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Collaborative Feature—Soapbox and CR

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

For our third collaborative feature with Cincinnati’s online magazine Soapbox, we’re featuring Brian Barker’s prose poem “Bats” from issue 9.1. Soapbox tells the new Cincinnati story—a narrative of creative people and businesses, new development, cool places to live, and the best places to work and play. And every other month, Cincinnati Review will contribute some of the best lit—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—in the country. Here, we’ve reprinted Barker’s “Bats” in full, as well as “bonus material” in the form of comments from the writer and our staff, including the editor who accepted the piece for publication—also on the Soapbox website.

Bats

They will crawl out of the ashes of cold barbecue pits. Their wings will be cut from the backs of chimney sweeps. They will hang from the antlers of an elk like a congress of drowsy trapeze artists. At dusk above houses, they will appear and disappear and appear, weaving a jagged cotillion through the trees. Their songs will travel before them like aneurysms on strings, shattering streetlights, car alarms, nerves. When winter comes too early, we will see their faces in our frostbitten fruit. Insomniac, they will be your alphabet at the window. Sleeper, they will be the jewelry of your death, tangled in silk pajamas, in a wet beehive of hair.

Brian Barker: This poem belongs to a sequence of linked prose poems I’ve been working on recently called “Natural Histories.” Each poem in this sequence concerns a different animal, and the poems are linked in that animal images, which occur organically within the poems, dictate the subjects. For example, the poem that precedes “Bats” is “Hippopotamuses,” where I write: “When they belch, fruit bats will glide from the caves of their stomachs and startle the moonlight.” The poem that occurs after “Bats” is “Elk,” following from the line, “They will hang from the antlers of an elk like a congress of drowsy trapeze artists.”

I say that the images occur organically because I’m not working from a list of particular creatures I’d like to write about. The animals appear naturally and feel unforced. This kind of formal constraint, like other formal constraints in poetry, imposes restrictions. That is, at times I end up with animals that I don’t know how to write about, or didn’t anticipate writing about, and I have to find an imaginative way through such impasses.

Bats, on the other hand, felt like a gift. I’ve always had a mixture of fascination about and fear of  bats. They are strange beings with their furry, fox-like faces and exaggerated ears, and those wings—the thin, leathery skin stretched over dainty bones—look a bit like a botched experiment. I’ve spent many summer evenings watching them weave through my neighborhood, a flight that seems to vacillate violently between the graceful and the erratic.

This poem, like all of the poems in the “Natural Histories” series, mixes the factual with the mythic, and exploits the simple future verb tense (“They will”), which lends a mystery to the voice. Who speaks with such authority? Where are we in time? The poems, in my mind, seem to emanate from some otherworldly force out of a black void, as much creation myth as natural history.

In the poem, I have tried to capture the fear and the revulsion that so many people feel about bats. No matter how many insects they may eat, it’s hard to shake the notion that all bats are rabid, cunning bedroom invaders looking for a tender neck to suckle. And yet, they are amazing creatures! The only mammals that can fly, they are equipped with echolocation and spend much of their lives hanging upside down. When I watch them “appear and disappear and appear” above the houses in my neighborhood, it’s hard not to think of them urgently tracing a kind of alphabet in the sky, a message from one mammal to another that must be decoded before the dusk deepens into dark.

Lisa Ampleman: When I think of references to bats in poetry, I hear the final line of Robert Hass’s “Happiness”—“our eyes squinched up like bats”—or Ariel’s song in The Tempest: “On the bat’s back I do fly/ After summer merrily.” Such happy bats in those poems, the graceful divers of summer twilight.

Brian Barker’s bats are not that kind. They dance the cotillion, yes, but Barker aligns them with ashes, chimneys, aneurysms, car alarms, and frostbite. And, he reminds us of our worst fear of them: that they could become entangled in our hair. His are the bats of late October, as the evenings begin to cool and darken, when night-creatures are more threatening.

His form, the prose poem, uses the qualities of both genres: it moves by a series of associations and employs figurative language, while retaining the rhythms and formatting of prose. Though it’s been prevalent in other movements and time periods, the prose poem is closely associated with nineteenth-century French Symbolists, such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé. I like the description of prose poetry that the Academy of American Poets uses, from Peter Johnson, the editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal: “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.” Barker’s poem feels at once like a lyrical ode and a paragraph in an odd naturalist’s guide.

