RedMountainBlog

RED MOUNTAIN READING SERIES - FALL 2008

2008-09-19T07:57:00.005-05:00

Here's the scoop on this fall's Red Mountain Reading series. All readings start at 7:00 p.m. and will take place in the Lecture Hall of the Alabama School of Fine Arts in lovely downtown Birmingham.

Sep 26
"My Favorite Poem" Community Reading

TBD
Fiction Writer Wendy Rawlings

Dec 5
Poets Frank X. Walker and 2008 RMR Chapbook Contest winner Mark Smith-Soto

RMR GETS ARTS COUNCIL GRANT

2008-09-19T07:20:00.002-05:00

We're pleased to announce that the Alabama State Council on the Arts has awarded RMR an organizational grant for 2009. ASCA was instrumental to the RMR's successful launch with a seed grant back in 2004. We're glad they think we've done something right for these last four years.

2008 Red Mountain Chapbook Contest Winner

2008-09-05T09:45:00.004-05:00

Our judge, Frank X. Walker, has selected Mark Smith-Soto's "Waiting Room" as this year's chapbook contest winner! Mark's fine chapbook will be published later this fall by Greencup Books, and Mark will join Frank to give a public reading in Birmingham on Dec 5 at 7 p.m. in the Lecture Hall of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

IS JAKE ADAM YORK THE NICEST GUY IN PO-BIZ?

2008-05-10T10:06:00.005-05:00

Could very well be. In fact, that's probably damning him with faint praise. We had him down (over?) to the Magic City last night to speak and read to an audience of high school literary arts award winners. He read from his latest book, A Murmuration of Starlings. Powerful, affecting stuff chronicling the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement. Couple that with his unpretentious but unmistakable intellect and his all-around menschiness, and a whole bunch of young Alabama writers now have oodles of legitimacy when they say, "Mom, dad...I want to be a poet." Okay, not oodles. Tough for any aspiring poet to have oodles of anything, with the possible exception of noodles. But now they can say it's possible and it's important and there are, in fact, cool people who've taken that path. Check out Jake's blog while you're at it....

CHAPBOOK CONTEST NEWS-AND-NOTES

2008-05-10T09:51:00.003-05:00

The deadline for our chapbook contest has come and gone, and we're in the process of, well, processing all the fine work you and yours sent our way. We'll get those entries to our preliminary judges next week. By mid-June we expect to ship off ten finalists to our final judge -- whose identity we know, but we need to dot a few i's and cross a few t's before we announce the name. Our goal is to announce the winner of the contest by August 1.

Thanks, as always, for submitting your work to us. We'll keep you posted as we have news.

500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: MICHELLE BURKE

2008-04-10T14:28:00.017-05:00

Michelle Burke's Horse Loquela is the winner of the third Red Mountain Review Chapbook Series contest. She just finished her MFA in poetry from The Ohio State University in June. Drawing on her extensive experience working on farms in Ohio and upstate New York, Michelle currently serves as outreach coordinator for GreenThumb, New York City’s community gardening program. Working with the more than 600 community gardens in Gotham, she teaches gardeners to grow organically, to compost, to can, and to cook healthy meals with the food they’ve grown.

Now that is the day job for a poet.

Click the link below to check out what she had to say about Helen Keller, chapbooks, and...Amtrak in this 500 Words (More) Or Less!

1. Talk a little bit about the chapbook as a form. Horse Loquela is part of a larger project, yes? So was the process of paring it down to 24 pages more or less useful? Nerve-racking? What were your governing principles for compiling a successful chapbook-length manuscript?

The chapbook came from my master's thesis, which was a book-length manuscript. Paring it down to 24 pages wasn't hard--I was so tired of my thesis at that point that I enjoyed cutting poems from it. Really, I've never had a hard time getting rid of poems. What's harder is deciding to keep a poem, to bring myself to that point where I feel like I can say, yes, this is a finished poem, and I'm ready to send it out. That's hard.

I did find the ordering to be difficult. I liked beginning and ending with a Helen Keller poem--that seemed right. The middle was tricky. I didn't want to put a horse poem next to a horse poem, and I wanted to vary the form from page to page. The more that I shuffled poems around, however, the more I saw the ways in which they built upon each other. This was an important realization for me as a writer. I knew I was writing a lot of love poems, and I knew I was writing a lot of poems about horses and other domesticated, ill-used animals, but it wasn't until I put everything together that I realized how much the poems about the horses spoke to the poems about human relations. I became very interested in the lover's desire to be both free and tethered. In romantic love, there’s an almost unbearable need to lash oneself to the beloved, but even as we embrace such tethers, we resist them. I think it's related to Milan Kundera's idea of lightness and heaviness--I just finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. We want to be light and float above the world, but it is our very heaviness that brings us to the earth, makes our lives real. Working the poems against each other in a concise format helped me to see these connections.

2. The title poem has an epigraph from Barthes that describes the term loquela as "language through which the subject tirelessly rehashes the effects of a wound." What drew you to Barthes, to that particular word, in helping you get your head around this project?

I happened upon A Lover's Discourse by chance, but I was immediately impressed by the book. It's an insane book really. Barthes sets out to unravel the very language of love--not the language with we which we woo one another--but the unuttered words we say to ourselves over and over, that endless litany of self-castigation and longing.

I also think that writing itself is a type of loquela. That's what writers do--we rehash the past and try to craft the stuff of raw experience into something finer. And all good writing comes from pain. As writers, we force ourselves to revisit wounds again and again, until something meaningful emerges. And writing is like being in love--there are moments of triumph, and that's what hooks us, but mostly it's disappointing or monotonous.

3. List three cool little-known facts about Helen Keller.

1. She performed vaudeville and acted in Hollywood.
2. She was secretly engaged, but never married.
3. Doctors replaced her real eyes with glass eyes tinted blue.

4.
Iowa or New Hampshire? Obama
Garden or Farm? Farm
Black Beauty or the Black Stallion? A horse named 20\20
Manhattan or Brooklyn? Brooklyn
LaGuardia or JFK? Amtrak
Yankees or Mets? Neither
Shiitake or Portobello? Morels and parmesan in risotto
Sonnets or Ghazals? Free verse or blank verse
Emily or Walt? Both
Dressage or Show-Jumping? Western

5. You are Poet-Dictator for a day. You may be either benevolent or despotic. Make a to-do list.
1. Give books by Lisa Olstein, Carl Phillips, Hayden Carruth, and Marianne Boruch to everyone.
2. Make tea, draw a bath, and read the stories in Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock.

THE DECKS ARE CLEARED!

2008-01-26T16:47:00.000-06:00

From the Department of Better Late Than Never: we can now officially say that any work submitted to us prior to the current reading period (that is, anything submitted before Oct 1, 2007) has been considered, decided upon, and SASEs are on their way.

Apologies to those of you who waited so patiently. As a general rule, here is how it works around here. We don't read from May through September, though we do hold submissions we receive during that period for consideration in the next reading period. We start to field submissions in October, but we really don't start reading and processing in earnest until the first of the year. Our last decision -- typically the chapbook winner -- is made by August 1. We say all that just to give you a sense that it can sometimes take a while to hear from us.

Here's another general rule: if you submit sometime during the reading period (and, really, why would you do anything else?) and you haven't heard from us by August 1, it's a safe bet we've taken a pass on your work. We will, of course, process the SASEs and you will get official notice. This just gives you a sense of the timing so you can manage your submission process accordingly.

And if you submit when we're not reading, it will likely take a VERY long time to hear from us. But even then, you'll hear from us.

There's always some guilt associated with the processing -- takes way longer than it should and rejection notices don't always go out in a timely fashion. We assuage our guilt a little bit by not only accepting but ENCOURAGING simultaneous submissions. And, of course, we never charge reading fees. Still, we understand any enmity this causes. Perhaps you can take some solace in all the bad kharma we're making for ourselves in our own writing lives.

Thanks for your patience and understanding -- and, as always, thanks for your interest in RMR.

READY TO ROLL IN O-EIGHT

2008-01-04T19:14:00.000-06:00

Just so's you know, we're cranking up the machine that is RMR once more. We're fielding chapbook contest entries -- again at no cost to you! -- and the best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry you can send our way. Please note...we're abandoning (at least for now) our experiment with e-submissions. Snail-mail only please. As usual, send to 1800 8th Ave N, Birmingham, AL 35203. Thanks for your interest. And hey -- how about buying something we're selling?!

2007 RMR CHAPBOOK CONTEST WINNER IS...

2007-08-05T11:58:00.000-05:00

Michelle Burke's "Horse Loquela"! Thanks to all those who submitted. Michelle's chapbook will appear in its entirety in RMR3 as well as in a stand-alone limited edition. She will also join contest judge Katie Ford for a reading on the campus of the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham in early December, when both the limited edition and RMR3 will be released. More info on all of that in the near future...

WE HAVE A WINNER...

2007-07-31T15:01:00.000-05:00

You guys are funny -- several e-mails asking us "You said you'd announce by Aug 1 -- what's wrong?" Uh, it's like, July 31 -- right? All kidding aside, we're glad you're paying attention. Here's the scoop: Katie Ford has, indeed, selected a winner. We have, indeed, notified said winner. We are, however, still waiting for a reply from our winner. Until we hear back from...her...we'll wait to make the official announcement. Thanks to everyone for your patience. We still hope/expect to make good on our Aug 1 promise. On a related note, RMR3 is also now officially full, though we're sorry to say that not everyone who submitted during our last reading period has been notified of the final status of their submission. Our next project will be to do just that. We hope to have that accomplished by Sep 1. Again, thanks for your patience...

SUBMISSIONS DEADLINE IS HERE!

2007-04-30T09:05:00.000-05:00

It's April 30, and that means we won't be considering submissions that are postmarked after today (we'll start reading for RMR4 on Oct 1). Truth be known, we've long had our fiction line-up set for RMR3 (as reported here in this space a couple of months ago). We're now almost all set in the other genres as well. And we've been blown away by the number of chapbook entries we've received. (Guess there's a market out there for a free chapbook contest...) Thanks very much for entrusting us with your fine work.

The chapbook contest will work like this: we'll send each entry to our initial readers, poetry editors Jim Murphy and Mary Kaiser, who will score each manuscript anonymously. The five highest-scoring finalists will then proceed to this year's judge, Katie Ford. We hope to have her final decision by no later than August 1. We will announce the finalists and winner in this space as soon as Katie makes her choice. (Please do note: This will be our only means of notification.)

