The Church in Ocean Park hosts an expansive day of writers, poets, and publishers, and finding out about new releases from over 25 small presses.

Saturday, May 10, 2008 10:30-5:00 pm

Publishers will be selling books throughout the whole day. Every hour will begin with a short period of poetry and spoken word readings hosted by Peggy Dobreer.

Presses and writers taking part in the Book Fair Readings include:

Veronica Lane Books: Etan Boritzer—11:00
Lynne Bronstein: 11:05
Cahuenga Press: Harry Northup, Holly Prado : 11:10
Rattle : Tim Green 11:15
Heart Press: C. Natale Perdito: 12:00
Conflux Press: FrancEye: 12:05
Split Shift Press: Roger Taus : 12:10
Petroglyph Books: Jeff Green, Ruth Nolan 12:15
Penelope Barnes Thompson: 1:00
Noble Swine Press: Corrie Greathouse, Saria Idana 1:05
John Harris: 1:10
Akashic Books: Karen Harryman 1:15
Free Venice Beachhead: Rex Butters 2:00
TcCreative Press: Theresa Antonia 2:05
Cherry Grove Collections: Julia Stein: 2:10
Siglio Press: Lisa Pearson 2:15
Gentle Strings Quarterly: Leilani Squire 3:00
Beyond Baroque Press 3:05
Patrice Karst 3:10
Askew: Phil Taggart 3:15
DeAnn Jordan 4:00
Writ Largh Press: 4:05

Also represented: Santa Monica Review, DVD Video: Alexis Krasilovsly, Poetry Flash. More presses and writers to be announced.

Admission by donation at the door.

Church in Ocean Park

235 Hill Street on the northeast corner of Hill & 2nd in Santa Monica

The Church is wheelchair accessible. Bus accessible by the MTA #33 & Big Blue Bus #s 1, 2, & 8. The church has a small parking lot on the north side of the street between 2nd & 3rd Sts.

Meter parking, 1/4 block west of Main St., $.75/hr to 10 hours & free parking from 4th St. east

Contact Fred Whitlock at 310-828-3951 for more information.

Below is a list of review copies we’ve received in just the last month or so. If any of them sound interesting, email me with your address, and I’ll send them to you. All you have to do is write a little review, maybe a page or so, and the book is yours.

The full list is here. I’ve also added CDs, DVDs, and literary journals for the first time. Enjoy!

Books Available (updated 5/7/08, latest additions on top):

* Elaine Sexton – Causeway
* Mike Maggio – deMOCKracy
* Sandra Kohler – The Country of Women
* Joe Larkin – Outside the Frame
* Peggy Munson – Pathogenesis
* Christian Ward – Slippage #
* Jane Pupek – Forms of Intercession
* Naomi Levine – Songs of an Aging Optimist
* Linda Pastan – Queen of Rainy Country
* Peter Krok – Looking for an EYE
* Polis Is This – Ferrini & Riaf (DVD)
* Janet Sarbanes – Army of One
* Language for a New Century: Poetry From the Middle East, Asia and Beyond
* Eric Greinke – Wild Strawberries
* Lawrence Kessenich – Strange News #
* Ralph-Michael Chiaia – Ten Poems About East Asia
* Lyn Lifshin – 92 Rapple Drive
* Dragan Dragojlovic – Death’s Homeland
* Can You Stay Forever – A. Molotkov (CD)
* Next on the Mic: The Lizard Lounge Poetry Jam (CD)
* Wind and Waves – Le Pham Le (CD)
* Imagine: Indiana in Music and Words – Krapf & Herzig (CD)
* J. Reuben Appelman – Make Loneliness
* Michele Fabbri – Apocalisse 23
* Ellaraine Lockie – Blue Ribbons at the County Fair
* Philip Ramp – Keen
* Ellen Peckham – Ticket Stubs
* Myronn Hardy – The Headless Saints
* Louis Daniel Brodsky – Still Wandering in the Wilderness
* David Alpaugh – Heavy Lifting
* David James – Trembling in Someone’s Palm
* Home: Anthology – ed. by Anne Brudevold
* Christopher William Purdom – too many chairs on the green hill*
* Llyn Clague – Confessions
* Van G. Garrett – Songs in Blue Negritude
* Kathleen Tyler – My Florida
* Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry
* Matt Mason – Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know

* = chapbook
# = proof
CD = CD

Literary Journals Available for Review (current issues):

* New England Review
* Denver Quarterly
* Iconoclast
* Hiram Poetry Review
* Prairie Schooner

61 pages of art, poetry, and essays. Our two book features are each outstanding for entirely different reasons — John Amen’s More of Me Disappears and Diane Lockward’s What Feeds Us. As if on cue after the last couple posts, David James writes about the joy of inventing new poetic forms. Then Gary Lehmann asks, Is Poetry Fiction?, and trust me, he knows the answer. The art spread is five hand-colored photographs by Dianne Carroll Burdick, from which the cover above is drawn.

As always, a fun quick read — something to whet the appetite before the big issue in June. Click here to download the PDF (1.6 MB).

I just hope I wasn’t too gloomy at the end of the introduction. I mention a great anthology I just read, Seeds of Fire (Smokestack Books, 2008), edited by former Rattle contributor and Curbstone author, Jon Andersen. The book was an uplifting reminder for me that so many people see this war industry for what it is, and while real change operates at a glacial pace, it’s worth it to keep plugging away, to keep standing together and speaking out. But you can’t explain being uplifted without mentioning what you’re being lifted from.

I’m starting to feel like the existence of a poetry community is more important than the poetry itself. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing for an editor to say.

But the surprising thing for me, coming at this as poetry person with a science background, is that graphic design and desktop publishing is really fun. Reading submissions can be exciting, or it can be brutal, depending on your mood and where the wheel spins, but working on design has probably become my favorite part of the job. And I have no idea what I’m doing. One of my high school teachers always said, it doesn’t matter what you learn in school, because everything you need you have to learn on the fly.

The summer issue has a special Visual Poetry feature, which includes 38 images — collages, poem paintings, comics, graphic poems, concrete poems. The biggest challenge yet, but well worth it. Wild, varied, random. You’ll see in a few months. And I updated the layout just a touch, for the first time in 10 years — cleaner, and a little more elegant.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m posting this, but I promised myself I’d get into the habit of using the blog more often.

Two reviews of RATTLE #28 have come out in the last month, and they demonstrate both sides of the coin. The first, at NewPages.com (scroll down to the R’s), is inarguably glowing, as it praises our selection of poems, our humor, and the nurses tribute in particular. But if you know anything about NewPages.com, you know that they don’t publish negative reviews — the reviewers focus on magazines they already know they like. So while I’m grateful for Anne Wolfe’s opinion, especially her emphasis on the nurses, who I think are spectacular, I can’t help but wonder about all those reviewers who might not be so enthusiastic. What might they have said, given the chance?

Well, I didn’t have to wait long. Luna Park is a new quarterly, and seems to do a good job of filling a mostly vacant niche — the online and modernized role of Literary Magazine Review. The website is tasteful, the reviews seem thoughtful, and most importantly, they seem to really care about the value of an honest opinion.

One might describe Gregg Weiss’s review of RATTLE #28 as “mixed”, but “kindly negative” is probably more accurate. At first read, this one hits me where it hurts — the criticism is that the we’re exactly what I aim not to be; no matter how hard I’ve tried to be eclectic, we’re a one trick pony, publishing only “weighty-topic free-verse.” I’ve always felt like we needed to diversify, and I’ve been preaching just that since I started running things — basically, Weiss is telling me that I’ve failed. We’ve “opted for Creedence Clearwater Revival instead of Picasso,” whatever that means.

But then I realize that’s not the only place I have no idea what he means. Take his penultimate paragraph for example. “Like the emotional effect of Schindler’s List, the vast majority of small-moment poems may seem momentarily counterintuitive, but are ultimately self-evident.” Huh?

And I start to notice other little problems, too. One of his examples of a “Heavy Shit” topic is “assassinations.” There is one poem called “Assassin”, but it’s about the glutinous complacency of suburban life. Later in the review, the poem Weiss lists as his favorite happens to be one of the heaviest in the issue. And as for a lack of light, “small moment” poems, what about a group of inmates playing soccer with their slippers? Or “Stud Spray”? Or Roy Jacobstein’s narrator secretly being a duck? The more I think about his call for “Billy Collins poems” the more I realize I don’t know what he means by that.

But the icing on the cake is his claim that “Only one of the 98 poems features either a rhyming or metric pattern.” I don’t know which of the several sonnets he’s referring to, so I don’t know which ones don’t count. The idea of a reviewer criticizing something they can’t even recognize is a little baffling, and I must say, undermines his whole piece. Fourteen lines of slant-rhymed pentameter, three quatrains with a couplet at the end, should be kind of obvious, shouldn’t it?

So ha, I showed him, right? But then after he hit you where it hurt, he lands the sucker punch — there’s nothing worse than getting defensive about a negative review, and here I am, getting defensive. Damn you, Weiss! Resistance is futile.

In the end, I agree with the overarching argument, despite his critical mistakes — we could still be more eclectic, and looking back at the last issue, it does tend to be heavier and more free-versed in balance than I’d prefer. But the assumption that this is a stance, by design, is untrue. We like formal verse; we like to laugh. We’re just at your mercy — send us a funny sestina! Write a navel-gazing ghazal! We can only publish what seems worth it from what we get. Stop being so damn serious, people!