The appreciation month takes place in March, and you can find the details here:  http://savvyverseandwit.com/2011/02/call-for-guest-posts.html

Agusto-Cox is also looking for guest reviews of independently published fiction and poetry.  Reviews should be sent to Agusto-Cox by Feb. 25 for inclusion.

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Dear friends,

As many of you know I responded to Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” at AWP. I also solicited from Tony a response to my response. Many informal conversations have been taking place online and elsewhere since my presentation of this dialogue. This request is an attempt to move the conversation away from the he said-she said vibe toward a discussion about the creative imagination, creative writing and race.

If you have time in the next month please consider sharing some thoughts on writing about race (1-5 pages).

Here are a few possible jumping off points:

- If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?

- How do we invent the language of racial identity–that is, not necessarily constructing the “scene of instruction” about race, but create the linguistic material of racial speech/thought?

- If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?

- If you don’t consider yourself in any majority how does this contribute to how race enters your work?

- If fear is a component of your reluctance to approach this subject could you examine that in a short essay that would be made public?

- If you don’t intend to write about race but consider yourself a reader of work dealing with race what are your expectations for a poem where race matters?

- Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history?

- Is there a poem you think is particularly successful at inventing the language of racial dentity or at dramatizing the site of race as such? Tell us why.

In short, write what you want. But in the interest of constructing a discussion pertinent to the more important issue of the creative imagination and race, please do not reference Tony or me in your writings. We both served as the catalyst for this discussion but the real work as a community interested in this issue begins with our individual assessments.

If you write back to me by March 11, 2011, one month from today, with “OPEN LETTER” in the subject heading I will post everything on the morning of the 15th of March. Feel free to pass this on to your friends. Please direct your thoughts to openletter@claudiarankine.com.

In peace,
Claudia
openletter@claudiarankine.com

No Shoes Required for this Kind of Poetry Reading

Online journals, workshops, and literary relationships existing entirely online have reinvigorated poetry and hardened it against accusations of it being a dying art. Part of this effect, I’m sure, is the immediacy that the internet can provide. An immediacy which HTMLGIANT is using to its fullest with their series of ‘Live Giants’ online poetry readings. Can’t get to New York or Chicago to experience Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey read? Just tune in online, instead. To be honest, the virtual ‘crowd’ that gathers for these readings is larger than most poetry readings I’ve ever been to. Not only does it allows the wonderful poems to be heard by people who are geographically inaccessible, but it provides yet another online platform for poetry folk to come together. Who doesn’t enjoy a love-in? Ok, so the animal masks are a little scary, but it all adds to the experience. HTMLGIANT are up to number 8, and previous readings have included Mairéad Byrne, Zachary Schomburg and Sam Lipsyte

Best of all, HTMLGIANT’s archives mean you can replay the readings over and over and over until your heart’s content. It’s always frustrating when you grow to love a poet’s work after you’ve seen them live and can’t quite recall the poems in the same way. Well now you can, whenever you like. Doing laundry, cleaning, jumping up and down… the possibilities are endless.

Who wouldn’t want poets in animal masks reading you to sleep?

McBreen is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Heather Island. She has put together several significant anthologies of Irish poetry, including The White Page: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets. McBreen’s is a poetry of memory and rooted in the Irish landscape of her various homes in Sligo and Galway. She enters into the Irish poetic tradition of emotional geography, mapping her relationships onto the surrounding terrain. It is a terrain traversed by Michael Longley and Eamon Grennan, who are McBreen’s neighbours both in Ireland and in Emory’s archives.

Personally, it’s incredibly exciting to have access to such a wealth of material, and I cannot wait to explore them. Still, something seems not quite right with the situation. Ireland has an immense cultural heritage and, as recently highlighted in Brian Cowen’s inaugurating speech for Harry Clifton as Ireland Professor of Poetry, poets are particularly elevated within the Irish arts. So surely the archives and manuscripts of Ireland’s brightest literary stars belong on their home turf? Emory’s collection even includes the papers of the Nobel laureate and arguably Ireland’s second largest export (after Guinness, of course), Seamus Heaney, despite the fact that Queen’s University Belfast has a wonderful centre for poetry named after him.

