A quick update on some news we posted earlier this week: Kundiman has announced that the submission deadline for its poetry contest has been extended to February 16, 2009.
To find out more, please read the guidelines on their web site.
Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Jan. 12-20, 2010)
It’s the first Weekend Events Roundup of the New Year! (And of the decade, we might add). There’s a lot of things going on this weekend in the literary arts world. Monday (January 18th) is also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We hope that, in addition to considering what arts events you’d like to check out, you’ll also consider attending a celebratory event or participating in service or activism this weekend in honor of his work and legacy.
Continue reading “Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Jan. 12-20, 2010)”
Friends & Neighbors: Kundiman Poetry Prize Deadline – Jan 15
We posted about it in our December Holiday Roundup, but since the postmark deadline for Kundiman’s Poetry Prize is this week, we wanted to put out the call one last time.
From Sarah Gambito:
“Kundiman and Alice James Books will be accepting submissions of poetry manuscripts for The Kundiman Poetry Prize. The deadline is January 15, 2010.
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 $2000, book publication and a feature New York City reading.”
Application guidelines can be found here. Or, read more about Alice James Books here.
LR News: Suggestions and Upcoming Reading Period
Happy New Year, and welcome back to the Lantern Review blog! We’d like to kick off the year 2010 with a request for suggestions re: topics/questions/books you’d like us to blog about in the New Year. As always, we love to hear from you, and want very much to be responsive to our readers and wider community of poets/writers.
Also, our reading period is opening soon, which means that we will (if all goes according to plan!) begin accepting submissions for the first issue of Lantern Review sometime toward the end of the month. If you haven’t already, check out our journal’s main page and preview issue, which offer a glimpse of our mission statement, aesthetic, and layout.
We wish you a Happy New Year, and look forward to reading your submissions!
Best,
The Editors
Happy Holidays!
As of December 23, 2009, the Lantern Review staff are taking a short break from the blog for the holidays. We will return on January 8, 2010. In the meantime, have a safe and joyous holiday season, and a very happy New Year.
Thank you so much for a fantastic first few months; it’s been an experience more wonderful than anything we could ever have imagined when we first planted the seeds of this project. We are incredibly grateful to you for your continued support and enthusiasm, and look forward to 2010 with great excitement. Happy Holidays!
Best Always,
Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff
Friends & Neighbors: Holiday Events Roundup (Dec. 23, 2009 – Jan. 11, 2010)
Things in the literary scene are winding down for the year, and the LR staff is going to be taking some time off from the blog for the holidays starting tomorrow (December 23), and ending on January 8th. It’s been a great last few months, and we’ve been bowled over again and again by your support and enthusiasm as this community has begun to take root. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be taking time to rest, spend time with friends and family, attend to personal matters, and prepare for LR’s next steps in 2010. In light of the fact that we’ll be taking such a long span of time off, we’ve decided that four our events roundup this week, we will cover a longer time period than usual. The Holiday Roundup below covers events happening from December 23rd until January 11th, and, since there are several contests and festivals with deadlines coming up in the next month or so, we’ve also included a list of calls for entries. As always, please let us know of any corrections that need to be made, or if you have an event that you’d like to add. Happy Holidays!
Continue reading “Friends & Neighbors: Holiday Events Roundup (Dec. 23, 2009 – Jan. 11, 2010)”
Friends & Neighbors: The Asian American Literary Review
We recently received word about The Asian American Literary Review, a new and exciting journal that will soon be available by subscription.
Says Editor Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis:
“The Asian American Literary Review is a space for writers who consider the designation ‘Asian American’ a fruitful starting point for artistic vision and community. In showcasing the work of established and emerging writers, the journal aims to incubate dialogues and, just as importantly, open those dialogues to regional, national, and international audiences of all constituencies. We select work that is, as Marianne Moore once put it, ‘an expression of our needs…[and] feeling, modified by the writer’s moral and technical insights.’ AALR features fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, comic art, interviews, and book reviews.
Our first issue, debuting in April 2010, features forum responses by Alexander Chee, David Mura, and Ru Freeman; poetry by Cathy Song, Oliver de la Paz, Paisley Rekdal, April Naoko Heck, Mong-Lan, Eugene Gloria, Nick Carbo, and David Woo; Karen Tei Yamashita interviewed by Kandice Chuh; prose by Ed Lin, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Sonya Chung, Hasanthika Sirisena, David Mura, Gary Pak, and Brian Ascalon Roley; and book reviews by Paul Lai, Timothy Yu, and Jennifer Ann Ho.”
Lawrence speculates that submissions will likely open sometime in late spring or early summer of 2010. In the meantime, please head on over and check out their temporary web site, or leave them some love on Facebook by joining their group.
