Getting Inspired at 3 in the Morning

Mark Twain said, "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." I would like to propose a more particularly literary corollary to this excellent proverb: The best writing makes you want to participate in it by creating something yourself. For the writers among you, don't you love that feeling when you read a story or book or poem, and you put it down and all you want to do is write something yourself? For Whom the Bell Tolls affected me that way so powerfully that it induced me to re-emerge from a years-long writing hiatus and once again take up the pen.

I was recently perusing Web del Sol's own 3:AM Magazine when I felt once again the thrill of inspiration that comes from reading a good piece of writing. The flash fiction piece "I Am Running Out of Ways to Make You Love Me," by Elizabeth Ellen, made me want to sit right down and pop out my own flash fiction. (I didn't do it, for various reasons, all of them hopefully good ones, but that's another blog post.)

Specifically, the story made me think, "Why isn't more of my writing sexy?" Ellen's piece is sexy, although not pruriently so; it's just about the complicated interweavings of sex, love, and loneliness in a relationship (and potentially outside of it). I immediately fell in love with the story's first-person narrative voice:

I’d never taken nude photos of myself before. I wrote this on the palm of my hand so I’d remember to tell you: I’ve never taken nude photos of myself before. I wanted to make sure you appreciated the gesture. I was trying to make you love me anyway I could. I had a feeling I wasn’t doing so well anymore. I thought about how effortless it had been in the beginning:
1. eat a bag of peanut M&M’s
2. brush hair

Compelling, emotional, nonchalant, and realistic, all at the same time, all without veering into mawkishness, cynicism, obscurantism, or any of the other pitfalls awaiting those who write flash fiction, or who write about relationships, or who write about sex. So do yourself a favor and read some good fiction that will make you want to write, or paint, or sing, or maybe take naked pictures of yourself.

The Old Left Makes New Compromises

Winston Churchill was a brilliant, articulate, eloquent politician. He also had some deplorable political views, especially with regard to race, as a recent biography has pointed out. But the man could turn a mean phrase, and he left us with some great quotations, even when they express views that are, shall we say, regrettable.

For example, here's my favorite Churchill quotation: "If you're not on the left in your twenties, there's something wrong with your heart. If you're not on the right in your fifties, there's something wrong with your head." This quotation is not my favorite because I agree with it (because, for the record, I don't); it's my favorite because it so neatly sums up a trend that's prevalent in many cultures: the seemingly inevitable rightward shift. Communists become democratic socialists, anarchists become Labourites, and Trotskyists become full-on neoconservatives.

The latter group has it the easiest; they can simply say they've seen the light and have dropped a fundamentally flawed set of principles for a completely different and fundamentally sound set. But those who shift right within the left can much more easily be painted as people who compromise for the sake of expedience. You still think capitalism is wrong, or at least not inherently right; but you no longer proclaim your intent to do anything about it. You take the cushy job; you wear the nicer clothes; you compromise.

Author Tessa Hadley writes convincingly, even poignantly, about these issues in "The Enemy," a story (which actually appears to be a novel extract) in The Barcelona Review. I found Hadley's story by going through eScene, Webdelsol.com's excellent archive of links to poetry, fiction, essays, and other literary content located off-site. There's enough great writing here to keep you reading for many a moon.

"The Enemy" is about a woman in her fifties who is visited by her former brother-in-law, who was once a charismatic revolutionary in the 1960s. The tale is suffused by the melancholy mood of a middle-aged woman whose life has never come close to meeting the impossibly high ideals she once used to possess; yet she accepts her life, and herself, with a certain grace. Or is it simply the comfort felt by the bourgeoisie? This is the question constellated by the former revolutionary, who has also changed--at least enough to know something about wine, which he once would have derided as a hopelessly bourgeois (and thus counterrevolutionary) affectation.

But don't let all this political talk put you off. "The Enemy" uses political convictions as the staging ground for an inquiry into psychology, aging, personal change, the texture of a life in its fifth or sixth decade--in short, all the stuff of literature. It's a subtle, wonderful story.

Masks, Mirrors, and Poetry from In Posse Review

You may not know this, but your humble editor is also a writer. Your humble editor writes poetry. This is not to say that your humble editor gets any of his poetry published. Some of your humble editor's poetry got rejected just yesterday, in fact, and by a very fine journal, too.
But I keep drinking from the well of poetry, because the water tastes so damn fine. And here's a fresh draught for you: The all-poetry "Mask & Mirror" issue of Web del Sol's In Posse Review has just hit the cyber-stands. The poems in this issue range in style and content from the mundane to the fantastic to the imagistic, written by veteran poets with decades of experience and by new authors receiving their first publication.
Shawn Pittard's "Fall Stream" starts with an image both concrete and fanciful, and continues in the same vein:

There’s a door in the bottom of the freestone stream
at the bend below the railroad grade.
On my birthday, I dared to open it, figuring
I’d lost most of what I had to lose by fifty.
Under the door, the water was drinkable,
like it was when I was a boy scout.
Crayfish still crawled everywhere.
A speckled trout swam by
with my lost hook in its mouth.
My front tooth sparkled in the gravel bed
near the piece of my right knee the orthopedist removed.

