Sherry Chandler

“a heat-slick valentine”

Whereas Marilyn Taylor’s Going Wrong is a traditional library press edition, the second chapbook I want to bring to your attention is one that forges ahead into the frontiers of publication. It is Pamela Johnson Parker’s A Walk Through the Memory Palace, winner of qarrtsiluni’s first chapbook contest, judged by Dinty Moore.

In establishing their small press arm, editors Beth Adams and Dave Bonta want to continue the work they’re doing with qarrtsiluni itself, that is, exploring methods of publication that exploit the full potential of the internet. To that end, A Walk Through the Memory Palace is available as a nicely designed, highly readable online text. It is also available as a half-hour podcast, or as a print edition.

In an interview at readwritepoem, Beth Adams explains qarrtsiluni’s publishing philosophy:

Three things seem evident: 1. Distribution and marketing and a lot of publishing are going to happen via the web; 2. The future of indie book publishing (of paper editions) lies in print-on-demand; and 3. The former competitive model has to give way to innovative collaborative efforts, where artists and writers and publishers help each other rather than competing for a shrinking number of book contracts, awards and recognition. Dave and I are both motivated by that third reality — wanting to find new ways to encourage writers, get their work out there, and preserve some of it for posterity in print — because we continue to believe that people want to hold books in their hands.

The online edition is Creative Commons licensed, in line with Dave Bonta’s philosophy:

Poetry was never about money for me. It’s like water. It’s supposed to be free.

It is designed, I think, with WordPress software, to exploit the navigation advantages of blog design. Though, I’m quick to add, the online chapbook does not look like a blog.

The print edition is published in collaboration with Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal, a print-on-demand press. It is 28 pages, perfect bound, with a full-color, glossy cover, cover art by Carrie Ann Baade. The list price is $5.95.

Pamela Johnson Parker’s poems are imagistic and erotic. Parker’s free verse line is short and she likes to float it away from the left margin, give it plenty of white space. These ten poems range in subject from listening to old 78s on a Western Kentucky front porch to Greek mythology, from those whose tattoos are body art (“Tattoos”) to those whose tattoos are marks of holocaust (“Some Yellow Tulips”). For me, it is strongest when it is most straightforward, as in these lines from “Tattoos”

Clean Rooms by the Hour — neon
blues, reds, blurring past

our window, through blinds
that won’t quite shut (one slat slants
diagonal) printing
its ladder of light
all the way down your back. Here
with you, I don’t care

about tawdry or
geography; I want you
so much it hurts to
breathe . . .

We are very much in the senses here and in that motel room with that body tattooed with ink, with the shadows of the blind slats, the “tattoo / of skin against skin.” We are reading “a heat-slick valentine.”

Parker is fond of lists and uses them to advantage, as in the beginning of this same long poem, “Tattoos.” “Tattoos” is a poem in two parts. The lines quoted above are from the second part, “Canvas,” which is to say, the body. These lines are from the first part, “Ink:”

Cardamom, ginger,
pomegranate bark. Bamboo
shoots, asparagus,

damp smouldering leaves —
mugwort mordant in votives.
Wicker baskets, rows

and rows of trays, jars
decanting tarragon, dried
dandelions, black

mushrooms, bear bladders.

It’s informative to listen to Parker read these poems. With her Kentucky accent, a word like “still” travels over its diphthongs at a leisurely pace and the poems become like the spoken version of a Lucinda Williams song, an effect that adds texture to poems dealing with Greek myth:

ARCHAIC FRAGMENTS

NARCISSUS: NARKE

Water takes you in.
For days the gods talk
Of nothing but your

Spine in the dark, white
Coral, of how fish
School into your dead

Calm. And still water
Gives you back: thirsting,
Already bent to drink.

“Archaic Fragments,” like many of the poems in this chapbook is a long multi-part work. These offerings wrap poems into poems, so that you do get your full 28-pages of value.

In another of life’s totally meaningless coincidences, Parker is a graduate of Murray State University’s MFA program in creative writing and my son, who did some work in that program, is acquainted with her.

We also have in common our work as medical editors. That training is evident “Breasts,” a six-part, five-page contemplation cancer that mixes technical and sensual language set up like figure legends for a medical paper:

Figure C.   Recent radical mastectomy showing markings for
radiation. Incisions placed so that they will not show
when wearing evening dress or bathing suit.

