This was my first visit to "The Blue House," which boasts archived issues from as early as 2002, so certainly not a newcomer to the poetry publishing scene. Sad to discover [i]yet[/i] another website with such poor, poor design. The poems suffer in presentation and navigation is unpleasant, at best.
That aside, it's the poetry that really matters, and so that's where I headed. After a grubby assortment of ill-made metrical verse and poorly proofread contributions, there wasn't much hope. One wonders how it is even possible to steadily select such poor writing to be "published" in any kind of poetry journal--even by chance, you'd think, one or two good pieces would creep in. The editor's own poem, published prominently among the others, explains much. From her poem, "Mirror Street," we learn: "the world is something/made/of concrete/lies/and politics/but earth/is with/us truly."
Further exploration revealed the editorial essay, "How Not to Hate Your Writing," which seems, perhaps, misguided. A little more critical judgment surely would only improve things. "The surest way to erode confidence is to begin to compare your own work with that of others," we learn. I'm not sure that a small blow to the confidence of this "editor" would really be a bad thing.
Truly. The kind of "online journal" that earns online journals their dubious reputation.
of concrete,
lies
and politics
but
earth
is with
us truly.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Monday, March 3, 2008
jubilat #14
There's something about jubilat's squat little shape that I like and there's always something in an issue that challenges the vertically-minded. In this issue, one needs to do the Big Switcharoo in order to read Amy Jean Porter's "[i]from[/i] The Check-List of the Mammals of Nicaragua," for example.
I never respond well to "theme" issues, but I do like to see an issue in which the poems have some kind of conversation with one another. Some journals do this very obviously, as in Golden Handcuffs propensity for call-and-response, but others do so softly, in the margins, with loose weaving. This issue of jubilat features, among other thematic elements, a searching for connection between the perceptions of the body and mind, embodied well, I think, in the opening from Lisa Olstein's "From This Vantage Point Your View Will Be Clear." She writes, "Any shift in philosophy introduces the need for new habits of body." And, indeed, several other poems speak poignantly to this need for movement/translation in the body's response to the mind, soul, to outside phenomena. Sometimes this involves the inability to achieve recognition--to see one's self, to recognize one's self. In "The News," Arda Collins writes, "I try to get my mind around the sight of myself," and a perfect arc seems to build itself between the two poems. Mathias Svalina's "Distant Nearness or Hostage Being," also approaches the same, although here it's not just the physical body that is treated as foreign, that must be analyzed and experienced as if it were a foreign entity, but perception itself, reality itself that must be scolded and investigated. Here, newspapers print photos of their own pages and "white boxes where photographs would have been, but they retain the captions for the stories." Experientally, our world is suspect, our reality is suspect because of, one imagines, our inability to see ourselves for what we are, to truly see others, to empathize or understand something apart from ourselves.
Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo's startling, spare "Somatic Loss Poem to Bird," is both a poem of extra-personal loss (separation from a loved one) and also something more. The very Buddhist "You are the boat. From a boat/You are the shore of infinite loss," can be drawn up into the internal, as well as the external struggle to comprehend and accept mortality and finite space. The poem turns, lathelike, on line after line of understated loveliness, coupling the abstract and divine to the utterly physical presence, to the concrete image, as in "...the sky is the recycled grey/of urgency, emergency."
Moving through the issue, Bob Brown's handprinted/drawn pages are a novelty, but might have been just as effectively produced/condensed in one or two selections. The page with the "eyes/eyes/my godt/what eyes!"
There's something really self-knowledgeable about Jubilat's printing of Porter's poems, given their extreme penchant for list poems, and other poems that feature, more than any other salient trait, disparate images whose connection [b]is[/b], forcefully, only their presence in the same poem. O'Hara-like catalogs of imagery beckon from page after page, issue after issue, and there can be something repetitive and tiresome in the litany, without his eternal questioning and reaching out for [i]significance[/i]. But Porter's poems seem a kind of self-defense, a clear-spoken delight in the meaning that is created always-already by proximity.
