Emily's New Look

The UK Guardian reports a rare find: a new photo of Emily Dickinson, showing the poet in her 20s, as a contrast to the daguerreotype of her in her teens that we are all used to seeing. That's the claim anyway. After having submitted the newly located image to various tests (which you can read about at the article), experts are pretty sure it's Emily. What do you think?



New photo: Supposedly Emily on the left, with friend Kate Scott Turner.



New Emily, Old Emily. What do you think?

Kartsonis Online

A poet I am particularly entranced with, Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, is featured in the Thrush September edition online. Thrush is a new online journal that I couldn't be more enthusiastic about. So go!

 

Broadside Bonanza

Thrush Press is now accepting submissions for their broadside series. Check out their  beautiful work featuring geometric designs, gears, birds, feathers and leaves, all some of my favorite motifs, and then consider submitting your own poems.

Writing & Exercise

So the title of this isn't "Writing Exercises," which is a topic I've thought a lot about, but "Writing & Exercise," which is a topic I haven't.

I've long been aware that many writers are also runners, and I've thought that was due to the tendency of both activities to attract the obsessive types, or that perhaps the dual interests might have come from a desire of the writer to correct her tendency to spend so much time in her mind. Many writers who run recount writing in the morning and then running later in the day, for instance. And of course there are the yoga-writers, whom I also assumed were also rebalancing themselves from a life spent too much in the mind.

And there's John Irving, who famously is a wrestler. I could probably name more writer-athletes if I put my mind to it, and if you've got others please post them in the comments section.

So this week I was listening to a podcast interview of Lidia Yuknavitch by Brad Listi on the podcast Other People, and I learned that Yuknavitch had been a competitive swimmer since childhood and that she still swims as part of her writing process. This last bit is what caught my attention: as part of her writing process, not in reaction to it. Yuknavitch says that she tries to write from her body, a visceral kind of writing (I think that's what she said, visceral, but I don't have time to go back and find the exact quote in the podcast), and in order to do that she swims hard until she works out all that is in her head and can come to her writing with her mind emptied out through her vigorous exercise. So that she can write from her body and not from her mind.

This is not something I had ever thought about before. But it sounds very appealing. And I wonder about how other writers use exercise, and if I should reconsider my approach to it (which is unenthusiastic but thorough, so that I do get moderate daily exercise but don't as often get a good workout since I injured my foot three months ago. Should I be pursuing more strenuous exercise, and before I write in particular? Something to try, once the foot is completely healed....)

More of Madness, Rack, and Honey

KCRW's Michael Silverblatt interviews Mary Ruefle about her new book of essays, Madness, Rack, and Honey (new from Wave Books), on the radio program Bookworm.

Ruefle says such things as "Every poem moves forward by getting lost and then finding itself, and then getting lost and then finding itself." And "I never have anything to say when I begin a poem. When I begin a poem I have nothing to say and I think the poem is my way of saying, 'I have nothing to say. Give me a moment and I'll talk forever.' (laughter) That's my experience of writing."