NEW!!! Spring 2010 Issue 39.1

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We’re proud to announce the release of our Spring 2010 issue of Phoebe!

Special Feature in Translation:

Regis Bonvincino as translated by Odile Cisneros and Charles Bernstein

The Beowulf Poet in homophonic translation by Theodora Danylevich

Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Parveen Shakir as translated by Ranjani Murali

Angelica Tornero as translated by Krista Ingebretson

Pura Lopez Colome as translated by Forrest Gander

Ales Stegner as translated by Forrest Gander and Aljaz Kovac

Additional poetry by:

Steffi Drewes, Julie Lein, Karina Borowicz, Stephanie Ford, Keith Montesano, Kory M Shrum, Eric Burger, Sandra Marchetti, Grant Souders, Megan Gannon, Cate Whetzel, Michaela Essl, Dina Hardy

Fiction by:

Joe Meno, Claudia Putnam, Julia Pierpont

Cover art and poster insert by Alexis Mackenzie

Greg Grummer Contest Extended!

Dear Submitters,

We are excited to announce that our contest deadline for the Greg Grummer Poetry Award has been extended to January 15th, 2010! We are honored to have Rae Armantrout as our judge this year. Please see our contest page for details.

Warm regards,

The Editors

New Issue: Vol 38 no 2

phoebe-38-no-2.jpg Please see “Latest Issue” tab for more information

38:2 spinning through the printer

Our new issue is currently making its way through the printer’s facilities.  We’re excited and we’ll send word again once 38:2 comes home.  

2009 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest and Winter Fiction Contest Results

The results are in. Here are Phoebe’s 2009 Contest Winners and Finalists.

Greg Grummer Poetry Contest

Judge: Bin Ramke

Winner: Sarah Blackman - “That Bloody Hammer”

Honorable Mentions: Gina Abelkop - “Godpaper (1930),” Nancy Naomi Carlson - “After I Xeroxed the Sky”

Finalists: Chuck Carlisle - “The Most Kissed Face in the World, 3: Mechanics” & “Where We Are, Where We Are Not,” Haines Eason - “Reservoir,” Sandra Marchetti - “Le Parc des Suicides (The Park of Suicides),” Judith Pacht - “Falcon,” Jonathan Rice - “Matins: Leonids,” Katrin Talbot - “World without end”

Winter Fiction Contest

Judge: Benjamin Percy

Winner: Jim Wyatt - “Blunt Not the Heart”

Runner-Up: Tate Higgins - “Hanging Tree”

Finalists: Vanessa Garcia - “33,” Ross Garrison - “Deer in the Valley,” Burt Michaels - “A Modern Couple,” Michelle Nichols - “The Holiness”

*The editors would like to congratulate our winners and finalists and thanks to all the poets and writers who entered our winter contests. We are indebted to you for yuor support and we thank you for allowing us to consider work of such high caliber.

New Issue

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Please see the “Latest Issue” tab for more info.

A Note on Contest Submissions and Subscription Payments from Outside the United States:

Checks must be made payable to “Phoebe/George Mason University” in U.S. Dollars. Foreign checks are acceptable only if they are payable through a U.S. bank and are denominated in U.S. dollars.

Money orders are also acceptable, provided that they too are denominated in U.S. dollars.

(Our apologies to the Canadian who already sent us an uncashable check.  We are currently returning your cash money and submission.)

A Review of Maurya Simon’s Cartographies


by Mike Maggio

 

Maurya Simon’s resume reads like that of a literary superstar. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and the Pushcart Prize in 2004, she has held residencies, won awards and has been granted numerous fellowships both domestically and abroad. The author of eight volumes of poetry, she has been published in a host of anthologies and has written in such publications as The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Pegasus and The Georgia Review.

            So it is with much disappointment that her latest collection, Cartographies: Uncollected Poems 1980-2008 arrives as her latest contribution to belle letters. It’s not that the book lacks substance or that the poems contained within are lacking. In fact, overall, it is just the opposite: Simon’s commitment to formalism and her depth of insight are prevalent throughout. However, the book is uneven, with some extremely powerful poems juxtaposed against others which, despite their formal elements, are weak and sometimes uninteresting.

            “City of Angels” (p.78), for instance, a dark poem written in rhyming couplets, strikes of discordance with its sing-songy rhythms.

 

Night beyond our wooded deck is murderous.

Pandemonium erupts in static bursts:

 

The radio’s high voices pitch themselves in waves

Of terror through the nervous house, and we, adaze,

 

Can only shake our heads in disbelief, certain

That before evening’s curtain drops its tattered hem,

 

The city of angels will have fallen hellishly to ash

Each palm and signpost flaming like a giant, struck match.

 

Against the poem’s rhymes, both full and slanted, lies a discourse that meshes hope for the child who appears a little later in the poem and whose future is unpredictable and fraught with uncertainty. The subject matter of this poem seems very much out of place with its formal structure, its cadence and its unambiguous rhyming distracting from its bleak message.

