Mary Kovaleski Byrnes’ “Maybe This Happens to Everyone”

Poem: Maybe This Happens to Everyone
Poet: Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Magazine: inter|rupture (Best of the Net Winner)
http://www.interrupture.com/archives/feb_2011/mary_kovaleski_byrnes/
Blogger: D. Glazebrook

The poem starts out with a woman laying in bed with a man.  The woman speaking in this poem is describing how beautiful Paris is, but is really describing the summer romance she is having while being in the city.  The two visit different sites in the city but the woman can’t focus on them because she’s so focused on this guy.  She’s making it seem that life has no worries and that her and the man she is with are just two young people in love.  They don’t care about what other people think about their public display of affection.  She described people looking at the two of them by saying “their faces like mirrors”.  I think this means that anyone who looked at them saw the joy they were feeling and it made them happy to see this, or made them want to be in the same position (happy and in love).

The woman is describing this feeling as a “flame” or “fire”; “at night the flames were in my hair, the flames were in his mouth, and each street unrolled like a tongue that gave us what we couldn’t understand”.  This imagery makes me just picture how much fun they’re having, running up and down the streets, probably a little buzzed, not having a care in the world.  She later says, “maybe this happens to everyone, in every city, even in small towns, where corn fields catch fire at the end of summer and teenagers tear off their clothes and run naked through them”.  She talks about how the flame will get so close to these teenagers but won’t even singe them.  This sounds like the kids are “playing with fire”.  It’s a young summer love and they know that it’s probably all just for fun and could get hurt in the end, but at the time, they’re just having fun and don’t care about what could happen later.

The poem ends with trains coming and going and the couple stays behind (skipping their train).  It sounds like they’re trying to live in this love forever but it won’t last, no matter how hard they try; “it won’t brand them, won’t even singe, no matter how hard they run”.  It won’t be something that “brands” them and lasts forever, like a scar.  It is temporary and they need to live in the moment.

I really liked this poem because it perfectly describes a “summer love”; something that a lot of people want to experience at least once in their life.  What better city to describe this in than Paris?

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Noah Al-Badry’s Observing Girl X

Poem: Observing Girl X
Poet: Noah Al-Badry
Magazine: failbetter.com
Blogger: R. Romero
http://failbetter.com/45/AlBadryGirl.php?sxnSrc=ltst

While reading the title of Observing girl X, I assumed that this would be a poem about a person who may envy this girl x or be around this girl frequently to make observations about her. However, this poem took a huge twist and was about a person who sees a girl eating a large salad and has a bag of Mars chocolate sitting next to her. The narrator states how this girl X will eat everything she can, her salad, the chocolate and anything she can afford to buy, and then go to the bathroom to purge everything she has eaten. This narrator gives a very detailed story to what they think this girl will do in the bathroom and this story caught my attention because I did not see this poem being about bulimia. It’s a strong poem because it does not hold back from the details of what a girl will do to keep herself looking skinny. I like this sentence the most out of the poem because Noha uses a technique that lets the reader know he is going to talk about bulimia, yet he uses the steps of what a women does in the bathroom to fix her makeup and image instead; “Stealthily stare until its inhabitants – a woman fixing, re-fixing her veil then applying, reapplying her mascara, her lipstick then touching up her powder for what seems like hours…and a girl with a mane of fuzzy curls washing her hands vigorously — to exit”. I find it interesting how he cuts off the sentence to go upon describing applying makeup and then the next sentence are the description and step by step direction of how girl X will make herself vomit to fix the way she thinks she looks. This was a good poem in my eyes because I like the way the story or observation was told by the narrator.

Flash Photography/Flash Fiction contest winner

We’re pleased to announce Erich O’Connor’s short piece “Play Fight” as the winner of our flash fiction contest, inspired by the photography of Diane Arbus!

PLAY FIGHT

by Erich O’Connor

We stood shoulder to shoulder staring at the photo in The Medicine Shop—a local art gallery.

“What does it mean?” Alberta whispers.

“I don’t know,” Marvin says.

“Well, it’s clearly a statement about the effect of war and the Military Industrial Complex on the younger generations,” Frank says. “Humanity’s always been at war. We learn to fight because that is what we are taught.”

Frank is such a bummer—he’s smart—but he always takes the fun out of things by over-over analyzing things and always ends up making everyone feel like a dumbass.

