Self-Promotion: New Homes for Poems

Last year, after submitting to literary journals at a fairly steady rate, I stopped.  Partly, I was exhausted.  Submitting is relatively easy, though it can be a pain to reformat submission after submission, but mostly it's the waiting.  Two days to a rejection with no explanation.  Four months to hear from an editor that several readers liked it, but then decided it wasn't for them.  Additional work sent to editors who praised a submission, but requested something slightly different, only to take six months to reject it with zero feedback.  Sometimes, an editor or readers likes a piece enough to accept it.  Sometimes they like a few.

As it turned out, I was just successful enough, so that I only had a handful of poems left, and most of them, even the ones I loved, felt a little stale.  Like a marshmallow.  Still good for roasting, and sort of pleasant in its chewiness, but not always the best kind.  So last year I started going to the Boston Public Library in Copley Square to write, and did not submit at all: I ended the year with a sack of new poems, ready for s'mores (or some other confusing metaphor).  Then I began to submit, and racked up a handful of acceptances, usually a combination of fresh and the old, chewy ones.

In just the last week I've had pieces in three fine places.  Perhaps you find yourself here, because you found me in one. In any case, thanks to BOAAT Press, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Storyacious for providing homes for my poems, and to Boaat and Storyacious for the nifty illustrations! Paper Darts, who published a few of my pieces a couple years ago, still takes the cake for best accompanying artwork, but I do like when journals provide you with additional stimulation.

Here they are:

BOAAT - Unexpected Delays and Small Comfort
The food court is a desert, undergoing renovations, and the fast food burger chain has run out of Happy Meals. Instead, they are selling Tragedy Meals...

Pretty Owl Poetry - Strange Shores and Memories of Water
A man’s head was filled with water. In summery months it teemed with glittering fish-like thoughts that he’d lure with the subtle bait of meditation...

Storyacious - Lightbringers
They kept their angel chained to a post in the subdivision. Its song was so beautiful, all the birds left town in shame...


Stay tuned for more publications and random musings in October!

Submission Recession, Writing Domination

Now that I've had a little time to recover from the 2013 AWP Conference in Boston, it seems like a good time to consider the year 2012 in writing.  I participated in two readings: one at the Marliave for U35, a reading series for writers under the age of 35, and another, the highly esteemed, or at least somewhat recognizable, Literary Death Match at Club Oberon.  Out of 33 submissions, I had 6 publications, for an acceptance rate, roughly comparable to Ivy League schools, of about 18%.  One piece, "Sidekicks," published in the MidAmerican Review, was an "Editor's Choice," and a finalist for the 2011 Fineline Competition.  Two more pieces appeared in Knock Magazine, a publication that seems to have already gone under.  The rest are available online for your reading pleasure.

Paper Darts, a hip sort of design-collective/publication dolled up The Sweetness, Mirror Day, and Ride to the Top with some images that will likely be my first tattoo.

Ditch, a Canadian journal of poetry, published Flutters, Midnight of the Caramel Eaters, and Sprout.

Then Punchnel's put up Gibbous.

And The Destroyer offered my one and only poem (or is it fiction?) in the second person: Animus.

Finally, towards the end of the year, Fjords Review accepted two pieces, and curiously decided that despite having submitted those pieces as prose poems, that I would be listed not as a contributing "poet," like nearly everyone else in the issue, but as a "writer." 

This continues the very incremental upward trajectory of my submission acceptances. In 2012, I focused my attention on online publications, and submitted to online venues that seemed like they might have a slightly different audience from places I've had work in the past. 

This year, I sense a submission recession has set in.  Seeing the last of the worthy poems I wrote in college published has made me somewhat introspective, and as a result I've been focused on writing more (which is a perennial New Year's resolution).  So far, I've maintained a far steadier pace then I have in several years.  There's still plenty of time left in 2013, but my hope is that even if I don't make a single submission this year, I'll be building up my war chest of poems in anticipation of a bumper year in 2014.

November and Beyond

Well, November was a busy month.

