Like a love bomb with shrapnel made of satisfaction guarantees, the Siren’s song pops. And, like a customized Pandora’s boombox with the listener, as the artist, genre and track, it blasts a powerful force. Classic translators of Homer’s Odyssey, for centuries, have earned their academic laurels in rendering the blandishment and flattery of the Greek Sirens’ song and the rest of the Odyssey into English verse and prose. The Sirens woo ruthlessly, through the friendly fire that proves to be terminally complimentary to anyone hearing it.
What You May Not Know About the Song of the Sirens
Sirens are everywhere. Their song calls familiar and true, 24-7. On the world wide waves of the Internet, sailors are constantly serenaded by similar seductions, the urge of a sense to “act now” with temptations and come-ons that will never be fully consummated, but play on the strings of desire, directly to each and every listener.…
...continue reading
The past year gives one the suspicion that American society is dysfunctional. Our Congress is useless, our institutions inept. Faced with the terror of existence, young men react with violence. Faced with manageable problems such as reforming health care, our democracy self-destructs. Anger is everywhere; understanding is nowhere.
Although a democratic society cannot function unless its citizens are able to rationally debate one another, rationality is missing from American politics. We assail our political enemies with intractable opinions and self-righteous anger. An ugly bitterness pervades everything. Meanwhile, our country is slowly but surely committing suicide.
It seems to me that this dysfunctional political dialogue, which stems from the iron certainty we grant our opinions, is the most pressing problem confronting 21st century America. In fact, it is a crisis.…
...continue reading
Alex Andy Phuong earned his Bachelor of Arts in English from California State University—Los Angeles in 2015 while also serving as an editor for Statement Magazine.
What were your duties as editor for Statement Magazine?
Statement Magazine is the literary magazine that has been part of California State University—Los Angeles since 1950. As an editor, my job was to read over a hundred creative pieces that consisted of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid forms. We did not exactly categorize the writing, though, because the staff wanted to celebrate the creative writing talents of the entire university. The editors also had the judge each written piece to assess whether or not the writing is of a professional and literary quality. Other staff members also judged artwork based on photographs that artists submitted, and then the entire staff celebrates the production of the magazine at an elaborate launch party during the spring academic term.…
...continue reading
There’s a scene in Angelica Baker’s debut novel, Our Little Racket, where the underaged daughter of a fallen financial tycoon escapes her Greenwich, Connecticut community and runs off to New York City. She’s looking for a reprieve from the suffocating attention her family is under and winds up at a noisy bar. It has an underlying din dominated by male voices and interspersed with female shrieks in reaction to them. The moment is an apt metaphor for this book and its rumination on the ways in which women can become the collateral damage of scandal. In this novel, the men at the root of the story create chaos and then proceed to exist in shadows, while the women are positioned to be reactive, left to process the situation they’ve inherited and face societal scrutiny head-on.…
...continue reading
A multi-Pushcart nominee in RHINO and Drunken Boat, Carol Smallwood’s founded and supported humane societies. Her 2017 books include: In Hubble’s Shadow (Shanti Arts); Prisms, Particles, and Refractions (Finishing Line Press); Interweavings: Creative Nonfiction (Shanti Arts); Library Outreach to Writers and Poets: Interviews and Case Studies of Cooperation; and Gender Issues and the Library: Case Studies of Innovative Programs and Resources (McFarland). Here, she is interviewed by author Aline Soules.
Your books cover a wide range of topics and genres—poetry, creative nonfiction, and non-fiction mainly aimed at the library world. How did you end up writing such a broad array of work? How do you balance these various projects?
I started when teachers asked me for classroom materials as a librarian. Then, seeing my first book spurred me to do another, and then another.…
...continue reading
“Mere, pere, și bretele,” went the old Romanian joke, which loses all its rhyming wordplay in English: “apples, pears, and suspenders.” This was my first exposure to the indignities of female body image, and it came not, as you might imagine, from my mother, but from my dad. A recognized world-class curmudgeon, my father never even tried to reign in his colorful expressions to shelter the budding sensibilities of his daughter and only child. He would repeat this joke with glee, ignoring my mother’s frowns; I would giggle blithely.
If you haven’t realized already, the joke refers to the physical state of a woman’s breasts through life: in her youth, firm apples standing proud on her chest; in her middle age, pears tugged by gravity earthwards; and finally, in late life, suspenders that have entirely given up their shape and the fight with gravity.…
...continue reading
One of the many awards that noted American poet Judith Skillman has received is from the Academy of American Poets (for Storm), while Red Town and Prisoner of the Swifts were Washington State Book Award finalists. Her poems have been included in such journals as Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and FIELD; also, her collaborative translations in various journals. She’s in Best Indie Verse of New England as well. Her latest full poetry collection is Kafka’s Shadow and you can visit her here.
How did you decide on Franz Kafka for your new poetry collection?
I read “Metamorphosis” again and was very taken with it. After a span of thirty years since the last reading, the story took on new dimensions. Then I read “The Stoker,” “The Judgment,” and “Letter to His Father,” as these have been reissued in a new edition titled The Sons (Schocken Books, Inc.,…
...continue reading