Reminder to Check Your Filter

Okay, it's not really your Filter, though it could be if you purchased a copy! What I'm talking about is this: Filter Literary Journal is having a release party to celebrate to celebrate Vol. III, which I described in more detail an earlier post, and you should check it out, particularly if you live in Seattle.

For a far better description, go the the Filter Blog and watch time-lapse videos of staff and volunteers assembling these beautiful books by hand.

And don't forget the party next Friday. Details as follows:

Media Contact:

Jennifer Borges Foster (206) 353-7685

tickerfinch@gmail.com

Filter Vol. III Release Party

An evening of readings from Zachary Schomburg, John Osebold, Stacey Levine, Maged Zaher, Karen Finneyfrock, Ed Skoog, Elizabeth Colen, Elissa Washuta, Susan Rich and Sarah Bartlett . Freshly letterpressed copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Friday, June 17th, 8p.m.at the Fremont Abbey, 4272 Fremont Ave North, Seattle, WA 98103

SEATTLE – The 3rd limited edition volume of Filter Literary Journal will be released upon the public!

Filter Vol. III has arrived. This 3rd issue of the entirely handmade journal is a box of wonder: The cover has a paint-by-numbers theme, and the box structure is letterpress printed by Kate Fernandez of Fernandez and Sons. The book will be filled with brilliant work in individually bound chapbooks of prose and poetry, with art postcards and posters that you can remove and display.

The contributors in Filter III are:

Yusef Komunyakaa, Zachary Schomburg, Stacey Levine, Amanda Manitach, Maged Zaher, Sharon Arnold, Martha Silano, John Osebold, Rebecca Brown, Counsel Langely, Ed Skoog, Karen Finneyfrock, Sean Ennis, Sarah Mangold, Gala Bent, Rachel Contreni Flynn, David Lasky, Elizabeth Colen, Sandra & Ben Doller, Brandon Shimoda, Ben Beres, Brandon Downing, Sarah Kate Moore, Dan Rosenberg, Susan Rich, Susan Denning, Sid Miller, Sarah Bartlett, Shawn Vestal, Marie-Caroline Moir, Lucy Corin, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Jill McDonough, Jessica Goodfellow, Jessica Bonin, Friedrich Kerksieck , Erika Wilder, Elissa Washuta, David Bartone, Chris Dusterhoff, Britt Ashley, Becca Yenser, Anne Gorrick

Tickets for the Filter release party are on sale now through Brown Paper Tickets. http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/178844

Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door, and $5 for students and seniors.

About Filter Literary Journal

Filter is a literary journal made entirely by hand. Each issue contains erasures and other literary art alongside unaltered poetry, fiction and visual art. Filter seeks to represent the work it holds on a visceral level, so that the book is as carefully crafted as the poetry, fiction and art that it contains. Copies of Filter may be purchased at: tickerfinch.etsy.com

Filter Literary Journal is grateful to 4Culture for their funding and support.

End of My Pollster Career

So I am taking down my poll today, even though there are three more days left to vote. There are two reasons for my decision:

1) In the four days my poll has been open, it has only received two votes, one of which was mine! So that means it engaged only one voter really. And this during a week of an all-time-high number of hits to my blog (see reason two below). Either the topic of prompts is not interesting to most people, or my question was badly written, leaving people who wished to vote without an option that represented them. Or maybe people couldn't find the poll in the sidebar to my blog since I couldn't figure out how to embed it in the text of my post.

I'd ask you which it was--I'd take a poll--but given my experience with this poll, that doesn't seem like it would be helpful.

2) The second reason I am taking down the poll is that Blogger has some troubles with polls that get phantom visitors to the blog, hits to the blog that aren't really people. I'm not sure what Blogger is counting, but it isn't really people coming to look at the blog. Some people who post a poll on Blogger actually get tens of thousands of these phantom hits (see this discussion concerning extra views generated by polls), but I actually only got 33. Not enough to invalidate my all-time-high, but enough to skew the data incorrectly. So the poll must go.

