Lost Data

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Swink Site

Swink magazine has a site worth exploring for poetry and fiction with an on-line edition and print edition along with contests for publication. There are various links to check out and they all offer something interesting. Check it out at:

http://www.swinkmag.com/index.html

Thanks for dropping by, please stop by tomorrow for another featured poet…

Poetry Tips: Catch Phrase Poems

We all know catch-phrases and clichés so why not use them in poems much like Andy Warhol made use of pop culture in his art? You could do an Ode to Erkel with a repeating line of “Did I do that?” Perhaps old commercials like the one that said “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” You could even try to pile in all the catch-phrases and clichés that you know and see if you can line all of them up into a poem that makes sense once it is all put together. Good luck and have fun!

Thanks for checking in, please drop by again Monday…

Knockout Open Submissions and news regarding Reginal Shepherd

Knockout Literary Magazine Open Submissions

You may e-mail 4-6 previously unpublished poems to Brett at knockoutpoetry(AT)gmail(DOT)com via Microsoft Word attachment and be sure to check out the site for further details and there are sample poems you can check out to get a feel for their magazine’s style preferences. They even have a printer-friendly submission guidelines link, so check them out at:

http://www.knockoutlit.org/submit.htm

Good luck to all of those who submit…

http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2008/09/reginald-shepherd-1963-2008.html
My condolences and prayers go to Robert, and all of Reginald Shepherd’s friends and family. For those of you who are unaware, Mr. Shepherd passed away September 10th. I will be keeping Shepherd’s blog linked on the side so that anyone who drops in may have a chance to read this man’s wonderful thoughts and essays during his lifetime.

Thanks always for dropping in, please stop by tomorrow…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://arseniclobster.magere.com/170102.html
Talia Reed’s “Package Deal”

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v7n1/poetry/bowen_a/vendettas.htm
Ash Bowen’s “All My Vendettas I’ve Given Your Name”

Thanks for reading, please stop in tomorrow for more Open Submissions..

Interview with Simone Muench and her Chapbook Orange Girl

1. Thank you for letting me ask you some questions about your book, Orange Girl from Dancing Girl Press. What was the inspiration behind this collection?

The poet Kristy Odelius and I were trading 20-lines a day via email in a writing project (ala Harry Mathews). Once I became aware of the re-occurring elements and image patterns in my writings, they become the vertebrae for the collection. The motifs arose from my interest with Buffy, film noir, and a recollection of reading True Detective when I was kid with these disturbing images of women in bondage, as well as an ongoing dialogue in my head with the archetype of the dead girl.

As a culture, we are obsessed with images of dead girls but I think women experience the concept of “dead girl” less as a fascination object, and more as a subjective residue. In a world that still devalues women at birth, regrets us, or in worst cases even expects/wants us dead, we retain a connective ghost tissue of dead girls in our psyches. And not just in the figurative sense of being silenced, violated, and erased, but the real accounts of girlfriends, sisters, mothers who’ve been preyed upon in some way: beaten, raped, murdered. As my friend the poet Lauren Levato says, “I lived through that violence and I was the walking dead. And it sucked. And there will always be these girls in me - the girl who was raped, the girl who was abused 6 ways to Sunday before that, the girl who _____________”.


2. The title Orange Girl and every subsequent poem, refers to “orange” in some way. What does the orange represent in context of this collection?


I recently finished a manuscript that was originally called The 29th Bather, but is now titled Orange Crush, which pays tribute to the figure of the “orange girl”. The term “orange girl” historically refers to girls during England’s Restoration period who sold oranges at the theatre. Selling oranges was often a euphemism for prostitution. The orange girl, and the word “orange” (which, for me, connotes illumination), become a device, a type of familiar, in which to view the various binds that women find themselves in, even as the poems shift quickly from Elizabethan England “Which girl hath the merriest eye?” to the present, so that history is observed as a loop instead of a line.

Within the same manuscript is a sequence of prose poems, called “The Orange Girl Cast,” which are about actual contemporary women, all living poets, whose language is gathered and re-considered and finally re-configured into homages, language portraits if you will, of women who through language, through the act of unsilencing in their decision to be writers, are re-inventing the “orange girl” so that she becomes, as the final poem in the orange girl sequence suggests, "Like riddles and diseases we are a multiplying sigh. . . blazing through doors of sugarwater and fire”.

3. I loved the first stanza of poem #2 and it led me right through to the end with intense interest. May I post the entirety of poem #2 and could you explain what this poem is about?

