Thanks to everyone who’s already shared this. And many thanks to Jesse Lichtenstein for writing so generously about my book in this article for the September issue of The Atlantic.
Amazing to see my face in this illustration/collage by Eleanor Shakespeare, and along with Aziza Barnes and Layli Long Soldier (also featured in the article). I do feel like “How Poetry Came to Matter Again” is a reductive title—poetry has always mattered! Maybe poetry matters differently now, maybe poetry matters in different ways in different eras or for different generations.
Titling aside, though, I think this essay offers some insightful readings of work by poets I really admire—yes, some close readings of particular poems! In a mainstream publication! Also incredible for my work to be introduced here in the context of some important ideas from Carl Phillips when it comes to identity and writing. You can read the full article in the print mag or online.
Jesse Lichtenstein has written an eloquent, intense, and introspective piece on Octopus Books' author and the Smutty Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, KS, Patricia Lockwood for The New York Times. The article starts at a Bad Blood reading series in Portland, and then it goes bravely into her bright wild darkness.
You can buy her Octopus book here. And you can go to the next Bad Blood tomorrow night.
Interview: Jesse Lichtenstein "Killweather" - Comics on Kickstarter
As often as I can, I will try to bring you short interviews with people who are creating comics and doing everything they can to show their work to the world.
Today, I spoke with Jesse Lichtenstein. His project Killweather is currently funding on Kickstarter.
Interview after the jump.
What is your project?
Killweather 1 is the first in a trilogy of graphic novels. The story is a mordent, political satire that follows a particularly nasty, fictional neo-con pundit, Cooper Killweather. In the course of his political ascent, he angers a small but capable, rogue faction of sex-reassignment surgeons who then give him all he has coming to him and more, setting him on a new path of self-discovery and revenge.
The book is visually unconventional. The artistic style is something different from most of what's out there in the indie comic world, I think in a cool sort of way.
What inspired this?
The inspiration came while commuting to an old newspaper job I had when I wrote sports in Portland. I listened to right-wing talk radio in the car, and fell in love with Michael Savage, amongst a slew of others. It blew me away how angry and venomous he was in particular, and how toxic almost everything he said could be. But the guy was obviously smart and capable as all get out, and I had to learn more about him.
So the Cooper Killweather character evolved from that kind of person, and the Darth Vader question of Is there still good in him? And then how do you draw out that good? So the story flowed from that.
Why do you love comics?
I love visual storytelling. I love collaborative art. You start with something, a story idea, that becomes a script, then you hand it off, and it’s in this artist's hands and becomes theirs. And they add all kinds of things you maybe didn’t even imagine, so it takes on a whole life beyond you and your vision. You relinquish that control and the story becomes something better than you could have created on your own. That’s fun.
I love reading comics too, but that’s a whole other long answer.
What do you think is the future of comics?
I think comics already are overtaking independent film in a way, in terms of the pure creative achievements people are making in storytelling. I think the medium is going to continue to attract cutting-edge, creative people. More great writers and artists are going emerge and continue driving things forward, telling great, challenging stories, thought-provoking stories, compelling stories, and taking narrative artwork to a new level.
If you could create anything, what would it be?
I would create more free parking in San Francisco. The meters here are everywhere and only give you like a minute for a quarter.
Jesse E. Lichtenstein is a writer, filmmaker, and journalist working in documentary, television, and outdoor media development. He lives with his wife and son in San Francisco.
Make sure to check out the campaign to fund Killweather on Kickstarter!
The postal service is not a federal agency. It does not cost taxpayers a dollar. It loses money only because Congress mandates that it do so. What it is is a miracle of high technology and human touch. It's what binds us together as a country.
Want to send a letter to Talkeetna, Alaska, from New York? It will cost you fifty dollars by UPS. Grabenhorst or Lipscomb can do it for less than two quarters: the same as the cost of getting a letter from Gold Hill to Shady Cove, Oregon, twenty miles up the road. It's how the postal service works: The many short-distance deliveries down the block or across the city pay for the longer ones across the country. From the moment Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general in 1775, the purpose of the post office has always been to bind the nation together. It was a way of unifying thirteen disparate colonies so that the abolitionist in Philadelphia had access to the same information and newspapers as the slaveholder in Augusta, Georgia.
Today the postal service has a network that stretches across America: 461 distribution centers, 32,000 post offices, and 213,000 vehicles, the largest civilian fleet in the world. Trucks carrying mail log 1.2 billion miles a year. The postal service handles almost half of the entire planet's mail. It can physically connect any American to any other American in 3.7 million square miles of territory in a few days, often overnight: a vast lattice of veins and arteries and capillaries designed to circulate the American lifeblood of commerce and information and human contact.
In mid-November, the postmaster general, Patrick Donahoe, reported that the post office had lost $15.9 billion for the year and was operating on just a few days' cash flow, having reached its legal debt limit. He all but begged Congress to take action. Mail was down 5 percent from the year before, and wages and benefits and other worker-related costs were an unsustainable 80 percent of the postal service's $81 billion operating expenses.
We still live in a physical world, we are still a highly dispersed nation. Things — pieces of paper or pieces of plastic or books or clothes or toys shipped in cardboard — still need to get to places where people live and work.
Jesse Lichtenstein, "Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?" (Esquire)
In the 1980s, well before Mee began working the DIOSS machine, postal carriers would receive all the mail for their route in a tub and sort it by hand into pigeonholes. Over the next twenty years, the postal service invested $13 billion in developing an automated system. In 1990, by keying each ZIP code into a computer, a crew of eighteen could break down five thousand pieces of mail in an hour. Today, using DIOSS, a crew of two can carve through more than thirty-six thousand pieces in the same hour. And the postal service is rolling out an even newer "intelligent mail" platform, which will scan items throughout the process, allowing the postal service to do pinpoint tracking, whether a letter is being sorted or five blocks from your door, awaiting delivery.
You won't find me complaining about the postal rate going up to 46 cents a letter. This article in Esquire is a great longread explaining everything about the Post Office and it's current crisis. It's like a much less romantic, modern version of The Night Mail.
