporary mash-up with ancient Greek life and times. Graham is working with some of the same material, but staying in the period, like a modern Virgil retelling the mysteries. I'd really like to get my Persephone and Graham's young oracle Gull together in a dream.

Bonus: Like all Orbit's books, it's beautifully designed. Isn't that a gorgeous cover? Hand of Isis is equally lovely.

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Books 4ever

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Back with more tomorrow, or possibly even later today, but for now a pointer to James Gleick's wonderful essay in the New York Times about books and obsolescence and the Google Books deal (which he helped negotiate):

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.

Of course, plenty of other stuff is destined for obsolescence. For more than a century the phonograph record was almost the only practical means of reproducing sound — and thus the basis of a multibillion-dollar industry. Now it’s just an oddity. Hardly anyone in the music business is sanguine about the prospects for CDs, either.

Now, at this point one expects to hear a certain type of sentimental plea for the old-fashioned book — how you like the feel of the thing resting in your hand, the smell of the pages, the faint cracking of the spine when you open a new book — and one may envision an aesthete who bakes his own bread and also professes to prefer the sound of vinyl. That’s not my argument. I do love the heft of a book in my hand, but I spend most of my waking hours looking at — which mainly means reading from — a computer screen. I’m just saying that the book is technology that works.

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Nice Profile

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The Washington Post has an excellent, fairly lengthy profile piece of M.T. "Tobin" Anderson, talking about the Octavian books but also his others:

"It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should," says the author of "Feed" and, most recently, "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation." Teens like challenges, he says. They know the world is complicated, and "they can tell when a book is simplifying life."

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