E·ratio issue 16 is in production. Proofs are on the way. If you are awaiting a reply to your submission, please know that one is coming soon. E·ratio is still reading and accepting for issue 16.


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Contributing editor Joseph F. Keppler (center, smiling) is a sculptor, a poet, a theorist and essayist, a member of The Seattle Group and an astute observer of the scene in Seattle, WA. Read his essay—The Mallarmé Project: an examination of a yearlong series of art and writing in Seattle—in E·ratio 15.

See photos of his sculpture, here.


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Read Me!  An interview with Carey Scott Wilkerson, publisher of my volume of poetry, The Valise. . . .

“The discussion is wide-ranging and, in Gregory’s inimitable style, discursively reflective: a real inner-view of the artist in his philosophical universe.”  — Carey Scott Wilkerson

Spring 2012 *

1.  Your new book The Valise seems, in some sense, to be a series of radical containments and equally radical moments of opening.  I wonder if you develop these ideas programmatically or if they emerge as you put the collection together? 

They develop programmatically, which I do emphasize is not the same as algorithmically.  They develop as a matter of form, poetic form.  But, see, the idea is, and besides research into the poetic, the idea is to acquire for oneself a toolbox, so to speak, a technique and a style, a methodology, as these are the means by which one proceeds and as this is the stuff of one’s poetic signature.  Still, the process, and in purpose and in procedure, is one of discovery, is one of problem solving, it’s heuristic, and necessarily so. 

2.  The book’s title poem ends with absence, indeed, it ends with the provocative image: “in absence,” which is here suspended without final punctuation.  In fact, this is true of many of your poems.  And yet I feel there is here a kind of St. Thomasinian, invisible diacritical, marking a distinctly Heideggerian aufhebung, but one that struggles with the idea of ends and endings. What are the risks of leaving a poem’s final moment open to that sort of hermetic drift?  And I ask this because, as Alan Halsey observes in his description which graces the back cover of your book, you “[write] with a philosopher’s precision.” 

