Newsletter Issue #50 August, 2015

But, we’ll see how it evolves: this refresh is very much a work-in-progress. Too, we have added a photograph of the Featured Selection poet, and much against my protestations, my own picture will appear inside the Editor’s Note — I wouldn’t want to frighten the horses. There is some talk about adding photographs of the poets as well, but I resist that for now: I like, and readers seem to like too,the sparseness of Plume, its lack of clutter: its Zen feel as some have labeled it. For all of this, let me give a tip of the cap to Heather Henderson: a gifted designer, and a name some of you know from your correspondence with her in the matter of edits and revisions of e-proofs.

I think that’s it, for now on that subject.

Time to turn then — you see? things are not so different — to our usual format: a “secret” poem,
Andrea Cohen’s “The Committee Weighs In” introduced by Tara Skurtu, herself a Plume contributor and needless to say most talented poet.

Tara Skurtu

on Andrea Cohen’s “The Committee Weighs In”

This poem will slam you. It slammed me the first time I heard it (and it has ever since). I was at a panel celebrating the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, and Andrea Cohen was reading a few poems. She said something about this particular poem being “little” or “short” (as a lot of her poems are–brilliant, precise, compact–like prayers carved into individual grains of rice), and my friend turned to me with this look on his face: You just wait. The poem was over before I knew it, and before I knew it, I’d laughed, gotten chills, and felt as if someone were standing on my chest.

Four sentences, eight lines. Two people playing a “little game” revolving around a joke. It’s playful, humorous. It exemplifies humor in its most elemental sense. The ride of this poem meets the moment in which you laugh at a joke and then realize this joke’s on you, or, you realize while laughing that it isn’t a joke at all. We’ve all been there–laughter as relief, laughter that’s confusing, laughter as coping mechanism. Humor is often tense, and there’s a swift tension in–to quote Cohen in “We Lost Our Everything”–the we-nessof this poem. The speaker strives to reach this we, but the striving is somewhat of an asymptote: these lines continually approach a given person but do not meet her at any finite distance.

To put it simply, this poem blows my mind. I read it to people of all ages. I share it on social media. I love the responses: Wow! Oh my god! I didn’t expect that! I love watching the faces of students and friends when I get to the final line that turns the poem on its head. I read it, thinking: You just wait.

“The Committee Weighs In” begins Cohen’s new collection, Furs Not Mine (Four Way Books, 2015). It conjures up absence like a prayer on a grain of rice–or perhaps it’s more like a psalm, one in which the speaker becomes the solitary “committee” praying or playing with the memory of a voice, the solitary we-ness of the self speaking to the mind.

I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?

It’s a little game
we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.

–Andrea Cohen

What next?

Plume has a slate of reading sets for the fall, three of which will commence in September. Below, you will see the sites and dates and times; the Boston/Cambridge roster has been filled, and the NYC almost done, too, as I write.

Boston/Cambridge
Cambridge Library  Wednesday September 9^th, 7 p.m.
Daniel Tobin
Lloyd Schwartz
David Rivard
Gail Mazur
Martha Collins
Marc Vincenz

New York City
Poets House   Friday September 11th, 7 p.m.
Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Cindy Cruz
Elaine Equi
Jerome Sala
Grace Schulman

BookCourt     Saturday September 12^th, 4 p.m.
Nicole Cooley
Lynn Emanuel
D. Nurkse
Kathleen Ossip
Tom Sleigh

Readings to follow in Asheville, I think, and New Orleans, perhaps New Haven or Providence, certainly at AWP in LA in March,  and in Paris and London in May. Should you feel inclined to read  at any of these sites— and some of you already have asked to be included — please, email me at plumepoetry@gmail.com and let me know.

Also, and I think this bears repeating (see the PR below), I think many of you are instructors in some fashion — colleges, universities, low-res programs. Can I suggest that Plume would make an ideal text for your creative writing classes?  Several of you already have indicated that you will be using The Plume Anthology of Poetry 3 as such in the fall.  And although I am aware that text-ordering deadlines might have passed for some, perhaps for this is not the case for all. Should this interest you in the slightest, you can order copies directly from MadHat Press at a discounted rate. Contact Marc Vincenz at that site.

Plume in conjunction with Bob Devin Jones at Studio@620  http://www.thestudioat620.org/ has organized a monthly series of poetry readings in Saint Petersburg, Florida. The Studio is a wonderful site, near downtown (suddenly hip, if you can believe it), and the readings I have been to there in the past have been well-received. The remarkable Jay Hopler will kick things off in late September.  So a heads up to any area poets, or poets touring in our vicinity, on the lookout for a venue, please keep us in mind, and contact me at plumepoetry@gmail.com to get on the calendar.
Congratulations are in order for winners of 2016 NEA Translation Fellowships: Any Gjika for her work with Luljeta Lleshanaku; and Dzvinia Orlowsky and Jeff Friedmanfor their translations of MieczysÅ‚aw Jastrun. Both poets were featured in past issues of Plume. And to Juan-FelipeHerrera, the new US Poet Laureate, who will read for the fourth annual Plume Poetry Series in Saint Petersburg, Florida, in March. You can see his work in an early issue of Plume.

And, this, again, as promised — threatened — above: The Plume Anthology of Poetry V 3 is available for purchase now, at Madhat Press a bargain at $21.95, I think, given the very high quality of the work, the poets, its eclectic range, and sheer size — 323 pages.  (Soon available at other venues, as well — Amazon, B &N, etc.)  Some very nice people have said some very nice things about our little endeavor. Below, just a few of the comments Plume V 3 has received:

“Plume’s apparent lack of a narrow editorial policy (except a fondness for interesting poems) makes for lots of strange bedfellows, but what was the last time that was a bad idea?”  ~Billy Collins

“Of all the things that might claim one’s attention, and they are in the multitudes! Plume is well worth making time for since it isn’t just another magazine. Its difference? Wonderful work, on the edge, room for play and dash, new forms, a great discerning editor in Danny
Lawless!”   ~ Tess Gallagher

“Plume is one of the most exciting, eclectic gatherings of writers on the web. Editor Daniel Lawless has a knack for putting together voices that create surprising neighborhoods of words, related in complex ways that only gradually reveal themselves. It’s one of very few webzines that I always read.”   ~ Chase Twichell

“Plume is rapidly becoming one of the best places in America to read poetry, online and in print, thanks to the untiring efforts of Danny Lawless. It’s where to find dazzling work by new and established writers, and, thanks to the new technology, it is available instantly to readers by the millions. Plume proves once more that poetry is essential to our lives, and that ‘Men die every day for want of what is found in it.’”  ~ Grace Schulman

“Plume continues to publish amazing poets in beautiful formats–both online and in-print. The magazine has an exciting vision, embracing a broad gamut of poetries, including collaborations. The work has a consistently intriguing quality about the joys and unsettling aspects of being alive.”   ~ Denise Duhamel

Our covert art this month comes from Al Gorman — a long-over-due return of Mr. Gorman’s wonderful work that enlivened the initial six issues of Plume. For more on Mr. Gorman, please see the Editor’s Note in this issue. Likewise, for New Work Received: quite a list!