For anyone interested, here are the results for the poll.

I asked: What is your favorite kind of writing prompt?
Answers:  Form-driven (1 vote, 50%) - this one was my vote
                Content driven (1 vote, 50%) - thanks to the one kind person who voted on my poll!
                A combination content- and form-driven (0 votes, 0%)
                I like both kinds equally (0 votes, 0%)
                Something else entirely (0 votes, 0%)
                I never use prompts (0 votes, 0%)

I actually only started using prompts recently myself; hence the poll, which failed miserably. Oh well, you can't win them all.

For Fans of Anne (Carson)

Will Aitken interviews Anne Carson on the Paris Review blog.

This extraordinarily personal interview reveals Carson's process behind her book-in-a-box, Vox, an elegy for her older brother. About which the poet says, "I finally decided that understanding isn’t what grief is about. Or laments. They’re just about making something beautiful out of the ugly chaos you’re left with when someone dies. You want to make that good."

When Carson is asked about the line "My personal poetry is a failure," (from the poem "Stanzas, Sexes, Seduction"), a conversation ensues about the sense of failure upon finishing a poem, whether or not its a function of the persona, and how the deeply the thinking is ever finished in a poem compared to how much it remains a surface experience, to which finally Carson answers, "...this capturing of the surface of emotional fact is useful for other people in that it jolts them into thinking, into doing their own act of understanding. But I still don’t think I finished the thinking." Which is a stunning thing to hear from a poet's whose words (particularly in "The Glass Essay," about which Carson and Aitken are discussing in particular at this point) jolted me into my own act of understanding, or it not understanding exactly, then thinking at least.

Which is what Anne Carson's writing does for me almost all of the time.

And which made me question: if Anne Carson doesn't feel like she has finished the thinking, how can I feel that in writing a poem, I have ever finished the thinking, with my intellect and instinct so less developed than hers? Indeed, have I ever felt that I was finished (the thinking, not the poem), or rather do I feel that I simply have no more to add that would be useful to the surface, without presuming about the deeper thinking? Or do I attempt the deeper level (honestly attempt it) and fail once again, a la Beckett, each time? Is a good poem always more useful to the reader than to the writer? And if it's not, is it not then a good poem?

Discussing her academic work, Carson explains, " I never found it possible to think without thinking about myself thinking. And I’m not sure if that’s a casualty of being me or a casualty of being human, so I decided to assume the latter and just go ahead with the project of thinking of me as if it were a legitimate human enterprise and would be enlightening to other humans. So my scholarship, such as it is, is intensely subjective. But because I am aware of this as a problem, I make an attempt to continually bridge the gap between that subjective self and the reader. So although it’s a private vision, it also brings the reader into its vision from time to time."

The entire interview winds around and around the self. Take your self over there and have a look.

Hands Down, No Contest!

If you would prefer to submit your manuscript to presses with open reading periods (instead of or in addition to contests), then poet Rachel Dacus has compiled a great list for you.

Click here for her recently updated lists of presses who entertain open reading periods. Some have fees; some don't. If you know of a press fitting the criteria that is presently not on the list, please let Rachel Dacus know.

What a great resource for poets who are, for the most part, pinching pennies.

Poll About Prompts

When I want to start a new poem and don't have any ideas at hand, I like to start with form, as I mentioned in my previous post, Vroom Vroom, a Pantoum.

However, I know lots of people like to start with content-based prompts as opposed to form-based prompts.

So I thought I'd take a poll. Since I haven't yet figured out how to create a poll inside a particular post, my poll is on the sidebar of the blog in general. Please vote about your favorite way for generating new poems with prompts.

And for plenty of good prompt ideas, largely content-driven, check out the blog Creative Writing Prompts for Writers.

Please vote! This is my first poll and I'm kind of nervous about it.