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.

Literary Death Match, Boston Ep 9

Tonight, and tonight only, I will be reading with a star-studded cast of literary luminaries at Club Oberon for the 9th Literary Death Match, Boston edition.

Tickets are $12 in advance or $15 at the door.

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

U:35 Reading, Tuesday 3/6, Marliave

I will be reading along with Ron Spalletta and Emily O'Neill Tuesday night at the Marliave.

Of course, Tuesday has already passed, so I sort of drophttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifped the ball as far as pre-event self-promotion, but here's a little post-event self and series promotion.

Daniel E. Pritchard, Editor of Critical Flame started the U:35 Poetry "a Reading Series of Apostate Youth" after overhearing a group of older poets proclaiming that really, the true writing of poetry doesn't begin till poets are at least 35 years old.

The series is held bimonthly, upstairs at Marliave, which is a cozy venue, and serves up some tasty bar food.

The reading was a grand success and I look forward to attending more in the future.

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!

Reflections: on the Death of Literary Journals

This morning I had a little free time and so I checked in on some of the internet publications I enjoy. I started by checking to see if Slurve Magazine, "The Arts & Culture Review that Masquerades as a Baseball Publication," had bit the dust yet.

Slurve was one of my first publications. I'd heard from a writing peer that she had been published there, and as I was somewhat publication-lite myself, and interested in having at least some work available online to the three people each year who probably Googled me, I decided I'd check them out.

Slurve was nascent. I looked around and liked the potential. The published contributors each had "baseball cards" with their stats and author info. I had just finished an essay about baseball cards and so it tickled my fancy. The editors asked not for "submissions" but for "tryouts," in all genres, including reviews and political commentary. This, I thought, seems like a good idea.

I submitted several pieces, had three accepted and published just a few months later. Not to say that I've had any pieces published that I'm not proud of, but I especially like the three they selected: an alternative-universe piece about baseball and poetry, and two about growing up in slightly odd ways. I was pleased to have them available to the world.

But they never managed to get my baseball card up on the site. And after another three months no new work had been posted. Then another three months passed. About two years later I checked in and discovered that the Slurve team was under new-management. The Head Coach had been jettisoned. The team had been moved from Boston to Los Angeles. New work was coming soon. It didn't come that soon. I stopped checking Slurve for new writing and instead visited periodically to see if it had died yet.

Their Facebook page indicates that the new work did come, and that in fact for at least a few months this year Slurve was posting regularly, however as of today, it's gone. I expected the end for so long, but that it's gone I'm a little surprised. Publication by Slurve was a minor milestone in my young writing career, and now they're gone. Selfishly, I guess I'm glad that their literary career petered out before mine.

Fortunately, internet is filled with many worthy little literary journals (both original and offshoots of print publications) that collect pieces you could never hope to run across in the Paris Review or Poetry, or some other high-falutin' journal, but are nevertheless beautiful and provocative. Through submissions and word-of-mouth I've discovered dozens of them (too many to read regularly) including elimae, which merrily trucks along in minimalist glory and PANK, which I check somewhat more regularly, and not just because they've published me.

Within the last couple years I also discovered two other journals whose format I especially liked, Wonderfort, and Abjective. Both featured one author or collaboration a week, a format which I found both simple and pleasing. To be fair (or maybe a little unfair), Wonderfort appeared to be a rather direct parallel of the style of Abjective, and the editor of one was published by the editor of the other at least once. Maybe it would be better to say they had a rapport.

Regardless, when I checked them today only Abjective remains online, for now displaying the somewhat terse message: "ABJECTIVE no longer publishes". If you go to the main site it displays random pieces from its archive, which are filled with many delightfully strange pieces.

Wonderfort, on the other hand, is completely gone. Where did it go? When was the fort breached? When did the wonder stop?

Audio Piece in Anomalous 3

I have a piece in the latest release from Anomalous Press.

The piece is a multi-track Michael Martone interview remix,in which Martone elucidates his thoughts on becoming a writer, the purpose of MFA programs, and the nature of authorship. Despite these heady concepts, the piece clocks in at a mere one minute long.

Michael Martone is the author of many books, including his latest release Four For A Quarter. Buy the book and follow Michael's meditation on fourrays (ha!) on Twitter.

Bonus Points: Can you identify all the writers in these Four For a Quarter photos?

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.

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!

Madness Much - Artifice Release Reading (Boston)

Join Artifice Magazine at the Boston stop of the MADNESS MUCH: THE ISSUE 2 RELEASE TOUR.

Date and Time:
Saturday, October 16 · 5:30pm - 7:30pm

Location:
The Enormous Room
569 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA
Created By

Readings by:

Elisa Gabbert
Ori Fienberg
Jeremy Bushnell
Andrew Farkas
M. Kitchell
...and others!

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.

The Omnilogist

Artifice Magazine is an incredibly hot new Literary Magazine out of Chicago. My Author Dossier is now up on their mainpage. Also be sure to check out their submissions Wishlist. Then think about how nice it would be to get a year's worth of thought provoking literary curiosities delivered to your door.

Self-Promotion #3

Quoted on the same page as Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood, and perhaps best of all, The Wonder Years.

http://zerite.net/literatti/love/

Scroll to the bottom of the page, and there I am.

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?"