Spreading the Word
We’re pleased to announce that our friend and recent contributor Erika Meitner is this week’s featured poet at Anti-.
A Fireside Chat (Sort Of)
With Conte 5.2 hot off the presses, I wanted to share yet another treat: Poets’ Quarterly just published my recent interview with William Hathaway, a friend and former Conte contributor. Enjoy!
Sidling up to the mantle, waiting until the other guests are distracted…
reaching up ever so casually to sliiiide back that release date. We’ll go live with our twelfth issue on January 31st.
Twelfth. That was just more difficult to type than is really warranted, I think. Not really a very useful word. A little hung up on itself if you ask me, and a very unflattering intestinal scramble of consonants at the end there. I guess some utility for discussing eggs or overtime, although truthfully, not that much! Yeah, but what has twelfth ever done, maliciously, to you, you say. Damn. I didn’t mean for this paragraph to become so accusatory. Now you made feel a little bit like an asshole for bringing it up.
And a Happy New Year
To all our readers, contributors, and friends, we here at Conte wish you a Happy New Year!
We are currently completing issue 5.2 slated for publication late January (it’s our twelfth!), so if you’ve submitted work for this issue, you can expect to hear from us presently.
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.
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!
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.
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.
A Nod to a Slightly Less New But Equally Appreciated Friend
That being David Bellantoni – his story Foreplay, which you may remember from the May ’07 issue, got quite a reception as a one-act performance during the Network One Act Festival in NYC this past March. We’re told that after winning awards at the festival, the play earned a reading at the New York Theater Workshop, and was then invited to participate in Lower East Side Festival of The Arts on Memorial Day Weekend. So, awesome. Kudos David!