The subject of poetry and punctuation—and immediately I’m thinking of Dickinson and Cummings, and of Yeats and of Shakespeare’s sonnets—and of what is appropriate and of what is necessary (to convey significance in the poem) is of absolute interest to me, but first, please, let’s hold on to “a series of radical containments and equally radical moments of opening” and see these together with “absence” and “aufhebung” and what I can make of “hermetic drift.”  Containments and openings are not a matter of punctuation for me, yea punctuation is not a matter of containments and openings for me, not as such, anyway, which is to say the purpose is not to draw the reader’s attention to my punctuation, but rather and something to the contrary I intend my punctuation to be a commentary on the sentence in poetry, and which is to say I do not think the poetic can be expressed in sentence form any more (not in “traditional” sentence form, that’s for sure), it’s at once, it’s simultaneously this commentary, if you will, and is itself of the grammar of my program, which is to say of logoclasody.  I was deeply into the study of W. B. Yeats, reading all the major studies of his work and then of course A Vision, Essays and Introductions, Explorations, The Autobiography, the plays, et cetera, The Lonely Tower, The Man and the Masks, et cetera, and reading his poetry I became intrigued, obsessed, really, with his sentences, his sentence structure, and how he was writing in these long, sophisticated, sort of, and down-right, run-on sentences.  So I became very aware of his sentence structure.  And I became very aware of how poetry was written in sentences—something I, myself, was doing, but was doing unconsciously, which is to say I was writing sentences but my first intention was not to write sentences but to write poetry!  In the writing of my sentences, I was concerned with the sentence as sentence, not as a language via which my poetic is conveyed.  I discovered for myself that the grammar of the sentence is not the grammar of poetry, at any rate not of poetry as I envisioned it, not of my poetry!  This of course brought to mind the case of Dickinson, whose, quoting Linscott, “erratic punctuation and lavish use of capital letters were changed to conform to accepted usage,” and how “occasional liberties were taken with the text in order to correct grammatical vagaries or to clarify rhyme or meaning.”  And of course this brought to mind Gertrude Stein, and the punctuation of the stream of consciousness “sentence.”  The grammar of the language (of the conversation, the discourse) was as much an expression of that language (a subject matter) as was the depictions, descriptions, imagistic evocations, as was the information being conveyed.  I believe that Dickinson and Stein, and as was Yeats, and Cummings, were “programmatically” searching, exploring language in pursuit of poetry, of poetry and of its poetic elements.  This is not to say that I believe there was ever a time when poets thought of language, when they did think of language, as an innocent bystander.  I think the idea of the poem as a work of language is a given throughout history.  But the idea that language per se can be, but more than merely expressive (as we see in, say, calligraphy), the idea that language per se can be informative of its own essence, of its own eidos, and as such of a poetry that is the Poetry behind the poetry, of a poetry that is the ground of the, let us say, ostensible poetry!  This poetry that is the Poetry behind the poetry, this is the end of poetry, and by “end” think not of terminus but of “purpose,” or, more precisely, “fulfillment.”  This is what poets have always been after, and they did, and do, seek it in various and idiosyncratic ways, and whether they have realized it or not, and they have known it by the frisson that accompanies it.  It is this frisson that the poet is addicted to, this is his high and this is his reward, and with this he knows that his poetry is real.  When the poet alters his consciousness—for instance through drugs, or, even in madness, in the cultivation of madness, or in neurosis, in the cultivation of neurosis, or in the “long, intensive and reasoned (“reasoned” because with purpose!) disordering of all the senses” of Rimbaud, or in the “self-discovery” of Basho or in some or other form of self-abuse—the poet is seeking a pathway into poetry, and his frisson rewards him and guides him in his pursuit.  For myself, I don’t think this “poetry that is the Poetry behind the poetry” is to be found in “altered consciousness,” or else not exactly, rather I think it is to be found in thinking.  For myself, by way of my own explorations into language, driven by my own poetic afflatus, in pursuit of that eidos, in pursuit of this Poetry—and this includes Heidegger’s writings, and including the writings on the poet Hölderlin—I came to understand poetic language as a matter of, what did we say, “containments” and “openings,” but more as discontinuities and continuities, the word being in itself, the word as word taken in its particularity, being a discontinuity, while simultaneously being a sentence and thus being a continuity, and more in that this sentence does not become a sentence until it is perceived to be so (continuity and discontinuity are reunited in observation, or, in perception, or, in the conscious, intentional act of signification—a cardinal note of logoclasody—or, in thinking).  Consider, now, liken this to the quantum particle which is simultaneously a particle, and thus a discontinuity, and a wave, and thus a continuity, a continuum.  Discontinuity and continuity are reunited in nature.  In thinking.  So, there is the sentence as a discrete, discontinuous structure, which is to see it in its particularity, and, there is the sentence as continuous, the sentence as wave.  But the idea is not to be stuck on language, or, rather, the sentence, as a discrete, discontinuous structure, that being a word followed by a word followed by a word and so on.  The discontinuity I’m thinking about is not seen, it is not seen but it is intuited.  The discontinuity I’m thinking about is that space where in the conscious, intentional act of signification the word behind the word breaks out, and in that logical suspension thus thought is formed a continuum (to the next word).  The word behind the word—I use the Greek word for this, logos.  Logos is the word behind the word.  I think to be stuck on the idea of language as a discrete, discontinuous structure would be ignorant of the place of language, and of mind, in nature.  Language is not simply a tool for conveying information, language reveals to us the Poetry behind poetry, the word behind the word, or, if you prefer the Being behind beings, and it does this in the conscious act of signification, whereby the logos breaks out, and that’s logoclastics.  With regard to “absence,” when one packs his valise and takes leave, what he leaves behind is “his absence,” and that is what we experience about him, we know him in his absence.  He is simultaneously gone and known “in his absence.”  And to know someone “in his absence” is different, of course, than knowing him in his presence.  For one thing there’s a sentimentality involved, in the reminiscence—we know the idea in the light of that sentimentality.  Throughout most of the writing of the poems in The Valise—and one of the them, “The Crocodile,” was first published in 1998—I was writing out of a deep sense of absence, a sense of loss and, even, of grief.  The loss of my brother and then almost immediately, barely one year later, the loss of my mother, the loss of my childhood, of my “innocence.”  My deepest memories of my brother are of when we were kids living in the country in New Jersey, we were naturalists and explorers and we were quite the mythologizers, as in nothing was simply what met the eye but rather everything had a mythology and was fecund (that’s a word I associate with Yeats) with significance and with a sort of magic.  Our world was enchanted.  We used to take a broomstick and tie a white flag to the end of it and we’d go out into the dark and wave the flag high above our heads and this attracted the bats and the bats would swoop down at the flag and that was our idea of having fun.  I would say, everyone is entitled to his own mythology, and I don’t mean that of Hollywood or comic books.  One ought to, I think, make his own mythology.  A life as literature.  A grammar of one’s own.  So far as “hermetic drift,” to take it in the negative, I think no poem can be all things to everybody, no poem can be all things to poetry.  The poem has to be its own structure, and that structure, and of necessity, I think, unless your thinking haiku or an imagistic miniature, will be to a degree an instance of figure-ground.  Now this is not to draw attention away from “in absence (without period).”  The person who is “seen” in the first lines of the poem, a dancer (“an attitude”) exercising at the barre, by the end of the poem is gone, and yet something remains in her absence.  What remains?  Is it simply the mentioning in a poem?  To take it in the positive, between those first lines and that last word is depicted a hermetic drift, a stream of consciousness.  And about “marking a distinctly Heideggerian aufhebung, but one that struggles with the idea of ends and endings.”  Consider, just as the particle is still a particle even when it is a wave, the word is still a word even when it is a sentence.  There is a permanence of identity—an invariance “hidden” behind the unending mutiplicity of the senses of that identity.  Is this a trick of the mind?  Or is it in the nature of things?  (Nature, and mind, abhor a discontinuity.) 