I left my job as the Lead Writing Specialist for Foundation Year at Northeastern University, and started as Tutor Coordinator for the College of Professional Studies.  I'm sad to leave my students in FY, but excited at the opportunity to help hundreds more in an administrative role.

I also went to Poland with my family for Thanksgiving.  We ate a large number of perogies, wandered the streets of the Kazimierz District, had some very moving outings to Holocaust related sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Oskar Schindler factory, and visited many synagogues, such as the Tempel Synagogue in Krakow pictured here.


The month was so busy that I never got around to posting anything, and aside from that personal update, I also had a piece publish by The Destroyer, which deals in Post-apocalyptic Paper-mache.  It begins

Every hungry, you stumble upon the ruins of a paper factory ...

Here's hoping that you never look at candy buttons quite the same way again.

Call For Submissions: Cartographie Curieux

Greetings Friends, Acquaintances, One-Night Stands, Frenemies, Editors, Classmates, Professors, Colleagues, and everyone else,

We are pleased to present a call for submissions from our new Web Journal: Cartographie Curieux. Cartographie Curieux is interested in the curious geographies that everyone must navigate as they travel through life. We are obsessed with finding ourselves and we are looking for some good maps to get us there. We think you may be (or know) one of the talented cartographers we are looking for: please send us submissions of any kind: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and of course, images which engage with the idea of maps. Surprise us!

Check Out Our Nascent Website: ttp://www.cartographiecurieux.com

And LIKE us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CartographieCurieux

We review and publish submissions on a rolling basis and plan to publish our first work in April of 2012. Some maps we’d love to publish:

Fantasy, blueprints, schema, diagram, to buried treasure, to nowhere, home, the backyard, offices, alleys, migration patterns of Canadian Geese, birds-eye view, the body, heaven, hell, daytrips, the mind, maps best viewed with red-blue 3D glasses, your career, well-intentioned but inaccurate, our career, fog density patterns in San Francisco, dungeons and dragons, territories, a backpack, macro and micro economies, the ocean floor, the highest points in Iowa, cotton candy trade-routes, maps that require a QR Code reader, “Family Circus” style misadventures, sculptural, ideas, the internet, the blogosphere, outlines, maps that employ erasure, sunken cities, invisible cities, as-yet-unbored subway lines, bird houses, carpet stains, concentrations of all-you-can-eat buffets in Ohio, and geographies we can’t imagine without your help…

Send All Submissions here:

submissions @ cartographiecurieux.com

Thanks in advance for your support; we hope your work finds its way to us soon.

Best,

Ori Fienberg
Michael Allen Potter

P.S. And LIKE us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CartographieCurieux

Short and Sweet

The end of the year is approaching, and as I do each year about this time I take stock of the writing I've sent out to literary journals. Around fall, when my submission fatigue set in, it appeared that this would be a bumper-year for publications, however after several publications dates were postponed, it ended up just keeping pace with past years. Here's a selection from/of pieces that appeared on the world wide strangeness this year:

". . . His fingertips are like gentle sandpaper, soft from years of rubbing." - from Night Hungers, in Kill Author

"On the horizon a red sunset walls off the earth from grey rain clouds." - from Brick Harvest, in The Prose Poems Project

"Naturally, it is important for all business to be conducted reclining." - from To the Heart, in the Nashville Review

I know of a few pieces I'll have published in 2012, and meanwhile here's a final piece for 2011. After I submitted to Serving House Journal I had a brief exchange with the editor, Steve Kowit, about one piece, then SHJ decided to publish another and forgot to tell me.

No matter; it's so small (the smallest I've ever had accepted) that I might have forgotten to tell me too. You can read it here:

"At night, cars with one burned out headlight pretend to be motorcycles."


Thanks for reading. Happy Holidays and New Year!

Selections from the Complete Rhyming Dictionary

... and Poet's Craft Book, Edited by Clement Wood, c. 1936

The desire to write poetry, or at least acceptable verse is almost universal. The achievement of this desire may be gained by anyone, without excessive effort.

* * *

Poetry is the expression of thoughts which awake the higher and nobler emotions or their opposites, in words arranged according to some accepted convention.

