LR News: Apply to Blog for Us! (2011-2012 Staff Search)

Apply to blog for us!

It’s that time of year again: we are once more looking for a handful of talented bloggers to add to our staff for next year.  Interested in writing for us?  Apply by August 5th at 11:59 EST. Please see our opportunities page for full details and application instructions.

Positions Available

Book Reviewers: write short reviews of recent poetry collections and anthologies (lists of books are generally pre-specified, but reviewers also have flexibility to choose their own).

Literary Magazine Reviewers: review poetry from recent issues of literary journals such as The Asian American Literary Review, Kartika Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Doveglion Press.

Interviewers: conduct interviews with poets, artists, and editors; may also be asked to help coordinate guest post series (e.g. our May “Process Profiles” series).

Columnists: We are interested in applications for columnists on a more limited basis (filling Reviewer and Interviewer positions is of a higher priority for us at the moment). Columnists choose a specialized topic to blog about on a monthly basis (e.g. performance poetry, profiles of digital and multimedia poets/their work, small press publishing, poetry in the classroom, etc.). We’re open to many ideas for columns (the more focused the better). If you are interested in a columnist position, please take a look at past successful columns (including Kelsay Myers’ “Becoming Realer” column and Simone Jacobson’s “Sulu Spotlight” column) and include a pitch in your cover letter that summarizes your idea for a column, proposes a title, and suggests one or two sample post topics.

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Bloggers commit to writing one post per month during our academic year term (Sept through June, not including blog hiatuses). More details and application instructions are available on our opportunities page.

We’re also still looking for an intern—so if think that you or someone you know would make a good candidate, please refer to that listing on opportunities page, as well!

Friends & Neighbors: W. Todd Kaneko’s “Northwest Poem” featured on “As It Ought to Be”

W. Todd Kaneko on As It Ought to Be
W. Todd Kaneko's "Northwest Poem" on "As It Ought to Be"

We’ve received word that W. Todd Kaneko’s “Northwest Poem,” which opens our second issue, was honored as last week’s Saturday featured poem on the blog “As It Ought to Be.”

Here’s an excerpt that showcases the poem’s masterful imagery—which is razor-sharp, tender, and resonant, yet just a touch fleeting and strange:

“Extinction begins as absence, ends gaping
like a surgery, a hole in my chest
marking that mythology we call home.
Mount Rainier does not drift phantomlike
in this poem, but here is that old woman,
crooked under the weight of a century.
She waves off that flock of dark birds
thronging overhead, threatening to pluck
eyes from sockets, tongues from mouths,
until all we can discern is the tide washing
over bare feet, the sound of wings.”

We love this poem (clearly) and are elated to see that others are enjoying it as much as we do.  The “As It Ought to Be” editor writes of this poem, “Here’s to W. Todd Kaneko’s muse . . .  She is a creature to be awed and honored.”  We heartily agree.

Click here to read the full post at “As It Ought to Be.”

Congrats, Todd!

– The Editors

“Northwest Poem” by W. Todd Kaneko was first published in Issue 2 of Lantern Review.

Friends & Neighbors: Maria Allocco in the 2011 IWL Anthology

Click to read CHICKEN SKIN AND IMPOSSIBLE TREES

We’ve just received word that Chicken Skin and Impossible Trees, the Kearny Street Workshop/Intersection for the Arts’ 2011 Intergenerational Writers Lab Online Anthology—featuring the work of LR Issue 1 contributor Maria T. Allocco and twelve other writers—is now available online.  Click here to read Maria’s contributions, or on the image below to check out this beautiful annual publication (it’s also worth noting that Issue 2 contributor Kenji C. Liu’s work appeared in the 2009 edition).  Congrats, Maria!

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Maria T. Allocco’s poem “Downstairs” appeared in Issue 1 of Lantern Review.

Event Coverage: Kundiman Retreat 2011

2011 Kundiman Faculty Jon Pineda, Kimiko Hahn, and Karen An-hwei Lee
2011 Kundiman Faculty Jon Pineda, Kimiko Hahn, and Karen An-hwei Lee

From June 15th-19th, two Lantern Review staff members (Editor Iris A. Law and Staff Writer Henry W. Leung) attended the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Retreat at Fordham University in New York City.  What follows are our reflections on our experiences there.