The simple, declarative sentences are complicated by deliberate line breaks and strong verbs. The combination of clear description and fantastic imagery makes us feel as if we're reading a fairy tale in the form of a particuarly well-written poem.
In "Tomasii and the Wise Serpent, Ourdyss," Jeff Miles recounts the experience of falling asleep while a grandfather tells a bedtime story about seven men who get chased into a cave:

In my dream, the seven found footholds
cut into the hidden cave’s near-vertical shaft.
Tomasii led them downward. The darkness
was complete. Then came the serpent’s voice:
I am Ourdyss. Who disturbs my sleep? Sleep,
said my grandfather’s voice. The seven men
groped along the cold black road, arms
stretched out before them. Ourdyss, said the voice
out of the darkness. My grandfather
said nothing, dead these forty years. He visits
my dreams, drinks from a red goblet, never speaks,
though sometimes I ask him questions. I know
he would not tell me what happens next. As always,
he would start over again from the beginning.

I love the palpable sense of adventure in this poem, but that youthful fun plays out in counterpoint against a sad adult wisdom that knows about loss and death. As I read this poem, I found myself as interested in the plight of Tomasii and his followers as in the relationship between the narrator and the grandfather; and by the end, the two threads are woven inextricably together. Poems like this make life itself seem like an adventure, a real one, whose final chapter is still unwritten.
After examining two poems with a strong narrative thread, I now want to look at a poem made of enigmatic images and metaphors. The title of Luisa Igloria's poem is also its first line:

At night, the sky's a parasol studded with points--
Its steel ribs retract, taking the woman's earrings,
her filigreed comb, the agate necklace
which she hung from a cloud's lowest branches.

Her arms grow heavy, so heavy, oh.

This is not a poem about life, or Life, or Death, or aging or sex or any of the other things poems are so often "about." Instead it uses arresting images to convey a feeling and a mood and a savor. But these are not static, unchanging moods; those steel ribs do retract, taking the stars away in the form of earrings and comb and necklace; yet the conflation of stars with jewelry does not leave the sky behind, as our attention is then directed to "a cloud's lowest branches." So the images move us from one side of a metaphor to the other and back again, and we still feel that we've never left the world drawn for us in that first line. This is a fine, fine poem.
There's a lot more where that came from, so click on over to In Posse Review, put on your mask, look in the mirror, and enjoy.

Big Quality in Small Packages: La Petite Zine Delivers Concentrated Literary Goodness

I know you're all dying to learn more about me--Who is that mysterious man with the attractive, uh, typing?--so here's a breakdown of my typical week:

• Edit article about the link between snack foods and death, while eating an apple.
• Write this blog, dazzle literary world.
• Edit book about blind, slimy cave organisms that have only been seen by a few nearsighted, clammy grad students.
  
• Write my personal blog, dazzle no one.
• Write screenplay that is vying to break world record for Taking Longest to Finish (record currently held by the novel Tristram Shandy, unfinished since the 18th century).
• Exercise (this one gets skipped now and then).
• Have fulfilling relationship with spouse (this one never gets skipped on purpose, but you know how it is).
• Have friendships with people whose weeks are at least as full as mine.
  

You know what's missing from this picture? Reading! Who has time to read for pleasure anymore? If it's not a menu or a court summons, I may not have the time to read it. And that, my friends, is why La Petite Zine is such a wonderful thing. Imagine a good literary journal that only publishes poetry and prose pieces of 1,000 words or fewer. Doesn't that make your stress monkey relax? And the reader in you, that underfed starveling, begins to salivate in anticipation of the nuggets of literature headed its way.

The latest issue of La Petite Zine has some real good little gobbets for you. "In Search of Mariachis," a prose piece by erstwhile poet David Shumate, begins with a grabber of a sentence:

When our lives grow unbearably dull, we load up the car and go in search of mariachis. Sometimes we drive a thousand miles before we come across a group dressed in those fancy black and silver suits strumming their guitars out in some parking lot or beneath a wedding tent. We listen to their ballads and laments and are restored.

