LR News: The LR Postcard Project 2011

Fill-In Style Postcard for the 2011 LR Postcard Project

A warm welcome to all those who are joining us for the first time after encountering us in D.C.!  We are back from AWP, and we’re getting ready to roll once again over here on the blog.  The conference and reading went wonderfully (look out for more about our experience in our upcoming post-AWP reflection posts), and we were delighted to be able to hand out 103 postcards as part of our 2011 Postcard Project.

For those of you who are just joining us, or who didn’t catch the explanation that we posted before the conference, the LR Postcard Project is a special venture that we’ve devised in order to encourage creative responses to the poems that we’ve published so far in Issue 1 & Issue 2.  We made up a series of 116 uniquely-numbered postcards, featuring either pre-selected “shimmery bits” (quotes, excerpts, lines, images, what have you) from poems that appeared in our first two issues or a blank front (where you could fill in your own favorite “shimmery bit” from an LR poem), and asked people at AWP to take one home, to write a response to their chosen excerpt in the form of a poem on the back, and to mail it back to us by April 15th.  The idea here is that we will post the cards that we receive to the blog (as they come in) and that we’ll even choose a few that we particularly like to publish in an upcoming issue.

You can expect to see more about the project—including reminders, and (hopefully!) responses, in upcoming weeks, but for those of you who were not able to make it to the conference, we wanted to offer you the opportunity to participate, as well, and so we are going to give away our 13 remaining postcards (all of which are of the fill-in-yourself variety) to the first 13 commentors on this post.  Here are the rules:

  1. Leave a comment on this post with your name, a contact email address, and the title of your favorite poem from Issue 1 or 2 of LR.
  2. We will contact the first 13 (human/non-spam/individual) commentors for their mailing addresses and will send them each a postcard via snail mail.
  3. If you receive a card, all you have to do is to inscribe a short quote or excerpt from a poem in Issue 1 or 2 on the front of  the card, write a poem on the back in response to that quote, stick on a postcard stamp, and send it back to us by April 15th.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Many thanks,

Iris & Mia
The Editors.

LR News: LANTERN REVIEW at AWP 2011

LR/BOXCAR Reading: Friday at 7:30

Yesterday evening, Mia gave you some suggestions of panels that might be of interest to you at AWP 2011.  Today, I’ll be giving you a more detailed overview of some of the ways that you can connect with us at this year’s AWP.

1. LANTERN REVIEW & BOXCAR POETRY REVIEW Joint Reading

We’ve talked about it before, but it deserves another mention here—the best way to show your support for Lantern Review at this year’s conference would be to come out to the joint, off-site  reading that we’re hosting with Boxcar Poetry Review on Friday night (the 4th) at 7:30 pm, at Go Mama Go! (1809 14th St. NW).  Entrance is pay-as-you-wish ($5 suggested donation, but we won’t turn anyone away for lack of funds).  We have a great lineup of about 16 readers (from both journals) planned, and will provide light refreshments afterward.  You don’t have to be a registered conference attender to come to this event, so even if you’re not going to AWP but live in the DC area, please consider coming out to show your support.  More information, and the option to RSVP (not required, but it helps us to get an approximate headcount) are available at the event’s Facebook invitation page.

2. AWP Bookfair: The LANTERN REVIEW Postcard Project 2011

LR Postcard Project 2011

Last year, we gave out bookmarks and a special edition run of mini-books at the AWP bookfair.  This year, we are trying something different—and it requires your participation!  We’ve made a set of 116 numbered postcards, each of which displays either a unique quote from a poem that’s appeared in an issue of Lantern Review, or a blank front for you to fill in with your own favorite line from an LR poem, and will be distributing stacks of them between the tables that have kindly agreed to display some of our materials (Boxcar Poetry Review and Notre Dame Review).  We would love for you to stop by and sign out a postcard (or postcards) that appeals to you—and then to take your selection(s) home, respond to the content on the front by writing a poem on the reverse side, and mail your creation back to us by April 15, 2011.   We’ll post most of the responses on the blog as they come in, and will publish any that we particularly like in a special section of a future issue.  Not to fret if you can’t make it to the conference, though; if we have postcards left over after the conference, we’ll be opening up the project to blog readers, too.