To look at it negatively, this collection could be viewed as cultural theft. Or it could just be admiration. So, is a nation’s literary heritage bound to geographical borders? Or is it free to the highest bidder?

Caroline Crew is on Fellowship at Emory University in Atlanta, GA for 2010-2011. She is an editorial assistant at 32 Poems.

Morse has penned ten haikus in total, and placed them all over the Metro Atlanta area. You can find a map of all the locations here. Saying that these signs, read by almost everyone in a quick glance in traffic or on the bus, offers ‘an ideal place for poetry’, Morse aims to make ‘compact observations and commentary on modern life’. My personal favorite packs a ton of poignancy into just seventeen syllables:

CASH 4 YOUR OLD GOLD

The Value of Memories

Measured by+ the Ounce

Still, it seems that not everyone is a fan of the public poetry. Speaking to Atlanta’s wsbtv.com Peggy Denby from Keep Atlanta Beautiful said, “We call signs like this, ‘litter on a stick’”.+ This is not empty griping, either. Flux Projects, the arts program sponsoring Morse’s poetry signs, has been notified of the illegality of the signs and advised to take them down. Fines for the offense range from $50 to $1,000.

Such controversy can only lead to more attention for the project—and maybe even inspire some copycat signs!

What do you think? Are unauthorized signs always litter? Or does art have a higher law?

You can find out more about the roadside haiku project with a video from John Morse here.

Berlin and LA are “bombed” with poetry.

I’m digging this poem from Julie Carr.

Jessie Carty made it onto the poetry bestseller list.

Can you write a novel in three days?

The big secret about writing? You don’t need anything special.

I’m reading–for a second time–Dan Albergotti’s Boatloads. Yes.

1. No one does, or will, read much poetry;
2. Poets will never make money.

The other day I was thinking about how 32 Poems used to use Manuscript Hub (MH) to organize submissions for our review. I thought this would offer people from outside of the U.S. an easy way to submit their manuscripts. I could have opened a new email account — I have at least three I have to check already though — or I could have people send their poems to my own email account.

Once I offered MH to people from outside the country, other people inside the U.S. asked if they could use it. Using it added an additional way for people to submit. Before that, we only accepted submissions via regular snail mail.

As an editor, I enjoyed using MH. I could use the system to email back a response without adding additional messages to my own email account. The writer had the benefit of receiving a quick response since the system was new for us and thousands were not using it.

I was surprised at the outrage expressed over MH charging $2 per submission. Comments were made about all the money 32 Poems was making off of this. First of all, we did not make a dime. However, that is not my point. If we had made money, so what? Why are literary magazines not supposed to make money? Someone built MH from scratch using PHP coding. Someone used their PHP skills to develop that website and pay for the hosting. Why should they not make money or at least cover their web hosting costs?

What else was interesting was that many of the complainers were not subscribers to 32 Poems. They are not supporting the magazine with their money, and money is what makes the magazine exist.

“Money” is not a dirty word.

Getting back to the MH debate, one person was strongly against our use of MH. I think it’s interesting people get so angry about this. However, I also think there’s a tendency to try to sound clever on message boards:

So now we can pay for the privilege of offering our work free of charge to a magazine that sells it.

I’d sooner drink from the toilet like a dog.

Someone else weighed in with this:

So hemmig and hawing, and with all due respect for other opinions, I want to say that for contributors living outside the country of submission, which ever that might be, it is so wonderfully convenient to have the opportunity to submit online.

I have always considered editorship of a literary magazine, whether print or online, to be a labor of love. There is cost involved, not only paper for printouts, but a huge investment in time. Computers, software, broadband, etc, are also costs.

And as every self-employed person knows, time is money. It would cost me more to prepare paper documents and take them to the post office–not to mention the hassle with stamps (as IRCs are no longer sold by the Swedish post office).

My question for you this: Is it bad to make money on poetry?