            Perhaps this is the point. Perhaps Simon wants us to experience the innocence of childhood despite the doom and gloom of the real world. Yet the rhymes (waves/adaze, collapse/lapses,  comfortlessness/blessedness) and the meter distract from the poem rather than add to it. And these same elements are repeated throughout the book to the same end in such poems as “Second Born,” “Simon Says,” “On Our Twentieth Anniversary” and “Revival.”

            Contrast these poems to those such as “Waste Management” and “Trees” where formalism informs rather than distracts. Here is the first stanza from “The Woodpecker” (p.63):

            sounds like a donkey braying

                        or a madman laughing

            from the depths of his grave.

                        Hee-haw, hee-haw, he says.

 

Here, the slanted end rhymes are far from distracting and, in fact, stir interest in the reader. The lines are at once descriptive and imitative of the woodpecker’s incessant hammering, and the preponderance of the “h’s and the two trochees and one iamb in the last line of the stanza break away from the rhythm of the first three and add to this onomatopoeic quality.

            Likewise, in “Waste Management” (p.62), Simon uses language to imitate the effect of a lumbering bear rummaging through garbage for his next meal. Here, she makes use of long lines and words with sounds that weigh heavily on the tongue, such as “forage,” “fragrant” and “trudging,” to further her characterization. Quatrains balance the poem out, preventing the use of such rich language from encumbering the reader and, when Simon does employ end rhymes, they are almost unnoticeable.

            One wishes that the entire book was made up completely of such poems and that the other, less interesting ones could be done away with. This would have made for a more solid, more interesting collection. Perhaps the weaker poems were included to round out the four sections of the book” “The Soul,” The Self,” “The World : Mountains,” and “The World : City,” though that would hardly be valid justification. The book could have been a lot stronger had they been eliminated. Overall, however, Cartographies is worth reading and leaves one hopeful that the next collection will fully exhibit Simon’s mastery of her craft.

AWP / Spring 2009 Issue of Phoebe

The Spring 2009 Issue of Phoebe is in our hands and by golly does it look good.  Chicago-based media artist, Paul Catanese, has created a phenomenal cover and art spread.  Fiction contributors include Dylan Lee, Jenn Scott, Craig Curtis, and Edward Hagelstein.  On the poetry end we have Rusty Morrison, Matthew Hittinger, Paul Fattaruso, Cathy Eisenhower, as well as a special feature of collaborative poetry.   

 Our table at AWP is Northwest 387.  We hope you will stop by, say hello, and have a look at the issue.

 Don’t forget your mittens.  Chicago is cold.  

 See you soon, 

Phoebe 

A Thing to Worry Our Way Through: Review of Rusty Morrison’s the true keeps calm biding its story

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Robb St. Lawrence

In 1845, a writer for Littell’s Living Age wrote that an American looking onto the development of telegraph communication lines across the United States “will regard this new and mighty agency in interchanging thoughts, sentiments and feelings, as one of the indissoluble links of firm and enduring union, and of making us all feel that we are still one nation—with one language—one capitol—and more than all, with one heart.”  If we ignore the colonialist undertone, it’s a pretty notion: that to share information—and, importantly, to share a language—could lead to the sharing of a heart.  It’s a utopian idea, but borne from what we know a shared means of communication can/must do: make community, bring us closer together.

In Rusty Morrison’s the true keeps calm biding its story, a sense of community, or even of communication between the poet and the reader, might easily be the last thing on a reader’s mind.  Morrison’s collection dramatically foregrounds form—each poem consists of three stanzas of three unpunctuated lines, each line is right-justified, and each line ends with the word ‘stop’, ‘please’, or ‘advise.’  Each poem ends with ‘please advise’ and is titled “please advise stop.”  The lines accumulate their sense through parataxis for the most part, standing more or less apart from the others in a given poem by the way that the end words (‘stop’ or ‘please’) function as a sort of vanishing point, the place at which sense dissolves into speech, surface.  All we are left with at the end of the line resides in the speaker’s voice; the image or contemplation that comprised the line until that point is refined into that more fundamental pleading: stop.  please.   The speaker reaches out to the reader, and the reader completes the circuit of the plea by giving both an ear and a voice to these pleas, extending the gesture of crisis embodied in the poem even further, toward some further place, some further listener.  Or, that is, toward some audience—the highly repetitive and ritualized nature of these formal tropes (including the numerological symmetry throughout the book: 3 stanzas of 3 lines, 9 sections of 6 poems of 9 lines each) is reminiscent of prayer: as the speaker hopefully claims, “my repetitive gesture will eventually wear through its surrounding world please” (8).  A hope here, that repetition that might clear off the trappings of material existence, lead us beyond this world and to some other place.  Or maybe, as Robert Fink has written, in a study of Minimalist music, “We repeated ourselves into this culture.  We might be able to repeat ourselves out.”

