Our Fall 08 Issue just got in earlier today. It looks very nice. I have been getting contributors’ copies in the mail for my fiction authors. Wade and Danika will send out the poetry copies soon. And then we’ll do a mass mailing shortly for all of our subscribers, exchanges, and contest entrants. The issue looks really good.Fall 08
Just a reminder to all authors who’d like to send us their work. Our reading period has closed for the summer. We will again begin accepting for consideration new submissions September 1st. To those authors who sent us work before the cutoff, we’ll be evaluating your work this summer.
We’ve also sent out the first draft of the Fall 08 issue to the printer and will hopefully get bluelines back this week for one last proof. We hope to have the journal printed soon.
We can now announce our Winter Fiction Contest Results - sorry about the wait; we’ve been sending out results in the mail for the past few days, and since those are done, here’s the online news.
Peter Orner selected “The Tourist Trail” by John Yunker as this year’s contest winner. Yunker will receive $1,000 dollars and his story will be published in our Fall 08 issue.
Out of one hundred an sixty entries, we selected seven additional finalists. They are as follows:
Daniel Coshnear - “The Hero Of My Unfinished Novel”
Clifford Garstang - “The Face In The Window”
Edward Hagelstein - “Pistol On Porcelain”
Leslie Maslow - “The Promenade”
Yelizaveta P. Renfro - “The Memory Of Water”
John Young - “Monopole”
Jen Silverman - “Waking Up To Trains”
We’d like to thank everyone who entered our contest. We are indebted to you for your support, and we thank you for allowing us to read your work. Be on the lookout for the Fall 08 issue arriving in your mailbox.
Congratulations to our winner and our finalists.
The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy, by Richard Froude
Letters Toward Jim, by Mathew Langley
Catfish Press, 2007
Review by
Catfish Press, edited by Jim Goar (who is also editor of the online journal past simple), released a pair of chapbooks in summer of 2007. And before I get into individual reviews, I would like to comment very briefly on the quality of the chapbooks as objects themselves. A look around at small presses would indicate that there seem to be an abundance of folks publishing incredible looking letterpress or silkscreen/digital print chapbooks right now. These two from Catfish appear to be of the digital printing variety, and are printed on what feels in the hand like résumé paper. The stapling looks as though it was done manually, which introduces to the book a quality of intimacy due to the hand-assembly. I only bring these things up because they seem pertinent to the projects of the poetry that the books contain: The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy, by Richard Froude, which contains some of the funniest and most affecting engagement with the trappings of empire I’ve read in a recent book, and Letters Toward Jim, by Matthew Langley, which has embedded in its formal conceit (a series of letters written by a speaker to ‘Jim’) a presumption of intimacy. Each of these projects seem somehow intensified by the book’s format, its insinuation of a small press, a limited distribution, a community of artists working collaboratively (the two books share a common cover artist, Stacy Elaine Dacheux). As though something would be off if the cover were done in some slick letterpress design, on a softer paper. So for this, and what appears to be a clear-eyed editorial sensibility, Catfish Press deserves some praise. But to the poetry…
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Richard Froude’s The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy consists of four sequences, each of which with a distinct cast of characters. The first sequence, “Practical Math (Exam Conditions),” approximates the discursive gestures of the mathematics word problem. I’ll quote the first poem of the sequence, “Question One” in its entirety, as it gives a sense of the moves that the chapbook as a whole is interested in making:
A train leaves
Another leaves St Ives at one. Henry 8th sits at the window.
Both are travelling at 65 miles per hour. Both are only half full.
If all these things remain constant, how many wives did he have?
Six. And he engineered the break with Catholicism.
No, I’m thinking of a different train. I’m thinking of Steve.
Sorry no. The engineer is called Steve.
The train was once, twice, three times a lady.
Her names were Beatrice, Margaret and Jane. Margaret was the feisty one.
Ended up becoming Prime Minister and turning the others to stone.
Or was it gold? No. That’s something else entirely.
There are turns in here that make me smile, and most of the surprise and interest in the poem comes from the displacement of mythologized authorities into an absurdist theater—Henry 8th in a word problem, in a train named Margaret, and Margaret Thatcher as a train that turned other ladies/trains to stone—from the recombinatory possibilities afforded to any group of characters. The rest of the excitement comes from an attention to language’s surface slippages from one reading into another—Henry engineering a break with Catholicism becoming Henry as not the engineer on this train, or, in the poem that follows, “What is her average speed? / 88” moves from what at first reads as a commentary on Thatcher’s age (she has just fallen asleep on stage) into a series of lines that refer back to Back to the Future and Back to the Future 3: “88. We don’t have enough road to get to 88. / But we’re traveling on rails.”
