William Stobb

Not every day that you get a piece published with a super cool illustration.  Thanks Katherine Villeneuve, Mark Yakich, and The New Orleans Review .  http://www.neworleansreview.org/the-pajama-queen-and-the-in-law-terloper/ "(Now, steak sauce: that’s tangy, and we put it on cooked slices of cow or deer or cooked eggs from chickens or ducks or soy products or tofu, if we’re vegetarian.  If we’re vegan, we might avoid steak sauce because it has a meat word in its name (also, some people will give steak sauce a chance on almost anything, like on ice cream or in coffee or on a banana.  It can be good.))."  

Jared Stanley’s 2012 collection The Weeds (Salt: London) represents a development in western poetics.   Stanley’s writing sees human interactions as part of the “natural world,” and connects not just to Romantic landscape imagery, but to the intricacies of scientific representations, as well.   That’s not the development, though.   There’s plenty of western writing that sees the ecological perspective (interwoven, interactive) instead of the environmental (anthropocentric, isolated).   What I find fresh about Stanley’s poetics is that it’s not elegiac.   Stanley’s not quietly weeping while the glaciers bleed out.   Neither is he proselytizing on the street-corner, or, more applicably, from a laptop in an air conditioned apartment.   In his wild, wide-ranging new book, Stanley’s clear-eyed about the situation vis-à-vis global warming, extinction spiral, etc.: your children’s children’s children will be hanging around someplace.  ...

I recently watched the documentary, Black White & Gray , about Sam Wagstaff, the New York curator, collector, and photographer who was Robert Mapplethorpe’s partner in a variety of ways.  It’s a really compelling study of a complex human being.  It's insightful, vivid and smart, and really honors Wagstaff's life and legacy without oversimplifying it.  It streams on Netflix.  In addition to all the ways that I really enjoyed the film and respect it as an excellent documentary profile, I was delighted and surprised to learn that Wagstaff had represented Michael Heizer during the (short?) phase of his life when he worked and made a splash on the east coast (later, Heizer would say, “I’d been to the east, and didn’t like what I saw.  It looked like it was degenerating.”).   Wagstaff put Heizer’s works in his shows, and set up a famous earthwork exhibition at the Detroit Art Institute, where Heizer was to drag a heavy mass across the lawn, ...

I've been honored this year to join the Wisconsin Poet Laureate commission, and today am excited to announce that Max Garland has been appointed as our state's new laureate for 2013 - 2014.  In honor of the announcement, I'm embedding the interview I did with Max a few years ago as part of my  miPOradio  podcast, "Hard to Say."  It features Max reading from his first book, The Postal Confessions , and talking about his years working as a rural mail carrier.  The episode was produced for miPOradio by Didi Menendez. Press Release from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, & Letters: January 3, 2013 Contact:  Cathryn Cofell , WPLC Chair,  920-209-0066                  Jason A. Smith , WASAL communications director,  608.263.1692 x21 Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission Selects Next  Poet Laureate MADISON—The Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commissio...

I'm pleased to announce that my poem "A Moment for Authentic Shine" has been awarded the 2012 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize.  The poem is printed in full on the SRPR website, here .   The new issue of SRPR  includes the judges comments by David Baker. Also, the online mag The Offending Adam  recently ran   this review of   my 2011 Penguin Poets collection, Absentia.   It's written by Kelli Anne Noftle, and looks at the book's relationship to the work of artist Michael Heizer , whose sculptures and earthworks inspired a group of the experimental poems in the collection.    I'm grateful for the good words of these editors and reviewers.  Thank you.

Fox, William.   The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing the Great Basin.   Reno: U of Nevada P, 2005. (The desert video below is shot from the first turnout on Soldier Meadows Road, Black Rock Desert.  As far as I can tell, there’s no footage available online of just d esert.  I do walk into the frame at the eleven minute mark.  Sorry.  Then it ends.  Larger version at  https://vimeo.com/55545311 .) For the last five years or so, William L Fox’s The Void, The Grid & The Sign ( VGS from now on) has occupied a special place in my life.  It’s taken the place of Leaves of Grass and Jay Meek’s Stations as my go-to travel book—the book I carry with me if I’m on a trip because I love it and it’s nice to have something you love with you when you travel.  As its subtitle explains, the book traverses the Great Basin, looking at land art and signature landscapes while thinking about the human and natural histo...