That means the holiday shopping season is on us. I know, some of you have already bought all of your presents but not me. Why? Well, I don’t have that many to buy and I’ve become fascinated with watching people shop on days like Black Friday. I’m a regular mall walker, so the new influx of shoppers messes up my flow a bit but it is fun to pick out the: Husband who has no idea what to buy, the power Grandma shopper, the kid who got their gift cards early . . .

But, I digress. What I am hear to talk about is what a terrific gift literature can make for the holidays. I’m gearing up for a post on my own blog with specific suggestions, but here is the blog I made last year. The list goes through some poetry, fiction, non-fiction and even books on writing, but you know what is missing from that list? A separate section for literary magazines. I do mention a few magazines but I want to really promote the idea of purchasing magazine subscriptions for Christmas gifts.

When you purchase just a book or gift card, that is a one-time gift. When you purchase a subscription, you’re giving something that will come quarterly, twice a year etc. And, unlike the pie-of-the-month-club, a literary magazine won’t make you fat…well…maybe unless there is a particular sad poem that makes you really, really, really need a piece of chocolate.

The only issue with giving a subscription is that you need to know what the person might like. I say: ask them. As I noted in the blog post I mentioned above, readers love to talk about what they are reading. You could also check out their shelves or have one of their children or significant others do that for you. What do they already subscribe to? What is comparable? Could you extend a subscription? Is there something you have read that blew you away and you know you just had to gift that same magazine to your friend? (Like 32 poems!)

You may wonder if you’ll have your lit mag in time to wrap it for the holiday. When you order the subscription, send a message to the publisher and ask for a back issue (or current issue) to be sent to you so you can wrap that issue and note that the subscription is coming. You could also visit a copy shop and have an inexpensive color picture of the magazines website or cover printed so you can enclose that in an envelope with a card for your gift recipient or along with a nice piece of chocolate (again, I know, the chocolate). Other ideas fair readers?

I’ve been the recipient of two different literary magazine subscriptions and for a poet/adjunct English teacher, having someone else spend the money on a magazine really is a gift. Maybe even a nice enough surprise that you, the gift giver, will find yourself under the mistletoe . . .

(stop by Jessie’s blog on 11-22-10 for this year’s holiday shopping guide. We love people who leave other suggestions in comments)

On the plane, I put my tray table down and carefully removed one postcard at a time. I found myself wanting to keep them in the original order. Eventually, I realized I had no idea which way they’d been, so I had to be okay with letting them get “out of order.” What’s funny is that you can read the poems and view the art in any order you want. Why did I care? I had to laugh at myself.

Visit the Tuesday: An Art Project website and subscribe.

My interview with Jennifer Flescher follows:

32: On the Tuesday: An Art Project website, I read that you named the journal after a poem of yours. Could you describe how you made that choice?

JF: Well, when I wrote the poem I was thinking about a sort of strange, dissociated day. It had been raining all week, so the days were sort of blurring together. Tuesday is both specific and vague at the same time. It’s also a sort of lost day — not laden with a lot of other things — a strange transition day….I was in a strange transition — suspension. This is, of course, one of those connections you create after rather than before, but maybe the journal is the same kind of transition spot — after creation but before really traveling on.

32: Your journal is unique in that it provides poems, prints, and photographs on postcard-sizes of paper. Each issue contains a handful of cards wrapped inside colored paper. What led you to create a journal in this format?

JF: Well, I’ve seen a lot of them cropping up… it’s always a mixed flattery. I was a book maker. I made books all the time and also holiday cards — my cards were very elaborate, and I would make about 100 of them a year. In the last incarnation they looked a lot like Tuesday — they had loose pieces bound together with a silk ribbon. That happened partly because I wanted people to be able to keep the photo of the kids and toss the rest, come February… I think that feeling of editing garbage had a lot to do with it. I only ever want to keep the parts of a piece that are important to me — I want to be able to leave the rest behind — I want to give away a piece if it seems meant for someone I know. I came across a project in DC in which someone was sending out a postcard/poem a month — I loved that idea. Bound journals frustrate me sometimes — I hate to get rid of them and I hate to keep them… At the same time, the holiday cards were frustrating me — because I wanted to do something more important — to have a content that really complimented the beautiful format I was creating. I was a journalist, and missed the community and importance I felt in reporting. It all sort of fell in pretty quickly. I love hearing stories of people sending them through the mail and putting them on their mirrors. I have a friend who is a literacy specialist in an elementary school — she leaves poems in the bathroom. I love that.

32: Readers of this blog may be interested in sending you work. What should poets know — beyond what’s in your submission guidelines — about what you’d like to see in a poem? Are there certain kinds of poems that you’d not publish?

