April 2004 Archives

I just learned this afternoon that I've done the unthinkable, from a publishing perspective. I submitted a poem to www.redchinamagazine.com that had years before been published in 2River magazine, and I never gave attribution or warning to the editors. It's unthinkable not just because I oppose this practice (including its less appealing form, simultaneous submission), but because it potentially reflects badly on the two magazines and their editors.

This brings up a question for discussion. How do writers, especially poets and particularly those who've published over a lifetime, how do they keep records? I suspect that, as in any other "business," there are keepers of meticulous records and there are sloppy record keepers. I've always prided myself on being the former. Everything that goes out also goes into a folder on my hard drive so that I know what piece went to whom and when. Purists might object, but I think most people would applaud my administrative efforts. Anyway, it's not like I'm prolific or that I submit every day. I should be able to keep track!

I'm curious to know how others manage the minutiae of publishing (assuming that most poets can't afford and don't have literary agents or secretaries to manage for them). I wonder, is there a database one can use to automatically warn against submitting previously published work?

I'm somewhere in the back of the pack in the picture to the right. It's the start of last Saturday's Chubb Trail Endurance Run, the most gruelling course I've ever run. Some people are running the 50K and others are running the 25K. My starting goal was to complete the 25K in 3:00:00, but at mile 12 or so I realized that wouldn't be possible, so my next goal was to finish ahead of the first 50K runner. An attainable goal, you say, but one I barely met, finishing 25K a mere 17 minutes before the winner of the 50K.

The Chubb Trail. Gruelling. A steep, mile downhill toward the Meramec River. Flat river bottom for three miles. Ridges for three miles. A short flat stretch. A mile ascent/descent. And finally heading back through the ridges, across the river bottom, and up the last mile to the finish line.

If I continue these trail runs I need to run on trails. Up to now, my trail running has been limited to races. I would do better, have more endurance, if I ran trails more frequently. Last Saturday, on several occasions, while running up the ridges, I had to stop and bend over to recover before ascending further.

Nonetheless, I'm thinking that next year I'll run the 50K. That would be considered an ultra run, and finishers of ultra runs receive nifty belt buckles.

http://www.crowdmagazine.com/ has published three issues, the most recent, Spring-Summer 2003. A lot has happened since then, so I wonder whether the magazine is still solvent. If not, it would be a shame because this little mag finds very strong writers--poets, at least--and its poetry editor, Brett Lauer, has definite ideas about what he wants to see published under the Crowd masthead.

Of course, I base this observation on only three poems of one issue that's now almost a year old. The TOC shows 19 poetry contributors, including Paul Muldoon. And there are entries of fiction (3), art (6), and photography (7).

Crowd Magazine is actually a print publication with a web site. The fact that the Internet is still full of this type of poetry magazine, I guess, testifies to its relative infancy. Hard to become as sophisticated as the print industry in only 10 years. It's certainly an indication that the poetry publishing industry--or any publishing for that matter--has yet to interiorize the new medium.

Crowd, like many other poetry pubs, uses its web site primarily as a marketing tool, sampling just enough of its contents to entice the browsing reader to buy an annual subscription ($20, though that may be an expensive alternative given the infrequency & irregularity of new issues posted to the web); or purchase a back issue ($12 for issue 3, $7 for issue 1, issue 2 is sold out). An annual subscription, apparently, also gets you full access to the contents of the online postings.

A "Past Issues" link takes you to the names of the two previous issues, but they, unfortunately, are not linked. Strike three, in spring/summer parlance. I fear that either the little mag is defunct or the editors have abandoned the web site.

Published in Brooklyn, New York, Crowd likely is available in NYC magazine and independent bookstores. It'd be helpful if the editors let you know which vendors--but buying a print copy off the street might not jive well with their odd reluctance to share contents online.

Still, the poetry's quite attractive, rich in tone and technique, and accomplished. Of the three poems & poets featured in the only issue available online, you begin to get a sense of editorial direction and predilection. Let's say "seriously surreal." "The Skin's Broken Aria," by Jennifer Chang, is a good example, as the opening lines indicate:

I cross the street
and my skin falls off. Who walks
to an abandoned lake? Who
abandons lakes?

Who, indeed? This meditation on Madame Butterfly, the human envelope, self, and imagined lives asks lots of provocative questions, voluptuously. "They don't / sell skin at Wal-Mart. And really, how / could I, humbly, buy it?" "Do you know/Puccini? Do you spill silk / at the gorgeous onslaught of love, of Pinkerton's / lurking return?"

I don't know about anybody else, but, as the saying goes, I value my skin. So does the (imagined) body beyond the voice of this poem. "My great passion was my skin." "There is no skin like mine." Perfect lines for the perfectly powdered (and powerless) Mdme. Butterfly.

Biology reminds us that we completely replace our body's cells about once every seven years. That fact makes expressions like "I've got you under my skin," or "If I were in your skin," and poems like this one either comical or tragical. Pick one. And it confirms that only memory and imagination make a whole & sustainable person. And love, maybe, or its substitutes.

Issue 3's cover is a photo of a lunch room, the nondescript kind you often see in nondescript office buildings: some cheap tables and chairs and bad lighting, nothing on the walls. A bottle of water, a couple of aluminum cans litter the tables. If there was a crowd, they've gone now. There's a big silence left over. That's where Crowd magazine comes in.

Note: the online issue invites submissions (five poems at a time, but only paper copies via postal mail, with SASE; no other guidelines provided). Might be worth subscribing or submitting to, assuming it's still alive. Hard to tell.

