Mazer on Mazer

"The tension is the meaning of the poet/poem versus the meaning of the world." 

This  comment by Ben Mazer about the vibrating tension at the heart of his work, comes from his 2014 reading at Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in reply to an audience question: "Can you explain for us please .the "mystery" of the "tension" which vibrates in your poetry?" (As reported at the Scarriet blog.)

//-- > Mazer's December Poems, published by Pen & Anvil in May 2016, is available for sale via the press website or Amazon.com.

E.B. White to Shirley Wiley, 1954

"An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write." From a letter from E.B. White to Shirley Wiley, 1954. 

Quote-card: Postman on typography

A quote from Neil Postman, pertinent to DIY, POD, and other species of publication (and relating generally to the topic of how changes in media technology lead to social change), from the essay "Media as Epistemology"in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

"Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality . . . but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration."

On Pinterest and Instagram as Pen & Anvil Quote-Card #47.

PotD: Passages from The City Builder

The prose George-Konrád's The City Builder is piled heavily upon itself, less like rows of bricks than like the buildings of new Troy built upon the layered ruins of earlier Troys.

The narrator, a city planner in an unnamed European town, has lived through both World War II and the communist takeover. His musings and observations are at times journalistic, and other times dream-like. The book compares favorable to noticing attitudes of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and to the associative imagination of Finnegans Wake.

The following selection is characteristic, and appears on pages 22-24 of the Dalkey Archive edition, published in 2007, translated by Ivan Sanders:

For me, this city is a challenge, a parable, an interrogation frozen in space, the messages of my fellow citizens dead and alive, a system of disappearing and regenerating worlds to come, the horizontal delineation of societies replacing one another by sperm, gunfire, senility; a fossilized tug of war, an Eastern European showcase of devastation and reconstruction . . . Because by virtue of my practiced clichés I have become one of its shareholders; though beyond the tenuous links of my existence and surroundings, beyond my father's overdecorated gravestone and the haunting shadow of a cremated woman, beyond my hardened and irremediable blueprints, my myopic utopias, and the procession of figures out of an ever-darkening past, I could well ask: what have I to do with this East-Central European city whose every shame I know so well. A city situated between the middle and the end of most scales, its reality far too real—the victim of partitionings, bankruptcies, punitive campaigns, extortions, bombings, burnings; a buffer city, a shelter-belt city, a protective-zone city. It can welcome the enemy with salt and bread, and, having taken crash courses in the art of survival, it can change its greeting signs, statues, scapegoats—its history. 

A tent city on the ruins of a Roman circus; ancient cats, crows, lizards scurry over the cracked skulls of legionnaires killed in rear-guard actions. For centuries a sun-faced god on a winged horse led his arrow-shooting nomads and their half-tamed studs from barren plains to vast forests, in search of grass and water, and at last reached this dead city of abandoned Roman watchtowers and water mains, where in the felt tents of their winter quarters they bowed their long, brown heads before the Prince Jesus and built a cathedral for Him from the stones of the old circus. In the undamaged crypts embalmed kings smile with curled-up gums; before their metal caskets tourist-wives stand in awe as flash guns pop and the guide tells them the sad tale of the Tartar invasion. They came from all directions with their battering rams and catapults, their poisoned spears, long, bone-tipped arrows, goatskin tubes, and scaling ladders; their root-eating horses, their cattle trained to screech, their straw dummies strapped to riderless horses and prisoners pulled on chains. They came on windswept, fear-soaked roads aswarm with terrible news. Pouring across the wooden barricades, they slashed the throats of kneeling supplicants. Smoke from scorched villages, burning churches, and the smell of dead bodies floating in the water and blooming in the rye fields trailed intheir wake. Up ahead a wall of arrow-absorbing prisoners subsist on sheep guts. A castellan is stretched out between two planks, and on the planks horses pass. Town elders are roasted alive like pigs; citizens are impaled or tied to the wheel, or become lamenting targets in the entryways of their houses. The cathedral, packed with preachers and feuding worshipers, is going up in flames; a rainstorm and human fat put out the glowing embers. But the hordes are already on their war, tracking down the survivors in tree hollows, empty riverbeds, swamps. The murderer cannot rest; whomever he spares will kill him. The city disappears under a sea of weeds, though a few starvelings are already searching under the blackened stones for buried meats and gold coins.

The Prose of the Day series, curated by editors, contributors, and supporters of Decameron journal, showcases examples of particularly excellent prose. To suggest an entry, email the excerpt and your reasons for calling it excellent to decameron@penandanvil.com.

Cover letter #1: "I am a bowl of fruit."

We get a few dozen submissions a day across the various Pen & Anvil in-house publications: Clarion, Pusteblume, Decameron, and so on. Over the years, that means our staff members have read tens of thousands of cover letters. And given our house policy of responding individually to each and any submission, we actually pay attention to those letters. Though it’s an ungodly expense of time, doing so means we’re able to make connections with a vastly greater number of writers, readers, and lovers of literature than we might if we only skimmed subs and dispatched them with standard boilerplate notes of rejection or acceptance.