“Whatever,” Alberta says, “I think it’s a toy grenade. The kid’s just playing around.”

“Exactly,” Frank resonates, “How else do you think we learn it.”

When we leave The Medicine Shop and Alberta says she wants to go to Tacos and Ice Cream and have a taco and some ice cream. We walk down the street, passing the spinning neon sign. Inside as Alberta is stuffing her face with a soft shell taco and I’m chowing on the cheesiest nachos, Frank informs us about the news report he’d just seen Andy Rooney give on last week’s 60 Minutes.

“In the news report,” Frank tells us, “they showed all the chickens and cows they pump full of hormones and stuff. The chicken’s bones snap like toothpicks and the breast meat is plump and the eggs are many. The cows, they get heavier, and the girl cows’ utters swell with so much milk that their utters touch the ground. It’s unhealthy,” he says, “and they use it for fast food and stuff.”

I throw a chip at his face, cheese sticks to his cheek and jacket before the chip falls to the floor.

“Hey!” Frank says.

I say, “What, you wanna take it outside?”

Clint Margrave’s “The Math Mortician”

Poem: “The Math Mortician”
Poet: Clint Margrave
Magazine/Journal: Verse Daily
Blogger: A. Duncan
http://www.versedaily.org/2012/themathmortician.shtml

This poem de-familiarizes death by comparing it to math, but in the same way gives it the depth of meaning we want death to have. The first stanza insinuates that the “math mortician” is so hardened by the many bodies he has seen that there is no value to death anymore. Death doesn’t carry the weight that it might have previously had for him because, “he sees numbers, readies them up on time’s table”. The second stanza starts to dive into how contemplative the mortician is about the power of death. He “uses algorithms over aspirate”. The words flow there, like how it flows for him to compute all the numbers over a regular breathing pattern. My favorite line is, “hypothesizes infinity is but an empty set”. It speaks with a somber attitude. Infinity does not exist and the mortician knows that, but hypothesizing is part of his nature, and infinity is a guess that won’t sit down next to him.

The last stanza really ties the poem together, and gives it more meaning than I had thought it would have based on the first stanza. The poem turns out to be more about the inevitability and sadness of death than about the mundane quality of death that the mortician could have had eyes to see. The last line states, “when death’s the only constant”. No one gets out of death; it is the only thing in our lives that is absolute, unlike the value of our lives, which he declares in the previous line.

Interview with T.A. Noonan

After her recent stop at UIS, poet and author T.A. Noonan was generous enough to sit down and answer a few questions via email about her most recent book, the hybrid-genre poetry collection The Bone Folders.  The interview touches on her writing process and how she found the subject material for her collection and also strayed into her experiences in small-press publishing and advice she has to small journals like The Alchemist ReviewBe sure to check out The Bone Folders, as well as her other works.  More information can be found on her home page, fear_of_abstraction.

What was the inspiration behind your second collection of poems, The Bone
Folders?  Was there a certain group behind some of the characters in this
collection?

In 1999, during my second semester at LSU, I connected with a young woman who was involved in the Goddess 2000 Project, an international art initiative designed to increase visibility of the Goddess and Goddess imagery for the new millennium. She knew I was interested in mythology, Paganism, and witchcraft, and she asked if I wanted to work with her. I did, and so I went to a seven-acre property in Walker, LA, that was home to a group of witches known as the Covens of the Licorice Unicorn. They had a huge fence that they “donated” to the Goddess 2000 Project, and we were given paints and the freedom to create our own murals. As I worked on my mural, I became intrigued by the men and women of the Licorice Unicorn and began interviewing them. Their stories were sad, uplifting, and magical. Quickly, I realized wanted to write a book about their lives, and, by extension, my own experiences with Paganism and witchcraft.

The members served as the primary models for the characters in The Bone Folders, but they weren’t the only ones. I drew upon my own experiences, as well as stories from the women of my family, especially my mother and grandmother. Later, when I was working on my MFA, I met a group in South Florida known as the Sisterhood of Ahel Adom, and they also served as inspiration. So, the characters in The Bone Folders are an amalgam of about a couple dozen women I know or know about. I had to fictionalize them, mixing and matching details, but every character all emerged from interactions with and stories about real people.

