Happy New Year!

I have poems in three just-published journals -- Prick of the Spindle, Honey Land Review, and Jelly Bucket. Here's one from Jelly Bucket, written in response to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting last Jan. 8. The poem seems appropriate for the end of 2011, the beginning of what I hope is a better year for all.

WHAT TO DO

When the chief surgeon’s press conference has winnowed to soundbites
and splashes of flowers cover most of the spattered blood
and we’ve swayed unarmed in a circle holding hands while a piper skirls
and police have unwound the yellow tape from stanchions and bollards
and before it all starts up again

let there be a little space in time
like a clearing
let us wash and dry the dishes after supper
and put them all away

MacLeod a writer to watch for

If you want to know what it feels like—really feels like—to footrace a train through the Windsor tunnel or stack bricks in the sun until your sunburn oozes and bleeds, Alexander MacLeod has the imagination to take you there. If you want to know what it feels like to read his short stories, check out my review of Light Lifting at 360 Main Street.

My new book available for pre-order

My first collection of short fiction is due out in January. The publisher, Mayapple Press, is offering a 10 percent discount for early orders. Please support this outstanding small press by ordering a copy, and by purchasing some of the many other fine titles of fiction and poetry that Mayapple offers. Click the link above; then go to the "coming soon" link at the right.

'A Texan Reflects' in New Verse News

New Verse News, the current affairs poetry website, has picked up my poem, "A Texan Reflects on an Old Cemetery." Check out the site here.


A TEXAN REFLECTS
ON AN OLD CEMETERY

It's hard work running a lake,
commodifying water. Thousands of facts
sit in filing cabinets and hard-drives --
pumping costs, acre-foot allocations.
Dealing with them every day
you get into a routine of thinking
and hold your mouth a certain way,
and then seven years of drought
undoes it all. A forgotten cemetery
emerges along the shoreline,
water falling away like a gray blanket,
uncovering wooden coffins, bones
of former slaves, mostly children.
It’s as if they woke and rubbed
sand out of their eyes like sleep
and came down to the courthouse
to testify about a terrible crime,
and then, being children, tumbled out
among bird song and dry grass
to play a while in the free air.

New batch of lit magazine reviews

New Pages has fresh lit magazine reviews up on the site today, including pieces on Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, and my take on the latest Southwest Review. Check them out here.

'Picking Blueberries' at Gulf Stream

I'm very happy to have this poem in Gulf Stream Online No. 6. The magazine has been in business since 1989 and is associated with the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. Check it out here.

PICKING BLUEBERRIES
We work apart,
each knowing by now
how the other does things.

I thumb berry from stem,
gather ten in hand to drop in a pail.
They’re clean, no need
to pick debris out later.

You grab ripe and red together,
leaves, stems, mummies and all,
fill three buckets to my two.
No one goes hungry
in your house.

At the slope-roofed shed,
morning haze just lifting now,
we stand before a girl working the counter
who weighs us out,
dumps everything together,
renewing our vows.

Lit magazines reviewed at New Pages

New Pages offers a new helping of lit magazine reviews, including Bellingham Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. Reviews by me of the latest Paris Review and Redactions are also included.

New Verse News finds poetry in headlines

The niche of New Verse News is poetry that comes out of the day's headlines. My poem, "Falling Leaves," is above the fold today at http://newversenews.blogspot.com/. Here's the poem:

FALLING LEAVES

World population reached 7 billion
on or about Oct. 31, 2011
-- News item

Chased from maples
by a stiff wind,
they rattle on the roof,
drift down on what was once
tall-grass prairie.
The lawn I raked yesterday
is half covered again.
Fifteen kraft bags
lean against the garage,
and the giant lindens
haven't even started.
How could there be
so many, when all we did
was plant some trees?

Non-fan finds compelling prose, poetry about sports

I'm not a big sports fan (though I'm rooting for the Cards in the Series), but I found compelling work about boxing and baseball in the latest issue of Apalachee Review. My reviews of that magazine and Blueline were posted yesterday here at New Pages. You'll also find reviews of a number of other lit magazines there. Check 'em out.

2011 Temenos is out from CMU

Temenos, the lit magazine at Central Michigan University, has published my poem "Boys" in a slightly different version in its 2011 issue, which arrived in my mailbox today. One of my favorite Michiganders, Danny Rendleman, has a poem in the same issue. Check it out.


BOYS

In the spare room of Odd Fellows Hall
we practiced half-hitches and square knots,
recited the words we’d memorized
then spilled out the door
to what we came for --
a dark vacant lot without rules
where we piled on any boy who had the ball,
dragged him hard to newly frosted ground,
hoping for blood.
Feral under an ivory moon, we did
what injury we could at 80 pounds
with narrow shoulders, skinny
arms and legs,
while the Scoutmaster and assistant
sat on folding chairs under a bare bulb, lit up,
and traded stories in a quiet drawl
that drifted with tobacco smoke across the carnage
like the certainty we were bred with,
that we lived in the best little place on earth
and everything was fine.

That Obituary Summer

This is the first paragraph of my short story, "That Obituary Summer," published in the current issue of Red Fez. The full story is here.

I’D GO IN AT 4:00, climbing stairs past a landing where linotypes clattered behind frosted glass. Another flight took me to the newsroom. I always ate beforehand at a grill down the street, open-faced hamburger and mashed potatoes with dark gravy. I could have taken a supper break, but I ate early because I didn’t want to miss anything. The two-star went to press at midnight. After the papers came up, we sent out for chili mac and beer. Sometimes we’d replate for a late-breaking story, but usually we played whiffle ball among the desks until 1 a.m. Then McCarthy, the night city editor, phoned the foreman to chisel a star off the plate, and the press in the basement rumbled back to life with the one-star. Staffers with families went home, and the rest of us bar-crawled the dark, humid city. It was my first newspaper job, and I wrote almost nothing but little stories about death.

"Honk to End War" published in Fall 2011 Sleet

My flash fiction piece, "Honk to End War," is online now in the Fall 2011 edition of Sleet. Check it out here, and please also devote some time to the other fiction writers, poets and experimental writers published in the magazine, whose motto is: "Ice crystal rain? Why don't you just call it sleet?"

Story published in on-line magazine

My short-short story, "Personal Touch," is on-line now at Press 1. It's a story about a Valentine's Day crisis at a candy shop. Read it here, and then spend some time with the other writers in this fresh five-year-old addition to the lit magazine scene.

More lit mags reviewed at New Pages

Two new handsful of lit magazines reviewed here at New Pages. Among them, my reviews of Chinese Literature Today and Hiram Poetry Review.

Mag reviews out at New Pages

New Pages has reviews by various hands of new issues of 20 literary magazines, from Alimentum to Z. Included are two reviews I wrote, of New Millenium Writings and Pilgrimage. I particularly recommend the latter, a typographically beautiful product with fine essays and poems. Not to miss: Mylene Dressler's essay "Found."

Three poems accepted at 'Prick of the Spindle'

Prick of the Spindle is a Pensacola-based online quarterly that publishes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and art that take both experimental and traditional approaches. The magazine describes its goal as being "well-rounded, with an acknowledgement to the works of literary history." (In case you've forgotten, as I had, the title on the masthead comes from the tale of Sleeping Beauty, who pricks her finger on a spindle and falls into a 100-year sleep until awakened by a prince). The journal is wide-ranging and ambitious. I'm happy as can be that three of my poems -- "Art," "A Young Man Sees His First Picasso," and "All Nighter on the Snow Plow" -- will appear in the December issue. The first is a response to reading Gregory Curtis' book The Cave Painters; the second, one of my few attempts at an ekphrastic poem -- a poem about a work of art. The third started out as a short story and got out of hand until I condensed it to 12 lines. Seems like I'm on a roll here.

Anne-Marie Oomen's American Map

Anne-Marie Oomen is a poet, essayist and playwright who also teaches creative writing at Michigan's Interlochen Arts Academy. Her latest collection of essays, American Map, is another in the Made in Michigan Writers Series published by Wayne State University Press. A travel memoir, the book demonstrates Oomen's considerable strengths: Use of place as a gateway to memory; an astonishing ability to capture and render detail; and a narrative about the present that is gripping in its own right and allows Oomen to come to terms with the past. Read the rest of my review at 360 Main Street.

Another poem about canning . . . .

The Honey Land Review is an on-line journal named after a nine-mile wide strip of rural land that stretches the length of the Iowa/Missouri border. In early- to mid-1800s, the strip was the subject of a border dispute. According to the review's website, militia from both states squared off over the territory, a Missouri sheriff was jailed, and three trees containing bee hives were ransacked. True to its name, the review says it "embraces work that pushes the boundaries." I'm very pleased to have a poem, "Canning Apple Sauce," accepted for the upcoming issue. The poem is one of several about preserving food. "Canning Peaches" appeared in the Winter 2011 issue of Clapboard House, and "A Bushel of Macs" is in my Pudding House chapbook, Harry Truman All the Way.

