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Winter, 2005 (Issue No. 5)
Table of Contents, Issue 5
Fiction
Sybil Kollar
Open SightSue Mellins
My Son Gives Me Jewels
Lance Olsen
Excerpt from 10:01
Poetry
Deborah Poe
L'AmantAlan Brilliant
Crossing the Frontier
Common TravelersSusan Donnelly
The Weapons InspectorPaul Murphy
Painting in a Sushi BarCatherine Daly
Bird ChasingTodd Swift
What Nostalgia Does to HistoryTad Richards
You're at the TrackmIEKAL aND
Suspended AnimationRoy Frisvold
Bend
GroundfruitRochelle Ratner
Black Holes (in memoriam: Ron Sukenick)Hugh Steinberg
SingingWilliam Sylvester
After Tibullus I-x-53Tim Martin
Double FantasySybil Kollar
Sway
Here
Andrew Lundwall
WaitingBurt Kimmelman
Back in BrooklynJames Cervantes
Degrees of Gray in Any BurgSkip Fox
It's really oddSheila E. Murphy
I Get in Bed with Language
from Omnia, #10César Vallejo
4 poems (translated by Rebecca Seiferle)
Contributors' Notes
mIEKAL aND is a longtime DIY cultural anarchist & the creator of an infoplex worth of visual-verbal lit, audio-art, performance ritual & hypermedia for the Macintosh, all distributed by Xexoxial Editions. His hypermedia works reside at JOGLARS Crossmedia Broadcast. Recent work has focused on activating online collaborative workspaces where writers & media artists can create collective digital works in a real time environment. Recent books include Literature Nation with Maria Damon, published by Potes and Poets Press and advancienced snakespeared published by extant. With Camille Bacos, he has producted 2 visual-poetry digital films, ...entré pyrobiblios... and The Samsara Laundry which has been shown at festivals at Harvard & Notre Dame. Since 1991, he has made his home at Dreamtime Village, a hypermedia / permaculture village project, located in the driftless bioregion of southwestern Wisconsin. And devotes much time to creating edible wilderness indoors & out, growing such things as figs, citrus, cherries, grapes & chestnuts. 1998 marked the creation of THE DRIFTLESS GROTTO OF WEST LIMA, a permanent public grotto/park/installation which when finished will feature a bird-operated time machine in a 25 ft blue glass tower.
Alan Brilliant is the founder and director of Unicorn Press (1965-- ). His essay "Robert Smithson's First One-Man Show, at the Alan Brilliant Gallery, 1265 Park Avenue, Dec. 1-31, 1957" will appear next fall in The Chicago Review.
James Cervantes edits The Salt River Review and has had poems recently in The Spoon River Poetry Review, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, The Laurel Review, Gargoyle, and other magazines.
Catherine Daly is the author of DaDaDa (Salt Publishing, 2003) and Locket (Tupelo Press, forthcoming). She lives in Los Angeles (where she does not practice t'ai chi) with her husband, playwright Ron Burch, and their bird, Po/e.
Susan Donnelly's latest published poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Bellevue Literary Review and Potomac Review, and work is forthcoming in Iron Horse Review and in New Millennium Writings. She is the author of Transit (Iris Press) and the Morse Prize winner, Eve Names the Animals (Northeastern), as well as of three chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. It can also be found online at Poetry Daily and other websites. Having founded a 24-year-old workshop of writing colleagues called Every Other Thursday, she teaches classes and provides individual consultations from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Skip Fox worked in the woods of the Olympic Peninsula, the warehouses of San Francisco, and the mental institutions of Ohio before taking his current teaching job in Louisiana, where he lives on three acres with a log cabin and a pond in one of the poorest parishes in the state. He dates his birth from his first reading of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. He (as Willard Fox) has published a secondary bibliography: Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan: A Reference Guide (G. K. Hall, 1989), which was the culmination of six years' work. He has also published poems in Talisman, Hambone, Pavement Saw, and Prosodia, among other publications, and has forthcoming work in Ambit, Blackbox, Dirty Swamp, Fuck, and Gestalten, among others. He has also published four chapbooks (from Bloody Twin, Oasis, and Auguste) and one book (from Potes & Poets).
