OK, so this note is going to be rather short, as I’m on my lunch break at work. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been rather interested in the Occupy Wall Street protests, and they’ve got me somewhat optimistic for the first time in a few years.

One question that’s been bandied about is a pretty basic one: Why the protests? And to be sure, the protests are hardly homogenous; there’s all sorts of different viewpoints and myriad causes being supported by protesters across the country.

But at its most basic, I think it’s quite clear that people are angry, and at one group of people in particular: The Scrooge McDucks among us.

No, really, Scrooge McDuck. You may remember the Duck Tales, which featured Scrooge McDuck, a very wealthy Duck who made a habit of taking a morning swim through his vault of money.

Now most of the folks that I’d label Scrooges aren’t actually individual people. They are banks that got bailed out. Well, I was thinking about the bank bailouts, and after (hastily) doing the math, I realized that the bank bailouts had not only given the banks, we’d given them enough to actually make the opening scene of the Duck Tales possible, and then some.

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If This World Falls Apart, Lou Lipsitz

For all the banter and bluster of the avant-garde crowd, plain speaking can be a virtue for a poet. The literary merits of the language of everyday life—let’s call it dinner table diction—haven’t been exhausted and won’t be anytime soon. Winner of the 2010 Lynx House Prize, Lou Liptsitz’s If This World Falls Apart is a fine reminder of this.

The poems are sometimes striking in their simplicity—some seem to start out almost as simple accounts of events—but they quickly become much more, as Lipsitz’ work often does what good work should—it conveys experience, puts you there, with each piece revealing something close to truth. And Lipsitz does so while dabbling in some pretty serious—and personal—subject matter: lost love, regret, family scandals, and he somehow avoids lapsing into the great sin of solipsism. That’s a difficult dance, and something to be commended. Read more »

I don’t want Blazevox to go under, as this is the worst possible outcome. Hopefully, however, the pledge to end Blazevox is reversible. Let me reiterate once again, I admire the books and work Mr. Gatza has produced. And as strange as it may sound, I’d like to try to help him devise ways to stay afloat.

I recently emailed Mr. Gatza twice to let him know this.

The simplest way would for him to simply to announce the existing policy with clarifications to assuage the fears that were clearly expressed in the comments of the earlier Bark piece. This might take effort, but perhaps it could keep the press running in the short term.

In addition, according to Mr. Gatza, he has little to no support for the press; there has to be a way to mobilize financial support for Blazevox, right? A Kickstarter campaign might be in order, or even an old-school donation drive. I’d be happy to help in that regard (and they can raise a significant amount of cash). Needless to say, there are options.

Can we somehow convince him of that?

UPDATE | UPDATE | UPDATE |

So for those of you following the Blazevox scandal (see the earlier post for a primer) it looks like I/we didn’t have to wait too long for a response. I’ve been checking Blazevox’s blog every few hours to see if he’d respond, and he just did in a blog post, where he rescinded the program.

Well, while I was writing about that post and asking questions (I’d just finished it and posted it), I just found out that his press will close at the end of the year.

I’m not happy about this. I didn’t want his press to close; I admired the work he does/did. That’s why I sent my manuscript there; I trusted him to turn it into a book.

But he violated that trust (and that of many others), and to rectify that, I simply wanted him to do the right thing and let writers know about his policy in advance. Transparency was what I was after.

Unfortunately, that transparency came far too late.

UPDATE | UPDATE | UPDATE |

So for those of you following the Blazevox scandal (see the earlier post for a primer) it looks like I/we didn’t have to wait too long for a response. I’ve checking Blazevox’s blog every few hours to see if he’d respond, and he just did in a blog post, the full text of which reads:

We will rescind this program immediately and I am sorry for the troubles it has caused.

Needless to say, the response has been overwhelming. Thank you to everyone who commented/read the article, as well as those who helped popularize it, especially Bark’s editor-in-chief Sam Ligon, Matt Bell and Jeremy Halinen on Facebook, and Christopher Higgs via our pals at HTMLGIANT.Thanks are also in order to all my poetry pals for their comments in Facebook messages, emails, and the like. I didn’t get my manuscript published, but I feel like I gained a bunch of good friends. So, now that the Oscar speech part is over, now what?

Well, let’s start with his response.

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The other day I got some good news, or so I thought. My poetry manuscript, which I’ve been shaping ever since I graduated from Eastern Washington’s MFA program in 2007, was accepted by BlazeVOX Books. Nevertheless, as I delved into the long letter, it became apparent that the publication offer was contingent on a monetary donation ($250, to be exact). This took me by complete surprise; over the course of the next day and a half (and a handful of emails), my initial elation turned to discontent, and then to near despair. Here’s what happened.
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Yours truly, with das Wife.

The World Beard and Moustache Championships are pretty amazing.