Two books of mine reviewed by U of I blogger

University of illinois writing teacher John Griswold, writing as Oronte Churm, included two of my books in a review of reading he's enjoyed this summer. Churm blogs for Inside Higher Education. Griswold is the author of A Democracy of Ghosts, a novel about the Herrin Massacre of 1922. The massacre is a key incident in Paul Angle's Bloody Williamson, which was required reading when I hired on in 1963 as a reporter with the Southern Illinoisan newspaper. Griswold's close-to-the-ground novel adds tremendously to my understanding of those events.

New collection from Li Tien

Friend and translation collaborator Li Tien of Midland (MI) has just self-published a chapbook of 23 poems published in journals. Entitled No Rain No Rainbow the book includes work that has appeared in Mid-America Poetry Review, Orbis Quarterly International, The MacGuffin, White Pine Review and numerous others. Among the translations are three from the Chinese of Tien's father, Yu Y. Tien, as well as two Song Dynasty poems that Li and I translated and published in the March Street Press chapbook Drizzle and Plum Blossoms. Li's new chapbook is full of wonderful short poems. Some are meditations on the natural world, others looks back at his youth in occupied China. Drizzle and Plum Blossoms was reviewed last year at 360 Main Street by Matthew Falk. His review is here.

Reviews of High Desert Journal, MacGuffin

I've had the joy of reading some outstanding fiction, poetry and essays in reviewing literary magazines for New Pages. My review of the latest High Desert Journal is here and of The MacGuffin is here. Best of the best: Don't miss Joe Wilkins' prize-winning short story "Enough of Me" in High Desert Journal, or Hunter Liguore's "The Last Soucouyant" in The MacGuffin.

I'll Have a Story in "Sleet" in the fall

As peaceful as things are for most Americans, the fact that we are engaged in our longest war to date slips into the background. One on-line magazine, Sleet, has been publishing war-themed poems and stories recently, and will continue with my short story, "Honk to End War," in its fall 2011 edition. It's a good magazine that I'm happy to be in. I was particularly grateful that the editors did some judicious editing to the piece to make it more forceful and direct. The current issue is here.. As usual, I have New Pages to thank for its "Calls for Submissions" feature that alerted me that Sleet was reading.

Press 1 takes a story

I grew up working in my father's retail store in a small Midwestern town. I've always been fascinated by the back story of retail -- what happens behind the counter in contrast to what happens in front. Happy to say that "Personal Touch," my story about a Valentine's Day crisis in a chocolate shop, will appear in the September issue of the online magazine Press 1. The current issue is at http://www.leafscape.org/press1/

New Blog From a New Place

Back in Michigan I blogged for many years as Three-Eyed Fish. The purpose of the blog was to help readers stay aware of what was going on in the arts and literature in the Great Lakes Bay Region.

Since I've moved to Central Illinois, I'm stepping out from the Three-Eyed Fish persona and writing as plain old John Palen. I'm happy to find that other journalists in my new home are taking care of Three-Eyed Fish's function very well. So this new blog will simply be an introduction to me as a writer, with occasional updates about what I'm working on and publishing.

Basically I've been a journalist and a poet, although I've been writing short fiction since 2008. I've published a number of collections of poetry, some no longer in print. Here are three that are in print and can be obtained from the publishers, or from me by emailing me at japalen@aol.com for more information.

-- Drizzle and Plum Blossoms: Four Poets of the Song Dynasty. With Li C. Tien. March Street Press 2009. A chapbook of translations.
-- Harry Truman All the Way. Pudding House Publications, 2008. A chapbook.
-- Open Communion: New and Selected Poems. Mayapple Press. 2005. A full-length collection.

I've been publishing poems in little magazines and journals for more than 40 years, including one Pushcart nomination.  I have recent work in or forthcoming in Clapboard House, Off the Coast, Ragazine, Bare Root Review, Temenos, and Jelly Bucket.  A collection of short stories is due to come out from Mayapple Press in January 2012.

As a journalist I worked for newspapers in Missouri, Illinois and Michigan, and taught journalism at Central Michigan University for 26 years, before retiring in May 2009.

Enough for starters. More later.