Saturday, May 06, 2006

 

Moving this mountain...

All right...it's been nearly a month since I posted, and the real fuss right now is the fact that there has been no shortage of material I should be posting here...which means, now I'm playing catch up. So, for the present, just an alert as to changes on the sidebar due to recent events: The new Triplopia is up, thus the addition of a new Spotlight and a new Yawp. Also, if you're a writer type, take note of our most recent contest. There's no fee for entering, the top prize is $100, and the only catch is that the poem has to have won a contest previously. Slots are filling up fast, so send your work quickly if you want to get in.

Trip's been the bulk of my work. There is the issue, but there is also letting people know the issue exists. For those who don't know, the core editorial staff stands, at present, at 4, with past contributor and new editor Tracy Koretsky coming on board just in time for our 4th anniversary celebrations--this summer! That's 16 Spotlights, 16 Yawps, and believe me, between those two alone, that's a LOT of Word Document pages (I'd conservatively estimate 320 pages of 12 point font--but it's more than that, and I know it). We're still going strong, in fact, stronger than ever, and just recently, have had a few people take note of us that had not before. Among them, the steady hand of Rus Bowdin, who has been 'personing' the helm of the Poetry and Poets in Rags newsletter for almost as long as there's been a Triplopia: many who read here do know, but if you don't, the IBPC and WebdelSol are among the venerable grandparents of online poetry. Triplopia's yet to get a mention on those pages (and even less yet to get a mention on Silliman's Blog), but hey, you can't blame a guy for trying, and in the meantime, I keep checking in because these are good sources of info. There are others. If you submit regularly, go check out a place called Duotrope, which I think has very real potential to become another go-to resource for poets and writers who are using the web to access and distribute the good words. Triplopia is among the magazines you can get information about on their pages, by the way.

Another source of attention, of late, is a blog Rus Bowden clued me in on, is Books, Inq., the online home of Frank Wilson, book review editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Frank recently posted a call for information about online poetry on his blog, and I think he's a little overwhelmed by the response: there's lots of good info for him, some comments that may be a little too closely informed by some of the internectine nonsense that goes in within the context of any particular poetry forum, but some interesting areas of discussion being proposed by those in the comments field. In any case, Frank's going ahead with the article, proposing a Carnival of Online Poetry and accompanying article slated for May 21. Watch for the update.

Also, if you like your poetry to be backed up with stats, go check out Ron Silliman's entries for April 23-May 4th: breakdowns of recent surveys by Terrain.org and PoetryFoundation.org (Yes, that is the contemporary face of Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine, and the public results, so far, of Ruth Lilly's $100 million dollar bequest to that venerable magazine. Let 'em know how you think they're doing spending the money.)

In other words, a LOT of news JUST on the poetry front here, and even more, on the ground, that I need to get to...but if I try to get to all of it in one post, it's going to overwhelm anyone who might be interested in reading it. So, one more note: in addition to my usual work at Trip, I also agreed to serve as guest poetry editor at poeticdiversity for their May 2006 issue. Two new pieces by yours truly on those pages: a review of the work of Norman Ball, and (gasp!) a poem. That particular piece is about 12 years old, and it's what remains of a piece about 3 times as long. After over a decade of it's steeping and being rearranged, I think I decided it was time to cut that one loose. There are more coming, this summer. Really--poems, and not just me blathering on about whatever comes to mind.

Okay, I'm gonna tweak the sidebar a bit, but wanted to alert you to just a little sliver of the stuff I've been fielding for the past couple of weeks. It's raining, and the countdown to home is, I think, officially commencing. I have 3 months and 20 days left.

More soon--tchitch

Comments:
Hi Gene,

Your comments have informed Frank Wilson's conversation marvelously. It was good to see you bring your experience into the mix--along with the Pushcart, certainly.

What a great response Frank has received. His upcoming story on online poetry has the potential to not only be an event for online poetry, but also an event for reporting news about most anything on the web. Has anything like this been done before, in this comprehensive way?

The Philadelphia Inquirer is big time enough, but with the attention he is giving it on the Books page, as he stated in his latest blog post Deadline extension, I have to wonder if the story will make the rounds into other Knight Ridder papers.

Yours,
Rus

P.S. I linked to Fool's Errand today, but don't have a periodicals list for Triplopia to be on--yet anyway.
 
Thanks for the link, Rus, and thanks for all your work. I think these last couple of weeks have really found me feeling genuinely energetic about contemporary poetics...which is a welcome development. I suppose I always have been, but the funny thing is, I always feel like I could be doing more.

Frank was kind enough to e-mail me. I e-mailed back. He warned me that his article was likely to be 1,000 words long. The archives of this blog stand as clear evidence that I could write 1,000 words on the subject and not even break a sweat: the challenge would be to get something finished in that small a space. I think my response at least doubled that amount. Dunno if he can use any of it, but it's there for him. Anyway, once the article comes out, I'm thinking to post my full response here, for the "benefit" of anyone who is interested in such subjects.

I still have to sort out my own publication links, though with Duotrope over there on the sidebar, any publication list I could offer would be redundant, to say the least. So I fully understand. I think my comments re: Silliman's blog are mostly because I have a deep respect for what he's done over there, and were Triplopia's name ever to pop up in his musings, I would consider it a very real achievement. And the fact is, with his poetry blog roll (which is extensive, and with some relatively well known names there...), he does link to this site.

I see you live in Lowell, hometown of one of my literary papas--after a pre-pubescent fling with Mr. King, and an adolescent fascination with Mr. Kesey, my first extensive exploration of a single writer was Kerouac. I think I really like writers whose surnames begin with K. What an editorial standard. Way back when, well, okay, yeah, about a decade ago, my wife (then girlfriend) and I circumnavigated the lower 48 by Greyhound, had a friend in Boston who put us up for a while, and we made the trek to Lowell, saw the memorial, then spent the rest of the day tromping around in the hot summer sun looking for a graveyard. Never found it, and eventually gave it up as a bad cause. If I ever find myself passing through again, I plan on dropping an e-mail your way, in the hopes of getting directions this time around.

Thanks again for dropping by, and keep up the good work.

--tchitch
 
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