Karyn Eisler blogs the story behind On the Wires, her video now up at qarrtsiluni.
It was early. It was loud. It was the beginning of June and I’d just returned from a trip abroad. I’d spent a full month in Central Europe, where birds sang for me all day long. I missed them. I missed their volume, the forest they hid in, the softness of their songs. I longed for 4 am when they consistently woke me from slumber. I doubted if Vancouver birds would ever offer such wonder.
But, as she discovered, there is wonder too in the raucousness of Vancouver crows. Check it out. And the rest of the “Animals in the City” issue.
Clifford Garstang gives us the 2013 Pushcart Prize Ranking of Literary Magazines — Poetry.
My method is straightforward. I use a ten-year rolling database and award points to magazines for the prizes awarded and fewer points for each special mention. I don’t go further back than ten years because it seems to me that what is relevant is the current success of the magazines, not their storied past. Also, the further back we go, the more defunct magazines we find, and that’s not terribly helpful
The rankings hold no real surprises.
Diane Lockward reprints Pablo Neruda’s essay Toward an Impure Poetry
Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand’s obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.
Here is an excellent interview with Marie Howe at On Being.
