First of all, I moved home from America and am about to move to Oxford ( although maybe), so everything I own is constantly being shuffled in suitcases.
That’s kind of the best excuse. Most of the other excuses are related to this:
I’m pretty traumatized from leaving, my brain is dead from having feelings, etc etc.
Also, I am now contributing to the awesome We Who Are About to Die, so some of the small energies are going there.
I did receive my contributors copy of Anon 8, in which my essay ‘Erotic Revisions’ appears. It’s pretty great, the articles especially. The cover is actually a POEM in Arabic calligraphy. They are pretty awe-inspiring.
Also, you can now pre-order Artifice 4. This will be the final Artifice magazine because Tadd has a large brain and large ideas and is going to do BOOKS now because they are bigger and he has good taste.
So, sorry for being quiet, but we’ll talk again soon, promise, just need to get my head together first.
OH and PS. ILK is making the final decisions for it’s first issue. Thanks to everyone who submitted and stayed tuned for pineapple poems, footnote poems, anti-ghazals, collaborations, genital orchestras and so much more.
New city means new dim sum restaurant and new literary magazines to me. I’m still working on finding some good pork buns, but there is no shortage of literary magazines in Georgia, so stay tuned for my first two-part blog post!
So to start out I’ve grabbed the big ones that are closest to me: The Lullwater Review, that runs out of “dear old Emory” and The Georgia Review, that runs out of The University of Georgia in Athens.
I got hold of the latest copy of Lullwater at Emory’s student activity fair, and settled down to get a look of what was going on right around me. First off, it’s a fairly wee magazine, but utterly gorgeous: slim and elegant. There are some good-looking magazines out there, but this is different. Art is given its own space, and does not just function to illustrate the words. Particularly outstanding are the series of photographs of frogs by A.H. Nelson.
I imagine that The Lullwater Review must have a pretty astringent submission process to distill its slush pile down to such a small and well formed collection of pieces. Ten poems, and three prose pieces. That is pretty darn concentrated. Still, within the ten poems on offer, except for a predisposition for free verse, there is considerable diversity. Sweeping views of Delphi (‘Delphi by Dellana Diovisalvo) sit alongside Lynch-esque psychedelia (The Empire State Building by Deborah H. Doolittle) and martini philosophy (The Third Martini by Gaylord Brewer). The strength of voice throughout these poems binds the magazine together as quite a startling cacophony.
My personal favourite is the final poem in the volume, ‘With the Colonel Historians’ by Peter Richardson, exploring the impossibilities of colonial nostalgia. The language is so excitingly simple: ‘we’d miss them in the way / we say we miss typewriters’.
A little further afield from Emory lays The University of Georgia in Athens, which publishes The Georgia Review. There can’t be much of a rivalry going on, seeing as managed to pick up the Summer 2010 edition at Emory’s bookstore. Significantly bulkier, the overall look of the magazine leans more toward the classical. Inside, there is an absolute array: as well as poetry and fiction, there are essays, reviews and a glossy, colour section of art work. Truly a volume to keep you reading all summer.
Upon digging in, I went straight to the poetry. I know, I know… I should try and broaden my reading horizons, especially as short stories don’t ask you for too much commitment. Anyway, there seems to be a thread of conversational tone and an almost prose-poetry sympathy for the longer line throughout the poems, including the special feature sequence, ‘Cadaver, Speak’ by Marianne Boruch. In truth, the poems just were not to my taste, but that isn’t to say they won’t be to yours. They weren’t weak pieces by any means, but I’m still struggling with the seemingly American predisposition to a stream of speech/ consciousness in a poem, it seems so uncrafted.
The Georgia Review‘s strength lies in its reviews and essays. The reviews of the new Winnie the Pooh and Kent Meyers’ great essay about the outlaw in literature were my unexpected highlights. The extensive reviews of books about Tibet will certainly be a useful guide when I’m preparing for the Dalai Lama’s visit to Emory.
