Sherry Chandler

Well, they say Friday afternoon is a really bad time for a news release but I didn’t want to waste any time in letting you know that I have a small selection of poems out in the September issue of nth position online magazine.

Edgy formal pieces. Postmodern formalism??

To read my poems, click the link here.

To read the entire September issue (fulled with poetry, fiction, book reviews and opinions pieces!), click here.

Elaine Fowler Palencia has drawn my attention to this special call for submissions from Rhino:

RHINO is looking for some lively accounts of what’s happening Out There, beyond our isolated circles — for a potential midsection of the magazine. There’s always an Out There, an event, a place, or an idea we’ve not been exposed to. It may be a reading that renders a crowd breathless, a unique conversation in some obscure basement, a literary party so aglitter it puts a peculiar smile on your face, a happening at an artists’ colony you can only recall as a dream, the ceremonious arrival of a foreign poet, etc. — in other words, fabulously written pieces that are witness to — something to do with poetry. Authors may be caught up in the thing encountered. The intent is to refresh and educate, break out of huddles and cocoons, bring in a piece of the outside — however you define it — whether it is wild, weird, foreign, profound, confounding, inspiring or just entertaining.

Full submission guidelines here. The reading period is April 1 to October 1, so there’s still time to submit.

Explore the Rhino web presence here.

In the dentist’s waiting room this morning, dentist delayed, I finally got a chance to read some of the July/August Poetry that I’ve been carrying around for two months.

Was it my mood? For some reason, the issue seemed jam packed with aphoristic lines of the type that may someday show up on my sidebar here:

The problem with calling our leader a bugger,
she insisted, was her special fondness
for buggerers…
—Robert Wrigley from “Little Prick”

And so we drift off to an unformed prayer…
—Brad Leithauser, from “Furnishings of the Moon”

Some were jubilant;
others were broken-hearted.
I have always been both.
—Edward Hirsch from “Late March”

and

Nothing means what it says,
and it says it all the time.
—Tony Hoagland from “Big Grab”

And you must read all of Hoagland’s poem “Barton Springs,” especially if you are a human of a particular age, as am I:

When I get my allotted case of cancer,
let me swim ten more times at Barton Springs,
in the outdoor pool at 6 AM, in the cold water
with the geezers and the jocks.

…

It was worth death to see you through these optic nerves,
to feel breeze through the fur on my arms
to be chilled and stirred in your mortal martini.

I don’t think I’ll try to memorize this poem — it’s 28 lines long and my brain is a little hardened up with amyloid plaques — but I will remember it.

is mostly up, says Helen. Not quite dead yet:

HTML and other computer-related issues have ’bout whupped the donkey’s—oops, I mean the mule’s dead—rear end this time. But that should take nothing from the great writing. The Mule prides itself in attracting great writers. Nice ones, too. We’re working hard to make the Mule something that is easily recognized as as special as it is. (Don’t ya just love sentences like a that! The computer swears you’re wrong, but you’re right.)

If this is what the Dead Mule folks can achieve when the karma is bad, think what it must be like when the karma is good!

Take a trip over there.

For myself, I’m grateful for an opportunity to publish my “Worldview,” a group of poems that is very important to me, and to publish it in such good company.

I am very pleased to say that my short chapbook, Worldview, is up in the current issue of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Unfortunately for Valerie MacEwan, the editor/publisher of the Mule, this is the Bad Karma issue, the one that made her lose it.

I’m not real sure what she lost but it wasn’t her ability to publish good poetry. Lots of good poetry in this issue, including a selection from Jane Kretschmann, one of our blogging community here, and Darrell B. Grayson’s chapbook, “Holman’s House.”

Check out the fiction and the essays, too.

I found this announcement at Eyewear:

Nthposition’s global headquarters is a minuscule eyrie in North London, and now that In The Criminal’s Cabinet has been in print for nearly three years, publisher and chief editor Val Stevenson is keen to get a few boxes of unsold copies out of her bedroom, though not nearly as keen as her long-suffering husband… If you would like one, please email Val.

Copies will be sent out on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, and when they are gone, ITCC will be officially out-of-print.

Copies will be a staggeringly reasonable £2.00 plus postage and packing (for airmail outside the UK) per copy

As a matter of full disclosure, I’m a contributor to In the Criminal’s Cabinet, and I must say that I’m impressed with myself to be included among so much lucid and edgy work by an international cast from the e-pages of nthposition.

I’ve been reading my way through the anthology again this summer, and I’m pleased with what I find. It’s a very attractively produced volume with 215 pages of poetry and fiction from Robert Allen to Harriet Zinnes. To quote the introduction by edtors Val Stevenson and Todd Swift:

Since 2002, London-based nthposition has featured several hundred poets, from almost every place where people write poetry in English, especially America, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and South Africa. …we have tried to offer a full-spectrum report on the state of poetry of the start of the 21st century, to suggest the various ways — from linguistically innovative to mainstream — a poem can be imagined and created. Good poems occur at all points of the writing compass, from political to just plain weird.

