The Occasional Poem

And lateness.  I want to talk about the poems in our new issue, the Fall/Winter 2011 Common Ground Review, but I’ll circle back to that.   As our local patron saint of poetry, Emily Dickinson, wrote, “tell all the truth, but tell it slant—/success in circuit lies.” 

Here is my circuitous path to our latest production: the process of selecting poems; getting them into a publishable format, along with the new masthead, table of contents, and contributors’ biographies; marking up our gorgeous cover with words and ISBN# in exactly the right places; putting them into PDFs to send to the printer; reviewing the proof copy; waiting for and then sending out the issue—it has been an amazing series of experiences, and at the end of it, I look at Lorna Ritz’s autumnal cover knowing there are really good poems inside and, to cap them off, Annie Dawid’s thought-provoking essay on poverty, basic needs and assumptions (all connected by teeth).  After all the work, the issue is here (more Winter than Fall, my apologies for the delay) and this is an Occasion. 

I happen to like occasional poems: they contain an urgency and an urge to write which that day (or moment, or reason) has called up in the author, despite—I am sure—the author’s need to do other things, like laundry; I like that a specific and personal occasion for writing emerges out of the day everyone shares. 

In this Fall/Winter issue (13.2), we have a number of wonderful occasional poems, some based on holidays (like Martha Christina’s “Memorial Day.  A Brief Remembrance,” Robert Cooperman’s “As My Brother Held His Son,” and Joyce Meyer’s eclectic “American Thanksgiving”—I wish we’d been able to get the issue out in time for everyone to read it at their Thanksgiving table.  Dudley Laufman’s occasional poem, “Ice Storm,” seemed prescient when our own Halloween blizzard knocked out our power for a week.  Richard Merelman, Christopher Nye and Jay Rubin use the occasions of journeys—in St. Petersburg (and we get a phone call from St. Petersburg in Dustin Junkert’s “Friend”), through Tuscany, and across California). And there are many more, all occasions for celebration.

        

Happy New Years

In an accident of fate, I started the new year of 2011 eating cookies across a kitchen table from Norton Juster.  I didn’t know he was Norton Juster—he just looked a little familiar, like a writer.  We were talking about his house, and the work he’d put in on it when he’d first gotten it, when he mentioned having published his book.  So I asked, what book?  The Phantom Tollbooth, he said, and I realized who he was.  “Oh, I love that book!” I said, because I really do, because it makes words come alive, and then I had to tell him my favorite line, which occurs early on, when Milo gets into the car and stops paying real attention to where he is, at which point he finds himself going along a road which looks “suspiciously like the wrong way.”

           

For me, this is a gorgeous use of language: it is evocative, it conveys emotion, it puts me inside a familiar experience in a new way—and it does all this very concisely, like poetry.  Even though Milo is heading into trouble, there’s real optimism in the idea that if you are going the wrong way, you might be able to recognize it. And if Milo hadn’t wound up in the Doldrums, nearly trapped by the Lethargarians’ exhausting schedule of naps and meals and ways to put off any actual work or thinking until later, he would never have met Tock, probably the sweetest character in the book, and he wouldn’t have learned how important it is in a journey to appreciate the sights along the road.

Now here I am, starting out as the editor of Common Ground Review, in another sort of new year (added to the calendar year of 2011, the academic year 2011-2012, the Rosh Hashonah of 57720), another metaphorical journey, and I hope to be attentive, to find many wonderful things along the way, and to work with the help of my friends and colleagues at bringing the magazine somewhere that looks suspiciously like a good place to be.     

Note:

I actually sang in the chorus of the Commonwealth Opera version of The Phantom Tollbooth: I got to be a Lethargarian.  The best part is that in addition to Juster’s words and Feiffer’s drawings, I also have Arnold Black’s music in my head for the complete and resonant experience that I look for in poetry (and find in the good stuff). 

Submission Guidelines

We publish two reviews a year: Fall/Winter (with a deadline of August 31) and Spring/Summer (with a deadline of March 1).  Submit up to three poems.  We will also showcase a short work of creative non-fiction in the Fall/Winter issue and a short story in the Spring/Summer issue.  Submit only one per issue.

We look for well-crafted poems under 61 lines.  Poems should be single-spaced indicating stanza breaks.  If other spacing is integral to the poem, please explain.

Creative non-fiction and short stories must be no more than 12 pages, double-spaced.

Manuscripts must bear the author’s name, address, email address and phone number.  A brief biography and SASE must also be included.

We will accept simultaneous submissions, but not previously published work.  If you intend to submit work simultaneously, tell us so in your cover letter.  Once we have notified you of an acceptance, it will be published as a first time publication.  All rights revert back to the author after publication.

We do not accept responsibility for incorrect guidelines obtained from other websites or outdated sources.  For full details, see our website: http://cgreview.org.

Questions?  Mail to editors@cgreview.org/

Send all work to Janet Bowdan, Editor, E-5309

Western New England University

1215 Wilbraham Road, Springfield, MA  01119

Editorial Board: Pearl Abraham, Janet Bowdan, Lisa Drnec-Kerr, Dan Mahoney

Art Editor: Lorna Ritz

Web Builders: Ari Mercado, Marilyn Mercado

Interns: Ashley Reynolds (Summer); Ryan Crowell (Fall)