This pair of magazines make excellent companions, and it’s good to see publications co-existing, with their own niches, in such a local area.
Do you support your local literary magazine? Or do you prefer your wordy delights to come from farther afield?
Stay tuned for part two!
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In other news…
I’ve just begun as a web intern over at the wonderful 32 Poems, and will be blogging there too!
Guys, the day has come. This time tomorrow I will be dragging my life (in 2 suitcases and a carry-on), around Heathrow Terminal 5 and departing to Atlanta. I’ll be leaving my parents’ house sometime before 8am, arriving at Heathrow around 1pm, spending a tearful hour with my wonderful boy, boarding the flight at 3pm, and arriving at Atlanta at 7pm local time, or midnight British time.
A nine hour flight sounded daunting initially, but it’s less time than it takes for me to travel from Edinburgh to my parents’ by train.
The only difficulty, other than travel stress, has been choosing how many books to take, a decision I made more complicated for myself by going on an utter binge at an amazing second hand book stall. I came away with some Tom Paulin, a collected Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath’s Journals, Randall Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age, Fleur Adcock’s Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry and many, many others.
Aside from a notebook and some bits and pieces of reviews to do, I’ve packed David Harsent‘s A Bird’s Idea of Flight to read on the journey. I picked this up the other day, based purely on the title, and then found that it was a Poetry Society Recommendation in 1998. I have read a couple of the poems (it’s a 26 poem sequence), and look forward to reading the rest. Only thing is, the opening poem is so sparkling that I keep coming back to re-read it, stopping me from moving on! It’s called ‘The Archivist’, and just sears upon reading. I guess it speaks to me just now because of its academic theme.
Anyway, I maybe AWOL for a few days while I relocate, but will update you as soon as I can. In the meantime, anything you want to know or ask, email me at carolinemarycrew AT gmail DOT com !
My twice yearly epic drive home from St Andrews to Cornwall is usually made palatable by Radio 4. Last Friday’s drive was particularly enlivened by Front Row (you can still listen to it here) which was celebrating the 40th birthday of the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Creative Writing course, which was the first of its kind in the UK. Notably, Ian McEwan was a graduate of this first course and he is often held up as a positive example of Creative Writing courses. He is interviewed at length along with some other great writers and teachers.
The debate about the worth of creative writing courses is ongoing, and isn’t about to run out of steam now. However, one of the most frequently rolled out arguments against Creative Writing is disbelief– ‘you can’t teach creative writing’. I just want to put my one cent in (two cents is overestimating my point)– this argument completely misunderstands Creative Writing courses in my experience. These courses don’t teach you writing formulas, their value lays in time: they give you the time to write. Some guy on the show said that he felt there would be no more or less great writers in our time because of Creative Writing courses, and that the world isn’t going to be a worse place if there are more shitty short stories floating around– we don’t have to read them. I totally agree with ‘some guy’ (I really don’t remember his name– if you listen and recall it, please let me know!), if doing these courses makes people happy, and helps fund universities, what is the harm? Teaching creative writing supports many of our fantastic writers, and although the cliché of the poverty-stricken writer is a goodun, it doesn’t have to be that poets are always filthy and smoking leftovers.
Anyway, I digress. The show is great, and I recommend it to you all. In particular, what I found fascinating given my soon to be transatlantic existence, was the comparisons made between the US and UK. In general, the difference was thought to be attitude. I’ll paraphrase — in the US the American Dream mentality of everyone being able to do anything leads to a more positive opinion of Creative Writing MFAs, but in the UK they tend to be viewed with more scepticism.
This is generalising extremely widely, but I am interested to see how Emory’s Creative Writing course will square up to the modules I took at St Andrews. Quick aside– I got into the course I wanted after much fuss! Hurrah!
So give it a listen if you like writing or reading or just enjoy the soothing tones of Radio 4.
