The Lightning Room with Tommy Pico

 

–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

Sing, O Internet, of the poems of Tommy “Teebs” Pico, who wrote “from IRL” and then talked about it on the blog.

1. “from IRL” seems to take as formal inspiration both epic poetry and internet diction. Can you talk about holding those two seemingly disparate influences together?

The idea first came to me after reading “Tape for the Turn of the Year” by A.R. Ammons, a book length poem written originally on one long piece of calculator printing tape. In it’s confines Ammons occasionally employed abbreviations that seemed a sort of proto-texting. I thought, what if I wrote a book length poem that could be sent as one long text message—a poem confined by the frame of the smart phone screen, but open to the shifting grammatical non-rules of texting, internet slang, typos, auto-corrects, etc. I guess holding Epic and Internet together, in my mind, had to do with wholly committing to them both and seeing where they led me.

2. I loved the idea of Muse as “finally giving me / what I want.” The traditional source of inspiration having her own power, deciding when and how much. What is your relationship to inspiration like? Continue reading

[REVIEW] A Different Sun, by Elaine Neil Orr

sun

Penguin

388 pages, $16.00

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Elaine Neil Orr’s first novel, A Different Sun, is a fascinating portrayal of 19th century missionaries struggling to create a Baptist church in the Yoruba region of Nigeria.  Orr got her inspiration for the book from the diary of Lurana Davis Bowen, who, along with her husband Thomas Jefferson Bowen, became the first Southern Baptists who worked as missionaries in Africa during the 19th century.  Orr writes:

“My mother gave me a copy of Lurana’s diary when I was working on my memoir, Gods of Noonday. I was tantalized by its suggested brevity . . . I first imagined a work of creative nonfiction in which I would seek to expand Lurana’s story, using all the historical evidence I could find, as well as my own experience. I found instead that fiction was the best medium for conveying not Lurana’s story per se but my own vision of what might have happened when a young, well-to-do woman from Georgia fell in love with a former Texas cavalryman and traveled to Yorubaland. What motivated her? What did she long for? What were her limitations?” Continue reading