21st Century Man, poem by Brianna Pike (Celebrity Free Verse Poetry Series)

21st Century Man
by Brianna Pike

Do I like being famous?
It’s sort of inconsequential.
I fear I’m initially quite private.
To be honest about my boundaries
encourages intimacy and intimacy
is really where it’s at. You don’t
get there if you’re pretending to be
anyone else. Why would you do that?

To answer the question: Is it enough?

SOURCE: “Tom Hiddleston: A god Among men?” Elle UK (March 2014).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: A particular area of interest for me as a poet is the push and pull of the private vs. the public self. I think this is especially interesting when it comes to actors because they are constantly stepping into different lives as the characters they inhabit and then they must take those lives into the public sphere. To me, the underlying current in this interview with Tom Hiddleston is the tension of finding balance while living in the public eye.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Brianna Pike earned her MFA from Murray State University’s Low Residency program. Her poems have appeared in Rust + Moth, Mojave River Review, New Plains Review, and Hamilton Stone Review among other publications. She currently lives in Indianapolis, where she is teaches creative writing at Ivy Tech Community College.

Novelist Haruki Murakami explains why The Great Gatsby is so great

In 2006, Haruki Murakami, author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, accomplished a long-standing goal — translating The Great Gatsby into Japanese. Murakami has discussed his reverence for the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel many times over the years — and has written a compelling afterword to his translation. Read Murakami’s moving love letter to Fitzgerald’s masterwork at scribd.com.

Here are some excerpts from Murakami’s heartfelt homage to The Great Gatsby…

When someone asks, ‘Which three books have meant the most to you?’ I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Dostoevesky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. All three have been indispensable to me (both as a reader and as a writer); yet if I were forced to select only one, I would unhesitatingly choose Gatsby. Had it not been for Fitzgerald’s novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there).

Whatever the case, you can sense the level of my infatuation with The Great Gatsby. It taught me so much and encouraged me so greatly in my own life. Through slender in size for a full-length work, it served as a standard and a fixed point, an axis around which I was able to organize the many coordinates that make up the world of the novel. I read Gatsby over and over, poking into every nook and cranny, until I had virtually memorized entire sections.

Remarks such as these are bound to perplex more than a few readers. ‘Look, Murakami,’ they’ll say, ‘I read the novel, and I don’t get it. Just why do you think it’s so great?’ My first impulse is to challenge them right back. ‘Hey, if The Great Gatsby isn’t great,’ I am tempted to say, inching closer, ‘then what the heck is?’…Gatsby is such a finely wrought novel – its scenes so fully realized, its evocations of sentiment so delicate, its language so layered – that, in the end, one has to study it line by line in English to appreciate its true value.”

Poetry X-rays, interview with Billy Collins

In this excerpt from a PBS radio interview, Billy Collins — U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 — discusses his process of X-raying poems. (Read and listen to the entire interview at KPBS.org.)

INTERVIEWER: Where is the artistry in poetry? Is it the imagery, the cadence, the choice of subject?

COLLINS: Well, it’s sort of like doing six or seven things at a time. In prose, one just has to write sentences, one after the other. In poetry, you have to — you don’t have to write sentence, but I haven’t had a better way to express myself than the sentence, and lines at the same time. Because the line is the second unit or maybe the primary unit of poetry. So lines are delivered one at a time. So those are two things to think about. And even packaging the poem into stanzas is another consideration that is part of the craft of poetry.

INTERVIEWER: When you hold classes with students about poetry, you talk about X-raying a poem. I think we’re hearing a little bit of that right now. Can you explain a little bit more what that means?

COLLINS: Well, I think to X-ray a poem is really to find how it gets through itself. When I start a poem, I have an inkling of where the thing is going. I’m not completely in the dark, but I don’t know exactly where it’s going, and that curiosity is kind of what drives me to continue through the poem. And I think if we take a famous poem and we imagine that Keats has written four lines of it, but he doesn’t know what the fifth line is or any of the subsequent lines, then we have a sense that the art of poetry is really a matter of finding a path, an imaginative path which results in a conclusion or some kind of ending. So when I teach poetry, I try to not use the question what does this poem mean, so much as how does this poem continue, how does it commence and how does it keep going, and how does it stop?