The contest winner will receive a $500 honorarium and ten copies of a limited edition, stand-alone print run of the chapbook itself. The chapbook will also appear in RMR3. We will host the chapbook winner and judge Katie Ford in Birmingham for a joint reading and release reception later on this year.

Thanks to all for your interest in RMR, and please do excuse the radio silence on this blog as we turn our attention to coordinating the chapbook contest and putting out a great-looking third issue of the magazine! Happy summer....

NEWSFLASH: POETRY IS SMALL!

2007-03-11T21:57:00.000-05:00

We were fortunate to enough to be in attendance at the first JARS (Journal Alliance Reading Series) event of 2007 earlier today, when RMR's own Mary Kaiser read from her new chapbook of poems, "Falling Into Velazquez" (Slapering Hol Press, 2006). There were a total of 23 people at the Bottletree Cafe in the lovely, gritty little Avondale neighborhood just east of the Magic City. That's 23 counting the bartenders. And the poet. You could look at that and say, "See...

1) ...poetry is insignificant!" and/or
2) ...the masses are ignorant slobs!"

You'd be wrong on both counts, though, and here's why...

As regards Count #1: Some of the most essential things are relatively small. Germs, for instance. Also kidneys. Wethinks our addiction to big portions stems from an excess of positivistic rationalism (or is that rationalistic positivism?) -- more is better because we can see it, and if we can see it, we can count it, and if we can count it, we can be sure it means something. But poetry's lack of size makes it stealthy, hearty too, and replete with coping strategies. And what is life without stealth and coping strategies? Boring and/or insufferable.

As regards Count #2: Poetry combats ignorance in the only way it can be beaten: that is, hand-to-hand. Sitting with 23 people in what used to be a gay bar, there isn't any such thing as "the masses." That vast shared numbness dissolves away. We will all, soon enough, retake our positions in regards to "the masses" -- among them, stalking their perimeter, etc. The point is 23 people on a Sunday afternoon listened to good poems and good thought and thereby engaged in something not very unlike a worship service. Contemplation. Reflection. Fellowship. Communion. A small moment made larger for its smallness, a brief time to step out of the world, our world: its ignorance, its significance, its sheer mass. Amen.

500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: MICHAEL MARTONE

2007-03-01T08:41:00.000-06:00

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he was educated in the public schools there. He attended Indiana University in Bloomington where, as a freshman, he took part in the famous Kinsey Report by completing a survey of his sexual history during orientation. Alfred Kinsey, a biology professor at the university, had begun his famous work on human sexual response when he was teaching, after the war, the "marriage" course, an early attempt in the health curriculum to provide information in what was called then sexual hygiene. One day, a co-ed, who was to be married that summer, approached Kinsey after a lecture to ask what she could expect from her husband, and Kinsey, always the scientist, couldn't answer her since he didn't have, he realized, any hard scientific evidence. "I'll get back to you," he told her, and began his decades long project collecting oral interviews, written personal narratives, taped anecdotal commentary, and computer scanned surveys from a vast range of informants in order to build a workable database of sexual behavior.

There, years later, in a crowded lecture room in Ballantine Hall, Michael Martone participated in the very same ongoing effort of data gathering, carefully blackening with the provided No.2 pencil the appropriate bubble corresponding to the numbered response most accurately representing such desired information as his masturbatory habits and history, his sexual preference, his preferred positions (there were illustrations), and the time, to the nearest minute, of his recovery after "performing vigorous coitus." The room fell silent as the freshman class bent to this initial collegian task required of them, the quiet broken only by the scratching of pencil lead on the rigid manila IBM cards and the counterpunctual response of the rubbing of rubber erasers.

Afterward, Martone remembers racing from the building into a bright fall day, the trees of Dunn Meadow just taking on the color of the season. That night, he called his mother, who had also been a student at Indiana University to ask her if she, too, had been recruited to contribute to Professor Kinsey's report, indicating to her, as best he could, the extent and duration of statistical instrument he had just endured. "No," his mother responded, "they didn't have that when I was there. I did take this facts-of-life course the spring before I married Daddy." She went on to say that she didn't learn much, that the class had been dry and very statistical in nature. "I even asked the professor about it." It hadn't mattered, she concluded, since shortly after that meeting with the professor who had told her he would get back to her about her questions, she and her soon-to-be husband figured out how to go about the very thing that had been so mysterious.

Late one night, in a classroom where, in his senior year at Indiana University, Martone would take a class on Chaucer, his parents, ignorant of contraception in spite of the courses they took, managed to conceive their son. Though when asked, years later, by her son for further details, his mother simply said she couldn't recall much more about that night but that she could make something up if that would help. [From Michael Martone by Michael Martone (FC2, 2005)]

Q&A

RMR: Cormac McCarthy once said, “Teaching writing is a hustle.” Agree or disagree? Discuss.

MM: So I guess he doesn’t mean that in a good way. And I guess that he is saying two things. First, that writing can’t be taught. And because he believes the first, it follows those who do teach are up to something, are taking advantage of someone. I don’t agree that teaching writing is a “hustle” and I think I disagree because we have different working definitions of “teaching.” I admit I am a teacher of writing. I think Mr. McCarthy’s notion of teaching is fiduciary. By that I mean, that the knowledge of a subject is held in trust by a teacher and one goes to school to have the teacher/trustee transfer that knowledge, the secrets so to speak. This model makes sense for law, say, or medicine. If it is applied to writing—that there are writing secrets mature writers know and can transfer for a fee—if that’s the way you think about teaching and writing well then it is a hustle because it is a commodity exchange. I don’t think about writing that way. I know no secrets. I cannot withhold or dole out wisdom on the matter. Teaching for me is more like helping the writer discover what he or she already knows. I provide what I hope are interesting spaces for people to read and write and talk about writing. The space is protected. The time is given. All my students are paid to come to school. There is no tuition. Let me talk about another hustle. A friend of mine, a writer, got fed up and quit teaching for reasons along Mr. McCarthy’s line. He thought most of his students wouldn’t become great writers. He felt he was deluding them by encouraging these less-than-great writers. Now it turns out David, my grumpy writing/teaching friend, also ran in marathons. And I just asked him if when he lines up at the start in Boston, New York, Chicago does he think he’s going to beat the world class Ethiopians. Well, no, he says. And I say why do you run if you aren’t going to win. The answer is that there are other reasons to run, other benefits besides winning. Ditto writing. Still another hustle. I just heard on the radio that students of medicine and law leave grad school with a debt of $50,000 to $80,000. Sure they will have jobs that will pay that back one-day. But those secrets are costly. Not so my none secrets for my writing students.

RMR: James Frey. Brad Vice. George Bush. All have fudged, fibbed, or fabricated here of late -- with disastrous results. Your work often tiptoes the blurry line between fact and fiction. What’s more, you seem to have a soft spot for the good old-fashioned hoax. Not only did you write The Blue Guide to Indiana but -- correct me if I’m wrong here -- you sought to have it reviewed as a legitimate guidebook, not a work of fiction. Likewise, in Michael Martone, you’ve written fifty fictitious bio notes for yourself -- actually placing many of them in the Contributors sections of literary magazines prior to their collection as a book. I think of the acknowledgments section of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Coming Through Slaughter, an artistic embellishment of the life of real-life jazz forebear Buddy Bolden: “While I have used real names and characters and historical situations I have also used more personal pieces of friends and fathers. There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction.” When and why should we favor “the truth of fiction” over cold, hard facts, and what responsibilities must we live up to -- as readers, writers, citizens, leaders of the free world -- when we do it?

MM: My feeling is that we should all be very careful. Collectively we have made a cultural choice to live in an empirical world. That is we know things our senses tell us. If you don’t believe we live in an empirical world then why do most of us stay in school so long or go to school so young. We believe that we are born blank slates and then are filled up by our experiences. But our senses can be so easily fooled. Satire begins with the cultural shift in the West to empirical belief. So we have always lived in a world where fact and fiction was supposedly easy to tell apart but at the same time we know it’s not. And remember this. A fact is a thing done. Once it has happened it is over, it does not exist. Instead we have residue of the facts. Facts are not real. Fiction on the other hand is a thing made. It is a fabrication. Even what we call nonfiction is a fiction in that sense. It is a made thing. This made thing, this construction has a reality but it is a constructed reality. So as I said above one must be careful in the making and in the consumption of the made thing.

RMR: Either/Or (Explain or not).

Letterman or Leno?..... Letterman
Jeter or DiMaggio?..... Mantle
Libby (I. Lewis “Scooter”) or Liddy (G. Gordon)?..... G. Gordon
Bones or Spock?..... Kirk the Midwestern boy
Brittany or Madonna?..... Christina
Form or Function?..... Form
Bobby Knight or Dean Smith?..... Knight
Borrowed or Blue?..... Blue
Quayle or Lugar?..... Bayh
Barth or Borges?..... Barthelme

RMR: You are George Steinbrenner for a day. Make a to-do list.

- Wake
- Evacuate the bowel
- Oatmeal
- Shower, shave, brush and floss teeth
- Read the New York and Florida Newspapers
- Place a call order on General Dynamics, Biomet, Viacom
- Read an hour in the work of Patrick O’Brien
- Confession, Mass
- Lunch at Four Seasons (steak Tartar)
- Circle Line Cruise and visit to Ellis Island reconstruction
- Call to Sports Talk Radio on XM
- Watch TiVo, saved shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
- Lou Dobbs and Kramer’s Mad Money
- Drinks at the Century Club
- Attend opening reception for Gees Bend Quilts at the Whitney
- Dinner at Sea
- View Manhattan from the top of the Empire State building
- Greet arriving zeppelin
- Prepare for bed and retire in a continuously cruising Airstream trailer cruising the West Side Highway

RMR: Fill in the blank: Michael Martone is absolutely, positively, unequivocally, 100% NOT...

MM: Serious.

MORE INTERVIEWS ON DECK!

2007-02-13T08:09:00.000-06:00

Hope you've been enjoying 500 Words (More) or Less. Stay tuned in March, when we post a recent e-chat we had with the inimitable Michael Martone. Here's a little teaser: At one point, he assumes the blustery persona of one George Steinbrenner. Hilarity -- with a healthy dollop of keen insight into the human condition -- ensues. You won't want to miss it. Until then, keep sending those chapbooks. And remember: We take e-submissions at RMRsubmissions@gmail.com!

