Bethlehem Writers Roundtable Short Story Award
Now accepting submissions of short fiction or memoir of 2000 words or less, for the Bethlehem Writers Roundtable Short Story Contest. The theme of this publication is Seasonal Pursuits: Sweet, Funny, and Strange Tales. In addition to a $200 prize, the first place winner's story will also be considered for print publication in the Bethlehem Writers Group, LLC's upcoming anthology of Seasonal Pursuits: Sweet, Funny, and Strange Tales. Second place will receive $100 and third place will receive $50. Submissions will be reviewed by our celebrity judge, Jonathan Maberry. All stories must be submitted by February 15th, 2012.
Whistling Fire Guest Editor Themed Selection
Whistling Fire is proud to announce our new ongoing Guest Editor Themed Selection. Throughout the year we will have various Guest Editors taking over The Whistling Fire for an entire month and selecting special themed work of their choice. The lucky few selected will be published every Tuesday of their Guest Editor’s month. We welcome experimental pieces but ask that your writing is limited in length to 3000 words. For more submission guidelines visit Whistling Fire's webpage.
Our March Guest Editor is Orlando Ramirez. Ramirez lives in Riverside, California, where is the editor of La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper. He recently received an MFA in Poetry from the Cal State University, San Bernardino, Creative Writing Program. He was one of the original editors of Mango Publications, and has been anthologized widely and published in Zzyva, Berkeley Poetry Review, Badlands and other journals.
Dear Writers,
Poetry – the best poetry – confronts that line, erases it, ignores it, smudges it with a little spit on the tip of the finger to blur the before into the after.
I am looking for poems that cross lines, whether it be the double-yellow line on a two-lane road; the wouldcouldshoulda chain of regret; the poetic line and its break; the line between English/Espanol; the fungible line between male, female and whatever other classifications we create. Send poems that cross that line and be prepared to discuss the consequences. Any style. In English and Espanol. Remember -- boundaries are of your own making.
Good Luck,
Orlando Ramirez
All poems must be submitted by February 25, 2012.
At Length
At Length will begin its next open reading period on February 1, 2012. Submissions received after the closing date of February 29th will not be considered. POETRY: We're interested in poems and sequences that are at least 7 single-spaced pages long. PROSE: We're looking for fiction and non-fiction of at least 7,500 words in length. We welcome novellas, novel excerpts, memoirs, narratives, essays, and long short stories. No academic papers, please. Simultaneous submissions are fine, previously published pieces, not so much. *Please be aware that we are not yet able to pay our contributors. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but be sure to mention it in the body of the email, and if parts of the work have already appeared in other venues, please note that as well and provide all relevant details. We will attempt to respond to all submissions within two months, and we ask that you only submit one poem at a time. All submissions are due by February 29, 2012.
Two-hundred New Mexico Poems
Two-hundred New Mexico Poems, a blog celebrating New Mexico's centennial through poetry, is now accepting previously unpublished submissions of poetry. Suitable themes include: New Mexico history (especially between the years of 1912 and 2012), environment and place, culture, and personal significance of the region. Poems may be formal or free verse and utilize narrative or lyric voice. Submissions are open to all poets regardless of residence, just as long as the poems are clearly connected to New Mexico. Poems written in Spanish will be considered as long as they are accompanied by an accurate English translation. Send your typed submissions with line count of each poem and 50 word bio as a word document to 200nmpoems@gmail.com. Submissions are open until 200 poems have been selected. ("Plenty of room," as of January 31, 2011)
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Fiction Dismantled
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| Photo by Todd McLellan See his Disassembly collection here. |
As an intern for the Piper House, I read a lot of stories submitted to Hayden's Ferry Review. When I'm six stories deep, running on coffee fumes and chocolate-covered espresso beans, form stories ignite my curiosity and pull me in. There is something attractive about a story that looks like a list, or a series of dictionary entries, or even a water bill. Postmodern experimental fiction allows readers to experience the emotional range of the traditional narrative through a fresh perspective while allowing writers to explore and experiment in their craft with a new flexibility.
