The second issue of
May 15, 2008
Lit Mag Heaven
May 13, 2008
Edna St. Vincent Millay gave good face.
This past weekend, I got an email from Michael Gushue of VRZHU Press containing the image to the left in which he and several other DC-area poets offer their reinterpretation of the famous 1914 Arnold Genthe photograph of young Edna St. Vincent Millay in a flowery tree. Back when I was like, 15, and everyone in my honors English class was assigned to write a long (10 pages!) "research paper" on a poet of our choosing, I chose Millay in no small part because, in addition to liking her poems (I still do), I thought she was super-pretty in this picture (ditto).
Revisiting this image got me thinking about iconic author photos, and what it takes to make a good one—not just one that will arguably endure the test of time, but even one that will be sufficient for the moment. It also got me to thinking about how silly author photos can be and how often they suck/beg for mockery, as Jim Behrle used to point out on his apparently now tragically defunct feature "What the hell is up with your author photo?"
According to Frances Wilson in the Guardian a couple years back, "Author photos are always embarrassing, either for the author or the reader" and therefore we should "get rid of the damn things." Is she right? What, readers, are your favorite author photos of all time? What are your least fave? What are your tips and strategies toward the creation of a book jacket image that at the very least is not "embarrassing"?
May 7, 2008
Blowback
VQR has gotten itself chastised, it seems, by the Net, for being a bit too frank about some visceral reactions to the slush pile. Make one tiny little joke about simians, and you end up having to apologize to... well, all of you.
The offending post has been removed, but you can see snippets of it in the comments here.
I think what we have here is a cultural failure to communicate. There’s the culture of the blog, which—like email—tends to reward immediacy and the cheapest forms of entertainment (i.e. glibness, snarkyness, confessionalism, even trolling). And there’s the culture of the literary magazine, which is more predominantly (and historically) Apollonian, genteel, the organizational equivalent of a tea cozy, where decisions and tastes are mutely orchestrated from behind the scrim of an editorial silence. Readers tend to come to literary magazines deliberately, whereas on the Net, one’s browsing interest (which may or may not touch the actual content of the work consumed) wars with the instant boredom and the latent velocity of any web consumer away from the page/blog/webzine.
VQR’s dispatches from the killing ground of the slush pile are no worse than anything I’ve heard of in editorial rooms, and after reading, I dunno, upwards of 100,000 poems in the service of various lit mags, there are several filters that drop into place over the years in order to make you not totally exhausted and self-loathing.
One of these filters is an instant amnesia that takes effect seconds after you finish a poem from the slush pile. (If indeed it is worthy of slush—good poems snag you, even if you’re in auto-mode, or the rest of the submission is abysmally bad. During my editorial career, I once selected a single poem (and put it first in the next issue) from an otherwise horrendous batch by a poet who seems to have never written anything else even remotely as good—and in fact has written some of the worst lines I’ve ever come across.) This way, you don’t take terrible poems home with you in your head.
Second, there’s... well several methods of emotional release. I have heard of editors reading especially dire poems aloud in a pirate voice (especially badly executed lyrical poems), of a wall of shame of the worst metaphors received, and in one case, the aerodynamic half-life test (meaning, the duration of time between opening a submission and flinging it across the room towards the recycling bin). Is this the apex of professionalism? No. It’s stress relief, and a way of convincing yourself that not all of the careerism, mediocrity, repetition, blandness, and misplaced optimism (and the fear of the aforementioned in one’s own writing) that is a constant note in all areas of the literary life does not, in the end, carry the day. The best editors I’ve known are those who can walk away from a few hours of reading submissions in thwarted hopes of finding something singular, and still be excited about writing themselves, rather than feeling dispirited and queasily afraid that a virulent form of verbal entropy has been gnawing at their brains from the inside.
I’m sure it’s the same in other subcultures, where one constantly questions the worth and relevance (not to mention the meager monetary rewards) of one’s activity, and the recurrent sensation of struggling for a small portion of an already small audience. Combine that with the headiness of the net (say, for instance, with Diagram’s claim of 160,000 monthly hits), and it’s not always pretty. But not out of the ordinary.
There needs to be an anonymous relationship with the submitter, for two reasons. First, because if you don’t have one, you enter into correspondences like this. And clearly someone’s professional, emotional, creative, and possibly sexual needs will not be met. Second, because the reader of literary magazines are going to encounter these poems anonymously, so the best way to model the suitability of the poem for an issue is to respond dispassionately (if not astringently) as an initial acid test. Despite common, underlying assumptions to the contrary, no one is forced to read poetry. Poetry has to make the case for itself, and to total strangers. This is what I try to remember when I sometimes receive puzzling comments on my 350-odd rejections. The editor or reader (who most likely is getting little or no financial recompense) may have just rejected hundreds of poems, and the last horrible one was about Crete, which my poems also references.
