QUOTES 12/20/15

the INTERVAL INTERVIEWS LYNN NOTTAGE

Are there any other areas of culture that inspire your work? 
Definitely. If you come to my house, it’s sort of wall to wall art, and sometimes I’ll just go into the living room and sit and look at all these fabulous things that artists over the ages have said, and feel inspired and awed and insecure and all of the things you feel when you’re in the presence of people who are quite genius artists. Whenever I begin a play, I always make a soundtrack, and that soundtrack is what I write to for the entire play. So for the beginning of Sweat, I spent like two weeks listening to music and picking songs and placing them where I wanted them in the order, and that’s what I wrote the play to. I did the same for By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and Intimate Apparel , and every play. That’s the foundation that I build from.

Do you use music that’s all from your iTunes library and songs that you know evoke certain things for you? Or do you research the music that you want to use and search for brand new things?
It’s both things. Sometimes they’re songs that are my favorites in the iTunes library, but for others, I have to go in search of them. For Sweat, because it takes place in a part of the country that I don’t live in and it’s a group of people that are very different from myself, I thought about what would they be listening to and what excites them and what are my characters’ favorite tunes, and I try and put those on my soundtrack. So some of the music may be music that’s really different than my favorites, but they’re evocative of the mood of the piece or the place where the characters are in their lives.



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WEB POETS' SOCIETY: NEW BREED SUCCEEDS IN TAKING VERSE VIRAL (New York Times)

Seven years ago, Mr. Gregson, 34, was scraping by as a freelance copywriter, churning out descriptions of exercise equipment, hair products and medical imaging devices. Now, thanks to his 560,000 Instagram and Tumblr followers, he has become the literary equivalent of a unicorn: a best-selling celebrity poet.

...their appeal lies in the unpolished flavor of their verses, which often read as if they were ripped from the pages of a diary. And their poems are reaching hundreds of thousands of readers, attracting the attention of literary agents, editors and publishers, and overturning poetry’s longstanding reputation as a lofty art form with limited popular appeal.