Allyn West

About Allyn West

Allyn West is a writer who works for the Rice Design Alliance at Rice University. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @allynwest.

To get the news from poems: Why Sara Cress’s “Breaking Poems” project is worth reading closely

March 30, 2016, by

12884453_10153948657976390_1763700063_nEvery night before bed, Sara Cress writes poetry in response to the headlines she’d spent the day surrounded by in her job. She posts most of her poems to her Tumblr site, but she has also published two slim volumes of them: Breaking Poems and 2015 Yearbook.

She identifies with a migratory songbird, “a mere puff,” she writes. She grieves the attacks in Paris. She, like most of the Internet, laments the revelation that bacon is very likely carcinogenic.

Cress, who received her degree in creative writing from the University of Houston, is making two essential assumptions. One is that poetry has something to say to the news. You’re probably familiar with that William Carlos Williams phrase — if you’ve shopped at Barnes & Noble, you’ve seen it on a tote bag: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” For Cress, it seems so. There is something about poetry — its complexity, its empathy — worth taking to the news of the day. The day, that is, we live in now: a day on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, scrolling, scrolling, where authority is dictated by “pageviews” and trending topics are flimsy as fame. “Poetry is the way I’ve always responded to sadness and frustration,” writes Cress in an email. “I started writing [the breaking poems] for me. … But a few months in I started to see that I was interpreting the news in a way that perhaps made it more palatable and heightened emotions about worn topics.”

It reminds me of something that James Kastely, Director of the Creative Writing Program at UH, once wrote: ““If there is any problem it is not that there is an excess of rhetoric but rather that there is not enough.” Continue reading

Gwendolyn Zepeda’s Monsters, Zombies and Addicts

June 5, 2015, by

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To be honest, before I started reading Gwendolyn Zepeda’s new collection, Monsters, Zombies and Addicts (Arte Público Press, 84 pages, 2015), released near the end of her two-year tenure as the first Houston Poet Laureate, I worried that the poems would be boosterish. Part of the gig, I knew, is to represent the city. Would every poem mention a bayou? Would she have been contractually obliged to champion the merits of the Downtown Living Initiative? Thankfully, the collection doesn’t show the strain of feeling that burden of representation. There are alligator gar. And freeways — and bayous. But you don’t learn much about Houston. Instead, you learn a lot about the kind of person, the kind of poet, that the city wanted to choose to represent it: sometimes chatty, sometimes vulgar, sometimes sentimental, and always funny, smart, honest, and tough.

You learn a lot about the kind of person, the kind of poet, that the city wanted to choose to represent it: sometimes chatty, sometimes vulgar, sometimes sentimental, and always funny, smart, honest, and tough.

Zepeda is best at homing in on the strange pleasure or pleasant strangeness in her everyday life. These poems are anecdotal, observational. Often, they begin the way the story a friend wants to tell you would:

“A woman who worked in our building killed herself this morning.”

And: “You say I flirt too much.”

And: “The other day I was working on a story.” Continue reading

Inprint Poetry Buskers at Sunday Streets

April 2, 2015, by

 

Cigna Sunday Strreets logoApril marks National Poetry Month. As we kick off this month, we thought it would be nice to showcase one of Inprint’s favorite programs, the Inprint Poetry Buskers. These poets spread the joy of poetry by writing poems on demand, using typewriters, at festivals and special events throughout the city. The Inprint Poetry Buskers can often be found at Sunday Streets. This past Sunday, they were writing poems on demand at Sunday Streets on Westheimer. Here, Inprint blogger and poetry busker Allyn West talks about poetry busking at Sunday Streets.

IMG_0533Sunday Streets is a hard thing to explain. The City of Houston, through its partnership with Cigna, talks about the initiative as a way to promote health and fitness. Those of us who have been to one, though, know that it’s much more than that. Sure, you’ll see people riding their bikes or jogging or doing parkour in the middle of the street, but you’ll also see organic farmers hawking fresh turnip greens and aspiring rappers peddling demo CDs.

I prefer the latter uses to the former. Besides, you can’t burn enough calories to offset the small-batch ice cream and brisket-slathered curly fries you buy from the food trucks that are parked on the route. Sunday Streets is really about the people you share the city with. The physical barriers of our vehicles and houses are dissolved. It’s a time when you can study the full behavioral range of Homo sapiens. You can bark, “Free poems here!” and other people look only somewhat askance at you. What a blessing. Continue reading

Puzzling through stories with Peter Turchi

February 4, 2015, by

Inprint loves to showcase the best in new books by top local authors. One of the most interesting books to come out in the past year is A Muse and A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic by Houston writer Peter Turchi. Turchi is the author of several books, including Map of the Imagination: Writer as Cartographer, named by The New York Times as one of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time. Turchi,  a faculty member at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, serves as a frequent interviewer for the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.  

A-_Muse_and_A_Maze-cover-236x300Some of my favorite books when I was just a li’l egghead were the Encyclopedia Brown stories by Donald Sobol. I went back to a collection of them recently after reading A Muse & A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, & Magic, the new book by University of Houston creative writing professor Peter Turchi.

The Encyclopedia Brown stories present themselves as mysteries. They concern Leroy, a.k.a. “Encyclopedia,” a 10-year-old “Sherlock Holmes in sneakers,” whose father happens to be the chief of police of Idaville, a town “like many other seaside [ones],” with “lovely beaches, three movie theaters, and four banks.” Except no one, writes Sobol, “got away with breaking the law in Idaville.”

