this is the new news

In the wake of actual life, I mourn my internet life. And it pains me to type that. This is what number in the slew of ‘terrible-blogger’ apologies. But still as sincere as the rest. I should say ‘authentic,’ not ‘sincere’. I’ve been talking recently about Lionel Trilling’s conception of these terms in Sincerity and Authenticity and it has made me wary of them.

But I am sorry. Great things have happened: ILK’s second issue came storming into the world and I am so so so in love with it. A massive thanks to everyone who submitted and said nice things and helped.

In a few days it will be NAPentines Day, and the new Greg Sherl edited issue of NAP will be upon the world, and include some collaborative found poems I helped to make. Some poems I wrote are also forthcoming in Salt Hill and H_NGM_N– two places I could not be more stoked to be making a home in.

And yes, I did finish applying for MFA programmes. There has been some news, but April is the largest month for that decision.

Otherwise, what? Well so many places keep stepping up the pace. I really like the new Aesthetix. I want to have time to read the new Sixth Finch. And so many others.

OH! And now sometimes I learn about Demonology. Which is much more fun than my current degree. Apart from all the Black Mountain reading I’ve been doing. And I l learnt this really cool thing about mountains: before the rise of the Sublime ideal, mountains were not thought beautiful but rather as a result of the Fall: when humankind had been in Eden and everything perfect, the Earth had been perfectly round. Mountains demonstrated the rupture and were thus thought ugly/ a bit evil. But Sublimity happened (thanks Kant, thanks Burke) and now mountains generally = awesome.

08/01/2012
by C Leave a comment

oh hello poem: Bernadette Mayer’s ‘[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up’

Something that needs discussing more is the lack of women submitting to literary magazines. When I say needs discussing more, I mean I need to discuss it more with people outside my immediate circles of contact because otherwise the talk goes around in circles. Hopefully, Robin Sampson and I will get a series together about this for We Who Are About To Die, but as for right now, I thought some killer lit by Bernadette Mayer (current obsession along with George Oppen) would suffice.

[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up

BY BERNADETTE MAYER

You jerk you didn’t call me up

I haven’t seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You’re drinking your parents to the airport

I’m through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It’s the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of

the Cobra Commander

-
-

_________________

To make love, turn to page 121.

To die, turn to page 172.

25/12/2011
by C 1 Comment

The year that is and soon will not be.

It is pretty impossible not to succumb to the end of year/ beginning of year meditation type thing, and who am I to resist, huh? And you know, 2011 was huge for me in a lot of ways.

I started off in Atlanta, and ended up in Oxford. Believe me, I have no idea where I’ll be this time next year. That fate is terrifyingly in the hands of admissions committees, once again.

2011 was the year I turned 23, the year I really started postgraduate life. I got into Oxford. I started Oxford. I decided I wanted to do an MFA not a PHD.

ILK came into being and totally rocked that being. Going over to the editor side made me learn a lot about how to submit to magazines. It is amazing to be reading submissions and getting excited about them, but man the small mistakes writers make become really annoying.

I started writing really insistently again, this year, and had poems appear in some wonderful places like PANK, >kill author, Vinyl, ARTIFICE and accepted other places.

I read some amazing stuff too. Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees, Brenda Hillman’s Practical Water, Ada Limon’s sharks in the rivers, Nate Pritts’ Big Bright Sun, and the list is long and other people have better ones.

Shockingly enough, all this moving around gave me a lot of feelings. Someone yesterday told me that my life pattern is not surprising as I am addicted to the highs and lows. That was a weird thing to be told, especially coming from someone who fights fires for a living.

You know how people say the people, that it’s always the people that make anything? Well yeh, I met some amazing people this last year. From all around. Including a really small person that my sister made. I like her a lot.

So yeh, 2011 was huge. 2012, I worry that you won’t shape up. If you do, I’m ready. Other side of the mountain, new mountain.

17/12/2011
by C Leave a comment

ARTIFICE // ILK alliance.

How terribly rude of me to not say anything for so long and then have a lot of exciting stuff to say. Well now. I finished my first term at Oxford, in a rat-infested library and soaking in Frank O’Hara’s Collected. So for a few weeks, I am remembering some other parts of who I am. I got some MFA apps done.

What else is new? ARTIFICE 4 is out. My poem machine is in it. As are some awesome writers.

ILK issue one finally got birthed into the world and I am prouder of it than I can say. All the contributors are mind-blowingly talented. Submissions for ISSUE TWO are open, and will be until January 15th.

Which brings me to the best bit of news: Artifice and ILK are forming a transatlantic alliance of generally being awesome– this new and ‘special’ friendship will be ratified, consolidated and most of all, drunk too, at a joint reading in London on January 3rd. Here is a link to the Facebook event. It’s in the Monarch in Camden and I would love to see you there, please.

Don’t tell anyone, but I am also really quite excited to see Tadd Adcox again. He’s kind of a big deal.

Long story short: I am sorry for, once again, being shitty and silent. But there is goodness here.

03/08/2011
by C 2 Comments

punchlines: simile vs joke

Sometimes when I blog I have occasional thoughts that I just shove into draft titles and can’t quite recapture when I get time to write about them. So when I examined by drafts this this morning it took a while to think what I had meant by ‘how jokes and similes are somehow similar.’ But really, the two device are pretty close. Aside from the obvious connection through wordplay, the mechanic of a joke and the mechanic of a simile relies on unexpected connection and surprise. The further away the two elements (the thing itself and the punchline/comparison) the greater reaction elicited from the reader.

This is why, I suppose, that clichés are so grating.The reader, or at least I as a reader, does not want the responsibility of creating the figure– so when I can predict the punchline, or predict the simile, it is extremely underwhelming.

The problem with all of this is that I have a huge fondness for very very terrible jokes. So hopefully I have an extra high standard for simile / metaphor to balance this out.

flotsam // caroline crew

Author Archives: C