RED MOUNTAIN READING SERIES HOSTS POET ALLISON JOSEPH...

2007-02-06T13:42:00.000-06:00

...this Thursday, Feb 8, on the Shelby campus of Jefferson State Community College! The reading starts at 11 a.m. in Room 211 of RSH Hall. Allison Joseph is the author of five books of poetry: Worldly Pleasure (Word Press, 2004); Imitation of Life (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2002); Soul Train (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1997); In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997); and What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), which won the Ampersand Women Poets Series Prize and the John C. Zacharis Award First Book Prize from Ploughshares. Her many awards include a fellowship and a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council, fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, an Academy of American Poets prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and an Associated Writing Programs Prize. She is an Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University and editor of Crab Orchard Review.

500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: ANDER MONSON

2007-02-01T08:42:00.000-06:00

Just in case you weren't aware, here it is all spelt out for you: Ander Monson is, in fact, the hardest working man in show business. 300+ shows a year. A growing media presence on all the habitable continents. (Stay tuned for an exciting announcement in the very near future regarding Antarctica!) Rabid, cult-like followings germinating out in concentric circles from all the world's major cities...

In all seriousness, the man is and always has been pretty dadgum large-and-in-charge. A phenom, if you will, in the truest sense of the word. A graduate of Knox College (a school that happens to be one of the best-kept secrets in the world of writing academe, by the way), Iowa State, and the University of Alabama, Monson is the author of two books: a novel, Other Electricities, Sarabande Books, 2005, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award; and a poetry collection, Vacationland, Tupelo Press, 2005. Neck Deep, a collection of "weirdo essays," won the Graywolf Press 2006 Nonfiction Prize and will be released TODAY! He edits the online magazine DIAGRAM as well as its comrade-in-arms, New Michigan Press. His individual stories, poems, and essays have been published damn-near everywhere, including (happily for us) the inaugural issue of RMR. To wit, a sampling from RMR1, by way of Vacationland...

APPROXIMATION

The coroner’s best guess as to time of death
is sometime in the earliness
before the light has staked its claim
with hammer-blows and threats of ice
useless, spilled like perfume across roads.

As for cause, you know it’s notoriously
iffy — in this case it is safe to say death
by drowning or by impact of the body
against the windshield, against the radio dial
which left its mark, and then the drowning after,
or death due to after-prom excitement — the occasion
marked by streamers in the rafters
and the crowning of the school’s best
heads and shoulders with a tin-foil
wrapped, fake-bejeweled band.

Death due to lack of the right date
who might have taken the right route
to the after party, who might not have swerved
to miss the fish — the enigmatic trout
frozen in the middle of the lane,
body like a beacon
warning of the impending season’s
weakness, of after-graduation life
in bars and doldrum rum and cokes in glasses.

Death due to lack of escapist training,
no Houdini present, no Tupac, Elvis
surviving death at least in myth
and continuing to release
themselves in beats & language
to critical suspicion.

Death due to loneliness
and books checked out too long ago
from the Public Library
and not returned on time,
death due to accruing, reoccurring fines
that continued to mount like banks of snow
until she returned them on prom night

until I went to check them out again
to have her signature—some vestige
of her neck/her mind/her hands.

____________________

Q&A

RMR: TRUE or FALSE: James Frey is the spawn of Satan. Discuss.

AM: False. Though I don't think we should give him credit for all the ensuing and in its way enjoyable fiction.

RMR: You are large and contain multitudes. Parsed out by project, your enormous productivity -- scads of journal pubs, three books and counting, DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, etc, etc -- is truly mind-boggling. ("How does he have time?" one wonders.) All well before you hit the big 4-0, no less. Taking a step back from it, I think there might be a more holistic -- and even more impressive, really -- way to look at it: That is, it seems to me that being Ander Monson is more process than product. Would it be a mistake, then, to look at your oeuvre as one continually evolving and expanding "document" -- an inclusive and holistic pastiche that reflects a singular artistic life as it develops in real time? A career arc more akin to Whitman's or Sandburg's than, say, Robert Frost's?

AM: Interesting. There’s a kind of kinship between the work, a point of common departure for the diaspora, and a shared mythology being created that includes the idea of author, and "author", and text (and hopefully even expands the idea of the "book"; see also Neck Deep and the website extension of it). One of the pieces in Neck Deep, the big index, was originally housed in Other Electricities, though it has found its new home as nonfiction, and in a way that's what it always was. It's really not all that interesting being a writer who simply produces product. Not that I'd disclaim any individual book, or the book as a technology that we as a culture really enjoy -- it offers a whole lot of advantages and that's the medium I work in, mostly. But it's also limiting (as genre is in its way -- it provides a sort of pressure which can be responded to in a number of ways). And I am more interested, finally in creation, not exhaustion. Though that sounds totally pompous.

RMR: Ten Either/Or’s. (Explain or not.)

BALL OR DISC? Disc. See also: [this right here].
ONTARIO OR QUEBEC? Ontario.
SOUTH PARK OR THE SIMPSONS? Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
TIGER OR JACK? Jack. Though Tiger can compete on Xbox.
PAGEMAKER OR QUARK? InDesign. But not Quark. Definitely not Quark, though it's always had the better name.
PROSE OR POETRY? Hmmmm...
JEN OR ANGELINA? Who are these people?
POL POT OR MANUEL NORIEGA? I do not understand your modern ways.
CIA OR FBI? I’ve only met the FBI so am not qualified to decide.
SKITTLES OR M&Ms? Skittles blow.

RMR: You are poet-king for a day. Make a to-do list.

AM: Play Katamari Damacy for a while. Roll things into a large ball. Crunch it down and throw it in the sky, which makes people smarter.

RMR: Michigan's Upper Peninsula is...

AM: A place that I'm not even sure still exists. Is it there at all? Look at it on google earth and it's all blurred out. That's suspicious. Who's actually from there? Who goes there? Who makes it their home? And do they read? See also Tom Bissell. See also Catie Rosemurgy. See also Beth Roberts, and Jonathan Johnson. Did I tell you I killed Hemingway? Most people don't know that. I had to cut his heart out. I'm serious. I read about it on the Internet and it made me feel so good.

7 DAYS 'TIL MONSON...

2007-01-25T09:03:00.000-06:00

Pass it on.

ERRATUM: ALLOW US TO INTRODUCE...

2007-01-25T08:17:00.000-06:00

Well, here's another example of us screwing up...

[- "Do you think we should be so forthcoming with our many missteps?"
- "Forget it, he's on a roll."]

Click here for the bio information on Mark Terrill's website. Seems we left it out of the contributors notes in RMR2. Sorry, Mark. Great poems, though. Here's one of them, for those of you who haven't had a chance to get your hands on the issue yet...

THE THIN LINE

The thin line of casualties
that runs accross your face.
The masks in the streets
and the panic they allow.
I only came
to pine in your woods
and now I'm lost here,
a hardened artery in
your radial grid.
Your countenance rusts
in televised anquish.
The medicine and the poison
look so much alike in this light.

Want to read the other two? Buy RMR2! And buy Mark's latest book while you're at it!

MAILBAG: MEA CULPA, YOU-A-CULPA...

2007-01-23T21:53:00.001-06:00

Wouldn't you like to be a-culpa too? As promised, here's a self-flagellatory post regarding RMR's til-now somewhat spotty turnaround times. With a tiny caveat and, as always, a call-to-arms...

We were going to print, verbatim, some of the letters we've received on this subject...but we lost them! (Sadly, that's the god's honest truth. Proof positive that we can't keep track of any correspondence, even when we want to use it. Not really, but the method in our madness is -- as it is with a lot of publishing venues -- only apparent to a very select few, and even that select few has trouble deciphering it sometimes. Alas, that seems to be endemic to the beast known as "Editor.")

Actually, maybe it's better this way, because all the correspondence hits a similar note. Allow us to paraphrase the letters in question: A few writers have railed against us for not returning their manuscripts even though they had provided return postage. One of them even threatened to badmouth us at all the writers conferences he attends and teaches -- "Don't send them your work!" Another writer gave us props for running a free chapbook contest but was disappointed that he had to discover on the blog that his manuscript didn't win the contest -- this after he sent us a SASE that we requested for notification purposes. There have been letters and e-mails -- even phone calls -- checking on submission status, some cordial and empathetic, some short and not-so-sweet.

And we have to plead guilty as charged. Our turnaround time has not been what we'd like it to be. There's no way to sugar-coat it.

All-in-all, we're very proud of what we've achieved in our first two years of existence: Our publications are beautiful, thanks to Russell and Travis at www.absnth.com. We've published first-time authors alongside writers who've been nominated for Pulitzers, Pushcarts, and National Book Awards. We've worked with friends and strangers and strangers-turned-friends. We've produced two great -- and very different -- chapbooks. We now publish a stand-alone version of the chapbook, and we've been able to double the contest honorarium and add a public reading to the award package. All while keeping the contest free to enter.

That doesn't mean that we haven't hit a few bumps along the way, and as far as we're concerned, the biggest bump has to be our inconsistent turnaround times. Our goal is to be writer-friendly, and this is the one area where we've made a few -- but vocal -- enemies.

Knowing what we know about publishing literary magazines, it's not a question of avoiding bumps. It's all about what you do once you hit them. So here's what we're doing:

We take e-submissions now. That, coupled with our "Yes-yes-a-thousand-times-yes!" policy regarding simultaneous submissions, helps give writers more freedom when it comes to where, when, and how they submit their work.
We're redoubling our efforts to make decisions in a more timely fashion. Prose (fiction and nonfiction) is read and decided upon in a central location, so those turnaround times should be faster -- we're aiming for within sixty days. There are more steps to our poetry process because our poetry editors are spread out. Rest assured all poems will be decided upon by the end of each academic year (May). And as a general rule, the longer we have it, the more likely we are to publish it (or at least to ask to see more work).
The blog will be a vital source of submissions-related information. To wit, the recent post announcing that fiction submissions for RMR3 are effectively closed now. Perhaps as useful, we're providing more regular content on the blog, which will give writers a sense of our overall aesthetic, our predilections, our current and/or abiding obsessions.
Chapbook contest results will be posted here and at the website by August 1 each year. No need to send a SASE.

