ELISA GABBERT: BOSTON'S BEST POET 2011

Last year, we SHOCKED THE WORLD with a write-in campaign that lifted Janaka Stucky to the heights of fame and fortune as the Boston Phoenix–anointed Boston's Best Poet of 2010. Yeah, he won. Conquered, really. It presaged Egyptian Democracy. And Janaka reigned with all the grace of a Philosopher King. So what do we have to show for it now?

The Phoenix left him off the ballot for 2011. Wtf mate.

But we'll have no monarchy in Boston. It's time to shake the pillars of power once again and upend the patriarchy.

Vote for Elisa Gabbert as Boston's Best Poet of 2011.
1. Click the Write-in field, enter her name.
2. Click “Submit Vote”
3. Click “Skip to Finish” (they don't know what “submit” means)
4. Then click “Vote Now” (no need to enter your info at all)

Elisa is an excellent poet and a great reader. Please vote for her and in so doing urge the Phoenix to get hip to what's happening in poetry in poetry in Boston! Janaka Stucky (Black Ocean) and I are working together to make poetry interesting in Boston — please help us by casting your vote.

Read Elisa's blog, The French Exit

Check out this Bookslut interview with Elisa from June 2010: “Certain things we sense are simple and it's easy to recognize them and conjure them up in your imagination when they're not present, the way you can pretty much play a familiar pop song in your head and it's almost as good as hearing it for real. Or the taste of green apple Jolly Ranchers, which is more consistent than real apples. But with something more complex, you can't simply memorize it. John listens to a lot of experimental chamber music and it often takes me a bit to realize when I've heard it before, and like you said, I recognize it by feel. Or perfume: The best perfumes are complex and abstract and therefore difficult to describe and difficult to remember with anywhere near the sort of rich sensory detail you get when you're actually smelling it. And often, when I've only met someone once or twice, it's hard to picture them clearly, they seem hazy in my mind like a dream face. Which is all to say that poetry is slippery because, like good perfume and good faces, it's complex.”

And a poem, from Typo 12:

“Aubade”

We both dream about wild animals.
There had been a dog fight at the party—

the older, bigger dog somehow threatened
by the puppy, a girl—he was chasing her

in circles around the yard, knocking over drinks
and gnawing on her leg. I tensed

when they bumped against mine,
and you said not to be afraid of them,

they’re only dogs. A rash prickled up there
and I scratched it all night.

The birds screech outside at this bleak hour.
Why do they always sound terrorized?

It’s a wave—their cries, the encroaching light;
the room growing paler in pindots,

coming up to our edges. Us feeling separate.
The nightmare you gave me, or caught.

Money is Power: Fighting Walker

Votes don't mean nearly as much in America as money, sad to say. (Particularly not after the Citizens United ruling.) So if we want to see policy changes, rallies and protests and GOTV campaigns are all very good, but sometimes you need to aim for the wallet.

Governor Walker of Wisconsin has made his call: he doesn't support the basic rights of working people. He wants to raise monied individuals over the rest of his citizens. It's wrong, morally and in regards to our Democracy. Even as corporations' rights are affirmed, we see the other hand of the GOP specifically removing the rights of working people. If he were taking away the right to free speech, of course, this would be a different issue. Or maybe it wouldn't, since the people harmed aren't wealthy — but I digress.

The thing to do now is hit him in the wallet. Do not spend money, whenever possible, on companies that donated to his campaign. If that fails, boycott all companies based in the state of Wisconsin. It will take mutual support and much dedication. Then we let the Governors rich friends pressure him for us. "Scott my boy," one will say in a 20 minute phone call, "This Union-busting bill has cost my company more than we would have paid into their pensions twice. Sales are down in New York, Boston, the twin cities, Austin, San Fancisco, Chicago. There are picket lines driving people away from stores. We've had phone calls and letters by the hundred. We've been dropped by our distributors. Enough is enough. Sign the repeal."

This is how you change policy. Find the list of donors at the website www.scottwalkerwatch.com.

Stephen Sturgeon's Trees of the Twentieth Century

To receive a 10% discount, include the coupon code "Trees" when ordering your copy. Copies will begin shipping on March 1st. Composed between 2005 and 2010, the poems in Trees of the Twentieth Century range in style from classically formalized stanzas on memory and vitality to allusive and lyrical free verses, and chronicle — among other subjects — the stories of lost friends, prophesies from a wandering head that speaks from a tree branch, and the experiences of a man as he pursues a curtain rod through the woods of Young Goodman Brown.

