Poetry Review: Zbigniew Herbert's "Elegy for the Departure"

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Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998) is perhaps best known in America for his poem “Report from the Besieged City,” and for his ability to demythologize time-worn tales as in “Why the Classics” or “Daedalus and Icarus.”In 1999 Ecco Press published Elegy for the Departure, a collection of poems translated into English for the first time. The collection includes poems from Herbert’s 1990 book of the same title as well as poems from earlier volumes. The book is arranged in roughly chronological order from 1950 to 1990. Some of the poems, especially in the first section, display Herbert’s attention to myth, his political voice: “—how to lead / people away from the ruins / how to lead / the chorus from poems—”. Much of the collection, though, turns to a more personal voice. He speaks often of his childhood: “home was the telescope of childhood / the skin of emotion / a sister’s cheek / branch of a tree.” In the later poems of the book he is ruminative, looking back upon his life: “I thought then / that before the deluge it was necessary / to save / one / thing / small / warm / faithful.” The language throughout the collection is lively, whimsical when you least expect it. Section three is made of clever prose poems that read like abbreviated fables: funny and sad all at once. Each is titled with a single noun, which the poem goes on to offer a definition of. “Drunkards” are people who “drink at one gulp, bottoms up,” who spend their time looking up through the necks of their bottles, but maybe “if they had stronger heads and more taste, they would be astronomers.” We also hear from a Wolf caught in one of Aesop’s fables. The wolf is terrorizing the sheep, but he admits that, “Were it not for Aesop, we would sit on our hind legs and gaze at the sunset. I like to do this very much.”I am continually amazed in reading Herbert’s poems—both long and short—at his ability to move the reader forward in the poem without any use of punctuation. This is a style that is certainly abused by many of us amateur writers so it is refreshing to see it done so well. I’ll leave you with my favorite lines from the book, which demonstrate the energy and rhythm of Herbert’s writing. From “The Troubles of a Little Creator”:A small puppy in vast empty spacein a world not yet readyI worked from the beginningwearing my arm to the quickthe earth uncertain as a dandelion puff ballI pressed it with my pilgrim’s footwith a double blow of my eyesI fixed the skyand with a mad fantasyimagined the color blue--Laura Stephenson, Editor-in-Chief

Review of "Sweet Talk," by Stephanie Vaughn

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"Every so often, that dead dog dreams me up again." And we're there, at attention. A bravura opening line, full of pulls, secrets. I get chills reading it. That dead dog dreams me up. We're going back in time, we're going to experience everything after that line in a backwards frame dreamed up by a dog. He won't be the narrator, though - just the spirit guide, if you will.

That's not the opening line of this collection of short stories, originally published in the early 1990s and recently re-released by Other Press. But it is the single sentence that best captures Stephanie Vaughn's astonishing, Grace Paley-like facility with the technical construction of the short story, and with the artistic achievement possible when a novel's worth of emotions and relationships are compressed into brilliant, diamond-like stories. It also shows how she does it without showing off. No big words, no strained punctuation. None of the flailing that all of us, the lesser talents, have to resort to. 

Many of the stories are about the often-unwritten world of children growing up on military bases - four of the stories, including "Dog Heaven," from which the opening quote is taken, are narrated by Gemma; whose father works for the US Army and who travels with him around the country as he takes new posts. The transience of these lives, their brief connections, the way these children are planted and ripped out until they grow thick emotional calluses, are brilliantly explored. 

For the last few months, I've been traveling - I'm currently studying in Berlin, and over the summer I worked in western Massachusetts. This is the book that I've brought with me, wherever I go. 

-Ben Miller, Assistant Prose Editor

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An Excerpt from "Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog," from Sweet Talk, by Stephanie Vaughn. Copyright 2012, by Stephanie Vaughn. Sweet Talk is in print and available from Other Press.

