As you’ll see on the sidebar to the right, I’m hosting Lois P. Jones’s episodes of Poets Cafe, a half-hour bi-weekly radio show that interviews poets. She interviewed me for the show last spring, and liked the way I archived mine online, so she asked if I’d store some others, and I thought, why the hell not.

They’re pages and not posts, so they won’t appear in the blog as they’re updated. The archive page is here (I’ll add some bells and whistles later), and so far we’ve got five shows. Mine and Peggy’s you’ve seen, William O’Daly is the best translator of Neruda into English, and I highly recommend giving his a listen. Mariano Zaro is a Spanish-American poet who writes and reads beautifully. I actually haven’t gotten a chance to listen to Annie Reiner’s yet, but I noticed she’s a psychoanalyst, so I’m hoping she’ll send us something for the upcoming tribute to mental health professionals issue.

Anyway, it’s a cool show, full of poetry, and Lois is a really good interviewer. So check them out.

August is the busiest month for Rattle, but the weeks of September and March 15th are the busiest times for me.  We used to pay a graphic designer several thousand dollars a year to do half of what I’m doing this week — in addition to typesetting and laying out the winter issue, I’m also putting together this fall’s e-issue, and sending hand-crafted mass-merged emails to tens of thousands of people.  It’s fun work, but it’s tiring.  Already I’ve spent one night at the office until 2am, and I’ll probably do it again.

But I hate having a whole week go by without a post on here, so I’ll give a quick update about what’s going on in po-po land:

1) You have to check out Megan’s chapbook, if you haven’t already.  Yes, I’m pimping my wife.  As I’ve said before, The Beaded Curtain is one of the best collections I’ve ever read — my only complaint is that it’s not book-length, and so will never have the kind of legacy it deserves, unless she adds it to her first full-length collection, which it doesn’t seem like she want to do.  So what are you gonna do?  But it’s finally available from Spire Press, and you can buy signed copies at the bottom of Rattle’s purchase page.  Read a couple sample poems plus blurbs here.

2) If you missed it (could you have possibly missed it?), we announced our fourth Rattle Poetry Prize winner on Tuesday, Lynne Knight. Of course we read the poems blind, having no idea who had written what, but I was happy to see Lynne’s name when I looked up our pick, entry #1074.  We’ve published three of her poems in the past — two in issue #26, and “The Lesson” last summer, which was already the third-most-read poem in Rattle.com history.  I’ve never met Lynne in person, but she’s always been warm and friendly over email — and she’s one of those poets who hasn’t seemed to have yet gotten the attention she deserves.  For more on Lynne, check out her website.

3. G. Tod Slone is at it again, but this time I have nothing but praise.  He and P. Maudit teamed up to produce another cartoon, which I assume they don’t mind my posting, because they didn’t mind that I posted the last one.  Click the picture to see a larger version, click here to read Slone’s blog.  When he emailed it to me, I burst out laughing, on a day I could really use a laugh.  The watercolor cartoon depicts Megan and I caged in an “Established-Order Zone,” while Maudit and our friend Mather Schneider lurk in the open as trolls.  Well-designed and legitimately funny, it makes a valid point — moderation is always a cage that holds the censor in, to an even greater extent than it keeps the censored out.  In my opinion, the cartoon would more accurately reflect my new comment policy if there was a door bell on the cell, and a sign that read, “Ring for entry.”  For the record, I’m not moderating out contrary opinions, only the rude behavior that I’m tired of dealing with.  Feel free to criticize me all you want, just do it civilly — as this cartoon does, which is why I like it.  And I love the Johnny Cash look — wish I could pull it off.  But I can’t figure out why Megan is wearing a blue mumu.  Is that a judge’s robe?

4.  Speaking of Mather Schneider, he has a poem in the winter issue that I just type-set, about illegal immigration, of all things.  If we’re  censors, I have to say, we’re pretty bad censors.

