Hello!

It’s been a while! I hadn’t planned on taking a break over the summer, but it turns out my faulty memory at the start of each month knew more than I did: a break was needed. After a few months of splash pad afternoons and family visits, heat waves and cold drinks, and listening to good music, I’ve gotten back to reading for myself and found myself thinking about my own writing and research, not because I need to make progress but because it’s just naturally on my mind again which feels really nice. And as I return to my projects, I want to start this correspondence with you again as well. Thanks for being here.

BJ is a fantastic poet who writes within a lineage of experimental poetry while maintaining a live, beating heart for everyone and everything he sees. I first met him in Missoula when we were both students at the University of Montana, and I became an avid fan of his poems, music, thinking, and art-making. Years later, he and the great poet Julie Rouse were among the first to welcome us to Missouri, a place they’d lived in for years before and after our shared time in Montana, and ever since I always connect them to both places.

This poem has stayed stuck in my mind since I first read it this past spring, its use of the sputtering process of memory as material for making something new. I remain caught by its imagery, its questions explicit and implicit, its simultaneous open heart and ironic distance, the way it lets on that underneath whatever gold leaf surrounds us (and that we spread, that we use) we can exist in multiple places at once and we can share them for however long the moment lasts.

If you haven’t yet read BJ’s work, there’s no better place to start than with his incredible books. The poem above is from his most recent collection, Birth Center in Corporate Woods, published earlier this year with Black Lawrence Press. His first book, Our Pornography & other disaster songs won the Slope Editions Book Prize, and his chapbook Selected Letters is published by New Michigan Press.

Summer Online Courses

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been really enjoying classes offered through the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia this past year, starting with one that was offered at the Newberry Library last August. This summer, I was able to take two online classes through their program: “Six Degrees of Phillis Wheatley” by Dr. Tara Bynum and “The Printing Press in Spanish America” by Dr. Albert Palacios. Both were wonderful experiences and helped me expand my understanding of topics important to my teaching and research: publishing and reading practices, early American and African American literary history, and Indigenous literary history.

Can’t wait to incorporate the conversations and resources from these classes into the next time I teach literature classes!

Ellen Has a New Job!

I want to give a huge congratulations to my wife Ellen on her new job as associate editor for The Missouri Review! As any of you who are part of the literary world know, getting an editorial job at all is tough, but getting one that’s full-time is very rare. Ellen’s an amazing editor, colleague, writer, (and also partner, mother, and friend,) and I can’t wait to see what she does in the coming months. If you want to read the magazine, you can subscribe here or read for free through their partnership with Project Muse here.

A Prompt

Think of a memory with strong emotion for you, then think of a genre of music that might, in the most basic, sketched outline of ways, be able to contain a plot or set of emotions like that of your memory. Use the music genre as your title, and start with a line that could exist in that kind of a song. From there, write your way into the memory, allowing the emotional capacity of the poem to expand as you go, pushing beyond what a song in the genre you chose may typically contain.

I really appreciate all of you who’ve signed up, and I look forward to writing again soon. Please leave a comment, reply to this email, share it with people you think would enjoy it, or send me a note in some other way just to say hi (hi!)

Wishing you all the best things.

-Jeremy