SEAM RIPPER: So Hot Right Now

Visit Delirious Hem to check out the next batch of pieces for SEAM RIPPER: Women on Textual & Sartorial Style!

Marisa Crawford | from Reversible

Khadijah Queen | 3 Poems

Jackie Wang | THE SKIN-CLOTH: Race, Fashion, Hygiene, Writing, and Embodied Movement Through Space

Danielle Pafunda | from The Book of Scab

Dolly Lemke | Orsino and Joanna: left to their own adornments

Yvette Thomas | The Panoply of Silk

Amy Boutell | Behind the Scenes of My Novel-in-Progress about Vintage Fashion & Surrealism

Anna Lena Phillips | desiderata

Nicole Steinberg | From a Closet of Grief

Jessica Bozek | "trunk to the blow": a poem-dress

Lily Ladewig | 5 Hats

Jennifer Tamayo | CUSTOM & CLOTHING

Danielle Roderick | The Pantsuit

jojo Lazar | 4 Poems

Susan Yount | Socks of Fire

Angela Veronica Wong | On Looking Like

Should All Submissions Be Read Blind?

A few minutes ago, in response to Kathleen Rooney's Facebook post (in response to Amber Tamblyn's response to Kathleen's post on Harriet in which she reps Switchback's Gatewood Prize, among other topics), I wrote the following:

Tina Fey's "dream for the future" that Tamblyn quotes ("that sketch comedy shows will become a gender-blind meritocracy of whoever is really the funniest") is also my dream for the literary world ("that journals and presses and magazines will become a gender blind meritocracy of whoever is really the best"), but "funniest" and "best" are always value judgments completely conditioned by context. (Who have you seen be funny on TV? Dudes. Who are you taught to read in school? Men.) So, sadly, it's still a dream, not a reality, and it's a dream that the stats from VIDA (and "Numbers Trouble" a few years back) shook people out of. And although we have pledges from many editors to do better, we still don't have a lot of solutions being thought up, which is troubling. Look what happened when symphonies started holding gender-blind auditions: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/01/0212/7b.shtml
So, until wider change comes about, women-only presses and journals are still necessary.

My response to people saying "Things should change" is usually to ask, "How can we start making the change happen right now?"

And so now I'm wondering what would happen if we took the example of symphony orchestras and asked presses, magazines, and journals to make their submission systems blind. When there was a lot of brouhaha on Foetry.com and elsewhere about judges choosing former students, etc., the CLMP created a recommended guideline that member presses could adopt, which asked former students or close friends of the judge to refrain from submitting. This language is now standard in many contest guidelines.

What if it became standard to read submissions blind, which programs like Submishmash could help editors do easily?

This doesn't solve the issues of soliciting writers, or writers who send query letters to certain types of publications, but it seems easy enough for small presses, magazines, and journals.

What do you think?

Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book

I took a class at the CUNY Graduate Center last semester -- with Ammiel Alcalay, and also with Ana Božičević, Tim Peterson, Seth Stewart, Kyle Waugh, Caolan Madden, sometimes Erica Kaufman, and many others -- where we learned about H.D. through Robert Duncan through Diane di Prima, who came to visit our class. It was as mystical as it sounds.

Duncan's H.D. Book wasn't out yet, but we seemed to be working our way toward it. It came out in January from the University of California Press, and now Lisa Jarnot has a review of it up at the Poetry Foundation. Here are some excerpts that put into writing some of the things I've heard about Duncan as a larger-than-life figure, and the book as a sacred text:

Duncan’s confidence as a thinker and talker and writer was generated partly by his adoptive parents’ belief that he had been incarnated from the realm of Atlantis.

*

He constellated H.D. as his mother (and Freud as his grandfather by default).

