This week Noted Abroad offers a few more examples of found English. We might say the examples are self-explanatory, except that really they are not self-explanatory, or in any other way explanatory. We might say the examples speak for themselves, except that really they don’t speak so much as blather. Let’s just say, Automatic Urban Fashion, Baby!, and leave it at that.

Continue Reading Noted Abroad.

Erin Malone is the teacher and poet we all want to meet when we decide we tragically suck at writing poetry and need a few good words to keep us going. She confirms the difficult process of writing with a grace that makes us feel normal for wrestling with one word for three days. We especially like how cerebral and warmhearted her answers are in this interview. And if you happen to love good titles, she’s perfect for that, too, as her poem Sonnet Destroyed by Crows shows. –- Lori Huskey

Dark Sky Magazine: How did you come to live and write in Seattle? How would you describe Seattle’s literary scene, and furthermore, has geographical location played a role in your poetic life?

Erin Malone: I came from Colorado in ’94 to start grad school in the creative writing program at the University of Washington. When I finished in the summer of ’96, I left; not without regrets, but happy to be returning to a place I loved, where my family lives, and where there’s enough sun to keep me charged year-round. I found that I really missed Seattle’s lit scene, though, with opportunities to hear both new and well-known writers reading some place every night — Elliott Bay Books, Open Books, Richard Hugo House — I could go on. Seattle celebrates its artists. So I felt divided: when in Seattle, I missed Colorado, but in Colorado I longed for Seattle. Then I fell in love with someone from Seattle, and that sealed the deal. I moved back in ’99.

Location has been important to me yes because many of the poems in my book have to do with being geographically foreign — they take place in Italy, France, Germany. And then from that role as outsider, the idea of division becomes bigger, more psychological: the split of body/mind, mother/child, interior/exterior self.

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Don't Lock Us In A Dark Room

Yesterday, we had a fight. Like a cat on steroids. Cuckolds and sergeants have concussed us. A clarification, these were sneaky, dirty bastards, jumping us. Our masculinity remains intact. On Monday we posted a link to Katie Roiphe’s essay in the New York Times Book Review; naturally a little row came about (God forbid one takes a shot at David Foster Wallace). In response, we bring you two male reactions. You knew it was coming. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Gilbert — yes, a woman — discussed sex in her book Eat, Pray, Love. Well, her new book takes it up a notch, to marriage. We’re not going to pick a fight with Tina Brown over what to read. Drinking begets fighting, but we didn’t fight when we had a drink at Square Books. Read why in Poets & Writers. Finally, we’re offering — yet again — a link to (another) forecast of the future of publishing. How many fingers are YOU holding up? – Andrew Geer

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