I should have mentioned this before, but got a little sidetracked. If you live in the LA area and want to be the first to see the new summer issue of RATTLE, hot off the presses, stop by the Church in Ocean Park this Saturday. We’ll be selling copies at a discount as part of the annual SoCal small press fair. I’ll also be reading a few poems from the issue at 11:15 AM. Here are the details:

The Church in Ocean Park hosts an expansive day of writers, poets, and publishers, and finding out about new releases from over 25 small presses.

Saturday, May 10, 2008 10:30-5:00 pm

Publishers will be selling books throughout the whole day. Every hour will begin with a short period of poetry and spoken word readings hosted by Peggy Dobreer.

Presses and writers taking part in the Book Fair Readings include:

Veronica Lane Books: Etan Boritzer—11:00
Lynne Bronstein: 11:05
Cahuenga Press: Harry Northup, Holly Prado : 11:10
Rattle : Tim Green 11:15
Heart Press: C. Natale Perdito: 12:00
Conflux Press: FrancEye: 12:05
Split Shift Press: Roger Taus : 12:10
Petroglyph Books: Jeff Green, Ruth Nolan 12:15
Penelope Barnes Thompson: 1:00
Noble Swine Press: Corrie Greathouse, Saria Idana 1:05
John Harris: 1:10
Akashic Books: Karen Harryman 1:15
Free Venice Beachhead: Rex Butters 2:00
TcCreative Press: Theresa Antonia 2:05
Cherry Grove Collections: Julia Stein: 2:10
Siglio Press: Lisa Pearson 2:15
Gentle Strings Quarterly: Leilani Squire 3:00
Beyond Baroque Press 3:05
Patrice Karst 3:10
Askew: Phil Taggart 3:15
DeAnn Jordan 4:00
Writ Largh Press: 4:05

Also represented: Santa Monica Review, DVD Video: Alexis Krasilovsly, Poetry Flash. More presses and writers to be announced.

Admission by donation at the door.

Church in Ocean Park

235 Hill Street on the northeast corner of Hill & 2nd in Santa Monica

The Church is wheelchair accessible. Bus accessible by the MTA #33 & Big Blue Bus #s 1, 2, & 8. The church has a small parking lot on the north side of the street between 2nd & 3rd Sts.

Meter parking, 1/4 block west of Main St., $.75/hr to 10 hours & free parking from 4th St. east

Contact Fred Whitlock at 310-828-3951 for more information.

While we still have plenty of reviews ready to go up online, but we haven’t been getting as many book requests lately and my shelf is filling up. It won’t be too long before I have to start giving up on some of these books.

Below is a list of review copies we’ve received in just the last month or so. If any of them sound interesting, email me with your address, and I’ll send them to you. All you have to do is write a little review, maybe a page or so, and the book is yours.

The full list is here. I’ve also added CDs, DVDs, and literary journals for the first time. Enjoy!

Books Available (updated 5/7/08, latest additions on top):

* Elaine Sexton – Causeway
* Mike Maggio – deMOCKracy
* Sandra Kohler – The Country of Women
* Joe Larkin – Outside the Frame
* Peggy Munson – Pathogenesis
* Christian Ward – Slippage #
* Jane Pupek – Forms of Intercession
* Naomi Levine – Songs of an Aging Optimist
* Linda Pastan – Queen of Rainy Country
* Peter Krok – Looking for an EYE
* Polis Is This – Ferrini & Riaf (DVD)
* Janet Sarbanes – Army of One
* Language for a New Century: Poetry From the Middle East, Asia and Beyond
* Eric Greinke – Wild Strawberries
* Lawrence Kessenich – Strange News #
* Ralph-Michael Chiaia – Ten Poems About East Asia
* Lyn Lifshin – 92 Rapple Drive
* Dragan Dragojlovic – Death’s Homeland
* Can You Stay Forever – A. Molotkov (CD)
* Next on the Mic: The Lizard Lounge Poetry Jam (CD)
* Wind and Waves – Le Pham Le (CD)
* Imagine: Indiana in Music and Words – Krapf & Herzig (CD)
* J. Reuben Appelman – Make Loneliness
* Michele Fabbri – Apocalisse 23
* Ellaraine Lockie – Blue Ribbons at the County Fair
* Philip Ramp – Keen
* Ellen Peckham – Ticket Stubs
* Myronn Hardy – The Headless Saints
* Louis Daniel Brodsky – Still Wandering in the Wilderness
* David Alpaugh – Heavy Lifting
* David James – Trembling in Someone’s Palm
* Home: Anthology – ed. by Anne Brudevold
* Christopher William Purdom – too many chairs on the green hill*
* Llyn Clague – Confessions
* Van G. Garrett – Songs in Blue Negritude
* Kathleen Tyler – My Florida
* Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry
* Matt Mason – Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know

