Live Performances/Recording Sessions/Radio Broadcasts

Call for submissions:
(Note: List is not restrictive nor preclusive of other themes.)
Dramatic Monologue (poetry: e.g. "My Last Dutchess"); Epigrams; Moving/Motion; Dust; Corridors; Insects; Cemeteries; Smoking; Infanticide; Montreal/Quebec (surtout francophone); Surrealism; Timepieces; Kites; Suicide; 'Lovesick'; Hands and Gloves; How the Other Half:  Rich vs. Poor; Wells; Windmills; and Small Town Wherewithal
(Bolding indicates features which are scheduled to appear very soon.)

Consult Submissions for guidelines, Masthead for editorial policy,
also Bridge City Lit and Big City, Little pages.
Please query first on articles over 750 words.
editors@nycBigCityLit.com.

Spring-Summer 2003 Contest awards for poetry and fiction are announced in this issue.

In This Issue:  November 2003

Poetry:
This month's feature is "Intermediating Surfaces:  The Sk(In) Between," conceived, edited, and introduced by Laurel Blossom. Contributors include Kathy Fagan, Annie Finch, Paul Pines, Nicholas Samaras, and seventeen others. Our hand-picked Twelve 12 page features work by winners, as just announced this month, of the magazine's Spring-Summer 2003 poetry chapbook contest:  Joan Fiset, Diane Furtney, Brad Ricca, and Leanne Averbach.

Fiction/Short Prose:
Rodney Nelsestuen's "Late", winner of the short category (1500-3500 words), is the first of three stories drawn from the magazine's Spring-Summer 2003 fiction contest. In it, thirty years spent defending an illusory line of scrimmage dissolves, unable to resist the vulnerable. Thomas Balázs's winning "Omicron Ceti III" (medium) and James Simpson's "Behind the Wheel" (long) appear in subsequent issues.
A House Upon the Downs
by Patrick Henry
Any house in this district meant so much. When I mentioned the presence of Kipling and Virginia Woolf, he talked at length about working on both of their houses, though some time after their departure.

Highly Recommended—Essay:  "Junk Politics:  A Voter's Guide to the Post-Literate Election"
Benjamin DeMott in this month's Harper's
The American democratic ideal called for universal, informed participation in the public square:  acquaintance with skills of argument, familiarity with standards of coherence, brains. The embrace by those in high office of dim-bulb diffidence tropes,—macho brandishings of ignorance—trashes that ideal and draws down added contempt on political vocation.

Articles:
'We Hold These Lies to Be Self-Evident…'
Gore's "False Impressions" Remarks at NYU Stand Up On the Page
Robust debate in a democracy will almost always involve occasional rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith, and we're all used to that. I've even been guilty of it myself on occasion. But there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.

Interviews:
Novelists Trump Poets Interviewed on Process:  "Lost in the Cave of the Mouth"
James Rother in Contemporary Poetry Review
[I]nterviews with poets are at best temporizing exercises (to show one is still alive creatively); at worst, a crushing bore. . . . "I don't know the answer to that," Heaney, fresh out of temporizations, admits. Would that he had left it there; for barely pausing to get his bearings, he proceeds to treat a hand that had nothing for openers as though it had the makings of a full house.

Series/Event Reviews:
[pending]


Other Arts:  Theatre
Waiting for Beckett
W.B. Yeats's The Cat and the Moon (1924)
adapted by Tom O'Neil and produced by the Thirteen Street Repertory Company
by Paul Espel
I must confess I've always loved Yeats the poet, but find him no Beckett or Synge on the stage.

Free Expression:
Rumsfeld Resorts to the OED to De-Americanize "Slog" (vide:  "Iraq will be a long, hard…'stroke, blow, violent assault'.") Brother, can you spare 87 billion?

Never Had 'Em, Never Will:  Two Years Before Secretary of State Powell Appeared Before UN Security Council He Asserted Saddam Hussein Had No Mass Destructive Capability

Wince If You Must, But Don't Duck:  Video of George W. Bush Still Hooked on Phonics After Getting Word of Second 9/11 Attack

Legal Forum:
Referendum City:  Division over Proposed Non-Partisan Voting Slates in New York

Print Series:
With thanks for all of your orders by email query, we now offer a convenient listing and order form. You may still inquire about any Headwaters Print Series or monograph you don't see listed here by writing to us. Query Monographs of work appearing in the popular Jun '01 Vietnam issue are now available again. We are preparing Big City Lit's Brightest Lights collection for 2002.

Letters:
(The editors invite for publication well-written letters or speakeasy pieces on any topic of concern or interest to the magazine's readers. See Letters Page for length, language, and other details.)

~ . ~ The magazine is intended to be read in Palatino, and preferably in Netscape. ~ . ~
Note to contributors: To cite your work in the Archive,
indicate the month, e.g. Jun2001/contents/poetrydusk.html.

Rain of One Ocean
The LyR 2002 Carnegie Collection
Poetry (64 pp) $15 (7x8.5 full color cover)


Degrees of Apprenticeship:
Sarah Lawrence mfa Collection
Poetry (56 pp) or Prose (64 pp) $10 each (full color)


Distance from the Tree
poems on fathers (64 pp $10) (full color)
Dana Gioia, Alice Notley, D. Nurkse, James Ragan, Ron Price et al.