Our judge, Frank X. Walker, has selected Mark Smith-Soto's "Waiting Room" as this year's chapbook contest winner! Mark's fine chapbook will be published later this fall by Greencup Books, and Mark will join Frank to give a public reading in Birmingham on Dec 5 at 7 p.m. in the Lecture Hall of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
Read More......
The deadline for our chapbook contest has come and gone, and we're in the process of, well, processing all the fine work you and yours sent our way. We'll get those entries to our preliminary judges next week. By mid-June we expect to ship off ten finalists to our final judge -- whose identity we know, but we need to dot a few i's and cross a few t's before we announce the name. Our goal is to announce the winner of the contest by August 1.
Thanks, as always, for submitting your work to us. We'll keep you posted as we have news.
Michelle Burke's "Horse Loquela"! Thanks to all those who submitted. Michelle's chapbook will appear in its entirety in RMR3 as well as in a stand-alone limited edition. She will also join contest judge Katie Ford for a reading on the campus of the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham in early December, when both the limited edition and RMR3 will be released. More info on all of that in the near future...
Read More......You guys are funny -- several e-mails asking us "You said you'd announce by Aug 1 -- what's wrong?" Uh, it's like, July 31 -- right? All kidding aside, we're glad you're paying attention. Here's the scoop: Katie Ford has, indeed, selected a winner. We have, indeed, notified said winner. We are, however, still waiting for a reply from our winner. Until we hear back from...her...we'll wait to make the official announcement. Thanks to everyone for your patience. We still hope/expect to make good on our Aug 1 promise. On a related note, RMR3 is also now officially full, though we're sorry to say that not everyone who submitted during our last reading period has been notified of the final status of their submission. Our next project will be to do just that. We hope to have that accomplished by Sep 1. Again, thanks for your patience...
Read More......It's April 30, and that means we won't be considering submissions that are postmarked after today (we'll start reading for RMR4 on Oct 1). Truth be known, we've long had our fiction line-up set for RMR3 (as reported here in this space a couple of months ago). We're now almost all set in the other genres as well. And we've been blown away by the number of chapbook entries we've received. (Guess there's a market out there for a free chapbook contest...) Thanks very much for entrusting us with your fine work.
The chapbook contest will work like this: we'll send each entry to our initial readers, poetry editors Jim Murphy and Mary Kaiser, who will score each manuscript anonymously. The five highest-scoring finalists will then proceed to this year's judge, Katie Ford. We hope to have her final decision by no later than August 1. We will announce the finalists and winner in this space as soon as Katie makes her choice. (Please do note: This will be our only means of notification.)
The contest winner will receive a $500 honorarium and ten copies of a limited edition, stand-alone print run of the chapbook itself. The chapbook will also appear in RMR3. We will host the chapbook winner and judge Katie Ford in Birmingham for a joint reading and release reception later on this year.
Thanks to all for your interest in RMR, and please do excuse the radio silence on this blog as we turn our attention to coordinating the chapbook contest and putting out a great-looking third issue of the magazine! Happy summer....
Whether or not Katie Ford is a "God-fearing soul," we can’t say for sure. We suspect, however, that God has fixed at least one wary eye on her. Somebody’d better -- she’s got the chops to take over the world (at least that small corner of it known as Po-Biz): Harvard M.Div. Iowa M.F.A. Latin honors from Whitman College. Good thing for us slack-ass mortals, she seems pretty benevolent.
Ford is the author of Deposition, published by Graywolf, and her individual poems have appeared anywhere and everywhere that matters. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Prairie Lights Prize, and she has contributed to the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Currently the Poetry Editor of New Orleans Review, she has taught most recently at Loyola University, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and Reed College.
Lucky for RMR, she’s agreed to judge the 2007 Red Mountain Chapbook Contest (!) and -- über–Good Sport that she is -- she’s submitted herself to the inaugural 500 Words (More) or Less [read the interview after the jump!]. This new feature will bring you the insights and musings of various writers, readers, and thinkers of note, all in 500 words (more) or less...
First, a morsel from Deposition:
Last Breath with No Proof
What is unremembered may be lodged she said a child may not
recall but will act it out in play doll on ground face against tile see how he takes it
by the hair by the foot by the tangled legs sweet mind made of tangled legs
and a patterned dress oh to have evidence to have the scent explained
birds trapped in chimney rustle of wings and fire or numbers etched into an arm
show me where you were hurt I am asked but I am simple unmarked remembering how
can one act out what happened in the mind how make the mind alone in a house
how show long silence what clock what song is there for hollowness who hurt you
once the ticking the voices start she did he did my mind did
and the trespass it begins again?