Okay, so we promised a caveat and here it is: Writers need to step up to the plate with some personal accountability as well. Some uninvited advice and/or requests:

Know the basic trends in literary publishing. Here's a biggie: Print manuscripts are recycled nowadays. Get a jump drive and save the extra postage. A 39-cent SASE will suffice for response to general submissions, and it saves you money in the long run.
If you notoriously and indiscriminately sling your poems to the far reaches (yes, we do know who you are; you'd be surprised how easy it is to make a "name" for yourself in this regard) please take a moment and ask yourself why you do it. There may be a legitimate reason. We can't think of one right off the top of our heads, but we're willing to change our minds if somebody will present a compelling reason.
Please think of literary magazines -- and their editors -- as your partners, not your enemies. In a world where it's too easy to feel disconnected and ignored, we understand it can be difficult to stomach an interminable reading period followed by an anonymous rejection. We get our fair share of those too in our other lives as writers-just-like-you.
Understand, however, that anonymous, assembly-line submissions (and by that we mean sending work to any address you can find in the 2002 Literary Marketplace) are likely to yield anonymous, assembly-line rejections. Sadly, the system feeds itself. Too few editors and readers, too many writers and manuscripts. We're not complaining. Editing a lit mag is fun or else we wouldn't do it. We're just suggesting that we're in this together and that if we acknowledge we're all a part of the problem, we can all be a part of the solution.
To dip back into the mailbag, from the day we hung out our shingle in 2004, we've received cover letters praising our "distinguished" publication -- even before we'd printed a single issue. In football, there's a saying: see what you hit. It's the safest way to tackle, for both the ball carrier and for the tackler. Well, see where you're sending your work -- it's better for everybody. Most notably, you.
Submit less, write, read, and think more.
Instead of sending work out in waves to all directions, send it out piece-by-piece to a magazine you've actually held in your hands. Just because you get rejected once, doesn't necessarily mean you should give up on that publication. Send something else -- something better. Don't have something better? Write it. If you are a good writer and your work fits the publication, you'll probably get in sooner or later. You're at least more likely to get some valuable and substantial editorial feedback. In our experience, that sort of feedback is at least as valuable as a single publication in a lit mag you've never even seen prior to receiving your obligatory two contributors copies.
Try to resist the idea that literary magazines are anonymous gatekeeping meritocracies. Good work gets rejected more often than it gets accepted. And, yes, lots of mediocre work gets published each year. Individual editorial aesthetics play a big part in what gets selected, as does the phenomenon of solicited submissions. Artistic merit, while important, simply can't be the only consideration because there's more meritorious work than could ever possibly be published.
Do submit work simultaneously; it's only fair. But sim-subs allow you to be more -- not less -- discriminate with where you send your work. Instead of sending a single story to thirty-nine magazines all at once, send it to two or three places at a time, places with which you've established some kind of connection. And the greatest connection you can make with any publication is to read it! You don't even have to buy it -- go find it in the library, or read its on-line counterpart regularly. You're more likely to get published in a publication you read religiously.
Last-not-least, get involved in literary publishing. Start a zine or volunteer to work at a lit mag near you -- we guarantee there is one, even if you don't know it. Find it. Give it some of your time, effort, and energy. It will change your entire approach to publishing your own work, both practically and philosophically. It's like waiting tables -- everybody should have to do it at least once, if only for a little while.

11 DAYS 'TIL MONSON...

2007-01-21T17:03:00.000-06:00

Pass it on.

REVIEW REVIEW: THE SOUTHEAST REVIEW

2007-01-18T18:55:00.000-06:00

One of the cool things about being a lit mag is you get to swap subscriptions with other lit mags. To wit, we just got our copy of the most recent Southeast Review. We were impressed. Here are five reasons why you should be too...

1. How awesome is that cover image? Two dudes in tights, doing the symbiotic acrobatics, with the oddly disconcerting grin-and-gaze-deeply-into-each-other's-eyes thing going on. Mesmerizing.

2. Lots of cool stuff in between the covers. Admittedly, our own particular brand of narcissism had us perk up at the fact that there were so many folks RMR has either published and/or hosted at past readings:

Charles Jensen, winner of our inaugural chapbook contest, interviews...
Beth Ann Fennelly, who's read for us and whose Tender Hooks we reviewed in this very space.
John Pursley III, who has work in RMR2 and who took part in the very first Birmingham JARS (Journal Alliance Reading Series) event this past fall, hosted by the five giants of literary publishing in the Magic City: RMR, PMS, Birmingham Poetry Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, and Aura.
And Josh Russell -- whose essay on New Orleans' Hubig's Pies appears in RMR1 -- has a story currently up on the on-line version of this issue.

3. Speaking of websites, Southeast Review's is so, so good. They bill it as the companion to the magazine, and it truly is. Lots of great content. A true presence on the web, not just a space filling dead-letter-office sort of thing. (We're not exactly sure what a dead-letter office is, but we must admit it certainly sounds pretty cool. And, hey, who doesn't love R.E.M.?)

4. A triumph in the book arts. Clean. Stylish. Navigable. Nice paper. Thumbs up!

5. An "Apocalyptic Penis Poem"...what more can you ask for?

Okay, so they have some pay-to-play contests, and we've gone on record as saying we're agin' 'em. We're still agin' 'em -- pay-to-plays, that is. But as such things go, The Southeast Review's is one of the more responsible ones: pretty strict ethics policy and everybody who enters gets a copy of the magazine. At least it's not money for nothing.

So, all in all, a net plus, big-time. Howz about you go out and buy you one? Easy enough to do: Just click here!

FYI: FICTION SUBMISSIONS FOR RMR3...

2007-01-12T11:45:00.000-06:00

...are just about closed. That was quick, we know. Still, we've got a bit of a back-log, and we want to start giving folks the heads-up about our reading process in real time.

Does that mean you shouldn't submit fiction? Not necessarily. It just means that everything we get from this date forward is going to be considered for RMR4, which will be released in far-off ought-eight.

Now, we are always open to sim-subs, so if you really want to send us a story while it makes the rounds, please do. Just know that it'll take a while for its status to be resolved -- likely this time next year. You can also, of course, wait until our next reading period, which will start October 1, 2007. Thanks, as always, for your patience -- and for entrusting us with your work.

500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: KATIE FORD

2007-01-06T15:10:00.001-06:00

Whether or not Katie Ford is a "God-fearing soul," we can’t say for sure. We suspect, however, that God has fixed at least one wary eye on her. Somebody’d better -- she’s got the chops to take over the world (at least that small corner of it known as Po-Biz): Harvard M.Div. Iowa M.F.A. Latin honors from Whitman College. Good thing for us slack-ass mortals, she seems pretty benevolent.

Ford is the author of Deposition, published by Graywolf, and her individual poems have appeared anywhere and everywhere that matters. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Prairie Lights Prize, and she has contributed to the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Currently the Poetry Editor of New Orleans Review, she has taught most recently at Loyola University, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and Reed College.

Lucky for RMR, she’s agreed to judge the 2007 Red Mountain Chapbook Contest (!) and -- über–Good Sport that she is -- she’s submitted herself to the inaugural 500 Words (More) or Less [read the interview after the jump!]. This new feature will bring you the insights and musings of various writers, readers, and thinkers of note, all in 500 words (more) or less...

First, a morsel from Deposition:

Last Breath with No Proof

What is unremembered may be lodged she said a child may not
recall but will act it out in play doll on ground face against tile see how he takes it

by the hair by the foot by the tangled legs sweet mind made of tangled legs
and a patterned dress oh to have evidence to have the scent explained

birds trapped in chimney rustle of wings and fire or numbers etched into an arm
show me where you were hurt I am asked but I am simple unmarked remembering how

can one act out what happened in the mind how make the mind alone in a house
how show long silence what clock what song is there for hollowness who hurt you

once the ticking the voices start she did he did my mind did
and the trespass it begins again?

_____________________________

Q&A

RMR: TRUE or FALSE: Contemporary American poetry is kissin’ cousins with Christian Gnosticism of old, stingy with its secret handshakes, its extinction hard-wired into its own genetic code. Discuss.

KF: The heart of your question is whether or not American poetry will go “extinct” because it is written by a group of insiders — mean, wise, and tight. We should be more concerned that we are writing poems that will last than we are with the movement called “Contemporary American Poetry.” The poems that will last in time, and that move us now, are written because a poet is trying to write something that someone else can utter as if it came from them. When I recite a lyric by Rilke, if I attend to its music and thinking and emotions, it feels as if it is my utterance. That is a form of lyric ecstasy. A fusion, an intimacy. There can be no stinginess in the poetic task. There can be no selfishness. Individual poets might be this way, but they are human beings, so forgive them. Where would we be without T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes”? Yet he was a part of perhaps the tightest, most elite poetic circle of history. But, for the “Preludes,” I would forgive him anything. To be able to have on my lips, “I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling: / The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.” There are extinctions in poetry all of the time—good extinctions. Poems published that are not memorable die off sometimes because of compositional haste, because they are not strenuous in their language, because they are anecdotal, etc. That is an extinction. But poems that will last press against and through this — it doesn’t matter who writes them.

When you are alone, you are with a poem, not with “Contemporary American Poetry.” If the poem slays you, you will be a little more alive, a little less extinguished. When I feel this way, I am full of gratitude toward the poet who struggled and thrashed about to write that poem.

As for the “Christian Gnostics,” their texts were lost to us because they were deemed a heretical threat to the political and religious powers of what was being named “orthodox Christianity.” We have them now because they were discovered centuries later in a sand-buried library in Egypt. They are gorgeous, complicated texts. In the same way, Contemporary Poetry, if it is foolish and threatened by new genius, if it allows power — political and literary — to publish only poems of the inner circle, we could bury the poems that would have otherwise brought us new utterance, ecstasy, and lasting literature.

RMR: A couple of years ago, in the Q&A after a reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City [scroll down to July 20], you explained your decision to pursue the study of Divinity by quoting Tony Hoagland’s poem, “When Dean Young Talks About Wine”:

When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.

But when a man is hurt,
he makes himself an expert.

Interestingly enough -- nearly as interesting as the fact that you know those lines by heart -- you left off the poem’s three-line dismount, which goes like this:

Then he stands there with a glass in his hand
staring at nothing
as if he was forming an opinion

All of this makes me think of Auden, addressing Yeats:

...Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

The same might be said of religion: not a thing but a way; not a noun but a verb. A means of addressing hurt, responding to it. A method of survival.

