Sherry Chandler

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Via Negative posting Honduran poetry here.

The Reluctant Poet Laureate

The Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature presents an opportunity to focus on the fine literature the state of Kentucky has produced, bringing it to the nation’s attention. Sarabande will publish one book annually of short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, a novella(s), or short novel. (Must be postmarked in July.)

Call for Submissions to Motes Books Motif 2 with the theme of “Chance.” Deadline September 1.

First Annual Ruth Redel Poetry Prize

Appalachian Studies

Anne Shelby makes me laugh.

Anne Shelby makes me think.

Anne Shelby makes me shake my power fist and cry out “Right on, Sister!”

And oh, how refreshing that is.

The poems in Appalachian Studies aren’t difficult. They are plain-spoken statements from a plain-spoken witty woman who is by nature a storyteller and a humorist.

Shelby is also clear-eyed, and though her poems, like her stories, tend to the folksy, there is nothing of the sentimental about them.

Appalachian Studies is a volume of poetry you can devour at a sitting.

And I did.

Nice review by Margaret Ricketts here. Says Margaret:

Like her fellow Southerners Flannery O’Connor and Molly Ivins, Shelby uses dialect to prick stereotypes like soap bubbles. You can’t have a grandbaby on this thing / without special arrangements. One spell / transformed my taters into tatters, served / me subpoenas when I ordered soupbeans.

The poem quoted is “Spell Check,” which begins

It’s handy but not much account for writing
hillbilly poems with.

If you’d like to see some sample poems see here and here. You’ll see that “hillbilly” isn’t the only stereotype she busts. She’s also hard on sexism. And ageism.

By the way, Anne has a new children’s book out: The Man Who Lived in a Hollow Tree.

And you can catch her this weekend at the Mountain Heritage Festival, along with a passel of other talented mountain writers, including Denise Giardina and Gwyn Hyman Rubio.

It’s come to this

From The Guardian’s Book Blog:

“Please … let it stop now. Haven’t we suffered enough?” has been my silent prayer to the gods of poetry in the last few days. I cannot be the only person sick of the Oxford Professor of Poetry saga? And while this soap opera of the dons was being played out, one of the most important publishers of contemporary poetry in the UK had its back to the financial wall. Despite some plucky moves on the part of Salt Publishing to avert the worst – more of which later – it still faces the prospect of going under. This is the sort of cause that the Oxford professor of poetry should have championed by bringing Salt’s talented poets to wider public attention if nothing else.

You can buy one book here at Just One Book

A Retreat of One’s Own

A Retreat of One’s Own
The Gathering of Writers and Songwriters
May 17-19, 2009
Greenbo Lake State Park

This retreat, sponsored by Motes Books, is designed especially for writers of fiction, creative non-fiction or poetry, and for songwriters. Silas House, Anne Shelby & Kate Larken will teach during this event; Marianne Worthington & Sue Massek will be guest presenters. Gather with us at beautiful Greenbo Lake State Park May 17-19 for an inspiring, creative experience. (Application deadline is April 25.)

Details at the link.

Small Press Month

Jessie Carty of Shape of a Box reminds us to remember to celebrate Small Press Month:

Kentucky has many find small presses. You will find a list of them on my navigation bar above, also by clicking this link. And if anybody knows of a press or a magazine I’ve left off, please let me know.

The joys of linguini

Diane Lockward’s poem “Linguini” is featured on The Writer’s Almanac today.

“Linguini” is from Diane’s book What Feeds Us, available for Wind Publications.

Diane, always a very generous poet, has recently updated her list of Journals that Accept E-Mail/Online Submissions, complete with links.

Thank you, Diane.

Poetry e-zine on a blog model

Over on the Wom-Po list this week, we’ve engaged in a lively discussion of Ron Offen’s editorial and the nature of web magazines. One name kept cropping up, qarrtsiluni, an e-zine that operates on the blog model.

Co-editor Dave Bonta’s post on the origins of qarrtsiluni at the Blogging Blog raises some pertinent points about web publishing:

And at some point during a site re-design in spring 2006, my co-editor Beth Adams slipped in a new tagline: online literary magazine.

At first, I was a little taken aback. Aren’t blogs and magazines two different things? But then a well-known editor of an established literary magazine took us to task on her personal blog for that very thing, accusing us of claiming to be something we weren’t, and it got me thinking a bit more critically about the lit mag genre.

Why do most online literary magazines continue to publish issues all at once, just like their print counterparts? Does anyone ever sit down and read those massive content dumps from cover to virtual cover? Reading text online can be a real strain on the eyes after more than a couple of pages. And online journals in most other disciplines publish new material whenever it’s ready for publication, so why don’t literary magazines?

I noticed a couple other odd things about the genre. For one, online literary magazines almost never have an RSS feed. Don’t they want readers?

Dave’s post is very readable and it’s worth your time to click through and read in full. Also, he lists some other blog-format poetry e-zines in the comments and you might want to check them out.

He ends his essay with this sentence:

Though blogs, like television, seem to have become associated with shallowness and ephemerality in the public mind, they’re still a great medium with enormous potential for literary and artistic expression.

