Hello old pals! It has been a long time since the last one of these. I am now a first-year English teacher and the publishing game has perceptibly slipped! Summer is coming soon, and I will be back on the horse. Here’s an oldish one that just came out in this month’s Rotary Dial. About Donald Rumsfeld. Kind of. You can get it here for a mere buck.
Also, as always, I love Canada. Thanks Canada
This one’s a bit of a watershed moment for me. My first published piece of short fiction is out now in Qwerty, University of New Brunswick’s literary magazine (love you lots, Canada). It’s the Spring 2014 issue, a delayed announcement due to some issues they were having with their site. Subscribe to get at the goods.
The piece is called “Allegorien Deutschlands”. It’s not strictly a short story, but a series of six little scenes, each less than a thousand words, that illustrate some symbolic or emotional aspect of German culture or philosophy. They were written mainly as a personal exercise while I was learning German last year, but having floated them out to a few places for jollies, I heard back from Qwerty. Then I ran around the house shouting stuff for a bit. Anyway, still trucking more fiction pieces out to magazines, so perhaps there’ll be more announcements of this sort in the near future!
As per the editorial:
Each poem in CV2’s spring 2014 “Poetry Only” issue is listening deep into the stirred silence of the page. Where once there was emptiness, a poem; where once there was attention, voice: 25 poets careening for your ear! Here reside disturbed ponds, otter-tailed exclamations, interstellar field static, oceanic fault lines, silent synapses, glacial angels, northern ghost-farms, skeleton councils, phantom dollhouses, sub-island descents, and debt, much debt—inherited, historical, environmental—to reconcile.
The “disturbed ponds” belong to one of my contributions to the issue, an ekphrasis poem on Peter Doig’s painting White Canoe. Also included: a poem on the Klimt painting Bewegtes Wasser, which I address to the Nibelung Alberich from the Ring Cycle (maybe a jump, but I think 1898 Vienna would have dug Wagner). Lastly, a poem from the Revenant sequence I wrote in 2012, in which an estranged husband and wife communicate through dreams over the course of one night.
This gig is significant to me for a couple of reasons. For one, I earned a little money from it, which is new for me. At the same time, CV2 has an air of legitimacy that I’m not used to. It’s not put together with staples and it has grants from a bunch of Canadian arts councils. A few people might actually be reading it! Still trying to work out why Canadians like me so much. Anyway, here is the issue. More news coming soon.
The summer 2013 issue of Off the Coast, “Calling Down Lightning”, is available to order here. Inside you’ll find a poem I wrote. Fun fact: Off the Coast, based in the bit of Maine closest to New Brunswick, is published further to the East than any other poetry magazine in the US. Also, I happen to be going on a trip to Maine in a matter of days.
Circa just put out their summer issue, containing three of my poems: shazam. The first is a translation of Rimbaud’s “Le Dormeur du val”, the second a piece I wrote after watching John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and the third a little sketch of our old French-Canadian landlord. More to come in the next couple of days!
owen lucas 