“Sturgeon illuminates the otherwise transparent impressions of memory and conscience, those opaque connections between our imaginations and each other, in music that sharpens the verse with thrilling uncertainty. His poems impress themselves upon the mind like an iron. He may be the first major poet of this generation.”
— Daniel E. Pritchard, editor of The Critical Flame

Letter to Peter Stothard, Editor of the TLS

Peter Stothard, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, responded at his blog to a comment I made some time ago at BooksInq: http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2011/02/vida-and-the-pie-charts.html

I was surprised, pleasantly, that he engaged the discussion, even if he was suspicious of the terms and pitfalls. It seemed only fair to then write back to him directly. The question of women in media is complicated — tho the societal failings that the question reflects seem clear — and this is particularly true for editors, whose careers rely on their taste and faculty of judgment. The disparity calls that judgment into question in fundamental ways, probably too harshly, while appearing to undermine some still-valuable ideals.

Since writing more than a week ago, I haven't heard back, either because the email never reached him, or because he has his hands plenty full (and he does, I'm sure), or because it seems silly to continue arguing against (honestly, without any self-depreciation or accusation) a relative nobody; but, I wanted to share my response with you.

Please note that I speak only for myself here — myself alone — and for the one very small project, The Critical Flame, that I control.

-------

Mr. Stothard,

Thank you for taking my comment at Books Inq seriously enough to respond, and let me begin by saying how much I enjoy and admire the TLS. I very much appreciate that you are engaging with this issue, even if you are skeptical of any measure that could detract from quality. I am also, as a reader, an editor, a poet and a critic, first and foremost concerned with quality — I edit a very minor book review journal, The Critical Flame. Perhaps it's simply that I don't have the same self-assurance you and Frank Wilson seem to possess. Of course, I'm lacking the decades of experience. But I believe myself to be full of unsubstantial biases, incorrect notions, and smallness of vision. Not because I feel badly about myself or my abilities, but because I believe every one of us is deeply and seriously flawed, narrowed by the facts of limited time and random chance, no matter how accomplished they are. Even godlike Hector hoped that his child would be a better man by far than he.

When I see this disparity, I am not nearly confident enough to say that my judgment considers only the matter of quality. The Critical Flame is, like the other magazines recently reported, unbalanced in gender. As the editor, I consider this to be my flaw: narrowness of vision, failing of temperament, exclusion of community, or failure to make contact. Something. I'm entirely uncertain that what I judge to be "quality" is not really, more narrowly, a matter of taste, or, worse, of bias. All this leads to introspection and self-criticism, and the occasional glass of bourbon. However, I'm going to be better in this regard — first myself, and then my little journal. I will do whatever I can to attain high quality as well as gender equity over the next year. I wish things would just get better without that, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. This is the least I can actually do.

As this is a flaw across so many magazines, as it is a failing of intellectual respect (and self-respect) so evident in so many areas of American society (I cannot speak for the UK), I'm compelled to seek a broader change as well. I do this for my mother who raised me alone, for my fiancee who is a scholar, for a daughter I might someday raise — and who should never be told, dismissively, as Jessa Crispin was by some editor not very long ago, that she "slept her way to the top." Such stripping away of one's humanity and accomplishments, leaving only the objectified sex, is a metonymy that forgives vicious behavior. Imagine if the comment had been about her race. The process is no different. It's no less vile. This gender disparity in magazine culture, whatever it's practical causes, is a failure of Democratic society, which fails only because we are not as righteous as a Democracy requires. If it is hard to remedy, and it is definitely very hard, we only become stronger by the task.

The TLS, as you mentioned, strikes a better balance than others in its category. And there are not many, at least in the United States, in that category any longer. These few remaining book sections probably bear more importance today than any time since mass literacy took hold. (At which time, it's worth noting, no woman was allowed to vote in either of our countries.) As you also wrote, judgment and quality are paramount. Those cannot be thrown aside. Ideas of aesthetic judgment and quality are not meaningless, as some might claim. They are communal projects. At their heart these ideas are humanist; in their ideal forms, they are transcendental; by our poor application they are, at best, only slightly flawed, and, at worst, totally unjust. The way those categories are applied is tremendously important. Did we chose this because it is "the best", or is it "the best" because we chose it?

If you feel, as I do, that TLS is a leader in the field, and leads by example, then I hope you'll reconsider the importance of this imbalance. If one leads, maybe the rest will find their way.

My best regards,

Daniel E. Pritchard
Editor, The Critical Flame

Elizabeth Bishop Centenary Reading @ BU

Getting Poesy at MIT

At the MIT Admissions blog, massively sleep-deprived Anna H. (class of 2014) shares a sonnet ode for each of her classes:

Ode to 8.022: Physics II (Electricity & Magnetism)
*Pronunciation guide: 8.022="eight oh two two"

Electric fields and charges: mystery
Unknowable to me in high school years
I struggled through the class and the AP,
But now I shed my bias and my fears.
"You fool!" you shout. "Why would you take that class?
The work is tough, and never will relent.
8.022 makes students cry en masse,
Your confidence, you will come to lament."
It could be that I'm crazy, I admit
But love like mine can deal with cranial pain
To endless waves of p-sets, I submit
Devoted to dear physics, I remain.
Professor Fisher's lectures help me see
That this is not impossible to clasp
There's elegance in here; there's symmetry
And solving problems can be in my grasp.
8.022, my love makes me a fool
Since I, to you, exist only to tool*.

