October 29th, 2011

Annual Book Fair Fundraiser

Washington Square‘s annual Book Fair Fundraiser is happening this Sunday, October 30th, from 11:00am to 4:00pm at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, New York, NY 10011. We would love to see you there! Some of the staff members will even be in costume, to add to the Halloween-themed atmosphere of the day.
Here’s a little more about it: 

+ Open to the public
+ No books priced over $5
+ Baked goods for sale

+ Remaining books will be donated to Housing Works*

*Housing Works pioneered the concept of social enterprise–businesses whose profits fund the mission of a parent not-for-profit organization. Supportive services include but are not limited to housing, healthcare, meals and nutritional counseling, mental health and substance use treatment, job training, and legal assistance. (http://www.housingworks.org/)

October 26th, 2011

Kerri Webster wins Whiting Award

It’s always sweet when one of our past contributors gains recognition for his or her outstanding work. That happened in a big way this week.

Huge congrats to Kerri Webster for winning the Whiting Award! Kerri was one of four poets to receive the honor this year, along with the cool 50K that comes with it. (Not too shabby.)

Kerri was our featured poet in our Summer / Fall 2011 issue with five — count em five! — poems. Here’s a brief taste from one titled “Diorama.”

See the cross-section opened on loss
so big you could charge admission? Hole
in the ceiling for the tree to grow through. Something
nests in the radiator. I don’t climb up.

Details on the Whiting Award here.

October 8th, 2011

Drunk Thoughts on the Launch Party

EDITORIAL NOTE:

Julie, who is my boss, told me that she would by me a beer if I posted this for her, because her mom wanted to go to a happy hour and was giving her the evil eye. So, while Julie is out getting tight with her mom, I’m here to share Julie’s account of last week’s Washington Square launch party with the world. She wrote it, and I added a couple of things that I thought would be appropriate. Click below if you think you can handle it.

Love,

Ed

Read the rest of this entry »

October 6th, 2011

Washington Square Issue 28 Launch Party – Exquisite Corpse

So here’s the Exquisite Corpse from the Issue 28 Launch Party. Gird your loins, as they say.

Is this reserved for me?
Oh I don’t know I can’t think of anyone.
But if I could it would be cyborg Jerry Orbach.
With his scratchy voice and questionable taste in wives, he was totally the fuck up I needed
To wax my mother’s moustache. Some things happen for a reason
And the way the dog kept vigorously hugging my leg reminded me
Of the way a child is too needy for too many years and there’s
No legal way to get rid of it.
Which left only illegal means: eat it, toss it, or hide it in another body.
Option three would be the messiest, but the most effective at hiding the smell.
October 1st, 2011

Stuff on the Internet

My name is Ed, and due to an all-night writing session the other day my sleep schedule is righteously messed up. But I’m working through that, and now I am here to share some stuff with you. Stuff from the internet. I had kind of a hard time finding things I really wanted to share, because a lot of what’s out there, insofar as writing about books and writing is concerned, strikes me as being exceedingly boring (A personal essay re: why I like to write in my treehouse, the things that Facebook does and how they are relevant to you in a different way than last week, 10 reasons why my friend the struggling poet is a much better writer than whatever famous dipshit sellouts you’re into, etc.)  and directed towards people who spend a lot more time reading about writing than writing. No offense. But here are some things:

 

  • I didn’t read this, but I thought the title showed promise.
  • The Paris Review Blog’s Odd Jobs thing is usually good. The second one has to be a microcosm of something. Maybe Facebook. This is the only time I’ll reference Facebook twice in one post. Don’t hold me to that. I don’t think I’ve ever been looked at through a two-way mirror – or have I?
  • Have you heard about the recently discovered Saul Bellow manuscript that’s being published? Book trailer here!
  • I hate everything ever written on this subject, but that doesn’t seem to stop anybody.
  • This is not new at all, but John Fowles told good stories: “When I was in a hospital bed just after having had a stroke recently, I was near weeping with self-rage and self-pity, reciting a mantra to myself: tenthredinifera, tenthredinifera, tenthredinifera . . . that unpronounceable name belongs to one of the most beautiful Ophrys, or bee orchids, of Europe. I had come upon it on a Cretan mountain the previous spring; and I was saying that name like a mantra because I thought I should never climb that remote mountain again.”
  • Usually if an interview ends like this: RB: I don’t want you to feel repressed. GB: No, no, this has been really great. RB: Well thank you very much. GB: OK. I feel like it was not a satisfying read, but they got in some 17th and 18th century American History talk, and that’s my jam.
In the future, it’ll be better than this.
September 24th, 2011