Brian Brodeur: I love the startling and often disturbing associative leaps in Barker’s prose poem. It opens, not with the phoenix of Eurasian mythology, but with the drowsy resurrection of bats. This local, suburban version of the classical creature “crawl[s]” instead of flies “out of the ashes of barbeque pits.” Moving from these backyard “ashes” to those caked on the “backs of chimney sweeps,” bats become the strange earrings adorning the “antlers of elk,” then transform once again into “a congress of trapeze artists,” a metaphor that suggests the precarious way bats hang by their toes to sleep. Like William Blake’s chimney sweeper, who is “a little black thing among the snow,” Barker’s “little black thing[s]” are conspicuous in spite of their smallness, speed, and nocturnal nature. Indeed, their “songs” are so loud they “shatter . . . streetlights, car alarms, nerves.”

As early practitioners of the prose poem understood, this hybrid form often employs rapid turns and contradictory perceptions, making it a great vehicle for nightmarish ideas and images Barker exploits in “Bats” (e.g., “aneurisms on string”). But I’d wager even Aloysius Bertrand, often cited as being the first to work with the form, would be envious of Barker’s image of these winged mammals as “weaving a jagged cotillion through the trees.”

Don Bogen: When I first came across Brian Barker’s “Bats,” I was struck by the strange use of future tense the poet himself mentions. That, coupled with the generalized “they” and “their” that appear in every sentence—we never see an individual bat but only bats en masse—lend an oracular quality to the piece, as if it were a dark prophecy of their future invasion. And they will be everywhere: from the skies above our houses, to the food in our hands, to the insides of our dreams—or should I say nightmares? The increasingly ominous tone of the poem adds to its sleek movement as it progresses from the mild discomfort of “cold barbecue pits” to “aneurysms,” “frostbitten fruit” (surely an echo of “forbidden fruit”), and at last “the jewelry of your death”—not a generalized “our death” but yours, reader, tonight most likely, in your sleep (cue demonic laughter). Well, it is only a dream, and Barker’s hint of humor throughout keeps us from having to spend the rest of our evening awake behind locked doors.

As Brian and Lisa note, the prose poem has a distinguished lineage, especially in French literature. Its energies lie in what Brian calls “associative leaps” between juxtaposed images, connections that are not rational but imaginative. Writing without the support of lines, the poet has to generate not only an effective progression of details but also a verbal music that can lift prose beyond its reputation as a mere carrier of meaning, useful only to tell a story or get a point across. “Bats” achieves this by subtle repetition and variation in sentence length and structure, starting with simple constructions, then adding more clauses and phrases in the middle of the poem, then shifting to direct address at the end.  And inside the sentences themselves there are some gorgeous patterns of sound: the rhythmic lilt of “appear and disappear and appear,” where you can almost hear their dipping flight, or that “congress of drowsy trapeze artists” where the s’s and z’s are as clustered and off kilter as the bats hanging upside down from the elk antlers. “Bats” looks like an everyday paragraph, but it sings like a poem.

We’re running Brian Barker’s “Bats” right next to his “Slugs” in the issue, so it was interesting to hear how he developed organic links between animals as he was working on the “Natural Histories” series.  As “Slugs” refers to “the severed head of a pig,” no doubt a porcine prose poem is also snorting somewhere in the group. But for now we get a glimpse not of the barnyard but the graveyard, with slugs that “suckle at the tear ducts of the dead” and bats tangled in our pajamas as they haunt our dreams. Happy Halloween!

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Posted in Features, Soapbox and CR, Uncategorized |

On the Schiff Prize Winners . . .

Monday, October 15th, 2012

Fiction Editor Michael Griffith on choosing Carey Cameron’s “Thursday”:

“Thursday” takes up—in subtle, touching, psychologically acute ways—a subject that seems to get relatively little attention in literary fiction: the slippages and frailties of late middle age, the tectonic grindings and intricate negotiations necessary to long marriage. It’s a sharp, smart story, tender but resolutely unsentimental.