*

Jack and Harvey’s insistence that The H.D. Book had some kind of cosmic significance loomed large in my imagination. I was 20, provincial, and ready for adventure. Duncan too gave hints of some secret that was hidden in H.D.’s work—he sensed that she was privy to some mysteries. In a 1960 meeting with her, she told him that she had fallen into a Roman Mithra cult in London during World War II and had “seen too much.” Whatever it was, I wanted to be in on it. Over a period of weeks I quietly xeroxed all of Duncan’s writings on H.D. and handed them to Harvey. When he died in 1991, the project seemed lost. But another member of our circle rescued it. In 1995 it arrived in my mailbox on a floppy disk, with no return address. Some years later it showed up on the Internet under the imprint Frontier Press.

That bit about the floppy disk and the internet is a piece of the story I hadn't heard before -- so wild.

I haven't read The H.D. Book yet; my suspicion is that it's something you should read in pieces over a long stretch. Anybody wanna have a book club? There really are reading groups forming for it around the country. If only I still lived in Milwaukee.

SEAM RIPPER Launches

SEAM RIPPER: Women on Textual & Sartorial Style

Read Kate Durbin's introduction, "Revenge of the Slip Dress Sluts," and check out pieces from Rosebud Ben-Oni, Dana Teen Lomax, Gina Abelkop, and Elisa Gabbert over at Delirious Hem!

It’s my belief that my unwavering allegiance to glitter is the most radical stance in my career.

--Kate Durbin

Nudists aside, there is no opting out of fashion.

--Elisa Gabbert

Nothing was purchased in the creation of this work.

--Dana Teen Lomax

Make us imitate the burlap in the corner. Beg to be broken in.

--Rosebud Ben-Oni

Fashion lords over this house of tribute with a bright and stealthy eye.

--Gina Abelkop

Destroyer at Webster Hall, 4/3/11

Dan Bejar holds the microphone like it’s a cigar, leans on the mic stand like it’s a cane. He said it was an album about “American communism” and he’s a crazy kindly old dictator.

A woman in yellow-glowing box seat to the right of stage bangs on the glass.

Dan Bejar crouching down and smiling while trumpet + pedals turn Destroyer into a jazzy noise band, then “Brown paper bag, don’t stop me now, I’m on a roll.”

New York City woooos loudly at “New York City just wants to see you naked, and they will." We're implicated but we love it and it was probably Kara Walker’s line anyway.

People kinda dance.

Dan Bejar avoids addressing audience as usual, but when he does it’s, “It smells like the islands in here. . . .” I think it must be some kinda Canadian expression, but A gets it. DB: “It’s a good thing.” I thought there were smoke machines; maybe it was just smoke.

The guy in the restroom spraying disinfectant, handing you paper towels, selling granola bars from Costco-size boxes.

Me suspecting “Savage Night at the Opera” and “Poor in Love” don't get played because they’re not Kaputty enough, which also might make them the songs longtime Destroyer fans love the best.

“My Favorite Year” makes up for it—one of my favorite songs of 2008, Kaputtified.

The drummer takes a picture of the sold-out hall, the band leaves, the cheers keep steady, the band slowly fills in for “Bay of Pigs” encore.

Girls screaming and throwing red underwear on stage: Destroyermania invades America!

Stella, Stella, and whiskey.

Photo: Brooklyn Vegan.

Distilled/poemified version here.

Switchback Books Launches the Gatewood Prize 2011!

The Gatewood Prize is Switchback Books' annual competition for a first or second full-length (48-80 pp.) collection of poems by a woman writing in the English language. It is named after Emma Gatewood, the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail.

2011 JUDGE: Harryette Mullen

READING PERIOD: April 1-June 1, 2011

HARRYETTE MULLEN's most recent books are Recyclopedia (Graywolf Press, 2006) and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press, 2002), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Mullen was the 2009 recipient of the Academy of American Poets' Fellowship Award. She teaches African American literature and creative writing in the English Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Please visit the Switchback website for more information and guidelines.

Download the contest flyer [PDF].

Please re-post and spread the word!

Thank you!

Hanna Andrews & Becca Klaver, Editors
Whitney Holmes, Managing Editor
Dolly Lemke, Assistant Editor
Brandi Homan, Board President

RU NaPoWriMo

Me 'n' my Rutgers pals are at it again this April. Visit us here: