1 Art

This afternoon while I sipped hot rooibos from a fancy gold-rimmed tea cup (Get on the bus, Gus. All the cool Tweetspeak kids are drinking tea now.), I thought to myself, “Gee, I wonder where I could get a complete listing of the 100 most iconic artworks of the last five years.” Imagine my delight when I came across just such a list of iconic artworks at Art Info. From a photo essay of images taken by Google Map’s nine-camera street view vehicles to a lingering-longer-than-I’d-like-it-to image of a flooded McDonald’s kitchen, this collection is comprised largely of “works that are participatory mass spectacles” vs. traditional painting. And while they are known to have inspired conversation in some significant way, I’m thinking I talk to all the wrong people. Anyway, next time my tea cup tips me toward wanting to peruse compelling artwork, I might just stop to see what Maureen Doallas has curated for All Art Friday.

Now, artist Frederico Pietrella did inspire some conversation the other day when my local librarian gave me a courtesy call to remind me that Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems was mildly overdue. Six dollars later, I blame Mr. Pietrella for running off with all the library date stamps, so I didn’t know when Ms. Plath’s curfew was. The Italian artist creates stunning images using only a rubber date stamp. Since they can take up to two months to complete, he changes the date as he goes along to show the passing of time (and, likely, avoid overdue book fines).

2 News

Last week the literary community of the Berkshires gathered for WordFest at the Mount. Held at the Edith Wharton mansion in Lenox, Mass., the event featured panels, interviews and readings. (If I were reporting for my hometown newspaper, I’d tell you who poured coffee and that a good time was had by all.) Tweetspeak’s managing editor and I enjoyed listening to poetry readings on the same terrace where the Berkshire Eagle notes Edith Wharton and Henry James sat “on summer nights, reading Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ aloud.” Not once did security try to escort us to the gate. We also heard from Norton Anthology editor and poet Mary Jo Salter and Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, among others. Stay tuned for an upcoming book club on Gopnik’s bestseller The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food later this year. We’ll even be giving away a copy signed by the author one day soon.

You might remember we reported in an earlier edition of the Top Ten on the discovery of a second portrait of Emily Dickinson. We stopped by the Amherst College Library during a brief literary tour following WordFest where the Special Collections staff graciously allowed us an after-hours viewing of the daguerreotype. Researchers in the Tweetspeak labs are currently conducting analysis on what may turn out to be yet another portrait of the reclusive Victorian-era poet.

When I said “Get on the bus, Gus” a bit earlier, I wasn’t kidding. Metrobus, a Canadian public transit line, has begun featuring the work of area poets on buses, including George Murray’s line, “Justice is never black and white, except on cop cars and killer whales.” Poet Mark Callanan, whose work is also featured in the Poetry in Motion endeavor, likens reading poetry while riding the bus to reading the cereal box over corn flakes. “To have it on buses kind of normalizes it, ” he said.

3 Publishing

Seems every time we turn around, book publishers have been given a new black eye. But it’s not all bad news. Lelia Mander, Senior Production Editor at HarperCollins, shares five great things about working for a book publisher, not the least of which is being paid to read. If you’re involved in publishing a book, you also get to watch the “journey of the written word” up close, almost like your creepy neighbor, only not like that at all.

It starts in a private place, as an idea, a proposal, a concept. Then it appears in a manuscript or Word file, where it works to tell a story, describe a time in history, argue a political point, expose a crime, bring about total destruction…from there, it gets line-edited and copyedited so it can do an even better job. After that, it is designed and typeset so that it’s pleasing to read on the page. It gets proofread so it won’t embarrass the author or editor, and then it’s published.

English professors get paid to read, too. T.S. Poetry Press is currently watching the journey of Karen Swallow Prior’s written word as her book inches closer to the press. An article on her forthcoming title, Booked, will appear in the October edition of Christianity Today. Sorry, we can’t pay you to read it at work, but you won’t want to miss it.

4 Business

Technical writing sounds so…oh, I don’t know. Technical. Maybe that’s because usually it’s printed in a twisted tangle of tiny fonts and enormous words. Tom Johnson of I’d Rather be Writing suggests that technical writing can be like poetry, applying a “philosophy of simplification and linguistic efficiency” in an effort to compress deeper meaning into fewer words. Anyone who can use Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright to teach technical writing is worth a read.

5 Creativity

Please don’t tell Dr. Prior, but I haven’t read many of the classics. (Maybe if someone had offered to pay me…) So I was delighted to come across this handy guide from Huffington Post Books to help me fake my way through insightful discussion of classic novels.

Why not analyze Hemingway’s ability to craft concise dialogue, or Faulkner’s ability to pen poetic interior monologues without having read their work? Sure, it’s not the same as actually reading it, but life is short and books are often long.

And if the summary of Moby-Dick inspired you, maybe you’d like to hear the book read aloud in a marathon celebrity effort called Big Read. The Guardian reports Moby-Dick Big Readers will include Tilda Swinton, David Cameron, and David Attenborough.

Projects like this are the sort of thing that happen through the generation of creative ideas and problem solving. Jonathan Fields interviews Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and 99u. You won’t want to miss this video to learn “how to better organize your mind, reach your goals and filter your thoughts.”

6 Write-It

Does Twitter make your head (or your stomach) spin? Are you still trying to figure out if hashtag is one word or two? (It’s one, by the way.) When folks start using MT and RT, #WW and #FF do you want to phone a friend and buy a vowel? Even if you’re a Twitter genius, you need to read InkyGirl.com’s Writer’s Guide to Twitter.

Once you’ve finally pulled yourself away from Twitter and actually want to spend some time writing, we have some wonderful things going on right here at Tweetspeak to help get your pen leaking onto the page. Seth Haines has been writing on tea and poetry this month, and the community is brewing up some delicious lines from his poetry prompts like these from Megan Willome:

it didn’t feel like a Revolution
or Tea’s Role In A Healthy Lifestyle
when i did not put sugar in my tea.
i simply never did. (read the rest of Megan’s poem)

And just yesterday we kicked off a new book club guaranteed to get you writing poetry, Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio.

7 Poems

Once in a while, a special poem comes along that speaks so strongly to you that it’s difficult to cross the intellectual divide to convince yourself the poet didn’t write it just for you in that very moment. Perhaps the poet lived and wrote a century before you were born. Or has never met you. Or was simply thinking of someone else (or even no one in particular) while sipping her tea and penning the lines. But you still can’t help but wonder at how it speaks. Such was this poem that dropped into my inbox recently via Every Day Poem’s daily delivery.

My table is long,
my window open.

What great poetic picks have you found this week? Be sure to share them with us in the comments.

Photos by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by Will Willingham.

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Will Willingham

Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

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