Matter Press Compressed Journal of Creative Arts

Month: October 2011

Abundance, image 26

by Joseph Young

Editor’s Note: Each Monday we’ve been publishing individual pieces from Joseph Young’s Abundance. Abundance is 27 occurrences: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25.

Joseph Young lives in Baltimore. His book of microfictions, Easter Rabbit, was released by Publishing Genius in December 2009; he is currently shopping out a second manuscript of microfiction. He also enjoys creating concrete representations of text, and this work has been included in a number of art shows in Baltimore. Some of this work can be found at TextShop.blogspot.com or www.verysmalldogs.blogspot.com.

Author’s Note. I was looking to do a project that would remind me of the abundance of my life, the many cool experiences I’ve had, people I’ve met, and I was looking to do something in text and image. I wanted to do something I’d not done before, material and process wise, so I came up with the idea of using a stencil and Letraset letters. The figure is a rough stencil I made from a photo of myself, spray painted on cardstock. Over about a week, I wrote the various pieces of text based on my memories and applied them to the cards with Letraset.

Writing Sample

by Jamie Iredell

Author’s Note: Students in the University System of Georgia must take and pass a Regents’ Exam in writing. I’ve taught a Regents’ Exam prep course, and in freshman composition I have generally been required to teach students how to pass this test. There are 635 approved essay prompts. When a student takes his Regents’ Exam, a random selection of four of these prompts shows up on the test instruction sheet. From these the student chooses one prompt.

As a writing exercise—warming up before jumping into whatever book I’m working on each day—I’ve been randomly selecting a prompt from the list of approved essay topics and writing a short essay—about the same length that an actual Georgia college student might compose when taking this test.

I don’t know if I’ll end up writing 635 essays, but this is a start. I’m calling this project “Writing Sample.”

DISCUSS THE INFLUENCE THAT ADVERTISING HAS HAD ON YOUR LIFE OR THE LIVES OF YOUR FRIENDS.

As a child my lunchbox was cast from tin and depicted a Confederate Flag-bedazzled Dodge leaping over the following: a police car, a Southern Belle, a fat man. Evenings I sat cross-legged before a television that spouted Dixie and Waylon Jennings. My Hot Wheels rattled across the kitchen’s linoleum, smashing into one another, though none dented.

In middle school my sister’s bedroom walls were held up by posters of the New Kids. I got an earring. My father laughed and said, “You look like a girl.” I bought a pair of British Knights and kept them white with cheap leather repair. Their tongues flopped over the cuffs of my black Levi’s. I watched that movie Colors with Sean Penn in it. I got into exactly three fights and earned a single bloodied lip.

In high school Randy turned me on to weed and Nirvana and flannel and Mountain Mike’s Pizza (all you can eat Wednesday nights, after the parking lot bowl we smoked). Just as quickly Randy turned to Too $hort and The Ghetto Boys and DJ Quick rapping about da bombud while Randy and I did the same on video, my parents’ camcorder, me in his bedroom, spitting on his new carpet.

I followed suits into college, paying my way by slinging said suits at the Men’s Wearhouse. My Givenchy, Louis Roth, Pierre Cardin, and Hugo Boss came 40% off.

I found a bar. The bar became the new job. I’ve been swilling Pabst Blue Ribbon ever since.

I don’t have cable television. I hardly drive. A billboard passes by the train’s or the bus’s windows, and my head’s in a book. I haven’t a clue who sings anything. I don tennis shoes (New Balance). Sometimes I still hum Waylon Jennings, ‘cause I’m a good timin’ man.

WHAT INFLUENCE SHOULD STUDENTS HAVE IN THE DETERMINATION OF COLLEGE POLICIES? EXPLAIN.

The college president offered to his students an opportunity: thou shalt vote for the proposed hike in tuition to pay for the college football team’s expansion into a Division I football program.

The students all agreed and vote went to ballot.