Within these pages, you will find, quite simply, indelible poets and poems to reckon with — from India’s Ranjit Hoskote to Ireland’s Kevin Higgins; from Canada’s Stephanie Bolster to UK’s Jen Hadfield; from American’s Charles Bernstein to South Africa’s Isobel Dixon…

And this, of course, is just the poets, in whom I am most interested.

The prose, too, is all “tight, vivid.” Nine short pieces from the UK, America, Canada, Ireland, Bulgaria, and Japan. I took time to read it this summer, which I had not done before, and I was blown away by works like Kieran D”Angelo’s “The Internal Life of a Brick” and amused and touched by Kenneth J. Harvey’s “No Better a House.”

Invest a few dollars and get hours, years, of enjoyment in return.

So Phoebe Adams dismisses To Kill A Mockingbird in the original Atlantic Monthly review, featured at Powell’s.

It is frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a six-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult. Miss Lee has, to be sure, made an attempt to confine the information in the text to what Scout would actually know, but it is no more than a casual gesture toward plausibility. … A variety of adults, mostly eccentric in Scout’s judgment, and a continual bubble of incident make To Kill A Mockingbird pleasant, undemanding reading.

Which segues me right in to the announcement that my friend Jane Kretschmann in The Mule. In her Southern Legitimacy Statement, Jane says her first love was To Kill a Mockingbird, but actually I’m more intriqued by this statement:

Later I was one of the founders of the Unofficial Pike County William Styron Fan Club and (the summer Nixon resigned) went to the first Faulkner Symposium.

Click the link to read Jane’s poetry submission and all the rest of the good poetry at the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

That I am opposed to the death penalty probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been reading here for long.

Here are two cases that help explain why.

Execution Of Ga. Man Near Despite Recantations

SAVANNAH, Ga. — A Georgia man is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Tuesday for killing a police officer in 1989, even though the case against him has withered in recent years as most of the key witnesses at his trial have recanted and in some cases said they lied under pressure from police.

Prosecutors discount the significance of the recantations and argue that it is too late to present such evidence. But supporters of Troy Davis, 38, and some legal scholars say the case illustrates the dangers wrought by decades of Supreme Court decisions and new laws that have rendered the courts less likely to overturn a death sentence.

…

At the heart of Davis’s difficulties is a law passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing — the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

The legislation was aimed at bomber Timothy J. McVeigh but has had far broader consequences: It limits the reasons for which federal courts can overturn death penalty convictions. In Davis’s case, it has helped block the exploration of witnesses’ statements that they had lied at trial.

Before the law, the federal courts intervened to provide “relief” to death row inmates — that is, a new trial, new sentencing hearing or a commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment — in about 45 percent of cases, though the rate was declining. But between 2000 and 2007, federal courts intervened to provide such relief to the death row inmate in about 10 percent of cases, according to a forthcoming study.

“People might say the law makes the system more efficient. But we have significantly increased the likelihood of executing someone who is actually innocent,” said David R. Dow, a University of Houston law professor who co-authored the study with Eric M. Freedman of Hofstra University.

And the impending execution of poet Darrel Grayson in Alabama

Facts:

Darrell Grayson, as a young, poor, African-American, was convicted by an all-white jury.

Darrell Grayson’s trial attorney had no experience in capital cases. He practiced divorece law.

Darrell Grayson confessed to the crime. (Not all persons who confess are guilty of the crime. See “Psychology and Confessions” by Dale Wisely. Read Darrell Grayson’s statement concerning what happened.)

DNA evidence is available which has never been tested. Darrell Grayson, facing execution, has been denied the right to have DNA testing.

Darrell Grayson’s case has been supported by the Innocence Project, yet his execution date is set for July 26th at Holman Prison in Alabama.

You can read Grayson’s poetry chapbook, Holman’s House, online at the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Follow-up: Georgia Board Grants Stay Of Execution to Consider Case

New Madrid, the literary journal associated with Murray State University’s low-residency M.F.A. program, announces its intention to dedicate its Winter 2008 issue to the theme of Mexico in the Heartland.

The purpose of the issue is to acknowledge, investigate and celebrate the degree to which Mexico influences those living in the central United States, especially those in Kentucky and bordering states.

Submissions may include fiction, non-fiction, poetry, interviews, translations from Spanish, etc.. The main criterion for acceptance, aside from literary excellence, is how well the submission addresses the theme of the issue.

Submissions for this issue will be read between August 15, 2007 and November 15, 2007. Please check the website (http://www.newmadridjournal.org) for submission guidelines.

First Tools

With a candleflame
I could create a holy place
a glowy breath to read by
to toast some bread
to guard me
from the hounds of night.

But all I’m given is a spark—
no, not even that.
Just two sharp stones—
one to hold
one to strike with—
and a craving for light.

—Mary E. O’Dell

Originally published in Wind, Fall 1998. Reproduced here by permission of the author.