JF: I always squirm out of this kind of question because it seems to me that it will limit my options. People often ask if I print visuals connected to poems — I don’t really do that. I look for bravery and risk. I look for an emotional center. I suppose that is my prejudice. I don’t publish light verse. I try to trust my authors — so that I would rather publish my favorite author’s favorite poem than my favorite poem by my favorite author. I think that publishing is cooperative — I prefer it to be.

32: A wise and well-respected editor of poetry and fiction told me that every editor has their prejudice in terms of what they do not want to read. Are there certain subjects that repel you?

JF: Yes — writing. And teaching. A lot of us are in that world &mdash and I think it’s natural to write about it — but I also am not interested. I guess it gets back to the emotional core concept — I’m not interested in what we are trying to write in between what we have to write.

32: What is the most challenging aspect of running a literary journal?

JF: Just time and money. Same as writing, and teaching. All of which I love so much. Distribution can be hard, but we are really lucky — amazing little bookstores all over the country write me and ask for copies.

32: You’ve been published in The Harvard Review, Lit, The Boston Globe, Agni, Jubilat, and Poetry Daily. What advice do you have for writers just starting to send their work out to magazines?

JF: Remember when you send that it is the beginning of a relationship. Think hard about presenting yourself with respect, and remember that it is only the beginning. A relationship with an editor can take years to develop — and that is a wonderful thing! You want people who are really reading and listening to the work. Always send again, and never send frustrated vent e-mails in your moment of rejection. Some of the people I was most bruised by helped me the most later…

32: Where do you most like to create? Do you have a studio in your house? Do you prefer to work in public somewhere?

JF: I have an office — it’s too filled to work in. I work on my couch, in the very early morning. Also out in coffee shops. I love to write traveling — I guess in every place I need some element of dissociation — of otherness. I can’t quite merge it with my real real life — if I do, my kids have to yell and poke me to get me to hear them…

32: What question would you like to answer that we did not ask?

The one question I think I would add is — about editorial mission. I’m not sure how I would phrase the answer, but the question goes something like this…

I think that, as is true in all of publishing, publishing in the literary world remains a fairly gated community. I think about that all the time, and I feel it is a privilege and a responsibility to be editing. I’m interested in the kind of work that I like — which tends to be slightly more experimental than the norm — but I am also interested in opening doors and crossing boundaries. I think that this often means reading and printing work that is outside of my comfort zone — but poetry, I believe, shouldn’t always be comfortable — or maybe, should rarely be — and that can mean many different things. If we don’t somehow cross boundaries of readers and writers we remain a tragically compartmentalized society.

Have you ever wanted to ask a poetry editor of a national magazine questions about publishing, writing, and poetry?

Well, guess what?

Post your questions in the comments here, and I’ll ask John. We’ll post the interview right here on April 20, 2010 as part of the Savvy Verse and Wit poetry blog tour.

Tell us about 32 Poems. What separates it from other literary journals?

I started 32 Poems in 2003 with John Poch. We’re celebrating our seventh anniversary with plenty of chocolate cake.

The magazine contains 32 poems, helps promote the writers it publishes, and fits into a purse without breaking your shoulder in half. Poems that first appeared in 32 Poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry and Best New Poets anthologies and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily.

Read the rest of the interview at The Writer’s Center blog.

One reason we can survive is that we keep our costs down. This year, I decided we’re not spending $600 or more dollars on the AWP Conference. Having a table at the conference can be fun — people know where to find me — yet it’s also exhausting and, as I said before, extremely expensive. The number of sales and subscriptions we receive from it is not worth the money to pay for it, and I must spend on increasing subscriptions.

Anyway, I digress.

Charles Jensen posted that creating a niche for a magazine is the way to stand out from the crowd. 32 Poems aims to do this by publishing a small number of poems in a nicely designed package. Do we need to do more? Please read Jensen’s list below. We welcome your thoughts.

1. Do it differently. I think magazines that niche themselves are better off than the “everything to everyone” magazines. Tin House and Passager are good examples of this, as is the print version of MiPOESIAS, with its huge glossy pages dominated by photography. It’s gorgeous.

2. Do it cooler. Whenever a technological advance democratizes the means of production of something, the outmoded way becomes a form of fine art (like letterpress printing, for example–formerly the norm, now an art form). So magazines like Ninth Letter really up the ante on quality and innovation in design. I say that’s a good call. Another great example is the print version of spork, which was community-made, hand-bound, and beautiful.

3. Do it smarter. American Poetry Review seems to understand the temporary nature of its work, and prints its issues on newsprint, which I’m sure saves buckets of money each year.

What would make you want to subscribe to 32 Poems?

