Friday, February 24, 2012
Three poems in Big Scream no. 50. 50? This beautifully printed 6" x 9" perfect bound paperback with the great front & back cover photos & title on the spine? The first Big Scream I was in around 1980 - it was already a number of issues into its long run - was an 8 1/2" x 11" zine, mimeographed, staple bound, with a line drawing cover. That's the way it was for awhile. Then it became a copy machine mag with photo covers, & over the years it looked better & better until it became what it is today. Publisher & Editor Dave Cope used to publish them as often as he felt like doing them, then they became an annual. They are still published under Dave's Nada Press name. Dave is Nada Press, & has issued some other things, including an a collection of my stuff.
I used to write a lot of open-form, open field poems that wandered all over the page; it was mostly the thought of Dave painstakingly retyping those kinds of poems from me into a mimeo stencil that made me reassess what I was doing & conclude almost every poem I wrote could sit comfortably against the left hand margin if I simply willed it so a little more. That & an admission from poet Ed Dorn in a preface to his collected poems that he no longer understood how some of his earlier poems functioned. Meaning he had forgotten the personal language of his forms, & the poems failed to explain their own workings. So according to the general rule of thumb (not strict doctrine) that I & most of the poets on my side of the literary fence use, "Form is an extension of content," an open field poem is complex thing. Was I determined to write complex poems? Not really.
Big Scream has a large "stable" of regular contributors Dave's collected over the decades. I've been in a dozen to fifteen issues, as a guess. If I didn't have at least five poems for him to choose from - he was bound to like one of them - I didn't submit any at all. There were always two or three other literary zines & editors I liked contributing to, they came & went, & I've never been a prolific poet. I've known poets who would write poems the day they had readings just to have something brand new. That was never my way.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I used to write a lot of open-form, open field poems that wandered all over the page; it was mostly the thought of Dave painstakingly retyping those kinds of poems from me into a mimeo stencil that made me reassess what I was doing & conclude almost every poem I wrote could sit comfortably against the left hand margin if I simply willed it so a little more. That & an admission from poet Ed Dorn in a preface to his collected poems that he no longer understood how some of his earlier poems functioned. Meaning he had forgotten the personal language of his forms, & the poems failed to explain their own workings. So according to the general rule of thumb (not strict doctrine) that I & most of the poets on my side of the literary fence use, "Form is an extension of content," an open field poem is complex thing. Was I determined to write complex poems? Not really.
Big Scream has a large "stable" of regular contributors Dave's collected over the decades. I've been in a dozen to fifteen issues, as a guess. If I didn't have at least five poems for him to choose from - he was bound to like one of them - I didn't submit any at all. There were always two or three other literary zines & editors I liked contributing to, they came & went, & I've never been a prolific poet. I've known poets who would write poems the day they had readings just to have something brand new. That was never my way.
Labels: poem, what I'm reading