I think the process of creating a form is a bit like dismantling a clock. Essentially, you're taking elements of the story—important elements integral to the heart of the piece, such as objects or themes—and using them to communicate the story in a fresh and entertaining way. My writing teachers all tell me that everything has to be earned. That, "if I remove one element, the entire story should fall apart. If not, it hasn't earned its spot." The same is true for a clock. Each part has to work in perfect harmony with the others, or else we lose time.
Here's one:
Hannah Wood's telling of Romeo and Juliet, in Blackbird's Fall 2011 Vol. 10 No. 2 issue, is a fresh and entertaining version of the classic. The story takes the shape of a science experiment that tests the strength of love. Wood adds versatility to her version by measuring the infamous duo against several other power couples, ranging from Daisy and Gatsby to Lancelot and Guinevere. For clarity (and some color), Wood offers a Venn diagram and an ionic bonding chart to illustrate their chemical behavior in any situation.
Working on a form story? Have a favorite story that plays with form? Post them in the comments below. I'll be sharing my favorites in this regular post. Currently, I'm working on submitting applications to graduate programs, so I'm considering writing a story through a personal statement or a gratuitously long and obsessively intrusive application...
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Singing in the Shower: An Interview with Lydia Millet
When I read Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet I was immediately smitten. Millet's compassion and empathy are guiding forces in her writing. She's an illuminating, courageous voice and she's not afraid to push the boundaries of our readerly world. Millet challenges us to step outside our comfort zone and to move beyond what we know into the unknown territory of her character's lives and circumstances. In short, she's one of the best writer's to ever grace the page. Below is a Q & A that Millet patiently conducted with me via email.
I’ll start at the literal beginning. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Honestly, I think I knew it when I realized I wouldn’t be an opera singer. This happened during college, when I noticed I was happiest singing not in front of crowds but in the shower.
When writer’s “sing in the shower” of their novels, short stories etc. what should these songs sound like?
I think contemporary fiction needs to move beyond the interpersonal sphere more often and into the metaphysical and the moral. We have to live our fictions not only for instant pleasure but for enlightenment and compassion.
What do you find most difficult about being a writer?
There’s a certain lack of power, riches and fame attendant upon the profession, at least as I practice it. Then again, I don’t know that any of those would sit well with me in real life. People who have those things tend to abuse them. Also they require attention, which I prefer to give simply to writing itself. On a practical level, I don’t like how long it takes for manuscripts to be turned into books. I’d love to be able to promote a book as soon as I finished writing it, so that I’d have the force and vigor of new love in the act of promotion as well as in the act of writing. For me it’s a shame to have to promote one thing while I’m already immersed in the next, or even two books later or three.
What writers have influenced your work?
The list of what I've read and loved is a long one. I can name a handful of writers who had a particular effect on me—C.S. Lewis and Dr. Seuss when I was a kid, and still today, for idealism and the quality of their imaginations; Thomas Bernhard, the great Austrian writer, for meditative space and the play between self-awareness and self-blindness; William Gaddis, for controlled chaos and good dialogue; Virginia Woolf, for beauty and the play of light; a whole raft of European novelists. For humor, Karel Capek's allegory War With the Newts. The past few years, I read my contemporaries pretty voraciously, to know what's being said and how.
On the level of craft, what are you most concerned about?
Voice rules.
How does voice rule?
Simply. It determines everything else.
In Love and Infant Monkeys you wrote about celebrities and their relationships to the animal world. What drove you to write about Madonna in Sexing the Pheasant, or any other number of celebrities in this collection?
