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Photo: © 2001 George Kunze (colaidian@aol.com)
God, thank you for my gift.
Increase my faith.
Let me make old men
with battle wounds
weep. . . .
(from "Thanksgiving Invocation, 1993" – Maureen Holm)
Grateful to Many, Poets House Reopens
Celebration: November 9, 6-9 p.m. with Stanley Kunitz
Reading: November 10, 4-9 p.m. with Galway Kinnell,
Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Jean Valentine et al.
An Urban Artist's Country Valentine
Brooklyn artist Margaret Cusack's quilt-stitched version
of the quintessential image of American plenty (pictured)
has now become a lickable, special-issue postage stamp.
Exhibit details in this month's Other Arts.
Call for submissions:
September 11 and Related Events (excluding anthrax);
The Desert; Confinement; Erotica; Poems on Paintings; Dramatic
Monologues; Colors; Epigrams; Self-Portrait; Shoes (socks optional).
Consult submissions page for guidelines, masthead for policy, also Bridge City Lit
and Big City, Little pages. Query first on articles over 750 words.
Email: editors@nycBigCityLit.com.
In This Issue: November 2001
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Poetry:
We anticipated a wave of work related to September 11, but with few exceptions, what we have received thus far is a wash of words. Author Joan Didion (A Book of Common Prayer) once asserted, "Anybody can write description." Perhaps there can be too much showing--and telling which is mere exhortation becomes propaganda. This issue offers percolations, alongside a single cascade. To complement the interview with its new editor-in-chief, we have selected a handful of poems from the current issue of Rattapallax. This month's Twelve page features work by F.C. Opalach. The cumulative Big City, Little page adds a piece on the child-level view of Dresden in '45 by Rob Wright and one on Paris by Michael Gause (also appearing on Bridge City Lit/Paris in a translation by Annick Fritz-Smead.)
Fiction:
In Vasi Vibha's "Nyna's Trip to Shirdi," a religious mecca becomes a convention center of intimate employer-employee negotiations. Bonafide lovers in a place for pilgrimage is bad enough, but adulterers? The bus was filling up with pilgrims, worshippers of the bandana-ed saint, Saibaba of Shirdi, Saibaba the original.
Essays:
The Artist and the Nobility of Conscience
by James Ragan
We have ceased to become a country of ideas. The data-base has replaced the dialogue. We are data-basing ourselves into mental atrophy.
9/11: Photo Essay Composed on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights
by Robert Bové
Paul Winston Responds to "Angels and Necessary Ambiguities" (Sep '01).
Articles:
Knighthood: 'Hizonner' Giuliani Bites a Degraded Currency
by Richard Evans (Wales)
The Imagination and the Psyche
by Elaine Schwager
~ .
Creative Imagination and the 'Inspirational Other':
The 'Dramatis Personae' of Writing
by Victor L. Schermer
Ten Mile Meadow Project: A Conservatory of Land and Language (with photos).
It was mowed lately--maybe to show off its contours, its stone walls, its natural amphitheatre. Some added wildflowers would be splendid, . . . A marker here or there, so children could spell all the names. A sky map too, for the nights lying on one's back, eyes on the layered stars.
Reviews:
Áine Miller's Touchwood
by Tim Scannell
In these autobiographical poems, precisely captured imagery of childhood is not abandoned in the busier rush of adulthood. -- TS
Interview:
Breaking into Words: A Conversation with
Rattapallax Editor-in-Chief, Martin Mitchell
In the first of a two-part interview conducted in late July, 2001 by Senior Poetry Editor Nicholas Johnson, Mitchell discusses his twenty years as editor of Pivot, his mentor Robert Stock, his views on the problem of the poem read on the page vs. the poem heard aloud, what most bad poems have in common, and a few poets he admires.
Series on Series:
La Plume Reading Series at Center for Book Arts
Series/Event Reviews:
The PSA's Tribute to Hayden Carruth on his Eightieth Birthday
The Hugeness of What is Missing: "Words to Comfort" at the New School
by Richard Pearse
Free Expression:
Radio: The Battle for Pacifica
by Steffie Brooks
The Albatross Shot Across the Bow or Whose Puritan Legacy?
Legal Forum:
Extradition: Hard Cases Make For Bad Law-lessness
Print Series:
Pending the load of a complete listing, please query regarding availability of monograph reprints of work appearing in June's Vietnam and other issues.
Letters:
"America, do not.": An Open Letter from Patrick Henry (UK)
Only Alexander the Great, the finest general in history, ever conquered that country. Vietnam would seem a picnic compared to what Americans will find there. . . . America, do not send your young men into Afghanistan.
Other Arts:
Poetry Theatre
Edwin Torres's Gecko Suite: An Opera in Three Colors was produced in February at The Kitchen in NYC (See Review March 2001). It appears here in unabridged form.
Textural
The craft of Margaret Cusack's quilt-stitched "We Give Thanks" is honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a special stamp release and multi-city exhibit of that and other work.
~ . ~ The magazine is intended to be read in Palatino. ~ . ~
Note to contributors: To cite your work in the Archive,
indicate the month, e.g. Jun2001/contents/poetrydusk.html.
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