Journals

So if one were to come into some holiday spending money for oneself, to which literary journals would one subscribe? Oh, forget the "one," stuff, I want to hear from you. Yeah, you.

If you could pick five literary journals, preferably ones that include poetry, which would they be and why? For a great editorial vision? For excellent special issues? For the articles? What are the must-haves for Post(modern or avant or office or whatever)? For more conservative poetry?

I give not a rat's ass about reputation. I stuck with Poetry for several years based on reputation back in college and was disappointed on a monthly basis (it may be better now with the editorial change, but I haven't gone back to it to find out). Let me know which ones actually impress you, press into you, leave some kind of mark.

The applicability game

There's water on the Moon.

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In related news, I just finished submitting manuscripts to the Bakeless and Yale Younger Series competitions.

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In unrelated news, the feature at Stone Church was great.

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In related-to-that news, no video or audio was recorded, which is probably for the best, given my inter-poem banter. I'm not sure that one family will ever be the same...

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In unrelated news, my dad is on business in China for a few days. We're trying out Skype. I'm liking it so far, much better than telephones.

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In related-to-China news, got a new Monsterpocalypse piece, Gakura:

Yes, that's a giant ape wielding a passenger train as a flail. I love this game.

A Tiny Compendium

Some time ago my manuscript The Icarus Sketches was picked up by Seven Kitchens Press. I've seen some of the chapbooks Seven Kitchens has put out and been impressed, so I was quite excited to see Icarus in the light (bad pun, sorry).

The poems I devised are a sequence, beginning with Icarus the Young, taking him through various childhood issues, then letting him live (he's offered the chance to live so long as he serves as a symbol of the long journey not taken), but each poem mimics the structure of the original myth, the rise and fall. So whether he's applying for a grant from the DoD or acting as a snarky docent, he's Icarus. I think the sequence stands as a damn good chapbook.

Then I saw the sequence my friend Crystal Boson was writing. It, too, took Icarus as a subject. It, too, reinvented him in a way few writers have bothered to try. But where my individual poems are fairly simple, hers are Ashbery-dense. Where her poems are fairly similar in style and voice, mine have a great deal of variety. The two sequences do really interesting things next to each other, effectively creating a space wherein the reader can imagine a whole spectrum of new Icarus material.

And here's the happy news / kicker. Ron Mohring at 7KP is going to publish both sequences in one chabpook. We haven't worked out all the details yet, but this will be a tiny compendium, containing two distinct works by two authors. Given my love for The Scarlet Compendium by Alice Notley and Douglass Oliver, I'm doubly excited.

Details will come over the summer. Anybody who wants to pre-order and/or review and/or would like to see Crystal and me reading side-by-side, drop me a line.

AWP Day 1 / Out of Sequence 2

The New England Review reading was great. The fiction writers in particular gave life to their selections, and the audience laughed. A lot. This is important.

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Some panels, which will go unnamed, were not so good. This is a sketch of a bad panelist about to neuter the poetry s/he claims to love:



This is a sketch of a series of panelists so in love with themselves that their egoheadballoons begin floating up through the empty room.



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Got to meet C. Dale Young and John Gallaher in person. Yay nonvirtuality!

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Received an email from one of the high school students I performed for yesterday. He was too shy to raise his hand when I asked if there were any budding writers in the audience. He notes in his email that he's been trying to look at things differently, like looking at a tree stump and instead of thinking "a tree was there" thinking "a homeless man's stage." This kid gets it. I haven't responded yet, but I'm very excited.

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Talked with my veryvery good friend Logen, who expressed disappointment on how fame works. Specifically, how the production of one good volume of poetry can get a poet "in" with a press, which then gives that poet seeming cart blanche for publication. Yes, we were oversimplifying a bit, but there's something about the sequence of publications that is disturbing. The work doesn't always improve. It often gets worse.

I added some comments about my performances at the high school yesterday and how changing the order of poems affects the reception of later ones. If I performed "Ma'am please put those jeans down" by Glenn Phillips (since I have it memorized, and it's rightly a crowd-pleaser) or "ADD TV," the kids would go crazy for anything else I did after that, even if I screwed up. Maybe the masses aren't quite so fickle as we think? To a/our fault?

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Incredible Hulk Quandary Haiku

rippling suddenly
with verdant musculature
what would you do first?

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I'm officially coining the term "nah-vant garde." So there.