This sense that the material world might just be temporary, a thing to worry our way through, is fitting, as the poems that make up this collection are elegiac in nature, for the most part seeming to respond more or less directly to either the death of the speaker’s father or (more often) the state of the speaker in some indeterminate span of time surrounding that loss.  For instance, in the first poem of section five:

I might travel his death a creaking and swaying beneath me stop

there are static expressions freed now and passing along the walls stop

an object isn’t what is hidden but what smiles out from the hiding please

(35)

“His death,” as the first line here has it, comes to encompass the whole of the book’s referential reach.  Even though section five of the book is the space most marked by the presence the speaker’s father’s death (followed by section seven), its positioning, so plainly at the center of the collection, means that even when we come across a passage far later in the book, and even if that passage has little obvious connection to the death of the speaker’s father, we are pressed toward the memory of what has come before.  Here is the first poem of section eight, quoted in full:

sullenly disposed to needing the sound of a second no stop

rootless in jars geranium-cuttings already telling time stop

spidery cracks in the wall’s plaster the breath of coarse masonry beneath stop

 

with each invasion of new furniture the same parade music please

patches of original carpet-color shine like exposed modesty stop

an impatience stiff and aromatic as sticks of cinnamon stop

 

crows on the lawn their shine so black it staunches modification please

some skies must remain unrecognizable to be kept stop

in the dark my flashlight is eager to toss its tight-fisted gleam please advise

(59)

Given the almost irresistible (despite the alternative mapping we have been given by the poet) pull of conventional narrative, it’s hard not to read this as a meditation on the clearing and re-staging of a deceased loved one’s house, though there is little in the poem itself to supply the suggestion that this house has anything to do with the speaker’s father.  One of the effects of the paratactic evolution in these poems is to scour out an ellipsis between lines, to supply a blank space into which the speaker invites the reader’s participation in creating the poem’s sense.  This is one of the ways in which the poetry in the true keeps calm biding its story functions as an invitation toward community: the reader’s mind and voice complete the circuits of the poems.  Whatever sense comes from these telegraphic packets of data, it is a sense that the reader has made in communion with the text itself and the poet, the assembler of these forms.  And since there are few umbrella-sized touchstones in the book aside from the death of the speaker’s father, that particular umbrella tends to cover what cannot otherwise be assimilated. 

So, on some level, the success of the book rests on the extent to which the reader is willing to lie across the synapse and complete the circuit of meaning themselves.  On another level, the success of the book depends upon the reader’s tolerance for repetition.  Some readers would, quite understandably, find the formal trope of this book either annoying or superfluous (perhaps the one because of the other)—a reason for that could be the self-reflexive tendency in some poems:

fill a page with words never letting a single phrase form stop

not for avoiding but for allowing what refuses to be remembered stop

displace all practiced confessions with a small shudder stop

(63)

Moments like these can lead a reader to question the purpose of a formal experiment—if the poem is about the process of writing the poem, what has the purpose of this formal innovation been, and what change has this brought about in me?, a reader might ask.  But to take that view of the poetry in this collection would be to ignore such compelling meditation, such purposeful constellations.  It would be to ignore the places where the poem makes the kind of invitation to be a part of its meaning that mark this book as truly interested in its readers, when it could have—given the locus of concerns it addresses at times—turned its back to them entirely.

Here is a poem from section six in full:

the driver wasn’t guilt-wracked but a pedestrian who saw the accident lost her sense of smell stop

according to the gondolier each wave strikes the hull in a different language stop

I find a new direction because every planet stays locked in its orbit stop

 

no way to tell the weeds that are flesh-colored from the flesh that is weed-colored please

listening is a composite of glossing novelty and following my fears around in the dark stop

emptied of questions and filled instead with the night-sky’s hooded throng stop

 

the road to the asylum forks each time I genuflect please

the entire morning gone callow with a rationale stop

now even the least leaf rustling must be theatricalized please advise

(43).

This is neither the ritualized and clichéd language of mourning nor the skittering horizontal parataxis of much of the (prose) writing that has been referred to by the label “the new sentence,” but something far more approachable.  A constellation that brings together the acute physical response of a pedestrian who witnessed an accident with a speaker’s inability to differentiate between color and texture, bodies and weeds, that pulls into the same orbit a speaker who finds new direction in—and is filled by—the swarm of celestial bodies in the night sky and a gondolier’s suggestive platitude about the many languages of the canal’s waters; the poem invites the reader to participate in the processing, in the making sense of, these fragments—yes—but it also invites the reader to gawk and marvel at the craft and emotional precision of each of its constituent parts.  The emotional space carved out by the line, “emptied of questions and filled instead with the night-sky’s hooded throng stop,” is both exact—that is, specific to this speaker—and open and available to the reader.  There is no retreat to private language, and that seems to be the point.  We’re reading an open communiqué, a missive sent off to us and folded into the codex.