The Bees’ Threes November 2009: Arlene Ang
Three Editors. Three Questions. Three small glimpses into what it means to write the bees knees poem.
These editors were kind to give their keen insight and advice to us, please feel free to leave them thank you notes in the comment boxes.
This Editor is a Gift to Poetry. Welcome, Ms. Arlene Ang.
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Arlene Ang is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being a collaborative work with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008). She lives in Spinea, Italy where she serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. More of her work may be viewed at www.leafscape.org.
How did you become an editor? Is one born an editor? Do you ever randomly catch yourself editing copy on; oh lets say cereal boxes and/or honey jars?
Now that I think of it, I’ve always been involved in one way or another with editing. Before joining The Pedestal Magazine staff in 2007, I was editor for the Italian edition of Niederngasse for four years.
Press 1, which came out later in 2007, is a labor of love for Valerie Fox, Phyllis Wat, Dennis Moritz and me. Valerie an d Phyllis do much of the reading and scouting while I occupy myself more with the web presentation.
Being an editor has been a way to share my fascination with poetry… and, more hedonistcally, read great poems. I still get a special thrill when I discover a poet whose work I’d never have come across if not through their submission.
And yes, I find myself wanting to correct grammars or typos and rephrasing some sentences wherever I find them. I’m a pedant at heart. I still spell every single word on text messages. It’s just stronger than me.
What do you think is so alluring about poetry? Why do you think people abandon other (possibly more lucrative pursuits) just for the chance to write one well crafted line? What is it about a poem that makes it like a bug-zapper to a poets little bug-heart?
There’s more immediacy in poetry. What I love best is how people interpret poetry in different ways based on their experiences. The attention to language makes it very intriguing and challenging, especially when it comes to finding out ways to reduce a whole experience into a couple of lines. I like to think of novels as beer, short fiction as wine… while poetry is hard liquor. If it’s 120 proof, it just sets your whole spirit on fire.
What differences do you see in online and print publications? Are paper books a thing of the past? How do you feel about the Kindle? How do you feel about paper? What advantages do online journals offer writers and editors that paper based journals do not?
While some people think that online publications have a higher tendency to publish trash, I’m still convinced that they beat print journals in terms of readership. With the internet, you can reach out to the whole world while with dead-tree publications your audience is limited to the print run.
One thing I really like about internet publications is how they’re more open to multimedia experiments. Born Magazine is one journal that showcases spectacular things that you can do online. Recently, The Pedestal Magazine has opened its doors to submissions of performance poetry, too.
As for paper books becoming obsolete, maybe… after another hundred years. The charm of paper publications will always remain, I think, but it’s also true that we’re moving towards an electronic age. When you browse through the book catalog of Project Gutenberg, you get a good feel of how the future would be like.
Upcoming Arlene Ang projects include:
An anthology, The Red Room: Writings from Press 1 will be published in late 2009. Contributors include Bill Kushner, Jayne Pupek, Maurice Oliver, Lewis Warsh, Changming Yuan, Ruth Altmann, Stephanie Gray, Sean Lovelace, Nicole Cartwright Denison, Leonard Gontarek, Andrew Mossin, Lydia Cortes, Lynn Levin, Meg Pokrass, Elizabeth Thorpe, Miriam Kotzin, John Grey, John Vick, and many others.
Press 1/Straw Gate Books will also be present at the AWP Bookfair in Denver 2010. Valerie Fox and I will be there as well as other anthology contributors.
Bees Threes November 2009: Kaite Hillenbrand
Three Editors. Three Questions. Three small glimpses into what it means to write the bees knees poem.
These editors were kind to give their keen insight and advice to us, please feel free to leave them thank you notes in the comment boxes.
November Brings Us a Honey Sweet Editor. Welcome, Ms. Kaite Hillenbrand.
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Kaite Hillenbrand is a poet and editor living in her home state of West Virginia. She is Assistant Editor in Chief of Connotation Press. While earning her MFA in Poetry at the University of California, Riverside, she was Poetry Editor for Crate. She teaches at Waynesburg University.
How did you become an editor? Is one born an editor? Do you ever randomly catch yourself editing copy on; oh lets say cereal boxes and/or honey jars?
I am constantly copy editing. I don’t know if I was born that way; I was probably born with the potential for it, and then my mother highly encouraged it in me. She made sure my grammar was impeccable in speech and on paper; bad grammar is possibly her biggest pet peeve. What I appreciate most about her insistence that I use correct grammar is that she explained the grammar rules to me, and gave me tricks for figuring out common grammar problems, like when to use “I” versus “me.” I even know when “whom” is appropriate, even though my grade school stopped teaching it the year I would’ve learned it, but it’s so uncommon that I still don’t use it. I’m no good at trivia, but these little rules stay with me. Who knows why.
My family is so interested in grammar that one story we like to tell is of the time we saw, in the want ads, someone selling a “Chester Drawers.” (We also think this is funny because my father is a master woodworker.) When bad grammar is the source of a long-running joke in your family, you know you’re helplessly editor-y. There are other instances of this weird sense of enthrallment and humor, too—like how we still talk about my student who, not knowing he was wittily changing the phrase, wrote that he’d been in “screw-eating pain.” Such an apt metaphor for something excruciating.
What I really like about having such a good grasp of grammar is that I get to play with it in my writing: since I know what’s right, and since I’m a writer, I think it’s my prerogative to make up and alter words and grammar for effect. This is also a place I mine for my charming but lame jokes.
I think it’s interesting to hear how different people talk and write, though, and I don’t think it’s always right to say that someone said or wrote something wrong. Many linguists tend to deny the old prescribed grammar rules in favor of descriptivism, which says that “grammar rules” should describe how people use language, since language is constantly evolving, rather than telling people how to use it.
Being a copy editor is a lot different than being a poetry editor, though. I was a copy editor for a newspaper for a while, and that’s mostly making sure that all stories follow AP Style, use correct grammar, and are factually correct. Being a poetry editor is much different, and more stressful—but also more wonderful. Discovering new voices is a rush, and it’s pretty incredible to be working for a magazine that goes out of its way to find new voices to publish alongside established writers. I also really like commenting on poetry, and, so far, my favorite job for Connotation Press (where I’m Assistant Editor in Chief, not Poetry Editor) is writing questions for the Q&A sections for the poets. It’s a neat way to interact both with the poetry and the poets.
What do you think is so alluring about poetry? Why do you think people abandon other (possibly more lucrative pursuits) just for the chance to write one well crafted line? What is it about a poem that makes it like a bug-zapper to a poets little bug-heart?
I love your simile! Though I wish that poetry weren’t as violent as a bug-zapper—and, of course, not everything about the writing life is bad. Many parts of it are lovely. But it’s true; writing, for most, is not a lucrative career, and writing itself is a painful process for many artists.
I think different poets have different reasons for writing. I’ve heard a number of writers say that they “have” to write. I’ve never heard one say why they have to, but I’m curious. I’ve also heard a number of successful poets (most recently, Carolyn Forché) say that if you don’t have to write, don’t write, because the writing life is too hard.
I partly like writing because poems are like puzzles. Figure out where everything goes, what doesn’t fit, what metaphor will work best; figure out how to condense that phrasing; figure out which word has the best sound… Sometimes I write an image, assuming it’s a metaphor, then I have to figure out what the image stands for and revise the image to suit the referent. The figuring-out-the puzzle aspect of writing delights me.
I also like writing because it helps me figure out what something means to me, or what I think. My favorite way to start writing is with an image. Images tend to lead me toward thoughts or emotions, so starting with an image that won’t leave my head or that strikes me right off the bat is ideal. I like seeing where it will take me, and I also want to share that image with other people. I often write about West Virginia, which I consider to be home (as far as places are concerned), and there are a lot of people who never experience living in country like this. In some cities, it’s hard to find dirt; the whole thing’s paved. So, it’s nice to think I might share a little of soothing West Virginia earth with people. There seems to be something inside us that makes us want to pay homage to whatever it is we call home, even if we rebel against it (or parts of it).
The reason I started writing is kind of complicated; in my mid-20s, I found myself feeling very alone, and I realized I hadn’t been honest enough with anyone to feel like I had any truly close friends. I’d always tried to be what I thought I was supposed to be—what would make people happy. Eventually, that way of living made me feel pretty hollow and depressed. I decided to make a change and start being honest with people. I was never good at that in person, and maybe that’s why I turned to poetry first. Once I’d started opening up in poetry, I started being able to open up to in person, too. So, I guess you could say I did need to write, especially at that point in my life. Most times, I really enjoy sharing my poetry with people, but sometimes I still get pretty freaked out about just how much I’m divulging about myself.
I like that about artists, though: even though it’s scary, we keep putting ourselves and all of our bizarre-ity out there, heads held high. I’d guess it has to do with ego and desperation and excitement and mourning and celebration and all sorts of emotions and ideas, but it seems to me that sharing art is also a way of respecting the world, or life, in a way—we have to trust that the world won’t destroy us for exposing ourselves in art, or else we think that the world, or living and expressing ourselves honestly, is worth getting destroyed for, if that’s what it comes to. Otherwise, we’d just write in private journals.
What differences do you see in online and print publications? Are paper books a thing of the past? How do you feel about the Kindle? How do you feel about paper? What advantages do online journals offer writers and editors that paper based journals do not?
Good questions! There’s so much to say here. I’ll start with the Kindle: I think it’s cool, especially if it gets more people to read. It’s lightweight, holds tons of books, and (as I understand it) you just need a fancy phone to download a book onto it, which seems like that would encourage some people to read books they might not have read otherwise. And you can still take notes “in the margins” and bookmark pages. That being said, I love pages. I love the smell of books and the feel of books and I especially love a signed book. I love an artifact. I’m the kind that brings home rocks from all over the world so I’ll have something to hold. I have more books than I’ll probably ever read, which I’m embarrassed to admit. I’d like to say, like my friend Maurya Simon, that I’ve read every book in my library. But it’s not true; I have signed books I’ve never cracked. So, no, I don’t think that paper books are a thing of the past, but I do think that the more technologically-inclined we become from generation to generation, there will probably be more and more people who appreciate the convenience of the Kindle and things like it much more than they appreciate, for example, lugging a 50 lb unabridged Shakespeare anthology back and forth to class three times a week.
On to journals: I think that online journals have a lot to offer. Online sites can accommodate longer pieces—at Connotation Press, we are proud to be able to publish, for example, feature-length plays and screenplays, 20- or 30-page poems, and long mixed-media pieces that have a hard time making their way into printed journals due to page limits, the cost of colored ink, and the constraints of the dimensions of a page. Online sites have constraints, too, of course, but being online does open up new possibilities.
We are also excited to have people create profile pages at Connotation Press so that they can comment on others’ art. Online publications can encourage and provide a place for a conversations to occur between artists and their fans, between artists in different genres, between artists in different stages of their careers, between editors, artists, and guests, etc. It seems to me that online publications have the opportunity to help different genres interact and grow based on that interaction: for instance, we have the opportunity to bring a poet, photographer, and musician together to create new art. And we can hope that music fans and musicians will come to our site to see the music we’ve posted, and while they’re on the site, they’ll see some poetry that inspires them or gives them a new idea for a song.
It’s pretty cool to be in the generation that gets to discover and encourage all of these possibilities. And I think it’s a really important development for art, since it’s become marginalized in our society (certain genres, like poetry, in particular). If artists in our global society can find a way to come together as an interactive community online, and if a website can interest more people in different kinds of art and get them to interact with genres they otherwise wouldn’t pay attention to, then I think that’s a great thing. I hope that it will lead to stronger local communities of various kinds of artists, too.
For more information about Connotation Press please visit: http://www.connotationpress.com/
For a sample of Kaite Hillenbrand’s poetry please visit:
November Free-For-All–Poetry Workshop
Beating the Dead Horse
Dear Poetry Friends,
Welcome to the November Bees’ Knees Poetry Workshop!
As a special request, I ask you to invite other poets to join our group.
Post a message on Facebook, Tweet, shout into the sky:
come play poetry with us!
Bring a friend to the Bees’ Knees and be entered into a drawing to win a copy of Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa!
November Beat Poetry Challenge: Beat the Beats at their Own Game
Welcome Poetry Friends
Write a Beat-like poem
and be entered to win a copy of
Allen Ginsberg’s Death & Fame
November Poetry Challenge: Beat It! Just…
And for your final November Poetry Challenge…
…write a poem for, about, or around the King of Pop
and be entered to win a M.J. CD!
(Come on, I know you want a M.J. CD.)
October Winners and November Highlights
Our Lucky Winners Are:
Mr. Fancy Ryan (Free-for-All Treat)
Alexis Vergalla (Bodie)
Fernando McGregor (Haunted Poem)
Please email me (NicelleCDavis (at) gmail (dot) com)
with your contact information so I can mail you your prize.
I hope everyone had a marvelous holiday.
Thank you to all of you poets, editors, and readers
for making the Bees’ Knees first month a truly ghoulish experience.
(We set out to make a monster and a poetry monster we have!)
Here is a sneak peek at
the incredible November line-up:
November Poetry Prompts:
- Beat Poets (write a beat-like poem and be entered to win a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Death & Fame),
- Micheal Jackson and the song “Beat It” (write a poem about the King of Pop and be entered to win a MJ C.D.)
- and the monthly “Free-for-All” workshop is open to one and all
The November Bees’ Threes will include interviews with the phenomenal:
- Kaite Hillenbrand, Assistant Editor-in-Chief of Connotation Press
- Arlene Ang, Editor of The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1
- Bonnie Bolling, Editor of Verdad Magazine
Poetry Challenge #3: Free for All
Say what ya gotta say. Write what ya gotta write.
Submit any poem you would enjoy having work-shopped.
October Deadline for Free for All: October 31st
Feedback Deadline for October Poems: November 5th
Be the “lucky-number-poem” submitted and be treated!
Poetry Challenge #2:California Ghost Town Poem Raffle
California’s official gold mining ghost town, Bodie was once notorious as the wildest town in the West. From 1877 to 1888, the community swelled to more than 10,000 residents and produced over $35 million in gold and silver. This Halloween let us put Bodie back on the poetic map. Please post your poems by October 31st. Please give feedback on poems by November 5th.
In honor of the gambling men of Bodie, each poem and response submitted will be entered into a raffle. You might just find yourself winning a game of poker. 
Poetic Challenge #1: The Haunted Poem
Create Your Own Frankenstein
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein for a bet without prizes. This Halloween the Scary Story Wars are back; only this time with prizes. I will mail a copy of Frankenstein to the author of the “best” Haunted Poem. All poems must be submitted by October 31st. I will announce the winner on November 5th. All poems will be open to review (aka workshop). Please keep in mind this is a space for “growth.” All comments must be constructive (or else I will track you down and kick you in your shins. Be afraid. Be very afraid!).
Annoucment: Going Butterfly Hunting.
Dear Bees’ Knees Poets,
We have a winner…but who is this mystery poet? jpearce-aleman, please send your contact information to NicelleCDavis (at) gmail (dot) com so I can mail Mr. Gabriel Garcia Marquez to you. Thank you for your contribution.
Best Wishes,
Nicelle Davis