5.  But the poem I’m excited about most in the winter issue is Patricia Smith’s “Motown Crown.”  It’s a full heroic crown of sonnets, meaning 15 sonnets on a theme, where the last line of each becomes the first line of the next, and each repeated line then forms the final sonnet #15.  It’s probably the most challenging traditional form in the English language, and the only other true heroic crown I’m familiar with is Marylin Nelson’s “A Wreath for Emmett Till.”  You can read a bit about the history of sonnet crowns on Wikipedia.  I heard Patricia read “Motown Crown” at a breathtaking performance at the AWP-Chicago this spring, and though I never solicit poems from anyone, I’ve been begging her for this sequence ever since.  So I guess I can’t say I never solicit poems anymore — but this is worth switch to the word “rarely,” trust me.

6.  That makes a clean 30 sonnets that will appear in Rattle #32, and we’ve got every style imaginable: Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets (duh), a backwards sonnet, free verse sonnets, blank verse sonnets, clean sonnets, dirty sonnets, invented sonnets, sonnets that praise sonnets, sonnets that mock sonnets, a sonnet that uses only one rhyme-word 14 times…  Rattle has a reputation for not liking form, but I love form.  I can’t wait.

The trolls are ruining this place, and I’m sick of cleaning piss out of a carpet that I don’t even care about.  There’s no reason to waste time thinking about comments on this blog, unless it’s to participate in a discussion relevant to the post above them.  I’ve spent way too much time this summer trying to decide how to respond to what amounts to ignorant, masturbatory graffiti.  I feel like a kindergarten teacher.  Well, I’m taking away the scissors.

Comments on this blog are now all moderated.  Hopefully very few comments will actually be screened out, but there will be a delay, while I check to make sure they follow these simple rules:

1) Be civil.

2) Be relevant.

That’s all you have to do: Be civil and relevant.  Even trolls who keep their whiny rants civil and relevant can voice their opinions.  But if you can’t, your comment will sit forever in a queue gathering cyberdust.

Let this be a notice to everyone who’s been warned before:  Don’t waste your time.  I suggest making your own blog and bitching there.

And to everyone who no longer reads the comments because they raise your blood pressure:  You can come back now, the riffraff is gone.

Thursday, September 3rd, 9 p.m.

The Hive/The Apiary (map)
1402 Micheltorena
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Tomorrow night/tonight I’ll be taking a much-needed break from reading contest entries and packing — we just moved to a new apartment, if I haven’t mentioned it, and for some reason we decided to do it on the hottest, smokiest, busiest week of the year.

The cool thing about this reading is, I think it’s actually going to be a cool reading.  The truth is, I haven’t really paid much attention to it, with so many other things going on — it’s a new series, and the last of a long string of them for me.  At the end of a hectic month, it’s kind of like a let down game, like beating your arch-nemesis and then losing to the Dolphins, who are actually a pretty good team, despite having Chad Pennington at QB — like I have victory disease, the poorly named tendency to get too cocky and lose after a big win, which Megan pointed out, is exactly what happened to my softball team last weekend in the championship game.

My point?  This reading is going to kick ass, and not just my own, because it’s not your typical reading.  It’s not just poetry, followed by some golf claps and melodramatic sighs — it’s poetry followed by a comic and a short film.  Hosted by the ultra short 5-Second Films.  Plus dollar beer.  In case you didn’t get all that, here’s the line up:

1. Me
2. Comedian Barry Holiday
3. Short film by Nate and Sara Kathryn Harrison
4. Jon Worley of 5-Second Films
5. Dollar beer

One of the organizers even did an interview with me, which you can read here.

