One Last Thank You and a Call for Submissions

First off I wanted to thank all of those who submitted to the MIND MUTATIONS anthology. The anthology has now been sent out to contributors and can be purchased at Amazon.com, at the publisher's website, and other online dealers, or at your local bookstore.

It was a pleasure to consider every poem, and a task worth the effort.

On another note:

I would like to welcome and encourage poets to submit their work to SMALL POTATOES MAGAZINE. Each issue will be online, and plans are being made for the magazine to become a print magazine in a chapbook format.

SP

Small Potato #4 : Pris Campbell

Small Potato #4 : Pris Campbell and her collection, abrasions from Rank Stranger Press

Your car rumbles east along the Cape,
headlights searching the blacktop
for your other life.

These lines from The Silence of Memory hold what this collection wants to portray to the reader. There exists more than the “you” of this poem within the entire collection. The poems are more about the narrator’s attempt to find herself, whether she is teasing a past lover about being gone, “You rub your eyes to find / that only the rustle of sea air / marks my empty seat.”, or in an attempt to understand herself as in the poem Shrinkbait:

Thoughts unfurl through
my brain nightly, set loose
by the storm of awakening.

He asks me what does it matter-
these endless questions without
answers. He inquires if our
insurance will cover a shrink.

I shrug, use my toes as a rosary,
imagine quarks eating dead skin
and wonder if Copernicus would still
declare my head round after consulting
with Einstein on space and pi square.

The narrator travels very well worn roads that every one of us at one time or another will find ourselves walking. She is in love with an older man, or so she thinks, because of the allure of that image: she’s fifteen, he’s too much older and living the life of an adult and in the end leaves that young love/lust for what he hopes will work, and she turns around to find herself with someone her age. But with someone who cannot cross over from virginal adolescence to the adulthood actions she has now become accustomed to.

When I turned sixteen,
Leon married a flat-chested violinist,
moved away in a great rush
of baggage and loud kisses.

I developed a crush on a boy down the block.
Tommy played snare drum in the marching band
and looked like Al Pacino in that later Godfather movie.

Despite all of my attempts to entice,
Tommy never tried anything more
than thrusting his tongue
down my throat and touching
one breast on our porch,
moths circling the light above us
and Ma Nature thundering disapproval
with flashes of yellow
at the foot of our suddenly silent street.

As I read each poem on to the next I would fall into the images and the thought of how our perceived idea of love changes throughout our lives. We can be held in rapture for a moment and believe it will last, but a few years, or even just months, will pass and we now have a totally different outlook on what constitutes love. How can we one minute know this other person is the one, then the next have that person holding us down, either physically or emotionally? Pris Campbell dives headfirst into these situations and does not hide any emotion in what these moments brought.

From Cross Town Train

Here in this first stanza we are put in the image and the emotion:

i fall beneath the belly
of this man called my husband,
trampled by his sweaty thrustings.

And here in the last stanza we hear her pleading, her wish to be somewhere else: that this is not what she had envisioned would be.

yesterday, the train killed a dog
loitering too long
with his bone at the crossing,
but who cares about one dog’s life,
when it’s all i can do
just to breathe, bite my lip,
and lie here listening
to that damn baby cry
in the distance.

In understanding love and relationships through these poems Campbell attempts to let the narrator understand herself. In the end I am not sure she ever finds that love or what it is she is searching for within. Can we ever actually find what we want in another? I think we can, but the narrator here has yet made that realization:

On the eye of the last full moon,
he pointed to a hole in the sky,
said it was his heart.

When I looked again, he was gone,
and the hole closed with a flash of
purple and blue, colors woven
into the bodice of my grass stained dress.

This, from In a Flash, is her past, her present, yet the future will have to be experienced, lived, then decided upon. She cannot believe what others tell her, instead she must keep throwing pebbles into the water until the waves are large enough, white enough, to wash away any and all fear of being in love.

A little info...

To all contributors of Mind Mutations:

The anthology has finally been sent to the printers. I know it has been a long wait for this one, but the anthology should be out by the end of the month. I need everyone to send their current address to the publisher at this e-mail address ( donette@sunbooks.com ) to make sure we do not miss anyone during the send out of contributors' copies. I would, again, like to thank you all for the submissions to the anthology. It was a pleasure to read each submission and to interact with those who ended up being included.

