Conte Online

Holy Bejeezus it’s Mid-December and also some Great Stuff

 Happy Hanukkah.  That comes about 3 days late.  I said it to you before I said it to my grandparents.  That’s how horrible I am.  Are you serious?  It’s like December…it’s pretty much about to almost be January.

Well, you guys, I feel like a seagull because of my inbox.  See, my inbox has a folder that all the (properly addressed) submissions go into due to computer magic.  See, seagulls, if you have never lived in or near a temperate coastal area, are like semi-vicious winged rats that congregate anywhere they can find a place where sea and land meet, and hold languid symposiums about how to spread poop.  One thing you can do with them – one thing I’ve never done with them, but it’s commonly believed by slightly angry people who sometimes need a mental image to vent with such as myself that you can do with seagulls – is feed them alka-seltzer.  Like rats, they eat anything they can stuff in their greedy little avian gullets (for the purpose of making poop), such as plastic rings from six-packs (that’s tragic), or fizzy white medicinal tablets (if you’re a sick bastard unlike me, I’m just bad to old people).  When they eat alka-seltzer, it reacts with their inherently disagreeable seagull nature, and they explode.  I don’t want you to hurt any seagulls, but I do want you to understand that my inbox is exploding.  On behalf of all seagulls I say thank you, and give me a couple days, I really am getting back to you very soon.  I also want you to be nice to your grandparents.

In the meantime, I’m making up for not having shared more lately by sharing something very good.  I love short fiction – short short fiction, preferably when it’s funny but also sort of tragically insightful, as long as it makes me laugh.  Some people call it flash fiction.  I generally don’t care for that name because it makes it sound like the author just wrote something very quick and shot it off.  If you’re a genius, this is a great way to write, and you should send me your so-called ‘flash fiction’ – otherwise this is a very terrible method for doing anything, and please don’t send it to me by the way.  How do you know if you’re a genius?  Are you better than Bob Powers?  Bob Powers writes probably the best short stuff I’ve read on the interwebs.  Some time ago his Girls Are Pretty blog came back.  Nobody told me.  Man you cannot imagine how angry I am about that.  It puts me way above the level of slightly angry that I claimed in the last paragraph.  But if you don’t know about GAP, then you can go here and be told what to do.

The reason I even checked up on Mr. Powers was because someone linked me to this other great thing, Tom Oatmeal.  If you write this well without even looking, then please do send something to us.  Actually if you have to look that’s OK too.  If you don’t write that well (either with or without looking), then you can join my club.  It’s called the Not Geniuses, Not Hilarious, but We Read GAP-and-TO club.  Joining is hard at the moment, but there might be stickers later.

 

 

Filed under: Musings — Lieb, December 14, 2009 at 11:52 am

A Cut Above the Rest

Though the holiday season is the most hectic time of year for all of us, I nonetheless wanted to share an exciting poetics blog I recently discovered called How a Poem Happens that is quickly becoming one of the best poetry sites online.  Edited by Virginia poet Brian Brodeur, the weekly updates feature a sample poem by a prominent American poet and a basic set of interview questions that often lead to surprising answers about craft, revision, and inspiration.  Harvey Shapiro, Kathryn Stripling Byer, and Mark Halliday are the most recent among an impressive roster of contributors.  So if you get a spare moment among the hussle and bustle, check it out!

Filed under: Musings — Tavel, December 9, 2009 at 1:33 pm

A Haunting: Somber Meditations for Halloween

It has always struck me as peculiar that Americans (myself included) celebrate Halloween—a holiday that has grown exceedingly morbid and ghoulish—with candy, costumes, and whimsical delight when, at its very core, it is a holiday centered on death. I’ll spare us all the history lesson, as there are several cultural variables that have led us to this odd state of affairs where kindergarteners dress as skeletons and go door-to-door begging strangers for chocolate. Among all the rubber spiders and vinyl Spiderman outfits, though, I’ve caught myself meditating on the work of Thomas James and Liam Rector, two poets whose very lives were haunted, and whose writings don’t garner nearly the attention they deserve.