But the best part for me is that I haven’t done a reading in about a month, and the last month has felt like two months — so I think I’m officially out of the bore-myself-to-tears phase of the reading schedule, and might actually be able to find my poems interesting again.  At the last couple readings I really felt like a space cadet.  And what a strange phrase, “space cadet.”  You’d think someone training to be launched into space would have to be really focused…

There are two reasons I’m announcing the Rattle Poetry Prize numbers a full week later than I did last year.  First, our editorial priorities had to be adjusted to fit with Alan’s travel schedule, as he’s going to be gone for much of September.  But the bigger issue was the volume of submissions we received.  You might be surprised by how long it takes just to log them all in.  Here are the totals:

812 hardcopy entries
781 email entries
1,593 total entries

As you can see from last year’s post, this is 433 more entries than we received last year, and we blew past my goal of 1,350 with ease.  This is more than just a record total, it’s also an incredible and unexpected spike in growth rate:

Year / #entries / %change
2006 / 805 / –
2007 / 991 / +23%
2008 / 1160 / +17%
2009 / 1593 / +37%

What was the secret to this year’s success?  It’s impossible to disentangle the variables.  What’s clear is that the growth was digital.  Email submissions increased by 63%, while hardcopy submissions only rose a modest (and expected) 18%.   So I think it’s safe to assume that we don’t have our new print ads in Poetry magazine to thank, as happy to place them as I was.

A better explanation would be the positive change in our internet profile.  Just 14 months ago, Rattle.com introduced its blog-style format, and began posting a new poem or review every day.  In the time since, traffic has swelled — unique visitors per day have doubled to over 1,000, and page views per day have nearly tripled to 10,000.  As more consumers read Rattle online, our demographic shifts toward a more tech-savvy profile, and email submissions for the first time are nearly matching the hardcopy numbers.

But that’s not the whole story.  I also better-utilized email marketing this year.  In the past, we’ve sent flyers to college English departments, announcing the contest, but this year I sent emails as well, asking administrators to forward the information to their students.  I’ve also learned, from trying to publicize events, that people are natural procrastinators — rather than sending our deadline reminder out with a month to go, I waited until five days before the deadline.  As a result, half of the entries came in the last two days.

So the lesson to be inferred this year is that successfully utilizing technology is far more important than traditional means of advertising (not to mention a fraction of the cost) — which is the gospel I’ve been preaching on this blog for years.

I broke down the revenue situation last year, and you can still do the math for yourself.  The honest truth is, production costs haven’t increased much in the last 12 months, beyond the postage rate hike, which was covered by our slightly higher entry fee.  We made an extra $10,000 and get to use all of it to help offset our annual budget.  My long-term, pipedream goal is to make Rattle a fiscally solvant magazine, something unheard of in the literary world.  We’re not close to that goal, at this point, but we’re closer than we were last year. If we keep growing at this rate, a full year out of the red might actually be plausible at some point before print media disappears altogether.

That’s the good news for Rattle, and I’m not too shy to pat myself on the back.  But the bad news for you, if you entered the contest, is that the competition has gotten even tougher:

1,593 entries x 3.8 poems/entry = 6,053 estimated total poems

Obviously that’s 37% more poems than last year, and your odds of placing in the top 11 in a random draw have fallen to 0.18% (from 0.25% in 2008).  As bad as that sounds, it’s still roughly equal to the 1 in 500 odds of any given poem from a regular submission making it onto the pages of Rattle.

So when you read the winners in December, if the honorable mentions seem no stronger than the rest of the poems in the magazine, and there are a few in the open section that seem even better than the $5,000 prize winner, don’t worry — that’s exactly what should happen, statistically (if we assume the quality of a contest entry is the same as that of a regular submission, which is probably the case).  It depends on the slope of the bell curve, but the odds that the Rattle Poetry Prize winner actually is the best poem in the magazine are something like 1 in 5 (pretending we could find an objective measure).

If that sounds counter-intuitive to you, you’re not alone — it sounds weird to me, too, every time I crunch the numbers.  The contest winners won’t necessarily be the best poems in an issue — they’re simply typical of what we always publish.  So if you happen to have a poem already forthcoming in Rattle you should be kicking yourself for not entering the contest — you really might have won!

Still no time for an essay-like post, and we’re going on a much needed mini-break to Laguna Beach this weekend, so here’s something to hold you over — a list of literary magazines that fans of Rattle could also be fans of, at least in my estimation.