On other fronts:

I was pleased to learn that, "Early Morning Remembrance", will be included in issue #18 of the print magazine Snow Monkey.

And there will soon be new reviews here at Small Potatoes. Some of the chapbooks currently being considered are; The Moodier Could of Being by Gregory K. Cole, Red Paper Flower by Suzanne Frischkorn, Drowning Ophelia by Alex Stolis, Alice In Wonderland by C.E. Laine, The Arche of Existentialism by Jason Fraley, Peach Box and Verge by L. Ward Abel, Simple Truths and Coughing Things by Patricia Gomes and Michael Paul Ladanyi, and Abrasions by Pris Campbell.

And on the final front:

We will only be taking submissions for the "Poets Who Support Survivors" page for one more month. At that time poets can still be included on the PWSS page, but will not have their poems considered for the first issue of Small Potatoes Magazine, which includes a twenty dollar payment for their work, or be considered for the chapbook to follow. The chapbook will include additional poets from the PWSS page, and those from the magazine issue. 50% of all profits from sales will go to the relief efforts currently in effect. The final date for submissions will be 11-20-05.

Send submissions to sirruspoe@hotmail.com

Poets Who Support Survivors

Hello All,

Well, I know many of you out there are devastated by what has happened in our southern states and I want to help raise money for those affected. I will be adding poems to my web-site under the title, Poets Who Support Survivors. What I need is for anyone who has, or will, donate money to any agency that is helping with the disaster to e-mail me one poem to be added to the web-site. I would like some proof that the poet has made a contribution, a copy of a receipt, forward an e-mail receipt if you donated online, just something that lets me know you have contributed. But I will not exclude anyone that tells me they have donated to the cause, I will trust each of you to be truthful about what you have done for the survivors. The purpose of this is to get people to donate to those who need it so desperately now.

The poems do not have to be related to the tragedy, or about the hurricane. It may be too soon at present to compose such a poem that would meet our own requirements of quality. Just send me a poem you would submit to another magazine, something that has been worked on and that you feel is worthy of being published. I will not exclude any poem because of quality for the PWSS page, but will exclude any poems I feel are degrading or too sexual in nature, this is for the people and I want them, when and if they are able, to come and see those poets who have contributed to their cause, and receive some sort of escape through reading poetry.

There is also another reason to only send your best work for posting to the page dedicated to survivors: I will be picking the ten best poems, in my opinion, to be included in the first issue of Small Potatoes Magazine, and will be paying each contributor to the magazine twenty dollars. This will be my donation to the survivors. If I can get others to donate through this effort then my two hundred dollars will have been well spent. Hopefully this effort will raise more than the two hundred dollars I would have donated anyway to the relief agencies. Yes, I’ve already made a few donations, but how much is enough in this time of need? I cannot give as much as I want, but with everyone else donating then I can feel better about what I have done and what we have done as a group.

So make that donation, dig out that poem, then submit it with your receipt to be included in the Poets Who Support Survivors, and possibly be included in the first issue of Small Potatoes Magazine. I will attempt to keep an ongoing amount of what has been donated by the poets (please include this with your e-mailed poem), but I will not be mentioning the amount each poet donated. It is the total of the group that matters, not the individual amounts.

Thank you for your interest and your donations. Please forward your submissions and receipts to sirruspoe@hotmail.com And pass along this information to others you feel may be interested in donating to the relief effort. Remember: Even if you have already made your donation in the past you can still be included.

Here is the webpage, look for additions to come soon:

http://www.sirruspoe.com/poetswhosupportsurvivors.html


Sincerely,

Sirrus Poe

Our Second, and 3rd, Small Potato

Hello All,

I hope everyone is having a fine day. Today I present to you another Small Potato, Michael Paul Ladanyi, and his collection "Humming Riddles in Naked Seasons".


Review of Michael Paul Ladanyi’s Humming Riddles in Naked Seasons from Sun Rising Poetry Press.

