At the blog of the venerable literary journal Ploughshares, 2006 Poetry Fellow Simeon Berry calls our attention to, in his own droll and idiosyncratic way, a spirited discussion within the online poetry community about one poet's disastrous experience with a poetry contest. So you want to build yourself a super-duper artist's website, and you want to do it free, gratis, and … [Read more...]
Archives for August 2008
Diary of a Bread Loafer by Tracy Strauss
Tracy Strauss, a poet, prose writer, educator, and past recipient of a Somerville Arts Council Artist Fellowship, recently attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, set in Vermont's Green Mountain National Forest. We asked Tracy about her thoughts on the conference, and she passed along this terrific description of her particular experiences, ranging from the view … [Read more...]
They made
Our September Fellows Notes page came into the world blank (as WordPress pages always do), badly needing some news to offset its colorlessness. And our fellows/finalists made good, offering up a month's worth of vibrant updates. A sampling of September's good makes: Stephen Mishol makes Realism. Mary O'Malley makes Detail. Ken Beck makes 'scapes. Read the MCC … [Read more...]
Smee on Keepers
Art critic Sebastian Smee had a warm review of Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts, in Friday's Boston Globe. The show is curated by state folklorist Maggie Holtzberg and runs at the National Heritage Museum through February 8, 2009. From the review: The show begins... with a dazzling costume from Boston's Caribbean Carnival made by Tamara … [Read more...]
Artists have feelings: a roundup
What can I, the individual artist, do to improve my discipline (and world, such as it is)? At Parabasis, Isaac Butler ardently argues that Personal Virtue (a concept usually discussed in reference to global warming) can and should apply to individual artists. Butler talks about theater artists, specifically, but I think his conclusions are universal to all disciplines: be a … [Read more...]