Summer Reviews Roundup: The Curfew

 

“William ate the rest of his lunch in silence. He put what he had learned in a box and he shut that box. To do otherwise would be to give signs that he had learned something, some new information, and such behavior—indicative of new information—is what alerts those who are looking for traitors. He could not even consider having learned that which he had learned, which after all was practically nothing. Just an idea, a hope of an idea. Away with it for now.”

The Curfew takes place in a city of invisible tyrants—a city where people go missing and grandmothers shoot police officers. Add to this a lost mother, a mute daughter, a father on a quest, and a puppet show. Jesse Ball (The Way Through Doors) creates a modern fable, nests and chops his narratives so that his reader is always pleasantly dislodged. Perhaps because of his background in poetry and art, Ball has meticulous methods of placement and composition. This book feels like something that was not written but put together from raw materials. Asides and observations mix with the story, and so The Curfew is full of aphoristic, fantastical flashes: “There is a theory that the sun is made up of thousands of suns arranged in a war against the others. It is a discredited theory, but it has never been disproven.” Think of this book as a novella and a sketch, a poem and a collage. It is pieces put together for a reason, and in the middle of it all there is still the story—a father who gives everything to keep his daughter safe, a daughter who reaches for anything within her power to learn her father’s fate—acting as a warm human thread that is never subsumed.

Cat Richardson, Managing Editor

September 21st, 2011

Summer Reviews Roundup: The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton

The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton, forward by Maxine Kumin

Mariner Books

ISBN-13: 978-0395957769

Here we are presented with an unflinching account of one of the great, highly original confessionals, illuminated in no small part by Maxine Kumin’s introduction. This is a practical tome, a Sexton survey that is best read in twenty-page doses. It’s also a striking concordance of her poetics; the ability to track the devices which constitute Sexton’s sensibility may prove its most useful aspect. We follow her wary sojourn towards God—“God is in your typewriter,” she was told—where her most scathing surrealism emerges: “Jesus was fasting. / He ate His celibate life. / The ground shuddered like an ocean, / a great sexual swell under His feet.” We follow her rhyming as it develops from a decorative stand-in for gravitas to a resonant, architectonic feature; in Love Poems (1969), this utterly conversational musicality reaches its culmination in tandem with gripping lineation. Sexton then turned to the mythic, reworking all manner of fable and fairy-tale in preparation for her later poems, which tackle her Christian mythology with a taut, peculiar faith. Her poetry is particularly suited to the frenzied asymptote between the cerebral and the carnal, piety and appetite: “For they fling together against hardness and somewhere, in another room, a light is clicked on by gentle fingers.”  She finds curious objects which fulfill the dual role of holy symbols and meals, arranging them in absurd litanies as befits her taste for the liturgical cadence, if not the precise content.

To be sure, there are many clunkers once everything is considered. There are times when Plath’s rigor might have benefitted Sexton’s lines a great deal: “Angel of hopes and calendars, do you know despair?” Her fierce dedication to the actuals of the body (genitalia and all), while necessary, will not always be appreciated. She also has a tendency to wring a certain turn of phrase dry if it works once—her catalogue of sea-actions ages quickly, as does her taste for possessives. These, however, can’t touch the resplendence of the greater portion of her output, characterized mostly by successful poem-cycles. While she championed the self as an inexhaustible reservoir, meanwhile asserting the female voice with formidable creative energies, it is clear that her genius rests on neither confessionalism nor feminism alone. To borrow Kumin’s phrase, Sexton has earned her place in the canon by advancing the frontiers of the English language’s unique poetic territory: diction both brutal and sinuous, ritualization, mythmaking, and the talent for extrapolating Place from Self.