What type of research is involved in writing about a coven of witches in
Louisiana – or Wicca in general?  What complications, if any, did you find
in writing about this culture?

Well, the Licorice Unicorn gave me almost full access to their archives and members. I understand that this was very unusual; even though they were public and known in the community, many members were very secretive, and the archive was a carefully controlled resource. I was and still am honored that they trusted me so much so quickly.

I also read a lot of books on witchcraft, Wicca, Paganism, and the occult. Of course, I already had a small library of my own by that point because I’d been practicing for a few years, but I didn’t know how much was out there until I started digging. There are some publishers that specialize in Occult, New Age, and Alternative Spirituality titles, and I read a lot of those. But I also did historical research, studying the roots of contemporary practices and beliefs. It’s still an area of interest for me, so I’m always reading and learning more. And, as a practitioner myself, I draw a lot of insights from “hands-on” experience from my personal and group workings.

There were two big complications I discovered while working on this book. The first was that a lot of the language used to talk about witchcraft is archaic, abstract, and clichéd. Plus, there’s always this problem of terminology; not everyone uses the same terms to describe or define the same things. It’s a pain. I struggled to find ways around that, even going as far as to dig into the words themselves, to create something that was more human and real than a vocabulary list.

The second was that it was really difficult to express my “insider’s” perspective in a way that was meaningful to an outsider. In a way, it’s like trying to write a reverse ethnography. So, I found myself focusing primarily on the human dramas, as well as drawing on other seemingly unconnected experiences to create associations that were accessible and identifiable.

“Witchcraft” seems to be a very loose word, especially in some of the poems
in this collection, such as “Slogan Triptych.”  In some poems, computer code
or mathematics or cooking seems synonymous with witchcraft.  Would you
define witchcraft as having a broad definition to include other forms of
craft and art?

I can’t help but tip my hat to Arthur C. Clarke, who famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Yeah, I see a lot of other arts, crafts, and sciences as part of “witchcraft,” but I think that may be something of a personal association and not “universal.” I mean, there are practitioners out there who, like me, use math in their witchcraft; for example, there’s a wonderful relationship between the Golden Ratio and the pentagram, that five-pointed star used by so many witches. Computer programming also strikes me as very much like setting a spell in motion because of the need to define a problem, figure out which operations to use, etc. Cooking requires knowledge of how different compounds will interact, and I’ve learned a lot about herbalism from using spices.

I guess the easiest way to think about it is to define witchcraft literally as “the craft of the witch,” and because my “craft” includes a lot of different activities, my notion of what witchcraft is ends up being pretty large. Then again, I know a lot of witches who incorporate other arts, crafts, sciences, etc. into their practices, so maybe it’s more universal than I think.

In The Bone Folders, and with witchcraft in general, there seems to be a
theme of people who are social outsiders.  Do you feel that this is a common
trait among practitioners of witchcraft, or other types of art and craft?

I do, but I also think that all people who are deeply involved in any specific or narrow field tend to be social outsiders. Ever met someone who can quote Kurt Russell movies verbatim, or sing all the lyrics to every Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, or talk for hours on the intricacies of snake bio-mechanics? It’s not like there are a million opportunities for these kinds of highly focused interests to come up in casual conversation.

The Japanese have a word for these people: otaku. In modern usage, it roughly translates to “geek,” but there’s a great deal of negativity associated with the term. Outside of Japan, otaku is used specifically to refer to fans of anime and manga, and while the term doesn’t have the same level of unsavoriness that it has in Japan, there are still plenty of negative stereotypes associated with it. And a lot of these stereotypes tie into various taboos we have relating to cleanliness, etiquette, obsession, sex, and so on.

Witches have the disadvantage of being marginalized because their craft hits on even more taboos. That’s not to say that pop culture hasn’t helped make witchcraft more visible or ameliorated some of the most harmful stereotypes.

Still, when I think of a lot of the witches I know, I see them as outsiders because they are invested in a subject that most don’t value, not because they can’t function in society. And that, I think, makes them a lot like people who obsess over what the average person would consider a “trivial” subject.

What was the writing process like for this collection?

Long. But that’s oversimplifying, a bit.

