NewPages Blog

PRISM international – Canada’s oldest literary magazine with its first issue published in 1959 – has taken a huge step in preserving its history. The Prism staff initiated and funded the digitization of its entire archive of magazines. The University of British Columbia’s Digitization Centre completed the task over a four-month period, making 194 issues available online; new issues will be added when published. “The digitization of PRISM international’s archives is an important step in preserving and promoting influential literature, both Canadian and international,” says current Poetry Editor, Dominique Bernier-Cormier, “connecting different communities, and generations, of writers and readers.”

Promotions Editor Claire Matthews entices readers to dig into the past issues, “You can check our early works by writers such as recently [Governor General Literary Award] nominated Robyn Sarah whose work first appeared in PRISM 13:1 [Summer 1973] or Seamus Heaney, who published two poems in issue 12:1 [Summer 1972]. In 1996, PRISM also managed to publish a translation by Seamus Heaney of the Irish poem ‘The Yellow Bittern,’ originally written by the 17th-18th century poet Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna. In a brief interview, Sarah O’Leary, author of When You Were Small (Simply Read Books, 2008), divulges how she was able to get her hands on work while she editor of PRISM international.”

The Fall/Winter 2015 issue of University of Alambama’s Black Warrior Review features the latest in their chapbook series: Loudermilk by Colin Winnette, author of Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio, 2015), Coyote (Les Figues Press, 2015), Fondly (Atticus Books, 2013), Animal Collection (Spork Press, 2012) and Revelation (Mutable Sound, 2011).

“Just what makes an essay literary ?” begins David H. Lynn’s Editor’s Notes in the Nov/Dec 2015 issue of Kenyon Review. “I’ve been challenged on that recently, not least because I’d like to extend the capaciousness of creative categories. These notes provide an early opportunity.”

Included in his discussion were these comments:

• Referencing Montaigne – “typically founded on memoir, reflection, or some other form of particular personal experience.”
• The writing can be “rich with the lyricism, the punch of fine fiction”; employ “rhythms, repetitions, and dramatically significant details.”
• “engages something external in the world and undertakes the research or journey necessary to bring the subject back to readers for reflection and meditation and greater knowledge.”
• Language: “Its rhythms, its diction, its metaphors are more than merely precise and effective—they exhibit a particular beauty of sound and sense and expression.”
• “The end here for the reader is pleasure. And literary writing strives always toward such feelings. We delight in, for example, le mot juste.”
• “the experience of fully engaging an essay’s tenor—the argument or subject or meaning—may sweep a reader toward a far deeper sense of fulfillment.”
• Reading the literary essay is “a process that catalyzes us into seeing in a new way, to grasping what may intuitively lie beyond language itself.”
• “readers themselves, engaged and moved by sharing in the transformative experience of the narrator, are not only enabled to see the world differently, they themselves are subtly but meaningfully transformed by the crucible of the literary.”

Read the full edtiorial here.

The newest issue of The Sewanee Review (Fall 2015) focuses on war literature with Architecture of Death: War and the Literature of War. The feature includes fiction and poetry as well as essays by Richard Tillinghast on Nathan Bedford Forrest and Robert Lacy on the home front during WWII along with essays by George Bornstein, Gerald L. Smith, Christopher Thornton, and Robert G. Walker. Jeffrey Meyers’ essay “Hemingway and Goya” can be read on The Sewanee Review website along with Ann Lohner’s fiction “The Iron Trap.”

According to the editors of FIELD Magazine, the publication’s “association with Russell Edson goes all the way back to FIELD #7 (Fall 1972), which featured five of his prose poems, among them ‘An Old Man’s Son’:

There was an old man who had a kite for a son, which he would let up into the air attached to a string, when he had need to be alone.

…And would watch this high bloom of himself, as something distant that will be close again…

“Those weren’t the only prose poems in that issue; we also had one by W. S. Merwin, two by Jean Valentine, and four by Erica Pedretti . . . But everyone knew that if you wanted to talk about the prose poem in contemporary poetry, you began and ended with the strange, commanding genius of Edson.”

Featured in FIELD #93 (Fall 2015), Russell Edson: A FIELD Symposium includes John Gallaher (“So Are We to Laugh or What”), Dennis Schmitz (“Edson’s Animals”), Lee Upton (“Counting Russell Edson”), Charles Simic (“Easy as Pie”), B. K. Fischer (“Some Strange Conjunction”), and Jon Loomis (“Consider the Ostrich”).