On the other hand, there’s something calcified in expertise, or perhaps cauterized. Product over process. Safe, confined, contained -- and trapped.

Your work, specifically Deposition, seems more unleashed than that. There’s a helluva lot of roaring involved. Incomprehension, too: the powerful, growling -- yes -- ferocious kind. There’s also huddling, nesting. Indeed, there’s “nothing,” as well -- “...how show long silence what clock what song / is there for hollowness who hurt you” -- but it’s the kind of nothing that won’t suffer to be blinked at dumbly. It demands an opinion, a stance, if only as a mechanism of self-defense.

Messy, yes. Painful and incomprehensible, too. I suspect (who can say for sure?) those things are part and parcel of transcendence: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” pleads the bloody Nazarene (and here’s the kicker) the moment before his spirit ascends. Last breath with no proof.

Here’s something I notice: There’s some measure of resignation in Hoagland’s sentiment, and defeat. Secular and still. But I daresay there’s a roar of religiosity in the Auden, as in Matthew 27:46. And I already said I hear that roar -- lots of them, actually -- in Deposition.

So here, finally, is the question -- loaded and unanswerable though it might be:

Where would you locate your study of Divinity and -- if I may be so bold as to ask them to join hands -- your poetry on the continuum of secular to religious, of sacred to profane?

KF: Divinity School and Deposition were part of the same time period in my life, but there is a distinction between them, and that is why I quoted Hoagland’s beautiful lines, “But when a man is hurt/he makes himself an expert,” when asked why I went to Divinity School. Expertise is a pursuit of the intellect, and, in some cases, the body. So, yes, it holds itself at a distance, a distance religious seekers don’t usually want. They want intimacy, submersion. Studying theology (trying to gain some intellectual expertise) was a way for me to contend with the powerful and destructive elements of religion, elements I had experienced in my earlier, younger religiosity. Deposition stems from those emotions, which were, I believe, flamed a bit by things I was learning in my intellectual studies. For example, I began to find clear correlations between the ways theologians and religious leaders wrote and spoke and the ways humans perpetrate violence. Both forcefully define the reality of another person, both control another, both thrive by moments of threat and moments of mercy. I have a long essay on this and can’t go into it all now. I used up too many words above! But, having this theory made Deposition even stormier. My work engages the metaphors of my tradition — God, world, human, salvation, etc. — and in that way, my work is not fully secular. If being called a “religious” poet means the questions I most often contend with in my poems concern those metaphors, then I lean towards what you call the sacred. That said, the human is included in my list of metaphors.

I am not a Christian poet. I am just a poet, and it means very little to me to say or not say I am religious. I don’t believe in God, I do believe in God. I have no interest in reading poetry that claims to be Christian or religious, in the same way I have no interest in surrounding myself with people who are eager to claim those things.

RMR: Ten Either/Or’s. (Explain or not.)

Barack or Hillary? Barack.
Clooney or Johansson? This is not an interesting either/or.
John or Paul? Small parts of both.
Psalm 23 or Sonnet 18? The psalm, I dare say.
East or West? Northwest near the East.
Elvis or Frank? Elvis.
Emily or Walt? Emily.
Martin Luther or Martin Luther King? MLK.
Audrey or Katharine? Katharine in “Bringing Up Baby.”
Loaves or Fishes? Fishes, currently Japanese varieties.

RMR: You are poet-king for a day. Make a to-do list.

KF: 1. Depose some people.

RMR: Katie Ford poems as prophecies, as tongues, as baptisms, as ablutions, as all or none of these. Discuss.

KF: One becomes ugly when one claims these things. I will say this: there are rhetorical and musical techniques in the voices, liturgies, and manners of speech you list in your question. Sometimes I use them.

MAILBAG: THE MORALITY OF PAY-TO-PLAY?

2007-01-03T15:51:00.000-06:00

Recently, we received an e-mail from a frantic MFA student who had a big-time bee in his bonnet to get his hands on a copy of RMR. Seems he'd been assigned one of those mind-numbing reports for his poetry workshop. His mission: Drone about chapbook contests -- particularly those which feature the winner embedded in a literary magazine. At least that's what he told us. Could be he was a spy for the government.

At any rate, since we're no strangers to all things half-assed and last-minute, we obliged the poor guy. No charge, even -- but there was a catch. He had to disseminate the following screed to any and all who would listen. Did he do it? You'll have to ask the folks in State College, PA. But just in case you don't get to Happy Valley any time soon, here it is, in its glorious entirety (albeit slightly edited for readability)...

A SEMI-MINI-MANIFESTO

One thing of note on chapbook contests: Ours is free to enter. It's one of the only such contests (free entry, that is) I know about.

I mention that because I think it's worthwhile for us writers and editors to consider the repercussions of the "pay-to-play" publication model, which has a stranglehold on contemporary poetry in particular. Book contests, first-book contests, chapbook contests -- now lit mags are increasingly sponsoring contests for individual poems, stories, or essays. One could easily spend hundreds of dollars a year in pursuit of a "win" in one of the Big Fish contests -- even more than that if a little fish will do. To what end, though? To be read? Or -- more likely, I fear -- for a noteworthy line on a vita?

I certainly don't have a magic solution to the problem, but I think it's insidious and important. What does it say about us writers of contemporary literature? How much will we shell out in an effort to be published before we realize that we're just so many Wile E. Coyotes running madly in thin air?

I also wonder what it says about us as (non)readers of contemporary literature. If small presses and magazines can't support themselves through subscriptions and sales -- if we have far more submissions than we do subscriptions, and we do -- what exactly are we up to here? Almost by definition, that means more people are writing than reading. Why? And what, then, is the role for the contemporary literary magazine in such a landscape?

The Faux-Capitalist approach -- market-driven business plans aimed at increasing readership, for instance -- is just that: faux. Why? Because the real market isn't readers, it's writers.

Readers don't value us nearly as much as writers do. That's a fact. (Feel free to banty about the chicken-or-egg question of what's a reader, what's a writer, and where they intersect. To me, writing is best served if it aspires past onanism [i.e., writing for other writers], but that might just be me. PS...Raise your hand if the first place you look in a lit mag is the contributors section.)

Case in point: When I edited Black Warrior Review -- one of the older, more reputable lit mags around -- guess how many subscribers we had. About 350, give or take. Just under $5,000 gross income per year. We got that many submissions (350) in a month -- often more. With a yearly budget of around $20,000, my successors at the moderately cash-strapped BWR have recently instituted a wildly successful pay-to-play fiction contest, whereby the winner gets $1000 and his/her winning story published in the magazine. It grossed $9,000 last year. Can you blame them? Clearly, from a strictly quantitative perspective, that's a market to mine. In our system, publication is worth more to the writer than it is to the reader.

But do we realize there's some troubling morality at play in that equation? At best, it's built on circular logic: there aren't enough readers who want to buy all this writing so we're going to sell it back to the writers, who can then show university hiring committees that, indeed, they are significant enough writers to serve on a faculty that is charged with...creating more writers. Or at least they can teach the service courses the creative writing and literature faculty doesn't want to teach. (Don't look now, but isn't that us dropping towards the canyon floor faster than an ACME anvil?)

I say we, as lit mags, need to redefine our purpose. We should aim to serve, not solicit, writers. Why serve writers -- why embrace them as a constituency?

Because, damn it, they -- we -- need it and nobody else is going to do it but us. Because lit mags and small presses aren't mini-corporations; they're activist organizations. Because writers still have an important role in the body politic: to keep our culture evolving, to encourage good, provocative thought, and to inspire action -- directly or indirectly--based upon that enlightened thought.

Therefore, a lit mag's goal should be to publish and distribute work that would not otherwise see the light of day. To provoke thought. To provide an energetic, active, tangible space for said endeavors. And to do it in the most writer-friendly way possible. Free contests, openness to simultaneous submissions, and quick turnaround times are a few tangible ways to be writer friendly. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Please stay tuned to this space for another mailbag where folks rail against us for our own shortcomings in this regard. It's like the Dalai Lama says--we never said all this moralizing and compassion was easy. Necessary, yes. Easy, no.]

We need to rethink distribution and funding as well. Is Ingram's anonymous, hands-off distribution model the right one to aspire to? And practically speaking, does it even matter if it is -- few lit mags can count themselves "lucky" enough to be taken into the Ingram fold.

I think our lit mags and small presses need to "think global, act local." Or hell, think local, act local. Every community has writers in it. Writers make a community richer, smarter, more thoughtful, more empathetic, more introspective. A lit mag can -- and should -- be a local nexus for the literary arts. One that both provides a supportive common environment for literary artists but that also stakes its ground within the larger community. Poets in the schools. Public readings. Community workshops. Reading groups...

How do you pay for it? Ask for money from people who actually have it. Write grant proposals. Get shrewd about in-kind services. Publish fewer issues, smaller issues, use the web to complement content as well as to augment sales & distribution.

Clearly I'm getting carried away in a Utopian fervor. And I'm not really sure what this has to do with chapbook contests -- other than maybe this bit of advice for you and your peers: Beware the literary-industrial complex! I'll go back to my padded room now...

THE JUDGE FOR RMR'S THIRD-ANNUAL CHAPBOOK CONTEST IS...

2007-01-02T21:30:00.000-06:00

Katie Ford! No, not the one responsible for the Miss Congeniality franchise. The one who wrote Deposition, about which the NY Times Book Review wrote: “Moving and mysterious, the poems in Ford’s first collection possess the veiled brilliance of stained glass windows seen at night.”

And we're willing to bet John Shelby Spong never referred to you as "young, vibrant, evocative and brilliant." He certainly never called us that, so we're pretty darned stoked that Katie has agreed to judge our contest.

Check back for an interview with her later this month. Between now and then, order up your copy of Deposition for a glimpse at a remarkable young poet on the ascent.

Also check out the RMR website for our chapbook contest guidelines, complete with a fabulous array of new perks: a larger honorarium ($500!), a stand-alone limited edition version of the winning manuscript, and an all-expenses-paid visit to Birmingham to read at the release of RMR3!

And -- oh yeah -- to quote David Byrne, the entry fee's the same as it ever was: Nothing! Zero! Zilch! Nada! If you ask us, there ain't a better chapbook deal around.