Roy Frisvold lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has produced four small chapbooks of poetry: Squirms in Radiance, Wyvern, Video Creek Road and Eroded Home. He is currently working on a study of surrealism and consumerism.
Burt Kimmelman has published four collections of poetry: Musaics (1992), First Life (2000), The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, and Somehow (2005). For over a decade, he was Senior Editor of Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is an associate professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The Winter Mind: William Bronk and American Letters (1998) and The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (1996, paperback 1999). He is also the editor of The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (2005).
Sybil Kollar's work has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies including The American Voice, Chelsea, Columbia, The Literary Review, Other Voices, and Rattapallax. Her poems have been appeared in anthologies including A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, Story Line Press and Party Train: American Prose Poems, New Rivers Press. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and has written text for a song-cycle for mezzo-soprano and flute composed by Donna Kelly Eastman that was included in the Society of Composers, Inc. CD Series. She won the first Chris O'Malley Fiction Award from the University of Wisconsin and the CCS Fiction Prize, New York City. She's been a recipient of writing residencies in Germany and Scotland, and a collection of her verse Water Speaking to Stone was published by Pivot Press, 2004.
Andrew Lundwall, originally from southern Wisconsin, now resides in the Washington, D.C., metro region. With Jeannie Smith he is the co-founder and managing editor of the electronic literary journal Poetic Inhalation. His poetry has appeared in numerous electronic and print journals including Lost and Found Times, Moria, Near South, Big Bridge, and Miami Sun Post's Mad Love. Recently he edited an e-anthology for the February 2005 edition of Big Bridge entitled "Export: Writing the Midwest."
Tim Martin is from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He has a BA in Writing and Literature from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University. His plays Of One's Self I Sing, Once Upon A River, and Tales From Turtle Island have been performed at the Hedgerow Theatre. His serial poem Ricochet has been recorded twice and recently turned into a performance piece. Martin is the founder of King of Mice Press and the author of several chapbooks, most recently Nothing At All. His work has appeared in Poetry Sz, In Words, Scars, Autumn Leaves, Orange/Blowmoney2, [Melancholy Breakfast], and other small magazines. He currently works with the Curio Theatre Company, and is a member of the Philadelphia-area arts collective The BMC.
Sue Mellins's fiction has appeared in Confrontation, Seventeen, and elsewhere. She lives in New Yorlk City, and is now working on a collection of stories set all over the world.
Paul Murphy was born in Belfast in 1965. He studied at the University of Warwick, gaining a BA in Film and Literature. From there he went to Queen's University Belfast to study for an MA on T. S. Eliot and the French philosopher Jacques Lacan. He has just finished a stint as writer-in-residence at the Albert-Ludwig Universitat, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany. His poetry, literary criticism, book reviews and travel writings have been published in English, Irish and American journals. He has published a pamphlet and one previous book of poetry, and has read from his work in Paris, Cambridge, Galway and Belfast. He is currently writing an oral history of the Black Forest, and working on many reviews of contemporary authors. He also writes philosophy and enjoys working on the interface between poetry and philosophy.
Sheila E. Murphy's most recent publications include Proof of Silhouettes (Stride, UK, 2004) and Concentricity (Pleasure Boat Studio, NYC, 2004). Her writing, visual poetry, and visual work appear widely. Murphy has made Phoenix, Arizona, her home for many years.
Lance Olsen is author of fifteen books of and about innovative fiction, as well as many short stories, essays, and reviews. The excerpts in this issue are from his novel 10:01, a print version which will be published in March by Chiasmus Press. A complementary hypermedia version will appear shortly thereafter. His website, which contains many resources concerning alternative fiction, is www.cafezeitgeist.com.
Deborah Poe was born in Del Rio, Texas, in 1969. She is now living in upstate New York, but considers the Pacific Northwest her home. Her writing has appeared in Solo Magazine, Jeopardy, Poetry Midwest, Snow Monkey and Poetry Bay. Her chapbooks ,,clitoris,, ,,vulva,, ,,penis,, and (W(e)a(St) Solo were published in April and October 2004 by furniture press.
Rochelle Ratner has two new poetry collections on the web: Leah (a book of postcard poems) from www.xPressed.org and Newsreal: 2003 from Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry. Her latest print book is House and Home, published in 2003 by Marsh Hawk Press.
