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

Because I am just adjusting to this already godforsaken year (although, I suppose I think every year is godforsaken in a way because I don’t have a god but that is a different question), this update is going to be more like a news update than a feature story. Some good things though.

Up first: happy new year guys! 2012 started when well, because on January 1st the new edition of elimae went live and I am so happy to have a poem, ‘Interval,’ included.

Also, the new issue of Specter is also alive and I’m pretty stoked to have some erasure poems I made of Derrida for my wonderful friend Michael in such fine company.

In other news, ILK and Artifice Magazine joined forces last night to provide Camden with some killer lit. There is a promise that if / when I get into an MFA program, a Chicago edition of this alliance will happen. Huge thanks to everyone who came, and to those who read.

Directly related to the above bulletin: I have pretty much finished all my applications now. So if you are the praying kind, please pray. If not, hope, for me– that’d be swell.

Also, yesterday I had an sweet time clearing up Oxfam’s poetry selection. I found a copy of Nick Flynn’s some ether, which is just heart-wrenching. As I was reading on the bus yesterday I noticed that the book is actually signed by the author and dedicated to Mary– there’s quite a cute wee note and now I wonder if she meant to give it away. I also bought an amazing book called ‘Animal Language’ written by a zoologist in the 1930s. It is missing its accompanying record, but it tells you some wonderful things– such as, the rattle of a rattlesnake is caused by it collecting fragments of dead skin at the tip of its tail each time it moults. This is disgusting but quite beautiful.

ILK is gathering a whole head of steam for its second issue– and submissions for that are open until January 15th, so if you haven’t please send us some poems!

I really hope to be back at some point soon without such abrupt things to say. I resolve to do that!

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.

I have to say, reading and re-reading this recently made me lose my breath a little. It is equally exciting and awful to read a statement of poetics that you agree with. Exciting, because, well, it is; and awful because someone has gotten there before you. As always with a statements like this, grand manifestos and the like, what is perhaps most interesting is how easy it is to agree with the principles yet how various your own poems might be from the orator proclaiming.

I am not a Black Mountain poet. Well, who is these days? They are movements and movements have temporal issues.

Yet, as a statement of poetics, Olson gets some things very right. You can read PROJECTIVE VERSE in full at The Poetry Foundation. Olson originally wrote it as a pamphlet in 1950.

To get to ‘open form’ as opposed to the ‘closed verse’ that Olson sees as being dominant in Anglophone poetry, some things need to happen:

The line is gone– what needs to be reinstated is the breath. And smaller than that, the minimum element of language– the syllable.

Gone too, is the ego. (Well maybe, I don’t know how well this is actually achieved. Olson rejects the Romantic self/ego, but how well is this ever achieved in poems?).

Not in its place, but at the centre of the poem, is an insistence on FORWARD. The poem must keep moving– don’t stay static! Each perception onto another perception and onwards and onwards. The energy, the kinetic energy in the poem is a means of transferring energy from the poet through the poem to the reader. (I really, really like this idea– as opposed to the poem purely communicating ‘meaning’)

Also, grammar is not such a big deal. Which, for me, is always a plus.

I like this manifesto, I like it a lot. (But it might be difficult for me to rid myself of the ‘I’, sigh)

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.

I don’t want to end up one of those people who just talks about themselves on their blog so I’ll get that out of the way first: PANK 6 is on the way and I have 2 poems in it about 2 very important things that happened last year. I’m in some awesome company. Also, Specter is publishing some Derrida erasures I made, as is Tadd Adcox‘s super secret awesome secret journal project. And NAP is going to put out a collaboration of poems that I was a part of made of songs. I read some of these the other night and that went down really which made me happy.

Alright, so let’s talk about something else. New places, huh? There is something to be said for them. My new place is Oxford. England, not Mississippi. It is old. There is tradition everywhere. There are different kinds of poets.

I watch a lot of movies here. Today I watched Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Circus’ and ‘Modern Times’. Apparently, the reason we find these films funny is because man is imitating machine. (So Bergson suggests). I don’t know how much this still counts because the machine is so much closer to the human these days. I think of how machines connect me to people in ways that I could not deal without. You could say this dependence is funny, I guess, but people are important.

I’ve also been using machines again in poems. Google Translate to be precise. That shit is addictive. There’s this amazing piece forthcoming in the next >kill author that uses Google voicemail in an awesome way.

I’m still reading a ton of Modernism. It isn’t great. But I just re-read Burnt Norton from Eliot’s Four Quartets and his ideas of time are mindblowing. Did I already talk about universal time is a pretty recent development? It seems appropriate given the clocks have gone back both sides of the Atlantic now. Some of my professors enjoy examining how time works in Modernist texts, and how there are often two types of time. Public time imposed by clocks, and private time. They work at different rates. And yes, this is true. Clock time is raging. Can you believe it’s already November? We already scared everyone and put up fireworks and started Christmas songs. Private time though, man that is weird. I am at different speeds the whole time. Eliot talks about time constantly collapsing into itself.

I have not yet decided where the rose garden is. Let me know if you do.

Oh shit, you guys. I went and started another real life and that means I am totally neglecting my internet one. Seems to be ticking along pretty well without me but I miss it. What is going on?

So anyway. I live in Oxford now. I just took the GRE for MFA apps.

In other news this week I have poems up in >kill author 15. One of these is an apology to someone I wasn’t very nice to. One of them is about pupose. The other one is about sex.

I also have 2 poems in the killer Vinyl 4. These poems are about taking a bath and being a volcano, and about lying and earlobes.

If you’re in Atlanta tonight, please think about heading to the 100 Thousand Poets for Change fundraiser at the Highland Ballroom.

Some excellent poets and friends are reading. It’ll be amazing.

Plus, a poem I made for my wonderful friend and artist Emily Cooper called ‘Landscape Painting’ is included in the chapbook.

Just a disclaimer before I get into this, this isn’t a post dedicated to the  recent MFA debates. I’m staying out of them. I’m applying for 2012 MFA programs because I want to, and that’s about as much as I have to contribute.

So, onwards. The first major hurdle, aside from whittling down a list of schools (which might be easier for me than most people, as my location requirements are ‘not England’), is writing the Statement of Purpose. I’ve written these kind of things before, but usually they’ve been academic, almost a narrative CV/resume.

This thing though, oh boy. For 2 pages max, I am supposed to craft some lyric essay that encompasses my development as a poet, my aesthetics and my future and why that would be at X university’s MFA program.

Not easy. Especially when you are used to rattling off your achievements. Here, academic stuff doesn’t matter a great deal. Neither does the volunteering stuff, I don’t think. And surely, everyone has the same story?

My first draft is awful. Even I wince when I read it.

Very tempted to just go Elle Woods on this, send in an ‘audio-visual’ statement of purpose and hope that British accent and lingerie approach works.