What We’re Reading: Tuesday; An Art Project
Tuesday; An Art ProjectBear with my letterpress obsession yet again, folks. Tuesday; An Art Project is an incredibly unique unbound letterpress literary journal specializing in poetry and art. I happened upon the journal at AWP-Denver at a panel in which the editor and founder Jennifer S. Flescher was a panelist. I won’t go into that, but suffice to say, AWP is nothing but full of fascinating new finds like this and the start of intriguing discussions. Go, if you can.
The beauty arrives in the mail folded in on itself. Unfold it, and nestled inside you find the unbound pages of the journal. Each poem or piece of art has its own postcard-sized page, lending an intimacy and singular significance to each poem that is truly fascinating to me. When you hold this single piece of paper in your hand, and have nothing else to hold but that poem, or that photograph, it makes you slow down and think, hey, this must be something significant. I also enjoy the shuffling of pages. I read them in the order they came first, but then take joy in jumbling them up, and reading them in different sequences every time after. This, too, adds to the idea of the single poem you’re holding being the most important of them all, as having these pages unbound and moveable makes order somewhat irrelevant, perhaps meaning that each poem by itself is what’s important, rather than a more conventional dialogue between the whole grouping of poems.
The poetry in the journal doesn’t always jive with me completely, every time, like some other literary journals do for me, but I think that’s more personal preference of poetry than actual quality of material. Regardless, I always discover new poets, and fall in love with new work.
I just received the newest issue, 5:1, from spring/summer 2011, which isn’t even on their website yet (the one pictured above is from Fall 2009). A bit behind, but nonetheless a treat; it contains some familiar names to me, such as Tony Hoagland, and some new names. Two poems stuck out to me most: “Safe” by Quraysh Ali Lansana, and “Spells” by Khadijah Queen. “Safe” is haunting and unsettling and takes on the voice of a dirty-mouthed kid talking about abuse. The opening line is “he ate boogers and smelled like pee.” Enough said.
“Spells” wraps itself around you with its abstract moments of mystical nature. The women in the poem do strange things, weaving dark magic into their routines, such as this:
“Her sister Jane stuck
photographs of certain people inside her shoes
to give them bad luck. Spent whole
days walking all over them”
What unique literary journals do you fawn over when you get them in the mail? What do you think about calling such attention to each individual poem?
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This got me thinking not about literary journals, but about poems as a sequence. Ever since I took a course on long poetry, I’ve been interested in the idea of a collection having an arc of some kind. Not necessarily that there’s a narrative, but that there may be an emotional journey that the reader goes on while reading.
While I love reading anthologies and journals, sometimes what I’m looking for when I sit down to read is actually that extended arc. Not that editors don’t have that in mind when they’re assembling a work, but I imagine it’s much more difficult to maintain a consistent “structure.” This journal allows you to create your own structure, or step out of that structure entirely to view each poem separately. That’s fascinating to me.