Some cover letters stand out, by virtue of audacity, originality, sheer force of self-celebration, or, in some unfortunate cases, their contempt for editors. (We’ll post some of these in the last category in coming blog updates, not to embarrass their authors—alright, not just to embarrass their authors—but by way of opening the shop doors to let folks see how murky it can get in the back of the house.)

Some cover letters simply charm. The example below certainly did. It came to us through our online submission portal from a guy named Joe Nicholas: “an experimenter, experiencer, and editor of The Screaming Sheep.” He writes:

Greetings! 

Imagine for a moment that you are a bowl of fruit. All you want to do is share your fruit with everyone, but you can’t. You are only a bowl of fruit. You do not have the technology for such a feat. So instead you write poems about your fruit, hoping that someone will be stirred to crave the real thing. Now imagine I am a bowl of fruit. I am a bowl of fruit. 

I hope you enjoy. 

Joe Nicholas

See? Charming! If only they were all so...

Setting aside the pleasant manner of his cover letter in favor of principled iron-bound editorial objectivity, we reviewed Joe’s attached submissions, and accepted two of his excellent pieces. You can find “Kid Icarus” and “A Love Poem” in the current Spring/Summer issue of Clarion.

Other examples of Joe’s work can be found or is forthcoming in BOAAT, Chiron Review, Found Poetry Review, Fruita Pulp, Weave, and other magazines. His online roost is http://8rainCh1ld.tk.

Hanson on Vendler

From a most excellent review essay concerning Helen Vendler, appearing in Open Letters Monthly and authored by our Issue 18 contributor Jack Hanson:

Against such emotional, psychological, and spiritual power, what worth have the various over-politicized theories of literature? Many have come and gone in Vendler’s time, and were from time to time the source of insults against her and other “formalist” critics. But she herself never internalized such distinctions, and, apart from her continued engagement in what might be called post-modern literature, she even recalls auditing Paul de Man’s courses at Cornell and gaining immensely from them.

Find Jack on Twitter (not to mention Clarion! and OLM!) or click here to see a listing of his other pieces for Open Letters Monthly. His poems "Maternal" and "To the Daughters..." can be found on the issue page for Clarion 18.

Further thoughts on Nicholson's "Amherst"

The Free Lance-Star, down in Fredericksburg VA, featured a write-up by Emily Jennings about William Nicholson's new novel, Amherst. From the review, "Different Dickinsons, different era", re: "the affair between respectable Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd: 

... Austin’s reclusive sister, the poet Emily Dickinson, permitted the lovers to meet in her home, an easy walking distance for both ... Sue, Austin’s wife, was devastated. She made her disapproval clear but would never have considered divorce. David Todd, on the other hand, encouraged his wife’s relationship with Austin, even taking part in their trysts now and then. Amherst ...weaves Austin and Mabel’s story with a contemporary parallel ... Young advertising executive Alice Dickinson (no relation to Emily) travels to Amherst from London to research Austin and Mabel’s affair for a screenplay. Alice’s only contact there is the old flame of her ex-boyfriend’s mother, Nick Crocker, a lecturer and great admirer of Emily’s poetry ... Alice is disgusted to discover Nick has an interest in younger women, and they in him, his marriage disregarded. Even so, we all know her disgust will develop differently as the two continue to cross paths. How both stories find their conclusion, however, is worth the read. Nicholson’s ability with screenwriting is apparent in this novel as he skillfully illuminates each scene and segue in our heads... Emily’s actual involvement in the affair is still debated today. She was friends from childhood with Sue, Austin’s wife; some believe they grew apart as her brother’s marriage cooled and Emily mourned for Austin’s loneliness. Others believe Emily was driven by Austin to comply with him and Mabel meeting at Emily’s home, and that Emily was routinely banished to the upstairs rooms to make way... None of Emily’s immediate family members believed her poetry would sell. Curiously, it was Mabel who championed Emily’s poetry after her death and edited it for publication.

One of our Press associates, Clarion reader Justin Lievano, has thoughts. Writing exclusively for Ampersand, here is his feedback on and furtherance of this review:

1. Emily Dickinson had her own very exciting love life. Her sister Lavinia once wrote that she caught Emily in the arms of a local judge! Emily was probably also in love with Sue, her sister-in-law. That would have made a better novel. 
2. *Everyone* knew about Austin and Mabel's uproarious affair. To say that Emily was the primary co-conspirator or enabler is ridiculous. Everyone in the Dickinson family -- hell, everyone in Amherst! -- was complicit. 
3. The publication of Emily's poetry actually became a very interesting competition of sorts between Susan Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd. After Lavinia located Dickinson's manuscripts, she made loose promises to both women that they might publish them; at times, Lavinia had transcriptions of the same poem in both Susan and Mabel's hands. Eventually, Lavinia's dangerous game came to light and it permanently damaged her relationship with Susan. Mabel, having better access to the world of publishing took control of Emily's poetry and published in a wildly successful volume. The rest is history.