3.  Formally, The Valise is extraordinarily disciplined, written entirely in two-lined stanzas, loosely the couplets of a venerable tradition.  I want to describe these poems as rigorously experimental, but I’m not sure that’s quite right.  Can you speak to their design? 

They are designed to make available to the reader a certain reading experience—on a poetic level, one akin to trobar clus, and on an aesthetic level one that is analogous to cubism in painting.  If you consider cubism (analytical cubism) experimental, then I suppose you can refer to a poetry, to this poetry, as experimental—experimental in the sense that, say, I’m going to write a certain way and see if I can live with the results.  And like I said above, the process is one of discovery and of problem solving, it’s heuristic, and necessarily so.  For instance, what do I mean by “cubism”?  What is a cubist poetry?  What does a cubist poetry look like?  Well, the analogy is very simple, it’s based on faceted form.  It’s the analogy between the geometric structure of the painting and the grammar of the poetry (of the sentence).  To facet grammar is to break it up, but not to break it up gratuitously or “by chance,” you have to understand the parts of grammar and know how they function.  It’s not just a matter of breaking up syntax—you’re not just putting syntax into disarray.  If something is “rigorously experimental,” then it is both theoretically and experimentally rigorous.  Writing in couplets (and in sonnets) seems intuitively and organically very comfortable for me.  I have no problem using the term “couplets,” and I do intend mine to be more than just units of a couple of lines each.  Here’s an example, from The Valise. 

The Crocodile

in stress and carriage

in darning pleats and salts

and bearing certain ordinary likenesses

or to pass, unrecognized

in tide.

in shallows and remove

in summer lists and anthem

is making face of boot and purse

4.  “The Archaeology of Palestine,” a Pushcart-Nominated poem, encodes the intimacy of things lost to time but holds history up to the tests and texts of its “didaskalos” and inscribes “the names” and “the letters” in the proving grounds of imaginative experience.  How, as an artist, do you reconcile the power of art with the twin forces of the “wand and schedule of tides”? 

“Wand and schedule of tides,” that’s Moses.  This is his science and his magic.  His gramarye. Moses was in conversation with God.  Jesus, the didaskalos, gave his disciples a language, a prayer, with which to have a conversation with God, it’s called, Oratio Dominica, or, “The Lord’s Prayer.”  I think by “power of art” we mean the power art has to evoke a time and a place and an experience and to make available to the reader an insight.  If there is no insight, the work runs the risk of being gratuitous, and exploitative (—art can disseminate propaganda, and art can degenerate into “agitprop”).  The power of art is its power to bear witness.  (And that is through depiction.  The language of art is not the “message” one writes in however “artistic” a fashion on a placard to be carried during a demonstration, it’s a language of symbols and of depiction.  Otherwise there’s a risk the “art,” with its power to enchant, can lead to deception.) 