* * *

Insofar as the conventions of poetry were artificial and unnatural, poetry tended constantly to rigidify and petrify. It became artificial and unnatural,
whereas prose continued...

* * *

Poets, bound by fossilized conventions, have become a tepid social group...

* * *

The fulfillment of desire causes others to spring hydra-like from its invisible corpse.

* * *

In all cases the danger is rather in the overuse of the intellect, than in the use of inspiration.

Reading the Street

Lilly, my parents' dog, is a sweetheart. When you're sick she'll lie down on the floor next to your bed and keep you company. She very rarely barks, and instead communicates using a variety of whines, all with different pitches and tones, to let us know she's hungry, wants to go outside, or is excited to see someone. When her food bowl is brought to her outside she prances merrily until it's put down. She occasionally jumps up to greet people, but usually she returns to the ground quickly. Certainly, there's no question: Lilly has many admirable traits. She is a good dog.

However, despite what might be expected of a German Shepherd, she's never struck me as particularly smart. She completed an obedience school class, and then returned for remedial work when she was about two years old. Of course, practice makes perfect, and while they strongly encouraged me to practice my trumpet every day for a couple of years, my parents haven't done much to ensure that Lilly continued her education and practice at home.

Now, at over 4 years old, it's not clear what Lilly remembers/learned from her training. She sometimes acknowledges her name by lifting her head, but rarely comes when called. She's trained my father to play a form of fetch in which he throws, she brings the ball or stick back to within about fifteen feet, and only relinquishes it once another ball is thrown. After the final walk of the night, we have successfully conditioned her to sit and wait for her treat, but outside of that context, and without a treat forthcoming, Lilly simply looks on quizzically as I encourage her to do tricks.

Despite not retaining much memory of her schooling, I still hold out hope for Lilly, because I believe she's an inquisitive reader, and as I always tell my writing students, reading can make you better at just about anything. While the house is filled with books, I'm not suggesting that Lilly is a big fan of literature, rather she's a street reader, a reader of scents.

When my parents take Lilly on her final walk of the night around 10, they let her sniff around a little, but especially as Autumn descends and it becomes colder, the walk is more of a march. We complete the .75 mile loop in about 15 minutes, however we have to pull Lilly away from her reading in order to make it in around that time.

Once I had the idea of Lilly reading in my head I couldn't get it out. I hate being bothered while in the midst of a book, and if some tried to pull me away while I was reading the last few sentences of a page, I might snap at her. Lilly never does, which I think is a testament to her good nature.

So when I was dog-sitting a few weeks ago I decided that I would give Lilly all the time she wanted to Read the Street. That same .75 mile loop that usually takes 15 minutes, took us nearly an 1.5 hours, but I'm sure Lilly was satisfied with her read. I have yet to determine exactly what constitutes a page, but I like to imagine each area she sniffs as a poem that she's studying carefully so she'll remember every detail. Lilly is especially lucky to read a book that's constantly changing, and I hope to give her another chance to read it in full the next time I visit.

Poetry Prize Finalist

My poetry manuscript, "Where the Bees Are Going," was a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.

Poems from the manuscript can be found all over the internet (as well as a smattering of other places):

To the Heart
Night Hungers
Brick Harvest

The manuscript is still being considered for a number of late-Spring and Summer contests. Obviously I hope someone picks it up. And if not I'll continue to edit, cut, and add so hopefully it will be accepted next year.

Writing on the Side, Part II

I've always written. My parents have saved various artifacts of my nascent writing career. There's a story I transcribed to a teacher in preschool, and my first book, a graphic novel written and illustrated on construction paper about the adventures of Fred and his best friend, a piece of bread come to life (called "Fred and Bread"). In fifth grade I had my first taste of true inspiration. While walking on the beach I had a fragment of poetry come to me and I spent dinner with my family finishing it on a napkin.

The encouragement I got from my parents for those few lines was amazing. Over the next two years I wrote many "poems," but in truth few of them had any spark to them accept the first I wrote on the beach. Even I could tell when I started clawing at words, desperately trying and failing to make something magical happen.

