Month: July 2013
VISUAL POEMS
by Nance Van Winckel
Part II: ALTERED GUIDE BOOK PAGES
[Artist’s Statement: Pages from Nance Van Winckel’s ebook in progress, entitled SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP: altered pages from the 1964 Official Guide to the New York World’s Fair.]LIVE BETTER
Nance Van Winckel’s digital collage work has appeared in Handsome Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Em, Dark Sky, Western Humanities Review, and other journals. Excerpts from a collage novel are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She has also had collage work in various galleries, juried and solo shows, and museums. Her sixth collection of poems is PACIFIC WALKERS (U. of Washington Press, 2013); a fourth book of linked stories will be out in July. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. To see more of her visual poems, visit: http://photoemsbynancevanwinckel.zenfolio.com/.
Salvia, Reblooming
by Jennnifer Schomburg Kanke
Speak to me of love
and I will speak to you
of salvia bought on sale,
twenty-cents, an end
of the season find. The man
said bloomless shafts
weren’t worth the dirt.
Forget to water,
leave bare on chilly nights.
Speak to me of love
and I will tell you of replanting
in terracotta pots, good drainage,
of some protected spot,
an alcove on the porch
where the winds can’t reach.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University. Her work has appeared in Pleiades, Fugue and Earth’s Daughters. Previously, she served as an editor at Quarter After Eight and is currently the Poetry Editor for The Southeast Review.
How did you arrive at the title for this piece? Not in a very sexy way I’m afraid, it’s pretty much just a description of the narrative of the poem. Of course, if I’m feeling sassy I guess I could say “I asked it what its name was,” but that feels like a bit much. Nance Van Winckel’s digital collage work has appeared in Handsome Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Em, Dark Sky, Western Humanities Review, and other journals. Excerpts from a collage novel are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She has also had collage work in various galleries, juried and solo shows, and museums. Her sixth collection of poems is PACIFIC WALKERS (U. of Washington Press, 2013); a fourth book of linked stories will be out in July. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. To see more of her visual poems, visit: http://photoemsbynancevanwinckel.zenfolio.com/. dropped beside an oak, and love how a socket swallows as a firing line? And whose Helen Wallace’s first collection of poems, Shimming the Glass House, won the Richard Snyder Prize and was published by Ashland Poetry Press, then received a Florida Book Award in 2008. Individual poems have been published in several journals/anthologies. She received her Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from Florida State University, and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Eckerd College where she teaches poetry and creative nonfiction. What is the origin of “I Pocket Bones (of a deer?)”? While walking in the woods of western North Carolina I stumbled on a small pile of bones I couldn’t identify—the impetus for this poem. Often what I don’t know prompts writing. Red maples bursting along a path prodded the metaphor. To me, these images suggested what I think is the poem’s heart: 1) our attempt to fight mortality/chaos; 2) our inability to prevail, and 3) the startling beauty in our mutual impermanence. At some point these “ideas” become the half-buried bones of the poem—I ask the images and music (flesh and blood) to take over. It’s through these, our shared matter, that I have the best chance of inviting a reader into my work. Nance Van Winckel’s digital collage work has appeared in Handsome Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Em, Dark Sky, Western Humanities Review, and other journals. Excerpts from a collage novel are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She has also had collage work in various galleries, juried and solo shows, and museums. Her sixth collection of poems is PACIFIC WALKERS (U. of Washington Press, 2013); a fourth book of linked stories will be out in July. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. To see more of her visual poems, visit: http://photoemsbynancevanwinckel.zenfolio.com/. No broken shrub, this bird, Adrian Gibbons Koesters’ work has recently appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, International Poetry Review, Saranac Review, and elsewhere. She is a fiction editor at A River and Sound Review, and hosts the online recorded reading series for Air Schooner at Prairie Schooner magazine. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she teaches writing. What is the origin of “Sidewalk, Bakery”? The story of “Sidewalk, Bakery” takes a little longer to tell than the poem itself. One morning this past fall as I was leaving a bakery and going over to my car, under a tree on the sidewalk I nearly kicked out of the way what I thought was a small branch with an open pod of some kind on it. When I looked closer, I saw that it was a small brown and grey bird that had fallen and died. The body appeared as a near-perfect circle of puffed-out pin-feathers, and the beak and angles of the bird’s legs were “composed” like bamboo leaves in a sumi-e painting. That spare appearance was what I tried to replicate in the poem, which I hope I was able to do. She’s very proper, warm yet reserved; well dressed, though in faded colors. (more…) [Click on the picture to view it in full size.]
