Our planned cycling of Harriet impersonators is causing some pangs. One regular reader Mary Meriam writes: “I understand Alicia’s [A.E. Stallings] days are numbered with you, Harriet. What a pity!” We couldn’t agree more.

Though we fashioned Harriet to change personalities every three to four months, facing the switchover is difficult. How will we distract ourselves from family or work without….

After reading the numerous responses to Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young's "Numbers Trouble," Jennifer Ashton's response, and our note, it became clear that we needed to make these articles available online. We hope the essays will ground a larger exchange of ideas.

Chicago Review
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/

(Follow the links for PDFs.)

Our initial reluctance to post the articles was only due to the magazine's financial insecurity: we rely on issue sales for 80% of our $50,000 annual budget. Therefore we hope that you'll consider ordering the issue or subscribing to CR. The magazine's survival depends on support from its readers.

Joshua Kotin
Robert P. Baird

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We'd been hearing for a month or so about a forthcoming article in the Chicago Review called “Numbers Trouble,” an essay written by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young on gender and contemporary poetry, plus a response by Jennifer Ashton. When I ran into Joshua Kotin, the editor of the Chicago Review at a poetry event, I told him about the buzz and asked if he'd like us to blog it. "Sure," he said, "that would be great." He went one step further and sent me electronic versions of the essays. I passed these along to Ange Mlinko and Alicia Stallings to see if they wanted to respond, and only this week, in the spirit of inclusiveness, I also sent them to our other bloggers.

In this post, we've published (with Joshua Kotin's permission) a chart and table that accompanies the Chicago Review articles, which shows the percentage of women vs. men being published in literary journals over time. We published our invidivual responses (Ange's, Alicia's, mine) to the articles as separate posts. You can read the original articles in this month's Chicago Review, which is now available for purchase.

I’m eavesdropping; my hand cupped around my ear to better hear the conversation at the next table--a poetry clan is debating an article that has riled them—and it’s by one of their own. Previous issues of Chicago Review and women’s anthologies clutter a table already crammed with a computer for browsing the contemporary/experimentl/postmodern/avant-garde/innovative poetry blogosphere. I want to join them. Maybe they’ll let me if I figure out what “essentialism” means. Is it related to “creationism”? Or “phrenology”?

Should I bring my laptop,” Ange asked. “Sure,” I shot back in email, wondering if it was a Mac or PC? We, like you, first meet Harriet's bloggers on the web, and then feel that we know them through their posts and comments. Setting eyes on them for the first time always fuzzes my mental picture. Ange doesn’t have black hair as in her author photo (Duh.). The laptop she pulled from her bag to blog the Academy of American Poets Forum last week was a MacBook—I guessed that. What I can never guess is where her or other bloggers' posts will get picked up on the web.

Where is Kwame Dawes? Did we muzzle Kenneth Goldsmith after his Madonna/Koons post? Why have Patricia Smith’s musings and shout outs slowed down? And who are all these newcomers prattling and jabbing away on Harriet?

Peter O'Leary sent this note today:

"The truly terrific Chicago poet Ralph J. Mills, Jr. passed away over the weekend. Here's a link to his obituary in the Tribune today. And here's a link to the small tribute page Tom Raworth has set up for Ralph on his website. (Tom lived in Chicago for a brief period, where he got to know Ralph.) Ralph - whom we published in LVNG several times - was a real inheritor of the Objectivist line & spirit."

Also, here's a link to Bookslut on Mills' book Essays on Poetry.

You are reading these words because your machine is reading code. The code instructs the machine how to respond to the clicks and keyboard strokes that you make in response to reading text. This interplay between words and machine code makes up Harriet’s (inter)face.

If you wanted to create art by playing with Harriet’s make up—not just the words and images, but also the processes generating them—you would be joining the clan of electronic literature artists who create works that “are not content to let code remain below the surface but rather show it erupting through the surface of the screen to challenge the hegemony of alphabetic language.” (N. Katherine Hayles-- leading theorist on electronic literature. Click here to read her primer “Electronic Literature: What Is It?”)

Recently, a reporter (Travis Nichols) called to ask why we publish Jim Behrle on our website. “Because he’s an indicator species,” I answered. His question got me thinking about other people and organizations that are breaking a pattern and in so doing, pointing out the vibrancy of the poetry world and its insularity.

Jim Behrle
Until recently the poetry world has been a fairly closed world without a significant force to counter the powers that be, the ones who create reputations through plum jobs, prizes, publications, and grants. There hasn’t been an audience large and voracious enough to sift through the thousands of books and magazines to discover talent (maybe there never has been), and there’s no equivalent to the Huffington Post to interpret the spin through its alternative storyline. Then the web happened and gigantic numbers of MFA poet-graduates happened, many of whom pine for a reputation but can’t get their first book published.

I spent the day in the Golan Heights, in a ruined Syrian town, Quneitra, absolutely destroyed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War between the Syrians and Israelis. Before the Israeli army withdrew after the 1973 ceasefire, the Israelis evacuated the 37,000 Arabs living there and destroyed the town, stripping buildings of windows, doors, anything that could be carted off: this was sold to Israeli contractors, and then bulldozers and tractors moved in and knocked down most of the stripped buildings, now mangled slabs of concrete and rebar. It was odd, disturbingly odd, to see a herd of cows here and there, birdsong everywhere, the remains of the town overgrown, even a garden full of roses run wild in what used to be somebody's front yard.

Earlier in the year, we asked Tom Sleigh to write one of those Journals (yeah, the ones that C. Dale Young is missing so badly) from Lebanon where he was slated to travel as part of a cross-cultural scholarly exchange, this one sponsored by the Trans-Arab Institute and the Syrian Ministry of Culture. The trip was canceled because, as Sleigh wrote, "after one of the Gemayels got assassinated, and Hizullah called some strikes, our hosts didn't think they could take the security risk in having a bunch of Americans roaming around."

So instead he and six others took off last Saturday—the day the situation in the Palestinian refugee camps turned dire! When we wrote yesterday to check up on him, we received this reply:

"I'll try to keep the 'creative writing' to a minimum. No 'plumes of smoke rising in tattered, twisted tails,' though there's been some of that, mostly seen on TV. I'll try to give some of the texture: odd things that strike me, nothing comprehensive, nothing authoritative, everything seen a little slant.

Hope you caught Shanna Compton's podcast on our site this week about the poetry blogosphere. Here are links to the poets and blogs she mentions in it (via her blog):

Reb Livingston's blog Home-Schooled by a Cackling Jackal

"Retention" by Reb Livingston in Kulture Vulture

Her chapbook from Coconut

Flarf: Mainstream Poetry

Katie Degentesh's book The Anger Scale

Combo Arts

"Life Is a Strain for Me Much of the Time" by Katie Degentesh (scroll down)

Updated 5:40 p.m. thanks to Shanna Compton...

Shoemaker & Hoard, soft skull press, and Counterpoint publishing houses were all purchased by Charles Winton and are being reorganized into a new publishing house known as Winton-Shoemaker. (via Shanna Compton's blog).

Shoemaker & Hoard Announces Purchase of Soft Skull Press

Shoemaker & Hoard Announces Purchase of Counterpoint

Read Richard Eoin Nash's post about what this means for American publishing" on Soft Skull News

About half our readers come from search engines and other places looking for poems to post on their blogs. Here’s a few linking to us today:

1. Can’t you put up some more?
Chris Frizzale on the The Stranger's blog complains about our Heather McHugh selection. What he might not understand is the complicated world of poetry permissions.

No, it isn’t a rumor that the book review sections of newspapers in LA, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, and more are being axed or shrunk. The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) are beating their keyboards into swords and have launched a campaign to save book reviews. Their efforts are gaining momentum on the Web this week:

The New Book Burning, Art Winslow in Huffington Post
Dramatic Changes in Newspaper Book Reviews, Craig Teicher in Publishers Weekly
NBCC's campaign series, featuring book review editors and writers on its blog Critical Mass.

This story came to our attention via the NYU listserv. Kazim thought it was a good idea to post it here, too.

"On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white beetle and carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.

A young man from ROTC was watching me....."

When I taught creative writing at Lynchburg College in Virginia, I discovered, like many creative writing teachers, that violence pervaded the lives of many undergraduates students. After receiving several poems about assaults, suicide, and abuse, I conducted an unscientific survey. I asked students to anonymously list violence they, their families, or friends had experienced. All but fifteen of my 50 students were victims or had a close friend who had experienced one of the following: abuse, murder, suicide, assault, or rape.

Book Notes

Is Kenneth Goldsmith the lost triplet of Henry Thoreau and Ronald Johnson? Donald Revell called the latter two “twinned visionaries” in his new book of essays Invisible Green (Omnidawn). They both drank from the same arrowhead he hypothesizes--by which he means their writing depends on “facts found as they are.” Their art is to register “sense as revelation.” As a result, their work proposes “a heroic unoriginality.” If that doesn’t sound like Kenneth's notion of uncreative writing, how about: “The garden is always already there when the gardener arrives.” (Well, maybe that sounds more like Peter Sellers.) By “garden” Revell means both literary works and woodlots. Most of the other essays in this book also untangle the links between writing and reading: “Poetry is the fate of reading…”

Another pairing: C.D Wright and Lorine Niedecker…..

Recommended reading from the editors on the AWP panel “Books Every Poet should Read (But Probably Hasn’t).”

Michael Wiegers, editor at Copper Canyon Press, pulled out this fact to explain why he organized a panel called “Books Every Poet should Read (But Probably Hasn’t).”

“With so many books coming out, the publishing industry puts serious marketing pressures on literary titles and can end up silencing them,” he said.

The idea was for the panelists—editors from other small poetry presses—to recommend books that for one reason or another have stopped circulating. A packed crowd under four gigantic faux crystal chandeliers in Ballroom A at the Hilton in Atlanta clearly disoriented the panelists. Who were these people? Instead of shoving manuscripts in editors’ faces, they were scribbling down book titles to, uh, maybe buy?