I went downstairs and put on my hat, coat, boots.  I followed his footsteps in the snow, down the front walk, and across the road to the riverbank.  He did not seem surprised to see me next to him.  We stood side by side, hands in our pockets, breathing frost into the air.  The river was filled from shore to shore with white heaps of ice, which cast blue shadows in the moonlight.

“This is the edge of America,” he said, in a tone that seemed to answer a question I had just asked.  There was a creak and crunch of ice as two floes below us scraped each other and jammed against the bank.

“You knew all week, didn’t you?  Your mother and your grandmother didn’t know, but I knew that you could be counted on to know.”

I hadn’t known until just then, but I guessed the unspeakable thing—that his career was falling apart—and I knew.  I nodded.  Years later, my mother told me what she had learned about the incident, not from him but from another Army wife.  He had called a general a son of a bitch.  That was all.  I never knew was the issue was or whether he had been right or wrong.  Whether the defense of the United States of America had been at stake, or merely the pot in a card game.  I didn’t even know whether he had called the general a son of a bitch to his face or simply been overheard in an unguarded moment.  I only knew that he had been given a 7 instead of a 9 on his Efficiency Report and then passed over for promotion.  But that night I nodded, not knowing the cause but knowing the consequences, as we stood on the riverbank above the moonlit ice.  “I am looking at that thin beautiful line of Canada,” he said.  “I think I will go for a walk.”

“No,” I said.  I said it again.  “No.”  I wanted to remember later that I had told him not to go.

“How long do you think it would take to go over and back?” he said.

“Two hours.”

He rocked back and forth in his boots, looked up at the moon, then down at the river.  I did not say anything.

He started down the bank, sideways, taking long, graceful sliding steps, which threw little puffs of snow in the air.  He took his hands from his pockets and hopped from the bank to the ice.  He tested his weight against the weight of the ice, flexing his knees.  I watched him walk a few years from the shore and then I saw him rise in the air, his long legs, scissoring the moonlight, as he crossed from the edge of one floe to the next.  He turned and waved to me, one hand making a slow arc.

I could have said anything.  I could have said “Come back” or “I love you.”  Instead, I called after him, “Be sure and write!”  The last thing I heard, long after I had lost sight of him far out on the river, was the sound of his laugh splitting the cold air.

Workshop with us!

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The editors of West 10th invite you to a poetry workshop on Tuesday, November 13th at 7pm in Bobst LL2-07. Please bring one poem of up to 3 pages or a prose poem of under 500 words for the group to read and discuss. You may also bring brief excerpts of fiction.This is West 10th's first time hosting a community-wide workshop, a great opportunity for NYU undergrads to polish up on a piece of their writing. Also, a chance for us editors to get to know you!Refreshments will be served. We look forward to reading your work! For more information please visit the facebook event page. RSVPs are appreciated.Additionally, we would like to announce that the submission deadline for West 10th has been pushed back to Sunday, December 16th. In light of the recent hurricane and subsequent rushed academic schedules, we want to give you some extra time to work on submissions. Please check out submissions page for guidelines before submitting.

Fiction Review: Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

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Robin Sloan’s debut novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, takes a formula for classic intrigue and updates it for a 21st Century audience. Clay Jannon, a recent college graduate, falls victim to the Recession of 2008 and loses his web design job when the company he works for goes under. Out of necessity, he takes a job at the titular Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour secondhand bookstore. However, he soon discovers that the majority of Mr. Penumbra’s customers are part of a mysterious club, which borrows one-of-a-kind volumes seemingly filled with gibberish, and that Mr. Penumbra’s bookstore is not the only one of its kind.

            But, Sloan’s novel is more than just a compelling narrative; his juxtaposition of analog and digital books cleverly explores the ways in which we have fully integrated technology into our literary lives without sounding overly pedantic. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore manages to be both fun and insightful, and a truly modern mystery.

-Rebecca Rae, Copyeditor

A Review of Kij Johnson's At the Mouth of the River of Bees

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Recently, I read a wonderful collection of short stories by Kij Johnson called "At the Mouth of the River of Bees". In this book, no two stories are the same. Each one is separated by the immeasurable leaps of Johnson's imagination and her unbridled creative energy. As I progressed through the book, I encountered a slew of different fantasies: a magic act consisting of 26 monkeys, a claw-foot bathtub, and a magician that doesn't understand her own tricks; a nomadic tribe of horse raiders that wander a distant planet in search of a cure for a plague that has devastated their horse population; a glimpse inside the impossible "Schrödinger's Cathouse", where the drinks flow, the women simmer, and nothing makes sense because quantum mechanics suck and there is really nothing we can do about that; and a scene of mind-blowingly explicit intercourse between a young woman and an alien that left me feeling more violated than when the girl who sat behind me in my 5th grade math class insisted on whispering profoundly erotic phrases in my ear while we practiced long division.No, that isn't a euphemism. No, I didn't think it sounded like one, but you can never be too sure anymore.Either way, this is just the tip of the narrative iceberg. The book is a sincere testament to what stories are capable in terms of both content and style. And yet for all of the science fiction and fantasy elements present, Johnson's most impressive achievement is her lyrical examination of the human spirit and the finely woven threads of horror and beauty that run through even our most simple moments.The best example of this lies, in my opinion, in the story from which the collection takes its name. Without giving too much away, "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" follows the story of Linna and her very ill dog, Sam, as they travel along the banks of a river of bees that has mysteriously appeared across the state of Montana. What is remarkable about this story is not the massive stream of bees rampaging across Montana, but the depth of feeling between Linna and Sam. Linna is aware that Sam's days are numbered, but she still insists on sticking to their routines, and he, perhaps out of loyalty, continues to plod along beside her, concealing his pain the whole time.But there is a moment in the story when the routines fall away and Linna has no choice but to face the reality of the inevitable. It is dark, and Linna decides to park her car so Sam can rest. She watches him while he sleeps. He's just lying there, splayed out in the backseat, his chest rising and falling in the faint starlight that presses against the windowpane, and it seems as though death's infinite arms are creeping closer and closer to her companion. Her thoughts scream "live forever", but all we hear is the thundering procession of bees outside the car.This is the masterstroke of Johnson's work. For it was in this moment that I found my foundation in a veritable river of bees. For me, this absurdity was the only source of comfort I could experience. In contrast, this dying dog appeared unsettling in his strangeness and his beauty, and I felt the need to embrace him mingle with the most basic, indescribable terror. There are many moments in the book when, through a juxtaposition of the fantastic and the real, Johnson restores the magic back to real life, that which should always be miraculous to us, even if on the most fundamental level.--Joe Masco, assistant poetry editor

West 10th 2012-2013 Editorial Board

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Congratulations to the new editorial board! We received a record number of applications this year, and after much deliberation, Lauren and I feel confident that we have selected the strongest, most cohesive group possible. We can't wait to start work on the magazine again next year. 

 

Editor-In-Chief: Laura Stephenson

Managing Editor: Lauren Roberts

Poetry Editors: Maeve Nolan, Beau Peregoy

Assistant Poetry Editors: Jarry Lee, Joe Masco, Amanda Montell, Eric Stiefel

Prose Editors: Zonia Ali, Conor Burnett

Assistant Prose Editors: Caroline Calloway, Katelyn Lovejoy, Benjamin Miller, Meredith Sharpe

Art Editors: Laura Hetzel, Michelle Ling

Copyeditors: Olivia Loving, Rebecca Rae, Emma Sullivan

 

See you in the fall! 

Thanks

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A huge thank you to all who submitted applications for positions on the West 10th editorial board! We are very excited to start reading all your applications. As this is a big task, and we want to give each application its due, please be patient in waiting for our responses. We hope to announce the new roster by mid to late June. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please contact us at west10th.submissions@gmail.com. 

Deadline Extended - Editorial Board Applications Now Due on May 13th

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West 10th has extended the deadline for editorial board applications, now due May 13th. The following positions are available:Poetry EditorAssistant Poetry EditorProse EditorAssistant Prose EditorThe prose and poetry boards are responsible for reading all the submissions over winter break. We will then meet to discuss the submissions and decide which pieces to publish. Members will also be expected to help with distribution, calls for submissions, and blog writing. You do not need to have taken any creative writing classes to apply for these positions! Feel free to attach a brief writing sample of up to 3 poems and 3,000 words of prose with your application. Download the application here.Art Editor–We are looking for 2-3 visual artists to help judge our art submissions. You may submit a portfolio of up to 6 images with your application. Download the application here.Copy-Editor –We are looking to add a team of dedicated copyeditors to the editorial board. This group of editors will be responsible for reading through the entire magazine before we send it off to press. Applicants should download and complete the brief copy-editing test and send it in with their applications. *Copyediting applications deadline isMay 14th*Copyediting TestCopyediting Application Feel free to apply to as many positions as you want! Applications should be sent towest10th.submissions@gmail.com by/on  May 13th! Please contact us if you have any questions.N.B. Please do not apply to the editorial board if you will be graduating in December 2012. This is a full-year commitment.Some people have been asking “I’m studying abroad for a semester next year, can I still apply?!” To which our response is “Yes!”  – Keep the applications coming!

Applications due May 6th

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Don't forget to send in your applications for the 2012-2013 editorial board by May 6th! More information here. Questions? email us: west10th.submissions@gmail.comIf you're looking for inspiration while you write your application—or a way to procrastinate instead of studying for finals—check out this literary-themed community art project. Naomi Chasse, a student in NYU's photography department, is making one thousand red paper cranes with quotes from the writing of Francesca Lia Block. Naomi has been handing the cranes out all over New York, asking people to upload pictures of them to her tumblr. We're loving the simple words of wisdom on each crane, and the immaginative pictures people have come up with.

Apply to the editorial board!

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West 10th is now accepting applications for its 2012-2013 editorial board! The following positions are available:Poetry EditorAssistant Poetry EditorProse EditorAssistant Prose EditorThe prose and poetry boards are responsible for reading all the submissions over winter break. We will then meet to discuss the submissions and decide which pieces to publish. Members will also be expected to help with distribution, calls for submissions, and blog writing. You do not need to have taken any creative writing classes to apply for these positions! Feel free to attach a brief writing sample of up to 3 poems and 3,000 words of prose with your application. Download the application here.  Art Editor--We are looking for 2-3 visual artists to help judge our art submissions. You may submit a portfolio of up to 6 images with your application. Download the application here.Copy-Editor --We are looking to add a team of dedicated copyeditors to the editorial board. This group of editors will be responsible for reading through the entire magazine before we send it off to press. Applicants should download and complete the brief copy-editing test and send it in with their applications. *Copyediting applications deadline is May 14th*Copyediting TestCopyediting Application Feel free to apply to as many positions as you want! Applications should be sent to west10th.submissions@gmail.com by/on  May 6th! Please contact us if you have any questions.N.B. Please do not apply to the editorial board if you will be graduating in December 2012. This is a full-year commitment.Some people have been asking "I'm studying abroad for a semester next year, can I still apply?!" To which our response is "Yes!"  -- Keep the applications coming!

Writer's Bloq

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Have you ever felt that, even in this brave new world of online sharing, you are lacking in options for online creative writing communities? Where is the Flickr of poetry? Writer's Bloq seems poised to fill this niche. The Bloq is an online community for MFA and Undergraduate Writing, English, and Comparative Literature students, professors, and alumni to share work, connect with peers, discover new writing, and uncover the literary events. Students, alumni, and professors from top programs such as Austin, Brooklyn, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, New School, Stanford, and Syracuse have already joined in creating a modern platform for writers.Writer’s Bloq is hosting its first event, “Unsolicited: MFA Mingle”, at the Strand on May 3rd. “Unsolicited” will feature the top writers from the site. To learn more about the event, check www.unsolicited.eventbrite.com. Interested in reading at the event, discovering the work of fellow writers, or showcasing your own skills? Join the Bloq today at writersbloq.com. Because writer's block isn't always a bad thing.

Editors' Awards

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Congratulations to the 2011-2012 recipients of the West 10th Editors' Awards! The recipients were selected by our executive editors, Matthew Rohrer and Darin Strauss.Editors' Award in Poetry: Jade Conlee, for "Illinois"Editors' Award in Prose: Nick Chrastil, for "Fish Tacos"Thanks to all who submitted, and to everyone for coming to the release party to support our writers! Stay tuned for applications for the 2012-2013 editorial board!Copies of the new issue can be picked up at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House at 58 West 10th Street. Ask for Joanna Yas or Jessica Flynn.

First Person Narration and Drama: A Review of "The Select"

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Michelle Chen reviews Elevator Repair Service's performance (and reading) of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.In the late nineteenth century, Tolstoy proclaimed the inherent diversity of unhappiness—the unfathomable multiplicity of individual suffering. The Sun Also Rises presents a rather different interpretation.Discontent in Sun is universal, quotidian, even banal. On occasion a character may be ephemerally “happy”, is often “sore”, or sometimes in a tearful state of despair simply termed “so unhappy”. To top it off, they are usually “tight”—drunk. Other mental states are rarely specified. Hemingway’s portrayal of a Lost Generation leaves little room for musings upon the individual experience of sadness: the nuances, say, of Mike Campbell’s feeling of abandonment versus Robert Cohn’s or even Jake’s. We hear that happy families are all alike, but Sun has shown that unhappiness too, can be indistinctive. Our characters pivot towards one of three emotions—joy, annoyance, or dejection—all the while attempting to maintain what seems to be expatriate homeostasis: a moderately unhealthy to near-lethal level of drunkenness. Narration in Sun is not preoccupied with the adjectival or even linguistic expression of complex individual psychologies. A strange fit for theater adaptation.Rendering Sun on stage is a daunting endeavor for any theater troupe, the Elevator Repair Service included. Confining drama to Hemingway’s paucity of explicit emotional narrative for a little more than three hours (while simultaneously attempting to convey a state of perpetual inebriation) is sure to make for a messy play tainted by an overall performative dullness. After all, what we deem literary ambiguity or economy of style in one form often becomes bad acting in the other. And yet The Select illustrates complexity of character well. Lucy Taylor, for example, presents an uninterrupted dialogue of polarities: charming and rude; helpless and impressive; beautiful and perverse. Her Brett is a tragic blend of masculine sexuality and feminine romanticism brimming with an aristocratic ennui. Mike Iveson brings to Jake both the solemnity of his damned biblical namesake and the insouciance of a wine-drinker with a seemingly endless bank account. Rarely does Matt Tierney truly occupy his stage space, often remaining a bit of a backdrop and giving to Robert Cohn the impression of a painfully self-aware adolescent unsure of how to inhabit an adult body. Each character is parsed, and then reassembled before our eyes. “The Select” illustrates their passions, tempers, fears, and vulnerabilities with a vividness that only theatrical experience can bring.And that is precisely the problem. Whether we credit Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory or not, Sun undoubtedly has a knack for the suggestion of deeper consciousness through the revelatory triviality of an icy tip. By this I mean that the obvious inadequacy (and sometimes, unoriginality) of certain sentences in Sun is often a means of suggesting either a significant omission or a profound understatement. Jake’s narration is a rhetoric of suppression and self-deception, a linguistic rejection of complex sentiment even during moments of despair. He cries, “then after a while it was better”. Yet the emotional deficiency with which he sheaths the topic of his impotence, for example, is so markedly unnatural as to become unbelievable. “I was bored enough,” Jake says, and we cannot help but to doubt his reliability: tragic genital wounds that thwart love are not exactly boring. Such absurd meiosis actually serves to insinuate an affected narrative restraint—an active resistance against the recognition of emotional trauma. While our view of characters’ interiority is severely limited by Jake’s repressive perspective, it is exactly this narrative façade of emotional simplicity that implicitly expresses—perhaps more successfully than any sentence could—psychologies that are simultaneously unspecified and complex.Such nuance is lost in the transition from novel to play. Transplanting the first-person unreliable narrator from prose to theater is an impossible task, for drama does not consent to such mediation. When Jake states that Georgette touches him, the lack of details in his narration creates ambiguity: where exactly does she touch him? As readers we can make a fairly educated guess, yet our knowledge of what actually occurs is based solely upon what Jake decides to tell us and how. An attempt to filter the audiences’ experience of theatrical action through the discriminating lens of a first-person narrator would result in drama’s generic rejection of the foreign, novelistic contaminate (see episode 15 of Joyce’s Ulysses for proof of such unstagable chaos): the nature of theater requires the presentation of “objective” action. We see precisely where and how Georgette touches Jake; we feel the weight of a lag in conversation when the truth about San Sebastian is revealed: social tensions and individual emotions are all infuriatingly on display. What lovers of Sun get from “The Select,” then, is a set of characters and actions depicted with uncomfortably meticulous detail and lacking the protean nature of a true Hemingway creation. By no means is “The Select” a bad play, but it can only do so much: the nature of the experiment dooms adaptation to failure.

