Book + Beer: Betty Superman and Modelo Especial
I hope you’re not an amateur, the type to quaff dark beer in the summer, light in the winter. The sun all splattered as a flung ball of cheese, so time for Mexican. Today, Modelo Especial (of behemoth Grupo Modelo). You’ll need a heavy, cold glass. (If you can, a chalice [or goblet] would be best, preferably one with scoring [You can do this yourself with a glass cutter] on the inside bottom of the glass, to create a CO2 nucleation point.) You do drink your beer from glass? You do understand that aroma, clarity, head retention, bubble stream, the sheer synaptical rush, the anticipation, etc. is dependent on glass? Listen: Do you want a quality head? Yes, yes, you do—it traps the essential effervescent volatiles. What? You want to just release the volatiles like a bunch of damn kids running round the Walgreens parking lot? Ah, Jesus. You sick-ass. You know what, let’s move on.
Parents. Or, a parent, this woman (the men whirl around with all the gravitas of a vacuum cleaner). Betty Superman (Rose Metal winner) dominates, is the word I’m using. Who is she? Mingy fuss-budget. Rueful drag. Lying truth-yawper. Despotic depressive tarantella. Candy bar cad. Underdeveloped sloppy-knocker. God gossiper. Emphysemic tart. Mother. To this narrator. To this daughter trying to figure out something about her mother. To settle something. To grapple, to slam, to lift to a light, to see, to step upon, something. Tiff Holland (several glow poems here) has created a case study of characterization. A repulsion and an embrace. A homage and an exorcism. A bring up and a take down, of Betty Superman, not so easy—she dominates.
Do you even know how to pour a beer?
They Could No Longer Contain Themselves
They Could No Longer Contain Themselves:
A Collection of Five Flash Chapbooks
by Elizabeth J. Colen, John Jodzio,
Tim Jones-Yelvington, Sean Lovelace, and Mary Miller
Rose Metal Press, 2011
248 pages / $15.95 Buy from Rose Metal Press
Rating: 7.0
The problem with collections of flash fiction is their unevenness, or that the reader recognizes the unevenness more than in, say, a novel. Maybe this also applies to story collections, especially non-linked stories, though there are a few that come away feeling complete–to me, usually collections with fewer stories. I can’t think of a single flash collection that does not seem hill-and-valley. They Could No Longer Contain Themselves is no exception. I find it interesting to note, however, that the chapbooks that were linked helped me see past the valleys, as I was always aware of the range. Okay, enough of this terrible analogy. On to the individual chapbooks. READ MORE >
59 Comments
August 2nd, 2011 / 12:02 pm
August 2nd, 2011 / 12:02 pm
Things I’ve Read Lately
I’ve read some interesting books and magazines over the past couple weeks so I’m going to talk about them in one big post. Also, I’m giving several books away.
They Could No Longer Contain Themselves
I don’t care for the term flash fiction. I understand the etymology but I often think, “Why not call it a story?” There are so many terms now for different kinds of fiction. There is an obsession with naming, creating taxonomies so we can better understand the nature of a thing. Flash fiction. Very short stories. Sudden fiction. Microfiction. Nanofiction. All these terms strive to categorize the nature of stories that fous on brevity and compression. Ask five different writers how to define flash fiction and you will likely hear five different definitions. I read an article in the most recent issue of The New Yorker about tiny houses, and the writer talks about the article’s main subject, this guy named Shafer who designs tiny houses and the writer says, “What makes Shafer’s houses different from others is the classical elements of form and proportion and the graceful compression of his design.” I kept thinking about that line as I thought about the stories in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves. They each contain the classical elements of good fiction and the compression in each story is also graceful like a tiny house that holds everything you need to feel at home.
In They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, the latest book from the reliably excellent Rose Metal Press, five writers offer five unique interpretations of flash fiction in chapbooks by Mary Miller, Elizabeth J. Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, and Sean Lovelace (I reviewed his chapbook in 2009, here).