Thomas James was a young Illinois poet who, by most verifiable accounts, committed suicide at the age of 27 in 1974. His only book, Letters to a Stranger, was published shortly before his death, and the few reviews it garnered were unpleasant to say the least. Yes, the undeniable influence (and at times blatant imitation of) Sylvia Plath is palpable. But the sensuality, the lyricism, and the raw maturity of his voice are staggering. Take, for instance, this first stanza from his ghostly dramatic monologue “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh”:
 
My body holds its shape. The genius is intact.   
Will I return to Thebes? In that lost country
The eucalyptus trees have turned to stone.
Once, branches nudged me, dropping swollen blossoms,
And passionflowers lit my father’s garden.
Is it still there, that place of mottled shadow,   
The scarlet flowers breathing in the darkness?
 
You can read the rest of the poem here thanks to the Poetry Foundation, but the fluidity and authority of the language, from that stirring statement that “the genius is intact” to the lushly personified scarlet flowers are all quite remarkable, especially for a poet in his mid-twenties. I’m grateful that after thirty years of obscurity and being out-of-print, James’ Letters to a Stranger was finally reissued by Graywolf Press, and though we may never know the full details of James’ premature passing, his poems endure.
 
To say that Thomas James and Liam Rector have much in common would, I think, be an indefensible statement of epic proportions. And yet, when I consider Rector’s suicide in 2007 at the age of 57, after three well-received volumes of poetry and a long career as a respected academic (he founded and directed the writing seminars at Bennington College), I feel as if these two poets—if nowhere else but in the synapses of my brain—share some wavelength, even if that wavelength is an inconsolable isolation that led them to take their own lives. Perhaps no Rector poem haunts me more than “The Remarkable Objectivity of Your Old Friends,” which eerily foreshadows his own suicide, but was published nearly two decades earlier in his first book, American Prodigal. At fifteen lines, it is a quick but stirring read. I’ll include it here in its entirety:
 
We did right by your death and went out,
Right away, to a public place to drink,
To be with each other, to face it.
 
We called other friends—the ones
Your mother hadn’t called—and told them
What you had decided, and some said
 
What you did was right; it was the thing
You wanted and we’d just have to live
With that, that your life had been one
 
Long misery and they could see why you
Had chosen that, no matter what any of us
Thought about it, and anyway, one said,
 
Most of us abandoned each other a long
Time ago and we’d have to face that
If we had any hope of getting it right.
 
The diction is conversational, blunt, and supple, and the tercets slow the poem’s unfolding to a cadenced dirge. That said, however, the poem is full of little wonders, such as the friends calling “the ones/Your mother hadn’t called,” and of course the terrible truth that “most of us abandoned each other a long/Time ago.” One could do worse than to study this and some of Rector’s other poems that the Academy of American Poets kindly reprints online.
 
I’m not arguing we can’t all enjoy a fun-size Snickers and Linus’ fervent faith in the Great Pumpkin this weekend; far be it for me to ruin anyone’s holiday. It might do us writers all some good, however, to take a moment to remember those among us who were not merely haunted one night of the year, but every time they reached out for a pen.
Filed under: Musings — Tavel, October 30, 2009 at 9:37 am

Roses from Poo Poo

 A long time ago I read a short story which shouldn’t really have been any good.  It was called "The Flesh Man," and read with a certain perspective, it probably qualifies as basically pornography with a side of brooding pulp machismo.  I wouldn’t begrudge anyone that interpretation, at least.   The story’s not really that shocking, although certainly filthy, with a single-minded and irredeemable protagonist like a mongrel Doc Savage who lost his heroing years to a string of Bangkok whorehouses.  That’s not entirely accurate because the story is set in Mexico, but you get the idea.

The first time I read it I didn’t think it was going anywhere, which is no reason not to sit through a couple pages of sex and murder – which is good, because about three quarters in something happened that made everything snap into place like a rewinding tape measure.  I understood that every grimy gear turned exactly in time, like a music box dredged from the muck and human sewage at the bottom of the Hudson which, when activated, plays Frank Zappa.  The premise was unremarkable and the execution almost deliberately off-putting, but when I got it, the mastery of its construction was dazzling.  I try to remember that story when I read something that doesn’t snag me at first blush, because it reminds me that even things that shouldn’t work, that logically should be terrible, are sometimes, inexplicably, really great.