*to tool: verb. When used by MIT students, means "to work" or "to study".

Support American Culture

There are two things I have to say about this. The first is that you should click on the link below and send an email in support of the NEA to your Congressional Representatives and Senators. It's quick and easy, and the vast majority of our beloved cultural institutions — from museums and education programs, to theaters and publishers, to the artists themselves — rely on such support. Truly.

Second: please, after you do this, and after this part of the bill is acknowledged as bad for America, as a poor idea, and is inevitably off the table; please, make sure this was not just a smoke screen for some other equally terrible act against the average American. Millions of people rely on assistance from the Federal government for affordable housing, for their children's lunches, for addiction treatment. You know what it's like to struggle. Stand with them as well, make them a priority as well, defend them because they have no voice, because the same millionaires who would like to destroy the NEA are out to hurt them as well.

Now, the link to send an email in support of American Culture:

"The National Endowment for the Arts is targeted for a $22.5 million cut in the legislative proposal, and it is quite possible members of the Republican Study Committee will offer amendments to fully eliminate the NEA during floor consideration. We need you to send a message to your Members calling on them to reject these cuts to the NEA."

Get thee to a Woodhull Institute! [Vida and Gender 2]

At the blog ReelGirl: “When I invited a woman to come on the [radio talk] show as an expert guest, it was not unusual for her to decline. She’d tell me that she wasn’t really qualified, and then she’d recommend someone ‘better,’ often a male colleague. In the seven years that I worked in talk radio, guess how many men who I called up recommended someone else speak instead of them? Not one. Never happened.

“Like a persistent suitor, I refused to take the woman’s first no as an answer, spending a lot of time convincing her to go air. Not only did I repeatedly tell women that their ideas were important, but I coached them on how to deal with the aggressive host who they were afraid to talk to, and I gave them tips on how to respond to other aggressive callers. Talk radio may be democratic in some ways but the verbal sparring can be brutal and you need to know how to play to win. And want to win.

“My experience in talk radio showed me that if women had some basic training, at least part of the gender bias in media could be overcome. But it’s not the producer’s job to coach and train women. So I cofounded an organization, the Woodhull Institute, named for Victoria Woodhull who was the first woman to run for president; she also published her own newspaper. Woodhull trains women in professional skills including negotiation, advocacy, and public speaking; Woodhull also trains women in media skills, including the ones Patricia Cohen wondered about in the New York Times, such as how to pitch stories and how to write and submit book proposals.”

--

So. Right now registration is open for the Woodhull Retreat on writing non-fiction (op-ed, feature stories, and book propsals) in the San Francisco and NYC / Berkshires regions. It's April 8–10th. Then on April 11th:

Good Enough Not Good Enough: VIDA and Gender

Jessa Crispin at Bookslut:

After talking with editor after editor, a pattern started to emerge. "We don't get enough submissions by women." At each publication I talked to, women were submitting an average of 35% of manuscripts, poems, articles, and pitches. Most of the editors I talked to were not the callous, misogynist, cigar-chomping bastards they've been portrayed as since the Vida stats came out. Then again, this might be influenced by who I talked to: Poetry Magazine, The Chicagoan, Boston Review, Red Lemonade, Melville House, Dalkey Archive Press, The TLS — although his response was quite cranky. (I'll link to these conversations as they go up on the PBS website.) The disparity is greater at some other institutions, who didn't answer my e-mails. As I was writing up my interview with Poetry Magazine editor Christian Wiman, an e-mail came in with the fall list for FSG. There were only three women on that entire list. I asked FSG if they wanted to have a chat, but I never heard back.

The refrain of "we want more submissions from women" started to gnaw at me. Because I never pitch work. That makes me part of this problem. I have a working relationship with certain publications, and I'm content with staying with them. And most of them approached me initially, rather than me showing up on their doorstep with my CV saying, "Hi! Publish me, I'm good." And I wonder why that is. God, could it be because I'm under-confident in my writing? I don't want to talk about it! Okay, yes. Maybe. Fuck off. And it's easier for me to take an idea to the same editors I've been working with for years, rather than try to work for somewhere new, with a higher profile and better pay rate. Even when I'm discussing projects I'm working on with other friends, I disparage the work, saying, "This is probably a stupid idea," or, "Someone has probably already done this somewhere."