This word ephemeral keeps popping up. Ron Offen used it in his polemic against web publishing. Maybe I’m just dense, but I consider magazine publishing in either print or online to be somewhat ephemeral. My house is littered with fine print magazines that I read through and then lay aside. When they begin to accumulate, I bag them up and send them off to the Friends Book Cellar, where I hope some one else will buy and read them. But, in truth, who goes back to two-year-old copies of, say, well, Free Lunch?

I’ve said this stuff before and anyway, perhaps living in the midst of nature as I do, I have a skewed idea of ephemeral.

People are, perhaps, more likely to read my backlist by Googling my name than by searching the indices of lit mags.

Diane Lockward is good on the disadvantages of print magazines:

The technical glitches that Offen cites as nasty possibilities—a hard drive crash; a bug; troubles with the hosting site, both technical and financial; the end of the journal and the disappearance of your work from the site—seem to me no worse or more worrisome than the possibility that a print journal will go out of business before your work is published (I’ve had that happen), that there will be delays in delivery (also had that problem, many times), that your work will be inadvertently omitted (don’t even let me get started on this), that your work will appear with typos that can’t be fixed and your bio with your name misspelled (again, don’t let me get started).

Most of these things have also happened to me, and in these cases, the relatively fixed nature of print magazines and anthologies can be distressing.

Speaking of Google, as I was a couple of paragraphs back, except insofar as sites can be taken down, I find that web publication in general and blogs in particular are somewhat deceptive in their ephemerality. My deathless prose of the day may disappear off the front page, but I can assure you that it occasionally comes back to bite me. Because, just like embarrassing Facebook photographs that seemed like fun at the time, the whole blog is still out there in cyberspace.

And here I am, after all, quoting a year-old blog post from Dave Bonta, available at the click of a mouse button.

Readability may be a more serious deficit for online zines. A poem has to be awfully good to keep my attention onscreen, and often I resort to the printer to be able to read a longer work — and there goes the “saves paper” advantage.

Future of reading

I have received Free Lunch # 40, and as I always do with this publication, I turned first to Editor Ron Offen’s editorial. For Autumn 2008, Ron is explaining why he will never make Free Lunch an online publication. The title gives a clue: Poetry and the Web II (The Ephemeralization and Degradation of Poetry).

Are web publications ephemeral? Are their standards too low? Questions that only time will settle, I suppose. One of Ron’s arguments, I think may be a function of age. Those of us who grew up with books find them more comforting, easier on the eyes, easier on the concentration. But there may be a downside to linear English printed on the page. It may favor certain types of intelligence. That argument is also not one that I can win.

(There is something about this in Robert Pinksky’s interview in Rattle, but I don’t have that volume with me at the moment. I’ll come back to that later maybe. I think the question is more oriented toward the effect of texting on grammar.)

It is Offen’s final point that interests me here:

Finally, those fostering online poetry are apparently convinced that print is (or will soon will be) an obsolete medium. Considering the current demise of many newspapers and magazines, whose former readers are increasingly obtaining their news and information on television and online, this is a compelling argument. Yet studies also show that more and more books are being published and purchased in recent years. And what about the lines that form outside bookstores awaiting the first sales of books like those of the Harry Potter series? Also, did Billy Collins’ poetry books become bestpsellers because he was published so widely online? Moreover, even if such naysayers of print are right (which is highly doubtful), why would e-zine editors, who presumably care about the future of poetry, trust its future to a medium that is essentially anti-poetic? Why would they promote—to coin a word—the ephemeralization of the art?

While I’ll admit to being one who wants to see my work in print, Kathryn Greenhill, blogging at Librarians Matter, is not so sanguine about the future of the book, and she’s a little worried about the future of the library (that bastion of free speech). She asks What future the library? and suggests that those institutions would be wise to prepare for a bookless future. Via.

Like Ron Offen, I find the prospect of a bookless future bleak and can’t quite wrap my head around cuddling up with a good Kindle. Still, I’m beginning to think I’ve reached my fuddy-duddy years.

Does anybody remember the term fuddy-duddy?

__________
Addendum: Here is Diane Lockward on Ron Offen’s editorial:

Nevertheless, online journals are here and that’s just a fact. And not such an unpalatable one. There are things an online journal can do that a print one can’t: add lovely graphics, include links to other literary sites, correct mistakes. Some journals have added audio which is wonderful. I like reading the poem and then being able to listen to the poet read it aloud, especially if the poet lives somewhere far away from me. Now Offen makes it clear that he feels these additions detract from the poetry rather than add to it. I disagree.

The technical glitches that Offen cites as nasty possibilities—a hard drive crash; a bug; troubles with the hosting site, both technical and financial; the end of the journal and the disappearance of your work from the site—seem to me no worse or more worrisome than the possibility that a print journal will go out of business before your work is published (I’ve had that happen), that there will be delays in delivery (also had that problem, many times), that your work will be inadvertently omitted (don’t even let me get started on this), that your work will appear with typos that can’t be fixed and your bio with your name misspelled (again, don’t let me get started).

Read the whole post. Read Blogalicious, often (though she doesn’t often write about Offen.)