Some Magazines

I don't know how anyone keeps up with lit-mags, even within a particular aesthetic. Browsing Selby's List, I'm surprised at the number of new - and new to me - magazines with stellar work and (from what I can glean via a web site) great production value. Many of the web sites themselves - like Conduit's - are stunning. The down side to so many beautiful magazines is not being able to afford as many subscriptions as I would like.

And while eight or even twelve dollars is still cheaper than the average trade paperback, I still have a hard time plunking down more than five or six for a periodical. I think part of the reason for the continued success of American Poetry Review is that it's cheap. It may not store well, but if you dislike an issue, you don't feel that bad about wrapping fish in it.

I'm much more selective now than I used to be when submitting work, preferring to send poems to magazines I have read and genuinely like rather than carpet-bombing all the II's and III's in Poets Market, as I often did years ago when I was yet unpublished. I also have - as I'm sure most writers do - a short list of magazines I have sworn never to send to or read again:

FIELD: My SASE would come back with so many leaflets and ads that I'd have to trudge to the P.O. and pay postage due. Young writers should expect rejections, but they shouldn't have to pay for them.

THE MISSOURI REVIEW: Several years ago I sent a batch of poems in the fall, unaware that they held an annual contest. Within a week, I got my SASE back, sans poems, with a note that read: "I'd encourage you to enter our contest." It was initialed "E.S." I was a bit skeptical, but like most young writers, I was also desperate for publication and attention. Perhaps this reader really did like the stuff. I wrote my check for $15 and, of course, did not win the contest or even get one syllable of feedback. Using a contributor's SASE to solicit a contest entry/subscription without indicating whether the poems would still be considered otherwise is a bit slimy, and in hindsight I should have withdrawn the submission immediately.

ANOTHER CHICAGO MAGAZINE: Returned a SASE (sans poems despite sufficient postage) with a note saying their reading period didn't start until February 1. I received this on February 3.

There are several other such complaints noted in my submission record, all equally petty. The TMR thing still irks me, even though my work has grown into something that mags like FIELD and TMR don't generally publish. I hope that's not a standard practice of theirs.

Dying Young

Novelist Larry Brown died last week. He was 53.

apoetic

No post for today, so I'm going to be self-indulgent and post a short poem. I was a little surprised to discover that the word apoetic did not exist, at least according to the dictionary. I had thought Bernstein's title "A Poetics," from his essay collection of 1995 or so, was to be read as one word. It appears that way on the original cover, but I believe the title page has it as two words. NOTE: The chinese character Mi is to appear in stanza three, in a space before the parens that for some reason blogger will not allow me to include. And I just realized I've sent out eight copies of my manuscript without having inked it in. Great.


apoetic

It is everything
not just
a NY thing.

Accepting it is
nothing it has
everything to say.

It has a kind of
character, (pronounced
mē), that means both

show and see. It does
not recollect or plan (a)
like creation.

Funeral by funeral
it strives for the new
flourishes as one

whose spirit is scattered
flowers. It is a
light pervading

all (parts)
of the universe
equally.

It brings the zafu
to the top
of the whoopee cushion.

MFA

Rebecca Loudon encourages me not to envy younger poets, and she's right, and while envy and jealousy are not the same thing, I take her point.

It's impossible for most young poets - those of typical college or grad school age - to steep themselves in everything or have teachers whose reading lists are truly catholic. For my part, I'm glad that, having decided to do an MFA in the first place, I did it in a place that was decidedly "old school." Arkansas' program is the only one, to my knowledge, modeled on the original Iowa program that has not changed since its founding in the late 1960's. It's 60 hours for the MFA, with far more hours given to reading than shopping. It typically takes 4 years, with teaching, to complete. That's a lot of time to spend with a group of writers who are all from somewhere else, and that is probably a large part of the program's strength. Four years of near-poverty (those grants were not there in '92, and I think my monthly TA stipend went from $720 to $820 during my time there) with a two-course teaching load is a commitment.

No language writers were on the reading list. I don't think Stein and Zukofsky were on the list, but someone correct me if I'm wrong. For contemporaries, Nemerov was on the list. Lowell. Bishop. You get the idea. And most of the required coursework was pre-20th century anyway. Do I think it would have been nice to have Armantrout and Hejinian in there somewhere? Sure. But I wouldn't trade what I got for two years of workshops and a handful of up-to-the-minute lit courses, which seems to pass for a degree in a lot of places.

You pays your money [or gets your TA] and you takes your choice.

Readar

It's amazing to me how many poets and writers can fly under the radar. I don't mean up-and-comers with one book or some "cred" in certain communities but writers with careers spanning decades. Michael Dennis Browne is one such poet for me, whose three small poems in the current American Poetry Review (Nov/Dec - it's not on the site yet) I keep re-reading, particularly "Night Thought":

Awake, I think of being
out on the moors
in the gale, the rain.
I scare myself back
to sleep with that thought.

Where do the sheep go
that are loose? Where
do the horses go? What
do the rocks do?
(Huddle, huddle, huddle.)

I know what the streams do.
They go on boiling
coldly, like the rage among
members of a family.

It is Browne's attention to line sense that I find most appealing:

Awake, I think of being...

...to sleep with that thought...

The enjambed line as a unit of sense long ago lost its cache in favor of the line as a tonal unit, with breaks and enjambments designed to create that oft-withering voice, as if the printed poem were merely a score for a public reading. Lines that work well against their own sentences are difficult to pull off.

A couple of weeks back, in a comment I made to a post at Ron Silliman's blog, I mentioned that at the time of finishing my MFA (University of Arkansas) in 1995 I had never heard of Lyn Hejinian (or Bob Perelman, or Charles Bernstein, or Ron Silliman...). His response was that I should ask for a refund. (It was free.) It may seem unthinkable to Ron or to anyone else who has spent most of their lives in communities or cities on the edge of all things literary that graduate students anywhere can be oblivious to whole groups of writers and works, but before nearly everyone had access to nearly everything via the internet, this was common. You had what was on the reading list that was given to you and what you ferreted out on your own in the library or book store. It was very easy to read a great deal and still miss a lot. When I began poking around the SUNY Buffalo EPC site, it was 1996, and the great majority of the writers and publications featured there were new to me. I am more than a bit jealous of writers a decade or so younger than I, who got to come up with all this stuff ever-present at their fingertips.

Some Reading

With the exception of a few poetry magazines and two books of Lyn Hejinian's (A Border Comedy, The Fatalist), most of my reading lately has been of authors I just "hadn't got around to." That list is longer than I care to admit. I finally read Siddartha, which had been described to me beforehand as "a young person's book." I can definitely see myself being more excited about it had I read it at 20 than I am at 36. It is, after all, a story of home-leaving and self-discovery. But I do not think it is a "young person's book" in the sense that that phrase is often used, which is that only the naive and inexperienced could find such a work useful or moving. Hesse's slim novel succeeds in demonstrating the basic Buddhist idea of The Middle Way better than entire shelves of non-fiction "Zen books," of which there seem to be new ones released daily.

I'm also reading the collected poems of The Earl of Rochester, whom Johnny Depp is portraying in the film "The Libertine," which I thought was to be out by now. I have no doubt he will excel in this role as he has in most others he's undertaken, though at the same time it's hard to imagine it as much of a challenge for him. Perhaps that is proof of his acting genius - he plays some of the most oddball characters in recent film history, and I find myself thinking he should "branch out." In any case, I hope the film succeeds enough to regenerate interest in The Earl's work.

I am not reading the new Best American Poetry, despite my respect and admiration for this year's guest editor, Lyn Hejinian. Lehmann will write his usual optimistic introduction about the fact of poetry's continued existence being just swell, Hejinian will be compelled to tackle the idea of "best" for at least a paragraph, and the following collection of 75 poets will be more or less familiar, even the unfamiliar ones. It is not so much a collection of poems as a catalyst for arguments about WHAT IS (GOOD) POETRY, all of which became tedious a long time ago.

Baffler

Until this past election season I had never heard of Thomas Frank or his magazine, The Baffler, #16 of which I just received in the mail as the first issue of my new subscription. It is mostly non-fiction but features fiction and poetry also - this issue has poems by Bernadette Mayer, Andrea Brady, and Juliana Spahr. I also got Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler, a collection of pieces from the first ten years of the magazine. The piece on Donna Tartt, The Packaging of a Literary Persona, is priceless and could easily describe any number of pufferies that regularly appear in, say, Poets & Writers.

Def

I had intended a note about Def Poetry Jam in my previous post about Gioia and forgot it. Hence the asterisk with no note. Here it is:

The episodes of Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam that I have seen - and they are admittedly few - did not feature anything that I would call accomplished poetry. To call it stand-up comedy would be an insult to stand-up comedy. The worst - and these would be the majority - are litanies of our most obvious political and social ills presented with minimum formal innovation and maximum "tude." A large, black woman opens the show with a piece called "Bitch Ass Nigga" that reinforces a variety of cultural stereotypes, not the least of which is that black poets' chief concern is blackness. A very thin white male follows with essentially the same piece, though set in a rural white ghetto as opposed to an urban black one. With a couple of exceptions, the goal seemed to be to out-tude the previous performer, each one louder than the last. The producers of DPJ obviously take pains to make the show a multi-cultural experience, lest we forget that poets of every race are equally capable of predictable rhymes, cliches, and empty posturing.

Disappearing Ink

Dana Gioia's latest essay collection, Disappearing Ink, doesn't seem to be getting very much attention. Even the Amazon page for the book has no customer reviews yet. This seems surprising given the intense (and ongoing) reactions to "Can Poetry Matter," published some 12 years ago, but I suspect the reason for the lukewarm reception is Gioia's lukewarm criticism.

Gioia's chief appeal is his 'glass is half full' approach to poetry. He points out with genuine enthusiasm every instance of poetry happening in public - from cowboy poetry fests to Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam. In the April 2004 issue of Poetry, he lavished praise on Garrison Keillor's stupidly titled anthology, Good Poems, which did little but confirm the fact that people can still be sold on the idea of poetry in large, blue, formal looking volumes.

But his optimism over the future of the art is also his flaw, for it forces him to turn his critical attention to only the most accessible poets and poetry that offers little if any challenge. In this new collection is another selection of "Short Views," in which he champions Philip Levine and Donald Hall among other equally predictable choices.

In the title essay, Gioia points to the rise in popularity of performance/oral poetry as a good sign, despite his own (correct) assessment that the great majority of the "poetry" presented on Def Poetry Jam is utter shit. For Gioia, the fact that people stand on stage and read something labeled poetry to an audience outside of a university is apparently worth applauding, regardless of the quality of the work.*

But what is really amazing about Gioia's criticism is what he leaves out. He can write glowingly of Def Jam's existence and the "broader culture" for poetry this new oral renaissance promises, and yet even when writing about California poets he never mentions David Antin, who took one of the most innovative approaches to oral poetry around (creating the poem at the reading, recording it and transcribing it onto the page, hence reading first, book last), and was doing it decades ago. His reference to Charles Bernstein rings not so much as a familiarity with innovative writers as calculated name-dropping designed to make Gioia appear to be 'with it.' He either does not know any other avant garde California poets of the last thirty years or simply chooses to ignore them.

The result is a predictable collection of limp boosterism that will change no one's mind about anything.