Carey Cameron: You write about what you know, and I wrote “Thursday” because I have a family member dealing with hearing loss, and a family dealing with that family member’s hearing loss. I searched a couple of times on the internet for help—literature, groups—for the families of those experiencing hearing loss—a kind of Al-Anon, but for hearing-loss-affected families—but found nothing. Maybe I was simply not adept enough at searching on the internet, but it led me to want to write something inspired by my family’s experience in the hopes that it might resonate with others. There are a lot of baby boomers out there struggling with hearing loss and other “ordinary” problems of aging, which, however, require extraordinary adjustments.

Cameron is the author of Daddy Boy (Algonquin, 1989) and Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana (Algonquin, 2002, published under the pseudonym “Isadora Tattlin”).

Poetry Editor Don Bogen on choosing Emily Hipchen’s “Boy into Polished Concrete”:

“Boy into Polished Concrete” struck me at first reading by its command of music and structure. The stanzas each have a clear focus as the poem progresses from the schoolroom, to the test, the boy going to bed, and his feelings in bed; and the whole poem is framed brilliantly by the far-away galaxies we cannot see at the start and the close-in memory of the spiral “galaxy” of spilled milk at the end. That milky way spills out as a fluid play on blank verse in the last line, a subtle and effective contrast to the rattling, consonant-laden phrases that express the boy’s anxiety at the start. The craft here is both noteworthy in itself and seemingly natural to the scenes described.

Great craft alone, of course, does not make a poem, but in the case of “Boy into Polished Concrete” it builds an intimate and persuasive character study. I’m impressed by the way the boy’s distinctive integrity grows even as we get closer and closer to his inner thoughts. This poem brings us inside the boy’s world—and his family’s too—with insight and grace. It’s a rich and deeply moving piece of work.

Emily Hipchen: “I just hit things,” my friend said, “hard. Like in football. And for a split second I could think.” He took a sip of beer; I frowned. “Look,” he said, “It’s a cognitive disorder. This is what we had to do: my son’s teachers thought that children needed to sit still to take tests. My son needs to throw himself on the floor. Over and over.”

This is where the poem came from—my trying to understand what that must be like for my friend and his son—but more generally what the relationship is between knowledge and the floor, and the motion of falling to the floor, and the point in that gesture at which knowledge becomes accessible, and why that place? It’s not like I got answers over the raft of revisions I did (the only original line here is the title), which makes all the periods in this version look really bizarre to me. I just had the questions, and this picture in my head of the boy, his fat pencil, the test, the floor; his father, his mother; the way the noise in his head must be like watching a badly-tuned television. The way my father used to pound the side of ours to fix it, which did fix it, most of the time.

Hipchen is a Fulbright scholar, the editor of Adoption & Culture, one of the editors of a/b: Autobiography Studies, and the author of a memoir, Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption (2005). Her essays, short stories, and poems have appeared in Fourth Genre, Northwest Review, Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor at The University of West Georgia.

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Posted in Contests |

Don’s “Greetings Reading” Report

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

Don Bogen: The second Greetings from Cincinnati Review reading—at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle—was a grand success. Thanks to our fabulous contributors in the Pacific Northwest (especially Carolyne Wright, Martha Silano, and Jeannine Hall-Gailey who did the legwork) a standing-room-only crowd was on hand to hear seven—count ‘em, seven—poets on Wednesday, August 1st.  I was asked to introduce the readers and serve as general emcee and poem jockey—just call me Dr. Don.

We heard poems about radioactive cesium and electromagnetism; about bridges and the bridge pose; about love, death, gravy, and a Victorian museum, all from the pages of CR. Along with the three folks above, Kelly Davio, Rebecca Hoogs, Priscilla Long, and Megan Snyder-Camp took part. Former tireless volunteer Suzanne Warren, who’s now a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Puget Sound, turned up for the occasion. Contributors’ books sold out, free copies and subscription forms were snatched up, and the small bar at the Hugo House was hopping. After the reading, we moved on to a large bar in the neighborhood to continue the festivities.

CR will return to the scene of the crime for our tenth-anniversary celebration at the 2014 AWP conference in Seattle.  Before then, we hope to do more of these readings at cafés, bookstores, literary centers, and bars large and small.  Word is out to St. Louis and points east, including Boston and Washington, DC. We’ve got great fiction and poetry contributors across the US and abroad, and we’re always happy to send copies and maybe throw in an editor or two.

Click here to see the video on YouTube.

