Blogs

Fiction staff member Mason Johnson on the Marie Calloway debate (view his orginial blog post here):

Everyone has been weighing in on this Marie Calloway person and I thought I’d weigh in because, dammit, I like attention too.

Here are my two opinions about Marie Calloway:

1. I don’t know if she’s a good writer.

2. She seems like a perfectly fine human being.

I don’t mean that in a jerky way, like I’m insulting her writing, in that I don’t think she’s a bad writer either. What I mean to say is that I haven’t read much by her, so I’m not actually equipped to decide whether she’s a good writer, or whether she’s a bad writer.

No, I have not read Adrien Brody. I will eventually, I’m sure. I’m just in no hurry. Is it bad? I don’t know. Is it amazing? I have no clue. I know there are words in it. I can say that with confidence. So, if you want to quote me, you can quote that.

Mason Johnson, “Adrien Brody has words!”

I have read bits and pieces of her blog. She’s a passionate person with opinions. How terrible!

Here are some thoughts that are tangential to  Marie Calloway and people’s response to her:

Sometimes, we don’t respect each other in this little, writing community of ours. This is real goddamn annoying. It’s especially annoying to me when we’re not respecting women. On a whole, I like to respect women. Are there others out there who do not?

I think there are a lot of men out there in the literary world who work very hard and are inadvertently assholes. (Or maybe it’s intentional). They see a woman (or anyone that’s different from them) getting attention, and they scream, “why can’t I get away with that? Whatever it is they’re doing! It’s because I’m male, isn’t it?”

No, not exactly. The reason you can’t get away with it is because you put very little thought into it. You’re set into your ways and don’t want to change because, on the whole, they’ve done right by you. They’re not always right though. Why rely on critical thinking and empathy when you can tear something down though? When you can whine and complain about it?

It is possible that these male writers are trying to do good by the world. By criticizing women who write about sex, they’re taking the role of the older brother. Half resentful, immature and jealous, and half protective, as if a young woman like Marie Calloway needs to be saved from her “bad writing” and “poor sexual judgements” by the likes of you, Super-white-grad-student-man. The best super hero of all!

Well, fellow men, allow me to let you in on a little secret: women don’t need you to save them. Or to correct them. Or to help them. Marie Calloway, a young woman with strong opinions and apparent talent, does not need you to save her. By judging women through thinly veiled literary comments, you’re not coming off as an asshole for the better of the community. You’re just coming off as an asshole.

Hope you can live with that. I’m sorry to generalize, I know all white men aren’t like this, it’s just the easiest way to get my point across. At the end of the day, we all make horrible judgements like this about each other. Maybe, once in awhile, we could get out of our skin and attempt to respect one another just a tiny bit more.

Or we can say fuck it and keep on keepin’ on.

Which will it be?

More on Marie Calloway:

New York Observer article 

Roxane Gay in HTMLGiant

Interview with The Rumpus

Interested in participating in World Book Night? The deadline to register as a volunteer book giver has just been extended to Feb. 6. World Book Night will be on April 23 — the goal is to hand out one million books to underserved communities. Logan Square's newest book store, Uncharted Books, has signed up as a community pick-up location, so, if you're interested, sign up to volunteer now!

Check out these readings this week:

Tonight: Two Cookie Minimum, 9pm, The Hungry Brain (more info here)

Tuesday: WRITE CLUB, 7pm, The Hideout (more info here & here)

Wednesday: So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel, 8pm, The Empty Bottle (more info here)

Also Wednesday: The Encyclopedia Show, 7:30pm, Vittum Theater (more info here)

Friday: Waiting 4 the Bus, 7:30pm, Studio A (more info here)

Also Friday: Punk Rock Karaoke Benefit for the Chicago Zine Fest (ok, not a reading, but karaoke for a good cause), 9pm, Beauty Bar (more info here)

See you all there!

Our second volume of the Chicago Issue is now available to pre-order through the independent publisher Curbside Splendor. This edition of the magazine is a continuation of our 50th issue featuring local Chicago writers, including the work of Ben Tanzer, Tim Jones-Yevington, Zach Dodson, Fred Sasaki, Joe Meno, Natalie Edwards and Chris Bower, among others. The cost of each issue is $12, and will be mailed in February. Order your copy here now!

by Jennifer Moore

Methodist Hatchet. by Ken Babstock . Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2011. 101 pages. $14.95 softcover. ISBN: 978-0-88784-293-1.

