Mandala Journal Blog

nevver: How to Make Write

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:48:56 -0400

How to Make Write

one year ago today

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:14:00 -0400

poetrysince1912:

I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

—Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 - March 27, 2012)

Dear Adrienne Rich, rest in peace. If I had had the time I would have been posting excerpts of yours all day long. I may still.

(While we acknowledge her passing, it’s good to also acknowledge her record of transphobia. Complicated in life, complicated in death, and it would not do to whitewash or diminish that.)

bostonreview: In Uganda, where homosexuality is punishable by...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 23:00:03 -0400

bostonreview:

In Uganda, where homosexuality is punishable by death, activists held their first Pride. (via Have a Gay Day)

Even dying, her life riots in her.

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:50:00 -0400

Your Monday poem today is by Marie Ponsot. The Poetry Foundation declared her winner of the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize just last week, a sort of poet’s lifetime achievement award (and Lord it’s a large award - $100,000!) She’s been publishing and translating poetry (among other things) since 1957. And is she any good? Yes she is:

T.S. Eliot once said that modern poets had lost the ability to think and feel at the same time. If only he could have read Marie Ponsot! Her poems are marvels of intellectual curiosity and acuity, and they will also break your heart.

Below you will find her poem “The Visit,” from March 1958. And as always, thanks to The Poetry Foundation for all their good poetry publishing work.

(And how was your Monday? Was it kind? Ours was not, but tomorrow’s Tuesday.)

Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watch

The sly very old woman wile away from her pious

And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin.

She pours big drinks. We think of what

Has crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh in

And muddied her once tumbling blood that, young,

Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower,

Now Babel, then of ivory, of the Shulamite,

Collapsed to this keen dame moving among

Herself. She hums, she plays with used bright

Ghosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come here

My child, and feeling it, dear. A crooking finger

Shows how hot the oven is.

(Also she is alive with hate.

Also she is afraid of hell. Also, we wish

We might, illiberal, uncompassionate,

Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.)

Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock still

Though aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles.

We manage to mean well. We endure, and more.

We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure.

We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kin

To any after this of those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us,

Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure.

Time for another installment of

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 19:20:00 -0400

the VOX Reading Series.

Gabriel Blackwell is the author of Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer and Critique of Pure Reason. His essays and fictions have appeared in Conjunctions, Tin House, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, Unstuck, and many other places. He teaches creative writing at Willamette University and is the reviews editor of The Collagist.

Originally from Indiana, Matthew Nye holds degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of Utah. Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia and is an editor for A Bad Penny Review. Recent work is forthcoming in 1913: A Journal of Forms. He lives in Athens.

It’s at 7:30pm in the UGA Chapel on March 26. Mandala Journal has RSVPd on the Facebook event page, which is funny because haha a literary journal which has no embodied form and no free will or subjectivity is “attending” an event haha but seriously. Mandala Journal is attending. See you there!

Farewell to Chinua Achebe

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:45:19 -0400

(via The Guardian)

There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.

The Art of Fiction No. 139, The Paris Review

Nigerian author & giant of literature Chinua Achebe passed away early this morning. He was 82.

"your friend Byron is nice but-"

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:25:00 -0400

(via Hark! a vagrant)

If you have any interest in the aforementioned comic, gossipy diary entries, “the Byronic look”, or Salieri types, you are going to be interested in Carrie Frye’s recent piece for The Awl. And in the same vein,

If you have any interest in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or vampires or Romantic poets or, who knows, Swiss tourism, you’ve most likely read Polidori’s name. He’s a curio, Polly Dolly, most notable not for what he wrote but for being nearby when other people wrote things. It’s a strange afterlife; to think you’ve landed a leading role, and then there you are, on stage, sure, and with big names too, but fixed to a mark far upstage and over to the left, near the wings, in the half-dark where the spotlight doesn’t quite reach. “Poor Polidori.” That’s how Mary Shelley referred to him, writing years later. And he was.

Poor Polidori! Fantastic.

theparisreview: “Memory is the happiness of being alone.” —Lois...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:56:00 -0400

theparisreview:

“Memory is the happiness of being alone.” —Lois Lowry, Anastasia Krupnik

Happy Birthday, Lois Lowry!