Heather Christle's "Parallelograph" is poetry, but this is not your father's iambic pentameter or blank verse. No line breaks, no punctuation, no capitalization; just phrases separated by white space. Poems like this are too often experimental to the point of unreadability, but this one, while challenging, rewards the effort (slashes represent white space):

that is not a bird / that is a large dark area / it is the same thing / as your head / when I do your head in silhouette / there could be a nation / that outlawed the profile / or only thought of outlines / from the front / it is the same as your imaginary life / you have just given your concession speech / bravely to a small crowd of supporters / they could be thinking anything and aren't / you can’t tell a large dark area to give up

Jason Koo gives us a refreshing draught of the life-saving elixir called Humor in his poem "What We Talk About When We Talk About." The conversational tone rubs against precise word choices and skillful line breaks, creating a thread of tension that runs through the whole poem:

I thought I should write this down, since your ear
is a vagina and you might not hear it if I said it out loud,
she wrote, and I couldn't tell if she was being sweet
or funny or was just angry with me, mostly I was confused
by the vagina metaphor and thought it was a little extreme,
I mean, was a vagina the first thing that came to mind
when she thought of my ear? Which ear was she talking about?
By then I was fingering my right ear thinking it wasn't
all that different from a vagina, I guess I wouldn't be so shocked
if I took off her pants and saw an ear where her vagina
should be and took off her hat and saw two vaginas
where her ears should be, ears and vaginas were closer
in family than, say, vaginas and toes, and she often caressed
my ear with her tongue the way one might caress
a vagina, I'm not saying I climaxed but the possibility
was there.

There were more pieces I wanted to write about, but I'm edging close to my own thousand-word limit here. And besides, you're busy! Got places to go! Things to do! Short pieces of literature to read! Go to La Petite Zine! Hurry!

The Potomac Brings the Poetry

When I was in high school, I thought of poetry as a form of torture that boring people had invented so they could torment the rest of us with their boringness. Every poem I read supported this thesis until I encountered T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in freshman comp. Regrettably, I wound up failing that course--professors have an unfortunate tendency to give F's to students who skip half the classes as well as the final--but I got what I unknowingly came for: poetry. "Prufrock" cranked my mind and my heart wide open, and for the first time in my life I thought that maybe poetry wasn't a complete waste of trees and ink.

Lo these many years and pixels later, poetry is now what I want to read most. In its compressed meaning, sculpted language, and compact beauty, a good poem is like a superb bonbon: "a world in a grain of sand" indeed. Fortunately for us all, Web del Sol's own The Potomac offers a strong selection of poetry in its newest issue. And when I say "strong," I mean that I genuinely had a hard time choosing poems to write about for this post. Here are three poems that caught my eye among the many good ones in the July 2010 issue:

• Roger Netzer's "Three Tough Girls" is a compact gem of autobiography that elicits subtle shades of emotion through telling description and a pleasing rhyme scheme. There's a sense of humor here, and tenderness, and a touch of ribaldry, all in three short stanzas:

When giving the finger Jackie Schmidt
aligned her minor knuckles, so.
She had the looks and smarts to know
more tricks than good girls publicly admit.
In due course she broke my heart.

• At first I was not inclined to like Valerie Wallace's "The Pope's Poop" because of the title. Religious leaders make easy whipping boys and straw men for us literary types, and I wasn't interested in reading a poem whose raison d'etre was to shoot a very big fish in a barrel all by itself.

But such was not the case here. Wallace displays amazing lexical dexterity as she depicts images and events both vividly and evocatively; that is, the lines and sentences convey meaning forcefully as written, but they also resonate with allusive, etymological, even mythological implications long after the poem is finished:

Swaddled, the baby pope poops yellow sweet
jello. Chocolate pudding, chocolate stream. His face
grimaces red as a little napkin'd sugar beet.

In the forest, the boy pope finds a nest of leaves.
He rolls like an animal, grunts, then cowers. When
he poops he's a toad, about to leap. He's Adam. He's Eve.

The tone is gentle, arch, veering from the archaic to the playful. This pope is a human character in a drama larger than any one human. He is recognizable, yet not so, like any of us when viewed in the proper light, such as the light of poetry. I really liked this one.

• The two poems by Jane Crown are completely different from each other, and they are equally effective in completely different ways. "Photo Collage" is a tender but muscular elegy for a deceased brother. Fresh images and original metaphors let the pain of grief come through, but without a shred of sentimentality.

He was tattooed with crosses, and bearlike, and drank too much
but he was mine, and his stolen light still stings

He was found in his car on the side
of the road, and I miss him like spiders under the porch

I won't tell you much about Crown's "Dinner" except that it's a sinfully delicious treat, short and sweet and so good to eat. Enjoy.

Believe me when I say that I haven't come close to exhausting the good poetry in this month's The Potomac. Or don't believe me; see for yourself!

You Know What We Need? A Politically Oriented Literary Journal, That's What

But wait! We already have one: The Potomac, published by Web del Sol. Phew. I was starting to get worried there.