Perhaps surprisingly, I’m not all that current with literary magazines; when I first starting working here, the stack of exchange copies was enticing, and I dove in headlong.  But in the time since I’ve come to enjoy collections of poetry more than individual poems, and I figure, I have to read so many poets anyway, I might as well keep my pleasure-reading concentrated on the poets I know I’m going to like.  So I can’t guarantee that this list is complete, or even be certain that it’s still accurate.  These days, the magazines come, and I skim them.  They don’t seem to change significantly year-to-year.

So if you like reading Rattle, you might want to check out these magazines, which also publish our brand of poetry — which might be called intelligently accessible:

1. Mid-American Review (website).  The editors have good taste, and that’s all that really needs to be said.  The poems are always lyrical and imagistic and interesting, but are rarely pretentious.  They publish outstanding flash fiction and prose poetry with their Fineline Competition.  And their issues are well-designed, with good, vibrant cover art and a classy layout.  My praise has nothing to do with the fact that I’ve got two poems in their most recent issue — MAR was one of my favorites way before they published me.  The only knock: Even with a recent upgrade, the website is very 1.0, and doesn’t do the print version justice.  I mean, they don’t even resize thumbnailed images.

2. Margie (website).  It should be no surprise that Margie reads like a thicker, less frequent, version of Rattle – I’ve heard that Robert Nazarene and Rattle’s previous editor, Stellasue Lee, corresponded quite a bit as they learned how to put the two magazines together.  A decade later, we still swap poets like partners at Woodstock.  I counted 23 poets in their forthcoming issue that we’ve published recently, as well, and I quit in the Ns.  So if you can’t get enough of that “intelligently accessible” poetry and can’t wait for our next issue in December, order some Strong Medicine.  Extra points for all-poetry.  The only knock: The graphic design leaves something to be desired, and despite being more useful than MAR’s, the website is also very 1.0, complete with scrolling marquee text.

3. Tin House (website).  Great writing — including fiction that I actually enjoy — great design, great website.  They don’t publish much poetry, relative to fiction, particularly if you go by page-count, and they lean heavily big-name…but the big names who are actually good, and I suspect they have the integrity to say No to the big names who aren’t any good.  The only knock: An air of eliticism.  They’re the handsome, funny, smart bachelor who never gets the girl because he’s too perfect.  There must be something wrong with him, right?  He must be a cannibal…  I know — publish more than 13 poems in an issue!!!

4. Alehouse (website).  Another journal with Rattle-ish poetry, this one younger, just three years old, and published by Jay Rubin out in San Francisco.  To be honest, I only read one copy, but that was enough to leave me impressed.  Strong work, with a simple, tasteful, playful aesthetic.  Extra points for all-poetry.  The only knock: Another website that serves only as a submissions funnel.  Can I get a few sample poems, at least?  (ETA: It’s been brought to my attention that Alehouse only accepts unsolicited submissions through their contest, which means you have to pay to send them work.  When I made this post, I was thinking in terms of magazines you might like to read, not really thinking of submissions, but even so, I’m disappointed to hear about that policy.  You should never pay to send a magazine your work, even to a contest, unless you really want to enter the contest.  There are plenty of magazines who would be happy to read your work for free.  If you want to submit work, instead check out Crab Creek Review, which would have been #7 on my list if ordered by the case, and a few commenters have already mentioned.)

5. Barrelhouse (website).  I get them confused with Alehouse, but they have absolutely nothing in common. (What’s with all the “houses”?)  Barrelhouse is about as edgy as a Rattle reader might want to get — as an editor, I try to keep the old Rattle aesthetic, and my own tastes mostly align, but I really love when poetry goes surreal.  So if you enjoyed poems like “Considering the Trebonites” or even better “The Preakness,” you’ll love what Barrelhouse is cooking.  The only knock: As with all things edgy, their hipster-irony can get a little tedious at times.