In high school I started writing again. I had some genuine inspiration and when that didn't come through I just covered it with slavish homages and mimicry of Beck's lyrical style circa Mellow Gold. My freshman year I joined the high school literary journal club, a shunned circle filled with young women who wore to much black make-up and had a deep feelings about the nature of stuff. I'm only a little sorry to say that I mostly felt contempt for the student-written pieces we considered for inclusion. The final straw came when we read a submission that started like this:

My life
is like
a deep
dark pit

... it didn't get better from there. To my surprise everyone in the club praised it heartily, for it's honesty, and for getting things so right. I was flabbergasted, but when I went home and re-read the things I'd written I realized they were no better. Right then, in my sophomore year I made the determination that I was done with writing, at least until I was sure that I could avoid writing only about the deep importance of my high school angst.

The amazing thing is, I kept this resolution. From time to time an English class would offer a creative option for a project and I would take it and usually do well, but I didn't even consider it again until I was registering for my first college classes.

I was determined to be a Cognitive Science major, but Oberlin didn't have it and so I determined that I would take Neuroscience and Psychology 101, and see which was more fun. With those and an English seminar I was at 12 credits, and so I began flipping through the course catalog (when did they stop printing course catalogs?) looking for something light to slot in. My dad, who had his own copy of the catalog, said "What about Technique and Form in Poetry?"

Mid-way through my first semester in college I was already doing so disastrously bad in Neuroscience that even 100% scores for the rest of the semester would only have been good enough for me to pass with a very lenient curve. In Psychology 101 I had severely alienated myself from the department when I got into an argument with one of the professors in class where I posited that reported rates of male depression were far too low because men don't seek help for their depression and it manifests itself in different ways (now acknowledged as obvious in most psych circles). The professor then tried to tell me that women, who have so many responsibilities, not to mention ovaries, really have far more to be depressed about than men. At that point I called her an idiot. Things devolved from there.

Meanwhile the class I was loving most was Technique and Form in Poetry. Professor Martha Collins was just a little quirky and very enthusiastic. Every week we were responsible for writing at least one poem. There were couplets, haiku, sonnets, prose poetry, and many more. For individual assignments she awarded check minuses, checks, check pluses, and on a couple rare occasions, check-plus-pluses. I never received a check minus, though Martha was not a push over, on a few a occasions she gave me the check, but commented that she felt my work was weaker that weak. Every week Martha put a couple poems up on an overhead projector for the class to discuss, and I found mine poems going up nearly every other week.

About 3/4s of the way into the semester we were required to turn in a handful of poems, these inspired by the work of another poet. I knew immediately what I wanted to do. When I'd first gone to the book store for my textbooks I had browsed the poetry section. There I ran across Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions and was captivated. They didn't have it in Oberlin's library (or maybe it was checked out) and so I kept returning to the bookstore, surreptitiously making my way through it. I determined that I would write responses to the first few pages of questions. Once I got going I couldn't stop. By the time I finished I had written 50 pages of poetry.

When I got to class I threw my manuscript into the stack by the TA. Then I waited one week.

The next week when I came in Martha was waiting for me at the door of the classroom. "Come to my office after class," she said, "we need to talk." Her tone was flat. She didn't smile. That day nothing I'd written was on the overhead. Martha began the class, "I received a lot of interesting responses to this assignment. Many of you took it seriously. Some of you took it VERY seriously." I felt myself go red.

I sweated through the class and when it was over I was the first one out. I waited a healthy amount of time, enough so I was sure Martha would be in her office, and then headed over.

When I arrived she was flipping through my Answers. The pages were covered with her pen marks, some comments, but mostly check marks and a few smiley faces. I began to relax, a little. Martha turned to me and asked, "So how long have you been working on this?" When I explained that the spirits had done it all in one night, she nodded once and turned back to the pages. Then she asked another question, "What's your major?" I started to say biopychology, but Martha stopped me. "No you're not," she said, "you're a creative writing major."

