Resurrection: Poetry Flash

Good news! The Flash is back, and it’s full, as always, with news, interviews (a good one with Chris Abani, whose novel Graceland still burns in the part of my brain holding impressions of Nigeria), poems, and reviews, including some kind words from Richard Silberg for Plato’s Bad Horse by Bear Star poet and associate editor Deborah Woodard. Here is a selection from “Kore" to entice readers still unfamiliar with her work.

3.

Mother, they’ve strung up the head of the scapegoat
and I want him to open his eyes.
I’ll crawl past the bloodshot filaments, the tears
subsiding where his pain has not yet reached.
In this corner, a yellow barn cat,
fur licked flat about her teats; above, a wasps’ nest
no one has disturbed, the hay scent
and children’s voices hurtling down a ray of light.
Soon, I’ll be the mirror clouded by his panting.
I’ll be a bright penny destined for the locomotive,
and afterwards, the one who picks it up.
The mob gathers, siphoning green oil into their lanterns,
and I walk aimlessly with him
into the old city of the brain with its slant avenues.

The long and the short

Here we are at the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox with Punxsutawney Phil predicting more snow and rain, which is fine with all of us drought-conscious Californians even if we’d prefer to be outdoors readying our gardens for spring planting. It’s good reading weather.

For some reason, partly to do with a desire to cultivate a longer attention span, I’m into longer books so far this year, following 2666 with Infinite Jest. The latter seems weirdly appropriate in view of the recent SCOTUS ruling. Now that corporations can pour as much money as they like into political races, maybe it’s only a matter of time before the years are named, as in Jest, for sponsors. Somehow, “The Year of Depend Adult Undergarments” doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. I rather like picturing Alito and Scalia in diapers—Thomas, too.

But, speaking of long works, the latest Poetry has a marvelous essay by Durs Grünbein that makes a case for the time-saving aspects of poetry. “A few clusters of words express what the lavish epic draws out over hundreds of pages. Or to put it another way: couldn’t it be that poems, as long as they are alert and open to impressions, are novels by other means—and therefore do sterling service to readers short of time and hungry for intensity? What they offer are lessons in accelerated consciousness, machete slashes through a tangled world.”

And the winner is ...

… Robert Hill Long of Eugene, Oregon, whose manuscript wowed my stalwart readers and me with four long sonnet sequences—that’s it; no loose change in this book—that exhibit such narrative brio we often forgot we were reading sonnets. Long is the author of three previous poetry books: The Power to Die (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), The Work of the Bow (ditto), and The Effigies (Plinth Books). His new book, The Kilim Dreaming, will be out this fall. Here’s a stand-alone poem from the second section, “The Book of Joel.”

Parable of Shadows

What turns cities gray are ghosts: that’s where they answer
monotonous inquiries about the future
in monotones of ash, exhaust, and verdigris.
The residue they leave is like a sustained kiss—

on this portico that sheltered one’s live embrace;
on that marble sill where another leaned her face
into her arms and listened to the song of sirens
and taxis, and weighed the summer she held the reins

of a milk-paint horse, and no one called her in at dark.
The city ghosts touch gray is a moon-luminous ark,
they’re its true passengers. The living are ballast,
perishables with no sure date stamped as their last.

Something stilled in them wants the facades to keep graying.
What the dead do with their colors, they’re not saying.

The Part about the Office

Reviews of Bolaño’s 2666 tend to focus on the book’s epic scope and darker aspects—primarily, the femicides in Juarez (called Santa Teresa in the book) that continue to this day—but Bolaño is also at times quite a funny writer. In the book’s final section, I laughed aloud at the following passage, which takes place in the offices of an elderly publisher named Bubis. It’s a bit long, but I want to set the scene for the discussion of lapsus calami, or slips of the pen, that so animates Bubis and his employees. There is nothing here that will give the plot away, so just enjoy.