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Posted in Editors' Dispatches, From our Contributors, Uncategorized |

Dispatch from California

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

CR’s own prodigal editor, Don Bogen (who also goes by the monikers “The Bogues,” “Bogedy,” and “Dr. Bojangles” ) was in San Francisco last Monday for the CR reading at the Stable Cafe. Here’s Don’s account of the event:

By sheer coincidence, I had a chance to attend the first Greetings from Cincinnati Review reading last Monday, March 26, in San Francisco.  Thanks to the imagination and tireless energies of Nick Johnson, a poet and contributor to our most recent issue (8.2), I found myself among some sixty people huddled around space heaters in the courtyard of the Stable Cafe–things cool off at night in San Francisco.  Nick read along with two other poets in 8.2—Dan Bellm and Rebekah Bloyd—and the evening came to a close with some short prose sketches by Ian Tuttle, who, though not yet a contributor, cajoled his listeners with some satiric looks at the yuppified cafe crowds at various spots in the city, including the Stable itself.  We kept warm with wine, beer, snacks, and great writing, and though the outside lamp failed as the sun set, Dan Bellm’s trusty pocket flashlight saved the day—or the night.  Many books sold, much conviviality, and many toasts raised to the magazine and its contributors.

There are more writers than you can shake a stick at in the Bay Area, and a good number of them have been in The Cincinnati Review.  Rebecca Foust, who was in issue 5.2, made the trip down from Marin, and others sent regrets:  D. A. Powell (7.1) and C. S. Giscombe (5.2) were out of town doing visiting stints at the University of Iowa and Temple respectively, Randall Mann (7.2) was flying to Zurich for his job, and Dean Rader (7.2) was in the blurry time zone of life with a newborn.

Fortunately, there are rumors of a repeat event on the Berkeley side of the Bay sometime later this year, and, further north, talk of taking the show to Seattle, another hotbed of contributors.  Jeff Von Ward, who came up with the truly great Cincinnati poster for the reading—postcard, technicolor stripes and all—has been kind enough to offer it as a template for later events.  So contributors and friends beyond the West Coast who wish to do their own version of a Greetings from Cincinnati Review reading have things all set up.  It’s a great way to get the word out about the fine work we publish from all over.

Also, there are videos of the reading on youtube. Here’s one of event organizer and CR contributor Nick Johnson:

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Posted in Editors' Dispatches, From our Contributors |

Collaborative Feature—Soapbox and CR!

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

We’re trying something new and different—a collaboration with the amazing online magazine Soapbox.

Soapbox tells the new Cincinnati story—a narrative of creative people and businesses, new development, cool places to live, and the best places to work and play. And each month, Cincinnati Review will contribute some of the best lit—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—in the country. The full text of a poem or story will run in Soapbox, and we at Cincinnati Review will post  on our blog “bonus material” in the form of comments from the writer and our staff, including the editor who accepted the piece for publication.

Our first collaboration features a poem that appeared in issue 8.1: “For I Will Consider” by Terese Coe. If you don’t have a copy on hand, you can read it in Soapbox by clicking here. Look for our next feature—a fiction selection—in February!

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have recently appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Poetry, Agenda, New American Writing, Orbis, and Cyphers, among numerous others, and will soon appear in Alaska Quarterly Review and The Connecticut Review. Her first collection of poems, The Everyday Uncommon, won a Word Press publication prize and was published in 2005.

Terese Coe: Normally I don’t care to track how my poems were written, but this case is different. It came to me suddenly after rereading Christopher Smart. The lines flew off my pen. There were more than twice as many as now. At first it was a straight intuitive/objective exploration of the individual, a loading of facts and now and then an attempt at reasoning them out. Smart’s “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry” is partially a search for cause and effect, as in the Psalms, but for me that search emerged more clearly in the writing process. I put together a list of one cause that lead to another—as if it could make sense, or explicate existence. But nothing can make sense of existence. Nothing can make sense of the outlandish crevasse between life and death.

Some months later I began trying to reorder the lines, cutting whatever seemed out of place and trying different permutations. I did not add; I simply cut. I knew the poem needed gravitas. I wanted irony only at the end.