Perhaps it wasn’t the most professional thing for VQR to post what should stay secret inter-office cultural communiqués, but then again, how often do you encounter “professional” and “blog” in the same sentence? As a form, it tends to be, well, informal. The only “safe” form of institutional writing is a press release, and you’re not going to get a readership for your blog if all you post is essentially advertising (especially when, with the proliferation of blogs, one’s allergy to official communications and disguised solicitations only grows). In my experience, VQR’s flavor of snark is not a tremendous departure (if at all) from a great deal of editorial culture (and I’m not speaking here for Ploughshares, merely as a private consumer).
May 3, 2008
I can’t keep it up much longer, this unrecognizable dancing
I was a bit annoyed at first when my boyfriend insisted that we stop at the library on the way to Whole Foods yesterday — turning the excursion from a quick, pleasant outing to the “market” to a string of mere errands. But the Brookline Library turned out to be a very rewarding detour. The NEW BOOKS section had a whole shelf of poetry and I veritably squealed to see how many books from my mental to-read list they had. As I pulled one after another from the shelf, I looked at John in disbelief: Can I take as many as I want? My experience with the NEW BOOKS at libraries has generally been that the ones I want are perpetually checked out. I half expected some kind of limit per “customer.” But! Nobody reads poetry! So more for me. I walked out with:
Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (Craig Morgan Teicher)
Fragment of the Head of a Queen (Cate Marvin)
Quaker Guns (Caroline Knox)
Human Dark with Sugar (Brenda Shaughnessy)
Something Bright, Then Holes (Maggie Nelson)
Nomina (Karen Volkman)
Plus a big beautiful coffee table book on 100 contemporary artists from Phaidon. All free!! I asked John why they had such a good selection and he said maybe because Brookline has one of the highest literacy rates in the country. (I couldn’t find any data to back that up. But if it’s true that literacy and affluence are highly correlated …)
It thrills me to have new books, but then, it thrills me to have new underwear, new hair products, new condiments, so perhaps this says less about my “literacy rate” and more about my materialism rate. Perhaps relatedly, my reading habits suffer less from having too little to read and more from having too much. There are books I want to read littered all about my apartment. I must start over 100 books per year, but I only finish maybe 20 or 30. Economist Tyler Cowen sort of recommends this approach -- he claims people would read more/faster if they let themselves abandon books they weren’t enjoying. But I often abandon books I am enjoying, when another imminently enjoyable one falls on my desk…
May 1, 2008
If You're Bored at Work Today...
Check out the digital writing project that Penguin UK has created, We Tell Stories, a kind of chose-your-own-adventure feature for some of their authors' work. As for it's entertainment value, I was thoroughly amused for about ten minutes, but it's an interesting way to highlight these books and to draw people to the Penguin site. And speaking of using media to market literature, I've noticed it's becoming more common to see "trailers" for novels. I'd be interested to hear what people think about this trend, if book marketing folks are just getting up to speed, or if using promotional tools originally meant for films and online games somehow signifies a step in the wrong direction.
April 29, 2008
Quickie Interview #32: Jennifer Karmin
Jennifer Karmin co-curates the Red Rover Series and is a founding member of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented at a number of festivals, artist-run spaces, community centers, and on city streets. She teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the Chicago Public Schools. During 2008, she will be a guest writer in California with the Djerassi Program and in Kenya with the Summer Literary Seminars. Recent poems are published in Bird Dog, MoonLit, Womb, Seven Corners, Milk Magazine, and the anthologies A Sing Economy, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and Growing Up Girl: An Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces.
Currently, you are working on a project in response to the war called 4000 WORDS 4000 DEAD, for which you’re taking submissions until April 30. The resulting poem was performed as part of the Guild Complex's Art Against War event, and will also be done as a downtown street performance on May 2 at Looptopia. What is the goal of this? Can overtly political artistic gestures and poetry really “make a difference,” or is it a mistake to substitute artistic activity for political activity?
I think one of the jobs of the poet/artist is to remind us of what’s happening in the world and to help us think of these things in new ways. The work we make documents resistance. I get excited when the result is cross-community building. In 20 or 50 or 100 or 2000 years, people will find evidence that there were some of us who said NO to the Iraq War. Many many more than 4000 people have died and continue to die every day in this war. I want to literally bring this war back home to people in the United States and create a public memorial for the dead. In an era where we don't see images of our dead--of body bags and coffins, I think the number 4000 is a smack of reality.
