Banango Lit

BY: JUSTIN CARTER

In place of a true review of Brian Oliu’s Level End (Origami Zoo Press, 2012), I am writing a piece that responds to it & also sorta reviews it. Buy Brian Oliu’s Level End because it is very good. You are missing out if you do not read it.

When Brian Oliu arrived, the music changed, became a little less hollow. The final boss was ahead, seated inside the castle. I am so afraid, you whispered to Brian Oliu. We have three hearts left, Brian Oliu whispered to you. Everything is spinning. The final boss is behind a large pole & you know this & you feel afraid, but Brian Oliu holds you close & says no, no, it is going to be okay.The final boss is a dead flower. The final boss is taking one of your three hearts & is breaking it in half. The final boss is breaking us apart, you say. Brian Oliu stands in front of the pole. He does not speak. The final boss will always break your heart, a voice says. You think back to the last time you saved the game: was it in the old church? Was it in the open field, before you fell down, skinned your knee, started to cry. You can’t remember when you last saved because you do not want to remember. The final boss steps out from behind the pole. Brian Oliu holds a silver sword. Brian Oliu holds a bow & arrow, points it toward the boss. You open your eyes. The final boss is you. I don’t understand, you say. You never understood, Brian Oliu says. He puts the sword back in his backpack. The final boss walks toward you. You touch it. You touch yourself. You hold your own face, gently. The music fades. The screen turns black.

the following discussion occurred on Facebook:

Nathan Masserang: what is the metrical classification of an emoticon in poetry. :( = iamb? Theoretically, the longer the emoticon, the longer the beat, yet not stronger than an understood syllabic stress. *<:0) = weak anapest.

Justin Carter: since the emoticon is probably not read out loud & is understood via visual cues, i would say it would represent a single ‘weak’ beat in the poem

Tom Melton: Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t syllabic emphasis a function of vocalizing the poem? Like, even if it’s being read silently from off of a page, any question of emphasis or metric delineation has to be settled via pronunciation, which implies sound. So if you’re not going to read it, you can’t really say it should factor into the determination of the meter, right? I’m already blarfing hard over this and I haven’t even begun to consider what pronouncing an emoticon would/should sound like.

JC: i think there is also another problem: the writer of the poem can’t control if the reader will say ‘sad face’ for a :( emoticon, or if they will say ‘sad’ or if they will say ‘sad emoticon’ or if they will perceive it non verbally, so i think emoticons can’t properly exist in a poem that requires a strict meter, because the way they are said is too ambiguous

TM: By that same token a poet couldn’t use the word “aluminum” because British and American readers would construe that word as having two different syllable counts.

JC: we addressed that issue in my forms class: fuck the idea of meter’s actually having to be ‘strict’, the emoticon issue just seems to be more difficult to work around IF you, for some reason, actually need to maintain a fairly standard meter

Steve Roggenbuck: the imrpotant point for me is that i want to read more metered poetry that has emoticon’s or any poetry with emoticon

TM: Steve, I believe at the Seattle reading you used “smiley face” when reading an emoticon, do you consider that pronunciation #rare or #common?

SR:

It’s high time for interviews. A Poem From Us is a poetry project that aims to “use technology to help folks share their love of poetry with others.” Initial participants received and distributed a set of stickers with QR codes which, when scanned, lead to the project website. Anybody can submit a video of themselves reading a poem for inclusion on the website. I was drawn to the project’s creative use of technology and similarity to other collaborative poetry projects like Poetry By Emily Dickinson. A Poem From Us is the brainchild of Felix Jung, who I interviewed below.           

First off, could you tell us a bit about yourself, and your background?

My name is Felix Jung and I’m a writer who slowly turned into a tech guy. I was an English major as an undergrad, and pursued an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry. Near the end of my grad school career, I got interested in a program called (at the time) Macromedia Flash, looking to animate my poems. I got hooked on the program, and was lucky enough to land a job doing motion graphics full time.

The more I worked with tech, the more interested I became in finding ways to mix technology and writing. I’m a fan of both worlds, and there’s seemingly no end of new things to play with - multimedia, iPhone apps, API’s. Lots of stuff to explore out there.

Are you yourself a writer? How did you get into poetry? 