Froude’s management of repeating themes, fugue-like in their harmonization, is powerful and suggestive. He extracts the certainties of voice from the declaratives he deploys and ultimately turns that certainty against itself. Placing Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight them on the beaches” in the mouth of a parrot, and eventually turning Churchill himself into that parrot, the middle sequence of the collection, “Birds” (its poems with titles like “Phase Two: Mobilization”) deploys this recombinatory absurdism to obliquely address the current US-British war in
***
Although a very different collection of poems, the other chapbook from Catfish Press, Letters Toward Jim, by Matthew Langley, conjures Spicer as well, and his missives to an absent ‘Jim’. But for that surface similarity, there is a sensibility to these poems that brings writers from the other coast of the
The poems bear the singe marks of juxtaposed moments from a subject’s experience: “Eat a potato damned American. / When I go to the beach I touch / the sand.” Predominantly, the letters render scene (though not predominantly through description), and seem in fact to insist on the significance of insular moments of realization, flashes of sense that trace a path through some terrain. Even those letters that don’t foreground the sense of a speaker in some place play on this quality of epiphanic resolution. The following, for instance, quoted in its entirety:
Dear Jim,
Evel Knievel’s still big on eBay
but ready to die.
“I can’t wait
to meet God, ask Him
why He didn’t make me
faster, why all this pain.
He knows I’m not evil.”
He was a big eater.
To whatever extent the poem might make a gesture toward deflating itself in its final line, that line’s straight-forward declarative-ness, its conversation with the quote from Knievel, and its closure of the initial frame to the poem do give it a sense of resolution, of coming upon some new knowledge, however ambiguous and drenched in the pathos of “ask Him / why He didn’t make me / faster” that knowledge might be.
And pathos seems an apt quality to focus on in this collection, whose letters (if it could be said that they share some thematic thread) reflect a speaker yearning to connect with a familiar world left behind. The quiet, quotidian occasions of most of these poems are those same occasions that might trigger a conversation between two people watching the same eBay ad, as in the poem above. But for this speaker, the other side of the conversation is absent—the poems are tendrils that reach out for that conversation: “Did you know that mazeppa / was a Hungarian warlord? / I bet / you didn’t.”
The collection closes on an acknowledgment of the impossibility of sharing these moments, with a poem I will quote here in whole (the poems are short):
Dear Jim,
Everything has gotten bigger
since yesterday. Near the park,
the tomb sits behind a flock
of cormorants; slow barges extend
the circle without blemish.
I will never make it to your house.
Langley is a craftsman of small poems with strong resolutions, and this one seems to hold within it much of the collection’s sentiment—not only will the speaker never make it in person to “Jim”’s house, but whatever intimacy these letters might want to hold through their embrace of such small moments cannot transfer. The transaction fails for the same reason that postcards can’t actually render one’s trip to some foreign place—the medium is a vehicle for detail, and can’t take in the whole. And one gets the sense that these postcard-sized letters, however much they might be marked by both pathos and humor, are embracing precisely that lack.
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Robb St. Lawrence lives in Arlington, VA. He is in the MFA program at George Mason University and his poetry has appeared recently, or is forthcoming, in CutBank and Third Coast.
Phoebe is happy to announce our two nominations for the 2008 issue of best new poets:
Liberty Heise, for “The Dingo Falters”
&
Jess Rown, for her untitled visual poem
Both poems appeared in our Spring 2008 issue (37:1).
Congratulations and best of luck to both poets!
We’ve been working since this past winter to combine the Phoebe website and blog into one entity, presented to you here. Both of those sites will now redirect you to this one. We hope you like it. All of the previous posts (including reviews) have been archived, and the site in general should be much easier to navigate. We are still in the process of tweaking a few things (i.e. poetry reviews don’t link yet to their tab), but promise more updates over the coming weeks. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback, and thanks again for all your support.
The Phoebe Staff
Thank you to everyone who supported Phoebe by entering our 2008 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest.
I’m very happy to announce that our judge, Peter Gizzi, has selected “Satire on La Playa a Las Muertas”, by Nora Almeida, as the winner of the $1,000 prize + publication. Nora’s poem will be published in our Fall 2008 issue.
In addition, the following poems were selected as finalists, and will be considered for possible publication. We received quite a few strong submissions and were able to send a very diverse group of poems on to the judge:
Mary Austin Speaker - “The Leftovers”
Arpine Konyalian Grenier - “The Heart of the City”
Stephanie Anderson - “This Cleaving and This Burning” & “An Arrangement of Vertebrae”
Angela Szczepaniak - “Pancreas Puddings”
Jonathan Rice - “Inheritance”
Shira Dentz - “and now for contemplation”
Kimberly Lojek - “Vertical [With Russian Blue Gloves and Cigarette Burning]”, “[Women Bathing]”, & “[Conditional Winter]”
Fiction winners + finalists should be posted soon…
I’ve just added two new reviews to the blog, by Joe Hall and Mike Maggio, respectively, with a couple more to follow (including titles from Catfish Press and Black Ocean) in the coming weeks. Past reviews can be viewed by clicking on the “Phoebe Poetry Reviews” link in the left sidebar. Publishing reviews here has been a bit slower than we expected, in part because review copies have only begun to trickle in again. If you’d like us to consider a book for review, please send it to:
Phoebe, MSN 2C5
ATTN: POETRY EDITOR
George Mason University
4400 University Dr
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
As things pick up, we hope to publish 3-5 per month. I’ve left the comments section open for all reviews, so feel free to add your thoughts and feedback, but please, keep it respectful.
