An Introduction
In response to the Welsh/Jewish or Jewish/Welsh poet who noted that "There's a Million Poets Writing a Billion Poems and No-one Reading Them" we wish to make our contribution by turning kitchen from a magazine of writing into a magazine of writing and reading. The nerve, indeed, to suggest that Poets can also simultaneously be Readers. The Welsh/Jewish or Jewish/Welsh poet also noted that "someone's been fucking diluting my pot" to which we want to say, it wasn't us.
We bring you therefore, in a first step toward becoming a magazine that also reads, The Best Fucking Poem Series. Here we will make notations, promotions and flirtations with a number of written pieces found (and oh so quickly forgotten) in the endless pool known as The Small Press, or Independent Press, or Underground Press, or whatever it is now known as. These are the literary magazines (including our own) spread around the interweb that are small enough as to be read mostly by their own bearded editors and the occasional struggling writer's polite friends. What seems to be missing in this very strange world is not writing, however, but, as the Welsh/Jewish Jewish/Welsh Poet so snappily noted, Readers, but also, we would add, any type of conversation about the work outside of the congratulatory Facebook "like" thing, where poets who write similarly and/or once shared cousins have formed a community of "liking" with the occasional "awesome" or "let's webcam" thrown in.
Indeed, but what is a poor poet to do? The nature of the poet's failure to make economical ends meet (he can survive for weeks on a single acceptance and a thin slice of rye bread) can be seen as a glossy shine about the work as he learns to maneuver the ever changing landscape. Love Thyself. Persistence. Multiple Submissions. Hard Work. Fuck The New Yorker. Let's Start a Magazine. One Poem a Day is 365 Poems a Year. Multiple Orgasms. I Am a Man of Steel and Incredible Sadness. Ashbery Who? Let's Do it! Can I Write a Vagina Poem as a Man? etc. Eager to adapt the poet furnishes for himself a Consumer's Cold Dead Heart and becomes, it is only a matter of time, Poet Machine. Poet Machine is a state of heightened poet-hood where the poet consumes only his own poems together with the occasional (Diet) beverage. This is a very dangerous condition. Signs include hair loss and loss of human emotions as well as updating your "bio" daily and listing as your favorite poet of all time some dude named Rob or Bob who once positively reviewed your chapbook. Please see a doctor immediately.
In the light of this (or lack thereof) The Best Fucking Poem Series will feature poems that rise above the clonk and mumble of their contemporaries. They will be relatively recent (it is sometimes hard to see if a magazine is dead or alive). The use of the word "fucking" does not mean that the poems have to be about fucking but is our way to emphasize authority where there is none. A question of aesthetics and taste, no doubt, and who are we to say what is good and what is not? We have impeccable taste! The use of the word "poem", furthermore, does not mean that the writing has to be poem but is our subtle way of hinting that beneath the best of prose linger a poet's sensibilities (as the best of poems display some, however flighty, grasp of narrative). Poems by people that we know will not be featured in this series. We like to read and poems will be selected purely based on Readability and whether or not they entice in us a feeling of, what the Jewish/Welsh Welsh/Jewish poet once called, "Fucking Goodness". Feel free to add your comments below telling us we are wrong. The purpose is not an arbitrary handing out of imaginary awards but an attempt to stimulate reading and conversation about the writing that is there without being read.
The Best Fucking Poem, 1 (January)
Gloria Kills Many Things by Ofelia Hunt, published by kill author.
The first poem selected is not a poem but a short story (or maybe a flash story, so many categories) that goes straight to work being a short story. Reading this story we thought "Fucking Goodness" and then we thought "We Love This Ofelia Hunt Whoever Now She Is". There is none of that annoying fluff that most stories start out with that screams "This is a story!" or "This is not a story!" followed by "Hold on, the story will begin shortly, I just need to write this paragraph first." Though a story mostly made up of descriptions the descriptions are not passive scene settings but vital and active components that drive the story. Joy William's bleakly funny and often surreal underbelly America came to mind, so did the Borgesian idea that you should imagine the story as already written before you write it and instead of writing a story summarize the story already written. The bare bones of a story. Let the bigger story rest in the folds of the small story. Linearity is fucking overrated. A poem-story-poem-story-poem. Definitely a poem. How can anything with a line such as "Carson wants to research the orange-ness of all things" not be a poem. A fucking poem. So there.
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