I got into poetry when I was in high school and kept a notebook full of my own, terrible poems with me at all times. It had a neon orange Queensrÿche bumper sticker on the cover. I was lucky enough to have a lot of good friends who were willing to remain my friends, despite how often I pressed that notebook into their hands.

The first time I came across a poem that took my breath away was in high school, freshman year. I was ignoring my English teacher and flipping through the textbook when I came across Blake’s “A Poison Tree.” I had read a few love poems prior to that, but when I hit the last lines of that poem… I was shocked:

In the morning, glad I see

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Here was an actual, dead body! I had no idea poetry could do such things, and was just in awe at how a small set of words sent me for a loop. I started looking for more poems to read, and eventually started writing my own. 

In my, uh… Queensrÿche notebook.

*cough*

Where did the idea for A Poem From Us come from? Have you ever participated in any other public poetry projects?

Last year, I had come across an organization called “The Awesome Foundation,” a group that gives micro-grants of $1,000 to projects they deem “awesome.” A group of 10 people gather to form local chapters, each person donating $100 per month… allowing the chapter to award a $1,000 grant each month.

I submitted a proposal last November to the Awesome Foundation Chicago chapter, and was lucky enough to receive the grant.

The idea for the project stemmed a lot from the mission of the Awesome Foundation: I wanted to create something fun and interactive, I wanted to involve as many people as possible.

A project I’ve long admired is “You Are Beautiful.” I first came across those stickers when I moved to Chicago, and seeing the sticker for the first time was like a friend, putting his hand on your shoulder. I loved the feeling, in that it took me out of my routine and made me take a step back.

I wanted to do something similar with poetry, and decided on combining QR codes and YouTube/Vimeo. My hope was to scatter these stickers into public spaces so that… when someone scanned one, a random poem from the project would play. And, if if things went well, it would be a small surprise, a stranger’s voice taking them out of their routine, momentarily.

Are the first set of poems on the website all people you solicited personally? 

They are. I reached out to friends and former MFA colleagues via Facebook and asked them to help seed the site. I wanted to have a small collection of poems already up, when the site officially launched. I loved all the entries, and it was nice having a set of videos available for others to see.

When you set a hat down for donations, you throw a few coins in first. That was the thinking.

Now that the project has been active for a few weeks, how has it been going? Do you have any metrics by which you’re evaluating its success?

Things were going pretty well near the start of April, but naturally, as the month progresses, it’s gotten a lot slower. I’d say there was a good, steady amount of interest in the first two weeks. Now, I’ll see periods where there won’t be much activity for a day or so, before things pick up again.

I don’t have a specific metric I’m looking to, to define success. The fact that I got anyone at all interested enough to contribute a video makes me feel pretty good. I thought I might be able to target a younger, tech-savvy demographic (one that also really dug poetry), but perhaps I misjudged this. Or perhaps I haven’t reached them yet.

We had a few notable mentions. Several organizations with sizable Twitter accounts mentioned us, which helped tremendously. We also got nice mentions from: The Millions, The New Yorker’s “Book Bench,” and The Next Web.

If you want to know a moment where I felt the project was successful? It was late one night, shortly after I saw two submissions had come in. One was by Morgan Joyce Williams and another was by Harm Hendrik ten Napel. Though I did contact Morgan via Facebook, these were submissions that came from folks I didn’t know, personally. 

Morgan was the Illinois State Champion for Poetry Out Loud, 2011 - and it’s clear why she won if you listen to her video. Hearing Morgan’s video totally blew me away, and wowed me beyond belief. After seeing her video, I checked out Harm’s… and that too, blew me away. I found myself sitting at my computer, with a hand over my chest - just totally awed that two strangers were able to move me so much, just by reciting some words. 

Both poems were love poems and I totally felt that love, watching and listening to these two. That was a particularly magical moment for me, and made everything related to the project worthwhile. All the website mentions and Twitter retweets were great… but the moment I’ll remember most is that night, utterly moved by these two recordings.

What’s the most exotic place you’ve sent a sticker? How about the most surprising?

I’d have to say: Kosovo. I’m not even sure if I got the address correctly, but I’m hoping it arrives there. That request caught me by surprise.

There’s been one less than fun surprise. On April 20th, the project got listed on a “freebie” website. What I mean by this is that the website was all about places on the web where people can get free things. They linked to our Stickers page, and within a few hours… I started to see a ton of requests come in. As the morning went on, other “freebie” websites picked up on the link and much of our traffic was centered on the Sticker giveaway.

I ended up having to take the sticker request form offline, and it’s been that way for most of the weekend. I’m going to honor the first 30 requests that have already come in, but my feeling is that most folks were simply requesting stickers just because they were free. It was like a feeding frenzy.

I’m nearly through my first set of 1,000 stickers and have placed another order for 1,000 more. My intention was to cover postage for stickers throughout April, but at some future point… I’ll switch things to a SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope) model. If the freebie sites continue, that might happen earlier than planned.

What was the most challenging part of the project?

The biggest challenge that I seem to have with many of my projects is marketing: sharing the project URL via Facebook, Twitter, and getting it mentioned on enough sites/blogs where it starts to trigger momentum. I have a handful of places where I tend to always go to try to, but after I exhaust those resources… I feel like I end up having to rely on others to spread the word.

Since the start of National Poetry Month I’ve been monitoring hashtags on Twitter, and then contacting people/organizations via Facebook. I’ve tried contacting numerous local/Chicago news outlets, but surprisingly/sadly no one’s taken an interest so far, despite the various Chicago angles. 

My marketing approach is pretty slow and limited, and I’d daresay this is the toughest part of any project of mine - trying to get other sites/people interested. A big part of me feels that, were I better at self-promotion, some of my projects might have gotten more traction.

Do you imagine that A Poem From Us will come to a natural end? How long do you think it’ll go for?

That’s a really good question. I’ve been talking a lot about how the project has launched to coincide with National Poetry Month, but my intention is to keep the site up and running for far beyond April. Whether there will be continued interest after everyone’s moved on from National Poetry Month remains to be seen.

The project isn’t going anywhere, and worse comes to worse… it’ll be something that can pick up steam again, once next April rolls around again. 

I have an older Flash project called “pi10k“  that was something I did nearly a decade ago, when I was first learning how to program using ActionScript and Flash. I was learning how to manipulate strings, and came up with this fun idea of using the first 10,000 digits of pi… putting them to music. 

Every year, around March 14th (Pi Day, 3/14), I see a great deal of traffic. Even if the A Poem From Us project goes dormant for most of the year, I’m certain it will get a small resurgence every April at the very least.

How is technology changing the way people write, find, and consume poetry? 

I’d like to think it’s helping. We’ve never had more writing apps to help us along, and I daresay there’s a generation of writers now who’ve never had the pleasure of typewriters (and the sloppy tediousness of white-out). We’re able to record and revise our thoughts with such amazing ease. I think of software like Scrivener for novelists/essayists, and it’s staggering the kinds of tools that are out there for writers to use.

And finally: what exciting projects, poetry or otherwise, are up next?

Ha! I’m not sure just yet. I’ve spent a lot of 2012 working on prepping the project, and much of April trying to get the word out. The idea of taking a break seems like a really nice one.

I have a few other ideas that aren’t very well formed yet. A backburner project of mine involves me reading my own poems, using Creative Commons licensed video as background. I was working on bundling everything into a free iPhone app… so that might be something I return to.

I’ve long had this idea of doing crowd-sourced versions of Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” and Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” I’ve tried a few times (unsuccessfully) to get those projects off the ground, so that might be something I try again. Although having hit up all my friends to participate in this project… I may have exhausted all my goodwill, at least for a little while.

I usually go through periods of intense activity and lulls where nothing much happens. I don’t have a specific next project yet, but when I get that spark or idea in my head, I’ll be off to the races again.

Thank you, Felix! Check out A Poem For Us here.

Stephen Tully Dierks is the editor of Pop Serial, whose third issue is currently being serialized online. The issue will be completed soon & then a print edition will be available. I talked to Stephen about Pop Serial & his own writing & other things.

Justin Carter: What is Pop Serial and why did you start it?

Stephen Tully Dierks:     Pop Serial   is a magazine. From its start there has been a  tumblr for the magazine, promoting its contributors, spreading news about their activities. I started it because I didn’t like the lineups at other magazines. I wanted to see a different, to-me more appealing combination of names when I looked at a magazine’s table of contents. I wanted to recognize the names and be excited about them. And I had recently defended Tao Lin and Brandon Scott Gorrell in Shitstorm Alberto at HTMLGIANT. I had the idea to reach out to them to be in a magazine, and once Tao was onboard, I felt confident contacting various other writers I liked.

JC: Sweet. That’s kind of the reason we started Banango Street, because we wanted a contributor list that would feel like something we personally liked. Anyway,  I recently got in a Facebook argument with the editor of a genre fiction press that was telling me that the job of an editor was to put together a journal that was good and not to care about the people submitting, which I disagreed with, since I felt a journal should be a place that nurtures writing and writers, not just publishes things while only caring about profit. It seems like Pop Serial is even farther toward the opposite of that journal editor’s view: you seem to want to put together a journal that focuses on the contributor and eschews a lot of traditional ideas of a journal. For instance, Pop Serial does not accept submissions. Because of this, I think I’m very interested in knowing a little bit about your ideas about the ‘job’ or ‘role’ of an editor, and what you feel like you, as an editor, are most concerned about when putting together an issue of Pop Serial.

STD: To me the editor’s role and task is not much different than that of the artist: to do whatever he or she damn well pleases so as to be more satisfied and excited—in the editor’s case, w/r/t who and what is in one’s magazine.

I want there to be to-me good work in Pop Serial, but I also want to know the contributors and like them as artists and ideally also as people. I want an exciting magazine with exciting writers in it, like Evergreen Review, which had Beckett and Burroughs and Juan Rulfo and Henry Miller.
To clarify, I do receive and sometimes accept unsolicited submissions, however I mostly solicit. I don’t do calls for submissions. I am commonly interested in a writer and his/her work in general as opposed to a particular piece. And I don’t want to play judge for a writing contest—I want to avoid rejecting a bunch of people. I’d rather choose the people I like and skip that part, which most literary magazines have.

I identify more with other kinds of magazines besides the literary, like the culture magazine, for example, one of my favorites, Interview magazine. With that kind of magazine, the editor is largely following his or her idiosyncratic subjective vision of an exciting, sweet magazine, making the decisions and choosing the writers, as opposed to posing as judge over the selection of the “best” writing submitted.

That is not to say I am ceding “good” writing to other magazines. I think each issue has been closer to what I’d like in a literary magazine, both people-wise and writing-wise.

JC: Yeah, one of the things I really like about Pop Serial is that it seems less ‘literary journal’ and more of some kind of, I don’t know, ‘curated art exhibit’, if that makes sense. Each piece seems to fit together, sometimes aesthetically, sometimes thematically, sometimes in ways that are hard to really pinpoint.

I think Pop Serial feels like a journal that not only features very solid work, but features lots of writers whose work compliments the other writers in many ways. It feels like some type of diverse literary movement, whereas other journals, while highly enjoyable, feel like disparate collections of ‘alt lit’ writings. When I was putting Banango Street together, Rachel and I wanted to create something that seemed to ‘flow’ together in the same way as Pop Serial, by initially soliciting a lot of writers that were close to each other, but we ended up with an initial batch of submissions that, while very good, did not have nearly the amount of aesthetic and thematic diversity as Pop Serial.

Anyways, a question (probably a shitty one) bouncing off of this: why do you think Pop Serial seems to create a ‘community’ with the writers it features, while other journals don’t have the same type of feel. Other journals that, oftentimes, feature work that is much more similar than the work in Pop Serial?

STD: Thanks for the kind words, I’m glad you think there are interrelations between the pieces in the magazine. I do want to create the feeling of a collective or movement, if you like. But I also want stylistic diversity and excitement, so I’m glad you don’t think the work is too same-y from one writer to the next.

There is some hard-to-define combination of personality, dedication, and style that most of the contributors seem to have, that I like a lot and look for in new contributors. It’s hard for me to explain why I like certain writers.

As far as creating a sense of community, the aforementioned tumblr I think helps to create that, and the socializing contributors do. A lot of us are friends. That happens through gchat and Facebook and having things in common I guess. Another way there is a collective feel is via carrying over some contributors from one issue to the next.

JC: Where did the idea to release the pieces individually, once a day, initially come from? I feel like it is a really good way of releasing a journal, because it ensures that each piece gets the individual attention that they might miss if it was all released at once.