By the way, I am not scared of your criticism. I’ve survived workshops with The Most Hated Man in American Poetry, so whatever suggestions you have for this magazine will be milk in comparison.

When I solicit people, I say upfront that I might not take their poems. My note says something about how I can promise a careful read even if I can’t promise publication. My goal with that line is to give the poet a chance to say “no thanks” if they fear rejection after a solicitation. I also aim to set their expectation. I’ve heard stories of poets getting angry and annoyed — certainly, no editor wants that — when getting their poems rejected after a solicitation. Trust me, it hurts an editor to say no. We are not rejecting poems and then performing happy dances to celebrate.

If I don’t take a poem, then I write a NICE note to explain why. I invite the poet to send more poems and to send more soon.

I try to show respect to the poet throughout the entire process. I can take a long time to respond. John Poch, our editor, does not take as long as I do. I let the poet know I am slow to read and invite them to submit elsewhere if they are in a hurry to publish. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. On occasion, a poem is accepted elsewhere and that is sad for me. However, I feel it is only fair to let the poet send elsewhere if I am going to take a long time to get to it. For me, a long time is over two months.

One reason I may say no to the work of a poet I solicit is when the new work is nothing like what I’ve been reading and like what I had loved. This usually means that only between three and five poems did not speak to me. Often, a number of other poems the poet wrote DID speak to me and that is why I asked, yet sometimes people are insulted anyway.

Hopefully, I do not become the poet’s enemy for not taking a poem. After all, I am publishing this journal that supports and promotes poetry, and how many people are insane enough to do that? But that is another topic for another day.

Email the poems (less than 5, please) in one MS Word doc or docx file. The cover letter should be sent as the body of the gmail.

As usual, we prefer shorter lyric poems that fit on a single page, but we sometimes bend the rules to fit other extraordinary work. Do NOT email other materials, promotional, correspondence, or otherwise, to this address. Please query us after 3 months if you still have not heard a reply concerning your poems. We aim to keep our response time at less than 2 months. We will go back to our ordinary postal submission process in September 2010.

And don’t forget to subscribe or give a gift subscription!

Cell Phone Text Messaging. Credit: kb35 on flickr

Our own 32 Poems editor, John Poch, published this poem via text message:

Love Poem

Sometimes my shirt makes sparks. Watch me take it off.

I’m always curious about new and creative ventures A poetry magazine delivered via text messaging has to be one of the more innovative and creative ideas I’ve heard lately, so I knew I had to interview the brain behind the magazine. He was kind enough to answer my questions.

Where did you learn to program to create this project?

I started undergrad as a computer science major, but I only lasted a semester. Debugging is rough when your heart isn’t in it. So I knew some of the principles, but I needed to learn some PHP and mysql to get it all working. I learn best when a lack of knowledge stands between me and a project I’m passionate about, but it still took a lot of trial and error and some help from Google.

It’s not that unlike writing and revising a poem, except you get error
messages instead of funny looks or polite smiles when something goes
wrong.

When did the idea strike you to launch this project?

I first got a cell phone in summer of 2006, and I was playing around
then with writing some short poems for my phone. I actually did the
original site design then, but at the time there wasn’t an easy way to
shoestring a text-message-based journal. You had to buy bulk text
message packs from online services and talk people into giving you their cell phone numbers. That was no good.

At the time, most of my poems were fairly middle of the road in length,
but in the three years since, I’ve developed a real fascination with
short poems, so my desire to make this project work was building.

I didn’t really start hearing about Twitter until the media blitz in
fall of last year, but for some reason I didn’t connect the dots right
away. This spring, the clouds opened up a week or two before spring
break and a little free time was all it took for the a-ha moment and
the initial work necessary to launch the journal.

What’s been the biggest challenge with launching this magazine?

Well, it’s Twitter, really. There’s a big stigma, and to some extent I
agree with the sentiment that Twitter is vapid and pointless. So I know people who are writing, and it’s still tough to get them to sign up and participate. But that’s also one of my goals for the project–to break down that perception. Twitter is a communication media, like the
telephone or broadcast TV, so it’s got the some potential to be used for interesting and uninteresting things.

How do poets react when you ask them to submit work?

There are two camps, which is an over-generalization, and this spans the fiction writers, too. There are people who aren’t inclined to hate Twitter and people who are. So there’s excitement about the project on one side, and a real hesitation to participate on the other.

I’m okay at convincing the latter group to try it out if I have personal access to them. If that fails, I nag a lot. However, I can’t be there to make a sales pitch to everyone. My sales pitch would be:

Exposure is ideologically important for writers. We’ve bemoaned decreasing readership for a long time now, and we’ve finally got a chance to use one of the next prolific communication technologies (the cell phone, I mean) to put literature in people’s pockets. The various poetry books and mags on my desk and in my backpack are great, but they don’t ring and vibrate. They don’t disrupt chemistry class or follow you to the grocery store.