The Love in Infant Monkeys book sprang out of that first story, the one you mention, which I wrote for a McSweeney's project. I so enjoyed using biographical material to spin out a fiction that I decided to do it again, and again, and then there was a collection of them. I hope the stories also work without a context of celebrity, but fame gave me bits and pieces of information to play with. I've written about famous people before -- George Bush Sr. in my second novel George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, and Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard in my atomic book Oh Pure and Radiant Heart -- so I clearly enjoy it, but part of me also feels it's an addiction from which I will have to abstain in the future. Pleasurable and probably unhealthy.
Do you think obsession for a writer is a necessary evil?
Necessary but not evil. Really if you're not obsessive, there's no need at all for you to be a writer. Or any kind of art-making machine.
And what are your obsessions?
Empathy and objectification, aloneness and communion, the ludicrous and the sublime.
You mention that you read contemporary writers "to know what's being said and how.” Flannery O'Connor has this great passage in Mystery and Manners where she talks about how there's no new story only a new way to tell it. Do you find this to be the case within your own writing? Do you think writers recycle emotions, characters, and settings and mold these recyclables into something original yet eerily the same?
I like that reduction of O'Connor's and I also like similar reductions that there are only four great stories, or three, or whatever the number is, told in different forms. My own reductive formulation (and no doubt many others'), would be more that the story is the telling of it. Style is substance, particular language is substance. Story is just the skeleton we hang a body on. If we're writing well. I mean you can say, this or that book is about this or that, a man who gets religion after his hamster dies, a woman who eats only red fruit, and that's how we pitch things, even to literary readers. But what books are really about is the quality of their language and the subjective experience evoked and created by that language.
That’s so true. It’s how we arrange the body of words around the idea, not the idea itself. Can you elaborate on this a bit more?
I think I see the idea first, but it only gathers form as the flesh comes in. Our metaphor may have become tortured here, but if plot is a skeleton and the idea is say a heart, then I flesh around practically any old skeleton to get to the heart. And the flesh is the words, and the idea is — at least partly — ineffable. But, er, heart-shaped. Pumping blood through the veins in the flesh. Or something.
Has your creative process always functioned on such an intuitive level?
I used to plan books, and then I stopped enjoying that, so I took more of a shot-in-the-dark approach. It’s kept me joyful in my work. Writing is more exciting for me when I find out where I’m going along the way.
One of your obsessions is the idea of "aloneness and communion." How do you think technology plays into this dichotomy?
I think there’s greater access of readers to writers, and vice versa, but I’m not convinced that improves the reading experience or increases the intimacy of the reading encounter. It may even have the opposite effect, at times. Fictions are how we make meaning out of life, but we have to be careful not to let them persuade us that escape and refuge are the same thing. Life may be a multiplayer game, but only if we play it actively and with passion.
What do we have to look forward to from you next?
Me, next? Next I have two novels coming out from W.W. Norton that are the sequels to How the Dead Dream, the first this fall and the last in fall 2012. The one coming out this year is called Ghost Lights, next year's is called Magnificence. I also have my first book for young readers this year -- May -- which is set on Cape Cod and named The Fires Beneath the Sea. And there are books I've already written that will come out after that, I hope. But I'm between books now and have no idea what the next one will be. The delight for me is always finding out. Which I do when I write the first page.
I’ll start at the literal beginning. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Honestly, I think I knew it when I realized I wouldn’t be an opera singer. This happened during college, when I noticed I was happiest singing not in front of crowds but in the shower.
When writer’s “sing in the shower” of their novels, short stories etc. what should these songs sound like?
I think contemporary fiction needs to move beyond the interpersonal sphere more often and into the metaphysical and the moral. We have to live our fictions not only for instant pleasure but for enlightenment and compassion.
What do you find most difficult about being a writer?
There’s a certain lack of power, riches and fame attendant upon the profession, at least as I practice it. Then again, I don’t know that any of those would sit well with me in real life. People who have those things tend to abuse them. Also they require attention, which I prefer to give simply to writing itself. On a practical level, I don’t like how long it takes for manuscripts to be turned into books. I’d love to be able to promote a book as soon as I finished writing it, so that I’d have the force and vigor of new love in the act of promotion as well as in the act of writing. For me it’s a shame to have to promote one thing while I’m already immersed in the next, or even two books later or three.