STD: Cool, glad you like that. It occurred to me one day as an idea. I have liked this way of releasing an issue online a lot better than putting it all up at once. I wanted to increase the chance of each piece being read and appreciated and to attract attention to the issue over a prolonged period of time. And I think it’s more fun this way.

JC: We discussed the origins of Pop Serial, but I was wondering if you could discuss how you got into the indie/alt/whatever lit scene in the first place. It seems that a lot of people are being introduced to it through Pop Serial now, so I think it’d be interesting to know how you arrived in it pre-PS.

STD: I found the online lit scene via a HTMLGIANT post by Blake Butler about how there are no Joyces today, like that the current publishing climate wouldn’t be friendly to “another Joyce.” I was very into Joyce in college (and still admire him a lot) and so I must have been searching his name and found the post or something. Through HTMLGIANT I realized there were writers out there who socialized online and that there were online journals and a way to get published and participate in a scene of some kind as a writer. Through HTMLGIANT I found Tao Lin and that led to the magazine as I said.

JC: Broad question here: it seems like ‘alt-lit’ has exploded over the past year or so. I entered the scene about a year ago, and it feels so much bigger now. With Pop Serial acting as a type of ‘gateway’ into ‘alt-lit’, I feel like you would maybe have some insight into this: why do you think that ‘alt-lit’ has been growing so much?

STD: I don’t know. I agree there has been an influx of new people in the scene in the last year or so. I think some people come to the scene through Steve Roggenbuck now, instead of through Tao Lin or some other way, and Steve works hard at spreading his work and building a community. That could be a factor, although Steve seeks and likes non-writers as readers, so he is not attracting only fellow writers to the scene. I don’t know.  

JC: Playing off the “another Joyce” thing, I’ve noticed that literature in general, regardless of whether it is ‘alt’ or ‘mainstream’ or ‘genre’ seems to like to define new writers in a formulaic, “x is the y” kind of way. What do you think about this kind of generalization, where a writer is judged relative to past writers that worked in similar ways and not judged completely on their own works?

STD: I’d probably be flattered if someone whose opinion I respected compared me favorably to a writer I admire. Otherwise I don’t really care. The potential upside of “x is the new y” for a writer is that a reader may check out said writer’s work because of such a comparison.

JC: If someone did compare you and your writing (or even you and your work with Pop Serial) to one or a few writers from the past, which would you feel most flattered about being compared to?

STD: Salinger, Joyce, Beckett, Barney Rosset.

JC: I really enjoyed reading the story you posted on your blog, “Sad Cave.” I’ve noticed, however, that your own personal writing seems to not be as present online as many other people associated with Pop Serial and ‘alt-lit’. Was wondering if, playing off this observation, you could compare/contrast your role as an editor with your role as a writer.

STD: Thank you, glad you liked it. I’m not a very prolific writer, I agree.

I don’t kid myself that all my writing (or any of my writing (?)) is “good,” “great,” whatever, but I’m not attracted to pumping out an ebook every other week or pooping a poem a day onto my tumblr or whatever.

I’m also lazy and undisciplined, though, and haven’t gotten into a habit of writing every day. I’d like that to change so I have a book or books out before I’m 30.

I view the editor thing as something I can do like a job almost, except it’s mostly enjoyable and I don’t get paid. My writing has happened mostly through inspiration so far—I’ll have a concept or a person will inspire me. I generally do whatever the hell I want as an editor, purposely, but I do feel a small obligation to my contributors to do a good job.

As a writer I am obliged only to feelings.

JC: Last question. We like to end with this question a lot: why write?

STD: As a kid I picked the trumpet, instead of drums, and I never learned to write music. Because I loved to read. Because I want to gesture at some thing before I croak.

                                                           You should probably check this out.

M.G. Martin’s Pangur Ban Party chap Fall Out Of Your Skin came out a couple weeks ago. this ain’t no jagged little pill. it’s very short and very swallowable at just 8 poems. 

The poems are odd and surreal and sometimes when there’s an “i” or a “we” it’s hard to tell exactly who that is, but it’s secondary. 

