An eSalon featuring GMU MFA students Kathy Goodkin, Chris Harris, Lucy Biederman, and Eleanor Tipton, brought to you as part of So to Speak week at the Poetry Instigator, week two of our Summer Challenge. In addition to inspiring and helping to provide the week’s content, So to Speak is also behind this week’s prompt.

Kathy: Hi all,

It occurs to me that before we can decide whether “women’s writing” is necessary we should first discuss whether “women’s writing” really exists. I’m not sure what “women’s writing” is; what distinguishes it as a genre from other kinds of writing? I’m not asking this to be polemical; I really don’t have an answer, and it seems a necessary first step to having this conversation.

I don’t mean to question the influence of gender on writing; whether one feels aligned with or opposed to societal power structures, writers’ demographic characteristics shape their interests and aesthetic lenses. I’m just uncertain as to whether it’s possible to generalize the particular ways that gender influences writing, or the ways that gender-oriented writing might influence readers.

Colleagues: how would you define the distinction? Is “women’s writing” more of a political than a literary construct?

Eleanor: To speak to your last question, the short answer is: yes.  It is a political construct.   (more…)

What do you look for in a poem as an editor for S2S?



When I first read a poem, I’m kind of reading to see if I believe it.
Is its voice urgent and present? Does it have something to tell me
that it really wants me to believe?  Are its methods and language
sincere to its message?  Basically, does it have a purpose in what
it’s doing, was it crafted for that particular purpose? If at any
point I feel skeptical of those things, I usually move on. 

After that, I’m interested in freshness and appropriateness for our journal.  Is it interesting? Is it invested in feminist issues? Is it invested in them in productive, new, or insightful ways? We get a lot of poems that are concerned with issues of the female body or domesticity in superficial ways.  Those issues are important, but what matters more is how the poem engages those issues.  

How do you feel about submissions from men? (more…)

The second week of our SUMMER CHALLENGE is brought to you by So to Speak, a space for feminist writing and art. So to Speak week will feature discussion, debate, interviews, and more! Stay tuned all week…

To kick things off, poetry editor Megan Ronan provides the second prompt of our summer challenge, suitable for poets, writers, and artists of all genders. To participate in the challenge, post a poem based on this prompt to the forum. At the end of the week, So to Speak editors will select a winning poem, whose author will receive a year’s subscription to So to Speak!

              Her goodly eyes lyke Saphyres shining bright,
              Her forehead yvory white,
              Her cheekes lyke apples which the sun hath rudded,
              Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte,
              Her brest like to a bowle of creame uncrudded,
              Her paps lyke lyllies budded,
              Her snowie necke lyke to a marble towre;
              And all her body like a pallace fayre,
              Ascending up, with many a stately stayre,
              To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre.

              -Spenser, “Epithalamion”

Blason is a Petrarchan tradition in which lovers pick apart their beloveds’ bodies piece by piece to praise each feature separately, usually in a series of metaphors or similes.  This is not a very nice thing to do to a woman.  I like my eyes to stay in their sockets and my lips on my face.  I like my snowy neck between my head and my shoulders.  But, fortunately, we can work with this tradition of dismemberment.

What do you want to pick apart? What good can come of doing this?  What do the pieces reveal about the whole? Write a poem that picks something apart into its separate features.  Examine its pieces one by one.

**The deadline for submitting your So to Speak prompted poems for the contest is 12am Monday August 3, 2009 (i.e., the stroke of midnight on Sunday night)

What, you haven’t yet registered for our summer challenge? Go, get instigated!

To change your password or figure out what’s going on, check out our FAQs or drop us a line.

As week one of the Instigator’s Summer Journals Challenge draws to a close, we’d love for you to share with us your experience of being lost in translation. How did you interpret Phoebe’s prompt? What kind of translation did you do? Do you consider all poems translations of one kind or another? What authors in translation do you read? What translation-related worries plague you when you read? What about when you write? Spill the beans in the comments section, poets!

**Reminder: to be considered for the Week One Summer Journals Prize, post those poems on the forum by midnight, Sunday July 26!

Hey, what’s going through the minds of the editors reading your poetry submissions? Three readers from Phoebe–the Poetry Instigator’s journal of the week, responsible for Prompt 1.8–enlighten.

Kathy, reader (poetry):

I’m interested in thinking about whether I’m the same reader when I read submissions for Phoebe as when I read at my own discretion. The first thing that I want to acknowledge seems pretty obvious: the construct of reading *for* any specific purpose shapes one’s reading.

Someone famous and smart whose name I don’t remember once said that mistakes reside in readers as much as writers. This means that if the reader’s context lends itself to the task of “error” finding, i.e. being a teacher, editor, or critic, more errors will seem to be present in the work simply by virtue of being looked for. (more…)

What kinds of poems are you looking for at Phoebe?

I think Moriah, Poetry Editor, and I agree that we are looking for poems that have “formal strength.”  I think we are turned off by poems that are broken evenly at line breaks to fit the idea of what a poem should be.  In that way, I think it is safe to say we are drawn to experimental poems that are not afraid to play with formal expectations.  This is not to say that we don’t accept poems that you would consider to be in “traditional forms” or even stanzaic forms, but that there needs to be a reason why you are using that particular form.  It is safe to say that we don’t like safe.  We like it when poets take risks and write exhuberently. I think that all of the poems we accepted last issue fit that mold.

What are some of the first books of poetry that made you go, “this is great”?

I think there are the books that got me into poetry as a kid and those that got me serious about pursuing poetry:
-Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets and T.S. Eliot’s collected works were influential as a teenager.
-Philip Larkin’s High Windows and Whitsun Weddings are others.
-Also John Kinsella’s Collected Poems from 1980-1994

What do you look for in a poem?  As a reader?  As an editor?  As a writer?

I look for a poem with a reason for being.  A poem where the images work with the structure to create a cohesive experience.  I look for signals that the poet has written the poem carefully with a purpose.

What do you read when you’re not reading poems?

Everything.  Fiction, History, Philosophy, Theory, Mystery Novels, etc.

Questions asked by Eleanor Tipton.

BIO:

Wade Fletcher lives in Falls Church, VA with his wife and their wonderful new son. He teaches composition, literature, and poetry at two of the George universities: Mason and Washington, and also serves as assistant manager for Fall for the Book, a yearly literary arts festival. He completed his MFA in poetry in 2008 at GMU, where he held the Heritage Writer Fellowship. A former poetry editor for Phoebe, he now coordinates Cheryl’s Gone, a monthly multi-genre reading and performance series in Washington D.C. His chapbook, Snitch Culture, was published with dusie press in 2007, and recent poems have appeared in Barrelhouse and Versal.

Who are you reading now?

My schedule has slowed my reading some, but I’ve been trying to read around a lot. I’ve also been reading poetry to my (infant) son, which has been a wonderful experience… Most recently: Rob Halpern, Cathy Eisenhower, Rae Armantrout, Gary Snyder, Rodrigo Toscano, John Taggart, and Mel Nichols’ new book. I’ve also been slowly making my way through Ron Silliman’s massively impressive The Alphabet.

What blogs do you read?

Ron Silliman’s blog is a mainstay, and I frequently use it for a starting point in discovering other blogs. My attention span for blogs comes and goes, but some favorites have included Kasey Mohammed’s Lime Tree, Jessica Smith’s Looktouch Blog, Mark Wallace’s blog, and those of many other somewhat connected innovative poets.

How would you define the aesthetic of Phoebe?

A good one-word description, I think, would be present, in the most positive of ways. While content-wise its aesthetic can vary from year to year, since, as a grad-student-run journal, its editors change often, Phoebe has done a fine job of both building on its own history and tradition while very much being aware of and responsive to the present moment in the literary world, responding to, and interacting with, the experience of that moment itself. (more…)

LUCY AND ELLIE SIT DOWN TO CONSIDER THE FIRST PROMPT OF THE SUMMER CHALLENGE.

Lucy: you were telling me about what jen atkinson is doing with bird sounds. what is it again?

Ellie: oh yeah: she has a recording of birds that she is using to do a homophonic translation

Lucy: cool!

Ellie: She scales the words into musical bars according to a drum rhythm.  It’s a really interesting mix of textual and musical art.

Lucy: i had a bird outside my house growing up that said “Ricky” but when I told that to this kid Ricky, he thought I liked him

Ellie: right. see how Ricky translated what you said that the bird said into something else: a feeling that he imagined you had?

Lucy: yeah! that’s what i like about Jen’s project–it’s so technical, in a way, that it sort of side-steps the issue of appropriation.

Ellie: yeah, i think so.  Poetry has a translation issue out from a few months ago.  Phoebe will have a completely different angle on translation though. (more…)

The inaugural prompt for our SUMMER CHALLENGE is by Phoebe, a literary magazine out of George Mason University. Check up on us early and often this week for Phoebe-instigated action.

Each Spring issue Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art dedicates several pages to a special poetry feature. Last year’s special feature was collaborative poems, exploring a variety of methods poets collaborate with other poets and also with visual artists.

Phoebe’s special poetry feature for the Spring 2010 issue will be based on translation. We’ll be featuring both traditional translations and alternative methods of translation, such as homophonic translations. Homophonic translations, as one example, are translations based on the phonetic phonetic sound of a word, versus their literal meaning in another language. For example, the french lyric from the love song Ne Me Quitte Pas “Moi je t’offrirai / Des perles de pluie” (which in English means “I’ll bring back to you / the pearles of rain”) might be homophonically translated as “My jet offers a days’ pearls dappling.” Even when homophonically translating, the “original” text is felt underneath the new translation… pearls of rain do dapple certain surfaces, and the image is maintained… (albeit with the slightly humorous “jet” subject who is doing the offering!)

Translation, as put in the Oxford English Dictionary, is “Transference; removal or conveyance from one person, place, or condition to another.” What’s interesting about translation is that there is no way to exchange one thing for another exactly. It’s the difference, what is honored, what is conceded, that makes the new version fresh and interesting.

Write a poem where you translate a text from one “condition” to another. This can be a traditional translation, a homophonic translation, or another method of “transference” – interpret this as you like! (For other additional alternative translation forms, Charles Bernstein’s site has helpful definitions and examples: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/experiments.html)

**The deadline for submitting your Phoebe prompted poems for the contest is 12am on Sunday July 26, 2009

What, you haven’t yet registered for our summer challenge? Go, get instigated!

To change your password or figure out what’s going on, check out our FAQs or drop us a line.