What writers have influenced your work?
The list of what I've read and loved is a long one. I can name a handful of writers who had a particular effect on me—C.S. Lewis and Dr. Seuss when I was a kid, and still today, for idealism and the quality of their imaginations; Thomas Bernhard, the great Austrian writer, for meditative space and the play between self-awareness and self-blindness; William Gaddis, for controlled chaos and good dialogue; Virginia Woolf, for beauty and the play of light; a whole raft of European novelists. For humor, Karel Capek's allegory War With the Newts. The past few years, I read my contemporaries pretty voraciously, to know what's being said and how.
On the level of craft, what are you most concerned about?
Voice rules.
How does voice rule?
Simply. It determines everything else.
In Love and Infant Monkeys you wrote about celebrities and their relationships to the animal world. What drove you to write about Madonna in Sexing the Pheasant, or any other number of celebrities in this collection?
The Love in Infant Monkeys book sprang out of that first story, the one you mention, which I wrote for a McSweeney's project. I so enjoyed using biographical material to spin out a fiction that I decided to do it again, and again, and then there was a collection of them. I hope the stories also work without a context of celebrity, but fame gave me bits and pieces of information to play with. I've written about famous people before -- George Bush Sr. in my second novel George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, and Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard in my atomic book Oh Pure and Radiant Heart -- so I clearly enjoy it, but part of me also feels it's an addiction from which I will have to abstain in the future. Pleasurable and probably unhealthy.
Do you think obsession for a writer is a necessary evil?
Necessary but not evil. Really if you're not obsessive, there's no need at all for you to be a writer. Or any kind of art-making machine.
And what are your obsessions?
Empathy and objectification, aloneness and communion, the ludicrous and the sublime.
You mention that you read contemporary writers "to know what's being said and how.” Flannery O'Connor has this great passage in Mystery and Manners where she talks about how there's no new story only a new way to tell it. Do you find this to be the case within your own writing? Do you think writers recycle emotions, characters, and settings and mold these recyclables into something original yet eerily the same?
I like that reduction of O'Connor's and I also like similar reductions that there are only four great stories, or three, or whatever the number is, told in different forms. My own reductive formulation (and no doubt many others'), would be more that the story is the telling of it. Style is substance, particular language is substance. Story is just the skeleton we hang a body on. If we're writing well. I mean you can say, this or that book is about this or that, a man who gets religion after his hamster dies, a woman who eats only red fruit, and that's how we pitch things, even to literary readers. But what books are really about is the quality of their language and the subjective experience evoked and created by that language.
That’s so true. It’s how we arrange the body of words around the idea, not the idea itself. Can you elaborate on this a bit more?
I think I see the idea first, but it only gathers form as the flesh comes in. Our metaphor may have become tortured here, but if plot is a skeleton and the idea is say a heart, then I flesh around practically any old skeleton to get to the heart. And the flesh is the words, and the idea is — at least partly — ineffable. But, er, heart-shaped. Pumping blood through the veins in the flesh. Or something.
Has your creative process always functioned on such an intuitive level?
I used to plan books, and then I stopped enjoying that, so I took more of a shot-in-the-dark approach. It’s kept me joyful in my work. Writing is more exciting for me when I find out where I’m going along the way.
One of your obsessions is the idea of "aloneness and communion." How do you think technology plays into this dichotomy?
I think there’s greater access of readers to writers, and vice versa, but I’m not convinced that improves the reading experience or increases the intimacy of the reading encounter. It may even have the opposite effect, at times. Fictions are how we make meaning out of life, but we have to be careful not to let them persuade us that escape and refuge are the same thing. Life may be a multiplayer game, but only if we play it actively and with passion.