Long live Lois Lowry, long live YA

On an entirely different note, did you know that Krupnik the beloved middle-grade lit character is also a beloved Polish-Lithuanian honey spiced cordial? Let us assure you (and by “us” we mean “me”), it is very, very good. Long live YA, long live krupnik

the migration

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:34:31 -0400

Today’s Monday poem comes our own archives. The poet is Ken Poyner, the poem is “The Migration,” and it’s one of our favorites from the 2012 issue. The last two lines are really wonderful payoff, in particular, but we won’t spoil them for you, go ahead, read it and see:

Behind me there was an outbreak of the pox.
The disease as rare as fresh paint
Would take away millions, leave
Families of empty streets, apartment buildings
With lights on two floors only:
Tiny empty boxes separated by elevations of concrete.
I was heading North.
Alongside, the cholera was beginning:
Water being taken in by the thirsty
Like Bible stories, the dogma without the detail,
And to the same foggy end. No one
Spoke of it but the dehydrated
Did not wave as I passed.
No one asked of the news behind me,
Their hollowed eyes focused closer.
Anthrax lay ahead. Made into
An aerosol by the enterprising,
It was seeking the lungs of those
Who would be care givers, vying
With all the others to be
The chief disease. I know
There is no one germ or virus that rules:
The worst sickness is the one that kills you.
I was heading North,
As healthy as a white picket fence.
I had my food in a knapsack
And the best of the rain in two bottles.
I was as vivid as one of two farm animals
Used to breed fearlessly endless food stocks. As hale
As adolescent wood stacked against winter. God
Forgive me, I was whistling as I walked.

theparisreview: “A place where you hide from the wolves. That’s...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:27:06 -0400

theparisreview:

“A place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.” —Jean Rhys, from The Art of Fiction No. 64.

In anticipation of our upcoming issue, Shelter. In which we talk about taking shelter. From: wolves, the storm, the passing of time, maybe yourself. And, in which we talk about how we take shelter, and with whom. Coming in April! [Thanks for the segue, Paris Review!]

it's not outsourcing, it's crowd-sourcing

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:00:41 -0500

The word “crowd-sourcing” is not revolting, in our opinion, but imagine that recoiling were a word meaning “cause to recoil,” and that is what we think about the word “crowd-sourcing.” See also: eye-rolling. The idea of “crowd-sourcing,” though, has some possibility. To hear the writer Andrew Fitzgerald tell it, it’s the new frontier of the literary imagination or something:

I want to conduct an experiment.

We often think of written fiction as timeless, crafted for history. I want to write extremely timely fiction, nearly ephemeral. I want to write a story not just set in the present, but set in this very week. Almost real-time. A serialized narrative that keeps up with the events of our world and weaves them into its tale as it goes.

But also, I want to conduct an experiment with you.

We often think of the author as a solitary creator, laboring alone. It is only the author’s vision that is realized in written fiction. Where so many other art forms involve some element of collaboration, writing down stories is a one woman or one man endeavor. In this project I want to write a story with your help.

Intriguing! And he’s using Twitter to gather his story ideas, so file this one under “o brave new world.”

via Millions Millions

A Monday poem, this time on Monday

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:20:00 -0500

This one’s from Rainer Maria Rilke. The English translation comes from Rilke’s Book of Hours, republished in 2005 by Riverhead Books. It was translated by the poet Anita Barrows and the Buddhist/scholar/mystic/national treasure Joanna Macy (her recent interview with Krista Tippett for the radio show On Being is very beautiful and moving and well worth your time).

Also, if you are interested in being haunted by a hollowed-eyed visage forever and ever, we recommend Google image searching Rilke.

And now, your Monday poem:

You come and go. The doors swing closed
ever more gently, almost without a shudder.
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow. For all things
sing you: at times
we just hear them more clearly.

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
Then all the work I put my hand to
widens from turn to turn.

theparisreview: Marcel Proust (1871-1922) Cahier 12, 1909, NAF...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:57:39 -0500

theparisreview:

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) Cahier 12, 1909, NAF 16652 Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF), Paris, France, © BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais. (via)

"Spend one hour of coloring in silence"

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:19:28 -0500

Here are some course syllabi from some famous writer folk, like Zadie Smith and Auden and David Foster Wallace, via the Atlantic. We happen to love reading literature syllabi from regular non-famous folk anyway, so this is just a real double treat. However we do not know if the hand-drawn, Napoleon Dynamite doodle aesthetic works super well for a syllabus that one has to, you know, read:

books on books on books on books on

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:56:43 -0500

theparisreview:

From abandoned Wal-Marts to Venetian warrens, thirty places for book lovers.

