Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
As Valentine’s Day approaches, love and marriage are on some writers’ minds. At this week’s New York Times Bookends blog, writers Leslie Jamison and Charles McGrath discuss the best portrayals of marriage in literature. Jamison writes of Jack Gilbert’s elegiac marriage poems, “it is not a destination so much as a constant state of flux and re-creation.”
“The subject is a catalyst, a character, but our responsibility is, has to be, to the work.” David L. Ulin discusses what a writer owes his or her subject at the Los Angeles Times.
Police have arrested Daniel M. Ruland for removing the bronze plaque from Mark Twain’s grave in Elmira, New York. Details of a possible motive, however, have still not been disclosed. (SF Gate)
Independent bookstores are struggling to keep up with new state minimum wage laws. In a town hall meeting yesterday at the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute, bookstore owners expressed the difficulty of adapting to increased minimum wages, as the prices of their goods remain the same. (Shelf Awareness)
You may have heard a writer friend speak with a particular poetic—and at times obnoxious—vocal affect known as “poet voice.” “Is there some subconscious reason poets are prone to the contrived ‘poet voice?’” Matt Petronzio asks in an article at Mashable. The answer, he suggests, may have to do with linguistic “framing” signals.
Joan Didion’s fashion moment isn’t over. Last month, the eighty-year-old author was revealed as the face of French designer Céline’s Spring/Summer 2015 fashion campaign. This Thursday, Julian Wasser’s photography exhibition, “Didion by Wasser,” opens at the Danzinger Gallery in New York City. (T Magazine)
From James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, here is a list of popular novels that used inventive dialect to create languages singular to the worlds of the books. (Huffington Post)
At the Guardian, Helen Harris notices an underrepresented population in contemporary fiction: grandparents.