6. Subtropics (website).  This magazine is only a few years old, but has a lot in common with Mid-American Review. I don’t know the editors personally, but I know they have good taste.  Everything is simple and classy — they know good writing is all you need to blow your hair back, and they find the writing to do it.  Paying the poets well probably helps.  The only knock: I don’t know…  Maybe just that they’re still young, and I don’t trust big coastal universities not to get pretentious.

As I said, the list isn’t by any means extensive, just a summary of what I’ve read and am willing to recommend.  Comment if you’re a fan of Rattle, and have other magazines to recommend.

Next week I’ll post the list of lit mags that I envy and respect as an editor, which is a different group entirely.

I assumed KPFK would rather have me send listeners to their website, so I only posted a clip from this last week.  Quite the contrary, host Lois P. Jones asked if I’d post the whole thing, so it has a permanent home.  I just posted the first segment, with Peggy Dobreer.  Here’s the second, with me — about 25 minutes long. I read “Cooking Dinner,” “Playing Our Part,” “After Hopper,” “Impressionism,” and “The Body.” Talk about fractals, the theme of my book, Rattle as a rogue journal, and the importance of poetry to society.

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Since the KPFK archives only last 90 days, host Lois P. Jones asked me to make a permanent home for the show I was on last week.  Here is the first segment, with Peggy Dobeer — I thought she deserved her own page.

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Peggy Dobreer is an educator, poet, public speaker, and artisan who works and teaches in the Extension Program at Loyola Marymount University. She was a leading force in the educational vision of the Center for the Advancement of Nonviolence, from 1997-2004, and co-wrote and edited 64 Ways to Practice Nonviolence: A Curriculum and Resource Guide. Her poetry is published in Cracked Pavement and Plastic Trees, Our Gifts To Future Generations: An Anthology of Environmental Poetry, Everything About You Is Beautiful: Really Big Show Anthology (Winter 2004), WordWright’s Magazine, Tamafhyr Mountain Poetry Irregular Poetry Journal, and The Blue House. She has self-published four chapbooks: Henceforth (1999), Bravo Collection (2002), Face of Sky (2004) and B.L.A.B.B. Be Live at Beyond Baroque (2006).

Yesterday’s post to this blog inadvertently included a well-known, copyrighted image of Charles Bukowski and Georgia Peckham, which has since been removed.  Photo credit should have been given to Joan Levine Gannij.  Because the blog where I found the image didn’t list a credit, I didn’t either, a lazy and careless oversight that I truly regret.

There’s an old proverb, which I have to admit that I only heard recently in the movie-version of Doubt — teacher brings a pillow up to the roof and tells the student to tear it open and scatter the feathers to the wind.  A gust picks up and blows them across the countryside.  “Now I want you to gather every feather and put it back in the pillowcase,” the teachers says.  “But I can’t,” says the student, “that’s impossible, there are thousands of feathers everywhere.”

In the  proverb that’s gossip.  But it might also be copyright infringement.  Every time we use art that is unsourced, we encourage other people to do the same, in an exponentially expanding chain.  And the artist is left scrambling to put her work back in the bag — a frustrating and impossible task.  I feel awful for contributing to that, and foolish for not realizing it sooner.

There were a few other images I’ve used in the past without knowing who to credit; I’ve removed those as well, and would also like to apologize to those unnamed artists who will probably never know that I helped kick their can a little farther down the road.

Someone had to kick the Mickey Mouse out of our heads.
–William Packard of NYQ on Charles Bukowski

That’s a good quote, but I hate Bukowski.  And it’s not even for his poetry, which is mostly garbage, littered with gems.  Or his novels, which I mostly haven’t read.

I woke up at 6:30 a.m. this morning, thinking it was 10 a.m.  That’s three hours sleep for me.  Too tired to do much else at first, I thought I’d watch a documentary, and I came upon Born Into This, the 2003 biography by John Dullaghan.  It just confirmed everything I already thought about the man.