This is the spirit with which I recommend Charles Stross’s Missile Gap.  The elements at work – premise, setting, characters, everything really – it’s like they’re designed to kill the story before it ever starts.  Even the things that seem pretty awesome under independent consideration, like Yuri Gagarin flying a mammoth ekranoplan over an alien ocean through a lightning storm, shouldn’t work in context.  Any context.  The story is a conspiracy against itself, like a baby made completely of cancer.  The crazy thing is how the cancer baby doesn’t just not die, it grows up to have superpowers.  Loved it.

Filed under: Musings — Lieb, October 16, 2009 at 2:07 pm

“With Tremulous Cadence Slow”: An Editorial On Syntax

 
One of the burdens of narrative verse is that it requires the poet to be moderately skilled in the techniques of fiction. Character, arc, and even dialogue are essential weapons in the narrative poet’s arsenal. And while many beginning and journeyman poets have an intuitive understanding of these elements—surely we can all tell a story, right?—the lack of self-examination and honest revision can lead to language that is soft, expositive, and rambling. As an editor that reads literally thousands (if not tens of thousands) of narrative poems a year, one of my litmus tests for a publishable submission is a keen awareness of syntax, and how variety and inventiveness in one’s sentence structure allows a poem to explode off the page. I’d like to begin by sharing an example of the aforementioned soft, chatty style despite the embarrassment of exposing my own humble origins as a writer. Here is the first stanza of “The Stray,” a very early and unpublished piece:
 
I said something like “why don’t you ever drive me anywhere,”
when I opened the door and found him, shivering,
a mass of sunken bones plopped by the screen door.
I asked some of the neighbors—at least the ones on their stoops—
but nothing, and after seven calls to shelters I finally got
the sheriff’s dept to promise a van within the hour.
So I sat on our cold tile, dropping torn pieces of bread
through a slender rip in the screen, afraid to catch some rogue
disease known only to the broken immunity of lost dogs
while you and I bickered about his breed…
 
I cannot help but cringe as I reread these lines; the descriptions are weak, the voice is underdeveloped, and we already know that the poem will end with some grand pronouncement about the vulnerability of life. Yuck. The only phrase that is salvageable to my ear is “broken immunity of lost dogs,” but even that doesn’t hold up under closer scrutiny—“broken” is the wrong modifier, and needs to be replaced with something like “doomed,” but even that is too heavy-handed. Also, how can the dog be “lost” if it is sitting on the speaker’s stoop? The problems are legion.
 
While I could continue with this public self-chastisement, I’d rather turn my attention to the poem’s syntax. There are three sentences here, all of which have elementary structures: I said, I asked, I sat. This hindrance, from the very beginning, drastically limits the poem’s potential because even as a free verse poem it resists melody, cadence, or tonal variation. If one possible definition of poetry is a dynamic compression of language and thought, the syntax of these lines render them little more than the flat, conversational prose of a diary entry or email. 
 
Compare all this to the first four stanzas of Bob Hicok’s “Once a Green Sky,” which originally appeared in Ploughshares (you can read the entire poem at their website: http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=4630) and concludes his masterful collection Animal Soul:
 
A deer was on Linwood and I asked the forest
to come and retrieve her, curl its slow hammers
around our houses and decipher brick into scraps
of clay. My hardest wishes are for and against
 
ourselves, delicate locusts, ravenous flowers
with an appetite for even the breaths
between the spaces. Say you are alone. Pretend
everyone emulates you. Imagine if alone
 
the idea of the conversion van, the strong touch
of burrito wafting from the bodega, never
germinated in the cavernous brain. Hands
are no more clever than kneading dough,
 
the weapon of choice is sleep, the gods we adore
eat their own ribs, supplicant postures
of apology break out simultaneously in each
cabin and in exactly the same way. Impossible, OK,
 
move on…
 
The tone, enjambment, and associative force are all masterful. But behind these techniques is a syntax that dodges and ducks, sprints and spins, and it reveals a poet that is critically aware of sound, rhythm, and breath. In other words, a poem seemingly about a deer’s frenzied running through the street before later “she ran/into the mouth of a Saturn” takes on greater narrative force due to the ordering and energy of its language. It is also intriguing to note that the generative impulse behind both poems in question—my strikeout and Hicok’s homerun—is a searching, forlorn empathy for a victimized animal.
 
