Current Issues

When I returned from Oxford yesterday, I had a happily large stack of post waiting, and this book was the most exciting piece. Last year, working with co-editor Jeremy Noel-Tod, I composed six entries for this new edition of The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry: Andrea Brady, Forrest Gander, Laura Kasischke, Tim Liardet, Frances Presley and Catherine Wagner. Summing up a career and describing a probably evolving poetic style (as all these authors are alive and wonderfully active) in a few hundred words proved more arduous and time-consuming than I anticipated. At the same time, I enjoyed improving my knowledge and understanding of their work. 

The experience of writing the entries also gave me one of my most rewarding exchanges with an editor. Noel-Tod provided an ideal balance of guidance and leeway (for lack of the better word escaping me), and while I expect editing such a large work with so many entries and contributors will dissuade him from any more editing for a while, I hope another, perhaps smaller opportunity to work together in this capacity will come again sometime. 

I think I've been put off from doing many of these 'Current Issues' entries by people posting news of their acceptances for publication on Facebook. I understand so well the excitement and pleasure such an acceptance brings and often feel the impulse myself to make such posts, but I feel uneasy with self-promotion that I force on people's notice. Here on the blog, I figure only those interested will come by to read what I'm up to, but even so, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging. *sigh*

So I'll thank the editors of Ambit, Molly Bloom, New Walk, Poetry Wales and Shearsman for their support of my work by choosing poems of mine to appear in future issues. I'm most grateful.

Catherine Wagner's My New Job (Fence, 2009)

What a nervy, original book! I'd dipped into it before but only recently read the whole. Here are a few favourite passages.




I lean forward on a nerve ebullient
my sweet alive and roasting in a current

from "Exercise 1 (11/28/00 PM)"

Good for M the comfortable-with-people to be away from me. tauten the cord to make it all more urgent

from "Exercise 7 (12/3/00 PM)"

The wheatrows flattened

gold, another dark

combed curve opened

like a stretchy

machine.

opening lines of "Exercise 21 (11/8/01 Am) [Back Seat of Minivan]"

Snow

starred when I looked straight up

sky dark gray, geese rose

in alarmed soft shh and hasping

long-necked geese

a-gossip all upset

*

all along I was alone to that

though everyone saw me

checking myself out by talking to them

when they checked themselves out in me

I tried to say O here have it all

     warm woolen flood     welcomer

          some spider-netting held it back,

kept growing over my warm and my intention to befriend

from "Exercise 34 (1/3/02 PM)"

All the following poems come from a section titled, "Everyone in the Room Is a Representative of the World at Large," and all the poems share that title. Each passage comes from a different poem.

I make the bird a flying fist

my violence goes on out along the stream.

---

My beast came up and hit me in the self.

---

It is not a hero

who will approach the mirror of

this appointment

and glide her thighs and torso to it.

That is me

These passages can't convey the experience of the undulations of a whole Wagner poem. For that, please purchase the book from Foyle's in the UK or your independent bookstore in the US.

Lit mag junkie

That's me. I'm a lit mag junkie. I stand at the entrance to the AWP book fair looking as though I'm gazing at a fountain of Belgian chocolate. I set a $100 budget limit each conference and blow it every time (though admittedly that involves books, too).

Are you a lit mag junkie? What is it that drives us? A certain combination of literary delights and outstanding production values? Finding a special section that's just what we always thought should be in a lit mag, were we designing our own, like an insanely large section of short reviews?

This is on my mind partly because I'm going to that magical book fair next week and partly because I've discovered (thanks to Cathy Wagner) a brilliant, newish mag, Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion. It's edited by the outstanding poet and critic Calvin Bedient, whom I remember unimpressing markedly in my one meeting with him while I was an undergraduate at UCLA. Sadly, I remember the poem I showed him--sadly, I remember the meeting in fine detail--and have to acknowledge I understand his reaction.

Anyway, enough about youthful embarrassments. There's a generous sampling online of the annual printed issue, and I look forward to holding one before long. In the meantime, fellow lit mag junkies, come forward and tell me your favourite journals past and present, the qualities that attract you to some and put you off others--&c., &c. I know I'm not alone.

Women's Innovative Poetry & Cross-Genre Festival, 14-16 July, London

Emily Critchley and Carol Watts have drawn together an outstanding array of presenters and performers for the Women's Innovative Poetry & Cross-Genre Festival this Wednesday, 14 July through Friday, 16 July at the University of Greenwich. Participants include Caroline Bergvall, Andrea Brady, Lee Ann Brown, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susanna Gardener, Lisa Jarnot, Frances Presley, Lisa Robertson, Sophie Robinson, Eleni Sikelianos, Zoe Skoulding, Harriet Tarlo, Fiona Templeton, Cathy Wagner, and numerous others--the full schedule is online here. And the cost? Donation only. I'm expecting moments of poetic bliss.

Catherine Wagner's Macular Hole (Fence, 2004)

It's hard to excerpt from these poems as many work holistically; that is, individual passages often gain resonance because of their placement and so don't convey that power standing alone. Nonetheless, here's a sample.

I'm not stupidly assailed by moonlight

I'm an example, an experimental

Attempt to assess how a kid of my talents

Responds when she's given the life that I was

I'm the control and experiment bothly

you'll never get a result out of me

*

I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake

If I did all I could you'd shut up/be glad

Like fingers of a hand we all act as one

and aren't always needed, aren't needed as all

from "I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake"

Sleep for a long time and a thrust of activity: log rolling, fall off a skyscraper,

phenomenologues, cigarettes, korn, seeding herpes lip to lip.

Why LSD in the seventies, why coke in the eighties,

why Ecstasy in the nineties, why Ritalin.

To bolster the wandering mind; to bolster the wandering heart

to bolster the glamor; to glamor the wander.

The glamorous self and its story: no can do.

last 7 of 9 lines of "The divinity of man"

A day like a thing on a fork it arrives

from "A bash, and I wanna look good"

I call on creatures

Living in the sky today

I adjure you

Emerge and dive your wings and bodies

Prevail across the scary light

Cavernous several light

from "Song: Scary several light"

The prisoner is time, or my sense of it.

A great suction fattens

on my trés rich hours.

*

He can have vines because I can't drink wine

while I'm breastfeeding.

Tyrant. Asleep and saying huu,

fantastic waxen kicking

figurine, like a kick in the head, little

fat bag, a good drug

I see more of the

him in.

from "Perfect love"

Why was I writing so

much? Because I was impressed, & saddled up & ridden.

from "Imitating"

It's like we'll be together forever

so why should we talk. It's like parents.

As looking at yellow mountains

against blue sky. They're flaming

and it is your eyes.

last two stanzas of "Resume, face"

Macular Hole can be purchased from The Book Depository, with free worldwide shipping.