Chapter 16 - Part 559

In Shape

A new gallery show at the Nashville Public Library puts poetry on display

By Joe Nolan | August 11, 2010

August 11, 2010 People apparently started writing shaped poetry—in which words are arranged to create a picture—as soon as they began writing verse. An exhibit at the main Nashville Public Library includes examples of the practice dating from ancient times to the present. Boasting thirty prints of poems by E.E. Cummings, Lewis Carroll, Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Breton, Gertrude Stein, and others, it’s a compelling collection of work that occupies a space where poetry and painting overlap.

Dooced No More

Proto-blogger Heather Armstrong writes a bestselling book

By Margaret Renkl | August 10, 2010

August 10, 2010 Memphis native Heather Armstrong didn’t invent the personal weblog any more than Al Gore invented the Internet, but she is definitely one reason the word blog has entered the English language. In fact, the very name of her own blog, Dooce, is cited in the Urban Dictionary as an intransitive verb: to be dooced is to lose your job because of something you wrote on your blog. But getting fired is not something Armstrong worries about any more: Dooce now gets more than six million page views a month, and last year Forbes magazine named Armstrong one of the thirty most influential women in media. She talks with Chapter 16 about her life, her enemies, and her bestselling book.

Into the Woods

Sometimes even Janis Joplin isn’t enough of an escape

By Anne Delana Reeves | August 6, 2010

August 6, 2010 It was 1972, and my parents had exiled the family to a farm south of Nashville; the nearest town featured a Minnie Pearl’s Fried Chicken restaurant, a dime store, and a dully-lit library in the courthouse basement. What else was a fifteen-year-old girl to do but hide out in her bedroom and scream along to Janis Joplin records, or recite, in dramatic hand-over-heart fashion, T.S. Eliot’s poetry, the perfumed smoke from strawberry incense swirling in the air? Then Mrs. Caruthers sent me searching for wildflowers.

Pro-Separation

In The New York Times today, Amy Greene takes on political preachers

By Margaret Renkl | August 5, 2010

August 5, 2010 Remember that quaint little rule of etiquette that cautioned people to avoid politics and religion in polite conversation? East Tennessee novelist Amy Greene breaks it today on the op-ed page of The New York Times—but only to make the point that religion has no place in a political campaign. The daughter and granddaughter of ministers who believed fervently in the separation of church and state, Greene takes contemporary preachers to task for failing to understand this basic tenet of American democracy.

Honky Tonk Devil

Eileen Sisk delivers the first in-depth biography of Buck Owens

By Paul McCoy | August 5, 2010

August 5, 2010 A tenant farmer’s son; an influential musician with more than thirty top-ten and fifteen number-one singles; a cornball, overall-wearing bumpkin who hosted a popular country-music television show; a cutthroat, razor-sharp business tycoon obsessed with dollars, sex, and power: this isn’t the latest cast description of Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice. According to a new book by Eileen Sisk, all of these descriptions apply to one man: Buck Owens. On August 7, Eileen Sisk will sign copies of Buck Owens at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 2 p.m., and at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop at 9 p.m. Both venues are in Nashville.

Tell Me a Story of Deep Delight

Algonquin’s new collection inspires a troublesome question: is Southern literature going the way of the slamming screen door?

By Susannah Felts | August 4, 2010

August 4, 2010 In its annual anthology, New Stories from the South 2010: The Year’s Best, Algonquin Books has, as usual, brought out a strong collection of compelling short stories. Too bad so few of them are distinctly, or even faintly, Southern.

Tender Headed (National Poetry Series)

By Olatunde Osinaike
Akashic Books
80 pages
17.95

“In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what makes a man like me? As he interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world, his poems strut and duck and weave across their pages. These poems unpack the ingredients of being and make a meal of language.”

~ Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses