For Banned Books Month September 2012, PEN American’s The Daily Pen American Blog features daily posts by writers, editors, literary illuminati, and PEN staff about the banned books that matter to them most. Contributors thus far: Amy King on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; Melissa Broder on Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal; and Matthew Zapruder on Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

PEN American Center is the U.S. branch of the world’s oldest international literary and human rights organization. International PEN was founded in 1921 in direct response to the ethnic and national divisions that contributed to the First World War. PEN’s programs reach out to the world and into diverse communities within this country. They promote writing and literature at every level and are founded on the belief that free expression is an essential component of every healthy society.

American Life in Poetry: Column 389
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Perhaps by the time this column appears, our economy will have improved and people who want to work can find good work. Minnie Bruce Pratt, who lives in Syracuse, N.Y., has a new book, mentioned below, in which there are a number of poems about the difficulties of finding work and holding on to it. Here’s an example:

Temporary Job

Leaving again. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be
grieving. The particulars of place lodged in me,
like this room I lived in for eleven days,
how I learned the way the sun laid its palm
over the side window in the morning, heavy
light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Minnie Bruce Pratt from her most recent book of poems, Inside the Money Machine, Carolina Wren Press, 2011. Reprinted by permission of Minnie Bruce Pratt and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

A new publication of Beowulf  translated by the poet Thomas Meyer has been recently released by Punctum Books. It is edited with a preface by David Hadbawnik, and includes an introduction by Daniel C. Remein, and an interview with Thomas Meyer.

Hadbawnik writes: “This is an open access publication, which means it’s available for free download; however, there is also an option to purchase a physical copy of the book, and I would urge anyone who’s interested in Tom’s work, Old English poetry, or supporting independent publishers to buy a copy. Tom’s translation was done 40 years ago during his studies at Bard, and it’s pretty groundbreaking, especially compared to what poets have usually done with this poem.”

A post on Canadian Magazines blog let us know that Other Voices magazine of Edmonton has ceased publication. Started in mid 1988s, the magazine had a long history of publishing outside of the mainstream. Managing Editor Bobbi Beatty cited changes in the publishing industry and economy as two contributing factors to the decision to cease publication. The magazine website is no longer functioning.

In the most recent issue of Iron Horse Literary Review, Editor Leslie Jill Patterson announces that Managing Editor Brent Newsom, who also writes the Horselaugh column at the back of every issue, will be leaving for a tenure-track job in Oklahoma. “Brent has been a God-send to us this year,” she writes, “a young man quick to laugh and also real sly about calming tempters and quashing trouble in the office. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard as he and I did one day when proofing one of our issues. People passing by in the hallway must have thought we were drunk, howling as we were. I’ll miss him tremendously but am so happy for he and his wife, Amanda, as they start their lives as ‘real’ people, not poor, struggling students any more. Of course, it was only appropriate that Brent, with his sense of humor, created and wrote the Horse Laugh column at the back of every issue.”

She announces that there will be one more column from him in an upcoming issue, but then Iron Horse will start up a new column featuring the new managing editor, Landon Houle.

The actual issue includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from Harryette Mullen, John Hart, Mike Alexander, Alison Stine, Jennifer Bullis, Josh Booton, Ashley Seitz Kramer, Sean Bernard, Karen Regen-Tuero, and Amy Monticello.

The Summer 2012 issue of Western American Literature features Current Western TV. “The essays in this special issue,” says Guest Editor Michael K. Johnson, “suggest the range and diversity of western television. The issue seeks to expand the concept of the genre Western and to expand our understanding of the “place” of the Western. There series here combine or draw from multiple genres (police procedurals, biker tales, documentaries, reality TV, etc.) to create new versions of the Western, and they sometimes expand the setting of the Western to include places other than the traditionally defined American West.”

“While this issue celebrates the rebirth of the television Western in new twenty-first-century forms, the essays also suggest the necessity of critical engagement with a genre that continues to return to us a complicated, sometimes contradictory, alternately progressive and regressive reflection of our own cultural moment.”

Essays featured in this issue come from Jennifer Schell, Kerry Fine, Justin A. Joyce, Sara Humphreys, and book reviews are contributed by Cynthia J. Miller, Corey Dethier, Sue Matheson, Holly Jean Richard, D. B. Gough, Leonard Engel, Melinda Linscott, and John Hursh.

Tin House‘s current issue features a supplemental “mix-tape” and fold-out poster (featuring art from the cover). The editors say, “How could we put out a Portland/Brooklyn theme issue and not include a soundtrack?” This “mix-tape” soundtrack can be listened to and downloaded here.