Since that moment I've never doubted that I, whatever else I may do in life, am first and foremost, a writer. It's not an easy career/life choice. I've had dozens of pieces published, but I haven't yet had a manuscript accepted. I have an MFA, but an MFA is apparently no longer a terminal degree. I've scraped by the last few years with writing-related jobs that barely support me, and while I love the job I have now it's not tenure track and I don't receive benefits.

This history, and everything I wrote about in Part I came flooding back when I had a student ask a question I think about often (in the conditional past tense):

I really like writing: should I major in Creative Writing?

It was so assured, so matter of fact, that for a moment I had no idea how to answer. I often wonder, should I have majored in Creative Writing? I was interested in economics, psychology, and computer science. Surely one of those would have me in a position to be making bank now. But at the same time I know there were many things I've written, that almost certainly never would have come into being.

I hemmed and hawed, I made allusions to Wallace Stevens. Finally, I told her to double major, or if she writes on her own to join writing clubs or school lit magazines and minor in Creative Writing. I told her, despite what I chose, to keep her options open.

But not everyone can be Wallace Stevens (in fact, I'd guess only one person ever can). For me, and I think many other writers, there was no other way. I needed the mentoring and the validation to assure myself that I was making the right choice (even if I question it at times). By writing for so long, with such focus, I've steeled myself. Even if writing on the side only makes it impossible to write a few good pieces in a year. Even if I have to scrape out a living and wait years (I hope not) for one of my manuscripts to be accepted for publication, I write not for a grade, or remuneration, or even for the adulation of my peers, but because I love it and I must.

New Piece in The Nashville Review

I have a piece in the current issue of the Nashville Review.

My piece, about an island with a uniquely evolved people and culture, is called To the Heart.

I'm pleased To the Heart is in the company of other provocative works. I particularly enjoyed Ben Loory's short story The Cracks in the Sidewalk and Sarah Vap's long poem excerpt Winter:aphorisms.

Prose Poem Project and Kill Author

Two more of my pieces are available on the interwebs.

The latest, Night Hungers, can be viewed at Kill Author.

Another, Brick Harvest, is at Prose Poem Project, the fifth poem down on page 2 of the 5/26 additions.

Interviewed by Monkeybicycle

Today the literary journal with arguably the finest name, Monkeybicyle has posted an interview with me about the piece 'Clockwork Dog' which appears in their latest issue.

Enjoy an excerpt here and follow the link after the break to read more about the joy of baseball, why I write prose poetry, and the gentleness of Iowa:


‘Clockwork Dog’ is built on a disparity of terms – ‘friendly
friction’ / ‘retrieving discarded’ / etc. – how important is this
discord to your poetry (or this poem)?

In poetry, and contemporary poetry in particular, I think that the
pairing of disparate words and contrasting language is a common
strategy. The goal, I’m pretty sure is to be evocative, but often it
results in obfuscation. You could say the same about the very title
and subject of this poem. I understand that an initial reaction may
be something along the lines of, what the hell is a “clockwork dog”
anyway? Well, I don’t want my reader surrounded by a jangle of words,
so while the exact form of the dog is left to the reader, by the end
they have an idea of this dog’s motivations, and I think would agree
that he is a “good dog.” So rather than discord, in this and other
pieces I work to create chords from unlikely notes.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

There is also an aggressive use of range in this piece –
running the reader from a ‘tornado’ to a ‘merry-go-round’ – can you
talk to us about what you hope this scaled-variation will do to
readers?

Simply, the range makes the poem livelier and more engaging. The
reader has the opportunity to fit their own rotations and clocks
somewhere between bottle caps and planets, and make their own personal
connections to time with the Clockwork Dog as a guide. . .

For the full interview visit the Monkeybicycle blog

Hanky PANKy

Check out the review of PANK's latest issue at The Review Review. My poem, Stampede at the Premium Outlets, is featured as one of the "inviting titles" (and there are many others)in the Table of Contents.

More of my poems in (or is it "at"?) PANK Online.

Self-Promotion #4 - The Seasons

I have a piece in the latest issue of Zine Scene's The Reprint.
This piece originally appeared in Subtropics and was my first publication in a print journal.

Stay tuned later this week as I unpack my 2011 AWP conference swag bags!

