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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As folks familiar with Willow Springs know, Dean Young (issue #64 and my baby, #59) is a fantastic poet. You might not know that due to a heart condition, he needed a heart transplant. Happily, he got one today. And things are going well, thus far. Nevertheless, heart transplants aren’t exactly cheap, even with decent insurance. Mr. Young will no doubt need financial support after the transplant, and that’s where we can help. The National Foundation for Transplants website features a page where you can make a donation for Mr. Young. The page also features a letter from Tony Hoagland.

If you can, donate. He’s a great poet, and in my experience, a pretty damn good person too.

Here’s the link: http://www.transplants.org/donate/deanyoung

I’m not a jealous person, generally. I don’t particularly love money (I hate it, actually); I don’t have a lot of material possessions (other than books and prints, my weaknesses). Occasionally, there’s an object that I really truly covet, but usually it’s something completely impossible (a retired space shuttle [my wife continues to say no] or a first edition of Elizabeth Bishop book). When it comes to literature, however, I am the most jealous person I know, as I am one hell of a green-eyed reader. Whenever I read something I really like, I immediately think, damn, I wish I’d done that. I can remember a few times this has happened: the part in Slaughterhouse Five where Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and watches a war movie backwards; Campbell McGrath’s “Wild Thing;” pretty much anything in the Duino Elegies.

If you’re like me, this jealousy is productive, as it not only makes you want to read more, it also makes you want to write. Such books are wonderful for another reason, they remind you why we love writing to begin with, leaving you ready to write, but gratefully jealous at the same time.

Kate Nuernberger’s Rag and Bone made me jealous. Really jealous.

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Just after the color Nook had been released, there was a lively debate in the Ortler household about the merits of electronic readers versus printed-and-bound books. I’m something of a traditionalist when it comes to owning books, and I steadfastly denied any interest in owning an e-reader. I argued that there were just so many problems with electronic books.

First and foremost, they were damn expensive. $250 for a color Nook. That’s a car payment. I could stock my beer cellar for the rest of time. With $250, I could go to a handful of Twins games, and with my newfound largesse I could even afford the delicious $12 steak sandwich from the Twin Cities’ famous Murray’s Steakhouse.

Then there were all sorts of other issues. The problems with formatting (how the hell would they deal with line breaks in poetry? Or a photo-heavy layout in a field guide?) And then there’s the problem of portability and ruggedness. (I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be bringing my Nook in the fishing boat to ID my catch.)

And perhaps the most important issue of all—in my mind, a book is important as a thing in itself, a phrase we owe to our good friend Manny Kant. Like lots of other literary Luddites, I love the tactile heft of a book, the characteristic smell, and I’m a sucker for a good cover and interior design. I even like the sound of a page turning, which has been somewhat hilariously reproduced on the Nook.

E-readers, I argued, stripped books of all artfulness and reduced them to their basic content. And that’s problematic, because we don’t just buy a book for its text; we buy it for the whole package. The same is true in cuisine. We want our food to taste good, but to look decent too. Presentation matters. Given the choice, I argued that the artfully designed and tasty dish should win out over one that tastes the same but was just slopped onto a plate. That analogy seems to ring true. Instead of carefully-chosen typefaces and other garnishes, you get one of a few options on the e-reader. Instead of a well-wrought cover, you get a rescaled Jpeg.

My wife agreed with all this, more or less. A year later she betrayed me: she asked for a color Nook for Christmas.

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If you want to start a fistfight at a gathering of independent publishers or booksellers, make an impassioned defense of Amazon.com or the Internet marketplace. Argue vehemently enough in support, and a melee will probably result: chairs will fly across the room, you may get bopped on the head with a microphone stand, and poets and writers will attempt to hit you with whatever’s at hand—their fists, berets, or if you’re really unlucky, the “concise” version of the Oxford English Dictionary (which weighs about 50 pounds and comes with a magnifying glass—I’m not joking).

OK, I’m exaggerating a bit here, but there are certain arguments that seem almost taboo to support in the literary community at large. When it comes to the likes of Amazon and the Internet, the plight of independent booksellers and publishers is often described in terms of the story of David versus Goliath. Amazon.com is commonly portrayed as a veritable assassin of independent bookstores, Google Books is apparently run by copyright-infringing, secret-stealing spies (I picture Julian Assange in a Spy vs. Spy outfit.), and writers often worry that electronic books might make it impossible for writers to make a living.

Frankly, I don’t support the party line. It may be heresy, but I’m going to stand up for Goliath. In this section of the article, I’m going to focus on Barnes and Noble, Borders, Amazon.com and the other Internet booksellers. Read more »

Like almost everyone else in the literary world, I recently read Vida’s article discussing the apparent gender disparity prevalent in prominent literary publications like The New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and many others.

Specifically, Vida examined 15 major venues and examined each publication’s output for the year 2010. In most cases, they then detailed the overall number of authors/writers printed in the venue, and the gender breakdown of those authors/writers. In almost all of the cases, there were far more male authors than females. This was also true when Vida examined the number of reviewers present at each venue and each reviewer’s respective gender. Again, there were more males (by far) than females.

While I understand why this issue has gotten so much attention, I don’t find the data particularly convincing, at least not convincing enough to justify the (implicit) claim that women are discriminated against in literary magazines and publications.

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Bullseye. Courtesy of NOAA (public domain)

It’s the first blizzard of the season; on the National Weather Service radar the Twin Cities are surrounded by an oblong bull’s- eye of snow bands stretching for a hundred miles from east to west. At my house, there are only two ways to gauge how much snow has fallen over night. I can look at the ash tree in the front yard and see how much of the trunk is visible, or I can let my dog, Bullwinkle, outside to go to the bathroom.

Of course, he immediately falls through the snow, and when I pull him out I can make a pretty good estimate of how much snow we’ve gotten. If he can get out himself, that’s only one dog worth of snow (four inches). If he has more trouble, he’ll start clawing his way out and pops his head out of the snow like a prairie dog. That’s two dogs worth (eight inches). If he disappears completely, I jump in and get him, brush him off, and then I go start the snowblower, as I’m going to need it. That’s a three dog (12-inches) storm.

This is a three dog storm.

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