Western Book Roundup
University of Idaho Student’s Poem to Run in the New Yorker
Ciara Shuttleworth, sestina champ.By Jenny Shank, 9-01-10
Raise your hand if you’ve ever taken a creative writing class. Keep your hand raised if you ever wrote a poem while in class that ended up being published in the New Yorker. Everyone’s hands should have gone down now except for that of one very talented University of Idaho MFA poetry student, Ciara Shuttleworth.
Robert Wrigley recently asked his MFA poetry students to study sestinas, which, according to Wikipedia, are “highly structured poem(s) consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines.” Sounds complicated, but Ms. Shuttleworth and probably Eminem can do it.
Wrigley assigned his class to read a sestina by Lloyd Schwartz that consisted of only six words repeated in different patterns. After the class moved on to another poem, Shuttleworth wrote her own sestina, which also uses six words repeated seven times each. She revised her poem, sent it into the New Yorker, and the editors accepted it for publication this fall.
I am curious to read it, so I’ll look out for it and let everybody know when it turns up in the magazine.
• Benjamin Percy recently announced on Twitter that Iowa State’s MFA program in Creative Writing and the Environment just hired Rick Bass as affiliate faculty. Percy, who also teaches at Iowa State, reported, “He’ll visit each year, serve as thesis advisor, and host students in Yaak.”
In addition to teaching, both Percy and Bass have new novels out this month. Look for my review of Bass’s Nashville Chrome and an interview with Percy about The Wilding here soon.
• The Tattered Cover and Powell’s were recently featured in Luxist’s “The Ten Best Bookstores For Vacation Reading” by Alison Wellner. (I’m not sure what Luxist is—there’s a diamond in its logo, so I guess it’s a website for rich people?) In any case, Wellner wrote, “You’d be hard pressed to find a more pleasant vibe in a bookstore anywhere—it would be wrenching not to plan to spend a good couple of hours at the historic LoDo neighborhood store. (There’s even a fireplace.)”
And Jeremiah Chamberlin interviewed Joyce Meskis, owner of the Tattered Cover Book Store for his Inside Indie Book Stores series in Poets & Writers. One of the insights—many people counseled Meskis against setting up her bookstore on multiple floors, because it had rarely been done. But Meskis did it, and the multi-story aspect remains one of the LoDo Tattered Cover’s chief draws.
• The new Fall & Winter 2010 Issue of Alaska Quarterly Review should be out in fine indie bookstores such as the Tattered Cover now, and my short story “Moonlight, Starlight, Boogie Won’t Be Out Tonight,” is in it. There are also stories by Montana native Scott Bear Don’t Walk and one by Aurelie Sheehan, who directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson, plus a lot more good stuff, so please check it out.
• Do any of you own a Kindle? If so, and you have any desire to pay 99 cents to read New West’s Book feed on it, you’ll be happy to know that we have been “Highly Recommended” by The Kindle Blog Report, who writes, “This blog has a lot of different material. There are comments on politics, on the environment, on literary festivals, and so on, as well as lots of in-depths book reviews.” Aw, thanks for noticing. You’re making me blush. Here’s where you can find it at the Amazon Kindle store.
• The Roundup will be on hiatus for three weeks while I am out of town. While I’m gone, please enjoy some selections from the new anthology New Poets of the American West, edited by Lowell Jaeger. We’ll run poems by Montana, Colorado, and Idaho poets over the next three Wednesdays. Also, look for poet William Notter’s reviews of two recent poetry collections in the coming weeks.
Happy trails and happy reading to you, until we meet again!
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(I have canines like hers. We could probably have kids to complement the current vampire craze.}
I can't tell you how MUCH I appreciate your covering our writers and literature of the West! Makes me feel a lot less like I live in a literary "flyover state."
:-)
Tamara
http://www.inlander.com/spokane/article-15909-succinct-not-pithy.html
I've written sestinas (Yes I read Ciara Shuttleworth's) and her "sestina" seemed very clever, was probably challenging to write, however I didn't care much for it, being that it contained monosyllabic lines, lacking the fullness and the power of something like Pound's Altaforte. To me it just seemed like a clever exercise in wordplay. This leads to my first question: If the poet's last name was not "Shuttleworth," (the daughter of the esteemed cowboy poet Red Shuttleworth) would this poem have merited publishing in the New Yorker? Poetry is not hereditary and I don't mean to be harsh, but merit is the sole qualification for poets, not entitlement. It's not a bad poem, but I've read much better in smaller journals every time I pick one up.
My second question related to the bullying I experienced by faculty and students in Idaho's MFA program when I was there, and this bullying made me leave. My second question: If someone is emotionally distressed, and is asking for help from the faculty, but the faculty refers them to a person (the judicial officer to the dean of students) who has an agenda against the distressed for religious reasons, (the officer had a theology degree from the same institution I graduated from and was embarrassed that I was in distress) who is to blame? The person in distress? The judicial officer? Or the faculty? In my case, the person in distress (me) received all the blame, and a story was fabricated that I was dangerous, when no evidence supports this. Subsequently my career and reputation were destroyed by this fabrication, and I was quite literally shunned by the department, even I hurt no one, threatened no one, (yet I was believed to have made threats.) I am attacking anyone, as you can see my name and all other named parties in this paragraph are left out. But it must be acknowledged that academic bullying is a real problem in graduate school and I feel like I need to call the U of I department out on this.