In Which It Is Best Not To Ask Too Many Questions

Poems Newly Appeared: On You, On the World

You wish to start your own literary journal. Looking around, it soon becomes clear that everyone has poems they want to publish, and almost no one will pay to read them. Unperturbed, you simply upload your submissions on the Internet somewhere, link them together, and call it a day. Except for one problem. You have not created a web journal—you have created a web site.

Sixth Finch has shown another way of doing things. The editor, Rob MacDonald, launched his online-only journal in 2008, and it has remained low on links and void of colorful sidebars. Although he may have shrugged his shoulders at the unbounded possibilities of technology, he has done an admirable job of replicating the print journal’s format: a cover, followed by a table of contents, followed by poetry and art placed in considered sequence. One detail in particular gives a nice trompe l’oeil dimension to the poems: they are displayed not as HTML text, but as image files. This does cause them to load a little more slowly, but that seems appropriate enough to poetry.

Happily, the content is excellent. The journal appears quarterly, and the new Fall issue has about twenty or so poems, including two by Dan Boehl called “Self-Improvement”. If two here, then how many more elsewhere? It would be a pleasure to read more works like “Self-Improvement” the first, a prose poem that ends with:

I have a man date to go and see The Wrestler. I told my coworker that, and she told me not to cry at all the father daughter touching scenes. Then she said that she said that wrong. I don’t think she knows what it is inside of all of us that makes us want to see The Wrestler.

And how could she, being mortal?

The artwork in Sixth Finch is also impressive. Going through the pages, one occasionally feels the old urge to tap on links—for example, to see more work by photographer Stephan Zirwes—but MacDonald has done well to thwart that urge. In one respect, however, Sixth Finch differs from a print journal: he has the ability to publish works without consideration of length, such as Matthew Yeager’s captivating, vastly curious poem, “A Jar of Balloons, or The Uncooked Rice”:

Have you ever had a haircut so bad

you cried? When you open the drawer

after having poured yourself a bowl of cereal

do you reach for the small or a large

spoon? How conscious are you of your

posture? Will you agree to let a lover use

your toothbrush? Which …

The interrogation continues (if you printed it) for 35 pages.

* * *

We celebrate an anniversary. The London Review of Books turns thirty this year, having been founded during a strike at the Times, in a gesture of abhorrence toward the vacuum of book reviews that year. It took its name from the New York Review, also founded during a strike related to another Times. Both periodicals have served as a critical forum, in their respective cities, for left-wing politics (see either periodical circa 2003 or any other year) and book-world dust-ups (Wilson/Nabokov back then, Amis/Eagleton today, and others). In fact, the London version first appeared as an insert in the New York version.

In the current issue, the London Review’s debt of influence to New York is expressed through poems. One, “The Winemakers” by John Ashbery, begins:

It wasn’t meant to stand for what it stood for.

Only a puptent could do that. Besides, we were in a state

called New York …

As is customary with Ashbery, it is best not to ask too many questions. But there is the pervasive sense of a narrator looking back, nostalgic, perplexed by time and mortality:

                  A man comes to the end of the drive,

looks around. No one sees him. He putters

and in the end is the last to leave.

The other poem in this issue is by Charles Simic and, in tone, is not much different. It is called “The Old Man,” and concludes:

Cloudless skies on long June evenings,

Trees full of cherries in our orchard,

To make you ache and want to be with me,

Driving a cab in New York City.

The poetically embedded tribute to New York during the London Review’s anniversary year is clever and kind, and the nostalgic sentiment is right for the occasion. Simic and Ashbery, 71 and 82, can be found frequently, no special occasion required, in the pages of the New York Review.

* * *

A name that you tend to see is Zachary Schomburg. In Sixth Finch, for instance, he has poems in the Fall 2008 edition. His work continues to appear regularly in various literary magazines, while he also teaches and runs an online journal and a book publishing outfit, both called Octopus.

How does he do it all? In part, by sharing the labor. Octopus is co-run by Mathias Svalina, who also co-wrote poems with Schomburg in a recent issue of 6X6 magazine. Again you can find Schomburg sharing the by-line in jubilat, this time with Emily Kendal Frey. The poems in these two cases are neither identical nor dissimilar to each other.

In 6X6 you see the lines:

Your aneurysm left me speechless

like a pond.

In jubilat you see the lines:

these waves

must be code

for underwater

misunderstandings

Let us say they are 50% similar.

Now he appears again, in the current issue of Mantis, a journal published out of Stanford University. Here Schomburg shares the credit with Andrei Sen-Senkov of Moscow, whom he has translated. Sen-Senkov himself credits Alfred Hitchcock, whose film Rebecca inspired Sen-Senkov’s poem of the same name, just as Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca inspired Hitchcock. Some titles cannot be improved upon.

Schomburg, Sen-Senkov and others should know that submissions are now open for an anthology of poems “on the subject of Alfred Hitchcock—his life, his films, his impact (on you, on the world). His legend.” The anthology will be released by Dark Scribe Press, one of those rare publishers of genre poetry (cf. Poems Newly Appeared, two weeks ago). However, it should also be known that the submission guidelines are exhaustive, and include strictures like “refrain from rhyming ‘Hitch’ with anything” and “No doggerel.”

To submit to A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock, send your poems to dspsubmissions@aol.com. Payment is $0.25 per line. Poems longer than 50 lines not accepted.

—T.K.           

T.K. comments weekly on some poems currently available in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared at gmail dot com.

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