73 Comments
July 25th, 2011 / 5:36 pm
July 25th, 2011 / 5:36 pm
5 awareness that the essential values through which one…lock cat
2. Washington Post with “Three Books on Hipsters.”
Their affinity for tight jeans, shaggy hair and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer is easily mocked, but the principal criticism is that they’re frauds.
11. Rose Metal Press is having a fund drive! For 5 years RMP has been putting heart-imploding hybrid/slash/flash into your taped coins/eyes/tattoo tails/synapses. You get stuff, too. Give.
14. Cult Pulp Fiction at Sabotage Times. Or:
Pretty soon, my feverish teenage brain was boiling over with descriptions of high-class orgies, anal penetration and amyl-nitrate-fuelled orgasms.
236. Did someone on this fucking site already link to this long un-cut interview of DFW from 1998? I don’t know. I don’t. If so, some HTML god will most likely remove it and you won’t even see these words. Fuck.
9. Did you hear Steve Martin was so blar they had to offer a refund? Why was he boring? He talked about art. Martin says:
“So the 92nd St. Y has determined that the course of its interviews should be dictated in real time by its audience’s emails. Artists beware.”
Get off my lawn! Yeh but Steve, you’re trying to sell a book. You are Steve Martin. You manipulated, man. But I like it. This goes under one of my favorite genres of public readings: You expected this, I’m going to give you that. Recently, I went to see a semi-famous memoir writer and she ignored all that and read a dry history of religion. you could hear the air crackle as expectations tumbled into walls. Hissing. Andy Kaufman reading Great Gatsby. Ever been to one of those readings? Like WTF? They glow.
Today in Class
The Definition of a Prose Poem
For the definition of a prose poem, as defined by my poetry class, see above. The class paired up with one prose poem per pair and, based on just that one poem, wrote a prose poetry manifesto (we read poems by Edson, Simic, Hass, Tate, Forché, Mullen, Bowman, Emanuel–most, but not all, from Great American Prose Poems). Funny to write a manifesto since we’d just read Russell Edson’s feelings on theorizing. Of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement, Edson has said they are, “like painters who, instead of painting, spend their days smelling their brushes and easels thinking that a new age is about to dawn.” Of course, that kind of talk is always tinged with a little hypocrisy; there’s always a theory of writing. Maybe the difference is writing out of theory versus writing into theory. Age-old argument, really. Edson has this to say of his proses in his essay, “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man”:
A piece of writing must not only have the logic of language, but the logic of composition. Automatic writing doesn’t begin anyplace, and doesn’t end anyplace. It’s like a digestive system without a defined mouth or an asshole…. [My work] is not automatic writing. It’s looking for the shape of thought more than the particulars of the little narrative…. My pieces, when they work, though full of odd happenings, win the argument against disorder through the logic of language and a compositional wholeness. So my ideal prose poem is a small, complete work, utterly logical within its own madness. This is different than surrealism, which usually takes the commonplace and makes it strange, and leaves it there.
I’d say Edson has a theory, though I think he’s almost been forced to explicate it because he so naturally gravitated toward a way of writing (don’t call it a form! It is a form!) that flummoxes so many people.
Sarah Manguso’s 2004 essay in The Believer, “Why the Reader of Good Prose Poems is Never Sad,” is a great piece on prose poetry in general and Edson, who really is the father (grandfather?) “American prose poet,” in particular. Models of the Universe is a great anthology for a larger history of the prose poem, going back to Aloysius Bertrand’s 1842 book, Gaspar de la Nuit. And for interesting discussions and prose poem samples by contemporary prose poets, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry is good.
So we did prose poetry. Student poems were interesting and wacky, wordy and experimental. As you can see by the chalkboard, our definition of the prose poem does not employ brevity, though we did find lots of interconnected “ways of writing” the prose poem. “The poem sounds like it was shat out” is probably my favorite.
Up next: micro-reviews of contemporary poetry collections/magazines from my students.
We Know What We Are by Mary Hamilton
This gorgeous book is now available for pre-order by Rose Metal Press.