And lastly, I’m still working out formatting issues with the blog, especially in regards to spacing within the reviews. We hope to switch to WordPress sometime soon, which will hopefully alleviate some of this, as well as allow for a combined Phoebe website & blog. Stay tuned…
Zone 3 Press, 2007
Paperback. 74 pgs.
Review by Joe Hall
Finding love amidst the grief caused by a father’s death, the poems in Kozma’s first book are shaped by these most elemental, turbulent emotions. Some of his best poems place us within a landscape scored beyond recognition by this grief. It isn’t surreal, just as Dante isn’t surreal. From “Dis”:
…The distance holds Dis, the city of regret. The way back
is blocked by frogs with human eyes in their mouths,
but there’s no danger if you don’t stare.
Some figure beckons—but it is only a shadow
shorn by the dimming sun. The sun is fed
more bodies and wells into brightness… (1)
There’s virtuosity here, an intensity pushing us forward, making us willing to accept the wonderfully bizarre imagery. At moments in “Dis” the speaker’s fidelity to this landscape is absolute, and what seems at first bizarre, we realize, has a purposeful place in the terrible logic of grief. It isn’t a trick of seeing—it is.
At other times, Kozma emerges from this place where meaning is made through the strange, ornate image and into a forceful clarity of image and statement. From “Too Steep to Climb”:
The crematorium is just one thin spoke
of ritual holding us at bay, and what a kind
dictator to present death only as a shroud.
Forgive me, father, for I have missed
your skin, your eyes, I have been blind…
The poem pushes forward past this moment, yet the effect of such candor is remarkable in light of the vertiginous landscape it emerges from. In the crematorium ash, Kozma mingles personal and communal grief and in doing so recognizes that his grief has obscured rather than revealed the grieved for. Content and form converge to raise us out of the turbulence of other poem. Kozma seems at home in the quatrain. His occasional rhymes, though not abiding by any formal pattern, give his stanzas a sense of balance.
Many of Kozma’s poems are less assured in their strategies, especially those which seek to overlay fantastic ways of seeing onto day to day landscapes—a bar, a coffee shop, over the sink brushing our teeth—as if to mimic how grief can overtake us anywhere: “Cold bleeds into my trailer, creeping / past the sun. I’ve patched the walls with rust” (“Blood Perimeter”). This seems, oh, a bit too Gothic. Another example:
. . . From the hilltop
our hotel was a bone in a nest of bones and our balcony,
where we imagined ourselves watching, was a splinter
of red. (from “Acropolis”)
But what do I mean when I say something is too Gothic? Is this just an easy way to dismiss a way of image making? Caveat: I’m not a great reader of the Gothic, but let’s take, for instance, Poe. He was interested in representing the subjectivity of an unhinged individual, characters whose minds were divided against themselves. What signifies these self-subversions is often the gruesome, the visceral—hearts under floorboards and folks bricked up in crypts.
Given time, these images became signifiers for a gothic way of thinking, yet when removed from their contexts, meat and bones do not contain the complexity of the work of Poe or Coleridge (a la “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner). Instead, the gothic image becomes a way for the writer to stitch a landscape with pain, obscuring both the landscape and the pain, leaving the reader to grapple with the nakedness of this gesture.
One must build their own semiotic framework to encourage a reader to read complexly; Kozma occasionally fails to do this. Without being situated in frames strong enough to resist them, his stock of images can become somewhat exhausted on the conotational level. And there aren’t enough poems such as “Dis” which provide the vision of a larger structuring logic which has space enough to provide fixtures in which we can plug in the images and gestures of other poems.
So there are some duds.
I’m not being generous. Kozma’s poems are well made. He is sensitive to a harrowing kind of beauty. From “Through Ice”:
. . . Outside, in the rain, on a corner, is a love,
my love, waiting for a cab to enclose her,
or someone very like a cab. And the street is like slate,
and the rain is like bullets, and the sun in the blue sky,
is like transformation explaining photographs
of what it was . . .
Kozma’s speaker lives feeling the alternating concussions of grief and love. And though his images cannot contain the insistent tremor of these feelings, there’s a kind of eloquence in the dissatisfaction revealed by his movement from one to another.
***
Joe Hall is finishing his MFA in poetry at George Mason University where he is a Thesis Fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Versal and others.