Hicok’s deft syntactic maneuvering is a result of studiousness, revision, and natural talent. Nevertheless, all narrative poets—particularly those of us who are actively submitting work for publication—have a responsibility to avoid telegraphic blandness or quaint chattiness if we want a poem to enact a meaningful occasion for our readers rather than, say, a mere retelling of experience. So leave a gap. Take a leap. Juxtapose sweeping lyrical clauses with blunt admissions and vice versa. Make sure the subject is actually the subject. Diagram your sentences to find and squash repetitiveness. As an exercise, diagram the sentences of a poem by one of your favorite writers and get your hands greasy in its gears. Above all else, read your work out loud. Maybe we can’t all hit homeruns, but with enough practice, we can all get on base. 
 
Filed under: Musings — Tavel, May 11, 2009 at 2:37 pm

Digital Publishing Receives Nod in Poets & Writers Article

Chances are that if you’re reading this, you have some degree of faith that online journals make a substantial contribution to contemporary literature.  I’m glad to say that Sandra Beasley does, too, as her article "From Page to Pixels: The Evolution of Online Journals" in the May/June 2009 issue of Poets & Writers is one of the best pieces I’ve read on this issue in recent memory.  You can pick up a copy at your local bookstore or read Beasley’s entire article online:

http://www.pw.org/content/page_pixels_evolution_online_journals  

Filed under: Musings — Tavel, April 21, 2009 at 1:01 pm

Against the Blitzkrieg: Some Thoughts on Submission Etiquette

I recently had the good fortune to find myself with a free afternoon in a college library to peruse an eclectic array of literary journals. Most were the prestigious sort, with university endowments and several prominent names gracing their glossy back covers. And while I have nothing against this sort of publication—heck, I subscribe to a few and occasionally send them my work—I always find it curious how passive-aggressive some of their submission policies can be.

At the risk of making an unfair generalization, a beginning writer could hold one of these esteemed volumes in her hand and get the impression that she must read the past seventeen issues, cover to cover, before venturing the thought of sending such hallowed editors her meager envelope of poems. The language employed is vaguely menacing, too, like a corporate memo reminding employees not to swipe from the supply closet: “All writers, but especially those just starting out, should closely review the type of work we publish as well as our editorial guidelines, since we will burn any submissions that annoy us in an old oil drum behind the dumpster. We are quite important and can’t be bothered with any funny business. We also recommend you subscribe to our publication since we hope to hire an intern this summer. Our rates are as follows…”

I find all of this a bit self-serving and extreme. And yet, as an editor myself, I understand the need for an air of paternal sternness since many writers still insist on what is frequently called “blanket submissions,” and what I’ve come to call “blitzkrieg submissions” ever since Robert and I started Conte four long years ago. These are folks who want to get published by any means necessary, and send their stories, poems, or articles to as many editors as possible, regardless of whether 1) the journal is a good fit for the work; 2) the journal is even open to submissions at the time; or 3) the work is formatted properly. 
 
Other markers of these blitzkrieg submissions are the lack of a cover letter, a cover letter so painfully generic that it provides little context for the submission, or—and this is the one I hate the most—a cover letter that is an irreverent and sloppy autobiography, replete with dubious-sounding honors and publications: “I’m a 47 year-old Texan whose marriage is on the outs and I’m currently employed as a rat trainer in Houston. I love saltine crackers and try to get a foot massage at least once a month. Last summer I won the 3rd Annual Horse of a Different Color Essay Contest, and nine thousand of my poems have appeared in magazines such as Kangaroo Crucifixion, Vomit Casserole, Watch Out for Those Nuns, and Stabbed!”
 
The internet has made it even easier to send these blitzkrieg submissions, since all a writer has to do is paste the email addresses of various editors into the ‘send’ or ‘BCC’ bar of an email and away the little pretties go. I suspect there is some comfort in the anonymity of mass-mailing—after all, it’s only email—and a ticklish rush at the thought of dozens of editors considering your masterpieces.
 