The Potomac's July 2010 issue just came out, and it's a heady mix of poetry, essays, reviews, and flash fiction. I don't know about you, but I seem to be getting busier with each passing moment, which is one reason why I love flash fiction so much. Good flash gives you all the high literary quality you could want, but in a very short time frame. A writing professor of mine once said that she thought the short story was a higher form of art than the novel, and I agree. (Then again, I've written lots of short stories, but I failed abjectly the two times I tried to write a novel, so perhaps I'm biased.) By that token, it might be the case that the flash piece is a higher form of art than the regular short story. And The Potomac has flash aplenty, including a really good flash-fiction piece titled "The Incident," by Wendy Skinner.

I'm not sure exactly why I like "The Incident" so much. It's not a character-oriented piece in which someone changes, or fails to change. It doesn't have a plot-oriented climax or payoff at the end. I'm not even entirely sure what the piece is really about, although my guess would be something about U.S. car culture, as hinted at by the opening paragraph (which deserves to be quoted in its entirety):

The gas station attendant on the corner was the first to realize a connection between the car accidents and later deaths. Two of his regulars, Mr. O’Leary and Mrs. Gonzales, had been involved in a rear-ender the month before, really just a honk and a scratch hardly worth mentioning. He’d witnessed the accident while checking a taillight. Both of his customers had emerged from their vehicles and exchanged driver’s licenses with no apparent discomfort. However, a day or so afterwards, the attendant ran across their obituaries in the paper: one “suddenly with the Lord” and the other “unexpectedly taken from loved ones.”

There you have it: a solid opening sentence, straightforward prose, and clear description of events; yet these workmanlike tools of the trade are married to a subtly ominous tone. The feeling of ill portent grows as the piece continues, and the story partially disregards the rules of realism as it concludes--not with an epiphany or an event, but with an image. You come away from it with that unmistakable feeling of having just participated in a good piece of literature.

I want to point out one other feature on The Potomac, and it's weird of me to even mention this piece: it's Ryn Gargulinski's review of the book The Second Elizabeth, by Karen Lillis. In other words, I'm doing a review of a review. But I really enjoyed the review because it's written in the style of the book that it reviews, and apparently the book is pretty strange:

This is a review of a book. This is a review of a book and the book reads like this. This review, and the book, both read like the ocean. They read like the swirls in an eddy. They read like the overlapping waves.

I mean, geez, what's not to like about that? "Overlapping waves." Beautiful. The whole review does indeed read that way, and it really, really made me want to read the book. Another brief excerpt:

At first it made me mad. Not mad but annoyed, like the first time I read Shakespeare or my first bout with Clockwork Orange. It was hard for me to follow. Shakespeare made me cry. But then I embraced it.

And now I want to embrace it as well, and I bet you will too if you get on over to The Potomac and see what's on offer this month.

Is Confession Good for the Soul? Time to Find Out

Welcome back to Blog del Sol! Did you miss me? No? Well, I understand; our relationship is still so new. We're still figuring out how we feel about each other. But I missed you. Not to make you feel guilty. Just saying.

So, in the interest of strengthening our relationship, I have a confession to make: I am a recovering print-only snob. What I mean is that I used to be one of those people who thought that online-only publications--well, I thought they all sucked, to be blunt about it. And this was not a situation where I had perused a great many online publications and had developed an informed opinion on the topic. No, I was mainly just prejudiced based on the medium a publication appeared in. Does that make me a mediumist?

A recovering mediumist, that is, because fortunately I have been disabused of my narrow bigotry by such publications as storySouth, failbetter.com, and Web del Sol's very own La Petite Zine. These journals and others like them are publishing some of the best prose and poetry available on the literary scene today, period. Disregard them at your peril! You’ve been warned, callow youth (or jaded elder).

To prove my point, check out the two short but great poems by Kathryn Mockler in the latest issue of La Petite Zine. These are poems that tell stories--not personal stories, but very human stories nonetheless. The first one, "Wedding Reception," envisions how God and the Devil might get along if they were seated at the same table at the event named in the title:

You've got
a good sense of
humour, God said.
I don't know why
I never
liked you.
God patted
the Devil's shoulder
affectionately.
I don't know either,
said the Devil.
I think it
might have had
something to do
with bad
behaviour.

Mockler's second poem, "Rock Out," is suffused with grim humor:

This weekend
I'm going to
rock out, he said.

Good for you,
I said. I'm planning
to kill myself.

The language is simple, but spiked with strong verbs and clear voices. And both poems give a sense of payoff that poetry too often lacks. You read these poems because you enjoy reading them, not because you're trying to get in your RDA of poetry. So do yourself a favor and go read them in full. Go on, treat yourself. You deserve it.