Monthly Archives: May 2012

interviews by Jack Galmitz with Chris Gordon & Peter Yovu

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“While I’ve been very conscious over the years of using such poetic tools as juxtaposition, indeterminacy, sampling, and randomness to create haiku, I’ve been thinking in terms of images, feelings, senses, the matter of the poem. That the difference lay in the comparison of elements, not so much in the valence of meaning or the shifting of themes or focus.

In other words, I haven’t thought of it as an overlay of two different worlds, only an overlay of experiences. The mystical world and the mundane world are the same to me. Or so I strive to make them so. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it takes a great knack.”

—Chris Gordon

The Superlative Quotidian: An Interview with Chris Gordon

/ A Hundred Gourds 1.1 (2011)

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“Yes, and though I stay away from calling myself a haiku poet, I will admit that there is something in me that is attracted to the 5/7/5 blueprint and likes to play off and with it. Maybe it’s like agreeing to have four limbs (I’m a quadropus) and not the eight of an octopus. The body has limits which the dance, for one, plays off and with. There is no exceeding (and maybe no excelling) without limits. Seeds and cells.”

—Peter Yovu

 Artisan of the Imagination: An Interview with Peter Yovu

/ A Hundred Gourds 1.2 (2012)

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2 new books by Jack Galmitz

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Contributing editor of R’r, Jack Galmitz, has two new books out: Views (Cyberwit), and The Word ‘Dog’ Does Not Bark (Lulu Press).

Beth Vieira, a former professor at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote the introduction for Views. Here’s a small excerpt to give you an idea:

“[Jack Galmitz’s] Views (. . .) shows the power of allowing perspectival seeing, the layering of views, to accumulate on a topic that might be a bit like an elephant in miniature—contemporary haiku. Like the blind men in the [famous Buddhist] parable, people cling to their own views of haiku even though they have grasped just a part. Galmitz, in tandem with fourteen poets, follows Nietzsche’s lead to allow “more affects . . . more eyes” to the matter.

Through interviews, book reviews, and critical pieces, Galmitz covers the poetry and larger concerns of a broad range of writers: paul m., Peter Yovu, Chris Gordon, john martone, Ban’ya Natsuishi, Tateo Fukutomi, Tohta Kaneko, Robert Boldman, Marlene Mountain, Grant Hackett, Richard Gilbert, Dimitar Anakiev, Mark Truscott, and Fay Aoyagi. Each writer appears in exquisite specificity, as if Galmitz can disappear into each’s shadow and yet at the same time be so active that he pulls them into the spotlight to take a fine-tuned look at the work each does.”

The Word ‘Dog’ Does Not Bark is a new collection of recent work by Jack. The poems in the collection are each given a title. Here are two examples that appeared in slightly different forms in R’r 12.1:

Ancestry

Descendant

of a star

that coexisting

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Ancestry II

Impose do not

on the blank space

that pinioned the burial

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new issue 12.1 now on the website

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Many of you may have already checked out the new issue, 12.1.

It is now up on the website.

It features three sections of new ku (glass wombs, a collage of scissors, and not quite ice cream), Gathering Stones: An Interview with john martone by Jack Galmitz, Sunlight on a Different World: The Poetics of Grant Hackett, also by Jack, and Scorpion Prize 25 by Bob Perelman.


The submission deadline for 12.2 is August 1st, 2012.

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MASKS 4: Send Submissions

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We are pleased to announce that submissions are once again being considered for MASKS, now for issue 4.

MASKS is a journal that publishes haiku written by poets under the guises of pseudonyms (haigō, in the Japanese haiku tradition)—personae, mirages, alter egos, hallucinations, and/or tricksters.

Like the transformation masks carved by the Kwakwaka’wakw people, where, for example, the raven mask is opened and a human face is revealed (surrounded by two serpents), MASKS is a journal within a journal (R’r).

Send as many poems as you like to: haikumasks@gmail.com

Multiple masks may be used in a single submission, but all submissions must be accompanied by at least one.

For a look at what we’ve done so far, please see:

MASKS ONE    /    MASKS 2    /    MASKS III

We’ll be accepting submissions until August 1, 2012, and will respond to them as soon as possible.

Scott Metz & Chris Gordon, editors

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