EXTEMPORANEOUS MUSING #116: LO-BROW VS. NO-BROW

2006-12-31T16:15:00.000-06:00

Spent a couple hours we'll never get back watching Extremely Pretty People on screen the other day. They kissed, got PG-13-naked, consumed gobs of yummy material goods, and inexplicably bit their knuckles until it all turned out okay in the end.

The movie in question was The Holiday, with Mr. Jude Law, Ms. Cameron Diaz, and someday-Dame Kate Winslet. Also crazy Jack Black...who if you believe the folks at Slate -- and we do -- jumped the shark with High Fidelity.

It. Was. Awful. True paint-by-numbers crap. Worst of all, it wasn't even well-done paint-by-numbers crap. In fact, for the last thirty minutes of it, we could do nothing but try to think of a worse movie. We're sure there is one, but...(Even the infamous Ishtar had a trainwreck sort of virtue.) Afterwards, our lamentations were swept aside as snobbery by our companions. "You just don't like that kind of movie." Which deteriorated into us trying to list all the fluffy movies that we do, in fact, love. Or that are at least fine by us...

Jerry Maguire. Singles. Roxanne. About a Boy.

Even Meet the Parents was fine. That one TomHanks+MegRyan movie they kept trotting out under different titles, that was fine too. Hell, Bridget Jones's Diary -- a be-all-end-all chick-flick paragon if there ever was one -- made it past our "fine" threshold. Likewise, we'll gladly shell out eight bucks to watch some Sandra Bullock schtick, and lots of times Jennifer Anniston is funnier than she's given credit for (though we didn't see the Vince Vaughn thing and therefore have no opinion).

So here's why we're bothering you with the parsing of valid versus vapid...

Thinking about all this has led us to an aha-moment regarding aesthetics in general: We love lo-brow.

Love it. Can't get enough of it. Napoleon Dynamite is genius. Where have you gone, Beavis and Butthead? In fact, we think there's far too little really excellent lo-brow stuff out there. And we wonder if maybe that dearth says as much about the shaky state of Western culture as any cockamamie war or corporate scam.

Case in point: Even Shakespeare loved fart jokes and happy endings. Kicker being this: Lo-brow -- or at least that which does not aspire to "High Art" -- is still and always governed by the same criteria as any other narrative endeavor. Probably moreso.

Is it observant? Is it carefully constructed? Does it have the intangibles: Voice, Perspective, Insight, Chemistry, whatever it is you want to call it? Or does it think it can con us into accepting mediocrity based on the subtle discrimination of low expectations (and Jude Law's dreamy baby-blues)?

It strikes us that two of the stories in RMR2 are just exactly what we're talking about here. [How's that for a subtly capitalist segue?] That is, lo-brow that is spot-on and absolutely necessary. "What About the Bridesmaids' Dresses?" by Elizabeth May and Mark Tarallo's "Don Quixote of New Jersey" are both funny, clever, observant, and o-so-utterly contemporary. One's about an angsty telemarketer, the other references something called "pump fat" (that part of the foot which sometimes bulges out of a too-small pair of pumps). But the sentences are good too. There's clearly an artist -- and, no, we don't mean artiste -- pulling the strings back there.

The value of "lo-brow" (at least as we're defining it) is not so much that it entertains us -- a paper clip and a rubber band can do that. It's that it plumbs the shallow depths of our time and place -- right here, right now -- to tap into a lode of shared consciousness. (And, okay, touche: that's a fairly hi-brow aim. But the so-called developed world is a pretty damned esoteric place, when you finally get down to brass tacks. Mall culture is a helluva lot closer to an Ingmar Bergman flick, for example, than it is to, say, subsistence farming.)

In short, movies, novels, stories, stand-up comedy, or anything else that's funny-cuz-it's-true is fine -- more than fine -- as long as it's funny and as long as it's true. Way easier said than done. Just ask Kate Winslet.

HAPPY HAPPY!

2006-12-21T20:41:00.000-06:00

Don't know about you, but we're ready to call it an annum. Or something. Stay tuned to this space in early ought-seven. We're going to have new features: interviews (!), letters to the editor (!) and announcements (!). It's gonna be good times had by all!

Here's a teaser:

We know who our chapbook judge is...but you don't!

You'll just have to check back next year to find out who it is--and to read a fabulous, witty, provocative, meaty...eww, strike that...try again: So-resonant-it's-almost-painful-(but-in-a-good-way) interview with her. Or him. (Thought you tripped us up, didn't ya? Ah, but we haven't had that much nog, Ebenezer!) Needless to say, you won't want to miss it. Until then, have fun, be safe, and keep on sending your fine words to RMRsubmissions@gmail.com!

SEND US STUFF!

2006-12-20T11:04:00.000-06:00

● poems
● fictions
● nonfictions
● chapbooks

ander monson ● bruce smith ● joan connor ● jim daniels ● katherine soniat ● charles jensen ● lou suarez ● rane arroyo ● tony crunk ● janet mccann ● john pursley iii ● emily rapp ● kelli russell agodon ● diane glancy ● josh russell ● mark neely ● chris forhan ● alison pelegrin ● kat meads ● angela balcita ● kristine somerville ● elizabeth rees ● you?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!.....

our aesthetic? catholic, small c.

send to RMR ● 1800 eighth avenue north ● birmingham, alabama 35203...OR...send an attachment to RMRsubmissions@gmail.com!

be sure to include the title and the genre in the subject line, such as: "Moby Dick (fiction)"; "Five Poems"; "The Wasteland (chapbook)"; etc. if you want to be extra safe, send the text of your manuscript in the body of the e-mail as well.

We're reading for RMR3 from now through April 2007!

SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE OR...

2006-12-14T12:18:00.000-06:00

...proof positive that all the ultrasound and arthroscopic equipment in the world sometimes pales in comparison to a good ol' fashioned 41.7-inch human arm? (That's 3 1/2, uh, feet to you and me...)

World's Tallest Man Saves Two Dolphins

Who says the Chinese don't read Shel Silverstein? (That is where they got the idea right? That one Shel Silverstein book, where the really tall guy with long arms pulls some plastic out of the stomachs of two dolphins? Or are we thinking of Roald Dahl? Jacques Cousteau? Steve Zissou? Somebody, anyway. We're almost positive we didn't make it up...)

HEY, IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE IN MALAYSIA...

2006-12-13T19:25:00.000-06:00

...(that's Edna St. Vincent Malaysia, to you [Thank you! We're here all week!!])...this just in from the fine folks at Tupelo Press:

Stop by the Indie Scene Cafe in Kuala Lumpur's scenic Picolo Galleria, where Mong Lan will read some poems this Sunday, Dec. 17. It's free!*...

* [Editor's Note: Airfare and accommodations not included.]

RMR2, ROUGH BEAST, SLOUCHES TOWARD BETHLEHEM

2006-10-29T08:59:00.000-06:00

We are still here.

The media empire that is RMR continues its inexorable pursuit of total market dominence. Today, central Alabama. Tomorrow the world!

Lots going on in the last two months:

RMR2 is back from the printer and ready for purchase! New work from Joan Connor, Rane Arroyo, Diane Glancy, Jim Daniels, Janet McCann, and lots of others, "emerging and established," as the saying goes.

Just send us a check or money order for $6 to RMR/ASFA Foundation, 1800 8th Ave N, Bham, AL 35203. Or better yet, buy us right here on-line (see above and to the right)!

Poet Jim Murphy has agreed to come aboard as Poetry Co-Editor, joining the inimitable Mary Kaiser. This stokes us.

Last but not least, we've completed a deal with absnth.com to produce a stand-alone limited edition version of our chapbook each year! That means you can get Lou Suarez's On U.S. 6 to Providence (see above left) all by its lonesome for just $4. Buy it here on-line today! Here's a little teaser...titular, no less!

On U.S. 6 to Providence

Today I am lonely. It is not
the loneliness of a city without a river,
the waters on which the new ducks
enter, stay, then leave, on which
boys skip rocks and into which
girls wade knee-deep. Nor is it
the loneliness of the Confederate soldier,
so statuesque in the town square.
The pigeons at least flock to him
or splotch his head and shoes with white
that becomes black and hardens in sun.
And it is surely not the loneliness
of the bare tree in a field. No, not like that,
and not the tire in a roadside ditch,
not the fire escape
behind a school, the school itself.

I have never studied loneliness,
do not know how it resembles, say, love
or glory, nor how it differs from solitude, thirst.
I know this much: each has its own
rhythms that, when played together, make
a syncopated music I hear
in a part of my brain not meant for hearing.
I hear it in human breathing, hear it
in the truck driver's voice and hunch,
the bed wetter's, the asthmatic's....

Want the rest of the poem--and sixteen others as contemplative and wise? Buy it here! Now!

YOU LOVE UTNE, WE LOVE UTNE, AND UTNE LOVES...

2006-08-15T13:21:00.000-05:00

...well, Angela Balcita, but so do we, so it's all, like, one big happy love triangle! (Heck, throw Elysian Fields Quarterly in there, and we've got a rhombus! Or wait...would that be a pentagon?)

Anyhoo, check out this month's Utne for a reprint of the creative nonfiction piece formerly known as "You, Too, Can Be Americano" -- now simply "The Americano Dream" -- which first appeared in RMR1.

WANT TO DESIGN AND PRINT YOUR OWN FANCY LIT MAG?

2006-07-17T16:54:00.000-05:00

You know you do. If not you, who? If not now, when? Dammit, ask not what your country can do for you...

And when you finally decide to take the plunge, talk to Russell at www.absnth.com.

RMR is pleased to announce that absnth, inc., will be at the reins of the Quark Xpress (or whatever the heck program they use these days) for issue 2. Couldn't be in better hands, as Russell and the crew also handle the award-winning PMS: Poem-Memoir-Story.

Check 'em out.

ONE CRYING ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS

2006-07-10T09:56:00.001-05:00

Are you aware of this Gerard Jones fellow? He's the one with the twigs in his hair and locusts and honey on his breath. If you're an editor, publisher, movie producer, or a Nazi, then by golly you're not the boss of him!

Like lots of rabble rousers -- Mark Cuban, Sinead O'Connor, Martin Sheen -- he's not wrong. Not all the time, anyway. And, at any rate, he's got the basic gist, even if the tone's a little skewed.

It's the skew that interests us, though. Mr. Jones is clearly a smart man, smart enough to know that his strategies--incendiary e-mail carpet bombs aimed at establishment media operatives and a 4.57 MB website that's wall-to-wall with vitriol--are only going to yield a certain kind of attention.