The lawbreakers are your typical seaside layabouts; nothing to see here. Encyclopedia’s primary nemesis is a fledgling sociopath named Bugs Meany, instigator of a gang of would-be toughs called the Tigers who try to scam the other townies. Each chapter begins with an aggrieved victim seeking out Encyclopedia and his sidekick, Sally Kimbell. They ride their bikes to the scene of the crime; the story of the accuser and the story of the accused are told, and Encyclopedia pauses dramatically while Sobol interrupts to direct you to page 64 for “the solution.” In the end, some detail that violates the rate at which water evaporates, or the conventions of elevator repair, or the date when the Liberty Bell was cracked, is the lie that tells the truth. The antique lamp or the champion yodeling toad is returned to the rightful owner, and order is restored.  Continue reading

The Spiritual Oomph of Robert Boswell

August 22, 2013, by

bozOn Monday, August 26, Robert Boswell & James McBride launch the 2013/2014 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series reading from their new novels Tumbledown and The Good Lord Bird. Both books have received high praise from reviewers, so it is no wonder that the reading has sold out.

In addition to being a great writer of fiction, what the general public may not know is that Robert Boswell is also a great teacher of creative writing. Boswell teaches every spring at the UH Creative Writing Program—as co-holder of the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing with his wife, fiction writer Antonya Nelson—and his students love him. We asked Inprint blogger Allyn West to tell us what it’s like to study under Robert Boswell. (We should note that before teaching at UH, Boswell taught at New Mexico State University, in Las Cruces.)

These emails recruiting us grad students to come out for pool nights showed up every Thursday. The sender? Robert Boswell. The venue? My Brother’s Place, in Las Cruces. It was the one place to go in that town. Three years of these emails, and I went out once. Continue reading

Christine Ha, the writer

July 9, 2013, by

christine-1Christine Ha would always take the desk nearest the door — farthest, that is, from our professor. This was in 2009. We were enrolled in an Emily Dickinson class at the University of Houston. She spent most of the three hours typing — or hiding, maybe, on the other side of her laptop. Of course, there were some loudmouths who tended to dominate, but Christine rarely voiced her take on the few cryptic lines in front of us.

And I guess I was living under the assumption that only loudmouths are the right kind of people for reality television. Because when I heard that Christine would be taking a leave from the UH Creative Writing Program to compete on something called Master Chef, it struck me as — well, unlikely.  Continue reading

Pronouncing your favorite writer’s name

February 14, 2013, by

Inprint Michael ChabonOne of the reasons I wanted to go to Michael Chabon’s reading was to hear Inprint Executive Director Rich Levy pronounce the writer’s name.

More than a few times over the years I’d been — well, disabused of the pronunciation of a word I had come across reading but never heard aloud.

The first was “expletive.” I was 17, and I was in the habit of passing up chances to cuss by substituting a phrase I must have seen in Reader’s Digest, or something like that: “Expletive deleted.”

But I pronounced the word so it rhymed: “ex-PLEET-ive.” Continue reading

While at T. C. Boyle . . .

October 29, 2012, by

T.C. Boyle said that one of his teachers in elementary school—Mr. Carter—would bribe the class to behave with a promise that he’d read them a story at the end of the week. Touring on the release of a novel, San Miguel, Boyle was in town to read his own story for the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series earlier this month.

He stepped on stage at the Alley Theater in a buttercream jacket and red vintage Nikes. He’d arrived from London that weekend, in time to take in the Alley’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Recalling the pleasure he took from the play, the pleasure of listening to his teacher read to him, Boyle said he wanted to share with us not an except from San Miguel but a story, something “with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

“I’d used up all my sick days,” he began. Continue reading

“Readers,” Junot Diaz said, “are just happy to see you.”

October 5, 2012, by

Last Monday, over a thousand of us were. We’d come to Wortham Center to see him open the 32nd year of the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. Diaz—whose 2008 trip was nixed by Hurricane Ike—took the stage wearing dark jeans and running shoes. (Those of us who by now have read his latest collection, This is How You Lose Her, might be forgiven the desire to conflate these running shoes with Yunior’s, he of the depression-abating miles logged along the Charles River and the ruinous plantar fasciitis.)

Diaz shaded his eyes and looked into the crowd. He’d given readings, he said, at which the only people were his best friend and the guy’s fiancee, who would dump him later that night. After thanking us for coming and thanking Inprint for, as he said, “just existing,” then playfully cursing his favorite bookstore—“Damn you, Brazos,” he said. “I spent $300 there today”—Diaz read two short sections from This is How You Lose Her. Continue reading

On Writing Workshops

August 13, 2012, by

Tuesday, August 14th at noon Inprint begins online registration for its Fall 2012 Writers Workshops. All of our writing instructors have been students in a workshop in the past, either at the university level, or in another format. We thought it would be fun to hear what they have to say about writing workshops and why they can be meaningful. Here, Allyn West, who will be teaching a Personal Essay workshop this fall, shares his insights.

Do you want to know the secret to becoming a  writer? The one thing all writers everywhere want to know how to do?

You write.

But—then what? Unless you’re Zadie Smith or Junot Diaz, with major publishing houses clamoring even for your grocery lists, you will have all these pages and nothing to do with them, stumped by your questions about them. Are they any good? And how can I turn them into something—more? Continue reading