The tally resulted in said football program’s expansion.

Some students dropped out, unable to afford their classes, unwilling to take out more student loans, scholarshipless. The college president commiserated, however, unapologetically offering that “there are plenty of opportunities out there. This is America!”

Money funneled into the athletic director’s office. The athletic director in turn tossed money to the head football coach, who hired a new assistant, new offensive coordinator, new defensive coordinator, new offensive lineman coach, new defensive lineman coach, new defensive back coach. The head coach’s staff swelled, became a department.

The stadium, likewise, swelled to fill the teeming football fans that the college president wrung his hands over, hoping the public would worm in, eager for the smacking of shoulder pads and helmets, lips around the meat of hot dogs.

Fall came, leaves trailing behind the bumpers of cars along avenues—something television commercial-like. The college president’s desk was built of money. His cigar smoke swept out his office door. His receptionist developed asthma.

Christmastime found gifts—footballs, college football sweatshirts, t-shirts, caps—dispersed.

Tax season overtook the town, the college, the head football coach and his immense staff, the college president, the ousted and remaining college students. Everyone at a loss: not an accountant to be found in town. In fact, mathematics itself had disappeared. The populace counted in footballs, in sixes and threes, the ubiquitous point-after, the simplest digit of them all, incomprehensible, to put the two together. That, the college president declared, is a safety.

IF YOU COULD BE A FICTIONAL CHARACTER WHO COULD WALK OFF THE PAGE OF A BOOK, WHAT CHARACTER WOULD YOU BECOME AND WHAT WOULD YOU DO? EXPLAIN.

Sometimes I have dreams—some in the nighttime and some in the day—that I am a Marvel Comics mutant. I suppose I have these dreams—fantasies—because I was—am—a comic book dork. I’m not the kind of comic book dork that I know some comic book dorks can be. I don’t own many comic books. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I bought a comic book. I might’ve been fifteen, and rounding out my collection with the last issue of the limited series run (four comics) of Wolverine’s solo series. But I don’t think I’ll talk about being a character like Wolverine, because everyone wants to be Wolverine. They made all those movies and everything.

I suppose I would want to be someone like Iceman. I mean, he’s a pretty powerful mutant and everything—Omega Class, even. Here I tell you that I’m not a comic book dork, but I know what an Omega Class mutant is. Maybe I wouldn’t be Iceman, but instead Storm. She can control the weather, or she could when she had her powers, but she lost them. Well, she regained those powers, so in the sense that a character can be “living,” she still has them.

If I had power over weather, I’d make the days in Atlanta cooler, and not so muggy. Sometimes I’d cover the sky with a lid of fog. That’s because I’m from the Monterey Bay Area in California, and I’m not from Atlanta. I like living in Atlanta, but I miss home. The weather in Atlanta pretty much blows. You can manage a significant amount of time outside for approximately one month out of the year: two weeks in fall and two in spring. The summer’s too goddamn hot and full of humidity and mosquitoes to do anything outside. When I first moved here, just sitting around on someone’s porch, I kept a rag tucked into my back pocket that I withdrew and swiped across my brow, soaking up the sweat. Then I’d twist and drain it, like I was washing someone’s car. Last winter a snowstorm crippled the city for a week and a half. Car tires spun on the ice on Peachtree Street as I sidled past engulfed In the fur-lined jacket I bought In fucking Siberia (no joke), careful not to slip to my ass on the encrusted sidewalk.

If I was Storm everyday would be overcast, because I love those days. Gray with the lights on inside. A bowl of soup. I’ve never seen Storm eating soup, but I would do that on the overcast days I’ve created. If it was part of Storm’s power, I’d make myself a boy, and I’d make my mother young and capable of caring for me, because Lord only knows now that—Jesus, could she ever take care of an infant or a toddler? She can’t even handle her gin and tonics.