With the opening quote, “I stare at the yellow sky, thinking that all / the true artist have died or / now refuse to paint.”, the reader accepts a sense of loss on many different levels. Yet, this third book by Ladanyi is not about an artist being lost or forgotten, but about the loss of us. Ladanyi grabs hold of everything dark in our world. He tells us of truths, of lies, of death, of the choices that form “the marrow” of our lives.

In his poem “Mouthing Promises” Ladanyi tells us, “This old house is creaking against loss, / refining itself further, as a matter / of obligation to the past, these cracks, / and bits of carpet, chipped plaster, / they seep a million passionate words.” We must peer past literal words and be taken in by the comparison to our lives. Each day is filled with bits of tattered carpet, chipped plaster, and cracks. Without these we would not experience the “seep” of “a million passionate words.” in the future. Ladanyi gives us that passion of the past, brings it into the present, and then embraces it all. His arms tightly wrapped around past “ghosts” of his wife, father, brother, and others around him prove that there may be reason behind uncontrollable events. But if these events are buried, forgotten, then answers, calm, and fulfillment may never be achieved.

Ladanyi nearly demands us to look into the past to find out where we are today. In his poem “Not Yet Written” he again gives us a purpose of our past and why we must look upon it with new eyes day to day, be enchanted that we lived on and now have that ability to let our “bare feet” attempt “to negotiate the new snow in numbing, sucking gasps.”

Ladanyi stands naked before us. We see the death, rape, incest of our lives, but we are also revealed the life, hue, want, and the grace to continue filling blank pages with history. Whether that history be joyful or tearful we must live it and not let life be “like death unhinged, silently gathering / small treasures to bury in pale / places we would never think to look.”


I wanted to add a link here to Joe LaCorte's work, which was included in a past issue of VLQ. There also is a review/essay of the work by yours truely. Please do visit the link and leave some comments for the artist. (This can be done by going to the bottom of the page and clicking the link there.)

I hope you enjoyed the reviews and come back again for more reviews and interviews with all our Small Potatoes. Don't forget to leave comments or ask questions if you wish.

Thank you,

SP

Missing Me, Missing Pieces

Ah, those hands there have seemed to be reaching out for me in numerous ways lately. I think I have finally walked far enough away that their outstretched arms can no longer extend into my immediate area, but that remains to be seen.

Between regular life, work and attempting to continue to write (which has been rare even for me) I have failed to return here and fulfill my wish of starting a blog. At least, the time away has given me an idea of how this blog can be more than just a place for me to spew self-promotional garbage. I have been returning to an idea over and over lately concerning those of us who write to write, whether it be prose, poetry, or non-fiction. That idea is to give a small space here in the expanse of the world wide web to these writers.

I know, what the hell do I know about writing, or authors, that would lend me the credit to give an opinion? Well, regardless of ability, or smarts (ask my wife, she'll tell you about the lack of smarts) I want to give something to the small potatoes of the world. I am one of these lost, forgotten, eye growing, dirty, mis-shappened wanna-bes. Not a wanna-be famous potato, but a potato that realizes that their work does reach out to someone and that someone out there took the time to read those words and offered feedback all us potatoes secretly crave.

So, get ready you small potatoes-- you never know who or what I might be talking about here in my own patch of dirt, but be sure I will wash your skin and cut into your white center to let others know who you are.

Well, without waiting to long to get this started I present to you my first small potato: Kathryn Rantala.

I am sure to many this name is quite familiar and not all that small, but in this world of writing, and especially poetry, it's a hard road to grow into something more than a passing name that someone out there thinks they may have run across somewhere, but where remains unknown, and what that name stands for is even harder to guess. Rantala is the editor/publisher of Snow Monkey a magazine that has changed over the years and now is published twice a year as an anthology. And she has also began publishing books from other authors such as John Sweet, Denis Emorine and Rebecca Loudon through Ravenna Press.

It was after a visit there that I decided to pick up one of Rantala's own books, Missing Pieces. The book is a combination of poetry and prose dealing with the many aspects of daily life and death in the city of Seattle during the Thirties and Forties and is littered with photographs from the King County Medical Examiner's office in Seattle.

