Happy Memorial Day!

“On the School Tour”

by Mark Noonan, from WordLegs

We used to get the tube in London sometimes,
and the lady on the Tannoy would say, Mind
the Gap! — pushing out the syllables with her tongue
the way you'd push the stone from a peach.

In our minds she licked our necks,
slid her tongue into our ears and whispered to us.
She was a nibbling, biting, throbbing sex-fiend, that one.
We all knew it, but we couldn't prove a thing.

How could you? It was just a recording. Just an accent.
She was probably somebody's mother,
but if she was, we all thought, then she was a serious MILF,
dripping those syrupy words on our lips,

sliding her hands down the backs of our jeans
to pull us in close, and say it again.
We harboured these thoughts through galleries
and graveyards and all the way home,

to our classrooms, to our daydreams,
and on and on like that, forever.

Notes on Book Expo America

I just returned from BEA in New York late last night. For the company, the show was excellent. We received many congratulations for the fortieth anniversary; we took some good orders, met buyers from new bookstores (which we always like), saw old friends, and gave away pretty much all the promo material we brought down. And I must say that, all things considered, BEA was good for me as well: I met some great media / review people and happened upon a couple of bloggers I wanted to meet. There was plenty to complain about logistically, but then again there always is (the $4.00 waters in particular). Three items of note.

First, BEA this year was much smaller than it seemed. The show floor was packed from the already-crowded gates opening at 9:00 am right through until about two hours before the show closed the next day, but: it was one show floor instead of two as usual; two days instead of three as in the past; and held in the middle of the week instead of the weekend, which emphasized New York media professionals over book buyers.

The second thing of note was extra-professional. I attended the NBCC panel on The Future of Book Reviews, which was held in a standing-room-only room. It was disappointing, to say the very least. They regurgitated the same tired, inane conversation about book reviews, PDF galleys, and blogs that this industry has been chewing over for a decade. The audience was either so out of touch with the internet that they had no clue what the hell was being discussed, or too young for such a simplistic, remedial conversation. A telling anecdote: when I came in, there were about fifteen people standing in the back and sitting on the floor; but, in the last row, there was a chair with an empty box on top of it. I moved the box to the floor and took my seat. The people left standing glared. This is what I'm talking about in the book industry.

The final thing is mostly personal. I stopped by the Unbridled Books booth to grab their catalog, and it was mentioned by the publicist that Emily St. John Mandel would be there the following day. You may recall that Emily's first novel, Last Night in Montreal, was reviewed unfavorably in the first issue of The Critical Flame. This, folks, is the book review editor's dilemma, and the first time I'd been faced with it — but I went over to say hello the next morning. We talked about the review, and Emily was completely gracious and extremely nice. And she resisted what I'm sure was an intense urge to throw hot coffee all over me.

Reflections on Mazer’s “January 2008”

“Landis [Everson] was the dearest, sweetest man I ever knew. Everybody had that reaction to him. He also was madly in love with me, and very demanding about my attention. He claimed he was writing all the poems for me, that I was the reason he was writing them. I can’t really describe how much fun it was to have him come alive that way, or how much he affected my life because of it.” — Ben Mazer, Dark Sky Magazine

You can't pick up January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010), written just after the suicide of Landis Everson, and not think of the connection between Ben and Landis. Not hold in mind the shadow of their love — philia, the Greeks might have named it. This is a narrative of loss, full as it is of the variety of life. Mazer doesn't bare this anguish blankly, though. He doesn't lyricise his struggle through mythologies and narratives, as, say, Lowell did. There is none of that directness in Mazer’s book, a series of mostly untitled lyric poems; at least, nothing quite so simple or so clear. Ben's lyricism is always askew, is gestural where Lowell’s was figural; they take largely place within moments instead of reflecting on them from a distance.

Nonetheless, January 2008 is still a document that responds, immediately and fully, to this unique experience of loss. It responds from within a complete life, Joycean in its fullness. Thus, apparently ephemeral lines such as “I think that then my morale sank / because the peanuts and the pretzels stank” sit together with the more evocative, imagistic (and recognizably “poetic”) lines, “Shards of midnight cooing on the heath / are not more clever or more silver sad / than darkness glowing which envelops you.” Mazer's poems, hanging together, paint the picture of a whole life in the shadow of Landis’ death; or, as Hill writes, “More than I care to think / I am as one coarsened by feckless grief.”