Yes, you read that correctly. For some folks, facial hair is a competition. In the WBMC there are three main divisions:  “Moustaches” (that’s how they spell it), “Partial Beards” and “Beards.” There are subcategories too, and they include: “Dali,” “Musketeer,” “Imperial” and “Verdi.” Each main division also has a “freestyle” category, which gives the whole competition an X-games feel.

I’ve known about the WBMC for a few years, and I’ve secretly always wanted to compete. I was overjoyed, as I thought I’d finally found a competition that looked cool, took no real talent, and required almost no physical effort other than basic grooming, which I do on an occasional basis anyway.

It was a dream come true, or so I thought, but how wrong I was: this is my story.

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A few posts on Bark have featured MOTIONPOEMS, an animated poetry project founded by poet Todd Boss and designer/general wunderkind Angella Kassube. With the proliferation of design technology and the magical Interwebs, a lot of folks have begun creating animation versions of poems. But over the past couple of years I’ve paid closest attention to MOTIONPOEMS, as it’s been a bit different from the get-go. The quality of the work they’ve produced is quite simply the best I’ve seen. In my experience, many collaborations between poets and designers are lackluster because either the design and production are substandard, or the writing is. In other words, it’s hard to hit a home run back-to-back. But MOTIONPOEMS pulls it off. Boss and Kassube are, in effect, a professional poetic tag team, and their work proves it.

If that weren’t enough, MOTIONPOEMS got some pretty damn good news recently. They’ve inked a one-year pilot contract to animate poems from Scribner’s Best American Poetry. That’s pretty impressive, because the writers they run are already world-class, now they’ll be able to feature even more fine folks.

As one might imagine, this isn’t exactly cheap, so they’ve launched a Kickstarter Project to finance the endeavor. They are shooting for 15K, and they’re happily well on their way. If you’re so inclined, the Kickstarter project is open for donations until Tuesday or so, and there are a bunch of nifty poetry-related “thank you” items for each membership level. My personal favorite is a signed, hand-pencilled 14×20 broadside of Todd Boss’s poem “The World Is In Pencil,” which is due to appear in Poetry soon. It looks like this:

In any event, be sure to keep tabs on this project, as it’s got a damn bright future.

OK, I don’t know about you, but I obsess about the status of my submissions when I have work out and about. I constantly check duotrope.com to see if the amount of time my work has been out at a particular venue is any indication of likely failure or success, I look at my submission record daily, as if anything had changed, and I check the old mailbox right away when I get home (much to my dogs’ chagrin, as they bark and bark and beg to be set free).

As I’ve been submitting a lot of work lately, I wanted to get my mind off the status of my current submissions, so I started running the numbers on my previous submissions. And since that’s hella boring, I decided to spice it up a little by combining two things I like a great deal: submitting work and baseball. The result is this (somewhat crude) game of Poetry Submission Baseball. Given the intricacies of baseball, it’s not a perfect analog, but it’ll do to keep me busy for a few minutes.

The rules: There are nine innings and baseball, 3 outs per inning. For the purposes of this submission game, each submission is an at-bat.) This works best if you look back at your last 27 submissions, but if you haven’t sent that many out, then look at whatever you’ve got. For each submission that you sent out, look at the list below and see which result fits best. I’ve broken them down into three categories (Acceptances/Responses from Publications/Rejections), and I’ve covered the gamut of possible responses/results. For each, I’ve specified how many runs you can add or subtract to your score. Note: I’ll leave it to you to decide how the literary magazine tiers break down, as that’s a pretty subjective process. Read more »

If you took an average group of people on a hike into the woods, started pointing out plants and asked folks to identify them, my assumption is that not many people would do particularly well. This isn’t that surprising; after all, most people (80% give or take) live in urban areas, and not all of nature adjusts particularly well to a biome that consists largely of asphalt, glass and steel.

On the surface, at least, this general lack of knowledge about the natural world isn’t particularly problematic. Sure, given the wrong circumstances, not knowing about the natural world can get one into trouble—as with the grandmother from a community near mine who made jam from glossy buckthorn berries and ended up in the hospital, or the campers in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area who mistook blue cohosh for blueberries.

Even so, given the rarity of such occurrences one could make an argument that knowledge about the natural world is superfluous, especially when such knowledge can readily be obtained via one of a legion of technological devices.

That argument, however, is wrong, for several reasons.

Before I continue, however, you might be wondering what the hell all this has to do with a collection of poems. In this case, quite a bit. Maya Jewell Zeller’s book, Rust Fish, is steeped in the natural world, and it is replete with references to species of all sorts—skunk cabbage, sphagnum moss, filberts (another name for hazelnuts). Even the title itself refers to nature, specifically to a fossilized fish entombed in a shale deposit outside Bellingham, Washington.

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