But really, I’m not that much of a comic book dork. And I suppose most Atlantans would be chagrined at such prepostorousness. I don’t know what they’d think of this in Monterey, as if that could matter, since I don’t live there anymore and, basically, you have to be wealthy to live there at all. Really, all I want is to have my mother be there, because I’m desperate for her to take care of me.

Jamie Iredell is the author of Prose. Poems. a Novel and The Book of Freaks. His writing has appeared in many publications, among them The Literary Review, Opium Magazine, and Gigantic. He was a cofounder of New South, and is fiction editor of Atticus Review. He is Art Director for C&R Press. He lives in Atlanta, and teaches writing at Savannah College of Art and Design.

If the prompt were “Discuss the influence of compression on your own writing and writing career?” what would be your answer? In the beginning were the words. Lots of them. I imitated Kerouac, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Bukowski, each a lesson. Kerouac made me paint lavish pictures, focus on sound, breath, each utterance a blowing, a la horn, like some crazed hipster dingle-dodying his way through a jazz number, dig? Steinbeck made me sentimental and nostalgic for our mutual home: California’s central coast. The people working the fields, their hands roughed from hoe and shovel, were my childhood’s parents. Like those callused hands, Hemingway and Bukowski tarnished my sentimentality, or traded it for what seemed to be a tough exterior. My sentences grew short. I didn’t care.

It had to have been poetry, maybe Shakespeare, where every utterance flits like a bird full of metaphor—some mixed. Conciseness gobbled up my excess vocab. I steamrolled both verse and prose, paved them to smoother roads, a drive towards clarity.

Then I became a teacher. I read my students making my early mistakes. They try to sound the way they think a writer ought to sound. I pummel into them the uniqueness of their voice and perspective. Keep it simple and clear, I tell them. I teach from guides like Strunk and White, or from language snoots like David Foster Wallace or William Zinser. DFW? you might say: the opposite of brevity. But brevity’s not the issue, I’d respond. The man could write a sentence. Keep it simple. Keep it clear. Let not the convoluted twists of academese tie your fingers to the keyboard, nor the doublespeak of political correctness wind your syllables into a heady roar, for the simple, concise, specific, and—yes—compressed ideas wrought through language have been and always will be that which turns the phases of nations, the hearts of the public: the clarion call of irony shining through in all things short.

DAEDAL DOODLE, K

by Victor Stabin

[Editor’s Note: We will be publishing all 26 letters of Victor Stabin’s Daedal Doodle series, one each Wednesday for 26 weeks. Be sure to click on the picture for the FULL VIEW! Victor Stabin’s alphabet book is available here.]

For almost three years, wherever he went, Victor Stabin brought a dictionary along. Combing through over 8,000 pages of a variety of dictionaries, he came up with the alliterations that inhabit this work. Inspired by reading “ABC” books to his three-year-old daughter Skyler, his love of words, and his incessant inability to to stop doodling, he unflinchingly created the improbable alliterative combinations and illustrations that inhabit this work. In his heart he knew he was creating a work that, while using unusually obtuse words, would have broad appeal and challenge the “ABC” status quo. The goal—to create platforms that bridge literate curiosity across multiple generations using mostly common (and sometimes extraordinarily uncommon) imagery in new and inventive ways. Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, presented for your literate and retinal delight…

Born in New York City on March 5, 1954, Victor Stabin formally began his artistic journey studying at the Art Students League every summer from age 13 to 17. He graduated from the High School of Art and Design in 1972. He attended the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles from 1973 to 1975 before returning to the East Coast to continue his education at New York City’s School of Visual Arts from 1975 to 1976. A few years after finishing his education, he taught conceptual thinking for illustrators at the School of Visual Arts for five years as he continued his work as a professional illustrator.

His credits as an illustrator include creating nine stamps for the United States Postal Service’s Commemorative Postage Stamp program, a mural for RCA/BMG’s corporate headquarters in New York, and illustrations for The New York Times, Newsweek, Rolling Stone Magazine, and Time Magazine. Other works include an album cover for the rock band Kiss, and designs and illustrations for dozens of mass market books for publishers Random House, Penguin Books, and others. Twenty years of his favorite illustrations can be viewed in his illustration attic.

When he was 44, he was diagnosed with cancer and told he had a 50/50 chance of survival. Illustrations are predicated on phone calls; he had wells of his own ideas, and newly aware of the value of time, he no longer had the will to wait for the phone. Thus, he started to create a series of paintings that emanated from the personal.

The more recent works he’s created take on an otherworldly look of a fantasy land along the lines of works created by other surrealist artists. He considers himself an eco-surrealist artist. His paintings transport the viewer to unexpected environments through uncanny scenes that merge the realities of everyday life into the not-so-everyday life using other species as protagonists. This work can be viewed on his website at http://www.victorstabin.com/paintings/, and also the various essays he has written for that body of work are accessible through victorstabin.com.

He is the son of Jack Stabin, inventor of scientific instrumentation who received his technical training while working on the Manhattan Project and Florence Stabin, the piano teacher who knows the history of the world through the music of great European composers.

His influences are the 20th Century Surrealists, the 19th Century Japanese watercolor print artists, Advertising Art of the 20th Century, and the spirit of the Italian Renaissance. He is defined by his work; as you follow the path created by his paintings you’ll see other species stand in as protagonists, originally narrating the stories of his life and now lighting the path of his life. His goal is to create artwork that provokes empathy while creating visually tantalizing environments that take you to new places, with the intent of promoting awareness of and funding for the creatures that share our planet, with hope to create an enduring legacy for those living beings. Hence, Eco-Surrealist.

One of his favorite quotes (and he has many) is from Michaelangelo Buonarroti: “I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.”

Victor has been creating storylines for the characters that he’s created (from the alliterations in the book) and calling them the NPR stories. He doesn’t consider himself a writer; however, he’s funny and says, “Sometimes funny saves the day.” You are welcome to read the stories at http://www.victorstabinprints.com/info/blog/.

Abundance, image 25

by Joseph Young

Translation #1

by Michael Kimball

She died at home, at night, and was dead so long enough so there couldn’t be a resurrection. She was not just so. There was a serious hope as long as she was still alive. The rest of them remain in our lives these days. They are displayed in the control room. We already knew people who failed to die. (more…)

DAEDAL DOODLE, J

by Victor Stabin

One of his favorite quotes (and he has many) is from Michaelangelo Buonarroti: “I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.”

Abundance, image 24

by Joseph Young

DAEDAL DOODLE, I

by Victor Stabin

One of his favorite quotes (and he has many) is from Michaelangelo Buonarroti: “I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.”

The Forest

by Aaron Burch

They’d been walking through the forest for weeks. Months. Or maybe it just felt that way. Nearly every tree looked like one they’d seen before—earlier that morning, the week before—but then the next would look wholly unfamiliar. This continued, repeated. Finally: a clearing, a row of stumps looking like seats. A stack of pamphlets. Inside, on the left:

Man ……………… Himself

and recto:

Other Man ………. Himself

The back looked blank at first and then both noticed, near enough to be simultaneous, centered at the bottom and in a small font almost the color of the pamphlet itself: thank you. Each took a seat. Time passed, neither having any idea how much. Neither could remember having to sleep in the forest, nor having to eat, though neither could they remember the last time they were anywhere else.

Two more men appear from nowhere, from behind a tree, from somewhere deep in the forest. Each of the two original men immediately recognizes one of the new men as himself, though there are no recognizable similarities. Man and Other man walk around, look lost, soundlessly talk to one another. More walking around. More time passes. They—they, the two original men; they, Man and Other Man—wonder after some kind of reveal. How long they’ve been wandering, the way out, any kind of purpose. What might happen next. It all grows a little confusing.