It is a story told in the form of litany, or dialogue with oneself, which makes it essentially dramatic. I find the lines are more open to variation in performance than I had expected, and that is characteristic of drama. The meaning varies according to vocal inflection, tone, and mood variations, like dialogue. Of course, it is also a dramatic monologue in which the lines have immediacy and flexibility. And the poem is peculiar in that it doesn’t seem to matter that most of the lines are quite unlike contemporary dramatic dialogue. Smart’s style adds something enigmatic to the subject/protagonist, and that produces a counterpoint to his evident interest in nature and the natural.

Lisa Ampleman, Assistant Editor: Although the long lines and anaphora of Coe’s poem may call up Walt Whitman’s ghost for some readers, “For I Will Consider” is more directly indebted to Christopher Smart, an eighteenth-century writer best known for “his reckless drinking and spending habits” and “religious mania” (as the Academy of American Poets puts it)—and for writing a poem celebrating his cat, Jeoffry.

That poem (link: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15798), from Jubilate Agno, captures the cat-ness of the cat as he “sharpens his paws by wood” and “can catch the cork and toss it again.” This cat, however, also is “hated by the hypocrite and miser” and “knows that God is his Saviour”—atypical feline traits.

As we read Coe’s poem, we think about how Shay seems cat-like: fishing is his way of nourishment, he needs little to survive, and he sleeps on the carpet and is pleased.  However, he is also one with his dog and tinkers with the Kawasaki—things Jeoffry would be unlikely to enjoy.

Matt McBride, Associate Editor: I like to think of poems as perpetual motion machines, little Rube Goldberg devices of language that accomplish the impossible—they add up to more than the sum of their parts; they make something out of nothing. The most engaging thing, for me, about Terese Coe’s poem is the way it generates itself, the way it pushes itself along by its own momentum.

Coe does this through the use of repetition. By beginning each line with “For,” Coe sets us up for a poem that will be nothing more than a list with each object weighted equally. However, we quickly see that is not the case. Repetition inherently lends import. This import, though, can quickly become hollow, a weight without substance (see for example every political slogan ever). Coe prevents this by subtly raising the stakes as the poem progresses, matching the poem’s content with the power generated by the repetition, so the “For at the first glance of a girl in his direction he worships dutifully” becomes, a few lines later, “For thirdly he works not upon relationship but extends himself quietly.” The “For fishing is his way of nourishment” becomes “For the sea is in him” in the next line.

And this is what makes this piece so beautiful for me, the way it accrues. Coe’s poem is like snow, or the Dirty Harry films. Any single discrete part of the larger whole is not in itself amazing, but somehow these seemingly unimpressive parts (though many of the individual lines do have a kind of beauty in their sentiment and expression) add up to a value larger than the constituent elements.

Don Bogen, Poetry Editor: Back in Issue 4.1 (Winter 2007), we published Terese Coe’s “Boy Hustler”—a smart, tough sonnet spoken by the title character—and I was delighted to have another rich and energetic piece of work for the latest issue. Except for the fact that they are both young men, the figures the two poems present have little in common.  The forms of the poems are different as well, but in both cases Coe really livens up the conventions. Those lines about the cat Jeoffry from Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno are among my all-time favorites, and (full disclosure) we’ve had a cat in our household for many years now, so I was skeptical at first that Shay could live up to his illustrious feline predecessor. But, as Lisa mentioned, the young man has a certain cat-like mixture of grace and separation from the world that is immediately appealing.

Coe’s variations in pace, tone, focus, and line length keep the poem and the figure at its center constantly shifting and developing. I suppose one key challenge in a “perpetual motion machine” of this sort (to use Matt’s term) is how you get it to stop.  Coe’s last line is a quick jolt off in a new direction that caps the poem perfectly. What moves me most in the poem, though, is the depth of characterization embodied in the details—Shay’s take on girls, on the outdoors, on needs in general, and, my favorite, on self-defense: “For when attacked, he will grab the other’s wrists and hold them tightly rather than fight. / For I have seen this twice and was glad of it.” The observation is sharp, the character distinct, and the feelings of both mother and son rendered brilliantly.

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Posted in Features, From our Contributors, Soapbox and CR, Why We Like It |

On the Winners . . .

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

And now, what you’ve been waiting for: Statements from judges Don Bogen and Michael Griffith about the winners of the 2011 Schiff Prize in Prose and Poetry, as well as words from the winners themselves, Tresha Haefner and Elisabeth Cohen, on how their pieces came to be.