4000 WORDS 4000 DEAD is a companion piece to Revolutionary Optimism, an anti-war poem I wrote in 2004. Revolutionary Optimism is based on confessions from Iraqi prisoners, sympathy cards and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. During the past 4 years, I’ve performed it locally/nationally about a dozen times in art spaces and on city streets. For Looptopia, I've decided to perform selections from both 4000 WORDS 4000 DEAD and Revolutionary Optimism [pictured].
The weekend of May 9-11 at Links Hall. you will be performing a play that you created with Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson, Patrick Durgin, and Jacob Knabb. How is creating poetry in this? This kind of theatre/poetry combo has been known to cause fellow blog editor Elisa Gabbert’s mouth to literally hang open in awe. What is the appeal of doing poetry this way and how does one make it so mind-blowing?
Historically, many poets have written plays and novels too. There’s even a movement among some of the writers I know to get rid of these genre labels altogether. Do they hold us back from the act of creating? From the true innovation that happens between genre? We all use language as our medium. For me, it’s about the process. The final product is shaped by the writer’s intention. Although once the work lives in the world, it may take on its own genre or shed itself of one altogether. The conventions of theatre offer new layers. Language moves off the page and gains lighting, sets, props, movement, a different relationship to audience.
Your own work and that of many of the groups with which you are involved place a premium on “experimenting” with language--what does it mean to you to experiment in this way, and why are you drawn to doing so?
Experimenting to me has always meant thinking about all of the uses of language as ways to write, read, and discuss poetry. Poetry is one of the oldest art forms. People made poems to remember their stories and ideas. Sound is an essential element of words. Some words are just delightful to say aloud or see on the page.
I don't believe that experimentation is an elitist activity. Poetry is a living language. A poem can be whatever you want it to be. A list of words, a rap, a description, a joke, a dream. If you can question the text of a poem, you can question the text of a politician's speech or a news report. The biggest problem is when people think poetry has to be a certain way.
I was never told the correct way to write a poem. I was asked to read everything, old and new, with a lot of focus on contemporary writing. What are poets doing in the world right now? When I got to the University of Buffalo in 1991, they had just started the Poetics Program. I was an undergrad with a free ride at a state school and figured out that poetics meant something about studying poetry. Working with Bob Creeley, Susan Howe, and Charles Bernstein, I didn't know too much about their writing at the time but the playful energy of words was everywhere.
In keeping with this taste for experimentation, you are one of the curators of the Red Rover Series here in Chicago. How did you become involved in curating and how does that role influence your own work?
As a student, I curated readings at the University of Buffalo and the School of the Art Institute. After finishing my MFA, I joined the artists’ cooperative the SpareRoom and began curating multiarts events with more visual/performative work. When Amina Cain and I collaborated on an Anti Gravity Surprise project, she suggested we put together a reading at the SpareRoom. This was 2004 and we had been friends for a few years. There were already a lot of wonderful reading series in Chicago like Discrete, Myopic, and Danny’s, besides the readings being held at local schools. We wanted to add to what was happening in the writing community and provide something new. For us, this meant creating a series that would be not so male, not so white, and something that would actually try to redefine the act of reading to a live audience. The Red Rover curatorial line became to create “readings that play with reading” and design each event as a separate “reading experiment.” Experiment #1 premiered in April 2005 at the SpareRoom and this month we celebrated our 3-year anniversary with Experiment #20 at our new space, the Division Street Dance Loft.
Curating and collaboration in all of their forms push me to take creative risks that might not happen by myself. It’s thrilling, scary, pleasurable, and amazing when it all comes together to work in ways that you’ve never even imagined. In this spirit, Red Rover is about to embark on a new adventure with Amina moving to Los Angeles in August and Lisa Janssen jumping in as our new curator.
First Car?
A 1984 silver Nissan Pulsar that came from my favorite aunt (the other artist in the family) after she died. I was just starting college.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
Book: On The Road. It definitely helped to bring out the traveler in me. Band: The Velvet Underground.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
I took Kerouac seriously, ie -- “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ”
First job?
In high school, serving coffee at the Dunkin Donuts down the street.
Car now?
That was the first and only car I’ve ever owned. I’m proudly car-free since 1996. I grew up on public transport and still like it because I can use my time to read and write.
Favorite book now?