* = chapbook
# = proof
CD = CD

Literary Journals Available for Review (current issues):

* New England Review
* Denver Quarterly
* Iconoclast
* Hiram Poetry Review
* Prairie Schooner

This blog is supposed to be more than just a place for announcements, but I’ve been too busy to live up to my end of the bargain, and sometimes there are just things worth announcing. So here it is, this spring’s free online supplement.

61 pages of art, poetry, and essays. Our two book features are each outstanding for entirely different reasons — John Amen’s More of Me Disappears and Diane Lockward’s What Feeds Us. As if on cue after the last couple posts, David James writes about the joy of inventing new poetic forms. Then Gary Lehmann asks, Is Poetry Fiction?, and trust me, he knows the answer. The art spread is five hand-colored photographs by Dianne Carroll Burdick, from which the cover above is drawn.

As always, a fun quick read — something to whet the appetite before the big issue in June. Click here to download the PDF (1.6 MB).

I just hope I wasn’t too gloomy at the end of the introduction. I mention a great anthology I just read, Seeds of Fire (Smokestack Books, 2008), edited by former Rattle contributor and Curbstone author, Jon Andersen. The book was an uplifting reminder for me that so many people see this war industry for what it is, and while real change operates at a glacial pace, it’s worth it to keep plugging away, to keep standing together and speaking out. But you can’t explain being uplifted without mentioning what you’re being lifted from.

I’m starting to feel like the existence of a poetry community is more important than the poetry itself. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing for an editor to say.

I was at the office until just after 2am last night, or this morning, or whatever, putting the new issue together. This is what they call “in-sourcing” — we used to pay someone a few thousand dollars to turn our easy-to-manage Word file into a pretty PDF via Quark. Instead, we save that money, and I work 23 hours in one weekend, twice a year. If we had stockholders, I’d say, “It’s worth it to the stockholders.”

But the surprising thing for me, coming at this as poetry person with a science background, is that graphic design and desktop publishing is really fun. Reading submissions can be exciting, or it can be brutal, depending on your mood and where the wheel spins, but working on design has probably become my favorite part of the job. And I have no idea what I’m doing. One of my high school teachers always said, it doesn’t matter what you learn in school, because everything you need you have to learn on the fly.

The summer issue has a special Visual Poetry feature, which includes 38 images — collages, poem paintings, comics, graphic poems, concrete poems. The biggest challenge yet, but well worth it. Wild, varied, random. You’ll see in a few months. And I updated the layout just a touch, for the first time in 10 years — cleaner, and a little more elegant.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m posting this, but I promised myself I’d get into the habit of using the blog more often.

They’re really not. Either someone’s blowing smoke up your ass, or they’re kicking you in it. It’s easy to write off the praise, and hard to ignore the criticism. So it’s important to remember that reviews are written for an audience, and not the artist — or in this case, not the editor. And it’s just as important for an editor. I don’t have the kind of emotional investment in RATTLE that I would have for a book I’d written myself, but I do have the same kind of temporal investment, the same opportunity cost, and the hundred or so writers we publish in each issue feel like family…distant cousins in many cases, but there’s still blood.

Two reviews of RATTLE #28 have come out in the last month, and they demonstrate both sides of the coin. The first, at NewPages.com (scroll down to the R’s), is inarguably glowing, as it praises our selection of poems, our humor, and the nurses tribute in particular. But if you know anything about NewPages.com, you know that they don’t publish negative reviews — the reviewers focus on magazines they already know they like. So while I’m grateful for Anne Wolfe’s opinion, especially her emphasis on the nurses, who I think are spectacular, I can’t help but wonder about all those reviewers who might not be so enthusiastic. What might they have said, given the chance?