Tin House editors said, “We invited Brooklyn-based feminist noise-rockers Amy Klein and Catherine Tung of Hilly Eye and, from the City of Roses, the ambient electro-acoustic musician Liz Harris, of Grouper, to curate an epic mix that captures the sonic landscape of our hometowns. ‘The music coming out of Brooklyn is receiving a lot of attention right now,’ notes Klein and Tun. ‘Perhaps because it is being produced by a particularly young, particularly entrepreneurial set. Competition is stiff, which breeds technical and artistic savvy.’ To wit: Fiasco, TEEN, and ‘Magnetic Island, which melds math-rock rhythms with mind-expanding flights of guitar.'”

The Bands

Brooklyn
Shellshag
Magnetic Island
Queening
Fiasco
Hilly Eye
Devious
Teen
Dan Friel

Portland
Pulse Emitter
Ilyas Ahmed
Golden Retriever
Operative
Indignant Senility
Mirroring
Privacy
Cloaks

Writing featured in the issue includes work from Hannah Tinti, Jon Raymond, Adam Wilson, Evan Hughes, Vanessa Veselka, Ben Lerner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Karbo, Salma Abdelnour, and more.

The editor’s note in the most recent issue of Fence comes from Fiction Editor Lynne Tillman in honor of it being her last issue. “This is my fifteenth issue, and my last,” she says. “I figured it was time, which is a conveniently abstract way of saying a lot and not much. As editor, I satisfied a desire to get first-timers published. I loved bringing well-published writers into Fence, and having them share the Table of Contents with newer ones. I looked for and published many stories in translation. As editor, I could select pieces by different kinds of writers, who had varied approaches to prose and narrative. All of this made me very happy.”

“It was an honor being the fiction editor of Fence, and I thank Rebecca Wolff for the chance. What will come can only be terrific—and different. Vive la.”

This issue itself contains work from Denis Johnson, Paul Lisicky, Marin Buschel, Judith Goldman, Geoffrey Nutter, Cathy Eisenhower, Rosmarie Waldrop, Keith Waldrop, Daniel Tiffany, and more.

Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature was awarded to Molly Beth Griffin for her novel Silhouette of a Sparrow. Molly Beth Griffin is the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Grant, a graduate of Hamline University’s MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults, and a writing teacher at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

“Silhouette of a Sparrow is a coming-of-age story about the search for wildness in a confining time—a tale of a young woman discovering both the art of rebellion and the power of unexpected love. Sent to spend the summer with distant relatives at a resort hotel in Excelsior, Minnesota, sixteen-year-old Garnet Richardson—budding ornithologist; reluctant troublemaker; adventurous spirit—quickly compiles a list of all the things she wants to do: sneak into the new amusement park, wander the countryside looking for new birds, and somehow convince her mother to let her attend college. It’s 1926 and Garnet is well aware of the world’s expectations for her: after this summer with her relatives, she is to marry, settle down, and become a housewife. But what no one expects—least of all Garnet—is that she’ll fall in love with the beautiful and daring Isabella, a flapper at the local dance hall. It is she who will give Garnet the courage to take control of her own life and pursue her dreams.”

The title will be released next month by Milkweed Editions.

With the print of their newest issue, CALYX announces and presents a new section to the magazine: an interview section. This issue features an interview by one of the CALYX editors Bethany Haug with Rebecca Lindenberg, author of Love, An Index (McSweeney’s, 2012). The interview discusses Lindenberg’s new book, her inspiration for poetry, and how her experience of gender has shaped her identity as a writer.

Lindenberg says, “Well, in the sense that [gender] has centrally shaped my identity as a human, I’d say it shapes my identity as a writer quite a lot. And like it or not, I think the truth is that in writings as in all things, women and their work still encounter a degree of mostly unconscious skepticism from people—male and female—who are in positions to select or publish (or praise) our work, or give us jobs, or claim us as influences.” She goes on to say, “I aspire to be the same kind of poet as I am a woman/human—educated, inventive, generous, curious, ethical, attracted to quick wit and drawn to big, ambitious ideas, and maybe a little sassy, when the price is right.”

Senior Editor Rebecca Olson says, “You can continue to look forward to this interview section in future issues where we’ll feature discussions with the best and brightest women writers and artists today.”

The rest of the issue features poetry, prose, and art from Lisa Bellamy, Susan Nisenbaum Becker, Jung Hae Chae, Sandra Cisneros, Vanessa Hua, Julie Lein, Stephanie Glazier, Judy Halebsky, Jody Joldersma, Theresa Anderson, Katie Cercone, and more.

In a creative introduction to the nonfiction feature in New Madrid, Editors Lisa Luton and Elena Passarello address the ongoing debate in nonfiction writing—how far from the truth can a writer wander.

The introduction is a dialogue between two characters, Memoir and Essay. At first the two argue. Essay argues that “essayists try to create a new, fully realized contract with each piece of writing, one that is grounded and centered in art rather than proving anything. The trying is what turns us on, and hopefully what turns readers on. Why put art first? Because art is greater than fact.” To which Memoir says, “I think we are the purveyors of the existing, deeper truths of the world. We are not here to make art out of facts, but to find an portray the art that is already there.”

However, as they carry on, they realize that they have a lot in common with each other and that “Maybe nonfiction is about both the trying and the answering, and, just like with a painting, it is the audience’s interpretation of the art that makes the true meaning.” Essay goes on to say that “the greatest thing we can learn from all these submissions is that we nonfictioneers might have core values that go in opposite directions, but there’s enough room under this genre umbrella for all of us.”

This nonfiction feature in New Madrid includes both essays and memoirs—and pieces that perhaps can’t be defined one way or the other. Writers featured include Kim Trevathan, Kirby Wright, Matthew Gavin Frank, Sean Christopher Lewis, Frankie Finley, Briandaniel Oglesby, Sara B. Levi, Vincent Scarpa, Daniel Aristi, John Proctor, Tom Elliot, and Alison Stine.

The Chicago School of Poetics offers online and F2F workshops for writers who “feel the need for more specialized instruction” beyond the traditional academic program.

Currently offered is a master class workshop with poet Ron Silliman: “’What does not change / is the will to change’ : Embracing transformation in writing poetry”. The one-day (Oct. 20) workshop will run for three hours (1-4pm) in an online, video-conferenced classroom and is limited to ten students.

In addition to this master class and weekly salons, online classes offered include Poetics (I, II, & III), Documentary Poetics, Risk: Writing at the Edge, Erasure to Automatism, The Poetry of Cubism, Queer Poetics, Working Poets, Personal Archeology, Publishing, The Poem as Remix, Visual Poetry, and Hybrid Texts.

In the current issue of Denver Quarterly, Editor Bin Ramke announces the issue as his last as editor. After serving for seventeen years, he expresses his gratitude for the writers over the years.

“It can be an enormous amount of work to publish a literary journal four times per year,” he says in his editor’s note, “but when that work is shared it can also be a joy, and it was. I trust that joy will be part of Laird Hunt’s experience as he negotiates the burdens and opportunities of editorship, and I know he will renew the energy of the Denver Quarterly as he guides it toward and past its fiftieth year.”

The new issue of Illuminations marks the first issue for new Editor Meg Scott Copses. “In this first year as new editor,” she says, “there are many moments of blinking cursors, and quite a few question marks penciled in as my editorial team has worked to launch a new website and boost subscriptions and general readership for Illuminations. The component that remains more certain, that feels right, is the poetry itself, and the integrity of the poets who craft the lines that get sent my way. It has been such a sincere pleasure to read and correspond with this year’s contributing writers.”

And with a new editor comes changes to the way the magazine is run. Traditionally, the magazine has “published all work by a single author on adjacent pages.” With this issue, the poems are organized loosely into five larger themes or groupings: Speak, Season, Desire, Portrait, and Place. “A photograph by Lisa Scott Jones introduces each section,” says Scott Copses, “and while the photograph isn’t meant to represent anything literal about the poems in that section, I hope contributing writers will enjoy considering her photography alongside their own work. I hope also that the new arrangement fosters a conversation between poems and poets. My assistant editor and I have so enjoyed the many moments of resonance we discovered in arranging the magazine this way.”

Verse Wisconsin announces, in their most recent issue, that it will be the last summer issue printed. Starting in 2013 they will move to a biannual cycle, to be published in fall and spring. “This change will allow us to pay some attention to our press, Cowfeather, not to mention enjoy a few more summer evenings with our families and friends,” say Co-Editors Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman. “As much as we’re looking forward to publishing a few more books each year, we will miss sending out this gift of verse and voice to you each midsummer.”

They say that this last issue focuses on community, saying that they imagine that the poems “form their own sort of community of voices, which will thread its way through your summer days.” An online version of this issue features “brief essays by poets describing their various communities and community-oriented projects” as well as poems excerpted from the 2013 Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, published by the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, “an organization that exists primarily to create community among poets across the state.”

Green Mountains Review celebrates its 25th anniversary with a retrospective poetry issue. The issue not only includes poetry from the past 25 years but also commentary from more than half of the writers about what inspired their work and how the response to it had changed over time.

“How enlivening, enlightening (and exhausting!) to read back through almost 50 issues of Green Mountains Review in search of the best poems, interviews, and essays on poetry to be published in the past quarter-century,” says Senior Editor Neil Shepard. “And then came the difficult task: to pick and choose among the thousands of texts the 100-plus I could truly not resist, those pieces gathered here in GMR’s 25th Anniversary Retrospective issue.”

“Reading back through a quarter-century’s worth of literature,” he says, “I admire both the poems that shape, challenge, or unsettle their time, as well as the poems that assimilate, distill, and crystallize the experiments of the past; I hope they’re all brilliantly on display in GMR’s 25th Retrospective Anniversary on poetry.”

Included in this issue is poetry from David Wojahn, David St. John, David Mura, Larry Levis, Mark Doty, Molly Peacock, H.L. Hix, Dara Wier, G.C. Waldrep, Russell Edson, Peter Johnson, Paul Hoover, Quan Barry, Barbara Hamby, Laura Kasischke, Sherman Alexie, Melissa Stein, Robert Hill Long, and many more.

Sundress Publications has opened submissions the seventh volume of the Best of the Net Anthology: “The internet continues to be a rapidly evolving medium for the distribution of new and innovative literature, and the Best of the Net Anthology aims to nurture the relationship between writers and the web. In our first six years of existence, the anthology has published distinguished writers such as Claudia Emerson, B.H. Fairchild, Ron Carlson, Dorianne Laux, and Jill McCorkle alongside numerous new and emerging writers from around the world.”

Submissions must come from the editor of the publication (journal, chapbook, online press, etc), or, if the work is self-published, it must be sent by the author. Submissions must be sent by September 30th, 2012.

Full submission guidelines can be found here.

Sundress Publications also announced that this year will mark the first year they will also be publishing an e-book (completely free) of the anthology as a compendium to the online anthology.

[Artwork: Cover image for the 2011 Best of the Net online publication by Rhonda Lott.]

A new biannual online magazine, Ostrich Review, publishes poetry, fiction, and art. Editor Nayelly Barrios says that the name of the magazine actually came from a vote on the font, which is Sans Ostrich. “But we also happen to like burying our heads in the sand,” she says. Along with Co-Editor Benjamin Sutton, she says they “want to be a part of the literary tradition. Our mission is to publish work that shakes us.”

Barrios says that in Ostrich Review, readers can expect to find “not necessarily backs turned against expectation, but an attempt to display work reaching for the unexpected. We don’t have a specific aesthetic. We don’t want to have one specific aesthetic or style. We deliver diversity (which is evident in our inaugural issue). We deliver the good stuff. No, the amazing stuff.”

The first issue features poetry from Carmen Gimenez-Smith, Carolina Ebeid, Carolyn Hembree, G.C. Waldrep, Jaswinder Bolina, and Rodney Gomez; fiction from Brian Allen Carr, and Patricia O’Donnell; and art from Andrew Spear and Roymieco A. Carter.

Ostrich Review accepts submissions through Submittable year-round; there are no submission deadlines.

Add some art to your day! Omnidawn Publishing has posted a series of images Visual Poetry: Andrea Baker. The work is excerpted from The Incredibly True Adventures of Me, Baker’s 150-page manuscript made from cutouts and paper packing tape.

In the most recent issue of Our Stories, an online magazine that gives personalized feedback for each submission received, Editor-in-Chief Alexix E. Santi announces big changes in the way the magazine is run. He said that they will no longer publish “a finite cache of authors on a quarterly basis after the summer 2012 issue.” He said that the last issue will be the one for the already collected pieces for the Flash Fiction contest.

He goes on to explain their new approach: “In the fall of 2012 we will begin our new business model which will be the publishing of revised short stories that we have worked on in a souped up new website. Everyone who does a workshop with us at Our Stories (no matter the length of that workshop) will have one of their short stories published by our staff. We will publish one of the final drafts (if the workshop has more than one story) and a PDF version of the first draft that had our edits in the manuscript, you’ve seen these PDF versions before and there is a fancy YouTube video here that shows you how we go about editing a manuscript. So, we’re still publishing short stories but we’re trying to find a more direct way to show you the readers what we do. You, the readers will have the opportunity to see not only the final edited manuscript but we will be publishing the initial feedback that we gave to the writer as a marked up PDF. While this brings up moral / litjournal / hyperventilating / rheumatic fever thoughts in my mind of a pay-to-play scenario at Our Stories, I believe it is more of our true business model.”

Justin Brouckaert, one of the newer magazine reviewers for NewPages, just had his first piece of fiction published in Thrice Magazine–which can be purchased as a print copy or downloaded as a PDF, e-book, or Kindle file for free–titled “What is Hell, if not a Hard Candy.” He also had a one-sentence story called “She Gets Starry Eyed When We Make Love” published on MonkeyBicycle in June.