Go see http://www.artisdead.net, David Ondrik's web site of photography. I met David last weekend in Albuquerque, where he lives and works. He steered me toward this site as a way to get in touch with him and to sample his work.

Enough can be said by the work itself with little prodding by me, so I'll refrain from too much narrative here. But I am astonished by some of the pieces you'll see here, particularly "New Mexico," "Wasteland," and "Mirage."

Equally worthwhile are David's (and friends') narrative statements about technique, strategy, definition, purpose. So often I find artists can be maddeningly obtuse, even inarticulate, when making the traditional "artist's statement." And yes, I include Pablo Picasso in this unfortunate category. It's as though so many of them believe they have to make absurd or outlandish remarks about art and its social function, or lamely mysterious claims about the relationship between art and the artist, the World, Knowledge, Blah Blah Blah.

But this artist puts some thought into his craft and his art, always careful to include the role of the viewer in his deliberation. And he does so in clean, direct prose style.

But look at the photos first. They are powerful art, no doubt about it.

That's not a pretty sight of me to the right. It's just past the thirteenth mile of last Sunday's Spirit of St. Louis Half Marathon. I've passed the pack of people behind me, and I'm running fast (in my opinion) the last tenth of a mile to pass other runners ahead. My grimmace seems to indicate my tank is running out of gas, and I can't recall whether I ever passed the runners I was chasing.

All of which reminds me of my last post about the running writing pad and the comment left by Dr. B. She suggests using an iPod with add-on recorder to record my thoughts while I'm running. To boot, when/if I'm not thinking, I could listen to my running playlist. Great idea! Only problem is that my iPod, one of the originals, fell victim to iPod's dirty little secret and I'm now trying to decide whether I should send my iPod to Apple for a battery replacement or buy a sleek new one.

In any case, after two days of rest my feet are back on the street. 7 miles Wednesday. 6 miles yesterday. Both were beautiful spring days. Just right for a tank-top.

Wednesday, in Forest Park, another runner came up on me. "Saw you in the race Sunday."

"Passing me?" I asked, as he pulled ahead.

It's moments lke that when I wish I had my running writing pad.

Now seems to be a good time to add your poetry blog to Google's sponsored links. I just googled poetry blog, and of the 1,430,000 results, the blog kept by Talent Hizashi Yamasaki stood out. It's the only one listed under Sponsored Links. Smart guy!

I only wish Yamasaki lived up to the promise of his Google description: "Revolutionary Postmodern Poet." "The Test of the World," for instance, has some stunning lines, but seems to me even a postmodern poem should make some sense. It seems the images of the poem should have some adherence. In the first stanza I think there's some mixing of electrical imagery. "The text of the world" is plugged and the speaker's throat is throwing off sparks, but the electrical witness swallows the spark. Well, maybe there is some sort of adherence. Everything is electric!

One of the exciting things about blogging is that writers such as Yamasaki can use it for personal publishing. Just as writers learned HTML or WYSISWYG website software to publish their own work, other writers are now using blogs to do the same. The difference is that using blogs is much easier than marking text with HTML.

The technology just keeps getting easier, and with that easy ease I think will come a further proliferation of self publishing, some of which will probably be quite good, even excellent, but a lot which will be vanity writing.

Yesterday got past me without due appreciation of the milestone that date represents: the anniversary of my quitting smoking. My last cigarette was snuffed out in mid-burn on April 5, 1988. I remember worrying that quitting would harm my writing process. It may not have improved the writing, but it certainly didn't undermine process!

Many years ago in the classroom, I used to ask my writing students to describe their writing habits (where, when, in what position, with what kind of ambiance, alone or in a crowd, last-minute or steady, etc). As inexperienced writers, of course, their habits were understandably undeveloped. But it was a good exercise in getting them to focus on process and how it contributes to one's thinking and feeling.

I remember smoking up to two packs of Camel non-filters a day at one point in my life, usually while seated at the typewriter or with a book. But I wasn't the Perry White kind of writer, with the fag perpetually clinched between my teeth while I pounded away at the keyboard. I typically would light a Camel, take a good drag, then place it on the edge of the ashtray . . . where it proceeded to burn itself out as I wandered through another line or simile. At most, I was a victim of my own second-hand smoke! Of course, the cost-pleasure ratio was entirely out of balance.

Anyway, I've overcome that particular writer's habit only to acquire others. For example, I write poetry most often when I have a deadline looming for some other kind of writing. Poetry is a kind of theft of the world's time. I often write poems on airplanes and commuter buses when the seated-with-your-seatbelt-on time is more than 90 minutes. William Carlos Williams used to do it between patient visits. Frank O'Hara on his lunch break. Richard Long at an all-night Hardee's.

I'm trying to imagine a computer a runner could use to write poems in the middle of a distance race. Couldn't be a lap top. Couldn't be a PDA. It would need to be a hands-free suspended-in-air kind of device. Maybe something with voice recognition. The runner could wear a headset, bluetoothed to an arm-strapped recorder. My TIMEX time-distance measurement is something like that: a GPS, strapped to my shorts, that wirelessly sends speed/distance data to my watch for constant viewing.

I'm thinking about this computer for runners because yesterday was the Spirit of St. Louis Marathon and Half Marathon. Throughout the half marathon race I was having these wonderful poems flash in my head. A great way to get up a hill or beyond a momentary pain is to think poems, some of which, at the moment, seem inspirational but soon fade, like most moments of clarity, once you crest the hill or move beyond the pain. But with the runner's computer--maybe just a voice recorder, though, while running, it's easier to grunt than speak--you could later, quite possibly, see or hear that all your thoughts were garbled anyway.