Two devices don’t work well for Parker in this first chapbook venture. One is the poem “for two voices.” This may be a problem of my personal taste. In general, I don’t tend to like poems that entertwine two strands of meaning. I usually wind up picking the threads apart so that reading the poem becomes sort of like untying a knot. It’s difficult, I think, to do a poem like “Engendering: For Two Voices” in such a way that the two parts strengthen and build on one another. Although “Engendering” is, in many ways, a fine poem, I don’t think Parker quite pulls it off. The “Ulysses:Uxoria” section of “Archaic Fragments” works better because its use of two voices is simpler, less intrusive.

The other poem that doesn’t work for me is “Some Yellow Tulips,” a portrait of a holocaust survivor in rhymed couplets. Such subjects can be done in formal poetry. As an example, see Marilyn Taylor’s “In Other News.” But the poet has to be very careful to make sure the form serves the poem. As one who works a bit in form, I know that it’s easy to let it get away from you, to let the poem serve the form. Especially if you’re trying to bend the form to serve a narrative. I appreciate Parker’s effort in this poem. It contains some startling and moving images, especially the last line where the blowing yellow tulips “ravelled to a six-pointed star.” But the meter and rhyme are too regular, sometimes a bit forced.

Small flaws, born of personal preference, in a chapbook that is otherwise excellent.
A Walk Through the Memory Palace is Pamela Johnson Taylor’s first booklength publication. She is off to a fine start.

Let me remind you again that the price for the print edition of this book is $5.95, plus shipping. It would make a great stocking stuffer.

Some things to read

Heads-up!

The Fall 2009 issue of New Southerner Magazine is out, with great poetry by Jessie Carty, Ida Cerne, and Michael Jackman, a great essay by Jason Howard on mountaintop removal, and some nifty bread pudding recipes from Ellen Birkett Morris.

And let me remind you that you still have 17 days to submit to their writing contest.

Meanwhile qarrtsiluni , featuring their 2009 chapbook finalists, has introduced a podcast and has announced their next issue theme: words of power: curses, spells, charms, prayers, incantations, mantras, sacred scriptures, explicit performative utterances, oaths, or legal instruments.

Check out the online version of the winning chapbook, Pamela Johnson Parker’s A Walk Through the Memory Place.. It’s an elegant piece of online mixed-media design.

E-zines: the question of readability

As I mentioned yesterday, when most people make their list of things they don’t like about online poetry magazines, readability comes high on the list. It’s high on mine.

Dave Bonta has addressed this issue in an e-mail posted on the Wom-Po list, which he has kindly given me permission to quote:

If I were to re-write that [post at Blogging Blog] today, I think I’d be a little less polemical in
regards to online magazines that choose to publish all their material at once. Some of my own favorite journals still follow that pattern. But studies of online reading habits are discouraging, and do suggest that
people tend to skim rather than really read online material. One thing we try to do to counteract that behavior, aside from trickling material out on a near-daily basis, is to provide audio (and you can bet we’d include more video if we had it – we simply can’t afford to send a camera crew to film our contributors!). I bring this up, though, to suggest that the dyspeptic print editor who accused the internet of being “anti-poetry” is not completely out to lunch.

On the other hand, the online audience is potentially huge and multinational. Poetry Daily and Verse Daily each have many thousands of readers, me included. Say what you will about the Web; email is still perhaps the best way to reach people. (And it’s one reason I harp on the importance of RSS feeds: they give publishers a painless route to providing a subscribe-by-email option.)

Dave also suggested that I point you to the FAQ at The Cortland Review, an online lit magazine that answers the question “Why publish on line?” like this:

Editing poetry magazines has always been a labor of love: budgets are tight, distribution scant. The Internet offers publishers a viable alternative: the ability for an interactive multimedia presentation to a global audience, absolutely free. Publishing online, furthermore, honors the tradition that poetry is an oral art and allows for a more intimate connection between poet and audience than print alone. The electronic format, further, allows for access to TCR’s extensive archive, ongoing in both text and audio, available absolutely free to anyone in the world.

…

In Issue 3, we introduced our Read Along with the Author Series, and our journal evolved into something more than we had initially conceived. With the technology of RealAudio, we were able to include voice-recordings of the poets reading their own poems exclusively for The Cortland Review.

Poetry is an oral art, and contributions are enhanced by audio. Readers can sit back and listen to the poets read aloud while they follow along in text. This dynamic creates an intimate connection between poet and audience.

I love the chance to hear a poet read. Sometimes I have found that, when I can’t understand a poet’s line on the page, hearing him/her read will clarify.

Of course, I may be prejudiced because I’m a good reader myself with a sometimes eccentric line.

Nevertheless, I think the ability to add audio is a great plus for online publishing.

__________
Speaking of video zines, let me remind you of Jessie Carty’s Shape of a Box.

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.