Pants on Fire – Kim Addonizio

Hello lovelies! I hope you are keeping well. I'm prepping to record a reading and Q&A with students about my forthcoming book Windfalls and my writing process. I recently enjoyed seeing Kim Addonizio read at an online event for Cheltenham Poetry Festival and I have been revisiting her work. This chimed with me:

‘AS A WRITER occasionally tarred with the brush of being a “confessional poet,” feathered with disdain and once even tied to a maypole by roving bands of critics, I’d like to reveal a few transgressions to you here and now. I hope you will forgive me. I can’t seem to stop telling you everything about me in the lineated memoir of my life. This may be because I’m a woman, which means I am an emotional land mine waiting to be stepped on, a weeping, oversharing harpy whose inner weather fluctuates wildly. And women, as everyone knows, often lack that quality of imagination men have in such abundance.

‘In any case, I clearly have an inordinate, some might say excessive, need to kneel in a small dark space, separated from you by a little mesh screen, and reveal to you my impure thoughts and the number of times I dishonoured my parents or coveted my neighbour’s donkey. And now I must tell you how many times I have been guilty of lying my head off in my poems and just plain making shit up. Although I hope you will see that I have also told the God’s honest truth on occasion, because a writer must tell the truth at least some of the time, or who would ever want to listen to her bullshit?'

– Kim Addonizio, 'Pants on Fire', Bukowski in a Sundress

Comments

MS: Naked Librarians & Laugharne Literati (Part 1)

A pile of books in the courtyard of Shelf Life This is a blog of two parts… Part One I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a most wonderful weekend. A lovely weekend. A Laugharne Weekend, and many laughs were to be had at Laugharne. Yet the fun began early, as my weekends frequently seem to these days, kicking off with the press night for Shelf Life at The Old Library in Swansea on Thursday, the second of twelve new productions being put on across Wales this year by the so-far-so-damn-good National Theatre of Wales . They continue to set the standard high. After nibbles and natters upstairs in the Old Police Station where an exhibition of wire works by Swansea artist Debbie Evans Quek graced the walls, we were ushered down to the sunny courtyard for the start of the evening’s innovative often-improvised acts. The site-specific promenade performance screams Volcano Theatre, who here combine their groundbreaking talents with the Welsh National Opera (WNO). This time their chosen

WAR Best Poetry Collections of 2023: Hymnal

Thrilled to see Julia Bell's Hymnal on WAR's ' Best Poetry Collections of 2023 ' list! Late in the 1960s, before Bell was born, her father and mother visited Aberaeron, a small fishing town on the west coast of Wales. Here, her father heard a voice – which he knew to be God – directing him to minister to the Welsh. Six months after she was born in the early 1970s, they moved to Aberaeron where he took up his first curateship. Over the next eighteen years they would move to various parishes within a forty mile radius: first to Llangeler a predominantly Welsh-speaking parish in the Teifi valley, then back to Aberaeron where Bell’s father became vicar, and then to a larger and more Evangelical church in Aberystwyth. This unique memoir in verse offers a series of snapshots about religion and sexuality. In verse because it’s how Bell remembers: snapshots in words strung along a line, which somehow constitute a life. Snapshots of another time from now, but from a time whic

Buzz Blog: The Passion | Stage Review

> REVIEWS THE PASSION | STAGE REVIEW BY SUSIE WILD ⋅ APRIL 27, 2011 ⋅ POST A COMMENT FILED UNDER MICHAEL SHEEN , PORT TALBOT , THE PASSION **** Various locations, Port Talbot Fri 22 – Sun 24 April Cast includes: Michael Sheen, Matthew Aubrey, Nigel Barrett, Francine Morgan and Matthew Woodyatt. Michael Sheen became a Messiah of his home town over the Easter weekend with his leading role in a 72-hour epic retelling of The Passion, yet is was Port Talbot that was the real star of the show. For the sheer numbers in the audience (6000+), and national and international press attention The Passion is an ambitious event sure to go down in folklore. Two years in the planning and several months in community build up, National Theatre Wales joined forces with Cornwall’s WildWorks to create a multi-platform delivery of an age-old tale co-directed by local-boy-done-good Michael Sheen and the innovative Bill Mitchell . In this version of The Passion, poet and author Owen S

Wildlife

Search This Blog