Mazer occasionally employs a formal, epigrammatic compression; poems of just a few lines, such as: “Talk of yourself and history / embellishing with civility. / Of each story weave each thread / making your tapestry of the dead.” — reminiscent of Ben Jonson or Thom Gunn, distinctly musical and packed with insight. There is a more important connection to Gunn as well, in the way that Ben fit his playful, musical, lyric verse to a subject so penetratingly human, and moving, just as Gunn did when he began to deal with the death of his own friends. Mazer often addresses another directly, in terms of affection and loss, as in “Do I Know You?”

To love you I have to know you,
but what I know you will never know,
and what I know is what I know of you,
to know the world, to love to know
to know to love, and by loving me
love to be loved, the only way of knowing.

The lyric is a reflection on perception and connection, and the poem moves into images of storm and cityscape, of stone pounded by rain — the obscurity of lost meanings and possible signs, of a darkness and an opacity that arbitrates love between us. It could perhaps be the theme of the whole collection,

The hook of dawn across the virgin sky
revives a night’s fantastic promises,
to see it real — the workers lifting steel,
the docks receiving ships, tall posters
arcing over the new light with phrases
said by chrysalis of light in winter
by the orphan without breath.
The dispersals of books, of rags of paper,
through the dark low streets might met with love
inspire a city of angels. Our new year.

Beauty, humor, intellect, loss: in January 2008 Mazer gathers these disparate aspects to find a point of intersect. It's a remarkable book, and a testament to the depth of friendship between Landis and Ben.

Nora Delaney Reviews Henri Cole

Today I recommend a break from work to read Nora Delaney's incisive review of Pierce the Skin, the new selected edition of Henri Cole's poetry. She writes, “figurative realism is the dominant mode of the selections from Cole’s first four collections. The artist remains a faithful recorder of the physical world around him, just as the children in “The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge” — the extraordinary titular poem of Cole’s second volume — snap photographs of animals at the zoo. The moment is preserved permanently: the ape’s “lips are cracked and bleeding” and the polar bears swim in their tank. Cole makes the reader a part of this moment; faces are reflected in that of the ape, in the children taking photographs, and in the poet writing everything down.”

U35 @ The Marliave

I'm happy to report that the first iteration of U35 Poetry @ The Marliave was a smashing success! Over the din of diners in the adjacent room and the slosh of drinks being poured and shaken, James Stotts and Janaka Stucky imposed their poetic wills on the packed room. Stotts read mostly from memory, to the amazement of his fellow reader, Stucky, who read hypnotic verse from his chapbook Your Name is the Only Freedom. And afterward we all got tight, swapping jokes and talking poetry. If you missed it, visit the Official U35 site for recordings of both readers.

Thanks again to both readers, who were as brilliant as advertised, to The Marliave for hosting us, to my fiancee and mom for both coming out and supporting me. Aw. See you all in JULY for the next reading: Nora Delaney and TBA!

Straw Poll: Editors

I've been thinking recently about the future of publishing, where it is now and where it seems to be headed. But in order to do that, I needed data. Some idea of how my own thinking fell in line with that of others. So, I sent an email out to some fellow editors of online journals to get an idea of the state of their relationship with publishers, focusing on their frustrations.

In large part these editors found that publicists are amenable to working with online media sources. However, the lack of a personal relationship — even trying to build one; addressing review letters and press releases to Mrs. John Johnson, for example — was a point of almost universal annoyance. It goes far beyond envy for old-style wining and dining; that is to say, it isn’t an issue of nostalgia for bygone trivialities on the part of new media folks. It entails the lack of discretion on the part of large houses in sending out titles (“just shoveling the latest slag my way,” as one editor put it) where they have no chance of being reviewed; continuous yapping updates about authors and titles, shilling blatantly for reviews; and overuse (misuse, that is) of outlets like Twitter and Facebook.

