NewPages Blog

The summer 2017 issue of Rattle features a tribute to poets living with mental illness. “An estimated 26% of Americans experience mental illness in a given year,” write the editors, “and we wanted to acknowledge and explore that reality, while also helping to diminish the associated cultural stigma of these illnesses. [. . . ] While the topics of the poems themselves vary greatly, each of the poets live with some form of depressive, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, bi-polar, post-traumatic stress, or eating disorder—all of discussed openly and bravely in their contributor notes. In the conversation section, we talk about mental illness and a wide range of other topics with Francesca Bell.” [Cover Art by Jasmine C. Bell.]

Artists say things with objects, images, symbols, and metaphors that are difficult, if not impossible, to express any other way.
Artists have tremendous courage, a necessary quality when it comes to expressing personal dreams and emotions so all can see them.
Artists break down barriers of thought, time, custom, and expectation.
Artists make the intangible tangible.
Artists see the trees and the forest.
Artists challenge us to see and understand our world differently than we do now.
Artists are born with open hands and open hearts, courageously willing to accept whatever is given.
Imagine our world without artists, without their ability to see, dream, express, break down barriers, and challenge the rest of us to imagine our world differently.

Excerpted from Christine Brooks Cote, “Imagine Our World Without Artists,” from Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2017.

The June 2017 issue of Poetry features photographs and artifacts from the Poetry Foundation’s forthcoming exhibit, Matter in the Margins: Gwendolyn Brooks at 100, curated by Anna Chen, June 16–August 25, 2017.

Chen writes: “Gwendolyn Brooks’s literary archives, now in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, reveal that she clustered and bundled papers as well as life experiences: she tucked notes inside pieces of paper folded into makeshift pockets, slid photographs behind other photographs in albums, and pasted clippings on top of each other in scrapbooks. She added further layers of meaning with her copious annotations, like the detailed notes she wrote on the backs of many of her photographs (given in quotation marks in the accompanying images) in order to preserve the knowledge of the people and events they captured.”

Read Chen’s full introduction to this feature as well as view a slideshow of the photographs and artifacts here.

Fusion is Prarie Schooner’s online series, which Editor Kwame Dawes says, “is an opportunity to create dialog across geographical spaces and cultures through the sharing of art and writing. It represents an effort to create bridges between the many silos that separate us, and to do so by asking writers to think about the very things that connect us and distinguish us in different parts of the world.” Issue #11 is a collaboration with Ugandan poetry and art on the theme “Shoes.”

In her essay, “Ngato! Ngato! Shoes!” Ugandan Poet Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva [pictured] writes, “It’s often the most silent shoes that are the strongest. It’s the shoes that allow thieves to stalk upon unsuspecting people and the shoes that enable a cheetah to pounce on its prey. The silent shoes do not desire unnecessary attention to detract them from their mission.”

Read the full issue here.

In his introduction to Issue 63 (Spring 2017) of Creative Nonfiction, themed “How We Teach,” Lee Gutkind writes about attending a yoga and creative writing retreat where he is teaching creative nonfiction to an “ecclectic” group of attendees. Just as varied is the group’s experience with yoga, which the yoga instructor misjudged by giving too rigorous of a few first sessions. Gutkind writes that the instructor backed down after that, teaching technique and form basics, regardless of the participant’s experience level. “We hard-core students thought we knew all of this stuff—some of us have been practicing for decades—so we were somewhat apprehensive at first. But as the lesson progressed, we began to realize that going back to the basics and relearning what we thought we knew was quite helpful.”

Gutkind likens this to our need to review our own practice, weed out bad habits we may have developed over the years, and get back in tune with the basics: “In yoga or writing—or in practicing any art or skill—it does not hurt to start over once in a while just to make sure you know what you think you know. In fact, it occurs to me this is also why teaching can be reinvigorating—I know many writers who make their primary living by teaching and who often find their inspiration in writing prompts given to their students. But maybe there’s also something about focusing on the basics that can inspire innovation and transformation.”

Read the full editorial here.

Today, Shanti Arts announced changes coming to Still Point Arts Quarterly.

• Art submissions in response to calls will be free. Everything else about the exhibitions stays the same: 30 artists will be featured online and in Still Point Arts Quarterly with five winners awarded. “The Art of Structure” is the current, open call.

• The journal is transitioning from a print quarterly, to an interactive digital magazine. Paid subscriptions to the print journal will be honored until they expire.

• Because of these changes, subscriptions and single copies of the digital magazine will be free for readers. Subscription sign-ups for the digital magazine are now being taken at the magazine’s website.

Check out what else founder and editor Christine Cote has to say about the changes at the Shanti Arts blog.

The American Poetry Review May/June 2017 issue includes a special supplement interview by Lance Rutkin with Paul Muldoon. Included in their discussion: Muldoon’s thoughts on “commissioned” work; how to approach art when writing poetry about it; playing with linguistics in poetry; structuring a volume of poetry; the place of poetics in contemporary Irish politics; his poetic relationship with Seamus Heaney; and the sonnet form in the current day. Read the full interview here.

The May – August 2017 issue of World Literature Today features New Native Writing: From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock, guest edited by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish. The section includes “twenty-eight writers with tribal affiliations from throughout the continental US as well as Guåhån (Guam) and American Samoa.” In her introduction, Mish writes about the 1992 WLT  feature “From this World: Contemporary American Indian Literature” in an issue “released just before Returning the Gift, a historic Native writers’ conference held on the University of Oklahoma’s campus, the home of World Literature Today.” 

Mish used that 1992 date as the start point for the works she collected for this feature, “to avoid creating categories and to reaffirm the impact of Returning the Gift, I solicited submissions from United States Native writers whose first book was published after the 1992 festival. Despite the simple, temporal structure of this approach, I believe the aesthetics and thematics Native scholars and writers have identified are clearly present in the work.” A full list of contributors can be found here.

Twenty-five years later, Returning the Gift Literary Festival returns to Oklahoma University campus (October 8-11, 2017). For more information about the festival, visit here.

In his Spring 2017 Welcome Readers! section, Main Street Rag Publisher M. Scott Douglass offers readers a historical assessment of the publication’s genre content. Having originally started as a poetry journal, Douglass says it was from the advice of Dana Gioia and others that he started publishing fiction and then later book reviews. Now, he says, with the Spring 2017 issue, “for the first time ever – the balance has been tipped in the favor of prose.” He considers possible reasons for this, but the bottom line: “Main Street Rag needs poetry submissions. We need a lot of them. And we need them as soon as possible or the Summer issue may end up being a totally prose edition.”

Whatever you can do to help, readers. The publication DOES accept simultaneous submissions, Douglass assures – though the website may not yet reflect this change in policy. Writers can expect a reasonable report time, and, according to Douglass, a review by “a tougher poetry editor than we’ve ever had before. . . but that only makes the magazine better.” MSR  takes submissions via Submittable; there is a reading fee which is waived for subscribers.

Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine is “an online lit mag where artists of word and image explore the ephemeral boundary between human and animal.” Each month, Animal publishes one story, one poem, and one essay, and for each, there is an accompanying “cover art” image. The Cover Art page on Animal is a collection of truly amazing and stunning artwork that will have viewers on a slow scroll to contemplate and enjoy each piece.