Well, I didn’t have to wait long. Luna Park is a new quarterly, and seems to do a good job of filling a mostly vacant niche — the online and modernized role of Literary Magazine Review. The website is tasteful, the reviews seem thoughtful, and most importantly, they seem to really care about the value of an honest opinion.

One might describe Gregg Weiss’s review of RATTLE #28 as “mixed”, but “kindly negative” is probably more accurate. At first read, this one hits me where it hurts — the criticism is that the we’re exactly what I aim not to be; no matter how hard I’ve tried to be eclectic, we’re a one trick pony, publishing only “weighty-topic free-verse.” I’ve always felt like we needed to diversify, and I’ve been preaching just that since I started running things — basically, Weiss is telling me that I’ve failed. We’ve “opted for Creedence Clearwater Revival instead of Picasso,” whatever that means.

But then I realize that’s not the only place I have no idea what he means. Take his penultimate paragraph for example. “Like the emotional effect of Schindler’s List, the vast majority of small-moment poems may seem momentarily counterintuitive, but are ultimately self-evident.” Huh?

And I start to notice other little problems, too. One of his examples of a “Heavy Shit” topic is “assassinations.” There is one poem called “Assassin”, but it’s about the glutinous complacency of suburban life. Later in the review, the poem Weiss lists as his favorite happens to be one of the heaviest in the issue. And as for a lack of light, “small moment” poems, what about a group of inmates playing soccer with their slippers? Or “Stud Spray”? Or Roy Jacobstein’s narrator secretly being a duck? The more I think about his call for “Billy Collins poems” the more I realize I don’t know what he means by that.

But the icing on the cake is his claim that “Only one of the 98 poems features either a rhyming or metric pattern.” I don’t know which of the several sonnets he’s referring to, so I don’t know which ones don’t count. The idea of a reviewer criticizing something they can’t even recognize is a little baffling, and I must say, undermines his whole piece. Fourteen lines of slant-rhymed pentameter, three quatrains with a couplet at the end, should be kind of obvious, shouldn’t it?

So ha, I showed him, right? But then after he hit you where it hurt, he lands the sucker punch — there’s nothing worse than getting defensive about a negative review, and here I am, getting defensive. Damn you, Weiss! Resistance is futile.

In the end, I agree with the overarching argument, despite his critical mistakes — we could still be more eclectic, and looking back at the last issue, it does tend to be heavier and more free-versed in balance than I’d prefer. But the assumption that this is a stance, by design, is untrue. We like formal verse; we like to laugh. We’re just at your mercy — send us a funny sestina! Write a navel-gazing ghazal! We can only publish what seems worth it from what we get. Stop being so damn serious, people!

Thanks again to everyone who participated in this year’s competition. We’re pleased to announce the following winners, whose poems will appear in this December’s issue of Rattle, #28.

First Prize:

Honorable Mentions:

Semi-Finalists (offered publication in issue #29, Summer 2008):

Melissa Altenderfer, Martha Clarkson, John Colasacco, Paul Dickey, ellen, Peter Funk, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Jared Harel, Lynne Knight, Jason Nemec, John Paul O’Connor, Sherman Pearl, Hayden Saunier, Donna K. Spector, Sarah Pemberton Strong, Jennifer Sweeney, and Douglas Woody Woodsum

For anyone diligent enough to read this blog in hopes of news, you deserve to know that we’ve contacted and confirmed with each of our 11 winners for this year’s competition. If you haven’t heard from me yet, I’m afraid you didn’t win.

However, yesterday we sent letters to 18 additional poets, offering them publication in next summer’s issue. Even though you didn’t win, you still may be offered publication. We’ll officially announce the 11 winners and 18 semi-finalists later today. (I would list them all right now, but I’m blogging from home, and don’t have the list with me.)

If you pay attention to the news page you’ll have already seen this, but there are two events coming up this week.

First, a week from tonight, I’ll be reading from my forthcoming book AMERICAN FRACTAL at the Cobalt Cafe. That’s Tuesday 9/18 at 9pm. 22047 Sherman Way, Canoga Park, CA. Part of the Valley Contemporary Poets reading series.

Second, a week from Saturday we’ll have a booth at the California Poets Festival in San Jose. If you’re anywhere within driving distance, this is really going to be worth it. Check out this lineup: Robert Hass, Jane Hirshfield, Ellen Bass, Wanda Coleman, Victoria Chang, Francisco X. Alarcon, and Diem Jones. Lots of details on the website, but it’s 10am – 4:30pm, Sat. 9/22. 1650 Senter Road, San Jose, CA.