Don Bogen: What impresses me most about “A Walk Through the Parking Lot at Midnight” is the way it moves through a range of perspectives—below ground, on the surface, above the surface; outside the body, inside it—in a patient series of closed stanzas up to the very end of the poem. Each of these stanzas has its own particular angle, a new way of seeing the mundane that enlivens it. As the poem calmly and strangely unfolds, the perspectives interact, and the result is a landscape that is simultaneously defamiliarized and enriched. We may be in a parking lot, but the poet is not just parked there.

Tresha Haefner: When I first moved out on my own, I didn’t have a television, didn’t have much to do in my free time, and didn’t know anyone in town. I spent most of my nights walking around my apartment complex, which was across the street from a parking lot. I was just learning to write poetry, and most of my poems contained imagery of the night, and things I saw or thought about on my walks. A worm coming out in the rain. The nature of life, death, history, the body and brain and bones. The truth is, all the lines in “A Walk through the Parking Lot at Midnight” were originally parts of my other (failed) poems, which I had been hitting my head against for years.  Things came together when my friend (poet, Kelly Cressio-Moeller) directed me to an essay on “Free Line Poems” (written by Sally Ashton), which suggests looking at your old, “orphaned” lines to see if they are working together to say something. Mine were all about light and darkness, all the many places wherein there exists this faceless luminescence, both internally and externally. Rereading the poem and rewriting it I kept thinking about the prophet Zoaster, who was the first to speculate that there are two gods, a god of light and a god of darkness. The darkness, he said, is inside of us, but the light is all around.

Michael Griffith: Elisabeth Cohen’s story is a stylish voice piece about a parent trying to get an awkward, scabby youngest child into a tony private school. The voice is wry and witty and rueful, and Cohen’s social satire is beautifully executed. But what I like most about this story is the risky and surprising way it turns out to be about parental love, and not the greeting-card-homily kind but the real thing: guilty, sometimes ambivalent or miserable, frustrated, ringed round by anxiety and loathing of self and the world, but fierce and unkillable.

Elisabeth Cohen: Growing up, one of my brothers used to have these oceanic nosebleeds, which is where the end of “Mollusks and Optics” came from. They were these torrents of blood—there’s really no other word for it—profuse, seemingly endless, requiring lots of old towels. It was like something from the last of the Romanovs. My parents were outwardly calm during these episodes even as our kitchen began to look more and more like a slaughterhouse. The memory came back to me when I was trying to finish this story, and it seemed like a pretty good way to end a story  about the emotional price you pay as a parent, when you let someone outside of you, over whom you have the most tenuous illusion of control, carry your heart around.

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Posted in From our Contributors, Uncategorized |

Contest Winners!

Friday, September 30th, 2011

Well, after a long summer of careful reading and discussion, we are excited to announce the winners of the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Prizes in Poetry and Prose! We had a goodly number of excellent submissions, so the winnowing process was tough. Many thanks to all who sent in poems, stories, and essays—and even more (multitudinous?) thanks to those who shelled out a bit extra for a subscription to the mag. Your varied offerings saw us through the three-week heat wave and the Cincinnati Reds’ slow fade.

With no further ado, we offer hearty congratulations to Tresha Faye Haefner for her poem “A Walk Through the Parking Lot at Midnight” and Elisabeth Cohen for her story “Mollusks and Optics.” Haefner and Cohen each will receive a $300 prize, and their pieces will appear in the May 2012 issue of The Cincinnati Review.


The judges—Don Bogen for poetry and Michael Griffith for prose—have also named the following honorable mentions, who came close:

Logan Adams
Jacob M. Appel
Douglas Boatman
Jeffrey Condran
Rebecca Foust
Christine Grimes
Becky Hagenston
Hairee Lee
Joan Leegant
Lori Martin
Lori McMullen
Andrew Peery
Paul Takeuchi
Joshua Van Dereck

The editors would like to thank Heather Hamilton, Don Peteroy, and Becky Adnot Haynes for their invaluable help with the judging.

Tune in next week for comments by the writers on their winning pieces and from the editors who chose them!