I started the book when I was nineteen and worked on it throughout my undergraduate career. I completed the first draft when I was twenty-two, but I knew it wasn’t “done.” For one thing, it kept changing genres. The manuscript started as poetry, but it became fiction, then poetry again, then fiction again, then nonfiction, etc. I felt like I didn’t know what it was supposed to be, and I hadn’t realized it yet that could be all of those things. Another problem I had was that I didn’t feel like I’d captured the strange beauty of these people and their stories. The work felt too constrained, like I hadn’t managed to really get at the heart of who these women were. So, I kind of shelved the project and decided to write other things.

While working on my MFA, I had two experiences that made me rethink the project. One was meeting the Sisters of Ahel Adom; they helped me realize that my voice had value and could be used to tell a story that very few people could. I remember having long conversations with them about the ways that witches were portrayed in the media, and they were so supportive of the book’s concept because they saw that a book like The Bone Folders could capture the Pagan experience in a way that nothing else had.

The second experience was in my first poetry workshop as a graduate student. I had been struggling with this poem unrelated to the collection, and when I turned it in, the reaction from my peers was not good.

I explained all the ideas that went into the draft, and Susan Mitchell, my professor, said, “That was so much more interesting than what was on the page.” When I complained that there was no way to write the way I thought, that my ideas were impossible to translate, she looked at me and said, “Try.”

I did.

That poem became “A Chaos Theory,” which did make it into The Bone Folders, and the discovery that I could actually draw everything together and make the connections I saw was a revelation. I restarted the project, rescuing what I could from the older versions along the way. Not everything I wrote during that period ended up making it into the final version, but a lot of stuff did. It was kind of a crazy experience because there are pieces that I have almost no memory of drafting. (I sometimes wonder if I might have “tapped into” something during the process!) In any case, I completed the manuscript July 14, 2007, while I worked on my PhD. I did make one final revision to it September 2007, plus a pretty rigorous copyedit a few months before its publication. Fun fact: The Bone Folders was officially released on July 15, 2011, which was almost four years to the day after I declared the collection “done.”

So, all in all, The Bone Folders was nearly twelve years in the making. And it was totally worth it, because I’m very proud of it.

Some of your previous work has been published in several Southern literary
 journals.  As the internet brings cultures together and influences are
traded so easily, how do you feel that has affected the concept of
“Southern” fiction, if at all?

Maybe this is just my experience, but I’ve noticed that, until fairly recently, people have had pretty restrictive notions of what makes writing “Southern.” They immediately envision these Southern Gothic tropes and magnolia pastorals, or they turn to the setting or the author’s biography. That strikes me as unfair, and I wonder if it has something to do with the ways in which Southern literature is taught, the way its canon is constructed. It doesn’t seem like there are a lot of new, exciting texts making their way into classrooms, which is a shame because there are some great Southern writers that blow my mind. It’s not that there aren’t classics of Southern literature that do the same, but avoiding the really contemporary stuff gives an incomplete picture of the subgenre.

Whenever I talk about being a Southern writer, I always feel it necessary to point out that I’m not a Southerner by birth; I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I’ve lived the vast majority of my life in the South. I consider myself a Southerner because I was raised in the South, and the majority of my experiences are, by definition, Southern. But I’m also a New Yorker, of sorts. Plus, I’ve lived in Florida for at least a quarter of my lifetime, which is both Southern and not, depending on who you ask and where you’re looking within the state.

My point in mentioning this is that it’s far too easy to think of Southern writing as a combination of geography and trope. The world isn’t so small anymore. People are a lot more mobile than they used to be. I’ve met Southerners everywhere. The proliferation of independent and online publishing has allowed Southern writers who don’t fit this narrow scope of what is “Southern” to find outlets for their work, and that is a good thing. And I do see a broadening sense of what it means to write in and about the South. But it’s slow. I think it would happen a little faster if the canon of Southern literature opened up more and a greater emphasis was placed on what Southern writers are doing right now, as opposed to what they have done in the past.

By the way, Flannery O’Connor explores this even further in her excellent essay, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” Seriously, just read it. I’d quote her, but I’d either end up copying the whole thing or missing some of the nuances of her exploration.

You’re involved with several small presses and publications such as Sundress Publications and Flaming Giblet Press, which you founded.  What advice would
you have for a new (and small) literary journal?  What surprises did you
discover when starting up a small press?

