Happy National Poetry Month! All throughout April, we will interview poets about working in this digital age. Recently, we spoke with author David Lehman.
Lehman (pictured, via) has published several volumes of poetry throughout his career. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and has continued to serve as the series editor. Check out the highlights from our interview below…
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Faber & Faber, the storied publisher that published T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, Tom Stoppard and Sylvia Plath, now offers online writing creative courses.
The publisher launched Faber Academy Online, a 28-week course that costs £2800 (about $4,400). The publisher first offered writing courses in 2008. What do you think–should publishers offer creative writing classes?
Here’s more from the release: “Chatrooms, topic forums and specially commissioned video content from Faber editors will be combined with one-to-one Skype feedback and podcasts to create a unique learning experience … The first offering to run on the new platform will be Writing A Novel, a 28-week programme based on the face-to-face course of the same name that has already brought huge success for the writers S. J. Watson and Rachel Joyce.”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
I live, as many of you know, this odd cross-over life. A corporate communicator by day. A writer of fiction, memoir, poetry by night. A reader in those sacred hours in between. On rare occasions the many lives meet. A client will tell me about a book she is reading, say, or another will ask if I might bring some poetry to the job—write a script for an animation, write copy for a new brand, bring the sound of a lyric to a talk that must be given, do something different. I am grateful for those clients. Grateful for their trust.
I gravitate toward magazine stories about middle grounds, and I am especially intrigued by tales that tie the corporate to the poetic. That happens in John Colapinto's October 3
New Yorker piece titled "Famous Names." The article takes a look the fascinating world of brand naming—who does it, how it gets it done, what sounds mean, what customers see (and hear).
Tucked into the piece is this little nugget about 1957, the Ford Motor Company, and poet Marianne Moore. Ford was seeking a name for "the first affordable automobile." He turned to many, including Moore. He asked her, according to Colapinto's story, for a name that would "convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design."
Moore's responses probably do not bode well for a poet at work in corporate America (perhaps I shouldn't tell clients about my secret second life). Still, I find them dear and quaint, and share them with you here:
Intelligent Bullet
Utopian Turtletop
Bullet Cloisone
Pastelogram
Mongoose Civique
Andante con Moto
This is interesting. I know that there are poets who have worked as attorneys, reporters, in accounting offices, etc. So they are in the corporate world...but maybe they only work on poetry in secret...:)
I heard a story many years ago about a chartered accountant (or maybe it was a CPA--I'm not sure of the country) who was a senior partner. This is how he announced his retirement. One morning everyone in the firm who came to work discovered his office shelves were wall to wall poetry books.