—Michelle Chen, Assistant Prose Editor

NYU Local Praises West 10th's Legitimacy

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In an article on literary magazines at NYU, NYU Local recently praised West 10th, calling us "solid" and "universally recognized" as NYU's official literary magazine.It is a lovely article, one in which I'm pleased to be included. It is also a short article, though, and quotes culled from long conversation (it was) will always leave things out, understandably—I worry slightly, for example, that we might get a flood of poems in mimetic homage to Donne, Shakespeare, and Dickinson; also that our submitters will think that all we're interested in is sound; don't think these things. But good work, Olivia Loving and NYU Local, and thank you.Keep an eye out for further interaction with the NYU Community—especially the forthcoming announcement about a collaboration with Citywide, one of WNYU's arts-focussed lenses.Until then, keep writing—and submitting!Phillip Polefrone, Editor-in-Chief

2011-2012 Editorial Board!

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We are pleased to announce the editorial board for the coming year’s issue of West 10th, selected from a very competitive group of applicants:

Editor-In-Chief: Phillip Polefrone
Managing Editor: Laura Stephenson
Poetry Editors: Lucas Gerber, Eric Kim
Assistant Poetry Editors: Maya Lowy, Maeve Nolan, Lauren Roberts, Anna Russell
Prose Editors: Lauren Kuhn, Brittany Allen
Assistant Prose Editors: Cynthia Allum, Conor Burnett, Michelle Chen
Head of Community Board: Samuel Hernandez
Community Board: Zonia Ali, Sarah Buchanan, Kristine Swartz, Stela Xhiku
Thank you to all of those who applied, and we look forward to seeing all of your submissions in the fall!

Masthead Applications

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Apply to the West 10th Editorial Board! Applications can be downloaded here. Send applications to west10th.submissions@gmail.com.Available positions are:  Poetry Editor, Assistant Poetry Editor, Prose Editors, Assistant Prose Editors, Head of Community Board, Community Board.Poetry and prose editors/assistant editors will be mainly involved in the reading/vetting of all 2011-2012 submissions. You will read the submissions on your own and then the poetry and prose groups will meet several times to discuss the submissions and arrive at a final group to be published in the magazine. Community board members are involved in the planning and organizing of West 10th events, as well as spreading the word about West 10th across campus. All masthead member are welcome to post on the blog.

Apply NOW the deadline is May 31st! 

more information at the creative writing website.Questions? Email me at lcs331@nyu.edu.