The first piece of advice on publishing that I received was from Rodger Kamenetz, my mentor at LSU. When I mentioned that I wanted to start a press, he told me that the secret to making a small fortune as a publisher was to start with a large one. It’s a clever joke, but it taught me the first rule of running a press or journal. You can’t go into it thinking that you’ll get rich; you have to do it because you just have to do it. Publishing has to be a love affair and a moral imperative.

You’d be surprised how many hats a publisher needs to wear. It’s not merely about having a vision or aesthetic. You’ve got to be able to network, copyedit, design, communicate. If you can’t do all those things yourself, you need people who can teach you or do it for you. I guess that’s my second piece of advice: it’s good to find people you can ask advice of and/or work with. Network. Talk to others in the field. Almost every small-press or journal publisher I’ve met is totally open to discussing the process. And, if you’re going to work with other people, make sure their strengths compliment (or compensate for) your weaknesses. It’s not impossible to be a one-man or one-woman show, but it’s a lot harder.

One of the things that surprised me was how little I knew about publishing when I first got involved. I kind of had to teach myself a lot of the nuts and bolts. For example, the very first thing I published through Flaming Giblet Press was my chapbook, Balm. I figured that if I screwed it up, at least I only had to answer to myself. But I had no idea what I was doing, really. Thanks to the internet, I located a good chapbook template, used it to do the layout, designed and carved my own linocut block for the cover, and assembled the books myself.

Unfortunately, I was way too pleased with the results, and that satisfaction drove me to pursue a lot of projects that I wasn’t ready for. Ambition eventually got the best of me. That was and is my third lesson: ideas are great, but you should only do what’s within your means. And that includes everything from skills to time to resources. If all you can manage is a couple of broadsides a year, that’s great; do that. If you can do more, do more. However, don’t take on more than you can reasonably do. I’ve made a lot of mistakes as a publisher, but the majority of them stem from over-ambition.

I guess my next suggestion for people wanting to get into publishing is to get as much experience as possible in any many related fields and arenas as possible. Intern. Learn how to build a website. Take design courses. Absorb some style manuals, even if they’re not exactly rip-roaring reads. Putz around with Facebook and Twitter and other social networks. The more knowledge you have, the better off you’ll be.

And, even though this sounds cheesy, you need to read, promote, support, donate to, and purchase from independent publishers. They can’t survive without people like you. If your budget doesn’t allow for multiple subscriptions or dozens of books a year, boost the signal by telling your friends about the great work you’ve heard about, read, seen online, etc. Always be on the lookout for new great work, too. The more you encounter, the more you’ll discover about what is out there and what is possible.

Jen Lambert’s “Dinner for the Dying”

Poem:  Dinner for the Dying: blog one
Poet: Jen Lambert
Magazine: Boxcar Poetry Review
http://boxcarpoetry.com/030/lambert_jen_001.html
Blogger: R. Romero

 While reading through all the different poems on the websites, I wasn’t very interested in many of them. The poem on Box car poetry titled “Dinner for the Dying” by Jen Lambert caught my attention the most. This poem caught my attention because I felt like I could dissect it better than the others and also at first I was unsure if Jen was writing from the animal’s perspective or from the human mother of the farm. This contrast intrigued me because in the first stanza she describes a boy running in with blood on his hands and she was chopping onions, and I had no clue that this was going to end up talking about a female deer.

In the first stanza Jen presents a stylistic structure to her stanza which she describes a scene and then at the end puts a comma to side note what the character was doing at the time. I feel like this gave a twist that everyone in class could learn because it kind of gave a tone to the poem that the character was not surprised to see this boy with blood on his hands and made me want to keep reading.

In the second stanza, I love the way Jen uses specific words to defamiliarize an ordinary subject.

“The scar on my belly, that battered, barbwire grin
that opened like a window for him, twitches
for the dying mother and the calf like a love note in her womb.”

These three lines caught me the most in this poem. The scar on my belly, hence the character had a C-section and Jen describes the scar as a barbwire grin, which gave a new twist instead of just saying scar. When she states that this scar on her belly opened like a window for him, she tells how she gave birth to a baby boy and that she twitched in empathy for the mother deer because she knew how it felt to give birth.

These two stanzas intrigued me the most out of this poem and I feel like there is a lot to learn from here with word play and structure.