The lifespan of a poem

I had poems in the February edition of Pank Online. In "Facts About Marsupials," I take a stab at answering where poems begin. A couple of weeks ago J. Bradley, author of Dodging Traffic, interviewed me for PANK. He asked me where poems go when they die.

It's curious: there was a stage in my life where I was worried about where I'd go when I died. That stage has mostly passed. I don't know where, but it's less interesting to me than where I'll go while I live.

However, the life cycle of poetry is now very important to me. First there's the unpredictable gestation period. The poet can carry the first cells of a poem in them for years before they even know it's there. Then the actually birth may take a few minutes to several months.

Just a few back and forth talks and eventually the poems are sent out into the world to find a home. For the most part they become tempered by repeated rejection. When sent by mail they almost always return to the poet, who then must look them over for defects before sending them right back into the fray.

Hopefully, finally, the poem is accepted into the dormitory like pages of a literary journal. So many different poems, so many different types of writing. The poet can only hope that the poem is accepted by the other poems and by the other poets. Then, for a long time the poem remains in that one place. Very, very rarely it gets invited to hang out with other poems, in another place. Usually this happens within it's first year of life out of the poet's home. Other times the poem eventually finds a place to live with its relatives.

It's a strange life, and of course there's more to it than that.

If you're interested in where poems go when they die, or what the world would be like without typos, check out my interview over at the PANK blog. If you like it, if you makes you think of anything, leave a comment.

If you're not interested, sign up here. We have a gang of dinosaurs to kill.

A Space for Ideas to Meet

It's true, both the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Chicago Manual of Style recommend using one space, though neither brands two spaces as wrong, merely out of date. In the days of letterpress and typewriters, which used monospaced fonts, two spaces were considered essential to create a visual break. However, with the advent of computers and proportional fonts this break is apparently unnecessary.

Maybe I'm just a bit claustrophobia, but I like the breathing room and feel that two spaces are still valuable. If I left just one space I'd be afraid that something would emerge from the narrows between sentences, and perhaps make off with my commas. We do one space after each word. Between paragraphs there's the remainder of the line from the paragraph before, and at least a tab mark. Some even use a full blank line in separation. Shouldn't we pay sentences a little more respect?

Sometimes I like a sentence so much that I feel I should leave three spaces after it. I generally resist because then I risk leaving prose convention behind and entering the realm of poetry. But maybe poetry is behind the appeal of leaving two spaces. It is the "white space" that gives extra import to the words on either side. Two spaces offer a compromise between an endless and rough sawtooth of words and uncontainable worship of meaningful statements.

Book Review #4

The Gormenghast Novels: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I found this book used for $5. It's a beautiful edition, weighty, with creamy pages. It will undoubtedly cut an imposing figure on your bookcase. The Washington Post Book World review suggests that "many readers" consider it "the true fantasy classic of our time." I wonder who those many readers are. As a caveat, I've yet to read Gormenghast and Titus Alone, so maybe it's best taken as an entire oeuvre, but after reading Titus Groan, I don't feel I have the stamina to make it through the next to books. This is in stark contrast to J.R.R. Tolkien's novels, which I positively inhaled. I couldn't wait to finish one to get to the next.

So what makes Mervyn Peake's work different? Certainly there are things to like about Titus Groan. Robertson Davies says "Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe," and whether true or not, it is an apt comparison. Peake's writing is lush beyond compare, utterly exquisite horror writing, swarthy with neogolism. In particular, Peake delights in his characters. Each has a Dickensian name that serves as a constant reminder and indictment, while further description is like a dissection: finely detailed and a little disgusting. I can "hear" Prunesquallor's laugh, I'm duly annoyed by and sympathetic to Mrs Slagg, and I'm positive the aunts Cora and Clarice were Roald Dahl's models for "Spiker and Sponge."

Take this section where he describes the movement of Swelter, the castle's psychotic and obese head chef:

"He insinuated himself through space. His body encroached, sleuth-like, from air-volume to air-volume, entering, filling and edging out of each in turn, the slow and vile belly preceding the horribly deliberate and potentially nimble progress of his fallen arches, (p. 330)."