For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.

two calendar events for you

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:04:00 -0500

Have you heard of Ntone Edjabe? He is a lot of things: a Cameroonian; an emigrant to Cape Town; a prominent DJ in Cape Town clubs; the founder and editor of the pan-African arts (literary and otherwise) journal, Chimurenga, which CNN called “Africa’s Answer to the New Yorker” (if you care about that sort of thing). He’s going to be delivering a lecture today at the UGA Chapel at 4pm called “Diagnosing the Chimurenga Chronic,” and also he’s going to be djing tonight at the 40 Watt, and at this moment I feel very fortunate to be living in a town where these kinds of things happen on a Tuesday.

Here’s Edjabe on what Chimurenga brings to the global discourse about Africa:

I think, generally, discourse on Africa is geared toward simplicity,” he said. “Everything must be simple. … In a way, this is what signifies Africa in global consciousness. The moment you bring a degree of complexity to it, it kind of throws people off. They just don’t know where to look anymore. We try to present life as (being) as complex as it really is.

Now get thee to the UGA Chapel

Monday poem, on Tuesday

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:36:00 -0500

Last week I gave you a Monday poem, and that was going to become a regular Monday thing, poems every Monday. “Monday poems.” But yesterday, Monday, for one reason or another (I took a nap, was cowed into going to the gym, took an overlong shower, fell asleep), I did not give you a Monday poem. Here, let me make it up to you.

This is a poem called ‘Straightforward’ and it’s by Bob Hicok. Thanks to the Georgia Review for tweeting about it the other day. It contains the phrase “driving/And crying” which delights me, because of the band called (what else) Drivin’ and Cryin’.

There’s no way to know how many things I’ve seen: one million, two.
Picket fences. Stalin’s underwear. A woman nursing
while bouncing on a trampoline. I saw a man
in a stamping plant put his hand in a press
and turn his possible waving
at a giraffe, possible plinking of middle C
into paste. And when I saw you
crying behind me going 70 in your ’99
Corolla, I thought, let’s go smell
a few cedar trees. The other options are

we get drunk as an avalanche, an abattoir, or keep driving
and crying, or pull over and you show me the shape
of your hands around the throat of wind, I tell you
I want to kill myself in French
and you think I’m sharing a recipe
for cake, when the truth is
I want to kill myself in English and know nothing
will ever take this desire away. I own four acres

and however many beetles that is, cloudshadows
that is, it’s a lot of cedars, a lot of prying
my lungs open in the cold
to this scent that cuts an awakening
through everything, I call it jumpstart, call it suddenease
with tincture of deer scat. That’s all I’ve got to offer,
really. Listening and that. Lending you a few bucks
and shotguns shells and that. Standing beside rivers
and that. But mostly that.

superfluidity: The apotheosis of Abraham Lincoln into the arms...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:13:21 -0500

superfluidity:

The apotheosis of Abraham Lincoln into the arms of George Washington accompanied by angels and light breaking through clouds, artist unknown, 1860s, George Eastman House.

Happy (late) President’s Day!

the problem which actually has a name

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 17:51:35 -0500

the World Health Organization last year reported that some sixty thousand women and children in South Africa were victims of domestic violence on a monthly basis—the highest reported rate in the world.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault writing for The New Yorker puts Reeva Steenkamp’s death in context

As an aside: You may know that Hunter-Gault was one of the first Black students to attend the (reluctantly desegregating) University of Georgia. But did you know that she was also the first Black person to work at The New Yorker? If you didn’t know (like me), now you know (like me).

Reeva Steenkamp Reeva Steenkamp Reeva Steenkamp

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:16:40 -0500

There are other things I’d rather write about, but this affects everything else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving.

I’ve been meaning to link to this excellent piece on violence against women by Rebecca Solnit for ages now (or since January at least, when she wrote it), but today I finally will, in honor of Reeva Steenkamp. Remember that name. You are more likely to know the name of her (probable) murderer, Oscar Pistorius, because he is a famous athlete and because when a famous man murders a woman he is dating or married to we are far more likely to bemoan that famous man’s fall from grace than we are to bemoan that woman’s gruesome loss of life.