CruelestMonth.com

Saltgrass

Our very own Abigail Holstein, along with poet and blogger Julia Cohen, have launched Saltgrass, "a bi-annual literary journal in print and online featuring fiction, poetry, interviews and reviews."  I just got the print edition yesterday.  The cover features Kate Aspinall's beautiful piece "The Charge of the Goose Brigade."  It's $5 an issue and definitely worth a look.

Worth the Subscription

The Small Press Points and Literary MagNet columns in this latest issue of Poets & Writers are chock full of great stuff.  Hats off to the lovely ladies of No Tell Books (whom we interviewed a while back) who led the piece off.  It's great to see them doing so well.  The lit mag gone DVD periodical (for November, at least) Rattapallax, positioned in the column as an alternative to Wholphin, and, like most things, long established before my noticing of it here, is on my "get-tonight-at-St. Marks" list.  Ram Devineni, Rattapallax's publisher had this to say about turning to the new format:

It's time to look into the future and see where poetry and literature will be in the next ten, twenty years, rather than stay idle.

If that makes you sad and if you refuse to believe such a future looms, a nonprofit organization at the University of Liverpool, has taken a stand.  The Reader, a quarterly magazine, "features essays, interviews, reviews, and recommendations of books for those in the U.K. and the United States who'd rather turn off the television and continue reading."  And to cap it all off, there is the twenty-second issue of Poetry Kanto, an annual journal featuring English and Japanese poetry in translation.

Good Advice

"...Mastery is elusive.  For me, every story is a whole new set of problems, expressed in a whole new language, plus my glasses are out of prescription, and its raining.  So I am a very humble writer and a very humble reader, flinchy even." 

- George Saunders

I take such pleasure out of reading about writers' struggles with their craft.  It is undeniably reassuring.  Even if they are humble about their own success (ahem, Mr. Saunders), they invariably lead me to believe that wrestling and kvetching and avoiding the mess I've made of a page, I am doing just fine.  No, more than that, I am one of the fold, a fellow noble toiler, in with the in-crowd, practically a blood relation to Philip Roth.  And feeling as warm and loved as I did three screwdrivers into my high school reunion last weekend, I am also better at understanding their sage advice.   In the case of Mr. Saunders on Konundrum Engine, though, his is so clear, so clearly useful, too, I think I'm merely trying to justify my easily inflated ego. 

And if you haven't been to Konundrum Engine recently (it's listed under Literary Journals on CM, to your right), take some time to look about--Pitchaya Sudbanthad's interview with T.C. Boyle is cheeky and informative.  There are recipes that involve camels...need I say more? It's been there for some time, so read and/or reread.

Do the same for the barely-a-month-old KGB Bar magazine: KGB BarLit.  The venue that regularly brings booze and babbling bards together for everyone's benefit has put together an impressive  journal--I've enjoyed everything I've read thus far, especially Mary Phillips-Sandy's "No Kilts: Alan Bissett and Rodge Glass."  She writes, "As young Scottish writers living and working in Glasgow, Alan and Rodge spend a lot of time explaining Scottish writing to non-Scottish people."  There's every kind of word-arrangement you might be in the mood for: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, reviews, interviews, and of course, at KGB Bar, great events on the horizon.  I may have to cancel my plans to fluff my couch pillows and avoid my computer to see Drunken! Careening! Writers! on May 25.  You never know, I might feel flattered enough to learn something.

A New Creature Entirely

Perhaps it was falling asleep (fully dressed, mug in hand, crumbs down shirt) to the Discovery Channel last night, or perhaps it was my search for a poet I would like to see more of that lead me to Octopus Magazine. Now in their seventh issue, the online mag consistently offers its readers a bounty of new and deserving talent that tends to linger on the outermost boundaries of poetry, somewhere in the unsteady, uncertain territory of innovation and experimentation. The magazine is the best possible forum for new talent: Its design, a stunning web translation of all the best aspects of small-time print poetry journals, and the credentials of its creators, Tony Tost and Zachary Schomburg, convey a genuine standard, and a sense of legitimacy and commitment to the task of bringing new poetry its audience. But this platform is far from inaccessible or intimidating and, in turn, none of the new poets seem doomed by their obscurity. I approach their work with a fairer mind--I expect an even sampling of brilliance and mediocrity. This seems to have been the aim of the founding editors, as they wrote in their note in Octopus I:

"To create a public space is an act of hubris, perhaps. Perhaps a good journal begins in delight and ends in endowment. There are, perhaps, already enough DIY lit journals designed and edited by young women and men w/o tenure. Perhaps this shall be the new main stream...As Octopus I has developed, the editing process has become, if anything, an exploratory act. So? So it's fun to find out where your margins reside! Fun to thumb through journals! Fun to fall in love with poets you were dimly aware of—they're writing some of the best shit you've read in years...So that's the plan—to create a space that moves, that stretches. To build a better Octopus...If nothing else, dear comrade (dear commander, dear little lampshade), we've got eight arms to hold you, so you won't (you won't) be cold tonight."

The magazine also features the works of better known poets, commentary, and reviews. PW sang its praises in April (in the same article that mentioned this illustrious blog), using it as a model of the kind of online journal that is giving print magazines a run for their money.

But I was in search of a poet, one who I mentioned briefly some weeks ago in a post about the inagural issue of A Public Space. I found her, Matthea Harvey, in this seventh of seven issues, and a poem that left a sweet dirt taste in my mouth.

STRAWBERRY ON THE DRAWBRIDGE

I tried eating one there on the bridge’s fault line, listening out for the dispatcher’s radio so that I’d know if a ship was coming and the road was about to split in two—I love when roads give up on going anywhere and point up towards the heavens. But standing on tiptoe on that crenellated bit of metal (tongue in groove, groove in tongue) didn’t give me the right feeling. Ships were few. And it made me imagine myself being split in two, like St. Simon, martyred length-wise down the middle, which was a feeling I already knew.

For my experiment, I needed an abandoned drawbridge. I found it in Delaware. It was no star, with its rusted rivets and peeling paint, but it was what I was looking for. I got out my orange cones and police tape and cordoned off the area. As a last touch, I put on a uniform I’d bought at the Salvation Army. Then I made a little mound of earth right in the center of the bridge and planted my strawberry plant. I put a bell jar over it and sat next to it, shifting every half hour so that my shadow wouldn’t block the sun. Sometimes, I sat in the control box and polished the controls. Finally, one day the plant sprouted a tiny green strawberry dead center and a week later it was good and red and round. On that long-anticipated day, I pressed play on the tape recorder: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right—here I am, stuck in the middle with you. On the word “middle,” I lowered the lever and raised by my best binoculars to my eyes.

The bridge groaned and began to open. Some of the roots went to the left, some to the right. The bell jar wobbled, then toppled into the water with a celebratory splash. Soil sifted into the river. And the strawberry hung there, suspended between its two sets of roots and stems like an atom in a science experiment. First the skin, with its little grainy seeds strained, then split. Then as the fleshy part broke open, I could see the pale V of its interior and when that split too, the words finally separated into straw and berry and draw and bridge, and like recombinant DNA, formed new ones.  Straw bridge. Draw berry. In the world they conjured the straw bridges were sharp and shiny, too delicate to cross, and there in the berry patches were the artists, islanded at their easels.

thieves jargon

This journal accepts poems as well as short fiction. Their submission guidelines and  manifesto are quite encouraging. Take a look. 

Greatcoat

Another interesting journal is Greatcoat. This one is published in the Spring and Fall.

Half Drunk Muse

Here is a great poetry journal called Half Drunk Muse. They publish quarterly journals of submitted poems.