What do we have to look forward to from you next?
Me, next? Next I have two novels coming out from W.W. Norton that are the sequels to How the Dead Dream, the first this fall and the last in fall 2012. The one coming out this year is called Ghost Lights, next year's is called Magnificence. I also have my first book for young readers this year -- May -- which is set on Cape Cod and named The Fires Beneath the Sea. And there are books I've already written that will come out after that, I hope. But I'm between books now and have no idea what the next one will be. The delight for me is always finding out. Which I do when I write the first page.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Recommended Reading
This week's recommended reading: two poems & a photography portfolio.
For fans of: dead animals.
Fact: People are drawn to the grotesque. It’s true; don’t pretend like you don’t rubberneck while passing a car wreck on the highway. But hey, it’s okay. Everyone else rubbernecks, too. And they’re not just rubbernecking car accidents, or slowing down to see what kind of bloody and tangled creature lays on the side of the road. They’re pausing and observing, writing poems, taking photographs.
One of the privileges of art is to inhabit that disturbing space and draw from it, transform it into something really lovely. Andrew Bruce, a photographer pursuing his MA from the Royal College of Art, has mastered that transformation. His images are quietly sad and beautiful. Check out his online portfolio here.
Mute Love Poem by David Harris Ebenbach (from Issue #49) is another example:
I don’t know what to say about the skunk
that our neighbor’s dog killed and left
in the street, open-eyed in the wide and
bitter aura of its afterlife, about the city
coming to shovel it off the asphalt but
leaving a lot of the smell behind somehow,
or about the electrical charge of need that
cicadas have been adding to the air all
week, or about the black ants that cross
the bathroom floor on the diagonal,
or what it all has to do with you in a car,
driving the length of Pennsylvania to
come home, come home, all of us right
here, in this place, finally come home.
The poem drops the reader into that macabre region – a decaying skunk – gives visceral description – that lingering scent – and then turns, moving towards something urgent and relevant – a deeply rooted longing.
Joyce Peseroff’s poem Margin of Error (found in the Fall 2011 Issue of Ploughshares) evokes similar emotions. The speaker begins by acknowledging how inconsequential our time on earth is, and concludes:
“Such a tiny fraction, so little between
.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
and zero, my life
falls within the same statistical margin of error
as a cat struck in the fast lane
glued by its tail to blacktop, thrashing
to separate from skin.”
Peseroff's poem is a reverse image of Ebenbach's, beginning in a universal existential territory and then moving to the gruesome. Both poems succeed in drawing something lovely out of that dark place.
Pick up Ploughshares (subscribe from their website) to read Margin of Error in its entirety, and the rest of Peseroff’s wonderful poems (and please check out Laura van den Berg’s story “I Looked For You, I called Your Name”).
Friday, January 20, 2012
News Around the Net
F. Scott Fitzgerald's advice on life to his daughter. Apparently he didn't find flies as irritating as I do.
With the turning of the New Year, most of James Joyce's work moved into the public domain, ending Joyce's grandson's very possessive reign over the writer's estate.
For the third straight year, the mysterious Poe Toaster hasn't showed up at the writer's grave to leave three roses and a half bottle of cognac on the Poe's birthday. This after showing up every year for seven decades.
