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Because They Did
Jan '01 Feature
Print Series Version
(Artist: C Yellowhawk) |
PoProj discount for BCLit readers.
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Photo: M Berdeshevky |
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Bright Hill Center |
Grendel Vanquished |
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'Morning After'
Image: Blake Dawson |
Slovakia
Photo: M Berdeshevsky |
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Photo: © 2001 George Kunze(Madison Square Park, Manhattan)
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February
George Dickerson
Furtive month,
Trying to sneak by
With mufflered mien,
Trying to wipe
Its runny nose
On a sleeve too short,
Lips so numb
It slurs its name.
Tardy for winter,
Early for spring,
It must know
It's a feckless thing,
Shuffling its frost-bit feet
Just to mark time.
Runt of the litter—
Horologic quitter—
As if Gregory the Pope
Took the scraps left over
And lumped them together.
Short-changed,
Without hope.
Every so often
It begs another day
In a desperate attempt
to gain cachet.
(From Selected Poems, 1959-1999,
Rattapallax Press 2000)
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Live Performances/Recording Sessions
Watch for the print version release of
Big City Lit's collection for 2001.
Thurs, Mar 7, 7:00 Free Sarah Lawrence College, the third in our "Degrees of Apprenticeship" series on MFA programs, records at the KGB Bar (85 E 4). Thomas Lux and special guest (our Pushcart nominee), Meredith Sue Willis (Jul'01), join students, recent grads and faculty to record the March feature.
Thurs, Mar 14, 7:30 $15, 12 James Ragan (Womb-Weary, The Hunger Wall, Lusions), Maureen Holm, and Tobias Deehan appear in Makor's "Poetry & Mentorship" Series. 35 W 67th St. Reservations recommended. Call (212) 601-1030. (A 92nd St Y program center. Dr. Elliott Rabin, Dir. Educ.)
Sat, Mar 23, 4:00 $7 Semifinal Round Competition for Lyric Recovery Festival™ award. Poets House, 72 Spring St. Info: (212) 864-2823 or (212) 431-7920
Wed, Mar 27, 7:30 $25, 22, 16 Lyric Recovery Festival™ at Carnegie Hall 2002. Call (212) 864-2823 for advance seating or Carnegie Charge (212) 247-7800 after February 15 (surcharge applies). James Ragan and William Wadsworth feature. Judge: Alfred Corn. Submission deadline: Mar 15. Top prize: $1000. Program includes new musical settings, multivoice, verse theatre, and dance premieres choreographed by Ginger Thatcher (in collaboration with Dances Patrelle).
Call for submissions:
(Note: List is not restrictive nor preclusive of other themes.)
9/11 and related events; Erotica; Poems on Paintings; Dramatic Monologue; Colors; Epigrams; Self-Portrait; Shoes (socks optional); Moving/Motion; Dust; Corridors; Father; Insects; Cemeteries.
Consult Submissions page for guidelines,Masthead for editorial policy, also Bridge City Lit
and Big City, Little pages. Query first on articles over 750 words.
editors@nycBigCityLit.com.
OUR POETRY/FICTION DETAILS
In This Issue: February 2002
TRADE PUBLISHERS TAKE NOTE:
The Bookshelf is loaded and bids invited for
George Wallace's new novel, Down Dream Road.
Poetry:
Confinement: From the metaphoric to the poetically literal, dozens of poems are organized into four parts, including a special 8-piece cycle from D. Nurkse, and accompanied by a preface by the magazine's senior editors. The Twelve page features a loose-screw cycle on confinement by Stan Friedman. Big City, Little page adds two pieces on Houston by SuzAnne C. Cole. Bridge City Lit/Amsterdam is live and inviting as we prepare Chicago and Twin Cities pages.
Fiction/Short Prose:
Whether elective or life-threatening, confinement is never what it seems. Here, a diverse collection of fiction and short prose captures the spaces between the bars: in direct discourse from Reni in "Turf", Kathleen Nesbitt's complex call girl in (dolly damage) control; in a tone at once out-of-body detached and bleedingly internal, Andru Matthews's tower closes in on reader and fairy ("Princess, Op. 3); and the language of unearthly suffering gets physical in two George Dickerson stories, "Ambush," and its terrifying antecedent where hamas rules the hut, yet butterflies are free. This year's
Valentine greetings may be signed and sealed, but none more deftly delivered than by A.C. Koch's 12-part "Girlfriend Biography." SuzAnne C. Cole's widowed "Woman in the Closet" stifles herself in privilege long after her Archie-tyrant's gone, while Colleen R. Little's 15-year-old maiden is strapped down in medieval LaMaze by "What Mother Knows."
Essays:
The Chain Gang's Unopened Condoms
by Tim Scannell
The deputy holsters a .357 and tags along about ten yards after the final sixth or seventh fellow. Group-control pointer: Never 'lead' a chain gang; always 'follow' it!
Escape: A Bootleg Fragment
by Michael Gause
I awoke again to the certain knowledge of prison. Another stirring inmate, another northern winter. . . . I affixed the leeches of expression around my fingers and mouth.
Ground Hog (Mating) Day
by Bertha Rogers
Woodchucks don't make a conscious decision to venture forth on February 2; rather, they're drawn by a desperate need, fueled by hormones and pheromones, to find a mate.