The language is so poetic that it's imminently quotable. I could have opened to a random page and pointed. However, this quote also gets at my main difficulty with enjoying this novel. It was too "horribly deliberate." The writing overwhelms the story.

Most of the plot developments are announced far in advance and the reader is left watching pathos develop. And develop it does, but sadly, beyond the language level, it rarely excites.



View all my reviews >>

Collection or Book?

I recently, but belatedly ran across this review by Ellen Wehle.

Wehle reviews Joanne Fuhrman's Moraine which Publishers Weekly called, "well positioned somewhere in the nifty triangle formed by Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and the Shins," a nifty triangle I had previously been unaware of.

It's not Fuhrman's book or "nifty triangle[s]" that I feel warrant comment after three years, but Ellen Wehle's main argument independent of the review. Wehle says,

"The very fact that we publish our poems not just individually but in books implies relatedness, a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts quality that demands the poems be read together. Why, then, will one volume read as a distinct entity, confident and sure, while another reads like a grab bag of bits and pieces? What makes a book a book?"

Clearly Wehle holds some contempt for "grab bag" and it's this sort of attitude that has lead to the death of the first true collection by poets.

Anyone who visits the University of Iowa library has the opportunity to peruse the MFA thesises (even mine) going back to the beginning of the Writers' Workshop. Some of these were then published as collections and these collections provide an interesting window into the creative development of many poets now studied by literary scholars.

However, as the writing industry, and particularly the public interest in poetry has contracted first "collections" and even the initial MFA thesis have become less like a first collection and more akin to the polish level of a contemporary writer's second and third books. They are more likely to include sets of poems similar in form and/or content with the weaker or sometimes simply more difficult to categorize poems strained out. Suitable for individual publication, but not compatible with an over-arching form.

Most books of poetry I've read in the last few years have a discernible theme, even if like in the case of Moraine this a somewhat contrived or obvious post-modern idea like "the chaos of culture." A Collection may be a less polished form of art, but if we seek to demean the collection as a form comprised of mere "bits and pieces" we will miss out on the relative pleasures a first collection offers. Particularly we will be missing a step the writer's early work and trajectory as an artist. The collection won't die, but somehow the publishing community has decided that collections are the domain of more established writers who perhaps have earned the right to write roughly or randomly, whereas new poets must prove their discipline in some way before they're entitled.

By all means a first collection should be selective. I don't want to read a poet's high school journals (unless they're really fantastic), but at the same time I appreciate the possibility of something a little rougher, a debut that indicates exciting potential for future avenues in the poet's work, a collection with several different types of gems.

I suppose what I like best about reading the first collections of contemporary poets is the relative lack of Artifice. Artifice is an idea central to the work of most artists, but at the same time it can result in tunnel vision. It's exciting to read a poet's early work, when they're just discovering their ability to use words to communicate something fresh and interesting about the human experience, but haven't quite figured out the exact categories and strategies that will give form to the words.

Perhaps this is mostly semantic, with "collection" and "book" indicating two vague and overlapping forms. I think the highest volume of poetry readers are probably students taking literature classes in high school or college and I wonder if students with shorter attention spans, taught from anthologies packed with variety would crave the steadfast unity of a "book," or be excited by the possibility of a collection.

Certainly each has merits. What do you think?

Self Promotion #2

Self Promotion
And why not? These are a few links to pieces of writing I have in internet literary (or baseball) magazines. I'm sort of hoping if I post these links enough maybe they'll rise to the top when people google my name and maybe push the link to my sub-par performance in a 5K race I ran 5 years ago out of the top hits (the same one where I'm mistakenly listed as female)...

And leaving aside self-promotion, these are some pretty good journals, if you're just looking for random things to read on the internet, as you clearly are if you're here, then you should give 'em a read.


580Split
580Split is an annual journal of Arts and Literature housed by the MFA program at Mills College in Oakland, California. This is their first web edition. Show them some love.

Slurve Magazine
Slurve: The literature and arts review that masquerades as a baseball publication

2 River View
Distinguishes itself by including audio of the authors reading their work. Sadly I had a cold when it was due, but I think it's a great concept. Hearing a work read can add a lot to the literary experience. Though I'm not sure how well these mp3s will mix into your gym work out.