Yes, it’s an abbreviated format, but that’s all it takes to keep literature on people’s minds.

And, you know, people will go to the trouble to sign up for multiple
submission systems, or mail in manuscripts. Signing up for Twitter and
submitting to escarp is easier than that.

Visit escarp via web or Twitter.

What do you think? Can a text message be a poem?

1. What do you find most challenging about your writing practices and why? Would you have any advice to amateur poets?

Even though I’ve written for publication for 18 years, my writing practice is still erratic. I admire those writers who get up and write for an hour or two every morning, but I’ve never been one of them. In a productive year, I might finish ten or fifteen publishable poems; in a dry year, maybe one or two.

Right now, my biggest challenge is balancing my writing with my academic schedule. A year ago, I moved away from Washington, DC, where I worked as a freelance editor, to enroll in the PhD program in English at Tufts. I love being a graduate student, but it sucks away my time and energy in a way that editing never did.

My advice to a beginning poet would be to find or create an ongoing writing group, and to take classes whenever you can. The criticism, friendship, and support can be invaluable, and so can the regular deadlines.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

I don’t feel qualified to comment on spoken word or performance poetry, because my exposure to it has been limited, and, honestly, what I’ve encountered hasn’t been very much to my taste. I don’t mean to dismiss its value or interest to other people; I just don’t think I can make a judgment on its importance. I do enjoy reading my own poems out loud, though, and listening to other poets read their work.

I’d like to believe that writing can help people become more tolerant, and possibly more collaborative, but I don’t necessarily aspire to that in my own work. I just try to write good poems–emotionally powerful, formally successful, surprising. I love lyric poetry, but I don’t think it’s the genre I’d choose if I were trying to make the world a better place.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

As I mentioned, I’m in graduate school right now, so I’m mainly obsessive about that. I’ve recently switched fields, from Victorian fiction to English Renaissance drama, so I have a lot of catching up to do. I’m also teaching freshman writing for the first time this year, which is both exciting and scary.

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

I always write more and better when I’m in a workshop. Over the past few years, I’ve taken classes at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and I’m still in touch with the ongoing poetry group that developed out of one of those classes five years ago. I’ve also taken summer workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

I try to write poetry that’s accessible and engaging, but I accept that written poetry is a minority taste–it’s not going to compete successfully with fiction, much less with film or television, as a form of popular entertainment. Although I’m sometimes baffled and irritated by poems that seem needlessly obscure, I would never suggest that poets have an obligation to make their work accessible to a mainstream public. Writers have every right to make their work as transparent or as opaque as they like–with the understanding that readers have an equal right to put the book down and read something else.

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

I can’t listen to music while I’m writing–I’m too easily distracted! I don’t have many regular writing routines or habits, but I do find that daily or near-daily walks help me generate ideas and images for poems.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

I’ve definitely made friends in my writing classes and workshops. One of the other students from my MFA program, whose writing career has been much more successful than mine, has been very kind in terms of promoting my work. I’ve also formed lasting friendships with members of my long-term writing group, which still meets in Bethesda, and with instructors and peers from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

[Laugh] I don’t. I weigh 200 pounds! But I do walk a lot. Also, I do yoga two or three times a week, stock up on whole grains and vegetables, and write down everything I eat. But to be fit and healthy, I’d have to work a lot harder than that.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

If I can’t think what to write, I go for a walk and look for things to write about, or I do a formal exercise (e.g., a word list, a villanelle, an alphabet poem). Travel can work to jolt me out of a writer’s block, too, though it’s an expensive way to do it. Food doesn’t inspire me, but it can comfort me–oatmeal is a favorite.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I work in a very messy study, upstairs in a Victorian house on a hill. There’s a big old radiator, and two windows that rattle when the wind blows. Now and then my housemates come down the hall and say hello, or my cat pokes her nose in and meows to be fed. It would be a near-ideal space if it had an air conditioner, and if it were tidy enough that I could find things when I need them.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I’ve finished my first two book manuscripts, Stealing the Silver and What I Did Instead of Love, and I’m shopping them out to publishers. I haven’t written enough new poems to be sure what my next book’s themes will be. Over the past few years I’ve been writing more formal verse, and I expect that to continue, although I’m not a strict formalist–I like doodling around with traditional forms and stretching them out of shape. My last book, What I Did Instead of Love, was full of poems whose narrators are crazier, angrier, harder-drinking versions of myself. I enjoyed working with that kind of raw, edgy voice, but I imagine that my next collection may be a little gentler in tone.