Reviews of Ken Babstock’s Methodist Hatchet have been mixed. Most have more or less mentioned the book’s difficulty; that Babstock is “no longer intelligible” and “wilfully obscure” (Shane Neilson); that the poems are at times “so thick with sound it’s difficult for the reader to find a way in” (Abby Paige), and the sense is of “eavesdropping on a conversation of which the reader is no longer part” (Nick Mount). All of these claims are pretty much spot-on. There are some strong moments, though; unfortunately, those moments don’t make up for the book’s deficiencies.

The first poem in the collection, “The Décor,” functions as its central thematic piece, a small-scale version of the book as a whole. The reader’s initially struck by its not-so-subtle critique of conspicuous consumption, and along with that the baggage of style, money, class, and value. While the poem considers the role home décor plays in offering a picture of status and wealth to the public—“a visual/of earned leisure” (2), this concern with style extends beyond this scope to the role of style in poetry. Babstock writes “Nothing now eases the buzzing/suspicion I’m being signaled to from across/a great distance” (1-2), and we feel the same way; but it’s Babstock signaling to us through the “clutter of//the manifest image” (4). However, what he wants is clear: for the reader to

Slide an arm right through

the surface of this picture,

into whatever spatial realm lies

behind the illusion of depth, to hold

the hand of the person

wanting so badly to be seen precisely

as they feel themselves to be (ibid)

One hears John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (“One would like to stick one’s hand/out of the globe, but its dimension,/what carries it, will not allow it”), and Babstock’s interest in the visual arts (Jeff Wall, Jeff Koons and Robert Rauschenberg show up later) is clear. However, where he wants his readers to see “whatever spatial realm lies/behind the illusion of depth,” often all we’re given is that illusion. At one point he asks, “Is this about style?” (3). We worry that’s all it’s about. Throughout the book, the reader peruses the design, which has supplanted the structure itself. Methodist Hatchet is built out of surface material and little else.

Most of Babstock’s strong moments occur in the book’s first half. For example, in “Radio Tower” we read: “Everything’s the colour of rabbits, scissored/from another world and pasted on thin” (37). Or in “Nottawasaga”: “Sky a motif of cowslip in clear ice, /mayflies make moon-dials of the flagstones” (77). And in “As Marginalia in John Clare’s The Rural Muse”, a hospital is the setting for a consideration of ailment, perhaps the same sort Clare suffered while finishing his last collection. Here, Babstock depicts a view:

Hexagonal window, the moon

penned in it, and a segmented swarm sucking

up peonies (5)

The beauty here lies in its simplicity. Where the language is clarified, pared down and precise, Babstock succeeds. That kind of gracefulness is minimal in this collection, its resonance oftentimes drowned out by the buzzing of so much else.Another strong poem is “Caledonia,” a political piece centered on the protests regarding the Grand River land dispute in Ontario in 2006:

Then we came out in numbers. Organized as Canadians

we came out in numbers with flags. With flags aloft

and hooting we stepped out in anger and in numbers. In

numbers as Canadians we came out drunk and threw rocks.

We threw rocks and golf balls as our patience had come to its

natural end. As Canadians we threw rocks past our flags aloft. (10)

Again, where Babstock is strong is where he is able to pare down both language and lineation. Here, the result is a poem in couplets that works on the logic of pattern and variation, whose repetition and circling indicates a kind of futility. “Caledonia” enacts through language the difficulty in affecting political change or social action.

Where the poems are unsuccessful is where they lapse into wordplay (“Que Syria, Syria”), overwrought syntax (“Bathynaut”) or longish narratives with little momentum to carry the reader through (“Coney Burns,” “Russian Doctor”). His poems range in topic (sugar gliders, video games, Lee Atwater) as well as in formal choice (tercets, quatrains, sestets, longer stanzas, end rhyme), but this wild variance slips around the halfway point of the book. As Babstock writes in “The Living Text,” “the slipknot of visuals begins to undo” (20), and at times it’s hard to see why these poems exist in a volume together. At best, Methodist Hatchet is kaleidoscopic; at worst, it’s haphazard.

