Live Performances/Recording Sessions/Radio Broadcasts

Call for submissions:
(Note: List is not restrictive nor preclusive of other themes.)
Colors; Erotica; Dramatic Monologue (poetry: e.g. "My Last Dutchess"); Epigrams; Self-Portrait; Moving/Motion; Dust; Corridors; Insects; Cemeteries; Hunting and Predation; Smoking; Infanticide; Music; Japan; Montreal/Quebec (surtout francophone); Surrealism; Monsters/Monstrosity (also images); Timepieces; Kites; Suicide.
Consult Submissions for guidelines,Masthead for editorial policy, also Bridge City Lit and Big City, Little pages.
Query first on articles over 750 words.
editors@nycBigCityLit.com.

The magazine's Spring poetry/fiction contest brought a far-fetched response.
Here, after some delay, are the RESULTS. A sampling is scheduled to appear in the October issue.

In This Issue: September 2002

The July issue is still available in a bright, full-format newsstand version. ($10)
[Orders/Locations]

Poetry:
This month's multi-segment anthology, 'By Degree 365:  Year One of 9/11,' begins with a Masters Section:  "Centuries are hooped together…". Next, a Special Selected ("Point of Entry") is led by Robert Klein Engler's poem, "The Accomplishment of Metaphor and the Necessity of Suffering (in the Modernist Style)". Engler's remarkable grand écrivain farewell to fin-(du vintième)-siècle decadence is complemented by Sharon Olinka's fictive-historical poems on the Turkish destruction of Smyrna in September, 1922—just as Eliot's The Waste Land was establishing the new, 20th century trope.
Excerpts from two new Headwaters releases—Gail Segal's 12-part "Vade Mecum," which presages the internal flames of 9/11, and Vicki Hudspith's Within the Hour, a year's 9/11 collection—complete the segment. Both new releases are scheduled for launch at the "Degree 365" event at the MCNY on 9/14, along with Alexis Quinlan's Letters from the Front (Street) (excerpted here in a "Longer Draughts" special).
Work by Sophie Cabot Black, Mervyn Taylor, George Dickerson, and twenty-five other individual contributions address Year One in our 6-part "Points of the Circle," deepening the response since the Mar '02 issue's 'Living in the Falling Apart' WTC special.
Our hand-picked Twelve page features ongoing risks of invasion from Michael Graves ("Burqa"), David Goldstein, Andrew Oldham, Kimberly Burwick, Jim Boring, Sharon Olinka, and Cathy McArthur. The cumulative Big City, Little page adds work on Los Angles by Desmond Croan, from his cycle on that city.

Fiction/Short Prose:
David P. Follman's story, "Breathe Till Bleecker Street", overcomes is with might-have-been, while Terrence Dunn's pint-sized hero from "In A Single Bound" is drained fighting was and might-be-again.
Jeffrey Selin, temporarily displaced from the Oregon mountains, lives "A Foreign War in Progress on Our Streets," while Paul Murphy hies it in disguise to a personal alp in "A Hannibal Dummy Elephant".

Special:  Longer Draughts
Letters from the Front (Street)
by Alexis Quinlan
Intimate excerpts from the weeks
when seaport breathing hurt…
Essays:
By Degree 365:  The Earth's Rotational Wobble
by Maureen Holm, Senior Essayist
Over and over, my brother drove the moment to its crisis. A high-flown Los Alamos theoretician, Darryl took a six-month break from chaos and thermodynamics to spin tops at his desk; for all his second-nature science, as fascinated as a pre-Copernican kid with a dredl.

Towards a City of the Imagination:  How I Wrote the Smyrna Poems
by Sharon Olinka
September, 1922:  Smyrna was the site of the first mass-scale genocide in the 20th century. Approximately one million Greeks and 1.5 million Armenians were killed before, during, or directly after Attaturk's invasion.

The Disaster We Dreamed Of
by Elizabeth Seay
Ken sniffed the air. "Smells like Kuwait," he said. "The oilfields burning."  . . . This exploring of the wreckage was what all our lunches at the Odeon had prepared us for, what we'd dreamed of, in a way.

Silent as the Aftermath at Gettysburg
by Paul McDonald
I refuse to look at the photo-laden coffee-table books. I couldn't care less that the September 14th Time magazine is a collector's item.

In Memoriam
by Brian P. Katz
I was like this before 9/11—petty, self-absorbed, misanthropic—but I've became more pathetic in my exaggerations with the "It could have been me" syndrome and the "I've been on that flight" response.

Articles:
The Fish Market Reopens
by Alexis Quinlan

Biking into New York's Past
by Elizabeth Seay
On this night, Lower Manhattan seemed like a maze where all roads led to the same place. It emanated down every side street:  smoke, the grinding of machinery, and the glow of klieg lights, brighter than in Times Square.

Ten Mile Meadow Project: A Conservatory of Land and Language (with photos)

Reviews:
Major Jackson's Leaving Saturn
Transcendent Liberation in Flight
by George Held
In this winning debut collection, Jackson begins as a poet of the Philadelphia projects, then projects himself into the wider arena of American literature.

Series on Series:
The Dodge Festival at Waterloo, 9/19-22
The New Yorker Festival, 9/27-29
The Albany Wordfest at Thacher State Park (Voorhesville), 9/28

Other Arts: Theatre — Bryden MacDonald's Divinity Bash/Nine Lives
Divinity at the Pantheon
by Aileen Reyes
MacDonald seems to have endowed each of his "beautiful losers" with a facility for philosophy, a recognition of beauty and truth, which romanticizes the underworld of junkies, rent-boys, and transsexuals to the point of exaltation. He almost doesn't get away with it.

Free Expression:
Breaking the Fast Food Chain: Upper West Side Neighborhood United in Self-Determination

Legal Forum:
From Gravy Train to 24-Mule Team Borax:  Excessive Tax Breaks to U.S. Exporters Provoke Retaliatory European Trade Tariffs [pending]

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 on back-order. We are preparing Big City Lit's Brightest Lights collection for 2001.


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.

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.