At a sporting event, we pay attention to a streaker because he or she bears it all to dart through the melee knowing what will happen soon enough. A gang tackle. A collective wince from the crowd--we can only imagine where the bruises will show up later. And then it's game on again and we all go back to wishing we were principally involved in the action.

The streaker knows he's not a player. The streaker isn't trying to play, even if he grabs the ball and runs with it for a while. The streaker is anti-player, anti-rules, anti-game. The streaker's time in the sun is, by definition, fleeting. It's not posterity or a spot on the team he wants. It's disruption.

But then again, perhaps the rest of us writers and marginalized media types need a kamikaze. Maybe we can catch just enough of Gerard Jones's madness to require excellence -- even transcendence -- from what we read and write.

Just as long as we don't pretend that, given the chance, we wouldn't take our place in between the white lines of the establishment-media's playing field, and tap our toe impatiently as the cops wrangle away some inconvenient nutjob so we can get on with our fun.

So here's a hypothetical:

Would Gerard Jones trade his website and his persona for a seven-figure, multi-book deal?

Better question:

Would that be the equivalent of selling his heart and soul? Or would it just be a case of insult-comic marketeering that -- however improbably -- panned out?

ISN'T IT HARD TO DISLIKE...

2006-07-07T16:51:00.000-05:00

Nick Hornby?

A MUST-SEE RESOURCE FOR WRITERS...

2006-07-07T16:34:00.000-05:00

Check out writehabit.org. Lots of good stuff--publication opportunities, trolling agents, ideas for writing, and on-line workshops. Plus Angela Fountas, who runs the site, is good peeps. Check out how she fills her days: right-brain version here, left-brain version here. She's a great example of what one writer can do within a community. Who needs all the bureaucracy and blah-blah of university affiliation? Get out there and do something, in the real world.

Not that there's anything wrong with university affiliation. Just that there's more than one way to be a working writer in the world.

Here's to more writers just like Angela...

CHECK OUT OUR NEWPAGES.COM REVIEW!

2006-07-04T05:19:00.000-05:00

We're "unapologetically, if subtly, political"!

We're a "tender pinata"!

(That's good, right?!)

Read the review in toto [scroll down], cuz baby we ain't in Kansas anymore! In the words of the collective prophet, ZZ Top, we're nationwide!

So quit your elbowing -- there's plenty of Pez candy and trinkets for everybody...

AND THE WINNER IS...

2006-06-30T14:17:00.000-05:00

Annie Proulx, for Brokeback Mountain!

No, no. We kid.

THE 2006 RMR CHAPBOOK CONTEST WINNER...AS CHOSEN BY RODNEY JONES...IS...

ON U.S. 6 TO PROVIDENCE

BY LOU SUAREZ!!

Jones told us he was drawn to On U.S. 6 to Providence not just for its intelligence, humor, and confidence, but for its emotional risk as well. Those are meat-and-potatoes attributes, that's for sure, and we're confident readers won't push away from the table hungry after sitting down to sample what Suarez has to offer in these poems.

Thanks to those who submitted -- more than double the volume of last year's contest! -- and we sincerely hope you'll try us again. Lots that was very, very publishable in this batch.

Encouraging and daunting at the same time -- so much good work, so few good venues.

But we're fighting the good fight and we encourage you to join us!

Submit!

Subscribe!

Most important: Write! Read! Think!

AWP-AUSTIN REFLECTION: 'EDGY' IS THE NEW 'FLOW'

2006-03-13T12:37:00.000-06:00

His dark hair was longish and mussed, and his t-shirt was black. He was handsome in the way that many young men these days are trying to be: that is to say, scruffy, slightly off-kilter, shabby-chic. Like dozens of other editors and assorted hangers-on in the Austin Convention Center last week, the young man in question was hawking a literary magazine -- one he and his compatriots are looking to revive in a fresh new image. Asked just what kind of work he thought would do the trick, the E-word jumped off his lips.

'Edgy.'

In the end, what other word could he have used? To not use it would have been an affront to his milieu. After all, it isn't just us AWPeons who are scrambling for edges and ledges to toe. It's everywhere: cheerleaders pierce their tummies, grandmas get tattoos, politicians cap their boyz in the face. Rumor has it, they just made a movie where pretty men do a bunch of making out. With each other.

But we here at RMR can't help but feel a little deja vu all over again. For a while we couldn't figure out what the Ubiquity of 'Edgy' reminded us of and then it hit us: It's just like in countless writing classrooms, creative or otherwise, when students try to describe what they like or don't like about a piece of writing.

"It 'flows,'" they say, often with great self-assurance, as if it is the kind of empirical statement that cannot possibly be assailed. 2 + 2 = 'Flow.' And 'flow' is good.

But, alas, 'flow' is a word that, in the context of writing, doesn't mean anything in particular. Oh, it approximates meaning (we know, we know: that's all language ever does, blah, blah, blah). 'Flow' sort of means that 1) the poem or story proceeds in a linear -- oft narrative -- fashion, 2) the language is rhythmical, 3) the reader lost herself in the story or poem's occasion, 4) the reader did not have to stop reading to think about a word or phrase or concept, whether or not the writer intended it, 5) all of the above, 6) two or more, but not all, of the above, or 7) something else entirely.

Isn't that what 'edgy' is these days, especially in the context of the literary magazine's project? A word that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and therefore means exactly nothing to no one? Besides, aren't all literary magazines, stationed as we are on the Tatooine of contemporary culture (could be worse -- at least they gave us not one but two suns!), on the edge of something by default? Solvency? Sanity? Irrelevancy?

We raise the point not to throw a wet blanket on the many, many editors represented at AWP-Austin (not least ours truly at table #628) who want to publish work that gets a rise out of somebody -- anybody. Good. May the Force be with us. But we have to remember our audience. It's small. It consists largely of writers, many of whom are odd by birth, instinct, and experience. Put simply, it's always been daggone hard to get much of a rise out of us.

Couple that with the kinds of sugar-spike rises that make the developed world go round -- TV shows where people eat bugs and spleens; housing bubbles; big, fat Starbucks venti Sumatras -- and 'the edge' just ain't where it used to be. More than not these days, it's right smack dab in the middle of the road.

So here's our two cents:

If everybody's doing it -- whether 'it' is gender-bending, genre-bending, or just bending whichever way the wind blows -- then 'edgy' isn't edgy enough. We have to ask for more. More important, we have to know what it is we're asking for.

Shock and decadence (in all its forms) are easy. 'Original' is overrated. At RMR we're going to keep asking for 'interesting,' 'intelligent,' with a healthy measure of plain-old 'observant.' That's plenty enough to upset most applecarts anyway.

ET TU, OPRAH?

2006-02-02T09:53:00.000-06:00

We here at RMR simply can't help ourselves: we have to jump into the salacious, uh, Frey-fray. Please forgive us in advance.

You see, what's so daggone compelling about the whole snafu--check out The Smoking Gun's damning expose if, by some chance, you've been hiding under a rock for these last few weeks and don't know what the heck we're talking about--is the core question of authenticity and how little of it there is in the contemporary world of ideas.

(Whoa--we just read the last part of that sentence aloud and, man, does it sound harsh. We'll leave it for now.)

Let's also leave Frey for a while--he can use the time to gather up the million little pieces of his career--and first consider Ms. Winfrey. What she has to sell is not so much authenticity but its sexy first cousin once removed, intimacy. In a culture that's increasingly spread out, exurban, "red" or "blue" and factionalized, that's a hot commodity, indeed. So it's not surprising that, as Letterman likes to say, Oprah's got all the money. She does not sell information or entertainment or even herself. She sells the notion that she is a dear friend we can count on, especially if we're women aged 34-65.

There is also a vaguely creepy subset of intimacy: vicariousness. Oprah sells us that too. She is smart, she is from humble beginnings, she and/or her boyfriend seems to grapple with some degree of commitment phobia, and her figure has fluctuated more than Robert DeNiro's on the set of Raging Bull. She's also rich, powerful, and enormously popular. In short, Oprah is us and not us all at once; she is our friend with normal foibles who has somehow risen to lord over the ubiquitous entertainment industry. Best of all, she's done all the hard work so we don't have to! All we have to do is tune in every afternoon to see who's jumping on her couch or blinking at her sheepishly.

Which leads us back to Frey: Isn't some of the ferocious backlash against him rooted in that same sandy ground? People feel betrayed: social workers and recovering addicts alike have passed around his book as if it is a new millenium panacea for all manner of self-abuse. We trusted him. We thought he was one of those special and audacious few who had "done it so we didn't have to"--and, after living to tell about it, he'd brought back Wisdom and Insight from the brink of annihilation. Like all great heroes and seekers.

Alas, more like a dime-a-dozen, fratboy ne'er-do-well, Frey was mostly just cooking up his smack in a silver spoon. Should we have expected anything else, though? After all, he as much as tells us that his biggest problem is and always has been an inability to hold himself accountable to the truth. Is it really such a shock that his memoir is chock full of fudging, fabrication, and outright lies?

But many readers are mad at him anyway because that kind of problem sounds way, way, way too much like one of our own. And, damn it, if he's that much like us, then he shouldn't have a bunch of fancy houses and famous friends and movie deals. Get your pitchforks and torches: Let's sue the hell out of him! (We at RMR can't help but be reminded of Steve Martin's classic movie, The Jerk, where after a similar sort of ruination, Martin's character, Navin, has to refund the outraged consumers he's [unwittingly] duped--one $1.09-check at a time.)

We say let Frey keep his money. We say let's have him as our faux J.D. Salinger. Of course, it's particularly fitting that our "Salinger" drops off the scene not because of a genius-confirming eccentricity but because, in a classic close-the-barn-door-after-the-cow's-long-gone maneuver, his agent dropped him and he's presumably radioactive as a writer. At least for a while. What better emblem for the state of present-day commercial publishing than a filthy rich and famous--okay, infamous--man who must rest on the laurels of a life and work built out of smoke and mirrors?

So who gets the blame?

Maybe Power Editor Nan Talese, who took the bullet for the rest of her there-but-for-the-grace-of-Oprah Big Publishing colleagues by absorbing Winfrey's TV tongue lashing (check out The Slate for a discussion of just when Nan really knew what she knew).