Graphic: Poetry/Poem X-rays by Silver Birch Press

Haruki Murakami Translates F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 2006, Haruki Murakami – author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — accomplished a long-standing goal by translating The Great Gatsby into Japanese. Murakami has discussed his reverence for the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel many times over the years — and has written a compelling afterword to his translation. Read Murakami’s moving love letter to Fitzgerald’s masterwork at scribd.com.

Here are some excerpts from Murakami’s heartfelt homage to The Great Gatsby…

When someone asks, ‘Which three books have meant the most to you?’ I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Dostoevesky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. All three have been indispensable to me (both as a reader and as a writer); yet if I were forced to select only one, I would unhesitatingly choose Gatsby. Had it not been for Fitzgerald’s novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there).

Whatever the case, you can sense the level of my infatuation with The Great Gatsby. It taught me so much and encouraged me so greatly in my own life. Through slender in size for a full-length work, it served as a standard and a fixed point, an axis around which I was able to organize the many coordinates that make up the world of the novel. I read Gatsby over and over, poking into every nook and cranny, until I had virtually memorized entire sections.

Remarks such as these are bound to perplex more than a few readers. ‘Look, Murakami,’ they’ll say, ‘I read the novel, and I don’t get it. Just why do you think it’s so great?’ My first impulse is to challenge them right back. ‘Hey, if The Great Gatsby isn’t great,’ I am tempted to say, inching closer, ‘then what the heck is?’…Gatsby is such a finely wrought novel – its scenes so fully realized, its evocations of sentiment so delicate, its language so layered – that, in the end, one has to study it line by line in English to appreciate its true value.”

Poetry X-Rays, Interview with Billy Collins

In this excerpt from a PBS radio interview, Billy Collins — U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 — discusses his process of X-raying poems. (Read and listen to the entire interview at KPBS.org.)

INTERVIEWER: Where is the artistry in poetry? Is it the imagery, the cadence, the choice of subject?

COLLINS: Well, it’s sort of like doing six or seven things at a time. In prose, one just has to write sentences, one after the other. In poetry, you have to — you don’t have to write sentence, but I haven’t had a better way to express myself than the sentence, and lines at the same time. Because the line is the second unit or maybe the primary unit of poetry. So lines are delivered one at a time. So those are two things to think about. And even packaging the poem into stanzas is another consideration that is part of the craft of poetry.

INTERVIEWER: When you hold classes with students about poetry, you talk about X-raying a poem. I think we’re hearing a little bit of that right now. Can you explain a little bit more what that means?

COLLINS: Well, I think to X-ray a poem is really to find how it gets through itself. When I start a poem, I have an inkling of where the thing is going. I’m not completely in the dark, but I don’t know exactly where it’s going, and that curiosity is kind of what drives me to continue through the poem. And I think if we take a famous poem and we imagine that Keats has written four lines of it, but he doesn’t know what the fifth line is or any of the subsequent lines, then we have a sense that the art of poetry is really a matter of finding a path, an imaginative path which results in a conclusion or some kind of ending. So when I teach poetry, I try to not use the question what does this poem mean, so much as how does this poem continue, how does it commence and how does it keep going, and how does it stop?

Graphic: Poetry/Poem X-rays by Silver Birch Press

Henry Miller & Barbara Kraft

In October 1979, Barbara Kraft interviewed her friend Henry Miller about his life and art — in what turned out to be his last long interview. (Miller passed away in June 1980 at age 88.) The dialogue was published in the Spring 1981 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. Read “A Conversation with Henry Miller” here.

Kraft is the author of the recently published ebook Anais Nin: The Final Days, available here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A former reporter for Time, Washington Post, People, USA Today, and Architectural Digest, Barbara Kraft is author of The Restless Spirit: Journal of a Gemini, with a preface by Anaïs Nin.  Kraft’s work has appeared in Hudson Review, Michigan Quarterly, and Columbia Magazine, and among the many radio programs she has hosted and produced is Transforming OC, a two-part KCRW documentary on the 2006 opening of the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa. Kraft lives and writes in Los Angeles.