Yes, of course. Einstein says, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” so for me, the explanation of the poem is the poem. I can’t paraphrase it, but I can tell you some of the materials that were spinning in my head at the time I wrote it: film noirs, specifically Double Indemnity; a painting of a tree by Gabert Farrar; Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep; Nick Cave’s song “Lime Tree Arbor.”

The poem is as follows:

2:
[The orange-girl is generally allowed to enter an auction-store, for auctioneers are mortal, and sometimes eat oranges]

I’m stone and pulp, like policemen’s wives.
you’re an emerald, buried in dark clothes.
your eyes leaf, bone.

your fingers so many songs

out of tune

I have fallen out of trees singing your name; I have
fallen into foliation

into your moth-mouth, plum-
thick tongue.

wherever you are, I’ll be white teeth,
an abandoned town, a wrapped parcel.

I’ll be a blonde in a black smock with sex
appeal, smelling of apiaries.

I’ll be a cold sea in an old war film.
I’ll be insubordinate

and seville sweet.

you’ll be long gone
though you said you’d never leave
“those poor crippled orange trees”


4. Is the entire collection a reflection of a particular group of women or are they separate lives? Sometimes I get the sense that this revolves around a group of women who sell themselves to make a living, other times I wonder if they are individual girls in their individual tragedies?

Both, and all of the above. See answers to 1, 2 and 6.


5. Poem #16 is tragic but you don’t know what happened, specifically. May I post this poem and could you tell me what happened to this woman or how this poem came about?

The poem is essentially an ekphrastic poem in response to a 1926 painting by Yves Tanguy that’s located in the Met. It is also an acknowledgment of the surrealist painter Kay Sage who married Tanguy and committed suicide after his death, as well as Virginia Woolf, thus the reference to the lighthouse. But, hopefully, the poem is more than just tragic. It is a salutation to creation, not waste; and the belief that even after death, we continue to transmit our stories.

The poem is as follows:

16:
[Till all the crimson changed, and past into deep orange o’er the sea]

The water owns her, wears her
like a blue ball gown embossed

with froth. Cypress swoon
from white light. Leaves fall

into goldfish. Beneath a boat,
a girl. Beneath the girl, a poppy

spilling into fire-tangles into
a balefire wheeling in the water.

In one version, she folds up

like a hand fan, her songs
pleated gills panting underwater.

In another, she fashions
the wires of her earrings

into antennae, transmitting
her story across the harbor,

her taffeta dress sliding
toward the lighthouse without her.


6 The perspectives of your poems change between “I”, “we,” “you,” and so on. How did you decide which poems had a sense of ownership from your perspective as opposed to an outsider’s?

In my latest manuscript I have several epigraphs: one is by Lisa Robertson, “Dear Reader—a lady speaking to humans from the motion of her own mind is always multiple;” the other is by Dara Weir, “(we hadn’t been cursed or blessed) (we’d been syncopated)”. For me the “I” is vertiginous, a constantly revolving pronoun, inhabiting the roles of confession, personae and community, sometimes functioning separately from one another, and sometimes simultaneously. In most of my work, although the “I” seems confessional, it is often times a persona; but the familiarity and intimacy the “I” helps to create is central to the material at hand. The “I” and “we” become umbrella pronouns that create a connective empathy. The alternation between first, second, and third person in the manuscript goes to both quotes’ sense of syncopation and identity as a multiple entity (which nods to Whitman as well). The quick-stepping between points of view also has to do with the previous response about the circularity of history.

7. Which poem are you particularly fond of and may I post it if it isn’t already mentioned?

Probably #11, which has been re-titled “Psalm”.

11:
[An orange a day keeps the doctor away]

Fever-damaged girls
light up in a row. Spells
and vixens and dead calico kittens.
The convent said fire. The fire
said kindness. Kindness
took a victim. Bone
bonnets for the little girls
sleeping, and blue
beds for their snapped
necks. A kiss is a bite
is a bit. Slit in the clouds
above a slit throat. A black
coat and a black glove
went missing.

*

One girl was fallen
in cold golden light. Girl
was killed by frost, a man’s
hand on her starched
white collar, undone and
saturated with woodburn
while snow descended
like laudanum.

*

Doctor, come quick, the little girls
are sick, their voices muffled
by smoke and wool,
hands and psalms.

Hurry, hurry, it’s the eclipse,
the girls aren’t breathing
and the chapel is breaking.

Doctor, come quick,
someone’s a heretic someone’s a witch.

8. How often do you write around a theme like you have with Orange Girl and where does the inspiration for the theme(s) come from?