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I. Iris

A few weeks ago, I stepped out of a D train in the Bronx and trundled my suitcase up the hill toward my very first Kundiman Retreat. Fordham Road greeted me with its jumble and racket: taxis honked their way down the street; motorcycles revved; teenagers laughed over the tinkling of a Mr. Softee van; shop owners shouted from behind racks of merchandise that spilled colorfully onto the sidewalk; a child descended uneasily from a bus and promptly vomited on the pavement. It felt strange to enter the gated, manicured space of the Rose Hill campus—ostrich-like; irresponsible, almost. But once swaddled into this beautifully (even eerily) verdant setting, it was also difficult not to feel that this was a space that in some way enacted the purpose of Kundiman: a place in which the creative soul could clear space within itself so that new patches of greenness could be sown and take root—not in isolation from the world, but in juxtaposition with, and in the context of, the world. I was reminded of something that I’d read in an interview Sarah Gambito gave to The Fordham Observer. In order to write in New York, she remarks, she tries “to be as still as [she] can in the city.” Indeed, to be a writer is to live in a position of simultaneous privilege and responsibility. As participants in social communities, we hold a responsibility to live fully in the world, so that we can write into, for, and from those communities. But at the same time, the work of the writer cannot be completed without the ability to occasionally take a step back: to be a still, small, open receptacle to the world, but a simultaneous processor of that world. And the lens with which we process—with which we must enact our craft—requires, from time to time, the ability to allow ourselves space to wrestle with the work itself, and with the world surrounding the work.

Continue reading “Event Coverage: Kundiman Retreat 2011” →

Weekly Prompt: “Stealing”

On the subject of "stealing" poems from the observed world: a "steal-worthy" orthographical variation? (Bag reads "Roos Beep").

Today’s exercise is less of a prompt and more of a practice, but having just returned from the 2011 Kundiman retreat—at which Oliver de la Paz announced on the first day that he fully intended to “steal” from each of us, and where Kimiko Hahn shared a lovely collaborative variation of a “stealing” exercise during my final workshop of the weekend—I wanted to continue the chain and extend the same thought to you.

Perhaps the term “stealing” is a bit harsh-sounding—”recycling,” “quoting,” or “riffing” might be more a more genteel way to put it, since what it involves is not outright plagiarism, so much as a process of exploring new avenues through “sampling” and strategic mimicry—but somehow it still feels apropos, as the delightful discovery and surprise that occurs when one takes something that one admires and puts it into a different context, tinkers with it, uses it as a launching pad or a frame, embeds it, or layers it with one’s own work, does in part come from the feeling that one is doing something utterly subversive.  Socially and culturally, we tend to envision the artist as a lonely figure who operates entirely self-sufficiently—the work, and its every element, must come out of her head and her head alone.  But in fact, in our daily lives as artists, we are engaged in a perpetual process of “stealing”: we observe things in the world around us—the quality of light on a bedspread, the deep crease in a parent’s forehead, the conversation between a pair of girls at a nearby table, the color of a house, what the host is saying on TV, the sound a cash register makes when it opens, the texture of a wall at the train station, the funny taste of food when one is sick, a joke that fell flat at a party—we process them, we file them away, and these things which we file away filter themselves, eventually, into our creative work.

Continue reading “Weekly Prompt: “Stealing”” →

The LR Postcard Project: #009

#009 Front
#009 Back + Insert

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Postcard #009
Poet: Mariailona A. Panaligan

Papang Wore Fedora Hats

They were similar to the ones I
saw on the American TV
channels.
The scratch pixels waving
incandescently like a cheap
candle.
I’d watch the white men move around
the 4:3 in their pastel
colored suits, beltlines hiked up so
high that each cuffed polyester
pant leg flooded.
It seemed hot where they were,
a different hot from our home
in Muntinlupa.
The sun was always beaming
in its flecked way as the
tongue of each ray licked
the skin of the men on
the TV making them look
oily and sticky.
But on the hot days we knew,
the sun had a different familiar
face. I basked in it, dangling
my purple chinelas amply as I
sat on your lap eating ripened
mangos and bayabas. Or on a
really good day, you’d take me
to the corner vendor and buy
me Chippy with some Coke in a
bag that had a rubber band
wrapped loosely around a clear
straw sticking out from
the top, keeping it in place
for drinking. And you would hoist
me on your shoulders and hold the
Coke in a bag so I didn’t spill a single
sugary drop—
andIwould listen to the
crunching of each chip between
my ears one by one by one

as Papang whistled, I watched
the blue brim of his fedora
like the horizon.

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Thank you to all who participated in the 2011 LR Postcard Project.

LR News: LR featured in SAPLING #78

Sapling Screenshot
LR Editor Iris interviewed in SAPLING #78

I am thrilled (and a little flabbergasted) to announce that an interview that Diane Goettel, Executive Editor of Black Lawrence Press, conducted with me about Lantern Review earlier this spring  has been published as the Feature Article in the 78th issue of Sapling, Black Lawrence’s electronic small press newsletter.  Diane has very kindly given me permission to share an excerpt of the interview here on the LR Blog this week.

Continue reading “LR News: LR featured in SAPLING #78” →