3. Panels and Readings (Follow us on Twitter)

As Mia mentioned yesterday, we plan to be at the Kundiman panel and would love for you to look us up there.  But we’ll be also attending other panels and events sporadically throughout the conference and will try to Tweet about our plans for the next day each evening before we go to bed.  So if you’re not already following us on Twitter (@LanternReview), please do so!

Editors’ Picks: The LR Guide to AWP 2011

AWP Annual Conference 2011

It’s hard to believe that a year has gone by since last year’s AWP Conference in Denver, but the months have indeed flown and—it’s that time again!

The editors of LR have assembled a list of panels and readings we thought might be interest to readers and writers of Asian American poetry.

Keep an eye out for us in particular at Kundiman’s panel on Friday at noon — we’ll have promotional materials and information about our off-site reading, scheduled for Friday night at 7:30 PM.

If you’re browsing the bookfair, you’ll also be able to find our materials at the Boxcar Poetry Review table.

We look forward to seeing you in DC!

The Lantern Review Guide to AWP 2010 | Events of potential interest for LR readers…


Thursday| February 3, 2011

9:00 a.m.-10:15 p.m.

R108. Mongrels, Monsters, and Mutants: New Identities in Contemporary Poetry. (Joshua Kryah, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim, Prageeta Sharma)

R111. Courting Risk: A Multicultural/Multi-Genre Reading. (Khadijah Queen, Natalie Diaz, Naomi Benaron, L. Lamar Wilson, Susan Southard, Ariel Robello)

10:30 a.m.-11:45 a.m.

R125. Traveling Stanzas: Promoting Poetry and Design in the Community. (David Hassler, Nicole Robinson, Essence Cain, Scott Parsons, Valora Renicker, Natasha Rodriguez)

R138. Creative Writing Fulbright Fellowship Reading. (Katherine Arnoldi, Katrina Vandenberg, Erika M. Martinez, Gail M. Dottin, M. Thomas Gammarino, Josh Weil)

R142. If I Can’t Dance You Can Keep Your Revolution: A Reading by Six Writers of Political Engagement. (Sean Thomas Dougherty, Crystal Williams, Silvana Straw, Roger Bonair-Agard, Dora McQuaid)

R144. Beyond Print: Digital Directions in Literary Publishing. (H. Emerson Blake, Michael Archer, Jeffrey Thomson, Ram Devineni, Steven Lagerfeld)
Continue reading “Editors’ Picks: The LR Guide to AWP 2011” →

LR News: Issue Two Is Here!

LR Issue 2
LR Issue 2

We are delighted to announce that Issue 2 of Lantern Review is now live on our web site!

This tighter, more-streamlined volume contains 60 pages of extraordinary poetry and visual art, and features, for the first time, not only a page-bound sample of performance poetry (as part of our Community Voices feature), but also a special audio performance of that poem, which the artists recorded especially for LR.  Contributions to this issue include poetry by W. Todd Kaneko, Kenji C. Liu, Kathleen Hellen, Aryanil Mukherjee, Lek Borja, Wendi Lee, Aimee Suzara, Michelle Peñaloza, Rajiv Mohabir, JoAnn Balingit, Kimberly Alidio, and Marc Vincenz; as well as a range of beautiful photographic work, including a diptych of layered portraits by Bethany Hana Fong and the striking image of a blackbird by Anannya Dasgupta that appears on the cover.  Additionally, our Community Voices section in this issue features a profile of Sulu DC, as well as the collaborative poem mentioned above, which was created and is performed, in this issue, by three of the organization’s featured poets.

Before entering the issue, you might want to take a moment to check out our recommendations for optimum viewing, located here.  To listen to the audio in the issue, you’ll also need to have an updated version of the Adobe Flash player plugin installed, and will need to have Javascript enabled (more details and troubleshooting suggestions can be found on the issue’s masthead).  If you want to proceed to the issue right away, click here or on the cover image at the top left of this post. Issue 1 can now be accessed via the new “Archives” page on our main site.

We hope that you enjoy Issue 2!  As usual, we would love to hear any feedback that you might have regarding either its content or the [technical] navigability.  Please feel free to drop us a line any time at editors[at]lanternreview.com.

Many thanks for your continued support,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Board

Friends & Neighbors: Newly Released – Kartika Review Anthology & AALR Issue 2

For your edification: two new releases from the world of Asian American small press / journal publishing!  Please help support the good work that our friends at these magazines do:

The Asian American Literary Review has released its second issue, featuring, among other goodies, an interview with Arthur Sze and poetry by Ray Hsu, Kimiko Hahn, Rick Barot, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Jose Watanabe (as translated by Michelle Har Kim), Adrienne Su, Prageeta Sharma, Ching-In Chen, Pimone Triplett, and Jeffrey Yang.  Subscriptions are available for purchase via their web site — and at the moment, they’re being offered at a special discount (shipping and handling charges waived) for a limited time, so order your copy soon if you can.

[Click here to visit AALR’s subscription page].

* * *

On the digital magazine front, Kartika Review has just announced the release of its second [print] anthology, featuring work from their 5th-8th issues.  You can purchase a copy online through Lulu.

[Click here to order Kartika Review: The 2009-2010 Anthology]

Please help

Weekly Prompt: Writing in “The Round”

This week’s prompt was inspired by a writing “pitch” developed by some of my poetry students.  Special thanks to them for their creativity and inventive work with image!

Photo courtesy of Auntie P

In Stanley Kunitz’s “The Round,” the speaker describes the light falling on a bed of roses in three different ways, each of which evokes a slightly different mood and set of images.

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.

As if reaching for the right metaphor, or words with which to capture the moment, the speaker makes a few different attempts, leading to a cumulative vision whose whole is more effective than its parts.

Like Kunitz, think of a scene, object, or picture and describe it in a series of different ways, letting the profusion of images, metaphors, and colors generate an elaborate and multi-textured vision.  Use as much detail as possible and recreate the scene in such a way that someone reading your poem could visualize exactly what you’re seeing.

Now ask someone to read your poem — this is where this gets fun! — and draw the scene you have attempted to describe.  Notice which details and images the reader picks up in their drawing, and how they ascertain larger things like background, setting, and atmosphere.

Review: CERISE PRESS, VOL. 2 ISSUE 5

Cerise Press | Vol. 2 Issue 5 | Fall/Winter 2010-11

Nietzsche once wrote: “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” This dilemma poses a particular challenge to new poetry: can one ever speak truly—much less write?, much less sing?—when language is a prejudice of precedent, when there is nihil sub sole novum and all sayable things seem already said? This question is also poetry’s great virtue, for no other medium is so self-aware and self-justifying. Successful poems are their own apologia, and, by exhausting the fecundity of words, strike at the experience of mystery that lies behind words. I want to keep this in mind while examining some of the poems in Cerise Press‘s fall/winter issue. Every poem published in this issue is written with a mature handle on craft, which means each is already pushing the limits of the medium and approaching quiddity. The poems are of high quality, and for me to select one over another will be merely a matter of taste. For this reason, rather than praise what is already self-evidently praiseworthy, I want to approach this review with rhetoric in mind, with the goal of evincing how my favorite poems from this issue work and what they have to say about their own process.


Retelling the Expected

Patty Seyburn’s “A Year on Mars” is a kind of model of the conflict I’m describing. Seyburn takes up a tired theme—disillusioned love—and makes it linguistically new. Thematically, the human world is narrated with a vernacular of astrology: “I orbited you,” “this igneous adventure,” “everyone . . . bumping into the sun,” “lass stranded on that mythic isthmus,” “Mission Control // is still giving orders,” and so on. This naturalization of metaphor is a conceit of modern poetry, a fantastical irony: we know that people do not orbit one another, but the poem’s liveliness convinces us that indeed they do. The poem’s speaker narrates her courtship and breaking-up, which we can generally deduce, and makes it vivid precisely by depicting what it is not. Each time we ‘get it’ and connect metaphor to perspective, we undergo a constructive experience that brings the poem to life. The language of the poem (at its most distancing when “stranding a preposition, / widowing a noun”) is regulated and balanced by the speaker’s playfulness. The opening fact about Mars stretches into a metaphor—“as I orbited you / before I began to degenerate”—which would be hard to take if not for the next line, which is cute and colloquial and grounds us in the speaker’s personality: “You must be awfully affable . . .” Thus the language keeps us straddling what we may call the common and the poetical. Alone, either would be prolix; juxtaposed, we synchronically experience both a relationship and a cosmos. Metaphor functions on a physical level, as studies have long shown; when we think of ‘hot’ as in ‘sunny,’ we are activating the same part of the brain that thinks of ‘hot’ as in ‘spicy.’ So, when the red color-theme emerges in this poem, our perception is adjusted to include all that it encompasses, not merely that which it refers to.