Even though Orange Girl is definitely spun around a theme and historical figure, I don’t customarily think of my work as being theme-oriented; however, I do have obsessions: ambivalence, drowning, the uncanny, dead girls, estrangement, subterranean southern landscapes, crime scenes, the colors orange and blue, clothing as an articulation of self, violence and the silencing of women, the mouth as a window with its capacity for two types of language, both kiss and tell. These fixations resurface even when I’m not consciously attending to them.

9. Your collection is very tight and each poem can be more stunning than the last, which is difficult for a poet to do with any sized collection. Any advice for poets who want to round out or complete a collection based on an idea or theme without losing its intensity or integrity as they add more poems?

The only advice is to read people who do it well. . . Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “A Street in Bronzeville” and her sonnet series “Gay Chaps at the Bar”; Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters, Marilyn Krysl’s Soulskin, John Berryman’s “Op. posth.” series, John Yau’s “Russian Letter” series, Ed Roberson’s “Beauty’s Standing” sequence. . . Also, it doesn’t’ hurt to be passionate about the material at hand. It is the obsession that propels you forward and helps sustain the recursivity of a particular theme.

Thank you again for answering my questions Ms. Muench! Please let me and Poet Hound readers know where and when there are more collections available from you.

Courtesy of Ms. Muench:

Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005)
http://www.amazon.com/Lampblack-Ash-Poems-Simone-Muench/dp/193251127X
The Air Lost in Breathing (Helicon Nine, 2000)
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Air-Lost-in-Breathing/Simone Muench/e/9781884235306/?itm=1


Thanks to all the readers for dropping in, please visit the links included in the interview and please stop by tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…

Bulletin and Alternating Currents Blog

Bulletin:
If you are a small press devoted to poets and are looking for more readers/subscribers/submitters, please e-mail me at poethoundblogspot[AT]yahoo(DOT)com if you would like to be featured!

I am also looking for anyone who has current Open Submissions, as well as anyone who publishes poets and just wants to get their name spread out there a little farther. You can title your subject line “Monday Site Feature” or “Thursday Open Submissions.”

Now back to our regularly scheduled program:

Today’s site is a publishing blog called Alternating Current that features poetry, arts, indie, and more! You’ll see mentions of poets that have been interviewed here such as Justin Barrett and Chris Cunningham, along with many other delightful items. Check it out at:

http://alt-current.blogspot.com/

As always, thanks for clicking in, and please don’t be shy about recommending a site or Open Submissions, I’m always happy to receive tip-offs. Please stop by tomorrow for an interview with Simone Muench about her chapbook Orange Girl from Dancing Girl Press…

Poetry Tips: The Frequent Word

For those of you who write poems frequently you may have noticed that a particular word, or words, sneaks in to the majority of your poems. For me, it is the word “surely” and it is so frequent that I hardly notice it when I’m writing or typing up a new poem and when I go back to read it I become angry with myself and think “there it is again!” It also brings to mind the standard joke from the Naked Gun movies in which Leslie Nielsen replies “And don’t call me Shirley” to anyone who uses “surely” in a sentence. So for those of you in the same dilemma I propose that you write a poem which revolves around your frequent word choice. It can be a tribute to the word, a whine about the word, or you can make your word become a living, breathing entity. Have fun, and surely you have a more fascinating word to work with than I do.

Thanks for dropping in, please stop by on Monday for another featured site…

Up the Staircase Open Submissions

You have until September 25th deadline to three to five poems via e-mail to upthestaircaseATgmailDOTcom with “Poetry Submission” in the subject line, please explore the site to get a feel for the poems they publish and to learn more about their guidelines please click the link below:

http://www.upthestaircase.org/subguidess08.htm

Good luck to all who submit, please stop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://caffeinedestiny.com/poetry/FALL2008/ang.html
Arlene Ang’s poems “flashlight solo” and “The Model Particular”

http://www.upthestaircase.org/dawson.htm
Mercedes Dawson’s “Ink Stained”

Thanks for clicking in, please stop by tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

Poetry's September Issue

This issue has a wonderful gift for all poetry readers: A section devoted to Philip Larkin—not his poems—but his drawings. My absolute favorite is one he titled “Tea Time” that he had made for his mother. I am often jealous of poets who can paint, but I am also jealous of poets who can draw. Larkin is no exception. While some of the depictions are more like doodles, the one mentioned above is well done and full of detail, right down to the shadows of a toast on a toasting stick. I hope you get a chance to take a look at it because it is so endearing. You can sample one of his drawings at the following link:
http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0908/comment_182121.html

Interestingly, every single poem I “ear-marked” is available on the poetrymagazine.org. The first one, "Ten Moons" by Sasha Dugdale is a beautiful poem dedicated to night-time as opposed to garish day-time sun.