In We Know What We Are, worlds are made, torn apart, drowned. The stories go small: a girl ties a ribbon on a present. The stories go big: a war is raged against the evening sky. The characters in these thirteen short short fictions find themselves in less-than-desirable circumstances. They know their plights. They acknowledge their situations. They give in. They overcome. They daydream a world where everything will be all right.
“The concise stories in this dynamic collection are bursting with moments of stark urgency and unexpected humor, with imagery that moves seamlessly from the bizarre to the oddly familiar, and situations that shift from the ludicrous to the undeniably sad.
Mary Hamilton’s fiction is dream-like, precise, fresh, unexpected, cumulative, delightful, and at times, incantatory. She is a tenacious writer, working each word, each sentence, each image, the way a carver works the stone. It is fun, and fascinating, to see where she goes next.”
—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire
Sean Lovelace Is the Server Working Now
I think Sean Lovelace’s blog is hilarious and always spot on. His writing there makes me not hate runners as much. Like when he did the airforce marathon, I thought that was a fascinating and rugged bit of literary essay.
I also think he thinks that how a thing is said matters more than what that said thing is. That’s a smart rule, a top ten rule, one that can’t be made too elastic. I mean, really, I don’t know him at all so there’s not much reason for me to care about his running habits, impressive though they are, or his disc golf hobby, whatever that is, or how much he likes hot dogs and thinks they are the greatest food on the planteen. But since, blogwise, he often opts to invent a phrase like “hang something all oyster” rather than to further explain a point that is (maybe) clear enough or (maybe) less valuable than the vim of the saying or (maybe) whatever — since that — then I’m piqued and I have a reason to care about all the else, the running and deer hunting and whatever hippy hobby he has.
He can’t, thank heavens, go a blog-sentence without ending awonk. A paragraph like this gives the reader a lot of credit and gives him the opportunity to use language like paint:
. . . I ate my pre-race meal, a mixture of liquids and gels and potato chips and solvents and Near Beer and oil additives. My body felt like a Global Hawk. My stomach did the cloud-cover, the sandstorm. I then descended into the arms of Morpheus.
That excerpt starts with lucid detail then crashes another party. This is the reading eye I brought to his chapbook, How Some People Like Their Eggs, fresh from the Rose Metal Press skillet. How does it measure up?
13 Comments
September 30th, 2009 / 3:24 am
September 30th, 2009 / 3:24 am
Sam Pink—
sean lovelace releases his new chapbook HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS (rose metal press) onto the world much like a mean janitor releasing the class pet just to make everyone sad. read an excerpt here. the excerpt is really good. it has fullness.
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Elizabeth Ellen Rules
I’ve written about her before, but frankly, I could write about her every week. Check out her website for all thing Elizabeth Ellen, including contributions to A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press and a forthcoming chapbook with Paper Hero Press. Here are some power quotes from the woman who was largely responsible for my change in opinion of “online writing”:
From an interview in 3am magazine (linked here):
As for getting noticed…I don’t know. You can always try to be controversial, I guess. That’s certainly one way of getting noticed. Initiate a public feud. Be a dick. Write about it on your blog. That sort of thing. Other than that, I’d say just keep doing what you’re doing. This is going to sound like total, lameass bullshit, but I swear it’s true: I enjoy writing. I love it. I get off on it. I don’t do it to be in a particular magazine or to get a particular publisher’s notice. Not that I wouldn’t be stoked to be in The Paris Review or Tin House or with a major publisher. Of course I would. That’d be awesome. It’s just not something I think about on a daily or weekly basis.
Rose Metal Chapbook Contest Back For Third Year
The Rose Metal Chapbook contest has announced it’s third annual chapbook contest, beginning October 15th.
Having dipped into the realm of hybrid-fiction, and gained lots of notice from online writers (including Claudia Smith whose The Sky Is A Well and Other Shorts won the first year and helped launch Rose Metal into a little monster of a press) this year’s contest aims to publish another writer of flash fiction or short-shorts or whatever you want to call your pieces under 1,000 words (non-fiction included).
Manuscripts should be 25-40 pages. Check the website as the opening date approaches for more details.