"A Brief Treatise on Synaesthesia"

I normally don't want to announce every publication I get on the blog, but if there's one that particularly amuses me or makes me proud, I will put it up here. Such is the case with my poem just published at nth position. It really was an email to Mark Yakich, sent upon finishing his hilarious (and textured) book The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine. Check both out.

Useful links for beginning submitters

For friends just beginning to submit to literary journals:

1. Duotrope collects response times, submission requirements, and all that good information in one place for you.

2. Jeffrey Bahr's table ranks literary journals by how hard they are to get into. Note that this is not the same as saying how good they are, but others will generally accord more prestige to the 9s through 6/7s on this list than the 5s through 1s (in case you don't get it, due to stress over just starting to submit, the top-ranked journal, the Futility Review, is a gag).

3. Newpages gives slightly more in-depth (1-2 paragraphs) reviews of the journals. Qualitative as opposed to the quantitative approach of the previously mentioned sites.

For my friends at Halo tonight

Bacchae

we drive by a small town with no graveyard and people
so crackly-old they must have forgotten to die

we picnic by the side of the road
and corn husks
mutilated by ants
litter the ground
tattered as poor ghosts

expecting farmers
we instead find dancers
bloody as newborns
spinning in the fields
leaving little hoofprints in the soil

and knowing that the old people do not die
and knowing ghosts are poor
and knowing that the hoofprints are very small indeed

we begin to dance

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That poem was published in Karamu back in 2004, but tonight it's for my friends (who are probably still) dancing at Halo in downtown Bryan.

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Man, I just looked at the Karamu website, which hasn't been updated since 2003. Bad site, good journal. Stick to the poem.

Three Kinds of Braggadocio

Ron Mohring over at Seven Kitchens Press has given the go-ahead: The Icarus Sketches will appear in 2009 as the third chapbook in that press's Editor's Series. You can see the forthcomingness over in their sidebar.

I recently received two of 7KP's chapbooks - Underground Singing by Harry Humes and Still by Deborah Burnham - and the production value was quite good. I have Icarus poems out at various journals, and some have already been published. We'll see how nice I can make the acknowledgments page look by mid-2009 ;-)

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In related news, I finally have time to hunker down and work on diluvium. The recent feature on visual poetry in Poetry is heartening. I also think of the wonderful job Jessica Smith is doing to bring visual poetry out into the light. On the other hand, I have doubts any of the pages in diluvium will appear in a journal. It's just going to be too dependent on sequentiality and linking pages.

If I haven't talked to you about it recently, think of the love-child of Ed Dorn's Languedoc Variorum and Steve McCaffery's Carnival, and that's what I'm trying to do stylistically. Pair the two types of poetry that most depend on a burst of energy/imagery - that is, visual and lyric - and then extend them into an 80+ page poetic sequence.

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If you've been reading, you'll recall a previous post about me trying to freestyle. Well, I really liked the bit about boomerangs and elephant pelvises, and every once in a while I think of something that flows. I think this is going to turn into some kind of mock epic. Or mock rap epic. Or rap mock epic. Or epic rap mockery. Or something. Tentative title is "Attack of the 50 Foot Ideologies." These lines presumably will belong in the middle somewhere:

"From an elephant's pelvis I
fashioned a boomerang
that laid to waste and raised up cities
Then he came at me with a shank

shaved from an obelisk
stolen from Egypt
screaming, "I'm an objectivist!"
But I left his penis in pieces-

deflecting it with a shield
made out of Beowulf's contradictions
all the while replying, "Syncretism
derives energy from convictions' frictions."

Yeah, I get carried away. Sound does that. Haven't yet decided whether to choke it back a bit. It's a hell of a lot of fun to say out loud, let me tell you. I actually picture the line breaks somewhere else, incidentally, but there's a definite four-line rhyme box - I like carrying the energy from a set of rhymes into a new set of images.

How to Use Irony, and Lots of It, in a Title

From blognigger.com: "Dyslexic Negro Cryptographer Lightly Etches Code Into McCain Volunteer's Face While She Remains Perfectly Still"...

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In unrelated news, my dissertation proposal has moved one step closer to approval.

In related-to-that news, the dissertation itself is progressing nicely.

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In news that is somehow related to something, head over to The Splinter Generation, where my poem "The garbage man will make it all all right" is one of the pieces representing my fractured 15-35 year old demographic.

The poem is dedicated to Nandra Perry. She popped into my office today to say that since the poem appeared in The Texas Observer, she's been getting contacted by people she hasn't heard from in years. Ironic poetry, bringing people together in totally random ways :-)