LOS ANGELES — The POETRY App has been selected as a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Digital Media. As their press release noted, this is remarkable because the award basically recognizes that poetry — at least in the form of a cool app — has utility in our lives.
Poetry
Posted inBooks
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Once when I was breaking up with a girlfriend, she told me, “You act like a nice guy, but really you’re not.” Or maybe she said, “You pretend to be a nice guy,” I can’t quite remember. Anyway, I was taken aback. Would it be better to just habitually act like an asshole, rather than trying to do so as little as possible? Although I know my capacity for niceness is, like everyone else’s, limited, I try to cultivate my better qualities to the extent that I can. But then, what if, as a result, someone mistakenly comes to believe that I am nicer than I really am? Does that make me a bigger jerk than the guy who’s just self-evidently a jerk on the surface?
Posted inPoetry
They Always Ask for Water
1.
Today was unseasonably warm
There were mountains in the distance, and disaster was coming. I heard it on the evening news.
…
Posted inBooks
Vivid Words of a Cross-cultural Life
Poetry can be intimidating and difficult to “get.” It can evoke the same feelings many of us have toward contemporary art — we don’t always understand it, and it can make us feel shut out, like outsiders to an in-joke. Poetry as one of human nature’s more obtuse endeavors, can have the same effect. Ayala Sella’s first published book of poems, entitled Soliloquies of a Crosswalker (2011), published by Wasteland Press, works to contradict the notion that you must have a deep interest, appreciation, and knowledge of poetry before reading it.
Posted inArt
A Painter Revists the Images of 9/11 at 7 World Trade Center
Let the avalanche of September 11 exhibitions begin. As the tenth anniversary of the attack approaches, the art world gears up to remember and reflect with some of the bigger (and most intriguing) shows slated to run at blockbuster institutions like the Met, MoMA PS1 and the New Museum, as well as the opening of the Memorial Museum itself at the World Trade Center site on September 12. This Wednesday, I attended a small and intimate show at 7 World Trade Center that was a bit of quiet before the storm
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week’s Required Reading features mashed-up video games, a lost e.e. cummings poem, an indie arcade review and a museum just for you.
Posted inOpinion
Ian Bogost Casts Video Games as Haiku
Critic, writer and independent game developer Ian Bogost has created a suite of four games entitled “A Slow Year.” Comprised of a set piece about each of the four seasons, Bogost has made video games into meditations, interactive haiku meant to slow down the player instead of them speed up. Kotaku has the details.