How Fred Writes

I'm about to sit in on a talk in the series How I Write at the Stanford Writing Center. Tonight's speaker is Fred Turner, who wrote a great book on the emergence of the digital counterculture in the 1960s and beyond.

I'm particularly interested in what he has to say about his writing process since he also lived a life in journalism before returning to grad school and academia. His time in journalism was much more serious and successful...but I'm hoping the experience will still translate.

Oh, wow: I just discovered that the "How I Write" website has an amazing archive of audio and video! Very neat.

Actually listening to poetry

How often do we really listen to poetry anymore? Perhaps it is true that contemporary poetry is meant to be read more than to be heard, but I find that once I hear a poet reading his or her own work I can never read it the same way again. That's right, I'm looking at you, Paul.

The PENNsound poetry site collects audio files from all sorts of interesting people. We're using it this week in a class to listen to William Carlos Williams reading a few excerpts from Paterson.