“The atmosphere at the publishing house was one of feverish activity. Sometimes, however, everything halted, and the copy editor made coffee for herself and [an author] and tea for a new girl who worked as a designer, because by now the house had grown and the slate of employees had grown and sometimes, at a nearby desk, there was a young copy editor, Swiss, why on earth he lived in Hamburg no one knew, and the baroness came out of her office and so did the head of publicity and sometimes the secretary, and they talked about all sorts of things, about the last movie they’d seen or the actor Dirk Bogarde, and then the bookkeeper and even Marianne Gottlieb would drop by with a smile, and if the laughter was very loud in the big room where the copy editors worked, then Bubis himself would peer in with his teacup in his hand, and they would talk not just about Dirk Bogarde but also about politics and the dirty business that the new Hamburg officials got up to or they talked about some writers who had no ethical sense, self-confessed and happy plagiarists who hid expressions of mingled fear and outrage behind a cheerful mask, writers prepared to cling to any reputation, with the certainty that they would thus live on in posterity, any posterity, which made the copy editors and the other employees laugh and even prompted a resigned smile from Bubis, since no one knew better that posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats, and then they started to talk about lapsus calami, many of them collected in a book published long ago … and it wasn’t long before the copy editors got out a book … and began to read aloud a selection of cultured pearls:
‘Poor Marie! Whenever she hears the sound of an approaching horse, she is certain that it is I.’ Vie de Rancé, Chateaubriand.
‘The crew of the ship swallowed up by the waves consisted of twenty-five men, who left hundreds of widows consigned to misery.’ Les Cages flottantes, Gaston Leroux. …
‘ “Let’s go! said Peter, looking for a hat to dry his tears.” Lourdes, Zola.
‘The duke appeared followed by his entourage, which preceded him.’ Letters from My Mill, Alphonse Daudet.
‘With his hands clasped behind his back, Henri strolled about the garden, reading his friend’s novel.’ Le Cataclysme, Rosny.”

The list goes on, followed by commentary about particular pearls that if anything is funnier than the pearls themselves. I submit that the reason writers and editors so enjoy this kind of humor is that they—we—are all too conscious of the ease with which such goofs can make it into print, and so we laugh loudly (while knocking on wood to protect against further embarrassments).
I will end this post by reproducing the typo I make most often, and that on dark days I suspect describes me a little too well: edioter.

Got Macmillan?

Not anymore you don’t, not if you shop Amazon. On Friday, Amazon removed all its buy buttons for Macmillan books, disappeared them from wish lists, and removed downloaded Macmillan sample chapters from Kindles as well. Apparently, the world’s biggest bookseller is retaliating against the publisher for its move to establish a better pricing system for e-books, one that Macmillan says “provides a level playing field, and allows all retailers the possibility of selling books profitably [emphasis mine].” You can read more about it at Publishers Lunch, which also contains a copy of the ad Macmillan ran to alert its authors, illustrators, and agents. So far Amazon has said nothing publicly.

UPDATE: This just out from Amazon:
Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Haiti

This has nothing to do with the book biz, but if you're about to send a donation to aid relief efforts in Haiti, you want your dollars to go where they're most needed. Today on Talk of the Nation I heard about an organization that rates charities. Do yourself a favor and check it out: www.charitywatch.org/ . There's a handy index and also a list of the top-rated charities. Oxfam's on that list, by the way, and the Red Cross is not.

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
~Bertolt Brecht

Planning the Days

Or daze, as the case may be. In any case, I was happy to receive my copy of A Working Writer's Daily Planner for 2010 from the good people at Small Beer Press. It's a deal at $13.95, a handsome spiral-bound notebook full of handsome photos, deadlines for various contests, prompts for writers, and so on. I had merely contributed a few choice excerpts from Rotten Reviews (Pushcart Press, 1986; a reminder of how wrong we editors can be, as if anyone reading this post needs reminding) and Small Beer comped me a planner. The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses is full of kind folks who help each other out--and fast. Here is where I should insert a few personal examples of blowing it (there are several) and subsequent speedy rescue, but I'd rather list some rotten reviews. Think of these when you get your next rejection letter.

• Catch-22: "Heller wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it. What remains is a debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic looniness, and the sort of antic behavior the children fall into when they know they are losing our attention." ~The New Yorker
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "A gross trifling with every fine feeling ... Mr. Clemens has no reliable sense of propriety." ~The Springfield Republican
• Leaves of Grass: "Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics." ~The London Critic
• To the Lighthouse: "Her work is poetry; it must be judged as poetry, and all the weaknesses of poetry are inherent in it." ~New York Evening Post
• on Emily Dickinson: "An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village--or anywhere else--cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar .... Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood." ~Atlantic Monthly