Live Performances/Recording Sessions/Radio Broadcasts

Call for submissions:
(Note: List is not restrictive nor preclusive of other themes.)
Erotica (beyond anatomy); Dramatic Monologue (poetry: e.g. "My Last Dutchess"); Epigrams;
Self-Portrait; Moving/Motion; Dust; Corridors; Insects; Cemeteries; Smoking; Infanticide; Music;
Japan; Montreal/Quebec (surtout francophone); Surrealism; Monsters/Monstrosity (also images);
Timepieces; Kites; Suicide; 'Lovesick,' Intermediating Surfaces:  the Sk(in) Between
Consult Submissions for guidelines,Masthead for editorial policy, also Bridge City Lit and Big City, Little pages.
Please query first on articles over 750 words.
editors@nycBigCityLit.com.

In This Issue:  January 2003

Trade Publishers:
Bookshelf presents Chapter I of Mark Nickels's novel, Sumac.

Poetry:
Our poetry feature to greet the white month is "Colors," with special images and contributors Anne Blonstein, Ann Cefola, Jay Chollick, Charles Fishman, Stephen Massimilla, Gyorgyi Voros, and others. "The shade of their trees was a word of many shades." (—Dylan Thomas). The feature is preceded by a Masters section which includes Rimbaud, Tennyson, Lawrence, Lowell, Stevens, and other chromatists. Our hand-picked Twelve 12 page features Alice Notley's long poem, "Red Zinnias."

Fiction/Short Prose:
White in New York is green in Sydney. "The Fruits of Courage" by Australian Russell Griffin and "Gold, An Olympic Fish Story" by Robert Dunn study the limits of valor and fame in the modern world, while the Short Prose section reverts to prehistoric Dreamtime with "A Small Giant Dies, the King of Pintupi" by Valery Oisteanu, about Aboriginal painter, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, and to tradition with Marie Kazalia's "Red Powder," an interior monologue centered on the bindi.

Bookshelf:  First Chapters
Mark Nickels's novel, Sumac
The horses strained and lathered at harness and the men swore and cursed on top of a silence too dense to carry the complaint of the torn roots. Dadgum or in any case Goddamn anyone who ever thought of such a thing as a tree.

Essays:
Edmund Pennant:  Memorial Remarks
by Suzanne Noguere
He asked Edmund whether he had a manuscript ready for publication. He didn't. The man gave him his card and said to contact him when he did. The man was John Hall Wheelock, the press, Charles Scribner's Sons.

Peace on Earth to Bring Chaos
by Paul McDonald
Well, peace on earth is a laudable goal and I'm sure that people have been asking you for it ever since God was a boy and Strom Thurmond went to Congress.

Articles:
"Yer Mad, Yer Barstard!":  That Colorful Outback
by Patrick Henry (featuring paintings by the author)
"Last week, the vegetarian. Now you want a flamin' glass. We got none."

Ten Mile Meadow Project: A Conservatory of Land and Language (with photos)

Reviews:
Paul McDonald's Like Neon
3 Schools, 34 Churches:  We Tied Off for Pentecost
It is evident that McDonald renounced "Thank God, I'm a country boy" as all-purpose mantra early into his freshman World Philosophies course, and thereafter opened his mind wide to alternative interpretation.

Anthony Bernini's Distant Kinships
Daring Small Birds Through Heavy Rain
He does well to let his contemporaries record the quotidian in what Degas called "eyesight painting," while he draws on his much more mature poetic resources to unveil the world draped by the beneficent spider.

Interviews:
Memoir (a life and death Q & A in the fourth pew . . .)
by Terrence Dunn
You're going to heaven, but not for a long, long, long time."
"How do you know?"
"Because you're asking me these questions."

Series/Event Reviews:
"The Words of My City:  New Yorkers Read New York Poems" (12/3)
by Daniela Gioseffi
To begin "The Words of My City," PSA director Alice Quinn aptly quoted a line or two of Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish"—that very New York City masterpiece of 20th century American poetry.

The New Year's Day Marathons at Knitting Factory and Poetry Project
The city's annual Jan 1 marathons—the Poetry Project's original and Bruce Weber's alternative—each present over a hundred performers in three-minute segments, the products of otherwise correspondent downtown communities which, unfortunately, start the year at odds with one another.

Other Arts:
"Your Job's a Joke, You're Broke, Your Love Life's D.O.A":
Lanford Wilson's Burn This Revived at Union Square Theatre
by Stan Friedman
Call it 'Courtney Cox in Hell' as Wilson's quartet, composed of a soulful woman, her wise-cracking roommate, a mysterious beau and a bothersome relative, conspire to show us that placing too much false hope on a single human will result in nothing but a home where "somebody's always crying."

Adapting Kafka's Metamorphosis for the Stage
by E. Thomalen
The alien being must be in me, then, as distinctly and invisibly as the hidden object in a picture-puzzle where, too, one would never find anything if one did not know that it is there.—Franz Kafka

Michael Cunningham's The Hours, from Page to Film Reel
She Nurtured the Flower that Devoured Him
by Maureen Holm
On a clear, contemporary morning in June, Clarissa, 52, walks from her West Village brownstone garden duplex to the florist, places her party order, and brings an armload to Richard, 53, her lover at eighteen, a poet-novelist now stricken with AIDS, whom she will feed at 5:00 among friends and buckets of roses, and then deliver to his award ceremony. When she returns to dress him at 3:30, he begs off. "I don't think two people could have been happier than we've been," he says, and gently slides off his fifth-floor tenement sill.

Free Expression:
Poetry and Art in Chicago:  A Prosimetrical Complaint (Part One)
by Robert Klein Engler
Ironically, the propaganda that is public art and poetry in Chicago is failed propaganda because its motive is not to communicate a message, but rather, to further the self-esteem of the artist. It is pseudo-therapy, not a collective aspiration. Such art does not even approach the level of the great poster propaganda seen in the old Soviet state.

Breaking the Fast Food Chain: Upper West Side Neighborhood United in Self-Determination

Legal Forum:
Bush Administration Spends 100 Million Promoting Marriage, Reneges on 34 Million for UN Population Fund. Defiant Friends Campaign Raising It Dollar by Dollar.

Print Series:
With thanks for all of your orders by email query, we now offer a convenient listing and order form. You may still inquire about any Headwaters Print Series or monograph you don't see listed here by writing to us. Query Monographs of work appearing in the popular Jun '01 Vietnam issue are on back-order. We are preparing Big City Lit's Brightest Lights collection for 2002.


Degrees of Apprenticeship:
Sarah Lawrence mfa Collection
Poetry (56 pp) or Prose (64 pp) $10 each (full color)


Distance from the Tree
poems on fathers (64 pp $10) (full color)
Dana Gioia, Alice Notley, D. Nurkse, James Ragan, Ron Price et al.

Letters:
(The editors invite for publication well-written letters or speakeasy pieces on any topic of concern or interest to the magazine's readers. See Letters Page for length, language, and other details.)

~ . ~ The magazine is intended to be read in Palatino, and preferably in Netscape. ~ . ~
Note to contributors: To cite your work in the Archive,
indicate the month, e.g. Jun2001/contents/poetrydusk.html.