5.  Will language survive its own competing narratives? 

Well, by “language,” let’s say we mean “poetic language.”  The language of poetry.  Let’s say we just mean poetry.  Now there’s a lot of poetry that we can call, and that I do call, “ordinary language poetry,” that is exactly the sort of poetry I am not talking about.  And by “narratives,” let us say the narratives of technology, and I’ll define “technology.”  By “technology” I mean “ordinary language.”  And, certainly, “ordinary language” can include symbols and depictions, “ordinary language” is also computer code.  So I make a distinction between “poetic language” and “ordinary language.”  “Ordinary language” gives us information.  “Poetic language” does more than give us information, it, as I said above, reveals the Poetry behind the poetry, the word (or, logos) behind the word.  (Doesn’t all language do this?  Yes, but in poetry we celebrate it, we practice it for the sake of it, in poetry we write in the consciousness of it, we sing of it.)  Here’s an idea: The poet as generator of language.  In what sense is the poet a “generator of language”?  The poet is a generator of language in that he produces metaphors and metaphors produce semantic changes and semantic changes increase language.  In this, poets are in competition with “technology” which also generates language, language in the form of, for instance, neologisms, catch-phrases, slogans, for example “the one-percent,” “the ninety-nine percent,” these slogans compete with “the road not taken.”  Will language survive?  Yes: Language has had the first laugh and language will have the last laugh.  


*This interview originally appeared at the Dead Academics Press Page at Facebook. 

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Come see me, this Saturday, September 15, and then again next Saturday, September 22, 5 to 10 PM, corner of Mulberry and Prince. It’s The Italian American Writers Association and we’re a part of the “Via del Popolo” at the San Gennaro Feast!

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Review of COLORFORM at Fontana’s (105 Eldridge, Lower East Side).

 Made it over to Fontana’s last night for a performance by the concept band Colorform (that’s Colorform Music and Live Art). I don’t use the term “concept band” loosely, it can apply to “acts” as diverse as The Velvet Underground and Pussy Riot, not to mention the compositions of Cage, Berio, Glass, and where art is concerned there is of course the artist/theorist Sol LeWitt (who gave currency to the term), but, really, the term can be used and is indeed over-used to explain and to justify and to “upscale” just about anything. I use it here in its epitome sense to point out what is the real thing—which is to say, in Colorform the idea is realized, and it’s realized live, it happens live. Colorform is a multimedia event that lives up to its name.

 Around the early nineteen-sixties there came about the phenomenon we call the “Happening.” A Happening was a live and in great part chance-derived event that could be “staged” anywhere and that, in one way or another, exceeded the spectator’s expectations. More than just the unexpected, Happenings held an element of awe (something unfolding before the spectator’s eye and often including the “spectator’s” involvement—even if only in that he was there to be awestruck, to be “entertained,” or, simply, to bear witness). A Colorform performance is a Happening.

 Colorform is variously electric and acoustic with cello, percussion and atmosphere guitar (last night’s show was electric) and is fronted by singer-songwriter-guitarist Kate Logan and artist Sarah Valeri. Both Logan and Valeri are “physical” performers—Logan, who can wail lyrical riffs and in that she is constantly in motion, exuberantly “dancing” to her song and Valeri in that she is (most times, and as she was last night) on her hands and knees in the gestures of an Action painter over a huge “canvas” that is (most times, and as it was last night) stretched out on the floor before the stage. Her gestures bring to mind Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Valeri is an artist just born to create live, “live” as in before an audience, in a performance atmosphere. She puts out as much energy as a drummer.

 Colorform lives up to its name, “Music and Live Art.”

 Colorform is playing Fat Baby September 15 and on September 27 they’re at Cake Shop. See them now while you can still get up close.

Check out their Facebook Page for the rest of the story—

Colorform Music and Live Art.

by Sarah Valeri of Colorform Music and Live Art at Fontana’s 8/29/12 (detail).


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Made it over to the Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn this weekend for EXQUISITE FUCKING BOREDOM, Polaroids by Emma Bee Bernstein. This is the second show of Bernstein’s photography that I’ve been able to see. (She passed away in 2008, at the age of 23.) Both shows have been curated by Phong Bui, who here had access to more than 200 Polaroids from Bernstein’s personal archive and private diary notebooks. Unlike with the photography in her last show, An Imagined Space (Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, 2011), where the photographs were not Polaroids, but were blown-up prints, the photographs here are impervious to any aesthetic angle I might approach them from. Instead, I find I’m nonplused, and my feeling is of implication, insinuation. Trespass. It’s not a sense that what I’m viewing was not meant to be seen, but, rather, it’s the unexpected seeing of myself. One does not lose oneself in Bernstein’s photography, one finds oneself there, and we’re not always prepared for that. If we can base the success of an art on whether we are better off for having seen it, then I can say this art succeeds, and on that basis I can recommend it. (There’s certainly more here than you’ll find in any two-hour movie this coming weekend.) Now until June 25.