Tad Richards' most recent book was Situations, a novel in verse, published by Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press in Connecticut. He is president and artistic director of Opus 40 in Saugerties, NY. He is currently at work on a comic novel about the McCarthy era. More information, as well as his gallery of portraits of contemporary poets, can be found at www.opus40.org/tadrichards.
Todd Swift is the author or an editor of eight books of poetry. From 1998-2001 he was Visiting Lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, specializing in courses on poetry and film. In late 2001 he moved to Paris where he lived and wrote for two years. He has been poetry editor of online magazine nthposition since 2002. He has reviewed for Books in Canada, Poetry London, and The Dubliner, among others. In 2004 he was Oxfam's Poet-In-Residence (UK), raising funds for the Sudan Crisis Relief fund. His latest collections are Rue du Regard (2004) and a limited edition pamphlet from Lapwing, Belfast, The Oil and Gas University (2004). He lives in London's West End with his wife.
Rebecca Seiferle has previously translated Vallejo's Trilce (Sheep Meadow, 1992), which was a finalist for the PenWest Translation Award and his The Black Heralds (Copper Canyon 2003) which was a Lannan Literary Selection. She is a poet whose third collection, Bitters (Copper Canyon 2001) won the Western States Book Award and a Pushcart Prize. She was awarded a 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship and is poet-in-residence at Brandeis University.
Hugh Steinberg holds an MFA from the University of Arizona, and, in 1999, completed a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. His poems have appeared in or will appear in such journals as Spiral Bridge, Slope, Blackbird, Boston Review and Fence. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and teaches writing at California College of the Arts. He also edits Freehand, a journal devoted to handwritten work.
William Sylvester 's bio takes the form of a Q&A: What are my important experiences? My first sense of religion? The first time I made love to a woman I also liked? Who cares? What have I gone through that has a public significance? When I was 11 years old in 1929, the crash told me that the world of grown-ups was full of fear, anger and hatred. Contrary to what I read in history books, the depression didn't "bring people together." It poisoned feelings. During World War II, I navigated supply planes in the Navy. One day, we took off from Newfoundland and got to maybe a thousand feet, and all four engines began to sputter. We eased our way back and landed safely. The pilot was even younger than I was, and had given the order to take off, even though the magnetos hadn't given a proper reading. That experience taught me that we didn't have anything to fear from the enemy--our own incom- petence could do us in. Incompetence has now moved to the public arena with political impartiality. I write comic poetry, or poems with a comic veneer, hoping that the readers or listeners will laugh with me, driven by a similar indignation. "Cheer up, things are worse than they seem" was my motto for a while, until I found a stack of artistic posters with that motto. I bought one, gave it to the administrative assistant, who put it on her door. It became our motto. "Cheer up, things are worse than they seem." Nice poster, until somebody stole it.
César Vallejo, considered to be one of the great Spanish poets of the 20th century, was born in 1892 in Santiago de Chuco, Peru. He was the youngest of a family of eleven children and was of mixed descent; both of his grandfathers were Spanish priests, both of his grand- mothers were native women. He studied theology, law, literature and science at the university, but his education was often broken by periods of having to return home, working as a private tutor, working as a clerk in a mine, due to poverty. His first book, Los heraldos negros (The Black Heralds) was met with both critical praise and disdain. He was imprisoned for several months in 1920 as the "intellectual instigator" of a local uprising which occurred during a period of time that he happened to return home. His second book, Trilce, an innovative and difficult masterpiece, was published in 1922. A year later, in fear of being arrested again, jobless, and disappointed by the critical incomprehension with which Trilce was met, he left Peru for Paris, where, under often extreme conditions of poverty, he lived for the rest of his life, writing essays, a novel, plays, and articles that were published in Peru. Though he continued to write poetry that was occasionally published in magazines, he did not have another book of poetry published during his lifetime. He became a Marxist and engaged in a number of political activities, traveling to Spain on several occasions during the Spanish Civil War. Spain, Take This Cup From Me is a series of poems he wrote on that war. He died in 1938, on Good Friday. The poems appearing here were published posthumously.
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