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Posted in Contests, Uncategorized |

Dispatches from Belfast

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

Poetry editor Don Bogen, who has been off fellowshipping at the Heaney Centre in Belfast for what seems (to our lonesome staff) a great age, is soon to fly back to us. Appropriate, then, that his last across-the-pond post takes, as its topic, birds.

Don Bogen: A word about birds. They seem especially noticeable here, perhaps because we’re close to the river Lagan, which opens into the Irish Sea at Belfast Lough and, in the other direction, winds some dozen miles through a nature preserve along an old canal path to the former linen-mill town of Lisburn. Gulls of various species hover over our narrow street, particularly on garbage day. Along the canal path, you see more gulls, ducks, coots, moorhens and herons. As for land-oriented birds, magpies are ubiquitous and striking in their black, white, and glinting blue plumage. They look elegant but sound like ratchets—the Spanish word for them, urracas, is onomatopoetic. The crow of Ireland is the hooded crow—not completely black but with a grayish torso and black wings and head. A sturdy, good-sized creature, it looks like a raven wearing a vest. It sounds, well, like a crow. But the real singers here are the blackbirds—too small and plain to notice much, but you do hear them. Their call is rich, lyrical, and varied, like a musical conversation.

The blackbird is the symbol of the Seamus Heaney Centre. The founding director, the  poet Ciaran Carson, came up with this idea on his way to the interview for the position. He told us that he was nervous about getting the job—there are a lot of poets and folks like him with arts administration experience in Belfast—and just as he was about to enter the building, a blackbird came out of the hedge and sang to encourage him. There’s a lovely medieval Irish poem about the bird, found in the margins of an illuminated manuscript (those monks would get tired of copying the Gospels), which Ciaran has translated this way:

the little bird
that whistled shrill
from the nib of
its yellow bill:

a note let go
o’er Belfast Lough –
a blackbird from
a yellow whin

“Whin” is the gorse that flowers in March and April.

Ciaran is prominent among a generation of Irish poets now in their late fifties and early sixties who were at Queen’s University when Seamus Heaney taught here—including his Centre colleague Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, and Frank Ormsby—but he is also a traditional Irish musician, playing various flutes and whistles. Music forms an important part of the Centre. The singer and scholar of Irish folk song Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin is also on staff; she keeps discovering Irish songs that Ciaran translates and she sets to music. Ciaran and his wife Deirdre, who plays fiddle, take part in a regular session at a local pub. The scene there is hardcore traditional: The musicians have a corner table and play basically for each other—no stage, little applause. Newcomers are welcome to watch, but there are strict protocols about who can sit in. First you just leave your instrument case out to let folks know what you play. Then, maybe after two or three weeks of listening, you might open the case. But you never pick up the instrument until you’re invited, and that would be after at least a month.

We were down at the place a while back to hear Ciaran and Deirdre. He came over during a break, and talk turned, as it often does here, to poetry. You know, he said, we poets all want to sing like nightingales—or maybe skylarks. Yeah, we all want to be skylarks. I blurted out Shelley’s skylark line, “Bird thou never wert,” and Ciaran continued, But you know what we really are? We’re fuckin’ parrots, man. That’s as eloquent a statement about music and literary tradition as I can think of this side of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

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Dispatches from Belfast

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

We’re pining for our poetry editor, who is reading CR submissions all the way across the pond (ain’t technology grand). He returns this summer from his semester-long stint at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast. We look forward to hearing all about his adventures abroad, but he’s been kind enough to treat us with a few choice tidbits for our blog. Thanks, Don!

Don Bogen: Since we get our news here largely from the BBC—their Belfast studios are just down the road—it’s hard to avoid detailed coverage of things royal, including, most recently, the wedding of Wills (as the press delights in calling him) and Kate. Among the wedding gifts Queen Elizabeth presented her grandson and his bride were various titles. The one that seems to have stuck is Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, which results in their being called now, somewhat awkwardly, the Cambridges. But, to take care of this particular realm of the United Kingdom, the couple has also been named Baron and Baroness of Carrickfergus, a small town just a train ride north of Belfast, near where the inlet called Belfast Lough meets the sea. We’d been up there once before but took the trip again recently with a visiting relative.

