Wednesday, August 23, 2023

“A Window (I have no eyes)” appears in Cream Scene Carnival

Cream Scene Carnival: An Arts & Culture Magazine – Punk Rock & Irreverent since 2009 has just posted its Summer 2023 issue, Wild West. 

The issue includes my poem

“A Window (I have no eyes)”


Back in college in a poetry workshop class (early 90s) I wrote a series of poems using various ideas about windows. I revisited the collection fairly recently and did new versions of a few of the poems. 


Eyes are the windows of the soul, goes the old saw. I’ve played with that idea a few times. In “A Window (I have no eyes)” I was intrigued by the letter shapes (e looks like an eye, doesn’t it?, thus the word “eye” looks a bit like a face, an e (or eye) on either side of the y (which can be seen as nose-like, or like an elephant’s trunk?). I liked that eye and I and aye sound alike, that eyes and yes are such lookalikes, that the eye, our instrument for looking, cannot see itself. How much of that you’ll get from the poem, I can’t say. Much depends on whether you want to treat it as something with depth rather than something to glance at and move on. 


The poem was paired with a photo-scene & video by Andrea Letford. 


The photo next to my bio is a photo I took.


When the editors shared this to Instagram they also included audio of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds playing “Black Betty.”


Saturday, August 19, 2023

rejecto-zines

In 2021 I started sending out the poems “To Try to Fall” and “I used to think you were beautiful.” By the time the nice editors at Dark Winter decided to take them up, 50 other venues had already declined the opportunity. In case you are curious:

2021

Thrush, Cimarron Review, Agni, The New Yorker

2022

Arcturus, Magma, As It Ought to Be, Comstock Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nashville Review, Chestnut Review, Glass Mountain, Gordon Square Review, Limp Wrist/Glitter Bomb Award, Black Fox Literary Review, Baltimore Review, Columbia Journal, New Welsh Review, Suburbia Journal, Dillydoun Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Scapegoat Review, Foglifter, Route 7 Review, Lavender Bones

2023

Mollyhouse, Southland Alibi, 805, Broadkill Review, Pidgeonholes, The Maine Review, Emerson Review, Roi Faineant, Bluestem, The Ignatian, New Orleans Review, Gigantic Sequins, Showcase, Miracle Monocle, Red Coyote, After Happy Hour Review, Jake, A-Minor, Labyrinth Anthologies, Lumina, Lunch Ticket, Rock Paper Poem, Meetinghouse, Trace Fossils, Slippery Elm

Thursday, August 10, 2023

“Building a House” in Lifespan v.8: Achievement from Pure Slush Books

Achievement is vol. 8 in the Lifespan series of anthologies from Pure Slush Books in Australia. Included in Achievement is my poem

“Building a House”


“Established in 2010, Pure Slush currently publishes print anthologies of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry,” declares the About page. The press uses print-on-demand service Lulu.


They do not send out complementary contributor’s copies, so I purchased one on my own. At present the physical book costs $16; the ebook $7 (US dollars).







Tuesday, August 08, 2023

five poems in Otoliths

Mark Young has decided to hang up the editor hat. He announced Otoliths #70 would be the final issue. I’ve had work in past issues of Otoliths, including chapters from Autobiography of a Book. There’s a romance to finality — and being one of the last. So I sent along a batch of poems. Maybe I’d get in the ultimate issue. Indeed. Mark took all five of the poems I sent:

“a fan handle flashing”

“a nobody in whose happening this city”

“multiple fragile instruments”

“catamount in a lily”

“a blind item”


#70 is a big issue. There are names I know — Eileen R. Tabios, Dale Jensen, Richard Kostelanetz, John M. Bennett, Sheila E. Murphy, Alan Catlin, Jim McCrary — and many more I don’t. 


Mark also packages each issue into print on demand volumes, grouping text-based work and visual arts into separate volumes to keep any one collection from being prohibitively expensive (or gigantic).