It changes day to day, hour by hour. I’m usually reading a few books at the same time. What’s next to my bed right now: Hannah Weiner’s: Open House, A Humument, John Cage: Composed in America, Working (I Do It For The Money).
What's new on you iPod or CD player?
I’m a semi-luddite and don’t own an iPod. In my CD player today: James Brown, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Fela Kuti, and the poetry CD All Poets Welcome.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
I’m not an avid DVD renter. Most of the movies I watch are with friends who offer their suggestions. I’m more likely to see a video installation at an art space. I went to Providence to do a reading a few weeks ago and saw Walid Raad’s We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask at a Brown gallery. He’s a Lebanese artist focusing on the history of car bombings in his country. As an American, it’s important to see what war really looks like. Most days, we’d rather view pictures of bombed buildings than bombed people.
What are you working on these days?
My main writing project is a series of poems about the lives of Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman, and Helen Keller. I have been researching each of the women's lives, contemplating the ways illness transforms history, and examing the elements as catalysts for change: fire, air, water, and earth. This summer I’ve got a residency at the Djerassi Program and hope to put together a draft of this new manuscript. Poets Sarah Mangold, Jen Hofer,and Jennifer Scappettone will also be at Djerassi in the next few months so we’re planning a collaborative project together.
A few more projects that are occupying my time:
Creating a traveling art-activist book, Tell Us What You Think with Anti Gravity Surprise co-founder Kathleen Duffy. We’re getting ready to give away these free books in public places around the world, track their travels on our website, and ask readers to give them away again and again.
Curating a month-long festival with Amina Cain at Links Hall in Chicago. When Does It or You Begin? (Memory as Innovation) will take place in January 2009. This multidisciplinary festival explores the ways new forms of expression are created from the memory of individuals, groups, cultures, and places.
Being a monthly contributor to performance group Goat Island’s web-based writing project, The Last Performance. This work is collectively authored and documents Goat Island ending their 20 year collaboration.
Anything coming out soon?
An e-chapbook from Ahadada Books. Selections of performance projects on How2 and Action, Yes. Excerpts from my text-sound composition aaaaaaaaaaalice on a soundpoetry CD Max Middle is editing.
What are you reading that's fun?
Guillermo Gómez- Peña’s The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the Century. For example, from the book’s Glossary of Borderismos: “ALIEN – a term used by opportunistic politicians and sleazy reporters to describe any legal or illegal immigrant, people with heavy accents or exotic clothes, and people who exhibit eccentric social, sexual, or aesthetic behavior.”
What's your favorite a) writing exercise, and b) physical exercise?
Writing exercise: found poems. Go through old notebooks and books. Then, take a walk and write down interesting words/phrases you see. Physical exercise: yoga, swimming, and walking my beagle Walt.
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
A warm and funky hat.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
People watching, chocolate, getting a massage.
Favorite recipe (please be specific, like so we can cook it if we want)?
Simple vegan lentil soup to warm your belly and not burn a hole in your wallet: Fill a medium sized pot ¾ of the way with water. Add half a small bag of lentils, more if you like thick soup. Boil at medium heat. Cut up and add onions, garlic, carrots, potatoes, and any other favorite veggies. Add salt, pepper, chili powder, and lots of good spices to taste. Cook until all lentils and veggies are soft. Best served with friends and wine.
What’s on your desk?
At this moment: too many folders, papers, books, a travel water color set, a polaroid camera, a broken typewriter, a pile of change, a miniature monster sculpture from a free art show, a piece of wood from the Arizona desert, a postcard from Istanbul. My desk and I have a funny relationship. It’s always a place to put work on but not work at. I prefer the kitchen table.
Stones or Beatles?
Patti Smith or PJ Harvey?
So sometimes we ask: Fitzgerald or Hemingway. Feel free to answer that too, but I’d also like to know: Ashbery or O’Hara?
How about: Dickinson or Stein? Plath or Sexton? Brooks or Giovanni? DiPrima or Waldman? Howe or Heijinian? Berssenbrugge or Mullen?
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Kip Shepard, who would be an intellectual-sexpositive-revolutionary-superhero lovin’ and fightin’ against greed, exploitation, and the power hungry motherfuckers.
April 28, 2008
Contest Culture and Poetic Community
In a recent post, Silliman surveys the current publishing landscape, pitting small/micro press publishing against the contest model. While less prestigious, Silliman sees small/micro presses as being a more effective way to reach the right audience for your poems:
"A book by somebody I’ve never heard of before from one of these presses [he lists a bunch of his apparent faves] comes to me with a context that may help me to understand what the writer is trying to do. In marketing, this gets called brand equity, but in the low-level economics around poetry it really has to do with the degree that any well-run press is itself a concrete manifestation of an aesthetic community...Just coming from one of these presses directs a book toward a community of readers, a range of sympathies and expectations. As a poet, you can’t ask any more of a press."