Event Coverage: Breaking English
I mentioned in my last post that I was planning to check out an event on December 4th called Breaking English, hosted by Korean-Brazilian writer Larissa Min. Larissa moved to Seattle in 2000, where she got her M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Washington. Since then, she has taught at local community colleges and begun work on a family history project mapping her parents’ journey from Korea to Brazil, and several decades later, to New York City. Her research, sponsored by the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, has taken her back to Brazil, down the streets of her hometown, and into the archives of her childhood library.
I arrived at the event a little late, but found a great seat as Larissa assured the audience that she was running on “Latino time” and would be ready in a few minutes. I felt immediately gratified to be in the company of what seemed to me a different crowd than the one that usually frequents Seattle literary events (where I am often the only person of color present!) The unusual venue, a darkened second-floor dance studio in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district (known for its arts community), was a lovely event space: floor-length mirrors, wood pillars, votive candles flickering on the hardwood, white paper bags glowing luminously along the back wall of the studio… Continue reading “Event Coverage: Breaking English”
Weekly Prompt: Private Vocabularies
Everyone has a private vocabulary (or vocabularies) to which only they and those that they know are privvy. Some of these “private” terms are particular to an individual person’s worldview or imagination (I have a friend who refers to internet survey memes as “salsa”), while others develop in the context of relationships with a particular group of people (whenever our 12th grade calculus teacher told us to “put away the Martian,” my classmates and I knew that he meant for us to stop doing other classes’ homework while his back was turned). A private vocabulary can be deeply personal, and can link us to the awkward idiosyncracies of our families (as Paul Muldoon has reflected in his poem “Quoof”), or it can serve as a fruitful site from which creative production can bloom into entire alternate worlds (as in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Man-Moth,” or Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky”). Private vocabularies can be nonsense-based, or they can be based in mistranslations, in grammatical inconsistencies, or in innovation born of the need to fill linguistic gaps. This, I think, can be especially poignant for those of us from immigrant families in which a language other than English, a mixture of English and other language(s), or a non-standard version of English, was commonly spoken in the home.
Exercise:
Write a poem that draws on a word or set of words particular to a private vocabulary of your own.
Here’s an excerpt from my attempt, which draws upon the first time that my younger brother (who grew up calling me Jaibo, his variant of the Chinese word for older sister), addressed me by my “real” (legal) name.
Losing the Nickname
My real name
fell from your mouth
so stiffly I thought
perhaps you’d coughed.
“Ah-ris,” the sound
of it seemed to stick
in your gullet, balled up
behind your gums.
The word clattered
from your tongue,
scratchy, a stale clump
of bread bumping along
through uncombed carpet . . .
As always – if you attempt this – we’d be flattered if you shared an excerpt of your results in the comments. Happy writing!
Per Diem: The Poetics of Light and Shadow
Per Diem is a column devoted to reflections on poetics in everyday life from the perspective of an undergraduate creative writing student.
Ever notice how some things look really different at night, when there’s no sunlight? I go out for evening walks every now and then, and I’ve come to love my school campus when it’s dark out. There are less people milling about. Buildings loom taller where the sky is gone. Lampposts add a soft, ethereal glow to shadowed corridors. Not that the campus is ugly during the day. It’s just different. There’s definitely more of a ‘people’ focus when it’s bright. I notice students. I notice trees and squirrels and large white signs in the plaza…
Poetry reminds me of sunlight. I think a poem transforms its subject the same way sunlight transforms a place, by altering my perception of it rather than the thing itself. As though I were looking through a lens of some sort, that takes the form of words on a page, and really, all it’s doing is representing the ordinary as the different and noteworthy.
One of my favorite quotes is by Percy B. Shelley, from his “A Defense of Poetry.” He writes:
“poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos.”
Poetry rearranges the rules and associations we’ve taken for granted into something more deliberate, more personal, perhaps more in accordance with our private imaginations.
Looking back, quite a few of the so-called “poetic devices” I learned in English class seem to be doing this exactly. Similes, for instance, liken unrelated things to one another. Metaphors take the process a step further and claim that different things are each other, as though physical form is but a façade and what really matters is the essence of an object. Personification makes me reconsider what it means to be human, what human qualities are and where they can be found. Actually, now that I think about it, even rhyme and meter and other such techniques that focus more on language, affect perception; they ask me to reconsider the relationships between meaning and sound, sound and emotion.
Assuming this is true then, that poetry is the act of presenting anew, I ask myself: Must poetry be limited to words? Are there other ways to transform perception, so as to make the mundane seem absolutely spectacular and unique?
Ben-Zhen Sung is LR’s undergraduate correspondent and a senior at Stanford University.