Hey all — a few tips, for blog writing in particular, but I thought they'd be applicable to writing of all kinds — here you go!
Blogging can bring your business exposure, credibility, and whole lot more revenue - so it's in your best interest to deliver a steady stream of powerful writing. But for a lot of us, that's a tall order. If you're finding your creative juices running a little dry, this list of quick and easy tips is sure to get them flowing again.
(Somerville, Mass.) Somerville's Ibbetson Street Press will be awarding former U.S. poet/laureate Robert Pinsky the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award at the Somerville News Writers Festival, Nov. 11, 2007 7PM at the Dilboy VFW Hall ( 371 Summer St.) Davis Square, Somerville. The award, like the festival, is in its fifth year. It is awarded to individuals who have made substantial contributions to the poetry and or the small or alternative press world. Former recipients of the award have been Robert K. Johnson (poet and retired Suffolk University professor), Louisa Solano (former owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop), Jack Powers (founder of Stone Soup Poets), and David Godine (founder of Davide Godine publishing). Tickets are $15 and will be available at the door or by calling 617-666-4010.
Somerville, Mass. Robert Pinsky will be awarded the fifth annual Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award at the Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 11, 2007 at 7PM. ( Dilboy VFW Hall 371 Summer St. Davis Sq. Somerville) http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com/ Pinsky is the former Poet/Laureate of the United States.
Former recipients have been Robert K. Johnson ( retired Suffolk University Professor), Louisa Solano ( former owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop), Jack Powers ( founder of Stone Soup Poets), and David Godine ( founder of David Godine Publishing, Inc.) The Ibbetson Street Press is a small press located in Somerville, Mass. http://ibbetsonpress.com/ To get tickets to the Festival call 617-666-4010 or purchase at the door.
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. He received a B.A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters.
He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).
He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David (Schocken, 2006); Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry(1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.
Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of traslation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass).
About his work, the poet Louise Glück has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."
From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives.
In 1999, he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).
His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry Magazine's Oscar Blumenthal prize, the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.
This poetry book is about the atrocities committed in El Salvador during the civil war from 1980-1992. It is based on my talks with El Salvadoran refugees in the 1980's and years of research.
In San Miguel, many people are being exterminated and the atrocities continue to this day.
I hope you will order this book. The people of El Salvador should not be forgotten. I hope to carry this message on behalf of Rufina Amaya, the only survivor of the massacre at El Mozote, who died of a stroke in March of this year.
In her fascinating poem cycle, Gloria Mindock jolts back into memory the roots of El Salvador's present day violence. Mindock coaxes to the page the voices of the dead who lie, less in peace, than in restless obsession with the atrocities they suffered. She brings forth as well the voices of the living who seem startled to find that they died somewhere between the horrors they witnessed and the grave they have yet to lie down in. Blood Soaked Dresses is a beautiful, harrowing first book. --Catherine Sasanov
We are reminded of Cezar Vallejo's witnesses: bones, solitude, rain, and the roads -- that we are tied to each other in beauty and suffering, life and death. Gloria Mindock's poems grant us the voice of a soul caught on a limb between the promise of peace everlasting and impossible resurrections. Poem after poem we are asked to uncover those whose bitter ash weeps over the world, and no other country/wants to see it. This book is written from a compassionate heart that whispers and grieves, one that isn't afraid to hold its gaze. --Dzvinia Orlowsky
A poet must never shy from the necessary, no matter how hard it is. In poetry that is both elegant and brutal, Gloria Mindock exposes the horror of the Salvadorian conflict especially on women. Though Salvador has faded from the front pages, the war has reincarnated in other countries on other continents making "Blood Soaked Dresses" completely contemporaneous. This poetry possesses, as Yeats said, "a terrible beauty." And we need it now more than ever. --John Minczeski
The reader of Blood Soaked Dresses is enriched by Mindock's power and commitment. She has earned a place among our great protest poets, reminding us, with lyric tension, that social justice is our constant and necessary concern. --Simon Perchik
Cheryl Kaye Tardif, the author of The River, Divine Intervention and the Amazon bestseller Whale Song in this blog post, writes about the virtual book tour.
Lots of cool ideas there:
Virtual book tours (also known as virtual author tours, guest blogging, blog tours, or VBTs are a simple concept. The author "tours" various blogs and sites that pertain to a theme in the book or to writing in general. This way, you can potentially reach thousands of avid readers each tour day from the privacy of your office or home. The goal of marketing your book is to expose it to as many people as possible in an exciting, cost-effective and entertaining way. Guest blogging can achieve that goal. Most blogs are archived, so your post becomes permanent and often viral, spreading from site to site. That is leverage. You are in essence leveragingyour internet presence and duplicating yourself with every VBT stop. Your blog tour is working for you even while you sleep. Try doing that at a bookstore signing!
Among her peers, Cheryl Kaye Tardif is known for her perseverance and tireless dedication in book promotion. In August 2007, she was the first Kunati Books author to hold a virtual book tour with 35 stops. In September 2007, Cheryl will be speaking about book marketing strategies at the 8th Annual "Express Yourself..." Authors' Conference in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Over the years, she has appeared on television and radio, and in newspapers and magazines across Canada and the US.
Oh man, just found this blog after trolling through some of the other posts. It's totally my thing! The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks-making fun of bad punctuation since 2005. Check it out here.
The blog wasn't noticed much at first. But about six months ago, things started picking up. "You know how it happens _ one person links to you, then others do. Also, everyone has camera phones now," Keeley said in a phone interview. Earlier this week, she was linked on Yahoo!, which quadrupled her traffic for a couple days to about 2,000 hits _ though her record is still about 3,000 in a day.
What draws people? The humor, but also partly, Keeley admits, a sense of superiority, at least grammatically speaking _ something she tries to avoid herself. "I don't consider myself a prescriptivist or a pedant," she says (really). "So I'm open to critiques of my own language. I make plenty of mistakes myself."
Rampant quote abuse is a pet peeve of many writing teachers, of course. One of them, Pat Hoy, feels the larger problem is not the punctuation missteps _ that's bad enough _ but the reliance on quotes themselves, by writers who should know better.
Hey smallpressers — throught you would find the following post (from my personal blog) of interest — if not, move along, nothing to see here!
Of primary interest to me, as of late, is the use of the hyphen-particularly as it relates to foreign words (especially Japanese)-as we work through Yoko Danno's translation of the Kojiki. I prefer to use them only where it is established convention to do so or where omission would result in ambiguity or confusion. My mantra: when in doubt, leave it out!
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Robert Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. He received a B.A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic 
This poetry book is about the atrocities committed in El Salvador during the civil war from 1980-1992. It is based on my talks with El Salvadoran refugees in the 1980's and years of research.