Margaret Gibson, author of the memoir The Prodigal Daughter and seven books of poetry, most recently Broken Cup (LSU Press, 2014), is featured in the Fall 2015 issue of The Georgia Review. Editor Stephen Corey writes a special thanks to Margaret Gibson in his introduction “for her cooperation with our proposal to present her sequence of poems as a singled-out chapbook feature.” Set off with a title cover, artwork, and a font style different than the magazine’s, Richer Than Prayer or Vow is fourteen unnumbered pages of eleven poems for readers to really sink into and enjoy.

The newest issue of World Literature Today features poetry written about art. As Assistant Director and Editor in Chief of the publication describes it, “In this issue’s cover feature devoted to poetry inspired by post-1950 visual art, thirteen international poets fashion word-pictures that attempt not only to verbalize a visual analogue but to liberate moments of stasis from the prison-house of space. With each poem, you’ll find reproductions of the art that inspired it, allowing readers to witness the acts of transposition first-hand.

“As their point of departure, the twenty poems included in the section describe mostly paintings—oil, acrylic, gouache, or watercolor on canvas, board, masonite, wood, paper, cardboard, etc.—but also faded black-and-white photos from a family album and etched gourds. Several of the painters who inspired the poets have work in major art museums—Salvador Dalí, Elizabeth Murray, Remedios Varo, among others—yet some of the artists are relatively unknown. The majority of the poems featured are translations from other languages—Arabic, French, and Spanish—and all are published here for the first time in English.”

Alaska Quarterly Review‘s Fall/Winter 2015 issue includes an incredible special feature, “They Were My People” by John Luther Adams. AQR introduces the seventy-five page section: “Drawn from his upcoming memoir Silences So Deep: A Memoir of Music and Alaska, Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams writes about his music and deep friendship with Gordon Wright and John Haines. They were for him ‘larger-than-life figures’ and ‘the embodiment of Alaska.’” Adams also shares photos and the score for “Mountains Without End” from A Northern Suite and “How the Sun Came to the Forest” from Forest Without Leaves. Alaska Quarterly Review has generously made this entire feature available online for readers to enjoy.

Without much ado, James Smith has stepped into the role of Editor for the Southern Poetry Review. In issue 53.1, he writes of working with Editor Robert Parham [pictured]: “Over the past six to seven years, I have attended with pleasure to our daily work of the journal, the direct contact with poets, the layout of each issue. A steadying voice, Bob always stayed close to what we do. It is an honor now to hold the title of editor and to continue with the work (and play) of the poetry journal that Bob has long cherished.”

Poet David Kirby also offered “David Parham: An Appreciation” which appears alongside Smith’s comment. Kirby writes: “I read once that pioneer anthropologist Franz Boas told his students that evertything is material, even one’s own boredom, that we should never think we’ve seen something twice, because we haven’t. In that sense, Robert Parham is not only a poet and teacher, as all of Southern Poetry Review‘s editors have been, but something of an anthropologist as well, that is, an observer first and foremost and then an illuminator of the small things that shape our lives and thus turn out to be much bigger than we think. [ . . .] Here and elsewhere, Parham echoes something that Mark Strand said, which is that we are lucky simply to be here at all, and because we are, we’re obliged to pay attention, to respond to the world, to witness.”

Parham will contiue on as Editor Emeritus, and he is honored (and likewise honors the publication and its readers) with several of his poems in this issue.

The Common offers a great ‘package deal’ for teachers who want to use the publication in their classrooms, including discounted subscription prices, plus a free desk copy and sample lesson plans. Classroom subscription includes two issues for every student, plus an in-person or Skype visit from Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker [pictured]. Subscription price: $17/student.

The Common features contemporary literature and art from around the world and can recommend issues for curriculum in:

Contemporary Literature
Creative Writing
Editing and Publishing
Travel Writing
Web Writing
Comparative Literature
Landscape and Architecture
Place-Focused Seminars
First-Year Seminars
Rhetoric and Composition
Interdisciplinary Studies
Translation Programs

The Common editors recommend the publication for high school, undergraduate, and graduate-level courses, helping meet the folowing objectives/core standards:

Help students develop critical thinking, close reading, and rigorous analytic writing skills.
Inspire creative expression.
Encourage students to think of themselves in the roles of editors and publishers.
Enrich knowledge of domestic and global languages, histories, and literatures.

The Wax Paper is a literary magazine “produced in a beautiful newsprint, broadsheet format (22″ x 27.75”) that still smells like ink when you open it up,” Publisher Nicholas Freeman boasts. But readers can also find The Wax Paper online on all digital formats with tech features not available in print, balancing the best of many worlds.