_____________________________
Q&A
RMR: TRUE or FALSE: Contemporary American poetry is kissin’ cousins with Christian Gnosticism of old, stingy with its secret handshakes, its extinction hard-wired into its own genetic code. Discuss.
KF: The heart of your question is whether or not American poetry will go “extinct” because it is written by a group of insiders — mean, wise, and tight. We should be more concerned that we are writing poems that will last than we are with the movement called “Contemporary American Poetry.” The poems that will last in time, and that move us now, are written because a poet is trying to write something that someone else can utter as if it came from them. When I recite a lyric by Rilke, if I attend to its music and thinking and emotions, it feels as if it is my utterance. That is a form of lyric ecstasy. A fusion, an intimacy. There can be no stinginess in the poetic task. There can be no selfishness. Individual poets might be this way, but they are human beings, so forgive them. Where would we be without T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes”? Yet he was a part of perhaps the tightest, most elite poetic circle of history. But, for the “Preludes,” I would forgive him anything. To be able to have on my lips, “I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling: / The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.” There are extinctions in poetry all of the time—good extinctions. Poems published that are not memorable die off sometimes because of compositional haste, because they are not strenuous in their language, because they are anecdotal, etc. That is an extinction. But poems that will last press against and through this — it doesn’t matter who writes them.
When you are alone, you are with a poem, not with “Contemporary American Poetry.” If the poem slays you, you will be a little more alive, a little less extinguished. When I feel this way, I am full of gratitude toward the poet who struggled and thrashed about to write that poem.
As for the “Christian Gnostics,” their texts were lost to us because they were deemed a heretical threat to the political and religious powers of what was being named “orthodox Christianity.” We have them now because they were discovered centuries later in a sand-buried library in Egypt. They are gorgeous, complicated texts. In the same way, Contemporary Poetry, if it is foolish and threatened by new genius, if it allows power — political and literary — to publish only poems of the inner circle, we could bury the poems that would have otherwise brought us new utterance, ecstasy, and lasting literature.
RMR: A couple of years ago, in the Q&A after a reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City [scroll down to July 20], you explained your decision to pursue the study of Divinity by quoting Tony Hoagland’s poem, “When Dean Young Talks About Wine”:When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.
But when a man is hurt,
he makes himself an expert.
Interestingly enough -- nearly as interesting as the fact that you know those lines by heart -- you left off the poem’s three-line dismount, which goes like this:Then he stands there with a glass in his hand
All of this makes me think of Auden, addressing Yeats:
staring at nothing
as if he was forming an opinion ...Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
The same might be said of religion: not a thing but a way; not a noun but a verb. A means of addressing hurt, responding to it. A method of survival.
On the other hand, there’s something calcified in expertise, or perhaps cauterized. Product over process. Safe, confined, contained -- and trapped.
Your work, specifically Deposition, seems more unleashed than that. There’s a helluva lot of roaring involved. Incomprehension, too: the powerful, growling -- yes -- ferocious kind. There’s also huddling, nesting. Indeed, there’s “nothing,” as well -- “...how show long silence what clock what song / is there for hollowness who hurt you” -- but it’s the kind of nothing that won’t suffer to be blinked at dumbly. It demands an opinion, a stance, if only as a mechanism of self-defense.
Messy, yes. Painful and incomprehensible, too. I suspect (who can say for sure?) those things are part and parcel of transcendence: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” pleads the bloody Nazarene (and here’s the kicker) the moment before his spirit ascends. Last breath with no proof.
Here’s something I notice: There’s some measure of resignation in Hoagland’s sentiment, and defeat. Secular and still. But I daresay there’s a roar of religiosity in the Auden, as in Matthew 27:46. And I already said I hear that roar -- lots of them, actually -- in Deposition.
So here, finally, is the question -- loaded and unanswerable though it might be:
Where would you locate your study of Divinity and -- if I may be so bold as to ask them to join hands -- your poetry on the continuum of secular to religious, of sacred to profane?