Saturday, August 25th, 7:oo pm
Donation requested

Amy Davis, Jim Doane, Michael C. Ford, francEyE, and Tim Green, will read works by themselves and others, including a heart-rending rendition of “Casey at the Bat” by Tali Stein and great baseball songs by the incomparable Ross Altman. Open MIC for BASEBALL POETRY ONLY.

This is going to be fun. I don’t talk about baseball, and never write about it, but I play all the time. I had 5 games last week, 3 this week, including the semi-finals in LA County Men’s Slow-Pitch tomorrow night. Honestly, it’s kind of ridiculous how much time a grown man can spend playing softball in this land of perpetual summer. Coming from upstate New York, where we have three months warm enough to play, and still half of the games get rained-out, this feel a little too much like heaven. If I really wanted to, and the tendonitis in my shoulder could take it, I could easily play 200 games a year, between nightly leagues and tournaments. This LA’s biggest redeeming quality, as far as I’m concerned.

Every time I’m confronted with the idea of Baseball Poetry, I can’t help but wonder why, if I play so often, if I watch each of 162 Mets games every year, why do I never write about it? There are probably a number of reasons.

For one, it’s very difficult for a baseball poem to resist becoming sentimental — sports-writing is a minefield of cliche, but as “America’s pasttime,” baseball is especially precarious, with its age-old sticky pinetar, the smell of cut grass, a father and son playing catch, the first game, the hotdog, the dropped ball in the stands, your peanuts, your crackerjacks, and on and on. To love baseball is to slip into the nostalgia of that cliche. You have to admit, on some fundamental level, loving baseball is cheesy.

There are poems worth writing about baseball, but it seems like they’ve mostly been written. One of them, the one I’ve always meant to write, we published in our last issue. Peter Harris’s “Will Buddhism Survive?” In the poem, Harris describes baseball — and rightly so — as one of the last bastions of pre-concious thought, the kind of all-action, no-judgment transcendence that the Buddha would have truly appreciated. That meditative state of notan is what I love about playing. I’ve always meant to write that poem, but Harris beat me to it. So this Saturday, I’ll read it, along with severall others I’ve enjoyed.

All this said, I’ve never really pursued baseball poetry as a reader, either. Maybe I just assume it’s going to be too sentimental. Maybe I’m embarrassed that I’m a jock at heart. Who knows. But I’m very curious to see what other people come up with. Searching around, I found some baseball poems online by Donald Hall that I like. I’m sure there will be some good ones here, and maybe it will be inspiring.

I actaully do have one baseball poem, but it’s so bad that I don’t know if anyone’s ever read it — I’ve definitely never read it in public. But what the hell, I just might. So come by at 7pm Saturday and listen to me embarrass myself.

By request, here’s an update on the Rattle Poetry Prize, though it’s not much of an update.

We’ve read each of the submissions, all 4,500 or so poems, and have a pile of several hundred possible winners that we’re going to re-read over the next few days. We have our first group meeting to talk about the poems we like most on Saturday. I doubt we’ll have a winner at that point, though — it will take at least another week, and more reading. As anyone who’s done anything like this knows, it’s easy to sort the good from the bad — much more difficult to choose the best from what’s left. The line becomes much more fine, much more subjective.

Even when we do have the winners, we won’t be announcing them immediately. First we’ll be contacting the winners directly, to make sure that the poems are still elligible, and in the meantime, deciding which, if any, additional poems we’d like to publish. The goal for announcing the winners is still September 15th, but if we can do it any sooner, we will.

Also of note, the final tally on submissions has grown from 991 to 1052. I mis-labeled about 30 of the email submissions, and so didn’t count them at first, which when corrected bumped the total up to 1021. Then on 8/15, a full two weeks after the deadline, we received a bundle of entries that had been postmarked 8/1. First Class/Priority is supposed to take 3-5 days, and we received nothing from about 8/6-8/14, so this bundle was a mystery. But since we hadn’t yet finished reading everything anyway, it didn’t make a difference to us; those entries were just added to the bottom of the pile.

That’s all I can think to say. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask in the comments.