Maybe it's the big O herself, who--despite her mea culpa redux--should be seen for what she is: a businesswoman whose chief commodity is her ability to create her own sort of fiction, the idea that she is her audience's primary champion.

But we think it's a little more diffuse than all that. We think there's plenty of blame that falls on us as readers and consumers of contemporary culture. Shame on us for buying--hook, line, and $14.95-sinker--what in hindsight now seems like so much blaringly obvious braggadocio.

ALL ABOUT RED MOUNTAIN REVIEW

2005-02-22T09:43:00.000-06:00

Red Mountain Review takes its name from the seam of iron ore that runs through the heart of central Alabama. The magazine is produced at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, with the support of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, Southern Progress Corporation, and the creative writing faculty at Jefferson State Community College and the University of Montevallo. In partnership with the Red Mountain Reading Series--which has hosted such writers as Dana Johnson, Peter Meinke, Tom Franklin, Natasha Trethewey, and many more--RMR is poised to take its place in Alabama’s long tradition of helping America’s best writers of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction find an audience.

We have a simple goal—to produce a fine literary magazine that gets noticed, and to do so with Birmingham’s roots in mind. The Magic City has a long history of working hard and of grappling with hard truths. We will, therefore, always seek to recognize those in our field who do the hard work, who tell the hard truths, and who do so expecting little or no remuneration. Which is to say, the vast majority of writers of contemporary literature, literature that—for reasons of form, length, subject, or project—has traditionally had a difficult time finding the light of day in mainstream commercial venues. Luckily, our editorial tastes are broad: academics and “real people;” sonneteers and the so-called “Grrl-esque” poets; writers of very short nonfiction; those who write long, leisurely, expansive fiction. The list goes on.

In addition to publishing great individual poems, stories, and essays, we are the champions of the chapbook. Every issue will feature the winning collection from our chapbook contest, which is free to enter and is judged independently by a poet of national reputation. The contest winner recieves a $250 honorarium and publication in the magazine.

Thanks for your interest in RMR and in contemporary writing in general. Please peruse the rest of this site to see more about what we’re up to. And you might as well bookmark us, because we'll have a steady stream of contest announcements and updates, book reviews, links, and other fun tidbits.

Contact the editors at RMRsubmissions@gmail.com.

POETRY WITHOUT GIMMICK: BETH ANN FENNELLY'S TENDER HOOKS

2005-01-05T13:42:00.000-06:00

A review by Elizabeth Buckalew

If Muriel Rukeyser first wondered what would happen if a woman told the truth about her life, poet Beth Ann Fennelly has offered an answer. To read Tender Hooks, Fennelly's second book, is to encounter Fennelly herself, who throws open the doors of her life and invites readers inside. She introduces herself and others: her husband, fiction writer Tom Franklin; their young daughter, Claire; and poet-friend Ann Fisher-Wirth show up regularly, and the poems flow directly from Fennelly's life. As she explains on the jacket, Fennelly wrote Tender Hooks "to figure out what [she] was experiencing," and her poems proceed as explorations rather than proclamations. Fennelly demonstrates great versatility: she writes heroic couplets, sonnets, prose poems, and free verse. Some poems span eighteen pages; others, such as "First Day at Daycare," contain a mere fifteen syllables: "My daughter comes home smelling like another woman's perfume." Just as Fennelly's daughter carries the scent of another woman, these poems hold traces of other poets. However, they never allow their literary forbearers to overshadow their own poetics. Fennelly demonstrates an acute awareness of things literary, but she defines herself within this context rather than being subsumed by it.

Tender Hooks chronicles Fennelly's explorations, and its poems often juxtapose her life with people in it or with the outside world. "A Study of Writing Habits," for example, travels from Fennelly's composition classroom to her experience at Wrigley Field, from the papers of Ogden Nash to the poems of Moore and Bishop. Each stop raises questions; at Wrigley, Fennelly enjoys watching the umpires clean home plate, then wonders, half playfully and half self-consciously, "Does this make me a domestic poet?" Subsequent poems explore Fennelly's sensitivity to the impossibility of language, a theme introduced in her first book, Open House. She rigorously investigates miscommunications and misnomers, as in the prose poem "Waiting for the Heart to Moderate," which begins, "Adults had a drink, they said, to take the edge off, so that's how she came to understand growing up: erosion."

"Telling the Gospel Truth," a stunning, ten-section poem originally published in The Kenyon Review, links reflections on faith and writing to the realities of being a mother. Many of Tender Hooks' poems explore parenthood; Fennelly discusses childbirth, miscarriage, nursing, and child-rearing. Though these themes are common, Fennelly addresses them without melodrama and with fresh insight. Fennelly's role as a parent also allows her a fresh perspective on language and its acquisition, and the poems often discuss Claire, Fennelly's toddler, learning to speak. Readers see Claire master the word ball and then use it on every round object she encounters, but we also see language from Fennelly's perspective. Her descriptions are always exact, as in "Why We Shouldn't Write Love Poems, or, If We Must, Why We Shouldn't Publish Them," which reads, "We fall in love, we fumble for a pen, we send our poems out like Jehovah's Witnesses--in time they return home, and when they do, they find the locks changed." Fennelly makes writing appear effortless, "the way thin people seem naturally thin."

There is a risk inherent in such talent and ease, of course; models of the poet as untouchable sage abound, and they often repel readers. Fennelly, however, is wise enough not to be such a poet. She reveals her questions and uncertainties, and she does not assume a self-righteous posture. She crafts poems from rejection slips, weeps before her students, pokes fun at herself and her jealousy of Claire's "Daddy Phase," confessing, "I would like to pitch a fit when she ducks my kiss." Fennelly's poems are candid and welcoming. They are works likely to make readers long to invite her to dinner.

In Tender Hooks, Fennelly accomplishes what few poets ever master: she roots her poems in the specifics of everyday life, but she does so without banality and with great intelligence and wit. These poems are frank without relying on shock value; they are smart without being pompous. Although the title comes from a phrase Fennelly misunderstood as a child, it provides an apt glimpse at the volume's contents. Fennelly's poems offer a warm, generous protagonist who embraces challenging topics. Her poems explore the people and things that bear tender hooks, those entities that simultaneously compel and confound, bind and barb, those things that enthrall us.

Elizabeth Buckalew received her BA from Davidson College in North Carolina and is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Alabama. The book is Tender Hooks by Beth Ann Fennelly. W.W. Norton, 2004.

THE VOICE-DRIVEN LYRIC

2004-12-21T10:47:00.000-06:00

A review by Mary Kaiser

Take any sequence of lyric poems, say Keats’s five great odes. Try not to read them as the story of a twenty-four-year-old poet confronting his own death. Try reading Sappho’s ecstatic fragments without stitching them into a series of erotic encounters. Try reading Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection Ariel without looking for clues to her suicide.

The formalists cautioned against it, but we can’t help reading a series of poems as story. The narrative-hungry imagination reads any group of texts as a beginning, middle and end the way a magnet aligns a jumble of iron filings.

Maurice Manning uses this narrative magnetism to great advantage in his latest collection, A Companion for Owls:Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, &c. Roughly two-thirds of the poems are dramatic monologues, but interleaved among them are lyrical poems. Taken out of context, the lyrics, like the first poem “On God,” can be read as the product of a contemporary American poetic voice. But within the narrative force-field of the collection, the lyrics are energized with the voice of “Long Hunter, Back Woodsman,” Daniel Boone.

Why Daniel Boone? Because, Manning writes in the essay that closes this collection, “if ever there were a Noble Savage, surely it is Boone.” In fact, he goes on to argue that Boone could plausibly have been the image of English Romanticism’s solitary man in communion with the wilderness, free of the class conflict and political turmoil.

The Daniel Boone in Manning’s poems, however, is no Byronic hero. He might be disaffected by Jeffersonian democracy, but he is neither alienated nor alone. Married, the father of twelve children, friend of the Indian, he is an alert observer of his fellow men, and makes no claim to transcend the common human condition. In fact, in “To the Discovery Corps,” addressing Lewis and Clark, Boone inveighs against pride, calling it the most dangerous of all temptations, “of which I know/ no greater darkness, none.”

Manning gets the voice of Daniel Boone exactly right in these poems. It’s clean, sensuous, rigorously rational, rising to lyricism from a firm foundation of observation laid on bedrock of healthy skepticism. The voice of Daniel’s brother Squire appears in letters, the idiosyncratic spelling functioning as dialect: “What her you of Jeffersones kinsmen/ who bucherred and burnt up a Slave/ the night God so fercely shook the Erthe?” Manning’s faithfulness to the language of Boone’s time extends even to titles that resonate with the formal candor of eighteenth-century poetry, as in “On the Property of Magnetism,” “Advice to Rovers, and “A Description of a Crude Machine.”

If Maurice Manning’s Boone foreshadows the English Romantics, he also presages the Transcendentalism of Thoreau and Whitman. When Boone concludes in “On Being Raised Quaker” that “I never saw the need to make my peace with God,/ since I never felt we disagreed,” he’s paraphrasing Thoreau’s words on his deathbed.

Although he lived through the American Revolution, Daniel Boone participated very little in the debates of that period; he seemed more interested in the actual landscape than in theorizing about America. Manning’s Boone, who asks “What in the name of Shadrach, Meshach, and that other one/ is an inalienable right?” might agree with Thoreau that “it is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world.”

Boone also echoes Whitman throughout the collection, with one poem, “A Contemplation of the Celestial World,” a beautiful homage to Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” At a deeper level, Boone’s embrace of physicality, his celebration, with Whitman, of “the flesh and the appetites,” pervades these poems, as for example in these lines from “Sheltowee”: “Captivity/ is not the word that I would use when women/ place a string of beads around your neck/ and giggle to themselves.” When Boone compares a landscape to the “taut thighs of a woman giving birth,” we can see in this language the slippage between the historical Boone discussed in the closing essay and the imagined Boone of the poems. As a poetic creation Boone can appropriate a frank rhapsodic diction unavailable to his historical counterpart.

Maurice Manning’s Daniel Boone is a big man, with one foot in the frontier imagination of the eighteenth century and the other firmly planted in a post-modern consciousness of all that would be lost–magnificent herds of bison, free bands of Indians, undiscovered landscapes, and most of all the chance, when all your schemes come to naught, to light out once again for the territories.

Mary Kaiser serves as poetry editor for Red Mountain Review. The book is A Companion for Owls:Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, &c. by Maurice Manning. Harcourt, 2004.