KF: Divinity School and Deposition were part of the same time period in my life, but there is a distinction between them, and that is why I quoted Hoagland’s beautiful lines, “But when a man is hurt/he makes himself an expert,” when asked why I went to Divinity School. Expertise is a pursuit of the intellect, and, in some cases, the body. So, yes, it holds itself at a distance, a distance religious seekers don’t usually want. They want intimacy, submersion. Studying theology (trying to gain some intellectual expertise) was a way for me to contend with the powerful and destructive elements of religion, elements I had experienced in my earlier, younger religiosity. Deposition stems from those emotions, which were, I believe, flamed a bit by things I was learning in my intellectual studies. For example, I began to find clear correlations between the ways theologians and religious leaders wrote and spoke and the ways humans perpetrate violence. Both forcefully define the reality of another person, both control another, both thrive by moments of threat and moments of mercy. I have a long essay on this and can’t go into it all now. I used up too many words above! But, having this theory made Deposition even stormier. My work engages the metaphors of my tradition — God, world, human, salvation, etc. — and in that way, my work is not fully secular. If being called a “religious” poet means the questions I most often contend with in my poems concern those metaphors, then I lean towards what you call the sacred. That said, the human is included in my list of metaphors.
I am not a Christian poet. I am just a poet, and it means very little to me to say or not say I am religious. I don’t believe in God, I do believe in God. I have no interest in reading poetry that claims to be Christian or religious, in the same way I have no interest in surrounding myself with people who are eager to claim those things.
RMR: Ten Either/Or’s. (Explain or not.)
Barack or Hillary? Barack.
Clooney or Johansson? This is not an interesting either/or.
John or Paul? Small parts of both.
Psalm 23 or Sonnet 18? The psalm, I dare say.
East or West? Northwest near the East.
Elvis or Frank? Elvis.
Emily or Walt? Emily.
Martin Luther or Martin Luther King? MLK.
Audrey or Katharine? Katharine in “Bringing Up Baby.”
Loaves or Fishes? Fishes, currently Japanese varieties.
RMR: You are poet-king for a day. Make a to-do list.
KF: 1. Depose some people.
RMR: Katie Ford poems as prophecies, as tongues, as baptisms, as ablutions, as all or none of these. Discuss.
KF: One becomes ugly when one claims these things. I will say this: there are rhetorical and musical techniques in the voices, liturgies, and manners of speech you list in your question. Sometimes I use them.
Recently, we received an e-mail from a frantic MFA student who had a big-time bee in his bonnet to get his hands on a copy of RMR. Seems he'd been assigned one of those mind-numbing reports for his poetry workshop. His mission: Drone about chapbook contests -- particularly those which feature the winner embedded in a literary magazine. At least that's what he told us. Could be he was a spy for the government.
At any rate, since we're no strangers to all things half-assed and last-minute, we obliged the poor guy. No charge, even -- but there was a catch. He had to disseminate the following screed to any and all who would listen. Did he do it? You'll have to ask the folks in State College, PA. But just in case you don't get to Happy Valley any time soon, here it is, in its glorious entirety (albeit slightly edited for readability)...
A SEMI-MINI-MANIFESTO
One thing of note on chapbook contests: Ours is free to enter. It's one of the only such contests (free entry, that is) I know about.
I mention that because I think it's worthwhile for us writers and editors to consider the repercussions of the "pay-to-play" publication model, which has a stranglehold on contemporary poetry in particular. Book contests, first-book contests, chapbook contests -- now lit mags are increasingly sponsoring contests for individual poems, stories, or essays. One could easily spend hundreds of dollars a year in pursuit of a "win" in one of the Big Fish contests -- even more than that if a little fish will do. To what end, though? To be read? Or -- more likely, I fear -- for a noteworthy line on a vita?
I certainly don't have a magic solution to the problem, but I think it's insidious and important. What does it say about us writers of contemporary literature? How much will we shell out in an effort to be published before we realize that we're just so many Wile E. Coyotes running madly in thin air?
I also wonder what it says about us as (non)readers of contemporary literature. If small presses and magazines can't support themselves through subscriptions and sales -- if we have far more submissions than we do subscriptions, and we do -- what exactly are we up to here? Almost by definition, that means more people are writing than reading. Why? And what, then, is the role for the contemporary literary magazine in such a landscape?
The Faux-Capitalist approach -- market-driven business plans aimed at increasing readership, for instance -- is just that: faux. Why? Because the real market isn't readers, it's writers.
