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:

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.

BY: JUSTIN CARTER

Diana Salier contributes to this blog & one time we started a collaboration that I never finished working on because I am really bad at finishing shit. Hey Diana, will email you later with 90s lyrics. Okay. Okay.

I said that because I am really biased & should not be reviewing this but I am doing it anyways.

Here are things I liked about this book:

- The longer poems feel really New York School-ish in a good way. There are references to O’Hara & Ferlinghetti and lots of stuff I am too dumb to understand. These poems are really aware. I like them.

- Some of the longer poems make me say ‘damn I wish I wrote these.’

Here are some random lines that I really really liked in this. Buy the book if you like these lines.

(from “not all asses are created equal”)

the minute we cross van ness

the sun goes away

and the old dude kicking me out

of the music shop

says     be careful, it’s winter out there

and it’s september

(from “one night in echo park and suddenly i feel mummified”)

i fought with a girl who i thought

i loved at the time

because i would not believe that she loved me

i slept by the second floor window

above a liquor shop

that sold flowers next to our booze

woke up in search of pepperoni pizza

and a bottled root beer,

because that’s all you can really do

when the girl you think you might love

might not love you back anymore

and when you stare at the sun

and the sunspots disappear

you think you’ll never forget

being this young

but you will

someday

you will

(from “how to fight nostalgia”)

BAM you’re curled up on the corner

arms around your waist rocking back and forth

remembering your last love

your first love your old enemies

the first beer you drank   the last war you saw

and when you look up nostalgia is standing

over your prostrate body

Damn. Damn. Damn. Diana Salier knows how to write a goddamn sad love poem.

Okay. Things I did not like as much:

- some of the shorter poems felt a lot less emotionally strong and resonant

- the poems about the end of the world drew me out of the book some, felt like it kept the book from having an established mood of being really fucking sad and lonely (although the book was very much about being sad and lonely)

Overall this was a good book. It had a lot of good poems. It makes me want to get drunk and cry.

BY: JUSTIN CARTER

When Pop Serial 2 came out I tried to review every piece in it but there were too many.

Pop Serial 3 is being released in a serialized format though so I am going to try again. I will probably not be able to keep it up.

Pop Serial was the first alt lit journal that I became interested in, I think. I remember downloading the .pdf of the first issue and reading it and liking it.

The first piece in the new issue is by Luna Miguel. It is in Spanish. It is translated in the issue by Jeremy Spencer.

I do not speak Spanish very well anymore so I am only going to review the translations. Which is a damn shame, because as wonderful as the translations are, I’m sure they are missing something from the originals. Translation is too imperfect sometimes. Sometimes translators produce work as good or better than the work they translate though. So, I don’t know.

The first piece here is “Symptoms.”

This poem is in sections. The first section is my favorite:

I really like this. The poem makes a lot of “I” statement and normally I dislike “I” poems a lot, but I really like this one. The speaker seems to subtly negate other things that the speaker had said sometimes.

The second poem is “Red Bull Without Sugar.”

This poem is more narrative. It is about porn. It ends with: “because I cannot say no/ to Another damned me”. This part seems very deep.

Luna Miguel wrote two good poems. Jeremy Spencer did some cool translation.

I am looking forward to more of Pop Serialsoon.

by: Justin Carter

Section 1: Books That I Own/ Have Ordered

Light Boxes by Shane Jones: Russ Woods suggested this book to me on gchat. I don’t know much about it. I flipped through the pages and it looks very stylistically interesting. I think this will be the next book I read.

I Am A Productive Entrepreneur by Mathias Svalina: I ordered this book. I hope it comes in soon. Svalina wrote a poetry collection called Destruction Myth that I loved a whole whole lot. The poetry was very strange and, probably using this word wrong, very surreal.

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore: Read the first story out of this. Loved it. Stopped reading it and read Lorrie’s novels instead.

Bed by Tao Lin: Read, I think, three stories from this. Have read all of Tao’s novels but for some reason have not finished this. I felt like it was good and it reminded me of Moore a little bit at times.

During My Nervous Breakdown I Want To Have A Biographer Present by Brandon Scott Gorrell: Got this a few weeks ago. It is sitting next to my bed. I have read Megan Boyle and Ellen Kennedy’s books from Muumuu House and enjoyed them so I think I will like this book also, but I am not sure.

So You Know It’s Me by Brian Oliu: Ordered this. It is made up of lyric essays that Oliu posted on Craigslist. I am hoping it arrives in the mail soon.

Part 2: Books That I Do Not Own That I Should Order Or Find From The Library Or Something

Grow Up by Ben Brooks: This has not been published in America yet but I could probably find a way to get it if I tried. It has been getting a lot of hype. I think it reflects a lot of things about youth culture. I don’t know.

Normally Special by xTx: I read her chapbook and I liked it, though it made me feel discomforted. Her story collection probably would too, but I think I need to read it anyways. It has gotten some good press.

Mercury by Ariana Reines: I am currently reading The Cow and it is blowing me the fuck away. I don’t know what to say about Reines’ poetry that hasn’t been said. She is one of the most unique poetic voices writing poetry today.

What Is Amazing by Heather Christle: This book snuck up on me. I got both of Christle’s full length collections a few months ago. They are a nice blend of beauty and strangeness and a lot of other things. I feel like this book will be something like that also.

Part 3: Books That I Have Not Read Due To Them Not Being Released Yet

Crunk Juice by Steve Roggenbuck: Not sure what this book will be. Not sure how I will feel about reading it. If it has as much heart in it as Steve’s previous books, I think I will like it a lot.

Fjords Volume 1 by Zachary Schomburg: Schomburg is my favorite prose poem/flash fiction/weird things that are somewhere in between writer. I read his first two collections in one day, sitting in a small room at my college. Please read his first two books. Please do it now. Then finish reading this list.

Cataclysm Baby by Matt Bell: Bell’s short story collection How They Were Found was strange but satisfying. The stories seemed to deal a lot with place and loss (or both, as in the story involving some guys at/near the North Pole that are all losing their memories). Not sure what this book is about.

Level End by Brian Oliu: This is a collection of lyric essays about video games. I read a few excerpts online and loved them.

Untitled Book (or I can’t remember what the title is) by Gabby Gabby: I know nothing about this, just that it comes out in two-ish years and I am ready for it.

Everything that Love Symbol Press is planning on publishing: Seriously, they have M Kitchell, Joshua Kleinberg, Matt Rowan, and Heather Palmer books in the pipeline.

Please let me know if I am missing any great books that deserve to be read.

Many things came out on Valentine’s Day 2012. Most of them will be reviewed here. Some of the bigger things will be given due consideration and reviewed at a later point. Read on.

OKSTUPID by Walter Mackey
reviewed by Justin Carter

Walter Mackey wrote a story about love for Valentines Day. It is about Sarah and Greg. They meet through OkCupid. They are both depressed. Greg is in an emo band. They talk on AIM. They meet at a library. They discuss things like ‘being straight edge’ and ‘being vegan’ and ‘Skype sex’. The story is told in a very deadpan way. It reminds me of Tao Lin sometimes. It uses details to draw emotion out of the characters and the story.

I think the story here is interesting. I think the writing might be a little rough in spots but there is clearly a lot of emotion in the story. I think that the emotion and the way that Walter pays attention to small details and uses them to build up the characters is good. I feel like you should read this. I feel like Walter Mackey has a good grasp on human emotion. I am unsure how to comment on the Paul Cunningham controversy surrounding Walter because I have never read Zachary German. I don’t know. There is a gchat excerpt from Spencer Madsen and Stacey Teague at the beginning of this ebook and I find that interesting.


Pretty Flowers by Gabby Gabby
reviewed by Rachel Hyman

Gabby Gabby wrote a chapbook called “Pretty Flowers.” Pretty Flowers blows the Black Dot Series out of the water. True to its name, the words in the chapbook are pretty. They’re also conversational, and evocative, and sweet. I read the chapbook and imagined Gabby Gabby sitting on her bed, or maybe by a window, with a faint smile, speaking half to me and half to whatever’s out there. Pretty Flowers is wry but quiet in its beauty.

She says:

I don’t think I really like state fairs but I like the idea of being the type of person that likes state fairs.

I think if I tried hard enough I could really be that person.

She speaks of buying a corn dog just to hold it at the top of a Ferris wheel.

She moves from state fairs to the 50 states, wondering if the people on one side of Michigan miss the people on the other side.

She thinks about the square states in the Midwest, and how she would spend her whole life trying to be a circle if she lived in one of those square states.

She shows us, with a picture, how Virginia slopes upward or downward, depending on your point of view.

In one of the last few lines, she admits, “Maybe I am an optimist. At least for today.”

Reading Pretty Flowers makes me optimistic for the future of alt lit. It’s casually pretty, effortlessly touching, without being overly quaint or twee. Highly recommended.

Love Stories/Hate Stories by Russ Woods and Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
reviewed by Jackson Nieuwland

I’ve been looking forward to this book for a while

because Russ Woods has been one of my favorite poets for a while.

Once I made a facebook status update about how awesome Russ Woods is.

I don’t know anything about Brett Elizabeth Jenkins.

The concept is simple:

Russ wrote love stories

and Brett wrote hate stories.

These stories are in the form of poems.

These poems are my favorite type of poems.

They are short.

They are witty.

They are fun.

They are funny.

They explore the concept of the joke as poetry, which I am very interested in (the joke form is just begging to be utilized in poetry, right? Especially since failed jokes are always funnier than successful ones, right? (shout out to Adam Robinson)).

They are spare/minimalistic.

They are beautifully balanced (I love a poem that uses line breaks well like so many of these do) (the collection as a whole is also really well balanced because the two writers play off each other wonderfully. Maybe a few poems could have been cut though because a few jokes/references were recycled).

They are not obvious.

They are well laid out.

They are making me write a review that is so overwhelming positive that I want to think of a few detractors to throw in to make it seem more balanced…

Ummmmmmm

…

Nah

Everything is fantastic


Kimbra by Zack Schuster
reviewed by B. Barrera
B. Barrera attends an MFA program in fiction at a university in America

“Love is like a silhouette in dreams.” 

When Kimbra sings this line in a hot pink dress in the official Youtube video, I have no idea what she’s talking about.  Zack Schuster, in his story Kimbra, however, manages to turn this idea into something palpable in a relationship between two characters.  This story is made up of tiny moments, wiping a  stray hair from across the face of a beloved, feeling the cold on bare feet, and these tiny, stolen moments are all this couple has to work with as a relationship.  They seem to be “Cameo Lovers,” able to share only night time with each other until one of them is pulled away from their bed into the unremarkable realm of the awake.  There does seem to be something else hinted at about their relationship.  At one point the man leaves his sleeping lover voluntarily for—what?  an affair perhaps?  With such sparse prose it’s difficult to really tell what else is at the heart of their hurt, besides just never being awake at the same time, but there is definitely something deeper at work.

The prose, while sparing, is lovely.  The atmosphere of Kimbra is wistful and romantic, everything colored in black and white.  The warm, dark fullness of his lover’s hair and their bed together vs. the cold room, the man leaving the bed in his “tidy-whities,” a color palette worthy of Kimbra’s own signature look.  And the setting where the lovers finally meet, awake at the same time when their love becomes something real and not just a “silhouette” is suitably colored “brown.”  The use of Kimbra lyrics in between sections of prose is lovely, the black-and-white atmosphere of the silhouette love the characters have is perfectly heartbreaking, I just wish there had been a few more “brown” moments with the characters interacting, that they had really “opened up [their] heart to me,” instead of kept me at a distance.        

I’m going to fuck. And that’s a place you little asshole, not a verb by Pancho Espinosa
reviewed by Walter Mackey

If there is one thing Pancho Espinoza is good at, it is creating imagery. This little collection of poems completely blew me away when it comes to translating words into images in my fried little brain. From lines like ‘I’m like a Windows ‘98 screensaver at [night]’ to ‘I know there’s people lined up outside of Best Buy right now’—you really get a sense of how Pancho’s words form these beautiful pictures in your brain that you would have probably not even thought of if you hadn’t read this collection entitled ‘I’m going to Fuck and that’s a place you little asshole, not a verb’.

I thought it was really funny that Beach Sloth in his review decided to do some further research to find out if there was actually a place called ‘Fuck’. However, he states that ‘The title is incorrect. There is no place with the name ‘Fuck’. A town in Austria is called ‘Fucking’. Unsurprisingly that small town in rural Austria has a serious problem with people stealing its signs’ [Beachy Beachy Sloth Sloth 2012]. Nevertheless, I think there should be a place called ‘fuck’. I mean, in my province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, there is a place called ‘Dildo’. Yeah, I’m serious. Look it up. In the excerpt from the Dildo, Newfoundland wiki page, I think it’s really funny that it states ‘It is located on the southeastern Dildo Arm of Trinity Bay about 60 kilometres west of St. John’s’ [Wikipedia 2012]. I mean, I think ‘Dildo Arm’ just sounds a Hell of a lot worst than Dildo. Right? Upon hearing Dildo Arm, I just recall my first experience to a sex shop and being emotionally damaged for weeks.

The poem ‘yes, I am mulder and this is scully’ really reminds me of a Steve Roggenbuck poem. I can really picture Steve shouting in his Mr. Bean voice ‘i am like a retarded seven-year-old when I am with you’. Also, I think the poem at the end of this collection is Spanish. However, I don’t effing know because I’m from Canada and French is my second language. I’ll have to ask Jacob Steinberg about this because I don’t know if I could even have a conversation with Luna Miguel. I always click on the ‘view translation’ links on her statuses and they always appear in really broken English.

Overall, this was a really great collection. I felt depressed after reading most of these poems but I feel that is okay. I am depressed. I am really content with being depressed. It gives me character. It’s part of my ‘brand’. Being ‘depressed’ is totally ‘in’ these days. Feeling depressed? Pop a Xanax. Feeling depressed? Write a poem. Feeling severely depressed? Read ‘I’m going to Fuck and that’s a place, you little asshole and not a verb’.

Oh, also, Pancho Espinoza, I think your writing is incredible and your blog is even more perfect. I luv u, lil bb.


the moon looks red and the sky looks black by Keegan Crawford
reviewed by Justin Carter

Keegan Crawford completes the trifecta of the new emerging voices that I am about to, at this moment, dub the “Screaming Seahorsers.” (The others are Walter Mackey and Gabby Gabby). Keegan’s v-day release is in the form of these tiny little vignettes. The “forward” and “back” links in the collection function as part of the text also. There is a self-awareness in Keegan’s writing that I really like. Here is an example:

Sometimes I wonder if wearing enough black will make me completely invisible, and then I think about how that’s really dumb.

Every piece in this feels like it has strong emotions, but the language is very concrete, for the most part. The emotion in the text comes more from how the reader interprets the writing than from the writing itself. I hope that makes sense. Keegan shows very good control over the language of these pieces. They are easy to understand. Here is another example from the text:

Slow song and I hold you and you put your head on my shoulder and we kiss by a tree and try to find some other place to go but we go home instead and a couple years go by and I still have the ticket in a box in my closet and I still kiss you the same way.

Whereas, I think, other writers in the ‘alt lit’ scene would have a tendency to try to focus more on how these characters are feeling, Keegan gives us the details. He uses language that makes the details clear and forces the reader to understand perfectly what he is trying to say.

*****
Other things that dropped on Valentine’s Day include:

-NAP Issue 2.3
-Pank Issue 7.2
-UP Issue 2
-i’m not a slut, i’m a romantic by Jacob Steinberg (paypal jrs542@nyu.edu $1)

by Justin Carter

I recently received the following chapbooks in my mail box: tiny people by Russ Woods, He Is Talking to the Fat Lady by xTx, I Don’t Respect Female Expression by Frank Hinton, and make-believe love-making by Ana C.

I am going to write short reviews of each one and tell you why you should acquire them.

tiny people

Russ Woods is one of my favorite poets right now. I reviewed his online chapbook ‘pictures of salukis looking majestic’ here. This chapbook was released by NAP. It is about tiny people. Russ is one of the best writers in terms of creating poems that look exciting visually. Each page of the chapbook shows this off. Some pages feature words in small little boxes. Some pages feature lots of tiny boxes ‘wallpapering’ the background. Some pages have words in shapes. Sometimes when I read Russ’s online poems that do this, I feel a little disoriented, but when I read them in print, it is exciting and I do not become disoriented at all.

The chapbook makes me feel sad for the tiny people inside Russ Woods’s body. I don’t know if the tiny people are real. Maybe they aren’t. I don’t know.

make-believe love-making

Ana C is one of my favorite people in the internet literature. She edits New Wave Vomit, one of my favorite online journals. She sent me this chapbook during a “email me your address and I will mail you a free copy of my chapbook” thing.

This chapbook talks a lot about love and longing and sex. Ana’s writes words that make the speaker seem very vulnerable, words like:

my shirt is not touching yours

and i just feel really scared

because my seatbelt is off

remember i took it off

just for you

This chapbook feels vulnerable. It feels like it misses things. It makes love but, as the title says, it is not real love. Everything is pretend.

I Don’t Respect Female Expression

“All Of The People In These Pictures Are Dead Now” is possibly the best prose piece I have read so far in 2012. The rest of the chapbook are almost as great.

The longer pieces in this chapbook all seem to be about relationships and how they are shitty but finding a little beauty in them and the memories of them. Some of the relationships are sexual and some are family. Some are relationships between different parts of the self.

The shorter pieces also have this same theme but they focus a little more on the self, I think.

I want to write like Frank Hinton writes.

He Is Talking to the Fat Lady

xTx is another anonymous internet writer. Her chapbook seems very violent.

Here is an example of that:

He sometimes hits me and the hits hurt. The hits hurt for hours after they’ve been given to me. Days. Weeks. Years.

Throughout the chapbook, there is a constantly reoccurring theme of violence against women. This violence is talked about in a fairly neutral tone, but I think xTx is trying to highlight some serious issues. More than any of these other chapbooks, I think this elevates the most past “personal” issues and more into the territory of “important social” issues. I don’t know if this was the intention of the chapbook, but I left each piece worrying about the characters in it. I left the book with a fear in my stomach that bad shit was happening in the world.

 Bad shit happens in this chapbook. And while it is enjoyable to read, more than these other books it also is painful to read. I don’t think I would pick this up and read it again. I think reading again would causes me to feel the same fear it did on the first read. Again, I don’t know if this is the intention of the collection, but it works. It makes me feel something. Saying I don’t want to read it again is in no ways a “knock” on the book. I think it is a compliment. I think xTx made a strong book that causes me to feel and think about things that I don’t want to feel and think about.

by Justin Carter

I just got out of a craft talk/ lecture by Mark Halliday and J Allyn Rosser (which also featured Tony Hoagland and Kevin Prufer and Ange Mlinko asking questions (who needs AWP, this was probably better) ~10 minutes ago. The craft talk was about “everything” poems, by which they meant poems that attempt to discuss everything and the inability to be able to discuss everything and the exhaustion that can be found in these poems that attempt to do this. Also discussed were poems that were “anti-everything” and, as Rosser said, acted like “black holes” to the idea of the everything poem.

Poems we read/looked at include: “Great Topics of the World” by Albert Goldbarth, “Minor Figure” by Mary Ruefle, “Dog Toy” by Dean Young, and “The Living” by Robert Pinsky. The example of an “anti-everything” poem was Yehuda Amichai’s “The Diameter of the Bomb.”

The everything poem was looked at as a poem that wants to tell the reader about everything it can. It uses lots of images and lots of fragmentation and it usually does not have much of a narrative branch, although there is usually enough to “ground” the poem.

Dean Young writes these poems a lot. Ange Mlinko brought up the idea of the everything poem not being “memorable.” I love Dean Young, but if I was asked right now to write down some Dean Young lines, I could not do it. I can give you poem titles I like, but not lines. I felt like Mlinko’s concern was valid. Halliday countered by saying that the mood that these poems evoked could be memorable. I agreed with this.

I don’t write everything poems. When I have tried to write an everything poem I have ended up with a mass of images floating around on a page. Nothing was “grounding” my images. I think this is something that I learned at this lecture. If I want to write about everything, it needs to be grounded in something.

It also needs to show an awareness of the exhaustion that writing about everything must have. The Mary Ruefle poem is a good example of that.

I love Mary Ruefle.

Meanwhile, the “anti” everything poem, the Amichai piece, began by expanding in a way that suggested it would be an everything poem, but then ended with a type of meaninglessness and nothingness. Kevin Prufer mentioned this poem by Archibald MacLeish that does the same type of thing.

I don’t know what else to say about this topic. I hope it is interesting. I hope someone will want to discuss the “everything” poem with me.

To tie this to the “alt lit” world, and to encourage feedback, can you think of any poems in that scene that would be considered an everything poem?

by: Justin Carter

edit: link to the actual collection is HERE.

I don’t know who Gabby Gabby is. The best I can figure out is that she lives in Williamsburg, Virginia (thanks Beach Sloth) and that she surfaced on the ‘alt-lit’ scene fairly recently. She had a poem published in the first issue of a new online journal called ‘screaming seahorse’. She has something forthcoming at Metazen. She has posted some pictures of herself wearing little to no clothing on the internet. She has written some very good essays.

I guess I know a little. Idk.

The Black Dot Series is very minimalistic. Each poem features a large black circle with text inside, and then features another line of text underneath the circle.

I’m not entirely sure what to say about these poems.

Gabby Gabby seems to be writing from a place of loneliness and desire and longing. These poems feel like they went through terrible break-ups and then were hung on clotheslines for a little while, in the summer sun, until they were red and crying. These poems feel like they are sinking ships and you have this hope that you will survive even though you know that you are going to drown in the North Atlantic. These poems are the Titanic.

I am not including text here because the poems are all very short and you should just go read them all.

These poems have caused me to have a small tear inside my left eye that refuses to finish coming out.

This review is worthless. Read these poems because they will probably make you feel sad. Read them because they probably make Gabby Gabby feel sad also.

Read them so you can be sad, because being sad is the first step to not being sad in the future.

These poems are sinking stones. These poems are not skipping along the creek’s surface. They are falling. These poems are falling. These poems do not know how to swim.

Drown with these poems.

Please.