 Emma Bunny, Polaroid, estate of Emma Bee Bernstein © 2007


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Photo from The Indian Moose Tour, New Hampshire and Maine. (This is Maine, Friday, February 17, 2012.)

What does a transcendentalist look like?

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Susan Bee, Recalculating, 2010. (Oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches, from the collection of Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl.)

I am happy to have been able to make it over to the School of Visual Arts (133/141 West 21 Street) last night for a talk and presentation by the artist Susan Bee (see The Susan Bee Interview at E·ratio). This was part of SVA’s ongoing Art in the First Person lecture series. Bee is charming and amusing talking about her work and what I learned increased my appreciation of her paintings significantly and opened a new window on her collaborations, especially those with her husband, the poet Charles Bernstein. Bee is open-minded and undogmatic—and both where concerns issues of aesthetics in her own art and where concerns the role of art generally. She is humorous without being comical and serious without being stern, and this fits well with her Recalculating series: renderings, or, “recalculatings,” of details of scenes from film noir movies. (Her recalculatings add an element of paraphrase to the scenes sometimes bringing to the surface what was otherwise subliminal.) This film noir series of paintings makes up a very small part of her output and as a small series it succeeds. The presentation was too brief to be an actual overview of her work, for instance the series “Philosophical Trees” was left out. She did show some of her most recent paintings and I was deeply impressed by these and by what I would consider their “psychological content” (I was reminded of Hesse’s drawings for his Pictor’s Metamorphoses and C. G. Jung’s drawings in The Red Book). I am very much looking forward to her next show.

Watch the video: Susan Bee: Recalculating: paintings and collaborations.

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Next time you’re in a used book store that carries old journals and old art-lit ’zines, look for copies of Atticus Review. Atticus Review was edited by Harry Polkinhorn and David Quattrociocchi.

Featuring mostly concrete and experimental poetry, issue 17 (1989) includes contributions from Dick Higgins, Harlan Ristau, Clemente Padin, Jake Berry, Kevin Schiedermayer, Norman Conquest, Greg Autry Wallace, Ronald D. Rosen, John Eberly, Ruggero Maggi, Trudy Mercer, Petr Sevcik, Mike Miskowski, James Cushing, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, Barry Casselman, John Stickney, Serse Luigetti, Chris Winkler, Guttom Nordo, Kent Clair Chamberlain, Greg Evason and Erik Belgum. Highly collectable.


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a noun sing e·ratio 15 · 2012

with poetry by

Morgan Harlow, Candy Shue, Jan Lauwereyns, Doris Neidl, Tim Trace Peterson, Jen Besemer, Sheila Squillante, Lisa McCool-Grime, Natalie Watson, Julie Wood, Kristina Marie Darling, Felicia Shenker, Scott Bentley, J. Crouse, Bob Heman, James Davies, Dylan Harris, Michael Sikkema, Kent Leatham, Parker Tettleton, Bobbi Lurie, Lauren Marie Cappello, Erin Heath, Wynne Huddleston, Jane Olivier, Elise, Nathan Thompson, Tim Wright, Tim VanDyke, Iain Britton, Ian Hatcher, C. Brannon Watts, Seth Tyler Copeland, Rich Murphy, J. D. Nelson, Howie Good, Monty Reid, Dave Shortt, Billy Cancel, John Clinton, Thomas Fink, Larry Ziman, Valery Oisteanu, Michael Crane, Jon Cone, Mark Cunningham, Rick Marlatt, Nikolai Duffy, Alessandro Cusimano, Jacob Russell, Corey Wakeling, Stephen Nelson, Steve Gilmartin, James Valvis, Greg Cohen, Derek Henderson, Travis Cebula, Sean Howard, Walter Ruhlmann and Márton Koppány

and featuring

The Mallarmé Project, an examination of a yearlong series of art and writing in Seattle by Joseph F. Keppler

and

The Susan Bee Interview


E·ratio is edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino with contributing editors Joseph F. Keppler and Lauren Marie Cappello

E·ratio is reading for issue 16, the fall 2012 issue.



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Joseph F. Keppler on Ralph La Charity


THOUGHTS PROMPTED BY POEMS
ARRIVING WITH YESTERDAY’S MAIL

That ancient Greeks worked in the language and culture of their day comes as no surprise. Nor should it be a surprise that a contemporary American poet like Ralph La Charity works in his. Yet the consequences of being an artist in far different times and places are too little appreciated.

It is a small book La Charity sent me. Four 8½ by 13 sheets are folded in half and stapled to become a 16-page, 6½ by 8½ book, entitled flawed man drowns. For images, the booklet has three surrealist collages.

Reflecting on the once inspired Seattle poetry scene I remember the pro-vocative, confrontational way La Charity presents himself and his poetry. This seems to me to be how La Charity composes: to write poetry in con-temporary American English, speak like Homer, think like Socrates.

Yet our present language is, like us, full of sales and fury, signifying noth-ing. Just listen to radio, television, or the conversations around you. Today it seems much talk is a racket we make to one another. American English is maybe as stuck-up, musical, and abstract as Periclean Greek but surely not as momentous, meticulous, or particularly philosophical. The U.S. is not ancient Greece, and Bengal Cincinnati, La Charity’s home, not bronzed-armored Athens. Differences time takes take time. La Charity is practicing an ancient poetics in our noisy streets’ exhaust and exhaustion.

He performs poetry like a traveling rhapsode from a long-forgotten legend. Sometimes he’s a bard accompanied with music. He recites from memory and repeats stock phrases the same way oral poets like Homer have always done. Playing his voice and his words he appears to enter a trance as his rhythms work their way through his mind. He also wrestles with countless demons in league against divine poetry and that means challenging his con-temporaries. With Socratic insistence, he probes their knowledge and deliv-ers their affectations.

Poets like Ed Dorn, Lew Welch, and Roberto Valenza he admires. Using their work to accompany his own, he memorializes a period only slightly past. Other names in his poems are little known outside the poetry world and require footnotes like those supplied by scholars who translate the com-pany of Plato’s or Xenophon’s Socrates. Those who know who ‘Major’, ‘Bill’, and Tom Beckett are can better realize that in a poem like ‘pithy yet over’ La Charity is taking to task the publisher and editor of The Difficulties and E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S (the one a journal focussing on lan-guage-school poets, the other a series of poet interviews). La Charity criti-cizes this apparently sophist editor’s choice to surround himself with aca-demic starlight while slighting the lights shining in his own neighborhood.

Other poems in the booklet range from the sweeping Taklimakan Desert to La Charity’s own sense of what his life really means. In ‘flawed man drowns’ the poem that gives the book its title, La Charity writes his Apol-ogy. He wonders, “so what will it feel like to be deeply me/doing the very thing I want to & must do” when drawn into “the obliviating proverbial gun-fight armed / only with a smattering of mattering . . . dependent upon / the silent tympanic of strangers?”

Like La Charity we can only wonder what if any poetry from today might become as immortal as the ancient epics. We cannot decide that; it is not our decision or a decision at all.

Rather it is for poets to oblige greatness while alive and then to die like and unlike everyone else:


      The dead do
      not oblige

      they do so
      indefatigably.


For those interested in this unique booklet or in his poetics, La Charity’s email is raself@hotmail.com.

Joseph F. Keppler
Seattle, Autumn 2011


Joseph F. Keppler’s essay, The Mallarmé Project, an examination of a yearlong series of art and writing in Seattle, will appear in E·ratio 15.


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E·ratio's reading period for issue 15 is in full swing. If you're awaiting a response, please know you'll have one very soon. Meanwhile the issue is in production and we're expecting to go online sometime January 2012. It is the policy at E·ratio to continue reading submissions, and making acceptances, right up until publication time.

The number of submissions at E·ratio has been enormous, and, consequently, so has the work load, and so for the first time I have taken on two contributing editors to help shape future issues. Joining me at E·ratio are Joseph F. Keppler, sculptor, poet and theorist out of Seattle, WA, and Lauren Marie Cappello, poet out of New Orleans, LA.

If you are still awaiting a response to your submission, or you are awaiting your proofs, I apologize for the delay, and I thank you for your patience.

Issue 15 will be the biggest issue yet.

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Foreword by Jack Foley
Foreword by Carey Scott Wilkerson

A Parson, A Prior, A Parlour
Tender Telemetry
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
Catching Up
The Valise
Crossing Legs
Banjo
Jubilee
Mercury
Sills
Aver
The Archaeology of Palestine
Rummy
Warrens
Conklintown Road
Barker
Clapping Hands (Portrait of Beth Weisser)
Labor Day
The Crocodile
Sailcloth

Janes

January 2012

Congratulations to Mark Young whose poem, “A line from Paracelsus,” which appeared in E·ratio 14, was selected by John Tranter for The Best Australian Poems 2011.

Congratulations, Mark Young!

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