Diagram
Diagram has a nice clean-quirky aesthetic. Diagram is one of the few literary journals, whether print or web, that consistently excites me with their content. Every issue has a few pieces that are just a little different, a sort of special surprise. Plus they have great merchandising, including the "POE TRY" booty shorts (poe on the left cheek, try on the right).

Opium Magazine
Famed creator of the "Literary Deathmatch." While the authors featured don't fight to the death, they do one of the more exciting reading series around. All pieces on Opium Online feature an estimated reading time. Good for when you have a very specific amount of time to want to spend reading.

More links to publications next month. Hopefully.

A Brief Note on Self-Promotion: when I started this blog I was kind of hoping that this would be the top site one would find when they searched for "Ori Fienberg." However, I've since discovered that the only way to raise this site in those rankings would be to constantly insert Ori Fienberg's name, ideally in every post. But while I wanted this blog to be contiguous to my identity I don't want it to be so blatantly obvious. Alas, I have another problem, an ethereal web nemesis named Uri. No matter how many things I get published, or have articles that feature my name (Ori Fienberg) google still asks me whenever I search myself if I meant "Uri Feinberg." My main motivation to be published used to be entirely to get a wider audience for my writing and build up my C.V., but now I have a new goal. Someday I hope when Uri searches his name google will emasculate his sense of pride and identity by asking, did you mean "Ori Fienberg?"

Going Somewhere...?

A couple of years ago I worked as an assistant editor/reader at The Iowa Review. During that time assistant editors, mainly students were encouraged to contribute book reviews. I'll admit, I cared precious little for the enterprise of reviewing and was more concerned with entering my name, in a very small way, into the national literary dialogue. I went to the library and picked up several collections of new poetry from the University of Iowa's library. While I picked up books that had blurbs by authors I'd heard of and a couple that had won significant awards, I didn't find anything that I found exciting, or memorable. In response I wrote a couple lukewarm reviews, and one patently negative review.

However, when I submitted them to The Iowa Review's editors they were widely rejected. The general consensus was that publishing a negative review was petty, and in some way detrimental to the enterprise of poetry as a whole. The Iowa Review's main editor David Hamilton explained that to him it seemed as though there was no point in damning a collection with faint praise, because most poetry is doomed to obscurity anyway. Instead he preferred to use the reviews as an area to showcase and promote writing that the editors felt deserved a better readership.

Certainly that's a worthy editorial stance, however, it then seems disingenuous to call these sections and contributions "reviews." To my mind a review should at least have the option of being negative, or at the very least, critical. Otherwise literary journals should rename their review sections "Writer Showcases" or succinctly, "Props."

The most recent edition of POETRY includes an opinion/review piece Going Negative, by Jason Guriel, that addresses this issue. Guriel is perturbed that reviews tend to have a generically positive slant, and he offers up three brief reviews that take a more analytically critical approach. While I appreciate the candor of Guriel's reviews I'm not certain what he hopes their impact will be. However, Jason does offer this reason for why we read so few "negative" reviews of poetry collections:

"Maybe poetry is so marginal, so fragile a commodity, we worry about kicking it when it’s already pretty clearly down."

This captures at least a part of The Iowa Review's sentiment. Unfortunately, this fear is holding poetry back. It seems as though most books of poetry are reviewed by another poet, often times a poet who knows the author, or would like to be on good terms with the insular academic community most poets are a part of. This means reviewers are taken not as independent arbiters of opinion, but instead as members of a club dedicated to promoting other club members. If all reviews are positive it artificially inflates the value of poetry as a commodity.

But more than the issue of reviews, the poetry community needs to do some serious consideration of the last part of his statement, poetry is "pretty clearly down." And so I ask, why is poetry down? How is that poetry has become so culturally irrelevant? And what can the poetry community do to change that perception?

As a start I think acknowledging the over all state of poetry and minor individual failures, or "going negative," is at least an honest first step, and it's significantly better than running, or hiding scared.