I never respond well to "theme" issues, but I do like to see an issue in which the poems have some kind of conversation with one another. Some journals do this very obviously, as in Golden Handcuffs propensity for call-and-response, but others do so softly, in the margins, with loose weaving. This issue of jubilat features, among other thematic elements, a searching for connection between the perceptions of the body and mind, embodied well, I think, in the opening from Lisa Olstein's "From This Vantage Point Your View Will Be Clear." She writes, "Any shift in philosophy introduces the need for new habits of body." And, indeed, several other poems speak poignantly to this need for movement/translation in the body's response to the mind, soul, to outside phenomena. Sometimes this involves the inability to achieve recognition--to see one's self, to recognize one's self. In "The News," Arda Collins writes, "I try to get my mind around the sight of myself," and a perfect arc seems to build itself between the two poems. Mathias Svalina's "Distant Nearness or Hostage Being," also approaches the same, although here it's not just the physical body that is treated as foreign, that must be analyzed and experienced as if it were a foreign entity, but perception itself, reality itself that must be scolded and investigated. Here, newspapers print photos of their own pages and "white boxes where photographs would have been, but they retain the captions for the stories." Experientally, our world is suspect, our reality is suspect because of, one imagines, our inability to see ourselves for what we are, to truly see others, to empathize or understand something apart from ourselves.
Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo's startling, spare "Somatic Loss Poem to Bird," is both a poem of extra-personal loss (separation from a loved one) and also something more. The very Buddhist "You are the boat. From a boat/You are the shore of infinite loss," can be drawn up into the internal, as well as the external struggle to comprehend and accept mortality and finite space. The poem turns, lathelike, on line after line of understated loveliness, coupling the abstract and divine to the utterly physical presence, to the concrete image, as in "...the sky is the recycled grey/of urgency, emergency."
Moving through the issue, Bob Brown's handprinted/drawn pages are a novelty, but might have been just as effectively produced/condensed in one or two selections. The page with the "eyes/eyes/my godt/what eyes!"
There's something really self-knowledgeable about Jubilat's printing of Porter's poems, given their extreme penchant for list poems, and other poems that feature, more than any other salient trait, disparate images whose connection [b]is[/b], forcefully, only their presence in the same poem. O'Hara-like catalogs of imagery beckon from page after page, issue after issue, and there can be something repetitive and tiresome in the litany, without his eternal questioning and reaching out for [i]significance[/i]. But Porter's poems seem a kind of self-defense, a clear-spoken delight in the meaning that is created always-already by proximity.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Sycamore Review -- Volume 20, Issue 1
The Sycamore Review's 20th Anniversary issue opens with a brief editorial statement in which Mehdi Okasi appeals to the value of "meaning" in the poems selected. For this issue of the Sycamore Review, it seems "meaning" is often suggestively blurred into "memory," and the epic act of detailing one's intimate memories, the connective tissue on which relationships, stories, and history are constructed may take the place of constructing new meaning or even extricating meaning from the present. The past is where most of these poems dwell, and it does seem as if acts of excavation preclude acts of exploration, that recitation is often favored over the creation of new cognitive associations. Dead deer, missing lovers, unborn children--most of the poems seem to meld into one big, muddy wallow.
A few do stand out, however.
Masin Persina's "Death of a High-Ranking Terrorist" manages to skirt bathos ("blending peace into pain like cream into coffee") with a nonchalance that reflects how accustomed we have become to government-sponsored violence and how disconnected from the actual experience of killing. "...I don't know what governments do/with the bodies they've killed but/his has floated away from my mind's tiny shore." Indeed, it is this "tiny shore," that lends Persina's poem additional heft, with its recognition of our own smallness, our incapacity for comprehension, even as the effects of these actions, these acts of violence, muddy the waters we stand in.
Though Amanda Turner's "What We Are Given," has some pretty and profound moments, it barely scrapes by under a heavy, heavy load of fortune-cookie profundity. Still, "The Japanese maple reddens with premonition" remains a striking line.
A few do stand out, however.
Masin Persina's "Death of a High-Ranking Terrorist" manages to skirt bathos ("blending peace into pain like cream into coffee") with a nonchalance that reflects how accustomed we have become to government-sponsored violence and how disconnected from the actual experience of killing. "...I don't know what governments do/with the bodies they've killed but/his has floated away from my mind's tiny shore." Indeed, it is this "tiny shore," that lends Persina's poem additional heft, with its recognition of our own smallness, our incapacity for comprehension, even as the effects of these actions, these acts of violence, muddy the waters we stand in.
Though Amanda Turner's "What We Are Given," has some pretty and profound moments, it barely scrapes by under a heavy, heavy load of fortune-cookie profundity. Still, "The Japanese maple reddens with premonition" remains a striking line.
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