There is, of course, a middle road between the two extremes I’ve outlined above, and I can boil it down to two basic guidelines: 1) Never send your work to a journal you haven’t read. Ever. If it’s a print journal, purchase a copy from an independent bookstore, borrow an issue from a fellow writer, or spend a few hours (as I often do) getting acquainted in a local library. If the publication is freely available online, then you have no excuse for not reading it through. Personally, I’ve always found that thirty minutes with a journal gives me a pretty clear sense of their aesthetic, their editorial philosophy, and their range (or lack thereof). 2) If you decide to submit your work to a publication, follow their damn rules. Some journals don’t accept simultaneous submissions; some journals only read during the academic year; some journals don’t want a cover letter; some journals are picky about formatting, and even want poems double-spaced. Disregarding submission guidelines is the quickest path to rejection, and believe me—not all slush piles are created equal. Even if your work doesn’t make it through the first round of editorial readings, as it so often won’t, you can rest easy knowing that you followed the rules and can submit to a journal again in half a year without making some poor editor exclaim, “good grief, not this hack again!”
Filed under: Musings — Tavel, February 16, 2009 at 5:52 pm

Naming Our Children: A Brief Editorial on Titles

Several years ago I heard the poet Richard Jackson (who would, coincidently, later be a teacher of mine) remark during a reading that he labored, at times tremendously so, with finding appropriate titles for his poems. I won’t run the risk of misquoting him, but the gist of his remarks—which he shared with equal parts wit and rue—was that selecting titles proved chronically problematic, and that he exhausted countless possibilities before he sometimes surrendered, counted X number of lines down from the beginning, and just chose a three or four word phrase to finish the damn thing. 

I assume these remarks struck the rest of the audience as the idle, friendly, and somewhat awkward chit-chat that poets ramble while reading their work publicly, but for me at least, it was one of those billiard-ball moments that happens in the life of a writer when a seemingly innocuous statement sends us hurtling in an altogether new direction. Ever since, I’ve tried to hold the titles of my own poems to a higher standard, and while I have no real regimen for this process, my sole commandment has been “thou shall not let the title be an afterthought.” (Though I confess I’ve sinned against this commandment several times, and a few of these sins are in print.)  Recently, I couldn’t help but recall this moment when I was reading a slender anthology by young American poets. Here’s a random sampling of titles from the collection: “Clothes,” “The Photo,” “A Prayer,” “Epiphany,” “Dad,” “Untitled.”
 
Speaking merely as a reader and fellow poet, these titles…well, they just plain stink. Whether we write poetry or prose, research papers or rock lyrics, the title of any composition that claims literary merit has an obligation to be expressive and representative. Let me quickly qualify this statement: I am not advocating any proscriptive system for choosing a title. That said, however, I cannot help but compare the aforementioned throwaways to the following titles that I found in a mere ten minutes from a haphazard treasure hunt through my home library: “Antwerp Rainy All Churches Still Haunted” (Joshua Clover); “Costumes in the Forbidden City” (Roger Weingarten); “Grass Fires” (Robert Lowell); “My Father Rode Great, Silver Birds” (Vicki Hearne); “Bayonne Turnpike to Tuscarora” (Allen Ginsberg); “The Three Susans” (Jane Kenyon), “The Atom and Hawkman Discuss Metaphysics” (A. Van Jordan), “The Sudden Light and the Trees” (Stephen Dunn).
 
I’m not arguing these titles are good; I’m arguing they’re effective. After a great deal of reflection, I’d like to offer ten guidelines to the Conte community as it may help us all be more selective when we name our children:
  • Like a good doctor, a title should do no harm.
  • A title is not a thesis statement.
  • A title should purchase at least thirty seconds of a reader’s curiosity.
  • Unless you are an abstract expressionist from the 1940s, “untitled” should be banned from your vocabulary.
  • A title should be specific enough to fit only one composition in your personal oeuvre. 
  • A title shouldn’t give away all the answers to the quiz.
  • If a quick-and-dirty internet search generates dozens of poems/stories/essays with your title, bury it behind the shed.
  • A title shouldn’t spoil the ending. A title shouldn’t spoil.
  • Whether it’s charm, wit, eloquence, poise, or candor, a title should have at least one redeeming human quality.
  • A title best not write a check your ass can’t cash.
Filed under: Musings — Tavel, February 2, 2009 at 2:23 pm

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