Steve Sneyd, a past Small Press Writer of the Year, easily captures Rantala's work in his review in which he states, "Here, indeed, is the sound of silence." Rantala takes the mundane, lost fragments of lives and gives a voice to those who have gone missing.

I am reminded over and over by the poems and short prose sections of a passage from Henry Miller's, Tropic of Cancer, "It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me. You have heard others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough." Of course, Miller is expressing these sentiments to a single person and Rantala in Missing Pieces attempts to express these sentiments for those who were never listened to in life, or in death. It is as if the world listened to the characters of these writings and decided that yes, these songs were too beautiful, or not beautiful enough for those around to listen, to take that step which might have changed an outcome, a life, because of the numbness that generally affects us all when we consider those that do not play an intricate role in our own lives.

How many people have we each listened to? People who think we are listening, yet we are only appearing to listen, to take in and care about the events of this person who in the end is not a considerable part of our life. Rantala captures these lonely people repeatedly throughout the book and I wonder how many times I have been that person who sings to the crowd only to have my voice echo into the vacuum of deaf ears. I have sang to many people who I thought would listen and care enough to take the lyrics and respond, but not many wrote or sung back. I think each of us have been to that point where we just want to be heard and have someone say, "Yes, I hear you. I am here for you."

Rantala listens well and writes her own lyrics to the characters within this book and also gives them a voice to continue to sing to us. I know I listened, I heard the notes and they touched me because I am one of Rantala's characters: lost and still wanting to be heard by someone who cares.

The idea of what we see in front of us instead of what we should see if we were listening is clearly stated in the poem, roxbury road.

roxbury road

What can be seen:

things that are wrenched,

things made of parts,

soft or soldered things,

things over-tightened or loose,

breaking things.....

In the above section of the poem things are seen, but they are mechanical, non-living items of our lives. The poem gives us a snap-shot of how we often take in our world. We are too busy, to into our own self to see what may be in front of us, the others breathing around us.

The final two lines of the poem tells so much about us, "You can see quite a lot / when you drive down the Roxbury Road." But no where in the poem does the observer see a person; notice the man shining shoes, the pregnant lady walking the sidewalk, the children gathered together on the corner. Why do we not see what is in front of us and why do we refuse to get involved when we know those singing to us are singing for a purpose?

Many of the poems take the view of the character singing to the world around them to only have silence returned. It is this pleading that makes the book, as a whole, rewarding to read and reread. I cannot say that I understood exactly what I should be taking away from each poem, or even each prose section, but in the end it worked as a complete package.

I found myself returning to the prose sections more than I did to the poems. This is not to say the poems were less worthy of a revisit, but rather to say how taken in I was as a reader by the images and actions of her words in the prose form. One story in particular, the reunion, has garnered four reads so far and I am sure will get more in the future.

The story unfolds easily and the reader gets to know and care about the main character in a very short span of time. This is something that I find rarely in short short fiction. The title refers to a class reunion. The main character fights within herself about going, then not going to the reunion. Most of this happens on a commuter bus where the main character notices those around her, yet does not take them in -- just as the other riders see, but refuse to come out of their own private space to learn about people they spend so much time with every day.

A bee enters the bus when the main character does and in the end the bee gets more attention than anything, or anyone, else on the bus. The attention is slight, yet in the end becomes larger than anything in the life of the main character and helps to form her final decision on whether or not to go to the reunion. Not a friend, a person from school, or a co-worker helped her to decide, yet a bee, that cannot listen or reply back to her words, sang to her more beautifully (or maybe not) than anyone else in the world.

Relationships between people who know each other and those who know nothing of each other make numerous appearances in Missing Pieces and they get me to thinking: who have I sung to, who has listened, and have I listened to those who have sung to me?

Over-all I enjoyed this book for the thought-provoking ideas presented. I bring a lot of personal baggage to this trip though and cannot say everyone would enjoy the ride as much as I did. There are some poems and short prose sections I felt did not add much to the book, but in the end the whole made up for any weakness in the parts.