Nance Van Winckel’s digital collage work has appeared in Handsome Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Em, Dark Sky, Western Humanities Review, and other journals. Excerpts from a collage novel are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She has also had collage work in various galleries, juried and solo shows, and museums. Her sixth collection of poems is PACIFIC WALKERS (U. of Washington Press, 2013); a fourth book of linked stories will be out in July. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. To see more of her visual poems, visit: http://photoemsbynancevanwinckel.zenfolio.com/. Her dark beauty, the dark beauty of his paintings, spoke to one another like the corollaries of an argument inevitable, like the passion in their shared embrace. Or so she thought until the day she picked the lock on his study to discover feathers and masks, a spate of bloody bones, candles of carmine wax and black, apothecary jars filled with colored powders and liquids and the mummified bodies of lizards and bats. An entire wall of books, bound in leather, encased in mahogany, breathing a draught of foulness. It was then she realized how far his darkness flowed, that the love she felt for him was nothing more than a spell cast upon her. She wondered if his paintings were a spell that he cast on those who paid such sums for them. Perhaps this house of stone with its colonnades and balconies, its patterned divans and oaken tables, its embroidered tapestries and rare objects of art, was no more than an illusion upon illusion. “Are you sure?” her father had asked before the marriage, a concern she had not seen before filling his eyes. “He’s a strange man. Older than you. Don’t be blinded by his fame and his wealth.” It wasn’t his wealth and fame that that made her desire him…though she had never been able to explain what it was that drew her to his arms and his alone, that left her distraught and insecure when he was not by her side. Now she knew. # Nature or magic, the argument remained. The corollaries continued to a conclusion inevitable. Even if the love she felt was a spell cast upon her, she loved him nonetheless. Like the mutual passion of their shared embrace, this was a tie she could not break. So when his glance began to fall away from her dark beauty, when his arms sought hers less often and his nights away from her began to multiply, there was nothing left for her to do but dive into the currents of his true profession—not dark art but dark magic!—to read his cursed books and ply his cursed ways, to don his dreadful masks and dance in ritual black to a pitch of mad abandon until her sable locks unfurled and swirled about her face and her body glistened. And that was how he found her, collapsed upon the blood carpet of his study floor. “What have you done?” he cried, his voice resounding from the walls. By then it was too late. She had cast the spell that claimed his love, chaining him to her as she was bound to him. # And so it was until the end for them, sorcerer and sorceress they would remain in life together, in love together, trapped by a net of common evil they could not break, burning like candles of carmine wax with flames so black they could cast a room into darkness. He was the first to die. She followed soon after. Ebon light fled from her hair. Her copper flesh took a dun gray cast. Her laughter fell, coarse and knowing. The corollaries ceased. Their conclusion reached. No argument beyond the darkest river of all. No questions for the damned. Bruce Boston is the author of fifty books and chapbooks, including the novels The Guardener’s Tale and Stained Glass Rain. His writing has received the Bram Stoker Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov’s Readers Award, and the Grandmaster Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. He will be Poet Guest of Honor at the 2013 Bram Stoker Awards/World Horror Con, to be held in June at the haunted Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, Louisiana. Visit his website at http://www.bruceboston.com/. What, for you, is the challenge of writing compressed pieces, especially genre-tinged pieces such as “Witch of the Warlock”? Most of my work is genre, so there was no challenge on that count. As far as compression, I try to write flash fictions, whether they are direct or lyrical, the same way I write poetry, with the same intensity and economy of language, so that every word counts and contributes toward the whole, so there is no extraneous content.VISUAL POEMS
by Nance Van Winckel
Part II: ALTERED GUIDE BOOK PAGES
[Artist’s Statement: Pages from Nance Van Winckel’s ebook in progress, entitled SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP: altered pages from the 1964 Official Guide to the New York World’s Fair.]
ALMOST IMPERVIOUS
I Pocket Bones (of a deer?)
by Helen Wallace
a bulbous curve of hock,
a few hulled ribs,
what isn’t there, the joint
unjoined.
Who was it
planted the maples
in perfect rows, straight
astonishing death,
their red eruptions?
VISUAL POEMS
by Nance Van Winckel
Part II: ALTERED GUIDE BOOK PAGES
[Artist’s Statement: Pages from Nance Van Winckel’s ebook in progress, entitled SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP: altered pages from the 1964 Official Guide to the New York World’s Fair.]
GRIND OPEN THE CAN
Sidewalk, Bakery
by Adrian Gibbons Koesters
body the exploded dandelion,
wings two lashes of bamboo
leaf, slate-ink on paper.
VISUAL POEMS
by Nance Van Winckel
Creative Nonfiction: Cardigan Spy
by Kim Peter Kovac
VISUAL POEMS
by Nance Van Winckel
Part I: ALTERED ADS
[Artist’s Statement: I’m having a dialogue with these old ads, mostly from the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. I want to marry a bit of poetry with the dogs of commerce. After I alter the text, I sense the ads need a place to be, a place to live in their next incarnation, so I often put them on (my photo of) a wall. Then I add other graphic bits and refine to my own purposes all that had been in the vast before.]
PAINLESS, EFFECTUAL
Witch of the Warlock
by Bruce Boston
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