| CARVIEW |
A couple poems of mine are up at iO: A Journal of New American Poetry. If you’ve bought cut sunflowers often enough to know better (they always die immediately) or share my feeling that the seasons can’t change quickly enough, you might enjoy them.
There’s lots of other work there to enjoy, too; iO is marvelously well-curated thanks to editors Kyle McCord and Wendy Xu.
Proving that online journals have advantages beyond low budgets and broad accessibility, Better mag includes video and audio of all the poetry it publishes. So check me out in their fifth issue reading a couple of poems (The old ghost of the ghost-place, Ring ring, and The result of staying in the land you come from). Friends have dubbed it both “intimate” and “awkward.”
While you’re there, maybe say what up to Betsy Wheeler or Sam Cha.
Five (count ’em) new poems of mine appeared in H_NGM_N 16, including The naturalist, one of my personal favorites, in which I ask:
“Who told the monarchs to migrate?
Not me I was with the desert wind
Telling it to blow”
Not to mention Also, thank you, in which I talk to my food, saying:
“Congratulations
and it says
Congratulations for what”
How exciting for bird lovers! My poem “The birds on the streets in the trees” is in the new (as in just launched yesterday) issue of Sixth Finch. Along with another poem, “An economy,” which is about gear–not birding gear exactly, but close. It’s also about being polite. Also at the Finch, you’ll find poems by Mike Young, Martin Rock, and others, along with some cool art. And when I say cool, I mean cool.
And, in case you hadn’t had the chance, yet, to pick up a copy of everyone’s favorite tall literary magazine, I also have a new poem (“The box”) in Conduit #21, “Bodies in Motion.” And it also features naked pictures of athletes, plus poems by Noah Gershman, Ben Kopel, and Amanda Nadelberg, which are kind of the same thing. Not that the poems are the same as each other–that they’re all similar to naked athletes. In the way where you just want to keep looking at them.
You guys, life seems a little intense lately. It’s been a really busy few months–finishing the thesis, its defense and submission, picking out a law school, the magazine, lots of travel, the Juniper Institute–and on Sunday, just as the Juniper Festival and its attendant amazing readings and (ahem) amazing parties was coming to a close, I had what I’d like to call a David-goes-to-the-dentist moment, if I may. “IS THIS FOREVER???”
The thing is that whenever a larger force is acting upon your emotions (e.g. hormones, or some fast-approaching deadline) it really helps to recognize that. It gets easier to deal with those emotions, somehow, once you’ve diagnosed them.
I find that I usually make said diagnosis just a little late. So Sunday afternoon (we don’t have to go into what happened Saturday night), I answered my own question. NO, IT’S NOT FOREVER! I realized I was actually graduating. God, when I graduated from college, I cried for a month. (Happy tears.) At some level, of course, I knew that my time here was coming to an end–Ben and I have begun the apartment hunt in New York–but now I understand the emotional Technicolor I’m experiencing.
Into said emotional technicolor comes notnostrum’s review of THE TIDE.
I read it and I thought, these guys are such good readers. And what a rare skill that is. And I felt so grateful for the community of which I’ve been privileged to be part over these last three years. And I thought, I am so, so glad that the Pioneer Valley isn’t very far from New York.
Excuse me while I clear my throat. Obviously I’m a bit rusty. Sorry for the long silence.
I break it with two bits of news!
First, for those of you in the Pioneer Valley–I’ll be reading at Live Lit on Friday night. And I’m delighted to be reading with Christy Crutchfield, Katie Hoffman, and Gustavo Llarull. It’s at 8 pm, at Amherst Books as usual. Come, and be delighted!
Second, for those of you on the internet. There is a prize to be won, a prize-winning prize. You’re witty. Visit this delightful blog, write some witty captions, and if you win (over the forces of darkness), they will send you a copy of Jedediah Berry’s THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL. You lucky god, you.
So Jack sent around a link to Wordle, a website that will make you a weighted map of the words in any given piece of text. Here’s one for my manuscript-in-progress, “Open Season.” And here’s one I made of a chapter (“The Lobster Quadrille”) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
It isn’t the Puppy Channel, but it’s still pretty cool.
The Poetry Society of America has a gorgeous new website up–congratulations to Brett, Rob, et al, for what I know must have been a lot of work. Among lots of other terrific content that I’ll encourage you to browse independently, there’s a little interview with me, wherein I confess that, as with so much else in my life, I first came to poetry as a means to avoid homework. Many thanks to Hannah for taking the photo that appears there!
I am in among the leaves (in several senses, one depending whether the photo of leaves is the one that randomly loads) over at Absent. Issue number four is live! And very pretty. They recommend a “modern” browser, which I guess means that you should accept that update you’ve been putting off. If you use a PC, I hear Google Chrome is real neat.
Also, the LSAT score is back, and it is good. It definitely puts me within shooting range of all my target schools. Now, it’s on to applications: blam! blam! blam!
… to Seth Landman’s new project, Divine Magnet. You’ll find videos of poets reading, poets you either already love or poets you should love, the kind of poets you can’t help but love. And alongside the videos, there are short essays about their work. By other poets, as it happens.
It was my pleasure to be asked to write about Lewis Freedman’s poems, which are–as I say in the essay–necessary toys, a great challenge and a great pleasure at once. I think you’ll enjoy them, and the sight of Lewis’s face, which, unsurprisingly, is blinding in its beauty. Or is that the sun?
One of the many reasons I was so glad to write this essay is that I’ve been laboring, lately, over my personal statement for my law school applications. Last week I was desperately stressed about my LSAT scores, which I’ll get next week or the week after. Then I decided to put all that energy into the personal statement. I made some revisions that had the effect of making a not-very-good first draft even worse, then sent around the new and terrible draft for comment, feeling like, well, at least I had accomplished something. I got some constructive, but negative, feedback–I’m not yet very good with criticism, as much as I want to be–and nearly gave up writing sentences forever. But thinking and writing about Lewis’s poems helped me to remember myself, regarding words and the act of putting them together. It’s not that it’s always fun, or easy, although it sometimes is. It’s not that it saves the world, or that you necessarily get to write yourself into the future of your dreams. It’s simpler than that: for me, and maybe for many of you as well, there just isn’t any better way to be in the world. Words are our pickaxes and our anchors, the best tools at our disposal for the work we want to do. Go listen to Lewis read and see if you don’t agree.
Jessica Fjeld