Instead of a new novel, Cormac McCarthy decided to deliver a screenplay to his agents, to their surprise.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Unusual Calls for Submissions
REBIRTH ISSUE Last issue’s themed was The Apocalypse. Our purpose was to examine the meaning of the word in relation to what is happening in the world today. We received many magnificent submissions. For the Spring 2012 issue we are extending that idea to include the aftermath that occurs after this great change. Entitled the Rebirth Issue, it will explore the rebuilding of the material, mental and literary landscape. The DEADLINE for submissions for the Spring 2012 Rio Grande Review issue is Friday February 10th 2012. Submission Guidelines: Rio Grande Review is a Bilingual Journal and accepts submissions in both English and Spanish. Only 3 submissions per person. We accept POETRY, SHORT STORIES, NONFICTION, and ORIGINAL ARTWORK. SHORT STORIES, NONFICTION should be no longer than 4,000 words. Please include a brief biography with your submission (1-4 sentences maximum). We do not accept simultaneous submissions. Please attach a Word document and send to rgreditors(at)gmail.com (replace (at) with @ in sending e-mail)
CALLING ALL AMERICAN AND SWEDISH WRITERS! Rufous Press will publish an anthology of contemporary writers from the United States and Sweden. The book will be available worldwide as a paperback. It will be called Over Yonder.We editors believe that there are many interesting parallels and differences between these countries. Americans do not need to have Swedish ancestry to participate in the project, of course. We are looking for poetry, short stories and flash fiction. There is no particular theme, despite the Swedish/American focus. Yet, we are looking for work that is chiselled, concise and vibrant. All texts should be written in English. The deadline is 30 January 2012. How to Submit: Poetry: 1-3 pieces in the body of an email. Visual poetry or images with integrated poems should be in black and white and in the jpg. format. Short short stories or short stories: 1 piece as a Word/Works attachment. Include your full name and a short bio (10-60 words) in the third person. Mark the email as “American/Swedish” and indicate whether you are submitting poetry or fiction. We do not consider previously published material or simultaneous submissions. All rights remain with the creators. However, Rufous Salon and Rufous Press will claim the rights to archive links to the publication. We will not read submissions that do not follow these guidelines! Please send your submission to: journal(at)rufoussalon.com (replace (at) with @ in sending e-mail)
FLASH CONTEST: Each month Switchback provides a prompt and we want you to send us your best work inspired by that prompt. The winning entry as decided by our editors will be featured on Switchback. Contest submissions can be poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or even art but must be 500 words or under. Please send us only one submission per prompt and only previously unpublished works. We accept simultaneous submissions but please notify us immediately of acceptance elsewhere. Make sure your name DOES NOT appear on the submission itself. The deadline for submissions is 5:00 pm on the last day of the month. The January prompt is: "No, that's not funny." LITERARY REVIEWS: Switchback publishes reviews of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We greatly prefer reviews of lesser reviewed books or works from small presses published within the last two years. Reviews should be unpublished and run between 500-1500 words. In your cover letter please specify to which genre editor the review should be directed.Switchback is a publication of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program of the University of San Francisco. For more information visit Switchback online at www.swback.com
Silver Boomer Books has extended their reading period for submissions to On Our Own, an anthology about the widowhood experience, to March 31, 2012. Either prose or poetry is welcome. All aspects of widowhood are acceptable; we’d be especially interested in essays or poetry about how widows/widowers have become “survivors” and learned to live “on their own.” Please visit our website at www.silverboomerbooks.com and click on Call for Submissions for more information.