Speculations on the Poetic
by Alison Croggon
The poetic is the embarrassment of contemporary thinking because, no matter what cultural hygienists do, it stinks of a metaphysics.
Articles:
Bad Moon Rising: The View of the Towers from Beyond the Global Village
by Gil Griffin
In a land unmarked by time, uncorrupted by modernity, I was now starving for its everyday conveniences and for instantaneous connectedness with the rest of the world which I had been only too glad to leave behind, if only temporarily.
You Are There or George's Hair (Shakespeare & Co., Paris)
by Margo Berdeshevsky
He's written a tribute to the reading, saying in essence that I will probably never get published because I'm too "huge" and too "emotional" and too "good," so he proposes that my words be carved in stone somewhere, perhaps on a wall of the facing Notre Dame.
What is 'Lyric'?
Huddled since mid-century as "global village" around a dominant source of imagery, sound, even meaning, we must make uncommon use of language to ferry us beyond its perimeter to the essential, shared harmonics.
Ten Mile Meadow Project: A Conservatory of Land and Language (with photos).
A NYSCA Decentralization Program funding award will be presented to chief organizer, The Author's Watermark, at the New York State Capitol in Albany on February 12.
Reviews:
:
by Tim Scannell
David Offutt's Bench Marks
We need the long poem, . . . We also need the flashing truth of our usual Hesiodic works and days, offered here in a first 22-poem collection.
First Principles: Work and Love
The best part of poetry is to know that it is virtually unconscious (therefore fearless and trusting), like sensing God, however inexplicable—however much mere physical life hurts and is bruised and scraped; but as clear and solid as every leaf on every kind of flora, and as much a certainty as reaching for a cup of coffee without looking.
AND
Night and Day: George Held reviews a first book by African American poet Lester Graves Lennon
Interviews: Galway Kinnell
What a Kingdom It Is
by Daniela Gioseffi (Part One of Two)
I was living in France when the Civil Rights Movement became news, and reading the Paris edition of The Herald Tribune. I read about the Freedom Riders, and thought, 'My God! At last something is being done!'
Series on Series:
The New Bright Hill Center and The Tenth Year of Word Thursdays
The 2002 Starvy Awards:
February 21, Belcourt Theater, Hillsboro Village, Nashville
by John Gosslee
Series/Event Reviews:
Launch Reading for PoEP! A Poetry eJournal (12/20)
by Bill Kushner
Louise Glück and Karl Kirchwey at 92nd St Y (02/04)
by Daniela Gioseffi
Glück is masterful with her simple language, but one can't find the passion of a rich emotional life, rather, there is a tone of boredom, ennui, disappointment that does not abate.
Free Expression:
Averting Bioterrorism Begins with US Reforms
by Edward Hammond
The United States feels an imminent threat of biological or chemical terrorist attack. How do our own policies relate to the rise of this frightening situation?
Legal Forum:
Cheney Defies the GAO:
Outducking Dick or Into the (Naysaying) Agnew Stew with You !
Print Series:
Pending the load of a complete listing, please query regarding availability of monograph reprints of work appearing in June's Vietnam and other issues.
We are preparing Big City Lit's collection for 2001.
Bookshelf:
Currently on the publisher bidding block is Down Dream Road, a brand-new novel by George Wallace, editor of The Long Island Quarterly and poetrybay.com.. Chapter One appears here.
Other Arts:
Clarence in the Tower: Act I, Sc. IV from Richard III
O, no, my dream was lengthen'd after life; / O, then began the tempest to my soul, / Who pass'd, methought, the melancholy flood, / With that grim ferryman which poets write of, / Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.
Bill Kushner reviews Ross MacLean's play, The Cock Machine, at Theater for the New City.
Letters:
If this sounds like you… : An Exchange with Mr. Poetry Daily from Victoria, BC (Canada)
(The editors invite for publication well-written letters or speakeasy pieces on any topic of concern or interest to the magazine's readers. See Letters Page for length, language, and other details.)
CONTEST DETAILS
Poetry Chapbook:
The magazine invites submissions of 16-24 pages of (primarily) unpublished poems, including title page, table of contents, acknowledgments, and bio note. Format: MSW 98 or 95 TNR 12 (14 for titles; initial caps only). Send hard copy (separate page for each title, but not section) with disc, SA postcard, and $15 check or money order to Big City Lit, Contest/Poetry, Box 1141, Cathedral Sta. NY 10025. MSS not returned; all work considered for magazine publication. Postmark deadline: May 31, 2002. Winner and honorable mentions announced in August. Publication by Headwaters Press, NY, cash award, plus magazine-sponsored reading and awards presentation in New York.
Individual Poem:
Relevant guidelines, as above, apply. Fee: $5/poem.
Fiction:
Relevant guidelines, as above, apply. Fee: Shorts (to 1000 wds) $10; standard (to 3500) $15; long (6000 max.) $20. Awards and magazine publication in each length category. Unpublished manuscripts only.
~ . ~ The magazine is intended to be read in Palatino, and preferably in Netscape. ~ . ~
Note to contributors: To cite your work in the Archive,
indicate the month, e.g. Jun2001/contents/poetrydusk.html.
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