But what I’m most struck by here is the ambivalence Babstock seems to have regarding his status as a writer, and where he stands among other writers. Many poems cite figures: Theodor Adorno, William James, David Foster Wallace; the Johns Clare and Ashbery. Other writers pop in and out like snippets of conversation: T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Antonio Gramsci, Don DeLillo. At times the effect is of name-dropping, and one notices a pattern in those referenced: mostly literary or philosophical figures, and all men. In this book I hear an anxiety of influence—a man trying to understand why he does what he does—but in doing so, he overdoes the poems themselves. The reader is left with “the fuzz of bafflement” (84), surrounded by so much stuff, but with little understanding of the significance of the stuff. I wish I felt this was deliberate on the part of Babstock—that he’s making some comment about how hard it is to live in our bewildering contemporary moment—but the poems don’t resonate beyond their own boundaries. The effect of the book is kaleidoscopic, but there’s no center focus to hold the dazzle together.

Ken Babstock is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Mean (Anansi, 1999), Days into Flatspin (Anansi, 2001), and Airstream Land Yacht (Anansi, 2006), which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been anthologized in Canada, the United States, and Ireland and The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature. A former poetry editor at Anansi Press, he lives in Toronto.

Jennifer Mooreis a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and serves as Poetry Editor for Another Chicago Magazine.

Push. By Ronald F. Smits. Scranton, Pennsylvania: University of Scranton Press, 2009. 78 pages. $10.00 hardcover.

This remarkably nostalgic journey begins with a boy playing with grandpa’s glass eye, citing the guidance of a grandfather and inviting us into a world of boyhood memories laden with jokes, falling in love, and the guilt along the way. Ronald F. Smits immediately lures us into a place where “even the clothespins smell good” and “the creek takes care of its own, / bearing the weight of centuries like a single leaf.” ‘The Water Pistol’ is a poem that typifies the nostalgia and rich language in Push (8). Smits tells of boys armed at school despite constant leaking, shooting each other in the fly and aiming for girls they have crushes on. Smits is strikingly vivid while remaining concise.

He tells us of collecting bottle caps, admiring the body of Venus, and discovering a stick of bubble gum in the wrapper of WWII picture cards. His repetition of words within a poem and occasionally into the next, provide a strong cohesion that benefits the themes of the book. The pushing during birth and pattern of moving from town to town succinctly carry Smits’ choice for language. The alliterative tendencies and infrequent rhyme add to the fun that Smits is clearly having, particularly in the opening poems.

Nevertheless, the heartbreaks of Push do arrive. The speaker loses a pink Spaulding ball in the sewer, sobbing until finding a way to reclaim it, visits a friend at the cemetery, and rides his bike from church to church in hopes of having an unrecognizable voice during confession. Even through these glimpses, Smits somehow pulls the rug from underneath the reader in ‘Bridges’ (27). Walking across bridges close to home, he suddenly is crossing one during the Vietnam War, “where, in the harbor, the wombs / of Victory and Liberty are pregnant with napalm, / the canisters as shiny as the milk cans of the car.”

Shortly after a great fear of water and living in the shadow of an older brother, Smits addresses the quieter moments and a passion for trees. We find him under an elm, startled at breakfast as a doe peers through the window, and simply admiring how rocks settled. By the concluding twenty poems of Push, Whitman comes to mind. Smits’ listing techniques and role as playful observer of the natural and industrial world echoes the bard. Yet Smits proves to be more humorous.

With Push, Ronald F. Smits has revealed his fervor with the lyricism of a musician and the abundant, detailed palette of a painter. Seventy-eight pages just aren’t enough.   

Ronald F. Smits retired from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2008. His poems have appeared in College English, Free Lunch, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Poet Lore, Poet and Critic, Poetry East, North American Review, River Styx, The South Carolina Review, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry and The Texas Observer.

It's December 1, which means that a) it's time to shave, and b) it's the beginning of the end of the year reading compilations. Today, check out The New York Times's 10 Best Books of the year and The Millions's A Year in Reading Series. What do you love? What do you hate? What would you include on your own list?

Chicago Publishes talks to Tanner McSwain, owner of Uncharted Books, a new bookstore/workshop space to open in December in Logan Square. "We’re hoping to have writers’ workshops, open mics, and readings," McSwain told Claire Glass. I'm always a fan of new spaces for writing and art. Can't wait!

National Geographic ranks the top 10 literary cities of the world. The U.S. doesn't make it on the list until 7 (Portland, Oregon) and 8 (Washington, D.C.). While it's hard to argue with much of their reasoning, I still have to say it — no Chicago? Clearly they've never been to the Printers' Ball.

Hey Chicago writers, need some help breaking out of writer's block? Northwestern University creative writing graduate students are hosting free writing workshops on December 3 and December 4. Classes are 55 minutes long, and will be held on the Evanston campus. Interested participants can go here for more information on the classes, and for instructions on how to register.