Buggeryville

Satellite Telephone #2 has arrived, with a great pink cover and featuring work by Rodney Koeneke, Dan Raphael, Kimberly Lyons, Sam Lohmann, Fanny Howe, Kevin Killian, Lynn Behrendt, and many more. Including me.

It's been a few years since I've had poetry published in a journal. I only write (or submit) poetry when asked. There's more than enough of it out there. But Robert Dewhurst, proprietor and editor of Satellite Telephone, did ask, so I found something for him. Issue #1 was typed on a typewriter (I can't tell whether #2 was, but it might as well have been). I gave him a very old piece that requires a monospaced font. (And one that, I realized upon rereading the published version, I totally cribbed a line from and reused it in Exercises In Penmanship -- ah well!)

But (more than) enough about me. Two other thoughts before you scamper off to get your own copy (Robbie will do trades, so you have no excuse).

1. Rodney's fun poem on Urdu is included. I heard him read this at a recent reading in Portland, and now I have it in print, in a journal. This seems like how poetry journals are supposed to work, for those of us "in the life". But I'm not sure I remember it happening before! I feel like it must have happened in FO_A_RM at some point. Maybe I'm crazy. Anyway it was a nice experience, seeing a poem I had heard appear in a journal. If you weren't at that reading, though, you might not get that experience.

2. There are several pieces of criticism. And they are interesting and well written, but I couldn't help feeling that because they're not online, they are somehow impotent. That is, they aren't part of the conversation. People wanting to think about, oh, Jeni Olin's The Pill Book won't know that they will find a few pages of thought about it here. It's not googleable. (Well, it is now, because I mentioned it!)

That's crazy, of course. It's good to have some discussion outside of the internet, and it's good to have these little pockets of modest obscurity. Not all thought needs to go into the database, though it pains me to say it.

Lynn Behrendt's contributions, some critical writings through of Ron Silliman's blog entries, erasures and poemifications (Lynn has been the one updating Ron's blogroll), feel somehow more real for being on paper (though maybe it's just because I still can't read poetry on the web), just as the criticism felt somehow misplaced for not being online; but this was criticism as well as poetry. It underlined my anxieties nicely.

Anyway, go get it!