Even as a critic writing closely reasoned and sometimes scholarly pieces, or when producing what some now call “cultural journalism,” or as an occasional polemicist, I write for the ear as much as for the eye. Always. I hear all my writing as speech. If it doesn’t sound right when spoken aloud, I revise until it does. […]
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[T]though I keenly appreciated the honor of finding myself among the select few admitted to the SF State program [in creative writing], I didn’t really enjoy the experience, or thrive in that hothouse environment. I hated feeling those other people’s fingerprints all over my work in progress. … [E]ven today I rarely show work in progress, in any form, to anyone — not even my editors. […] One reason I feel free not to let any of this worry me is that I have no affiliations or allegiances within the poetry world, thus no image of myself as a poet of this or that tendency, nothing to maintain in anyone else’s eyes or my own except a level of quality to my output. […] On June 6, 2018, the aptly named website Artsy.net published “Photographer Robert Capa Risked It All to Capture D-Day — then Nearly All His Images Were Lost,” by Haley Weiss, under its “Visual Culture” rubric. It consists, in its entirety, of a rehash of the Capa D-Day myth, simply rewritten from one or more of the standard versions that our research project has thoroughly refuted. […] This article, the first in a series of columns written for the Village Voice between 1968 and 1973, appeared exactly 50 years ago, in the June 20, 1968 issue of that alt-weekly newspaper, which had already become the model for the emerging national and, indeed, international “alternative press.” With it I hung out my shingle as a photography critic, a rubric that I thereby inaugurated and under which flag I still sail. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |