1. This is the time of year when everyone
This time of year everyone

2. The stuff that dreams are made of
Dreamstuff

Billed as a serial poetry anthology, open year-round to submissions, Volume 1 will give you a hearty meal of U.S. poetry. By my calculation there are eighty-four poets and one hundred and thirteen poems on the menu.

The potential problem with such an open and eclectic gathering of verse is often quality, but a quick browse through the ten pages of notes on the contributing poets discloses a creditable writing and publishing record across almost the entire board.

With so many juicy titbits to sample, it is difficult for this reviewer to choose which poems to highlight to provide a flavour of the diverse verse on offer. I’ve opted for a semi-random selection, but as the poems are arranged alphabetically by poet I’ve endeavoured to select some from the beginning, middle and end of the anthology so the A,B,Cs don’t get all the glory.

First there is the sharp humour of craving a baby in Susan Ahdoot’s “Mutiny in the Body”,

“Yes, the ovaries are pissed
and seeking revenge.
There’s a battle being fought
and it isn’t always pretty.”

and three lyrical poems from Sara Berkely on the joy and pain of having children,

“You are coming down the present in your short dress,
you have not done this before, alive in your first April,
but this is your stride, the rhythm of arrival,
and you carry the moment aloft,
brimming, like pale water in a silver cup.”

In “September 11 – The Missing” Frank Hertle constructs a sombre poem shaped like the twin tours from lists of the dead and a narrative of their known fate, whilst Larry Ziman proffers a prose poem, “Sci-Fi Flick”, enthusing over the delights of an inter-galactic striptease,

“Fast as summer lightning I banked our fighter right and shot into the middle of an asteroid belt and hid our craft behind a speeding stream of planetary
boulders. Just as the enemy ship zipped into our gunner’s sights, a fluffy
pale-blue brassiere landed on the surface on our cockpit window.”

With so many forms, styles and tones on offer you are unlikely to enjoy every poem in this eat-all-you-can buffet, but then again there will inevitably be little delicacies to tempt you, whatever your palette.

The Great American Poetry Show is edited by Larry Ziman, Madeline Sharples and Nicky Selditz and is published by The Muse Media at The Great American Poetry Show and TGAPS.

Author bio:

J.S.Watts lives and writes in the flatlands of East Anglia. Her poetry, short fiction and reviews are published in a variety of magazines and publications in Britain, Canada, Australia and the States including: Ascent Aspirations, Envoi, The Journal, Polluto and The Recusant. Her debut poetry collection “Cats and Other Myths” is published by Lapwing Publications. For further details see J.S. Watts.

Grace Cavalieri, Producer and Host of the Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress says of The Keepers that “our senses come alive with language, simple and true,” and adds that “the short story is said to be a courtship with the read. If this is so, the reader will say, Yes.”

Madeleine Mysko, author of Bringing Vincent Home says “Mike Maggio the storyteller leans back in his comfy, authoritative omniscience and narrates in a voice that is familiar and charming,” adding that “the reader is immediately taken in, only later to recall that it is from the familiar that the surprise jumps out – and also, sometimes, the delicious terror.”

And Nathan Leslie, author of Night Sweat and Driver says that The Keepers “straddles the line between the lyrical and the caustic” and says that “with the deft touch of a poet, Maggio’s imaginative fiction pulls you in and won’t let go. These stories offer a rich landscape for those just now discovering his work. “

Signed copies of The Keepers are available via my website, www.Mikemaggio.net for $9.00 plus shipping and handling.

Reviewers and literary magazines may request copies by contacting Robert Bixby at rbixby@earthlink.net or myself.

Thank you and may you all have a wonderful holiday.

Best wishes,
Mike Maggio

Now available
The Keepers
March Street Press

Coming soon

Haunted Garden,

from Pudding House Publications

MANY CHILD survivors of the Holocaust owed their lives to the deadly serious business of games played collectively or alone, that enabled them to adjust to dangerous situations, sometimes even to control them, and to relieve tension in relative safety. These survival mechanisms were rooted in poetry.

In a moving memoir reminiscent of Anne Frank’s diary, Professor Zsuzsanna Ozsváth of the University of Texas describes the role played by games in her own, childhood victory over death in the climax of war and in the face of prolonged, organized racist mass murder in Hungary. Her experience of the life-preserving games of Jewish children during the Holocaust in Budapest is very close to my own. Other accounts are turning up elsewhere, often in verse.

If you read just one of the thousands of personal Holocaust memoirs published nowadays by the thinning, final generation of Jewish survivors, perhaps this one – When the Danube Ran Red By Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, Syracuse University Press, 2010, Hardcover, 184pp. $17.95, ISBN-10: 0815609809 & 13: 978-0815609803 – should be it.

She was then devotedly preparing for the promise of a career as a poet and concert pianist. Her ability amidst the battle to absorb herself in the solitary game of reciting poetry and playing the piano in the absence of an instrument may have saved her life.

A dozen years later, she left Hungary illegally, taking with her just one valuable possession: a collection of verse by Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), enslaved and murdered by fellow Hungarians because of his Jewish birth despite his well documented, sincere conversion to Catholicism.

Her excellent English translation of that book, composed in collaboration with the American poet Frederick Turner, has greatly contributed to Radnóti’s worldwide reputation today as perhaps the greatest among the Holocaust poets. In an imaginary dialogue with the Prophet Nahum, Radnóti describes the total war engulfing Nazi-occupied Europe (in the Ozsváth/Turner translation published in Foamy Sky, Princeton University Press, 1992 & Corvnia/Budapest, 2002):

POET:

…now the swift nations
slay one another, the human soul stands as naked as Niniveh.
Then to what purpose the exhortations, the hellish green clouds of
the locusts, what purpose? when humans are baser than animals!
Here and elsewhere they smash on the walls the innocent infants,
steeples are torches, homesteads flower as furnaces, households
roast in their embers, in smoke the factories rise up and vanish.
Streets full of people on fire go galloping, sink with a rumble,
hugely embedded the bomb-burst shatters masses asunder;
shrunken as cowpats on fields in the summer, the dead are lying
piled in the plazas and squares of their cities; and as it was written
all that you prophesied now is fulfilled. But say, what brought you
back to the earth from the primal dustcloud?

PROPHET:

Wrath: that forever
orphaned the children of men must serve in the hosts of the blasphemous,
shaped but not natured like men – and that I might see the unclean
citadel’s fall and unto these latter days speak and bear witness…

Today she is the Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies and professor of literature and history of ideas at Texas University in Dallas. Her writing and lectures have won her a string of distinguished honours including an American Fulbright and a top Hungarian Academy of Sciences award. Her new memoir is a profoundly moving work of literary as well as academic merit.

The title of the book refers to a scene witnessed by Zsuzsa the child, enacted nightly along the banks of the River Danube throughout the siege, when the Hungarian Nazis executed groups of Jewish captives, men women and children, bound by ropes in pairs to prevent survival. The idea was that if one had by chance escaped death by shooting, the survivor might still be dragged down by the weight of the attached corpse.

“Nobody screamed,” she recalls, “nobody cried. You could hear nothing but the shots and the splash of the bodies falling into the red foam (of) the river, which flowed… like blood.”

The Radnóti poems today are helping Hungary to comprehend the tragedy. This country of fewer than 10m souls was responsible for the humiliation and murder of some 600,000 of its Jewish citizens during the final phases of the Second World war, most of them brutally delivered for petty financial gain to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Zsuzsa and many other Jews crammed into the vermin-infested ghetto tenements of Budapest or hiding elsewhere in the capital escaped deportation. But they had to live with the constant threat of mass murder and worse – there was worse – meted out by the armed thugs of the Hungarian Arrow-Cross/Nyilas party, the role models of the neo-Nazi rabble on the rise today throughout Eastern Europe.

Her greatest secret fear was enforced separation from her beloved parents. That came to pass as the invading Soviets smashed through the combined German and Hungarian defences. But even then, she managed to keep her calm, alone in hiding, sustained by poetry and music.

The ferocity of the three-month siege, including vicious hand-to-hand fighting under constant Allied aerial bombardment, is compared by historians to the earlier battle for Stalingrad. But unlike Budapest, Stalingrad had been at least emptied of its residents. The siege of Budapest raged over the heads of 800,000 civilian witnesses, mostly women and children. The death toll approached 160,000. While the children composed their verse and played their games to delay death, many combatants on both sides reserved their last bullets for themselves for fear of being captured alive by their savage opponents.

Even during the final confrontations, the orgy of anti-Semitic violence continued in the ghetto. Zsuzsa, I, and all the others I know who in any way participated in the siege of Budapest have never overcome, or even attempted to overcome the experience.

Nearly seven decades after the event, Zsuzsa feels still indebted to countless miracles incorporated in the poems and games ghetto children created to distance themselves from the face of death. These usually took the shape of a human face.

There was Erzsébet (Erzsi) Fajó, Zsuzsa’s gentile playmate, friend and nanny who risked all for the survival of her employers who in turn eventually adopted her. Her name today is preserved by an olive tree planted in her memory in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

There was the family’s kindly, grey-moustached postman who turned up unexpectedly to seek out Zsuzsa in the ghetto when she was separated from her parents after witnessing her first massacre staged by the Arrow-Cross. He must have been aware of the peril he risked as he delivered to the tearful child messages of hope from her mother.

And there was a uniformed member of a Nazi raiding party dragging away the Jews, whose hastily whispered advice saved the entire family. Was he an angel? Or a decent cop? Or a member of the armed Zionist resistance that regularly infiltrated the ranks of the killers to save their victims?

The imagination of the temporarily unsupervised children flared as they wrote and recited their poems and played in an atmosphere of heightened tension approaching the state of collective hysteria endured by their families. The poems and games gave the children “space,” the author recalls, “that allowed us to leave behind the world of the adults as well as the ghetto house and with it the Germans, our fear of separation and the threat of death.”

They acted out well-known dramas in verse or invented new ones, reflecting the cultural pursuits of their community. “Good morning, Ophelia,” the ghetto children no longer allowed to attend school greeted each other in the morning, or “Good morning, Tristian,” or “Good morning, Rigoletto!”

Picking up the game, she relates, the person so addressed would try to meet the challenge by answering the call and stepping into the chosen theatrical role. The children sometimes changed the script to suit the prevailing mood or circumstance. They played feverishly together throughout the day and composed and rehearsed new scenes alone in their minds late into the night.

Some children managed to save lives through verse and play by diffusing potentially lethal situations, adds Professor George Eisen, executive director and associate vice-president at Nazareth College of Rochester, New York.

His pioneering, interdisciplinary study of the ghettoes and concentration camps of Europe (Children & Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows, Massachusetts University Press, 1988 & Corvina/Budapest 1990) cites instances of children’s games staged to divert the attention of guards from forbidden activities punishable by death, such as smuggling food or participating in educational activities.

Eisen is also a Jewish survivor of the Hungarian Holocaust and the siege of Budapest. He poignantly quotes a five-year old girl engaged in serious conversation with her doll:

Do not cry, little one!

When the Germans come
to grab you…
I will not leave you.

I add below my own recollection of a collective, unconscious endeavour by Jewish children in a tenement not far from Zsuzsa’s apartment block to express and relieve through play their community’s suppressed fear of death:

GHETTO GAME

Beneath a gloomy square of the sky
in the shadow of awesome, looming walls,
a crowd of kids met day after day
to test, to learn in that well of twilight
which ones in the block were destined to die.

Just a few at a time. Our faces were grey
and small, our eyes were clouded with fear.
We hung the Book and a key on a thread –
for we understood the path of death
yet could not make it go away.

We huddled close with lonely dread
in our hearts. The Bible turned around
and with it, the key. They came to rest
at random to point at a ghetto child.
He would be the first among the dead.

The block has grown, the world progressed.
I, the survivor, stand in the sunlight
aware of the cloud in every eye
as fear of the future grips the globe,
rekindling doom in every breast.

The most moving record of a Holocaust survival game that I know is in Zsuzsa’s book. It describes the triumph of a terrified, starving girl over a nightmare endured during three days and nights at the height of the siege when she was confined to a cupboard in an abandoned, sprawling apartment by the river, exposed to heavy machinegun fire and intermittent bombing.

She recalls: “I decided to practice the piano in my head… and started to imagine I was playing Beethoven’s f-minor sonata, op. 3, from the first measure to the last. Some passages went very well, some not at all. While my right hand’s fingers were really singing in the second part, my left hand’s fingers were too slow playing the triplets in the fourth part.

“I need to practice this more, I thought. But I did not go back to work on those passages; rather I started to play the second sonata in A major; and again, I thought through every single note. In the meantime, the bombing started anew… and (I) recited poetry.”

CAPTION: Zsuzsanna Ozsváth… a moving memoir (I hold a copyright release from her, authorizing free reproduction of the enclosed photograph. TOL)

THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent. DEATHMARCH, the fourth edition of his translation from the Hungarian of Holocaust poetry by Miklós Radnóti, was published by Snakeskin and The Penniless Press, both in England, in 2009.

Man – (Comedy/Biblical) – http://youtu.be/jg9hVLMLYeY – MOST POPULAR Fish – (Comedy) – http://youtu.be/M8ltKVlALfk Last Round – (Comedy) – http://youtu.be/RmBKMzmGm2M Tree – (Inspirational) – http://youtu.be/0kNYqKWTLrs Church – (Controversial) – http://youtu.be/XT_BoYC68pE My Brew – (Comedy) – http://youtu.be/A80rb_fYaJc Closet – (Food For Thought) – http://youtu.be/SfhdnDhb2WA Crime – (Food For Thought) – http://youtu.be/9za8oVOHpHI Blind – (Food For Thought/Comedy) – http://youtu.be/3aCmIftdbtI Signs – (Food For Thought) – http://youtu.be/W_KAC7RwV_8 Broken – (Food For Thought)- http://youtu.be/P7tWZpW3f24 Haunted – (Food For Thought) – http://youtu.be/v5fo1jAaJxw Outside – (Food for Thought) – http://youtu.be/aHOTD-YdfSo Behind The Door – (Comedy) – http://youtu.be/So6AvmL24o4 Little Seed – (Inspirational) – http://youtu.be/mXTRP7ZT3xs Kid – (Controversial/Inspirational) – http://youtu.be/iiueJ74Lzu8 – Child Abuse

She’s here, ready to pull your hair and poke out your eyes. Come to a reading, buy a book and she will love you dearly, or leave you alone, whichever annoys you the more. She is the BAD DAUGHTER.

Upcoming opportunities to view Bad Daughter and her alter ego Sarah Gorham:

Thursday, November 3, 7:00-9:00 pm
McNally Jackson Bookstore
52 Prince Street, NYC 10012

Thursday, November 17, 7:00 pm
Carmichael’s on Frankfort Ave
Louisville, KY 40206

Friday, December 9, 8:00 pm
InKY Reading Series @ The Bard’s Town
1801 Bardstown Rd.
Louisville, KY 40205

Visit Sarah Gorham’s website for a peek at the Bad Daughter trailer and much more: http://www.sarahgorham.net/
Purchase the book ahead of time at: Four Way Books
Sarah Gorham

I have long admired the exquisite poise-as well as the wisdom and disarming grace-of Sarah Gorham’s poetry. Her newest collection, Bad Daughter, offers meticulously observed meditations arising from a kaleidoscope of familial relationships centering upon mothers and daughters. This is Sarah Gorham’s most powerful and eloquent book yet, a sequence of sustained poetic reckonings upon the demands, despairs, and delights of family-both past and present-and the revelations that emerge in the course of the well-lived life. This is a collection of boundless pleasures.

-David St. John

Dear Writer, Magazine Editor or Publisher

I’m writing to let you know that I intend to withdraw The AA Independent Press Guide from my website soon. I have been travelling for a few years now and just haven’t had the time to maintain it. It is still reasonably accurate and certainly it is still useful, but as time passes the information will become defunct. You may want to download this information before it disappears. If so, go to my website, which is at http://www.thunderburst.co.uk (I will delete it on 1st October 2011)

This is the last time you will hear from me by email.* I am going to destroy my AA Independent Press Guide email address book. I am now finished with running the AA Independent Press Guide or with any of the other Writer’s Resources on my website. This is not due to disillusion, but because I have found a greater love in yoga and meditation, which I am currently studying full-time, and will eventually start teaching.

I have not given up my own personal creative processes, though I no longer dedicate quite so much time to them. For those of you who are interested in my art, writing and music I have now set up a dedicated Facebook page which I will update on a fairly regular basis: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dee-Sunshine-Writer-Artist-Musician/201729451659

Finally, if you are ever in need of artwork for a book or magazine jacket you might like to browse my online art gallery at http://www.rimbaud.org.uk/artmainpage.html

It’s been a pleasure running the AA Independent Press Guide, and I’m grateful to all of you who supported it through your words of encouragement and support, and especially to the few of you who made donations to help keep it running. It was 13 years ago that the AA Independent Press Guide started off as a humble appendix to Acid Angel magazine. We had a long run; and now we are done. If any of you want to publish the list on your websites, feel free.

Wishing you all the very best with your writing, your magazines and other projects

Dee Sunshine

(aka Dee Rimbaud)

* If you are interested in receiving occasional email updates about my art, writing and music let me know and I will add you to my opt in e-mailing list.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

DOWNLOAD FREE E-BOOKS OF MY NOVEL & MY POETRY COLLECTIONS AT OBOOKO.COM

The Bad Seed : My first collection of poetry, originally published in paperback by Stride (1998)

Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels : My second collection of poetry, originally published in paperback by Bluechrome (2004)

Visions Of The Drowning Man : My third collection of poetry, only published as an e-book via Obooko (2009)

Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God : My first novel, originally published in paperback by Bluechrome (2004)

There’s a big change to the competition, in this our sixth year, but it’s still as writer-friendly as ever. The entry fee is just a year’s subscription to the magazine, so no one walks away empty-handed — and, as always, we’ll read your work fairly and swiftly, and consider every poem for standard publication in Rattle.

But here’s the news: We’ve increased the number of paid finalists from ten to fifteen poets — each receiving $100 and publication in our winter issue. As the competition expands, more people deserve to be paid; that just makes sense.

Not only that, but for the first time this year YOU get to vote for the $5,000 winner. After selecting 15 finalists in our usual blind review, we’ll publish those poems in our winter issue, and include a ballot in the back. The winner will then be chosen by popular vote among all entrants and eligible subscribers.

Logging all those votes is going to be a massive undertaking. Are we nuts? Have we been watching too much American Idol? No…we just have faith in the ability of our readers to make the best choice possible. At Rattle we’ve always felt that everyone should have an equal say in what poetry is and what it should do, and the idea of one or three authoritarian editors judging which poem out of 8,000 deserves a huge prize doesn’t quite feel right.

There’s no way our subscribers can sift through all the entries, though, so it’s our job to help the cream rise to the top in the fairest way possible. We’ll do the grunt work, and then big decision is up to you. We’ll even let you blurb the winner…or if the winning poem is yours, you’ll have a thousand blurbers. How does that sound?

If you’re worried about it becoming a popularity contest, don’t be. Only subscribers who already had subscriptions prior to the announcements of the finalists get to vote. Ballot stuffing isn’t possible. And there are 3,000 of them, so no amount of politicking is going to overcome the true popular opinion. Having run this contest for five years, I’m absolutely sure that all 15 finalists will be deserving of the big prize. They always are. So I have no doubt that the winner will be the most outstanding poem that moves the greatest number of readers — and that’s what we’re always looking for in a poem, anyway.

We’ll see how it goes — I’m excited about every aspect, from our hunt for finalists, to the grand tally of the votes. The Rattle Poetry Prize is always fun, but this year it’s going to be a freaking carnival. I love it. Hope you do to. If you still have any questions, hit reply.

For complete guidelines on either email or hardcopy entries, go here: http://www.rattle.com/rpp/rpp.htm

Timothy Green
Editor / Rattle
12411 Ventura Blvd
Studio City, CA 91604
www.rattle.com
tim@rattle.com

There’s a big change to the competition, in this our sixth year, but it’s still as writer-friendly as ever. The entry fee is just a year’s subscription to the magazine, so no one walks away empty-handed — and, as always, we’ll read your work fairly and swiftly, and consider every poem for standard publication in Rattle.

But here’s the news: We’ve increased the number of paid finalists from ten to fifteen poets — each receiving $100 and publication in our winter issue. As the competition expands, more people deserve to be paid; that just makes sense.

Not only that, but for the first time this year YOU get to vote for the $5,000 winner. After selecting 15 finalists in our usual blind review, we’ll publish those poems in our winter issue, and include a ballot in the back. The winner will then be chosen by popular vote among all entrants and eligible subscribers.

Logging all those votes is going to be a massive undertaking. Are we nuts? Have we been watching too much American Idol? No…we just have faith in the ability of our readers to make the best choice possible. At Rattle we’ve always felt that everyone should have an equal say in what poetry is and what it should do, and the idea of one or three authoritarian editors judging which poem out of 8,000 deserves a huge prize doesn’t quite feel right.

There’s no way our subscribers can sift through all the entries, though, so it’s our job to help the cream rise to the top in the fairest way possible. We’ll do the grunt work, and then big decision is up to you. We’ll even let you blurb the winner…or if the winning poem is yours, you’ll have a thousand blurbers. How does that sound?

If you’re worried about it becoming a popularity contest, don’t be. Only subscribers who already had subscriptions prior to the announcements of the finalists get to vote. Ballot stuffing isn’t possible. And there are 3,000 of them, so no amount of politicking is going to overcome the true popular opinion. Having run this contest for five years, I’m absolutely sure that all 15 finalists will be deserving of the big prize. They always are. So I have no doubt that the winner will be the most outstanding poem that moves the greatest number of readers — and that’s what we’re always looking for in a poem, anyway.

We’ll see how it goes — I’m excited about every aspect, from our hunt for finalists, to the grand tally of the votes. The Rattle Poetry Prize is always fun, but this year it’s going to be a freaking carnival. I love it. Hope you do to. If you still have any questions, hit reply.

For complete guidelines on either email or hardcopy entries, go here: http://www.rattle.com/rpp/rpp.htm

Timothy Green
Editor / Rattle
12411 Ventura Blvd
Studio City, CA 91604
www.rattle.com
tim@rattle.com