Earlier this semester I was fortunate enough to sit down with Shara McCallum, UConn’s Aetna Writer-in-Residence for the spring, and have her review my work. As anybody who had the opportunity to talk to Shara while she was on campus can attest to, she was incredibly lovely and warm, and our workshop together was no different. She was certainly tough and critical when critiquing my work, but in a way that always conveyed her deep love for poetry, especially student poetry. Our meeting that day ended with Shara asking me, “What poets do you read?”

 
I of course immediately forgot the name of every obscure poet I loved that might impress her, and nervously admitted the truth, “Oh, I like Ginsberg a lot, even though he isn’t very respected by academia…I am also quite fond of Whitman and William Carlos Williams.”

 
Shara pressed on, “What about female poets?” This question took me aback; of course I like female poets but in that moment I couldn’t think of a single female poet except for Emily Dickinson. Why had I named three male poets? Why had I named three white male poets for that matter? As a young female poet myself, why couldn’t I think of a single female poet who has inspired me to write? The truth of the matter is that while I am partially responsible for not seeking out female voices. Poetry remains a boy’s club and this is especially true within the classroom. As students of creative writing we are constantly taught using the texts of monolithic writers of modern literature, most of whom are male voices—Shakespeare, John Keats, T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden—and the list continues on seemingly indefinitely. I would be hard pressed to name any female voices as anthologized with the exception of Syliva Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and ‘the’ female poet, Emily Dickinson . The situation does not improve much when you take into account the great novelists of literature either.

 
I was talking to a friend of mine who is a PhD student in English here at UConn last week, and she was telling me how she feels that even in contemporary journals the parameters of what is appropriate for a female voice remain quite rigid. She explained that male poets are able to write about whatever they please and still have their work published, female poets are limited to distinctly female experiences if they want to be published—housekeeping, marriage, children, the female body, etc. The only way to change the status quo is for us as poets and consumers of poetry to seek out publications that do honor female voices and subscribe to these journals, and to buy chapbooks in mass of female poets.

Anyways, here is a list of female poets for you to get started with, that I wish I had been able to come up with when Shara McCullum asked me that terribly simple question a few weeks ago. Why not start with Shara herself, a truly talented young Jamaican-American poet (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/438). Two other incredible female poets also graced UConn this past year as well, U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/352) and Irish prose poet Mairead Byrne (http://www.maireadbyrne.blogspot.com/). The poetry world lost two pioneering female poets this past year whose collections could nourish you for decades, the American Feminist poet Adrienne Rich (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/49) and the Polish Nobel Prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/340). As for lesser-known young female poets, I would suggest Bluets by Maggie Nelson (http://books.google.com/books/about/Bluets.html?id=WaIsAQAAIAAJ). This chapbook was assigned for a creative writing class I took last fall, and honestly it is one of the few books of poetry that I have ever devoured in one sitting. Lastly, I would be remiss in not recommending to you two lovely female poets who teach here at UConn, Dr. Penelope Pelizzon (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/238374) and Darcie Dennigan (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/darcie-dennigan). I hope that these few female voices are the just the beginning of your exploration of female poets, I know they will be for me.

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A tension often belies the relationship of the writer and the reader. Some authors are vehemently and vocally opposed to certain interpretations of their work, while still others refuse to even read reviews or criticism of their stories, novels, or poems. Authors even go so far as to directly interfere with interpretations: William Faulkner famously added an Appendix years after the initial publication of his novel The Sound and the Fury in which he narrated the lives and actions of the characters after the novels events, saying it was the “key” to unlocking the novel; Vladimir Nabokov claimed in an interview that, at the conclusion of his novel Pale Fire (one of the most widely read and interpreted novels of all time), its narrator, Kinbote, commits suicide; Steven King released a “Complete and Uncut” edition of his novel The Stand twelve years after its initial publication, updating the setting from 1980 to 1990 and including hundreds of pages of material that was not included in the original printing. This kind of authorial intervention obviously dramatically changes and invalidates many interpretations of a work; generally speaking, it is a riposte to scholars and readers who the author feels “just didn’t get it” the first time.

But is this correction of the text ever necessary? In my opinion, it’s completely illegitimate. When it comes down to it, a story or a poem is very much a work of art. The work, like a painting or a sculpture, only gains meaning when viewed or read. It requires a reader, with a unique set of experiences, from a unique background, and with a unique perspective to read it. An artist loses his ability to “fix things” after a work has been published; it is the equivalent of a painter repossessing a canvas from display just to repaint it more to his liking. While still connected tangentially to a time, a place, and a person, in reality, works of art exist largely independent of their creators.

