round-up: 7/28
quotations, tweets, submissions, etc.
Happy Wednesday!
Here’s what I have for you:
Housekeeping
Recommendations
Quotations
Call to action
Tweets
Housekeeping:
I have some art out in the Hayden’s Ferry Review summer issue—“Plum Scouts” and “Golden Hour.”
& here’s my lil artist statement:
Don’t we touch each other
just to prove we are still here?
-Ocean Vuong
These hand-cut collages—created with found photos, pen, marker, and scratch paper—focus on the act of touching: the impulse, the force of gravity, the vulnerability or security that it can bring. Within these works, blues and bright oranges juxtapose the black-and-white subjects in the foreground, who—holding hands, or lying side-by-side, looking up at the sky—find a sense of safety in each other.
& I have a very old poem out!
Some good art:
Caption: “i love art nouveau because it’s so unwaveringly fruity”
What else?
Behold! A bagel map!
Joyce Carol Oates remains the worst.
Deeply amused by these replies to her tweet, though:
Title of the week:
“Portrait of the heart as a seafaring vessel” (x)
To read:
Quotations:
I’m finally reading Brynne Rebele-Henry’s Prelude which, frankly, has been a little disappointing (3/5 stars)—but I rarely like poets’ second full-length collections. (The debuts often feel like such tour de forces, while second collections are so subdued & rarely sufficiently edited2.
Don’t get me wrong—despite this, Prelude is still very good. Here are some quotations I’ve underlined:
This is how a girl becomes
holy: first she becomes empty.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
To be a girl is to be an opening,
something to be filled.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
…bruises on her thighs I tongued
as if that could make them sweet.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
…my own drawn desire
a thing held only in the dark.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
Who are you, to turn yourself into nothing?
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
The slick of our girlhood, how we were covered with mud.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
The lemon juice I swallowed to stave off want,
the salt I rubbed on my gums until they burned.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
The hurt was a thing we swallowed until it corroded.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
her mouth always open / neck bruised / her want a soft thing turned sharp so that she became damp earth, damp girl, damp sky
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
All I ever wanted to be was nothing. To cleave / the girlhood from my flesh. To purge myself of this / unholy want.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
To be holy is to be empty
so I became barbed wire,
a girl holding nothing in her palms.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
My desire was a thing I swallowed until my teeth corroded.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
Why do we compare girls to birds?
Their clipped wings.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
How do you forget to love a city once it burns?
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
My knees scraped,
like the corners of the sky before dawn.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
I set the fire only to know if I was capable of burning.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
In the dark, we can pretend that dykes like us never die.
That instead we live and grow old in this blue velvet night,
the bedsheets an ocean to drown in.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
Once, I thought to become.
Once, I swallowed salt and prayed for forgiveness.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
The things I hunger for most:
a stretch of moonlight, the notches
between a woman’s spine, the salt of her.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
To be hungerless is to be holy.
-Brynne Rebele-Henry
Call to action:
Today’s is silly, maybe—or maybe it doesn’t need to be said, but: keep submitting to the journals you love, even after they reject you (sometimes more than once).
Back when I was teaching more & introducing students to the submissions process, they seemed to find it helpful (or at least reassuring) when I shared my own trials & triumphs—so, since then, I’ve been kind of tracking my submission numbers in an effort to demystify the reality, as best as I can.
What I mean is:
No one gets an acceptance on the first try—at least not always. And, for the sake of transparency—and maybe to demystify the process, even for you, if that’s helpful—here are some numbers & figures:
Guernica: accepted on the sixteenth try
Blue Earth Review: accepted on the sixth try
Bennington Review: accepted on the sixth try
Anyways:
Keep submitting! Keep trying! It takes time!
Tweets:
That’s all I have for you today!
Stay healthy, sane, & keep looking out for each other—
-Despy Boutris
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Listen. You can’t convince me that he’s sexy. Sorry. But that kiss with Winona’s character in Season 4 of Stranger Things?????? I felt that. Lucky bastard. (Watch it!)
See Rebele-Henry’s Autobiography of a Wound & Prelude, or Richard Siken’s Crush & War of the Foxes.