Due to unforeseen personal circumstances that have recently arisen for one of our editors, we have decided to tentatively extend our summer blog hiatus by two weeks. We apologize for the delay, but look forward to returning full-force as soon as possible, and hope that we’ll be able to resume posting and introduce you to our wonderful new team members as early as the 20th of September.
In the meantime, however, please do take some time to peruse our brand-new blog theme and leave us some feedback about how it’s working for you. We are excited about our new, clean look, and would love to hear your thoughts about how we might continue to improve our blog’s navigability.
Thank you so much for your patience. We remain, as always, incredibly grateful for your continued support and encouragement.
The LR blog staff is taking a short hiatus from August 11th–September 6th. We will be back next month with new posts, a new reading period, and new members of our team to introduce. Until then, take care and enjoy these last few lazy weeks of summer!
As we prepare to head into our late summer blog hiatus, we’re aware of the fact that several of our friends have recently put out new calls for submission. We thought we would put together a little list of interesting opportunities for submission that have recently come to our attention:
Cha: An Asian Literary Journalis calling both for regular submissions to be included in its 13th Issue, and for submissions to its special themed 14th issue, which will focus on China. Submissions are accepted electronically only. Deadline is December 15th for Issue 13, April 14th for the China Issue. Complete guidelines for Issue 13 here; details about the China Issue here.
Kweli Journal, a publication that focuses on promoting the work of writers of color, is calling for submissions to its Fall/Winter 2010 issue. Submissions are to be sent by postal mail. Deadline is September 16th. Guidelines here.
Kartika Reviewis calling for submissions in anticipation of future issues. Kartika, which has a rolling policy for screening work,is now accepting submissions both via email and through its online submissions manager. See their guidelines here.
BOXCAR Poetry Review and Cerise Press, which are edited by Asian American poets Neil Aitken and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, respectively, also have rolling submissions policies: look for BOXCAR‘s guidelines here, and Cerise‘s here.
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Finally, be on the lookout for the reopening of our own submissions period (in anticipation of our second issue), when we return in September.
Good luck, and see you on the other side of August!
For our Summer Reads series, we’ve asked contributors from Issue 1 to share what they’ve been reading or plan to read this summer. In this, our last installment, Subhashini Kaligotla shares about her summer reading plans.
Subhashini tells us,
“Since I am very interested in long poems but have succeeded in writing them only by putting together sections or fragments, I thought it would be useful to read Paisley Rekdal, who is a master of the long poem that marries lyric and narrative quite skillfully. So I am looking forward to reading her Six Girls Without Pants and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope.
Subhashini’s poem “Sydney Notebook” can be found in Issue 1 of Lantern Review. Many thanks to her, and to all of the Issue 1 contributors who have shared their reading lists with us this summer. We hope that this series has inspired you to explore new titles and poets in your own summer reading queues. Now it’s your turn: what is the best book that you’ve read this summer, and why? We’d love to hear; tell us about it in the comments below.
It’s always exciting to receive a fat jiffy envelope with a book-like bulge in it when the mail comes. So when my copy of The Asian American Literary Review‘s inaugural issue arrived last month, I was especially ecstatic to rip into the envelope. Since the editors of AALR announced their presence online earlier this year, I had been eagerly anticipating their first issue. Their pre-release publicity had advertised an impressive lineup of literary luminaries, and I must say that in every respect, the issue has managed to live up to the editors’ promises.
I’m going to focus on some of the poetry in the issue in a bit (since this is, after all, a poetry blog), but before I delve into that train of thought, I should note that I immensely enjoyed the prose in the issue, too. I especiallyliked that the editors chose to began the issue with a “forum” (i.e. a series of position statements and replies) in which three Asian American writers (Alexander Chee, David Mura, Ru Freeman) responded to questions regarding the necessity and purpose of an Asian American literary magazine. I enjoyed following the convergence and divergence of the participant’s different points of view, and in particular, thought that their discussion about whether an Asian American writer must necessarily write ‘about’ his or her ethnicity brought up some very important questions, such as: do MFA programs disservice students of color by teaching them to write toward a “norm” set by mostly middle-class, white models? Or, conversely, do they force students of color to conform their work to an particular “trope” or mode in which “ethnic writing” is expected to operate? I also enjoyed the dialogue sparked by David Mura’s observations about the lack of longevity that has hitherto plagued many Asian American literary ventures. Mura noted two problems that have contributed to this trend: 1) a lack of financial and administrative know-how, and 2) the divided nature of the Asian American community with regards to whether or not to claim a pan-Asian American identity. I thought that Mura’s observations were spot-on. Young as LR is, my work on it thus far has already given me a taste of some of the challenges that he identifies. I was especially struck by his point about lack of administrative manpower. Administratively, LR is a two-woman operation and our solution thus far to keeping the administrative side of things manageablehas been to keep the magazine relatively small. But what of the future? What will happen if LR expands beyond our administrative capacities? Mura’s observations (and the ensuing responses by Chee and Freeman) touched on a very real concern for us, and served as a good reminder that in order to avoid burnout, we will need to be humble enough to seek out help when it’s necessary while remaining practical enough to stay grounded in whatever way we can.
This week’s prompt is inspired by the story behind Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem “The Man-moth,” whose concept (and title) were derived from a newspaper’s misspelling of the word “mammoth.” While reflecting on the poem in a 1962 piece, Bishop mused,
“I’ve forgotten what it was that was supposed to be “mammoth.” But the misprint seemed meant for me. An oracle spoke from the page of the New York Times, kindly explaining New York City to me, at least for a moment.”
In “The Man-moth,” Bishop allows the content of the newspaper’s article to be subsumed by the wonderful strangeness of the misprint’s language. She excavates the question of what a man-moth might be, and builds an alternative universe around the idea. We are given a portrait of a subway-dwelling creature that is all eyes and all secrets, to whom the bustle of the surface world is threatening, but who finds comfort in the racing and lurching of the subway trains:
“Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.”
I am interested in the idea of what might be done with borrowed and revivified language of this sort. The newspaper-based exercise that I’ve delineated below is only one place to start, but I imagine that one could also get equally interesting results with another type of source: copy from internet advertisements, perhaps? the names of dishes on menus? informational text from a museum, zoo, or aquarium exhibit? The possibilities are pretty well endless.
Prompt: write a poem that takes, as its title, a headline or article title that has been borrowed from a newspaper. What fresh or alternative meanings might be excavated or derived from the headline’s syntax? Feel free to tweak (splice, loop, embellish) or even completely ignore the article’s actual contents.
If you’re looking for a place to start out, here are some titles of New York Times articles that I recently came across, which I thought might make for interesting titles of poems:
For our Summer Reads series, we’ve asked contributors from Issue 1 to share what they’ve been reading or plan to read this summer. This installment features reads from Jai Arun Ravine.
Happy August! Here is our little news flash for the month:
Late Summer Blog Hiatus & LR Staff Changes
Our staff will be taking a blog hiatus from August 11th until September 6th. During our hiatus, we’ll be updating the web site, fine-tuning our submissions policies in preparation for the next reading period, making final decisions about our staff search, and welcoming our new staff onto our team. When we return in September, we’ll introduce our new team members and open submissions for Issue 2.
August Community Calendar Posted
In light of our upcoming blog hiatus, we’ve extended the range of our August Calendar to include events up through September 6th. If you know of something going on or would like to note a correction to an existing listing, please email or message us to let us know (we will still be responding to email during the hiatus, even though we won’t be on Facebook or Twitter as regularly as usual).
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We’ll still be posting regularly up through August 10th, so in the meantime, keep on coming back for more poetry goodness. Many thanks to you, as always, for all of your support — having such a dedicated and enthusiastic community of readers has made our first year an incredible joy.
If you’ve been following the Lantern Review Blog for a while, you’re already familiar with the ekphrastic poem, that is, a poem written in response to a work of art. This prompt is a variation on the idea of ekphrasis and, like this prompt from two weeks ago, gives you an opportunity to play with perspective (except with higher stakes).
Pick a photograph of a meaningful occasion in your family’s history. A wedding, for example, or a baby shower. Maybe even a funeral; just choose an image that tells a story and features more than one member of your family. Look carefully at the people in the photo and think about their personalities, voices, idiosyncrasies. What family folklore comes to mind when you look at each individual? Now think about who’s not in the photo. Someone who passed away recently, or who has been deceased for decades. Someone who missed the occasion because they had something else to attend to, or forgot to show up.
Now write from the point of view of the absent party. Proceed in whatever way feels most natural to the voice of the person whose absence you’ve identified — this may mean you’re working mostly with direct address, description, narrative, or a combination of modes. You may find yourself experimenting with the voice of the dead, the voice of a divorced parent, or that of an uncle who cut himself off from the family. The idea is to forge a new perspective from which to consider your family’s history, one that would otherwise go unaddressed by more normative modes of “telling” family lore.
For our Summer Reads series, we’ve asked contributors from Issue 1 to share what they’ve been reading or plan to read this summer. This installment features a list of titles that were recommended to us by Eileen Tabios.
Writes Eileen,
“For another venue, I came up with a Summer reading list in poetry here . . .
From above list and for LR — I can recommend the following Asian American titles:
Juvenilia by Ken Chen (Yale University Press)
Far far above the typical poet’s first book. Admirably — and effectively — ambitious. Sophisticated. Will make you fall in love