While an author may have made deliberate choices about the content of their work of art, many of those ideas are equally subliminal (we are, after all, products of our culture, of our circumstances), and a reader with a different perspective from the author has the potential to reveal a more nuanced reading of a work than the author himself. While I hear the frustration beneath the often heard exclamation by friends or professors that “Sometimes a poem is just a poem!” I think it is, at best, reductive in its dismissal of the reader entirely. A poem is only a poem if it doesn’t have a reader. A poem is a work of art when it touches the experience and emotions of its reader.

As part of the fiction panel for this year’s issue of The Long River Review, the stories that ended up in the magazine were works of fiction lush with meaning and interpretive possibilities. In fact, I don’t think we all were in agreement about the meaning or significance of our favorites, but the stories resonated with us at varying timbres and frequencies. What we ended up with was a symphony of stories that we know our readers will enjoy as much as we did; even with their own, different perspectives and experiences.

So in the future, when a writer or a fellow reader tells you that you “didn’t get” what a work was about or that “you missed the entire point of the story,” don’t worry about it. No matter who they are, they don’t have the final say about what a work means to you: you do. As reader, after all, you are doing half of the work.

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Written submissions for the 2011 issue of Long River Review are due 5 pm, Tuesday, February 8. Art submissions are due Thursday, February 17. Specific Information about submission guidelines can be found below.

On a separate note, if you’re planning to submit a really sad story, bring it on. We can use a good cry.

Written Submission Guidelines

Please submit up to 8 pages of poetry and/or up to 5000 words of a prose. No individual prose piece should exceed 2500 words. Do not submit previously published material.

Enclose with your submission a cover letter that includes your name, students ID number (peoplesoft number), address, e-mail, and phone number. On this cover page also include a brief biographical note. This will appear in the contributor’s notes at the end of the journal, should your work be published.

Submit four copies of each piece. If a single piece is more than one page long, please staple it. If you are submitting multiple pieces, separate like pieces into sets so that each set will include one copy of each piece. Please staple or paperclip these sets together. Your student ID must appear on every page of your submission. Your name should not appear on any page except the cover letter.

Please submit your material in a manila envelope. On the envelope please include your name and contact information and prominently indicate to which genre you are submitting. We accept poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. If you are submitting to multiple genres, please use a separate envelope for each genre that you submit to.

Submissions may be dropped off in the appropriately labeled box in the English Department Office, CLAS 208, or in the Freshman English Office, CLAS 162. They can also be mailed to:

Alternatively, submissions may be e-mailed to submissions@longriverreview.com. You may attach multiple submissions per email as long as they are the same genre. Clearly indicate in the subject to which genre you are submitting and please send your submission as a .doc (NOT .docx), .rtf, .pdf or .txt file.

All submissions are anonymously read by multiple editors. Final editorial decision is made by editor in chief. Notification of acceptance or rejection will occur two to five weeks after submission deadline. Please do not request information on the status of your submission until after this time. Upon acceptance authors will be asked to provide an electronic copy of the piece through e-mail or disc and will be asked to provide written consent permitting Long River Review to publish the piece.

Please direct any questions and concerns to Joe Welch, Editor-in-Chief, at itsjoewelch@gmail.com

Art Submission Guidelines

Files must be submitted on CD to the box in the Art Building Office, by February 17, 2011.

Submit art work based on the following specifications:

Photoshop tiff
5.75 inches (minimum width)
300 dpi

All entries must include a cover sheet with the following information: title of work, medium, your name, local address, local phone, email, student ID number, and short description of piece. Pieces will probably be printed in black and white. If color is an important element to your piece and you do not want it to be printed in grayscale then you must specify so.

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You made it, you’re done
with the finals, done
with the papers, done
with the blue books, the pencils, the classes;
you’re done, done, done, done.

But are you really?

Does education end
with graduation – are the two
synonymous and entwined?
Will you never
pick up a book again, will you never
write a story, will you never
learn for the sake of learning?
Will you never
see old friends, old lovers; will your
interests die and
never
be reborn? Will you get
a job and never
look back, never
wonder about what might have been,
what might still be? Will you never
regret being done?

I like to hope
that we will stay
in touch; I like to hope
that you will find a good book
and read it just for fun; I hope
you will stay active, I hope
you will create, I hope
that being done
doesn’t necessarily mean
that you’re through. 

Yours always,
UConn

-Tim Stobierski

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