Of course we all must remember that everything above is my opinion and only that....I will not be rating books here with a scale from one to five stars or anything like that. I want you to be able to decide for yourself if what I present may be what you are looking for in a new book or author. And the main reason I am here is to give an extra voice to all small potatoes.

If you have a new book out, or coming out, and would like to have a chance of seeing a review of your work presented here feel free to e-mail me with the general theme and to get the mailing address. I am most interested for the time being in reviewing poetry collections, or chapbooks, but this does not automatically rule out anyone or any book.

Thank you all for stopping by the blog and I hope to see you again soon.

SP

A Bust, a Good Thing, and a Magazine Issue

Hello all,

Yep, the first thing here is a bust. NANO ended up being a signup then a total washout after everything was said and done. Other events in the month kept me from devoting the time I would of liked to the effort, but I did come away with an idea for a novel and a short outline of that novel. I guess in the end it was not a total bust, but I never did get off the 0 word count for the entire month. Maybe next year...

The good thing was the book signing at Hastings in Longview, TX. It went well and both books sold and they both are currently sitting on the shelves waiting for someone to pick them up and take them home and treat them the way they should be treated.

It is a great pleasure to walk into a store and see your book of horror next to King, Koontz, Rice and others. And I am torn on if I like that better or that the other book is mixed in with the likes of e.e. cummings, Plath, Frost, and so many more that I read in the past. But, it is not the fact of the book being there on that shelf that really gives me the satisfaction, it is hearing back from someone who purchased the book that either enjoyed the tense, disgusting scenes of Releasing the Demons or knowing that somehow I was able to put down a string of words that reached into someone else's being and gave them comfort or insight into a horrendous event of abuse in thier own lives.

Of course A Mother's Supposed Love means more to me than the other book because of what it covers and the truth behind the prose sections, but I still enjoy getting down with the demons that hide within us and our world to attempt to create a little fright for others.

And the final thing: SaucyVox has just went live with a new issue and the issue deals with all types of abuse. This is a poetry only issue and can be hard to read becuase of the subject matter, but the voices here are strong and show that we can survive and continue on with our lives. This fact is evident in their words and by their success.

Be sure to stop by, read, and leave a few comments for the editor and the poets. Feedback is one way that the poets and editor will know that their small, but still living, voices have been heard. Awareness of all abuse is a must and together we can help to stop some child, wife, or man from having to deal with this alone.

http://www.saucyvox.com

Thank you again for stopping by the blog.

SP

Hello and Welcome

Hello to all,

Well, I do not know what exactly will be posted here, but I wanted to have a place to help me keep the deadlines going for the upcoming NANOWRIMO. I will attempt to post about the progress of the novel along with the many problems that will be sure to pop up during the month. I already know I will be on the road for the first three days of the month, then have an anniversary to celebrate the following weekend (12 years!! Yep, someone put up with me that long.), then the following Friday I have a booksigning planned at Hastings at 405 W. Loop 281 in Longview, TX. for my newest poetry collection, A Mother's Supposed Love, and how can we forget about Thanksgiving later in the month. With all this it will be a challenge to fulfill the requirements for NANO, but I am willing to give it a shot as I have been wanting to get back to fiction for some time now.

I do have a one page outline for the novel, but it is very general and in need of fleshing out before the actual writing can begin. I plan on working on that later tonight after the kiddos are placed in the beds and quiet takes over the house. It has been a little hard to concentrate too much today on the novel as our six-year-old cat has been sick and now appears that she may not make it through the sickness. She is at the vet and taking antibiotics, so we have hope, but the vet was sure to tell us that not many cats survive the sickness. I cannot remember the name of the sickness, but it has something to do with her liver. Any and all thoughts would be appreciated for her to pull through.

Okay, on a lighter note, I wanted give a big, but late, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to CALLIE my niece in Mississippi. I have not forgotten about you and a surprise is not too far off in the future. And I hope to see you real soon, maybe in the next week or two again.

I also wanted to mention that the newest issue of VLQ was posted last week and is a great read for those who enjoy poetry and artwork. We plan on including fiction in the next issue as well. Please feel free to visit and leave comments for the poets and artist.

Once again, thank you for visiting and come back often and feel free to leave comments here or e-mail me.

SP