Friday, May 23, 2008

Re Correspondence

The first issue of Correspondence is constituted by a terrific heterogeneity of poetry (sometimes verse metered syllabically, sometimes structurally repetitious blocks of prose), fiction, work defiant of categorization, aerial ballet, and critical essays from a variant group of authors of determination. Correspondence was not predicated upon a manifesto serving to codify what is published within it, nor do its diverse contributors subscribe to a unified artistic intentionality; rather what has been collected is important new work by emerging writers accompanied by the presence of previously unpublished material from established talents. The consistency is in a dedication to producing work that fully engages with the possibilities of the word. This journal represents a congregation of busy minds involved in exuberant discourses while remaining wholly distinct. I think the Corresponding Society was founded as a way for its editors and contributors to struggle gloriously to create something that wouldn’t otherwise exist. This needs to exist because we refuse to be still and want to send out a space probe.

⎯Lonely Christopher (Web Editor)

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Statement on the Corresponding Society

The writers that make up the Corresponding Society do not share an aesthetics or a politics. But we send messages to one another⎯electronic or typewritten, mundane or profound, across the ocean or across a room. Correspondence is the child of this network. It is a collection, already obsolete and laughably partial, of our conversations; and it is itself a letter from an old friend, bearing the stale gossip of a world you, perhaps, no longer remember. It is also a collection of correspondences: the contents, however different, are always enmeshed in unstable juxtapositions, standoffs, claims and counter-claims. They bear the traces of conversations long past and portend those yet to come. So read our letters⎯and send us your own.

⎯ Gregory Afinogenov (Contributing Editor)

Monday, May 19, 2008

A Journal of Letters

The first issue of Correspondence is nearly prepared to be printed (there are only a few more details to tend to, such as figuring out how to design a spine and remembering how we planned to pay for everything). The collection of work, lovingly assembled by editor-in-chief Christopher Sweeney and his team of contributing editors, is ready to throw some bricks through some windshields; a few essays on our project by those who helped assemble it are forthcoming on this very blog. In lieu of more information, here is the final table of contents (full of unknown names you should know and flirtatiously suggestive titles):

Correspondence No. 1

David Swenson
Fugue Underwater
Resurga

Matthew Daniel
The Tale of Doomus and Doomifuss
The Party
Me & Uncle Jefe of the Carnival Consciousness
Gilligan and the Mermaid
Preface to Puberty
YouTube Bethlehem
The Second Prettiest Girl

Richard Loranger
I WANT A POETRY
Upon Reading Something
The Rub
There are only butterflies
I’m standing at the bathroom mirror
Taking a shit in an airplane is something
It may not be light

Thomas FitzGibbon
It’s Good To Be Going
Hay Vida

Beenish Ahmed
Rooster
Still sleeping, the sky turns onto its side
A quiet explosion of light / a flick of a finger
Rotted fruit and letters
Memory, the ghost in the graveyard
White-winged and hungry
Loose teeth and leggings
Skin, Broom, Tomb 1987
Tale of Begin and End

Christopher Sweeney
Return
No Simeon
An Invitation
Elegy for Hart Crane

Robert Snyderman
SOFT HELL

Chanelle Bergeron
“HERE IS THE SOIL...”
“with wood hands...”
“pale word...”
“imparted silos...”
IM THINKING OF A NUMBER BETWEEN EVERYTHING AND TWO
“thank you inside my head...”

Adrian Shirk
Interstate East West

John Kennedy
Weathered

Mae Saslaw
Persistence

Fareed Sajan
HER EYELIDS HUNTED.
HER EYELIDS PEELED BACK.

Gregory Afinogenov
Revelation, Revolution, and the Task of Critique

Fareed Sajan and Dana Matthiessen
Towards a Community of Split Truth

David Haddad
Looking for Now

Joshua Furst
The Distant Cathedral

Zachary German
White

Lonely Christopher
I Found You There (III)
Lines in the Air
Repeat Variation
The Alphabet
I Found You There (VII)

Talon
“on brooklyn bridge...”
“Burn pile...”
“Hex Delusions...”
“opiate swoon...”
“While You Were Asleep...”
“Windmills...”