I'd even go one step further to say that the opposite can occur as well--an aesthetic community can spring up as a result of a press or journal, or more likely a group of presses and journals. And I take "aesthetic community" to mean something more then a group of people who value the same type of poetry, who identify with a similar branding of art, but people who share similar values, ethics, world views, etc....are these not the things that shape our aesthetics? Certainly a majority of my friendships are based on a shared, albeit fairly general, poetics. But it seems intuitive to assume that the richness of these friendships owes itself less to the fact that we like similar poets and more to the reasons WHY we like the poets we do. As shallow as it may sound, we often wonder aloud to each other, "Would I like you if I hated your poems?" I guess my point is, such a question isn't shallow at all, but essential. In any case, the contest culture takes none of this into account.
"Contests, however," according to Silliman, "tend to do rather the opposite...Judges are cycled through too quickly, there’s no aesthetic focus, the resulting book series has little if any connection to an audience."
And it seems to me, if the books aren't connecting with an audience, then an audience certainly isn't connecting over the books. While I usually place a little more of the blame for this phenomenon on the aesthetic choices of the judge/press than Silliman does in this post, I think the issue of context/community is a vitally important one.
According to Silliman, the contest culture is based on there not being a context, or rather, on MFA programs not connecting themselves or their students to a contemporary poetry community:
"...I think for a lot of young writers, in particular, especially those coming out of MFA mills (and especially the programs that don’t quite “get” contemporary poetry, which is to say most of them), I think the transition to becoming a practicing writer can be a daunting, even crushing task. It’s when most people stop writing. They find that the context they had for poetry in school no longer exists in the “real” world and don’t know how to build one out of whole cloth. These are the people for whom contests exist, and it’s why I think they’re ultimately damaging. For one thing, the odds are preposterous. For another, unless they actually know the work of the judge, and know who the judge is, there is no way to ascertain if there is any reasonable expectation of even being competitive. They send in their money and their manuscript, they hope and they can feel crushed if they lose, sometimes again & again & again."
I couldn't agree more. And the two things that especially jumped out for me were "judge" and "money." It's my guess that the judges would be appalled to find out what DIDN'T get to them. Who, exactly, wittles the slush pile into a manageable finalist pool? I've done it as a student intern, just barely into a graduate program. It's this odd model of allowing, theoretically, the least qualified of those involved (the intern) choose the work that gets to the, theoretically, most qualified of those involved (the judge). The chances I, as a student intern 10 years ago, passed along the 10 best manuscripts, if given the chance to go back and review my choices, are slim to none. My guess is that a lot of sophistication and subtlety is lost on many a preliminary judge, as it was on me. This leads me to believe that much of what gets through is either gimmicky and loud or numbingly quiet--those that are undeniably under the umbrella of Poetry.
And this is simply a numbers problem. There are too many submissions for presses/journals to operate any other way. According to Silliman, "If there were only a few hundred publishing poets in the 1950s, by 1970 that total had swollen to some number over 1,000, but not so dramatically over it that it was difficult for a new poet to get heard...Today, however, there are at least ten thousand publishing poets working in the English language in & around North America. Unless all the MFA factories shut down at once, that number can be expected to double in the next decade. And there are more books of poetry published – roughly 4,000 a year."
The PoBiz, like suburban sprawl, has grown up too quickly and there just aren't enough resources to go around...namely book buyers. So the *money* has to come from somehwere. This may be shooting fish in a barrel here, but when contests, like MFA programs themselves, become cash cows, something is inevitably is lost. As someone who has spent an extra month's rent on contests each year for the past few years, my advice to you is the same as Silliman's:
"...get together with [your] friends and publish one another, [you'll make] enormous headway much more quickly. And [your] books [will reach] the right audiences."
The catch is, if you actually want to teach for a living, I'm not sure being on your friend's press is going to get you a job. Believe me, I wish I didn't want to teach. And I mean actually teach...not just enjoy the, ahem, "lifestyle." I envy my friends who are satisfied with their non-teaching jobs; their art is free from becoming a commodity. They don't have to use their poems to get to where they want to be. But tomorrow many of us will be sending another batch of mannies and their accompanying $20 checks to beat the 4/30 postmark date. I assume the Biz is well aware of this and is pleased.
