Dispatch from the Memory Palace

September 14th, 2009

This is one of the things I’ve been working on lately instead of blogging here: the online version of qarrtsiluni’s first poetry chapbook, A Walk Through the Memory Palace, by Pamela Johnson Parker. Read our announcement post at the magazine, where you can also see the cover of the print edition — my co-editor Beth Adams’ work.

This entry was posted Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Books and Music.

4 Responses to “Dispatch from the Memory Palace”

carolee says:

September 15, 2009 at 10:27 am

it’s beautiful, dave! congrats to you and beth and pam. wow!

worth all the hard work, for sure.

Dave says:

September 15, 2009 at 12:08 pm

Not only was it worth it, but I can’t wait till next year! I may use it as an excuse to learn Drupal (onto which platform I would eventually like to move qarrtsiluni, too.) Thanks.

Reply

Laura Sorrells says:

September 19, 2009 at 2:15 pm

It looks great. I ordered the print version of the Journaling the Apocalypse issue and it’s beautiful as well.

Dave says:

September 19, 2009 at 6:51 pm

Awesome. Thanks, Laura.

Reply

My other projects on the web

Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit
Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded
Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters
Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond
The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning
Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop"
Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems
Spoil, an online collection of my older poems

(For a complete listing, see my Google profile)

Smorgasblog

the cassandra pages
Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
Fadwa's Damascene face emerges
beneath my hands black with printing ink...
----

Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
----

everything feeds process
In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
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slow reads
This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
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Coyote Mercury
Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
----

The Middlewesterner
Even the crow
knows nothing

except that hope
is a kind of

uselessness.
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Heraclitean Fire
And while zebra finches aren’t exactly imbued with an enormous amount of dignity at the best of times, there was something slightly off-putting about seeing these little birds with their own aims and desires in life being cajoled into being art.
----

Timothy Green
As soon as we start to revere the writer over the writing, literature becomes a cult of personality. We crown these gods and pretend there could be no other. And I think that’s the real problem with literary publishing.
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Musings from Aotearoa
Aw shit, if you don't get it you don't get it. If these places and just the knowledge of them being there does not move you, then nothing here will. I can't come up with any clever arguments to change minds and sway people over from the Cement Jungle. It seems too entrenched, too set, and the disconnection from anything wild too complete. If we have already compromised 87% of our land and now need to attack the remaining 13% to get at its "real" value it would seem to suggest that something is inherently wrong with the system. Yet the machine grinds on.
----

Velveteen Rabbi
the sap already rising
will feed a million tiny banners
unfurling across the hills

and this small blue pill
will banish anxiety, restore to me
the woman I only dimly remember
----

Via Negativa

How can we live without the unknown before us? —Rene Char