Peter Longofono, International Editor

September 17th, 2011

Summer Reviews Roundup: Creatures of Habit

Creatures of Habit by Jill McCorkle
Shannon Ravenel Books
ISBN-13: 978-1565123977

Each of the twelve short stories in Creatures of Habit pulls you in deep and quick, and each contemplates the basic, animal aspects of human behavior. They’re set in small-town North Carolina and feature, among other characters: a neighborhood witch and her turd-throwing monkey, a senile and murderous nursing home resident, a husband-snatching next-door neighbor, and a woman on a honeymoon with the wrong guy. It’s dirty, human stuff—reality TV stuff—brilliantly nuanced and rendered by the skillful Jill McCorkle. I met Jill McCorkle this summer at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. In the words of Mike Yanagita, she’s such a super lady. She’s been compared to Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, and I think the comparisons are merited. McCorkle’s insanely good at getting people right:  she unearths the most subtle and troubling aspects of human endeavor in her stories, and deftly exposes the humor in human frailty. Her prose is clear and confident, honest and funny, and very, very Southern. Highly recommended!

Mary Block, Interviews Editor

September 3rd, 2011

Summer Reviews Roundup: Climate Reply

Climate Reply by Trey Moody
New Michigan Press
ISBN-13: 978-1934832264

These poems occur in a forest of sorts. These poems occur at night.

Trey Moody’s poems aren’t nature poems in the traditional sense—that is, they’re not clear heirs apparent to the works and poetic lineages of Wordsworth, Thoreau, and (to a lesser extent) Whitman—but are instead indicative of a newer, hybridized breed of poem that simultaneously inhabits the natural and human spheres. Trees abound, but so do kitchen utensils. “The loud knives // gleam along the forests” Moody writes in “The Listener, the Land,” and the encroachment of each world on the other gives the reader the sense of having stumbled upon a rusted-out mechanical relic in the woods at night. Or, equally plausibly, an oak tree mysteriously growing through his kitchen floor in the pre-dawn hours of the morning.

Moody’s poems also separate themselves from traditional nature poetry in the same way that Whitman’s, and later Frost’s and Glück’s, do: the inclusion of human beings and human agency. “When I open the fridge // in the middle of the night, I can hear / you thinking behind me,” Moody writes in the fourth section of “Dear Ghosts,” titled “Hum of the Fridge Like Thought.” Ghostly presences persist through Moody’s poems, presences the narrator “misse[s]… the most” and whom he entreats to “knock once if you believe // in structural security, twice / for mutual relationships.” While domestic images—light bulbs, refrigerators, cellars—contribute to the dual sense of interiority and exteriority in Climate Reply, the clincher is the human element, the component of the collection that makes the dialogue implied in its title possible. Who’s replying to the climate? To whom is the climate replying?

Trey Moody’s book doesn’t answer these questions, but it does complicate and compound them: echoes respond to echoes, people talk to the night sky, bodies commune and communicate with bodies. These poems are equal parts visceral and surreal, expansive and personal, and if you can’t read poetry alone in the woods at night, reading Climate Reply in your kitchen at 2:00 am may just be the next best thing.

Eric Weinstein, Poetry Editor

September 3rd, 2011

The Future

We are just three days away from the start of a new school year, and while that makes us sad, it also makes us happy, because our new masthead is kick-ass and we’re about to rock you hurricane-style with our plans for the future. One of the things getting revamped is our blog, which we hope to use as a platform to connect with you, lovely readers, writers, and contributors.

What you can expect to find:

  • Interviews with writers you’ve heard about and writers you might be hearing about for the first time but will certainly hear more about in the future.
  • Updates on our brilliant masthead and the books on their bedside tables.
  • Book news. LOLcats News. Weather News. News about My Lunch.
  • Poetry and prose from our slush pile that’s too good to go unshared.
  • Dispatches from behind the frontlines of the NYC/NYU literary scene. (In other words, what I saw when I spent all night in the corner closest to the wine table.)

There will be guest bloggers, there will be book reviews, and there will be whatever else you want to see here. If you have any suggestions for content, email me at: onsqublog@gmail.com.

My name is Julie Buntin. I’m a second-year MFA candidate in fiction at NYU, and I’ll be posting here regularly.

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