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2006-10-22, 8:55 a.m.:
Godbless godbless the Tattered Cover, where I spent part of a pleasant evening with Beth K., who shared a crowded happenin' suite with me at Oberlin freshman year, and where I swooped down on the litmag shelves all vulture-like. The take: 1. jubilat eleven
2. Columbia Poetry Review no. 19
3. Harpur Palate Vol. 6, Issue 1
4. Green Mountains Review, Vol. XIX, #1
5. Calyx 30th anniversary issue
6. Elixir Vol. 5, No. 2
7. and the latest FENCE, whose pertinent stats I can't at this juncture regurg. as I left it in the reading room(=balcony) late last night. You either have money to buy journals or money to buy books. Sometimes I have a desire for the solid, permanent thing; but other times I'm craving the new new new, the in-between, the changing, the in-progress, the zeitgeist. And I like to support the little press, the best and/or the local. Which is why for the life of me I don't know why I didn't remember to pick up a copy of the newest Denver Quarterly. I have to say the Elixir is a perfect (and perfect-bound), beautiful little magazine. I'm never disappointed in it and usually surprised/excited by some late-made discovery. It's also where I discovered Elizabeth Robinson's work - a wonder. But Elixir is never accepting new work - each time I check, at least - and currently the message is: Wait till May 2007. I think Colorado does quite well for itself on the litmag front. We have excellence here in Elixir, The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review and The Eleventh Muse. I haven't seen any new Many Mountains Moving so I can't speak for that one. 0 comments
2006-10-21, 9:41 a.m.:
Some poems take forever to find their form. Others born in just the right shape but lacking the right diction. And then there are the meandering, lost poems; the misguidedly meandering, not the wonderfully meandering. These are the last bloomers, usually. I have one problem child like this right now: a stray river of a poem, complex; and every time I look at it, I see it has shifted again. I never know where I stand with it, or which way it's going or is supposed to go. It doesn't seem to know, either. We're working on it. 0 comments
2006-10-19, 8:27 a.m.:
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Catherine Barnett) came in the mail and I opened it and read it through in one sitting, did not put it down. Then I turned back to the beginning and did the same thing again. This is incredible, heartbreaking work. It got me to thinking of the many things I can no longer read, it seems, since having children. It feels sometimes like I'm a slab of meat that's been overly tenderized. Worried about Cormac McCarthy's new book because of a single image mentioned in a review I scanned. Never no more 'Trainspotting' or 'The Pianist' or 'The Hours' or 'A Map of the World' for me. I worry about being compromised somehow from the horror, the morbid, the Gothic, the bloody bloody blood that has always been my stock in trade, interest-wise. What about Salem? This project - and I spend a good amount of my time contemplating the lot of Dorcas Good, four years old and chained to a wet dirty wall in a dungeon jail for many, many months - her baby sister died there - this project entails horrors. I can't keep looking away from them. It's human nature to both look away and to stare intently at, to want to take in. It doesn't help being superstitious about things: If I revel too much in this, I may risk this. May risk losing it all. I suppose the question is: What is my role here? What is my mandate? What is my intention? Read that book. That book is essential. Even the title kills me. 1 comments
2006-10-15, 10:32 a.m.:
I kind of love this. 0 comments
2006-09-29, 12:25 p.m.:
Required reading:
The Mass-Observation movement and the meaning of everyday life, in the September 11 New Yorker. Now this is a movement I can get behind. And here, a few extra comments from the article's author.
Speaking of the New Yorker, why read the whole thing when you can just read the haiku version? 0 comments
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