Continue reading “Review: CERISE PRESS, VOL. 2 ISSUE 5” →

Friends & Neighbors: 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize (Submit by February 11th!)

It’s that time of year again.  Our friends at Kundiman and Alice James Books are accepting submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts  for their annual book prize.  This is a unique opportunity for Asian American poets of all stripes (they accept entries from both emerging and established poets), and we highly encourage you to consider submitting your work.  (Not to mention that this year they are accepting electronic submissions in addition to traditional paper sub’s—a plus for both the environment, and for the money saved on postage!)

A few details, from the Kundiman web site:

Kundiman and Alice James Books are accepting submissions of poetry manuscripts for The Kundiman Poetry Prize electronically and by regular mail through February 11, 2011. The Kundiman Poetry Prize welcomes submissions from emerging as well as established Asian American poets. Entrants must reside in the United States.

The winner receives $1000, book publication and a New York City feature reading.

Kudos to Kundiman and Alice James for continuing this tradition of helping Asian American poets to get their work out into the world. More information about the prize and its submission guidelines can be found on Kundiman’s web site.  Or see our Issue 1 Community Voices feature on Kundiman for more about the organization itself.

Becoming Realer: Going Home

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

1854 Victorian Farmhouse – Photograph by Natalie Grumbles, Christmas 2008

The older I get, the harder it is to explain what I’m doing with my life. Thankfully, going home for the holidays is really the only time I need to. The Christmas and New Year’s parties, family friend get-togethers and annual reunions with high school and college friends are exhausting, particularly when I’m asked what I’m doing now. Getting an M.F.A. at Saint Mary’s College of California is cool but not specific enough, and writing creative nonfiction is not as self-explanatory as it sounds.

I was making Christmas gift exchanges at Caché when a colleague of my mother’s came into the store with his partner. After the general introductions and greetings, he asked what kind of writing I do. I explained that I do a cross between poetry and nonfiction. Then, he wanted to know who my favorite poet is. My answer was T.S. Eliot, though I internally debated whether to name Kimiko Hahn, Marilyn Chin, or Diane Seuss, all of whom have had a more formative impact on my writing and identity so far but are not generally well known. The brief look of bewilderment on his face or nervous silence that would inevitably follow didn’t seem worth it. For conversation’s sake, I said Eliot.

Continue reading “Becoming Realer: Going Home” →

LR News: January/February 2011

Happy 2011, everyone, and welcome back to the LR Blog!  We hope you had a joyous and healthy holiday. Here are a couple of updates to start off the New Year:

AWP 2011 – We’re Hosting a Reading!

Yes, the editors will be at the 2011 AWP conference in DC this year (Feb 3-5), and this time, we’re co-hosting a reading!

We are pleased to announce that we’ll be participating in an off-site joint reading with Boxcar Poetry Review.  The event will take place on the Friday night, and will feature the work of contributors to both magazines. Here are the details:

Lantern Review & Boxcar Poetry Review Present: A Night of Poetry
Friday, February 4, 2011 at 7:30 PM
at Go Mama Go!
1809 14th St. NW
Washington, DC
(Metro: U St/African-Amer Civil War Memorial/Cardozo)
Pay As You Wish ($5 suggested donation; no one will be turned away).

If you live in the D.C. area or will be there for the conference, we hope that you’ll consider stopping by.   If you haven’t already, please take a moment to RSVP at our Facebook Event Page.  We’ll be sharing more details about the reading and about our other plans for AWP as the time of the conference approaches.

Coming Soon: Issue 2

Issue 2 of Lantern Review is currently in the production and layout stage. We are extremely excited to be able to present what we feel is a tighter, more focused body of work this time around.   A sneak peek of some things you can expect to see: a Community Voices feature on Sulu DC (with a secret, surprise element), lots more visual art than in Issue 1, and of course, plenty of wonderful poetry.  Our goal is to have the issue out in time for AWP, so keep your eyes peeled in the next couple of weeks!