CALLING ALL AMERICAN AND SWEDISH WRITERS! Rufous Press will publish an anthology of contemporary writers from the United States and Sweden. The book will be available worldwide as a paperback. It will be called Over Yonder.We editors believe that there are many interesting parallels and differences between these countries. Americans do not need to have Swedish ancestry to participate in the project, of course. We are looking for poetry, short stories and flash fiction. There is no particular theme, despite the Swedish/American focus. Yet, we are looking for work that is chiselled, concise and vibrant. All texts should be written in English. The deadline is 30 January 2012. How to Submit: Poetry: 1-3 pieces in the body of an email. Visual poetry or images with integrated poems should be in black and white and in the jpg. format. Short short stories or short stories: 1 piece as a Word/Works attachment. Include your full name and a short bio (10-60 words) in the third person. Mark the email as “American/Swedish” and indicate whether you are submitting poetry or fiction. We do not consider previously published material or simultaneous submissions. All rights remain with the creators. However, Rufous Salon and Rufous Press will claim the rights to archive links to the publication. We will not read submissions that do not follow these guidelines! Please send your submission to: journal(at)rufoussalon.com (replace (at) with @ in sending e-mail)
FLASH CONTEST: Each month Switchback provides a prompt and we want you to send us your best work inspired by that prompt. The winning entry as decided by our editors will be featured on Switchback. Contest submissions can be poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or even art but must be 500 words or under. Please send us only one submission per prompt and only previously unpublished works. We accept simultaneous submissions but please notify us immediately of acceptance elsewhere. Make sure your name DOES NOT appear on the submission itself. The deadline for submissions is 5:00 pm on the last day of the month. The January prompt is: "No, that's not funny." LITERARY REVIEWS: Switchback publishes reviews of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We greatly prefer reviews of lesser reviewed books or works from small presses published within the last two years. Reviews should be unpublished and run between 500-1500 words. In your cover letter please specify to which genre editor the review should be directed.Switchback is a publication of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program of the University of San Francisco. For more information visit Switchback online at www.swback.com
Silver Boomer Books has extended their reading period for submissions to On Our Own, an anthology about the widowhood experience, to March 31, 2012. Either prose or poetry is welcome. All aspects of widowhood are acceptable; we’d be especially interested in essays or poetry about how widows/widowers have become “survivors” and learned to live “on their own.” Please visit our website at www.silverboomerbooks.com and click on Call for Submissions for more information.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Contributor Spotlight: Tory Adkisson
“Wilderness of Flesh,” which appears in HFR #49, was a strange poem for me to write—the beginning, in fact, of a somewhat formally experimental (at least for me) period I’m only now beginning to make more sense of. The stacked lines that begin a few of the stanzas were, to me, sort of daring to set down. In fact, writing any lines that do not conform to the left margin still carries an interminable spark of the transgressive for me, a sense that I am doing something bad, making a mess, challenging the status quo (even if the status quo is me, and all the writing that led up to the poem.)
Something I’ve been doing a lot lately is recycling titles from earlier failed poems, and “Wilderness of Flesh” is an example of this. Originally the title of a poem I wrote as an undergraduate, just as I was beginning to find a foothold in my sexuality (and, by proxy, in the bodies of the men I was beginning to know), I decided that the title still had some venal charge to it, and so it fit well with this poem about the body of a man transfigured into a forested landscape.
Wilderness, as a concept, is key to my understanding of the male body—with its smells, its hair, its roughness—in my poem, and so part of my goal was to bring some images to this wildness. I wanted to explore parts of the male body, or aspects of sexuality, I find alluring that aren’t typically written about in that way; images of armpits and shit soon followed as I pushed along this track of expression.
The shit, or “scat,” as I call it in the poem, was one of the riskiest images I’ve ever written, because it has the potential to be extremely off putting to a squeamish reader, or seem like too much of a gesture—that is, repulsive for the sake of only being repulsive. I think these concerns were resolved by incorporating the image into a catalogue of other body-as-landscape images, and by using the syntax of the sentence (I’m a little surprised when I realize I managed to write the poem with just two sentences) to transform the speaker from an external observer to a part of this erotic landscape, to a humble union of two bodies, in a lone, dark space, into one union.
I often write about the erotic power of the male body, but rarely do I write about love. Maybe this is due to an aversion toward sentiment (something bred out of me by both my workshop mates and the gay bars I’ve frequented), or maybe I’ve not experienced much love in my admittedly short life. Somehow, this poem came to me, a poem that seems rough and tender, that seems rooted in the body but reaches beyond it, as Jack Gilbert says in his remarkable poem “Tear It Down,” to “the body within that body.”
Briefly, it seems, I touched it.
*
Tory Adkisson is a Los Angeles native currently residing in Columbus, Ohio, where he attends the MFA program in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University, and serves as Poetry Editor of The Journal. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, The Potomac Review, West Branch Wired, CutBank, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Find him on his blog and Twitter.
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