M.G. Martin doesn’t care about punctuation unless it’s in his name you can read the middle four poems all in one breath because there are no periods or commas but there are so many cool images you’ll have to go back and read them again two three four times and sharks cigarettes hurricanes fruitflies grandmothers with knives and a lot of motherfuckers all make sometimes repeat appearances throughout  

This might be an insider’s judgement because he has sent me drunken emails in the past few days, but i think Martin might’ve written some of these poems when he was drunk, or at least started them drunk and then gone back and worked on them a little sober the next day, but then probably gotten drunk again and finished them.

My favorite thing here is the opening poem, “depth perception oven,” which is one of the more conventionally structured pieces in the book. It has this terrible sadness about the end of childhood innocence. It reads like a Jeff Mangum or Will Sheff lyric. Someone get a guitar and sing this shit and send me a video. A taste: “Everything was so large that mother had to explain that because we could fit in the oven we weren’t allowed to shower with father any longer.”

FOOYS ends with a poem called “even though i probably won’t,” and it’s about the poet’s imminent death, and it’s even stranger because it comes at the end of the book. So it almost feels like Martin just died after you finish reading it. Spooky.
 
Also, Mr. Martin gets an automatic 1000 bonus points just for including richard brautigan’s name in a poem, and then writing a poem about brautigan’s grocery store purchasing habits.

Read these standout lines, and then read the book, motherfucker.

“when we were children everything was so large we thought growing up meant being able to turn out the moonlight when the sun started to rise & o to do this with our hands.” (depth perception oven)
 
“richard brautigan never pays for a massage.” (richard brautigan)

“grandma is brandishing a knife of lust & death is cross-dressing in my darkroom” (o grandma you cigarette)

“when the floodwaters bring the sharks into the streets if this happens it is better to feed the sharks day time television than to say anything at all” (if a shark has ears)

“o death you are a cigarette in a hurricane” (even though i probably won’t)

BY MATT MARGO

Michael Inscoe is the author of Don’t Die Alone, a collection of poetry and fiction that was originally published in April 2011 and republished in a revised second edition in March 2012. It is available as a paperback for $9.00 and as an ebook for free. I recently finished reading the book for the first time, and these are some of my favorite sentences, stanzas, and lines from it.

Sentences:

“Memory thinks often of killing herself, but knows she should wait, because she doesn’t want the act to be related to her mother’s recent death.”

“She knows she will get an ‘A’ on the paper, but she will never know whether or not Dr. Blithe actually really paid attention to it, or read it, but while thinking about her hips and small breasts and mouth forming a smirk, forming an ‘O’ shape, silently speaking the word ‘morbid.’”

“Mark is in the bathroom at work. He feels sick and he is sweating. He is sitting on the toilet. He is reading an email from Sarah. He considers responding but he doesn’t feel like he could focus. He opens the application Safari and reads a short story by Ellen Kennedy. He feels sick and he is sweating.”

“Akon walks across the street. A car swerves to miss him and honks. Akon feels angry and confused at the consequential temporary meaningfulness it gives his life.”

Stanzas:

“That was the first time I ever drank coffee
So hot it burned my tongue

And Grant made fun of me later at the Taco Bell somewhere outside of town
For complaining about the sandpapery soreness”

“Listen, I’ve had enough of the picturesque, of colors and charm
Love, its tenderness and its cruelty”

“two hours alone
the cinema
a video
my family
my car
january
i’m celebrating the incineration”

“He went home and watched the Michael Jackson Memorial with his roommate. John Mayer was playing guitar in front of a casket where Michael Jackson’s dead body supposedly was and everyone was wearing sunglasses.
His roommate was irate at the disrespectful nature of the program.”

Lines:

“I want to sneak outside and have a beer chugging contest and laugh and get a little beer on our chins or shirts and both think that at that moment we would rather be doing nothing else”

“This poem is going to sneak into your email inbox and delete some of your important emails I don’t know why yet”

“I can shop for noise-canceling headphones online and think of you and your pursed lips”

“Later, on my way to work one evening, there was no more snow, and the ice was all gone, and I was strangely able to picture all those things vividly, the blue and yellow lights, your arm in mine, afraid you might fall on the ice”

“The waiter thought the temporary tattoo on your leg was real and we all made fun of him on the drive home”

“Exhume my bones when the time comes please”

Jackson Nieuwland:  Yo Mike is it cool if I interview you?

Mike Kitchell:  totally

JN: Sweet I’ll just jump right in then.