Issue Zero:
The Lady in Stripes
You are reading a screen! No news there. But the continuation of news! That's the oldest most wonderful news, and when Michael Rothenberg answered the call to a community shower town crier kind of party gathering lit zines of all stripes, cyber/mimeo/stapled/bound, we could sense the weavings of the antitradition small press tradition into the Web that is us now, at Issue Zero: The Literary Magazine Conference in New York March 10-12. Hosted by Brendan Lorber & Douglas Rothschild, editors from over 30 journals met in New York to discuss their journals & the larger issues facing writing communities in general. So listen to what the little birdy tells us, Poets. Tweet tweet. Here's (a) Michaelview. . .
--Bob Holman
The Lady in Stripes:
Letter to Ms. Suzi Winson, Editor/Publisher of Fish Drum Magazine
Dear Suzi:
It’s Saturday morning here in Pacifica, California. I have just poured my second cup of coffee. I slept pretty deeply last night, most of the time, I think, but there were dreams and I can't recall about what, but the thought that something happened lingers. When I first caught a sense of morning I began convincing myself there was no reason to get up yet. That it must be too early to get up, or there is no need to get up, nothing to get up early for but, oh yeah, now I see the dream:
I dreamed there was a bird. A pet bird of some kind, small, very small with some blue, kind of coloring like a Gouldian finch, very colorful, purple, red and aquamarine. I was walking outdoors and this finch followed me everywhere. This is a true dream. I was walking down this wooded lane, something you might expect to see in a place like France not in the U.S., and the finch continued to follow me through the trees, very tiny and hardly detectable most of the time, but I knew it was there. Then I came around a corner and there was Nancy, my wife, and suddenly in the dream I couldn't find the finch. Nancy and I got in a car and drove down a road looking for the finch. It occurred to me that the finch couldn't keep up with the car if it was trying to follow us, and that the wind on the field we were passing was blowing too hard for the finch to fly against. Also, if the finch was calling me I wouldn't be able to hear it because the wind and the engine of the car were too loud. So we turned the car around figuring we'd gone too far, got back to that wooded lane and parked. I walked towards where I thought I heard the finch last -- the hearing was louder than the seeing. And just at the spot where I thought the finch would be, it flew out of the trees right into my hands. I put the finch in a basket and carried it to the car. Then when I opened the basket to check on the finch I couldn't find it. But there was a shell in the basket, the color of the finch. I looked under the shell and the finch was hiding there nestled for safety and comfort. That was all I can remember of the dream. So, as you can imagine, I haven't had more than a sip of my second cup of coffee since I began this dream recollection. . . .
I finally lost the debate between getting up and not getting up. It was 8:30 a.m. and I didn't want the debate to turn into an antagonism. I got my coffee. Checked my e-mail, an invitation from Bob Holman to write what he called a “Michaelview” for About.com Poetry on Issue Zero: The Literary Magazine Conference. If I had known I was going to be asked to do this for Bob, I might have taken notes. But I don’t really like writing reviews very much. Essay form, or review form, or whatever that thing was I submitted to Read Me, an internet magazine, recently, is a relatively new task for me that I find difficult. It probably comes easier with habit but I don't know whether I would like to develop that habit. Though I always wanted to learn how to write like the 5-paragraph column-type entries Jim Harrison used to do for something like Vanity Fair. Did you ever read those? I think the column was called “The Raw and The Cooked” and it was sort of a cooking column but mostly reflections of things Harrison ate in the middle of doing mostly everything else. Sort of a Hunter S. Thompson in 5 paragraphs eating paté in Hollywood with a starlet while recalling the flight of a certain species of duck over his native Michigan with a comparison of the starlet to Sacagawea. Something like that. It was fun and playful and bright. I guess I would like to be fun and playful and bright.
