Billy Collins, “Feedback”

The woman who wrote from Phoenix
after my reading there

to tell me they were all still talking about it

just wrote again
to tell me that they had stopped.

Horoscopes for the Dead is the ninth collection from Billy Collins, the former U.S. Poet Laureate (and also a former laureate of New York State). Two other poems from this collection appeared in Poetry: “Memorizing ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne” and “The Chairs That No One Sits In.”

2 April 2011 | poetry |

Listen to This: The Stacked Podcast

Last Friday, I went out to Brooklyn and hung out with Christina Oppold, the creator of the literary blog Stacked, to talk about The Art of Immersion, a book by Wired contributing editor that looks at the new forms of storytelling being built around entertainment properties like Avatar, The Dark Knight, and Lost. The result: a 50-minute conversation about (among other things) how these narrative innovations might affect the publishing industry, with occasional detours through the existential hysteria prompted by Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s, the real meaning of Fahrenheit 451, the ascendancy of Amanda Hocking, and the transparent elitism of Andrew Keen.

There’s a point in the podcast where we’re talking about fan wikis, and Christina mentions Terry Pratchett, and I’m all, “If there isn’t a Discworld wiki, there should be.” Well, there is a Pratchett wiki, which was intended to be just about Discworld, so there you go. (Same for the Wheel of Time wiki.)

This was a lot of fun, and I know Christina has big plans for future episodes, so keep an eye out!

1 April 2011 | listen to this |