Carrickfergus (or Fergus’s Rock, where an ancient king was shipwrecked around 530) is a rather grim town in a gorgeous setting, with lovely views across the Lough toward Bangor and east toward Scotland. Its historic claim to fame is a fortified Anglo-Norman castle dating from the twelfth century, designed for protection against invaders from the sea.  It also has remnants of a city wall from the seventeenth century, designed for protection against the locals.  There are two gates left, one of which was particularly assigned to the Irish, who were allowed to come into the town and work during the day but kept out at other times. You can hear a good bit of the complicated history of this part of the world in the names of the folks running things, starting with those Norman types John de Courcy and Hugh de Lacy, down through Sir Arthur Chichester, the governor who built the walls and whose descendents became the Donegall dynasty—and on to the Windsors. It’s possible to buy a poster of the new Baron and his wife superimposed in front of a photograph of the castle, as if the couple were floating in a rowboat just beneath the tower. I don’t think they’ve visited yet.

Carrickfergus’s other noteworthy structure is the Church of St. Nicholas, where the father of the poet Louis MacNeice was rector. MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907 but moved with his family to Carrickfergus in 1909. He spent most of his adult life in England and tends to be seen as a member of the Auden circle of the 1930s, but, as the poet Michael Longley points out in his fine introduction to MacNeice’s Selected Poems, his childhood in Ulster is fundamental to his work. Not as a source of happy memories—as the rector’s son, he felt alienated from both the working-class Catholic population and the dour Scottish Calvinism of the Presbyterians—but as the anchor for a  particular turn of mind that tempers lyricism with an eye for details in the real world. The opening of “Carrickfergus” gives a good sense of what this part of the world was like when he was a boy:

I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries

To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:

Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim

Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams

The little boats beneath the Norman castle,

The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;

The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses

But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.

The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,

The yarn-mill called its funeral cry at noon;

Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor

Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.

Not to worry, Wills and Kate, the industrial griminess of both Belfast and Carrickfergus is long gone (along with the shipping and textile industries). The castle is thoughtfully restored—great fun to explore—and you can pose by a cannon pointing out to sea.

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Dispatches from Belfast

Friday, March 18th, 2011

This just in from our esteemed poetry editor and migrant worker (weirdly, that is how Ireland views Don while he’s on fellowship in Belfast).

Don Bogen: A word about money. There are seven kinds of banknotes accepted as legal tender here in Northern Ireland:  those from the Bank of England, which (no surprise) have the Queen’s face on them; two different kinds of Scottish notes (which we have yet to see); and notes from four different banks on this side of the Irish Sea. Some of these Irish notes are fairly sober. One issued, as I recall, by Northern Bank features a nineteenth-century character with a foot-long black beard, faintly reminiscent of one of the Smith Brothers on cough drops. The Ulster Bank bills have a seal with Latin motto on the back.  First Trust Bank goes for a more modern look, with the current bank directors—a  smiling middle-aged woman with what appears to be a chain of flowers around her neck, a guy in a turtleneck—and points of interest in nature on the reverse. My favorites, though, are the notes from the Bank of Ireland (“established by royal charter 1783,” as we are informed on the front), which feature an engraving of a lady of that period and the official shields of the six counties that make up Northern Ireland. But the back is where things get really impressive. Some older bills from this bank show the main hall at Queen’s University (home of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry): a late nineteenth-century structure pretending to be a Tudor manor house. The newer ones are even more notable, as they feature the Old Bushmills distillery not far from here in County Antrim.

The bills are multicolored and of different sizes for each denomination. As many folks have remarked, U.S. currency is considerably more boring. But what if we could return to the pre-Constitution days of each state printing its own money? It would be great to have an Ohio bill featuring the site of our offices at the University of Cincinnati, McMicken Hall, which is a mid-twentieth-century structure pretending to be a nineteenth-century New England college building  pretending to be an eighteenth-century British estate. Or maybe a note featuring one of the local breweries—not as picturesque as Old Bushmills but still close to what matters. Just across the river in Kentucky, of course, there’s a range of proud enterprises of the Bushmills variety—Maker’s Mark would take on a whole new meaning on the flip side of a twenty-dollar bill.

What banknotes look like, of course, is a whole different matter from what they can buy. Suffice it to say that we have reduced our anxiety considerably by convincing ourselves that the dollar and the pound—in all its different varieties—are roughly equivalent. It’s  amazing how far a little imagination can take you.

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