There's something about the culture at some of these places listed at Vida that make me think I would never in a million years be accepted there, and after taking a sampling of some female writer friends, I'm not the only one. Take the Atlantic, for example. Their rates of publishing women were not as devastatingly horrible as, say, The New York Review of Books. (What the fuck, NYRB?) But the women they are perhaps best known for publishing are Caitlin Flanagan, who writes about how abortion is bad, sex is bad, staying at home with the kids is awesome, doing her husband's laundry gives her purpose. Also Sandra Tsing Loh, who writes about her infidelity, the breakup of her marriage, being a bad mother. There is absolutely nothing about The Atlantic that screams out to me: We are totally respectful of women and their various viewpoints, and we'd be interested in publishing the work of a single, globetrotting, pro-choice feminist who does not under any circumstance want to write about her relationships, her femininity, or her sex life.

But as I'm writing this, I'm aware that this is partly my issue. That if I were bolder, more confident in my writing, had a genius idea for a story, or maybe were a man, I would look at the Atlantic and see that they had a lack in exactly the space I want to write about. I would see that missing voice as an opportunity, not as a Stay Out: No Girls Allowed sign.

Because I've been knocked on my ass by overt sexism before. The editor of an internationally renowned literary magazine once accused me to my face of sleeping my way to the top. I had been recommended to him for a job, and apparently the fellow writer who recommended me did so vigorously, and defended me against the accusation of hack-work. "And the only reason I could think of that he would do so, was if you were really good in bed. You guys must be fucking like bunnies." I have this burned on my brain, a bad night out in New York City. I had the job at that point. Did I then bust my ass on the job, thinking "I'll show you, motherfucker," and then gleefully take his money? No. I resigned almost immediately.

[bold emphasis in all cases above by the editor of The Wooden Spoon]

--

What is wrong with this culture? Seriously, I thought this shit was dead. My adult education and career has been spent surrounded by capable, intelligent women. Intellectual peers, or betters, mentors, and managers. I am marrying one in July. She writes inspired literary criticism. Half, or probably more than half, of my closest and oldest friends are women (despite having gone to an all-male high school), and those women are doctors, poets, Naval officers, literary critics, social workers. And now this? Nope. Not good enough. As Jessa writes, this is a complicated issue that deals not just with submissions and pages published, but with a whole hegemonic social structure that informs gender and uses anxiety, insecurity, like a natural predator, to limit growth. But, here is what I do have the power to affect:

Too direct?

Big- Government Reagan

from Slate: “Federal government spending was a quarter higher in real terms when Reagan left office than when he entered. As a share of GDP, the federal government shrank from 22.2 percent to 21.2 percent—a whopping one percentage point. The federal civilian work force increased from 2.8 million to 3 million. (Yes, it increased even if you exclude Defense Department civilians. And, no, assuming a year or two of lag time for a president's policies to take effect doesn't materially change any of these results.)

“Under eight years of Big Government Bill Clinton, to choose another president at random, the federal civilian work force went down from 2.9 million to 2.68 million. Federal spending grew by 11 percent in real terms—less than half as much as under Reagan. As a share of GDP, federal spending shrank from 21.5 percent to 18.3 percent—more than double Reagan's reduction, ending up with a federal government share of the economy about a tenth smaller than Reagan left behind.

“And taxes? Federal tax collections rose about a fifth in real terms under Reagan. As a share of GDP, they declined from 19.6 percent to 18.3 percent. After Clinton, they are up to 20 percent. It's hard to think of variations in this narrow range as revolutionary one way or the other. For most working Americans, the share of income going to taxes (including FICA) went up even under Reagan.

“Reagan enthusiasts say that what matters is marginal rates, which did decline significantly during his tenure. Of course, rates rose significantly under Clinton, which doesn't seem to have done the economy any harm. Critics say that if Reagan's tax cuts fed the 1980s prosperity, it was as an old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus, caused by the huge deficits the cuts produced. It's easy to throw a party if you're willing to triple the national debt.”

“A Sense of Family Comes from the Commitment We Make to Each Other”

Ben Mazer on Pound's “See, They Return”

from Dark Sky Magazine: “The poet, in creation, sees (and seizes), and the reader is told to see (ordered to see in order to see): the words return, not only in memory, but in the circularity of unity (the coming into being enacted by the completion of a circle, the words of a poem having life and afterlife in the contextualization enacted by the return of rereading, contemplation of parts of form in relation to the whole of form), ‘one,’ — reader and poet and poem (part and whole) — ‘and by one,’: word by word (with the emphasizing hesitation of a comma after the one word ‘one’), and line by line, in word and line seen (apprehended) by poet, and reader by reader, yes, but also: by one poet (or won by one poet), by one Ezra Pound, by one divinity, one unified and unifying source and author of creation and meaning.”