This definitely fell in line with my own experiences. Most large publishers, with a few notable exceptions, build anonymity into the review request process — although I've occasionally been able to get through the filter by calling and working my way through their phone directories. Smaller presses are usually more willing to correspond with online media. Personalized emails make a difference, particularly if they show some awareness of what The Critical Flame does. Even if the book isn't a fit, I'm more likely to get back in touch with that person if another title piques my interest later.

So, the big takeaway from this: online media still requires building relationships. Get over the blinking cursor and get through the screen to the person on the other end. As one editor wrote, “The internet is the present, not the future.” More later from my survey of publishers.

Daisy Hay on Young Romantics

I wrote on Young Romantics in the May / June issue of The Critical Flame, and quite enjoyed it; here is a video of the author, Daisy Hay, introducing the book:

The Critical Flame :: Issue 7, May 2010

Announcing the new issue of The Critical Flame: a Journal of Book Reviews & Criticism, also celebrating it's one-year anniversary. Thanks to all the readers and the support we've received. As I wrote in the e-mail announcement, “Better even than reading and writing on topics dear to me has been the opportunity to connect with so many people who are as passionate about literature and culture as I am.” This month we have some great features —

Scott Esposito discusses the brilliance of John D'Agata: “If there were such a thing as Emerging American Essayist Laureate, John D’Agata would be it. In a literary landscape where essay-writing is typically reserved for journalistic think-pieces, John McPhee, and midlist novelists looking to cultivate new audiences, John D’Agata has endeavored to reinvent the form once again and raise it onto an equal branch of literature’s family tree.”

Nora Delaney reviews Hanri Cole's selected edition, Pierce the Skin:  “What does this continued act of self-portraiture achieve? For one thing, in painting himself over and over again, Cole finds that language fails him. He longs for the preverbal — that direct expression he finds so engaging in the visual artist.”

Katherine A. Evans discusses Ralph Ellison's unfinished epic second novel:  “In many ways, from a thematic standpoint, Three Days Before the Shooting. . . is perhaps most notable for the ways in which it expands the project begun in Invisible Man, dramatizing the challenges of identity formation and the critiques of the American institution of racism, and emphasizing the centrality of the African-American narrative to the American story. ”

And those are just samples, with quite a bit more (this is a long issue by our standards) to peruse. For hardcore book lovers, I particularly recommend Carl Scarbrough's essay on The Art of American Book Covers, 1875—1930. Enjoy!

Red-Letter NYTBR

I was pleasantly surprised to see so much good stuff in the New York Times Book Review this week: an essay on Judaism and anti-semitism in England (“the long squalor of Jew-hatred in a supposedly enlightened, humane, liberal society”), by Harold Bloom; an essay on Martin Heidegger and his own anti-semitism, by Adam Kirsch; and an essay on Neitzsche by Francis Fukayama. I see a pattern here — what's the deal? Perhaps the recent visit from a certain famous Holocaust denier, one who does not get along with our Secretary of State, instigated it?

The New England Review, &c.

The New England Review, another casualty of the economic crisis, is looking for a little help from readers everywhere: “We are making every effort to cut expenditures wherever possible, but we’re counting on loyal readers like you to help support NER through its fourth decade of publication. Every gift not only helps with the costs of producing the magazine but is a vote of support for the continuation of New England Review.” C'mon. Skip the latte, write a tax-deductible check, or save up your change in a jar — it's a worthwhile cause and one of the better literary journals out there.

• Ernie Hilbert's E-Verse Radio today features a poem from Karen Volkman, “Sonnet [Nothing was ever what it claimed to be].” She's one of my favorite contemporary poets, and I recommend Nora Delaney's review of Volkman's Nomina, which appeared in the first issue of Sixty Six.

• At The Boston Review, Michael Scharf writes, “whether the poet intends it or not, lyric is political. When Indian reviewers wonder aloud whether India can ever produce poetry in English that would be of any value — or what the point of doing so would be — they are making a political argument. A related move is to challenge the poet’s linguistic competence in English, so as to impugn the poet with lingering colonialist sensibilities, to condemn alleged mimicry. Such critiques, rooted in a politics that does not see English as a proper medium for an Indian poetic, deny that Indian poetry in English is Indian at all.”