Bukowski was a self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, degenerate drunk.  Sexist and probably racist.  There’s a dirty old man at the end of every dive bar in America with just as much insight on the human condition as him.  But the worst part is, Bukowski was also a hypocrite.  He’s held up by his fans as some messiah of truth — he gets down in the dirt, doesn’t have time for metaphor, “cuts straight to the marrow of the bone,” as Bono of U2 says in the film.  But the real truth is, Bukowski is as phony as someone who’d change his name to Bono.  More phony, even — at least with Bono there’s always a layer where we know it’s an act.

You see it in every interview, every poem, every story, every reading he’d show up to drunk; everything Bukowski presents is orchestrated to get a reaction out of his audience.  Shock, disgust, excitement, pity — that’s a big one.  He lies about the facts, he lies about his feelings, and he’s hailed as a champion of truth.  What’s left to be true?  He tells people he was born out of wedlock so he can call himself a bastard.  He publishes under the name “Charles” to avoid the draft.  Says his father beat him, but I doubt it.  Says he was a Nazi, but I doubt it.  Plenty of grist there to be honest about, but all we get is “gritty” bullshit.

Side rant:  Over the last decade there’s been a big ridiculous ballyhoo over whether or not Bukowski was a Nazi sympathizer in his youth.  It started with Ben Pleasants’ feature in The Hollywood Reporter, then picked up again when the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission had to decide whether or not to make his bungalow a landmark.  I don’t understand why Bukowski’s political beliefs at the age of 20 matter with respect to the historical significance of his home — especially at a time when there were hundreds of thousands of members in the German-American Bund.  Hell, Prescott Bush was a business partner with Nazis, and that didn’t keep him out of the Senate, or from raising two future presidents.  The commission approved the ordinance three to one and protected Bukowski’s home, but they took the accusation seriously: “‘If I thought that any of the claims were true, in no way would I consider this,’ said commission president Mary Klaus-Martin.”

I don’t understand why it matters whether or not we can use the Nazi label on a man who so often demonstrated such deplorable traits.  Bukowski was not a good person.  He was the kind of guy who thinks its funny to shout, “Turn on the gas!” in a Jewish diner.  Why should it matter whether or not we can call him a Nazi, too?

That said, I don’t think there’s any validity to the Nazi sympathizer claim.  Ben Pleasants makes the mistake that so many do when encountering Bukowski:  Believing a single word he says.  Reading the article, it’s clear that Bukowski was just trying to get a rise out of his young interviewer.  I’m sure the boasting is somehow spliced onto a partial reality, but if you look closely, there are several inconsistencies within the narrative itself.  It would be mind-bendingly ironic if Nazism ultimately tarnished Bukowski’s reputation — an exaggeration he invented himself, but might as well be true, damaging the reputation that he’s too raw to care about, even though he really does.

But what I can’t get over is the simple fact that people take him seriously.  That they believe in his schtick.  Most of his friends and biographers, of course, believe him into a saint.  It’s grotesque.  He hits his girlfriends and he’s a “handful.”  Screams he’ll “get a Jew lawyer to kick [her] whore ass to the curb,” and they just laugh it off.   In1957, he married Barbara Frye sight-unseen because she was rich, but really “she was trying to control him with money.”  Right.

John Martin of Black Sparrow Press calls him:  “Today’s Whitman. A man of the street writing for the people in the street.”  But Bukowski hated the people: “beware the average man/ the average woman/ beware their love/ their love is average.”  He hated everyone — especially, I think, himself.  I really hope that’s not the voice of the people today.  Please tell me it isn’t.  Especially if it’s because so many people relate to his perspective.

There’s one point in the documentary where Bukowski is reading a poem about bathing with his ex-girlfriend Linda King.  Toward the end of the poem he breaks into tears, then composes himself and apologizes for growing sentimental in his old age.  “I read the wrong poem, damnit,” he says.  Of course he could never write about that feeling, because real feeling wasn’t a posture he was willing to hold — only project.

I know there are a lot of Bukowski fans out there — if you disagree with me, feel free to argue.

__________

NOTE (7/27/09): I turned off the commenting on this post, and deleted the last round of comments. I wanted to let valid objections to my opinion stand, but I was tired of the shouting match, where nothing new was being added.