Freeman, founder and director of The Finch Gallery of Chicago, brought together resources from this and Hey Rat! Press of Los Angeles to publish all forms of moving words and still images in the print edition; the website posts images, texts, audio recordings, film, and animation selections in a full archive of contributor work.

Publishing four issues per year, Freeman tells me The Wax Paper name is derived from Studs Terkel’s first radio program, The Wax Museum. “We adopted Studs as our spirit animal while we were mapping out the aesthetics of The Wax Paper. It was only natural to honor him in the name of our project. Through The Wax Paper, we are devoted to continuing Studs’ sensibilities and charisma by publishing an eclectic range of work from artists skilled in their field and empathetic in the depiction of their characters.”

The Wax Paper Editor Hans Hetrick has writing experience from poetry to technical manuals. As Freeman tells the story, the two “became acquainted 60 feet 6 inches away from each other as the famed battery in Chicago’s Mexican Baseball League. Post-game conversation found a common interest and belief that great art must possess a generosity of spirit, a genuine respect for its audience and its subjects, and a dedication to craft. We immediately began work publishing a chapbook, Fighting Love, filled with Hans’ poems and my illustrations. After the publication of Fighting Love, Hans started trying to sell me on founding a magazine. Eventually, I relented, and The Wax Paper was born.”

Freeman and Hetrick took their first cooperative publishing experience into their work on The Wax Paper as a publication open to all forms of written word, image, and any combination of the two. “The first priority of The Wax Paper,” Freeman explains, “is to expand our understanding of the people we share the world with, and in doing so, expand our understanding of ourselves. Works will be selected on their ability to illuminate the humanity and significance of the subjects that inhabit the work.”

Readers of The Wax Paper can expect to find well-crafted, lively work that explores the diverse range of the human condition. Contributors include poets, painters, playwrights, photographers, comedians, screenwriters, illustrators, essayists, fiction and nonfiction writers, translators, songwriters, muralists, storytellers, and anyone skilled in moving words and still images. The Wax Paper features unpublished and veteran artists like Richard Robbins, Thomas Maltman, Becky Fjelland Davis, Roger Hart, Karen Byers, Mike Lohre and Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author Garry Wills who honored the publication by writing their opening essay.

The Wax Paper accepts all forms of moving words and still images for their quarterly printed broadsheet. They are distributed nationally and all written work will be archived on their website. Current reading period is open until June 30th. All contributors are given a lifetime subscription.

If you like six-word memoirs, you’re going enjoy Creative Nonfiction’s Tiny Truths – tweets on a given topic, which until November 15 is Weather. CNF is looking for “True stories—personal, historical, reported—about fog, drought, flooding, tornado-chasing, blizzards, hurricanes, hail the size of golfballs, or whatever’s happening where you are… told within a single tweet. We’re looking for tiny truths that will change the way we see the world around us. Or, you know, simply blow our hair back a bit or make us sweat.” And because the tweet must include the tag #cnftweet, stories are actually limited to 130 characters.

For more on the craft of micro-essays, read The Square Root of Truth a virtual roundtable Q&A by “Fred,” a collective of regular #cnftweet contributors (and named after one of the group’s members), discussing “what a successful cnftweet looks like, how seriously to take this form, and whether it can survive transplantation out of the ephemeral medium in which it germinated.”

This year has brought a number of ways to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Miguel De Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Restless Books has released a new edition of the novel introduced by leading Quixote scholar Ilan Stavans. This edition inaugurates Restless Classics: interactive encounters with great books and inspired teachers. Each Restless Classic is designed with original artwork, a new introduction for the trade audience, and a video teaching series and live online book club discussions led by experts. Each copy of the book comes with a set of instructions on how to access videos corresponding to specific aspects within the text.

The Hudson Review Autumn 2015 features the essay “Don Quixote or the Art of Becoming” by Antonio Muñoz Molina. The full text of the essay can be read on The Hudson Review website here.

“There are standards, and we can be obedient to them. We can ask punctuation to be of service to meaning, in service of clarification, a hand to hold, a breeze at our backs. Standard punctuation is easy and safe and encouraged. It becomes almost invisible. ‘It was good enough for Shakespeare,’ a teacher once told me, ‘it’s good enough for you.’ Don’t be silly, I think he was saying. Don’t be a sophomore, or a sheep. Because he loved Bernhard and Beckett, too, their everlasting paragraphs induced by the substance and manner of what they had to say; there is nothing capricious about it. Nothing capricious about Merwin, whose unpunctuated, uncapitalized lines can look like leaves being blown from the page, light and dry and moving. Like wind in the fur of the foxes.” From Noy Holland’s Punctuation is When You Feel It, published in the Glimmer Train Bulletin #106.