The second is "Rest Before You Sleep" by Dionisio D. Martinez which grabbed the attention of a non-poetry reader in my household. What strikes me about this poem besides the smoothness of the language and the romanticism of weary feet is the way the lines are broken up in each stanza yet they don’t deter from the rhythm of the poem. The spaces seem to take the place of regular punctuation. Instead of periods, commas or semi-colons you encounter the spaces which provide just the right amount of pause for each point. It may not be a new idea but it is done so well that it seems novel anyway. The poem itself is easy enough to understand, so I thought I would share my thoughts on its structure this time around.

Finally, the third poem I ear-marked is "Dressing Down, 1962" by Lesley Wheeler. Really, the attitude is what I enjoy most in the poem. Ms. Wheeler sounds tired and irritable on an international flight, perhaps with a head-ache, and it is endlessly entertaining as a result. The poem leaves you wondering why she left England to come to America, the clues few in all of three lines:“I would do what I said and leave/England. I would ride that El Al jet, mystery/novel in hand and never grieve.” Regardless of her reasons, her first impression of Americans is humorous and will hopefully leave you grinning as it did for me.

Thanks always for reading, please drop in tomorrow for more found poems…

C & R Press Site

This looks like a relatively young press looking to publish emerging poets. They have one published book so far, as I said, a young press, so check in to see when their next Open Submissions are and to learn more about the creators at:

http://www.crpress.org/

Thanks for clicking in, please stop by tomorrow for another featured poet…

Poetry Tips: Did You Get the Memo?

September doesn’t have much to look forward to, Labor Day is at the beginning of the month and therefore all you have left to think about is work related items since all the holidays also seem far away, even Halloween. So why not pay tribute to your office by creating a poetic memo? Format the poem to look like a standard memo and create a poem about any topic you want, so long as it looks like it was supposed to be received in everyone’s in-boxes or office e-mail. Have fun fighting the work-a-day doldrums!

Thanks for stopping by, please visit again Monday for another featured site…

Haiku Competition Open Submissions

Did you notice Don Wentworth’s call for Haiku Poems at…
http://lilliputreview.blogspot.com/?

I have copy and pasted from his blog about the contest here (There’s a prize!):

“So, here's the deal: for the next four weeks, send along up to 5 haiku to lilliput review at gmail dot com (spelled out to fend off pesky bots) and the best haiku wins the review copy of Basho: The Complete Haiku. Minimally, I will need your name and email to contact you with the results. In the subject line of your email, please put "Basho Haiku Challenge" so I can easily differentiate it from the scads of other things that come my way. The final date for submissions will be October 2nd and the winner will be announced in either the October 9th or October 16th posting. My definition of haiku is about as liberal as you can get: I follow no one particular method, school or theory and there is no seasonal requirement. Your haiku can be 1, 2, or 3 lines (over 5 would be a bit much, folks, but I will keep an open mind for experimenters). The one restriction would be that it be in the spirit of haiku (I've always liked the definition of English haiku as lasting the length of one breath, in and out and pause, but that's just me - and, oh yeah, I'm the judge, but, again, it's the spirit of the thing that counts) and that the haiku be previously unpublished in either paper or electronic form (ok, that's two requirements).If I get only one haiku, we have a winner, so, what the hell, give it a go. I reserve the right to publish the haiku on the blog (or not), with possible publication in Lilliput Review.And, oh, yeah, spread the word ...To entice you a bit further here's a little something about Basho: The Complete Haiku. Like it says in the title, it's complete, which is significant in itself as all previous translations are just selections (according to the press release, this is the first complete Basho translation in English). That's 1012 haiku by the master. There are 164 pages of notes, one for each poem, which variously treat a haiku's origin, allusions, variations, and grammatical anomalies, the later being quite important and virtually untranslatable. Reichhold has provided an introduction and a short biography, with appendices on "Haiku Techniques", "A Selected Chronology", "A Glossary of Literary Terms", and a bibliography. I've just begun it and it is formidable; I'll be looking at it in more depth in a future post, probably sometime after the contest is over.”

Good luck to all of you who submit, and thanks for dropping by, please stop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips….

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue10/main.html
“The Legend of Good John Henry” by Dorothea Lasky

http://sixthfinch.com/orgera2.html
“Following An Electric Arc Between Two Luminous Points” by Alexis Orgera

Thanks for clicking in, please drop by tomorrow for more Open Submissions…