Readers don't value us nearly as much as writers do. That's a fact. (Feel free to banty about the chicken-or-egg question of what's a reader, what's a writer, and where they intersect. To me, writing is best served if it aspires past onanism [i.e., writing for other writers], but that might just be me. PS...Raise your hand if the first place you look in a lit mag is the contributors section.)
Case in point: When I edited Black Warrior Review -- one of the older, more reputable lit mags around -- guess how many subscribers we had. About 350, give or take. Just under $5,000 gross income per year. We got that many submissions (350) in a month -- often more. With a yearly budget of around $20,000, my successors at the moderately cash-strapped BWR have recently instituted a wildly successful pay-to-play fiction contest, whereby the winner gets $1000 and his/her winning story published in the magazine. It grossed $9,000 last year. Can you blame them? Clearly, from a strictly quantitative perspective, that's a market to mine. In our system, publication is worth more to the writer than it is to the reader.
But do we realize there's some troubling morality at play in that equation? At best, it's built on circular logic: there aren't enough readers who want to buy all this writing so we're going to sell it back to the writers, who can then show university hiring committees that, indeed, they are significant enough writers to serve on a faculty that is charged with...creating more writers. Or at least they can teach the service courses the creative writing and literature faculty doesn't want to teach. (Don't look now, but isn't that us dropping towards the canyon floor faster than an ACME anvil?)
I say we, as lit mags, need to redefine our purpose. We should aim to serve, not solicit, writers. Why serve writers -- why embrace them as a constituency?
Because, damn it, they -- we -- need it and nobody else is going to do it but us. Because lit mags and small presses aren't mini-corporations; they're activist organizations. Because writers still have an important role in the body politic: to keep our culture evolving, to encourage good, provocative thought, and to inspire action -- directly or indirectly--based upon that enlightened thought.
Therefore, a lit mag's goal should be to publish and distribute work that would not otherwise see the light of day. To provoke thought. To provide an energetic, active, tangible space for said endeavors. And to do it in the most writer-friendly way possible. Free contests, openness to simultaneous submissions, and quick turnaround times are a few tangible ways to be writer friendly. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Please stay tuned to this space for another mailbag where folks rail against us for our own shortcomings in this regard. It's like the Dalai Lama says--we never said all this moralizing and compassion was easy. Necessary, yes. Easy, no.]
We need to rethink distribution and funding as well. Is Ingram's anonymous, hands-off distribution model the right one to aspire to? And practically speaking, does it even matter if it is -- few lit mags can count themselves "lucky" enough to be taken into the Ingram fold.
I think our lit mags and small presses need to "think global, act local." Or hell, think local, act local. Every community has writers in it. Writers make a community richer, smarter, more thoughtful, more empathetic, more introspective. A lit mag can -- and should -- be a local nexus for the literary arts. One that both provides a supportive common environment for literary artists but that also stakes its ground within the larger community. Poets in the schools. Public readings. Community workshops. Reading groups...
How do you pay for it? Ask for money from people who actually have it. Write grant proposals. Get shrewd about in-kind services. Publish fewer issues, smaller issues, use the web to complement content as well as to augment sales & distribution.
Clearly I'm getting carried away in a Utopian fervor. And I'm not really sure what this has to do with chapbook contests -- other than maybe this bit of advice for you and your peers: Beware the literary-industrial complex! I'll go back to my padded room now...
Katie Ford! No, not the one responsible for the Miss Congeniality franchise. The one who wrote Deposition, about which the NY Times Book Review wrote: “Moving and mysterious, the poems in Ford’s first collection possess the veiled brilliance of stained glass windows seen at night.”
And we're willing to bet John Shelby Spong never referred to you as "young, vibrant, evocative and brilliant." He certainly never called us that, so we're pretty darned stoked that Katie has agreed to judge our contest.
Check back for an interview with her later this month. Between now and then, order up your copy of Deposition for a glimpse at a remarkable young poet on the ascent.
Also check out the RMR website for our chapbook contest guidelines, complete with a fabulous array of new perks: a larger honorarium ($500!), a stand-alone limited edition version of the winning manuscript, and an all-expenses-paid visit to Birmingham to read at the release of RMR3!
And -- oh yeah -- to quote David Byrne, the entry fee's the same as it ever was: Nothing! Zero! Zilch! Nada! If you ask us, there ain't a better chapbook deal around.