Two more men will wander into the clearing. The four original men will be seated, watching. More pamphlets appear. Sometimes one man will pull a knife, hidden in his book, and stab the other. Sometimes the reverse. Always, time will pass and both men—the killer and the resurrected—will find their way into seats. Other times, the two will wander their way out of the clearing. And always, too, more time will pass, two more men appear, the two escapees watch from the growing collection of viewers. More time will pass. More men will appear from nowhere. Time passes. They take their seats. More time passes.

Aaron Burch is the author of How to Predict the Weather and How to Take Yourself Apart, How to make Yourself Anew, which won PANK’s inaugural chapbook contest. He’s had stories in Unsaid, New York Tyrant, Barrelhouse, and Quick Fiction, and he edits HOBART: another literary journal.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, forest originates as such: “medieval Latin forest-em (silvam) the ‘outside’ wood (i.e. that lying outside the walls of the park, not fenced in).” What, if anything does it have to with “The Forest”? Hm. This is making me think about the story more explicitly and deeper than I did while writing it, and probably more than I’d ever intended to. What I had in mind while writing the piece was for it to hopefully work with a kind of dream logic. I guess what happened, in relation to that logic and the definition origin, is “The Forest” kind of reverses things, in that the stage of the story becomes fenced or locked in, as opposed to it being “not fenced in.” The conflict, if there is to be any, is the characters wanting to escape, to get “outside the walls of the park,” but I guess one (or, at least the OED) could argue they already are.

Abundance, image 23

by Joseph Young

DAEDAL DOODLE, H

by Victor Stabin

One of his favorite quotes (and he has many) is from Michaelangelo Buonarroti: “I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.”

Wang Wei in the Workshop

by Wendy Barker

Twelve hundred years
since the eighth century.
Of nineteen translations,
we’ve looked at five.
Lily is crying after
reading her poem
about her home city
of Hong Kong, where,
in a building designed
for ten dozen stories,
six men hauling waste
died when the elevator
shaft collapsed and
plunged twenty floors.
From that roof, no one
sees the house
of a small family
eating from porcelain
bowls on a wooden
table balanced
on level ground.
How can a moon
slip so far down
those concrete walls?

Wendy Barker’s fifth book of poetry is Nothing Between Us, a novel in prose poems that was runner-up for the Del Sol Prize and was published by Del Sol Press in 2009. Her third chapbook, Things of the Weather, was also published in 2009, by Pudding House Press. Her poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Gettysburg Review. She has received NEA and Rockefeller fellowships, and is Poet-in-Residence and a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982.

Please, if you’d be so kind, describe Wendy Barker in the Workshop, with “compression” being the thing that she is working on.

The incident described in the beginning of “Wang Wei in the Workshop” actually happened in a graduate workshop, when, after focusing on translations for about a month, we discussed 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a fascinating collection edited by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz. Later in the evening during our workshop session, one of the students, a brilliant woman from Hong Kong, began to sob while reading her own poem aloud. Her poem dealt with the recent collapse of a towering building under construction in Hong Kong, causing the deaths of six workers. Across the seminar table from the student, I wanted to stand up and walk around the room to give her a hug, but instead, I kept on talking in my usual teacherly workshop fashion, all the while feeling woefully inadequate as she continued to weep. The student sitting beside her reached over and held her for a little while. I was able to muster some comments about how deeply moving the student’s poem was, and gradually she rejoined our workshop discussion.

My poem is an attempt, first, to apologize to the student from Hong Kong for my inability to express my sympathy at the right moment, and, second, to make a comment about how much cultural and familial richness may have been lost with our drive to corporatize the world, with the building of taller and yet taller concrete towers. In attempting to convey something of what I feel has been lost in our global rush to “development,” I wanted to use imagery reminiscent of 8th Century Chinese poetry and to approximate the economy and vividness of a classical Chinese poem.

Abundance, image 22

by Joseph Young

Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.

Submissions

Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.

Upcoming

09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD