NewPages Blog

The newest issue of Valley Voices (Fall 2014, published by Mississippi Valley State University) is a special issue focused on New York School and Diaspora. Guest Editor Angela Ball writes in her introduction that she hosted a symposium on New York School Poetry and the South and extended the conversation of that gathering with this special issue, including the works of former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, and David Lehman, who had originally attended the symposium.

David Lehman agreed to join the project as Associate Editor, suggesting Angela Ball include blog entries she had written for Best American Poetry discussing the “big four poets of the New York School”: Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler.

Also included in the issue are student essays and comments written as part of a seminar Ball was teaching at the time, “The Poetry of the New York School.” Ball writes that these “record what graduate students in poetry writing, fiction writing, and literature have to say about the special qualities of the New York School that make it a potent force for leavening and enlivening contemporary poetry in the South and elsewhere.”

It was the change in format that first caught my eye with the new KENYON Review. Editor David H. Lynn comments on this altered physical appearance, but also a great deal more about how he and the staff and editors at Kenyon Review looked at the changing landscape of its readers to update the publication:

“I am delighted to present this first issue of a new volume year and with it the boldest revisions of design and frequency in the seventy-five-year trajectory of the Kenyon Review. Even that last ‘the’ has been challenged. More on that later. But note, please, that not only the look and feel of our magazine are dramatically new. It will now appear every two months, six times a year, rather than the quarterly iterations of many decades. All of this comes after two years of questions and debate and planning.”

Read Lynn’s full commentary here (and how he got cheeky with the “the”).

The newest issue of Mississippi Review (42.3), besides having a pretty swank cover image, is The Novella Issue, featuring works by only four authors: Katie Chase (46pp), Kevin A. Gonzalez (62pp), Jaimy Gordon (28pp), and Paola Peroni (25pp). Rare to see this kind of page dedication to the long form in an entire issue, making this a great collection for the long read.

New England Review editor, Carolyn Kuebler, introduces the publication’s new poetry editor, Rick Barot, in her Editor’s Note (v35.4). Not new to the publication, Barot was published in its pages in the past, then became a submissions reader. Kuebler writes that Barot “has a penchant for asking the hard questions, the big questions: What is NER for? What is our role in current events and conversations? What makes a piece of writing last beyond its immediate publication date? Must it, will it, should it? Why is so much of what we select so dark?” He turns these questions into conversation, and Kuebler shares what he comes to when considering works for the pages of NER. The Editor’s Note can be read in full here.

The newest issue of Indiana Review includes a special folio, “Understanding Readiness,” which is “meant to present diverse explorations and meditations on the impact of the writing, the figure, and political influence of Amiri Baraka” Poetry Editor Nandi Comer and Editor Britt Ashley write, “The voices in this section share Baraka’s aesthetic bravery – one that grabs its audience, demanding we listen to issues concerning contemporary American life. It also must be noted that the diversity in aesthetic and background of these writers speaks to the span of Baraka’s reach.”

Writers contributing to this folio: francine j. harris, Patricia Smith, Roger Reeves, Tarfiah Faizullah, Toi Derricotte, Matthew Shenoda, and avery r. young. Included with the written works are Amiri Baraka’s original drawings curated from Indiana University’s Lily Library.

Volume 3 of Conium Review is one of the most unique collectible editions of a literary magazine I’ve seen to date. “This is a book for book lovers,” say the editors. The “container” is a hand-stamped wooden box, conditioned with linseed, mineral, and orange oils. Inside are eight new stories from Olivia Ciacci, Tom Howard, D. V. Klenak, Jan LaPerle, Zach Powers, Christine Texeira, and Meeah Williams. Each individual micro-chapbook, broadside, and booklet is printed on unique paper, including parchment, linen, and recylced stock. This volume is also available in the standard perfect bound book form for non-collectors simply looking for good reading. Both can be ordered from the publication’s website.

I recommend reading World Literature Today cover-to-cover every issue, but if you need some extra incentive for the January-February 2015, here you go:

1. The article by J. Madison Davis: “The Idiotically Criminal Universe of the Brothers Cohen.”

2. The special section of flash nonfiction featuring works by Brian Doyle, Josey Foo, Lia Purpura, Vikram Kapur, and Dmitry Samarov.

3. The “Suite of Contempory Ethiopean Poetry” with Misrak Terefe, Abebaw Melaku, Mihret Kebede, Eric Ellingsen, and David Shook.

And my two runner-ups: “Storytelling, Fake Worlds, and the Internet” by Elif Shafak and “Ping-Pong: or, Writing Together” by Sergio Pitol. And everything else in between. But I did say I would pick three to number.

New Letters Editor Robert Stewart asks “Does art do much good?”

In his Editor’s Note, “Making What Matters,” Stewart shares, “In my home city recently, a 10-year-old girl named Machole and a 6-year-old girl named Angel, in separate events, were shot dead by gunfire. Machole was in her own living room when someone in a car shot several times into her house; Angel was walking out the door of a convenience store with her father. Other children continue to suffer abuse and violence, yes, but these two events, nine days apart, have caused many people here to examine the kind of landscape—city and country—we have shaped for our children.”

Go to the National Art Education Association News page on any given day, and you’ll see comment after comment from leaders across the nation proclaiming the importance of the arts in education, of turning and keeping the A in STEM for STEAM. It’s not a new struggle among cultures, among communiites, as Stewart notes the Trappist monk Thomas Merton “in a 1962 letter, where he confessed to being disheartened by evil in the world, despite his own writings and art. ‘Tell me,’ Merton wrote to his friend, “am I wasting my time?'”

It’s a question and concern that pervades and surfaces, resurfaces, confronts and confounds wirters, artists, educators, politician and policy makers. While Stewart answers the question in his commentary, an answer found through reading the works of authors in the journal and concluding on the worth and value of their efforts. A worth and value we need to retain and remind others of every chance we get.

In addition to the cover image, the Winter 2014 issue of The Georgia Review features what Editor Stephen Corey rightly refers to as “the striking art portfolio by Mequitta Ahuja” and notes this is the publication’s “second-ever multi-panel foldout.” This is both a generous and gorgeous dedication to artwork for journal readers to enjoy. Corey also footnotes the artwork introduction with this: “Mequitta Ahuja’s Automythography marks The Georgia Review‘s first collaborative project with the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries. Sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Ahuja will be in residence at the school from late January to early February 2015, and an exhibit of her work will be on display at the Dodd Galleries.”