You Don’t Have to Pay Exquisite Disarray to Read Your Poems
Your Book Could Be Next
Like so many publishers that deserve our attention today, Exquisite Disarray, is a non-profit. They deserve our attention because they are publishing beautiful, thoughtful, image-rich, linguistically refined art. Non-profit publishers don’t need to sell their works in large numbers–don’t need to appeal to the boorish majority–because they are able to convince entities to donate money. In this case, the Tacoma Arts Commission is a primary funder.
So far, Exquisite Disarray, which was started in 2008, has published two books, In Tahoma’s Shadow: Poems from the City of Destiny, an anthology of poems about Tacoma, and Fallow, a book of poems by William Kupinse. Exquisite Disarray is ready to publish its third book, a book of poems by a Washington writer. Manuscripts are due by May 15th, and will be read anonymously. The judge is Kathleen Flennikan, who, in addition to being a widely applauded writer and president/co-editor of Floating Bridge Press, published a poem in Willow Springs issue 61 (“Mosquito Truck”). The Exquisite Disarray book contest is the only one I know of that doesn’t ask for a reading fee. (I’d love to be proven wrong about this.)
In order to convey some of the care and quality of the work this publisher is doing, I thought I would include a poem from Fallow, called “Similar, but Different.” In this poem, as in so many of the poems in Fallow, Kupinse combines tenderness, humor, generosity of spirit, intellectual ruminations, intimacy through immediacy, and observations on interactions between humans and nature:
Similar, but Different
by William Kupinse
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
are similar, but different,
my student writes, in lieu of a thesis.
Yes, they are, I think; they are similar
in that both are modernist novels,
written by authors who were born
conveniently in 1882
and died obligingly in 1941.
Yet they are different because Clarissa descends
to buy flowers herself, flowers which Stephen Dedalus
cannot afford. Some day,
the flower girl encourages him.
Also, Clarissa is menopausal, Stephen pubescent,
and her author strolled into the River Ouse,
while Stephen’s was unlucky in a stomach operation.
Still, when I think that all things
are similar, but different
I can begin to understand the world.
The white oaks, solid outside my Tacoma window,
bear some relation to the pin oaks of Tulsa,
but the similarity ends with leaf and bark.
Tulsa and Tacoma are similar
as names taken from first languages,
but one speaks of an old town,
the other of a great mountain.
Today’s weather is similar to yesterday’s,
chill and leaf-scoured,
but today is the first day
of the rest of my life,
a distinction that yesterday has lost.
America is similar to other countries
in that it has a flag, a map, and a theme song,
but it is different because it is the only country
that thinks that it is different from other countries.
And you, my love, whose breathing during sleep
makes rise and fall the blanket on the couch,
while I hunch next to you with pen in hand,
you are different, because,
were you awake and I asleep,
instead of scratching out a poem,
you’d open up a box of paints.
I hope you submit. I hope you win. I hope we all buy copies of Exquisite Disarray’s next book.
Thanks for this, Shira. I didn’t even know this press existed. I’ll be sure to check them out.
Jaime, I hope you take this contest by storm. I just realized I have probably been misspelling your lovely name. Sorry. I wonder what taking the contest by storm might actually might look like. I picture fragments of manuscripts swirling around an ivory tower.
No worries. Everyone misspells it at least once, and if they don’t they mistake me for a guy because in Hispanic communities Jaime is a very masculine name. I get junk mail all the time addressed to Mr. Jaime Wood. Oh well!
Anyhow, I may actually have a manuscript ready by May 15th. My thesis is coming along. So I’m excited to find out about a contest that I can afford to enter!