Entry in Three Parts

Email
There is a development re our email address: we have one. It’s thecorrespondingsociety@gmail.com. Most of us are deeply afraid of technology, but we’ll try to manage in the event somebody finds it necessary to write us. I would like to editorialize now by insinuating that our editor-in-chief hates technology so much he threw his cellular telephone into a lake, but that’s not entirely relevant.

Internet Miscellany
Poem Shop, a project several contributors to Correspondence participate in, has an Internet presence. Those unfamiliar with the enterprise might visit that website to learn more. Incidentally, last month a photograph of Mr. Robert Snyderman (on the job with his typewriter) was described, in a blog entry re poet Max Bodenheim by Al Filreis, as capturing “the early-summer post-communist post-modernist Bodenheimian sensibility perfectly.” Also on the Internet, Jason Tallon reports on Kenneth Anger at the Anthology Film Archives here (Anger didn’t materialize, but half of the program was by Amy Greenfield and she was there and said a few words).

And!
Do not forget: The Corresponding Society will be at the KGB Bar on the 15th at 7pm. See below. The journal is finally arriving this week and details will be forthcoming.

Reading at the KGB Bar

To celebrate the release of the first issue of Correspondence⎯the journal of letters full of sexy lakes of substantial work from emerging writers everywhere⎯we are hosting a drunken reading at the illustrious (and literary) KGB Bar of New York City. You are enthusiastically invited to join us to revel in alcohol and poetry. Copies of Correspondence No. 1 will be available for purchase at an inadvisably low cost.

The Corresponding Society at the KGB Bar
Location: 85 East 4th St.
Date: 15 July
Time: 7pm

The line-up will include:

Christopher Sweeney
Tallon
Lonely Christopher
David Swenson
Chanelle Bergeron
Matthew Daniel
Zachary German
Adrian Shirk

(with some sort of introduction from Joshua Furst)

Retarded First Issue

This clearinghouse for information apposite to the inchoate Corresponding Society has been maintained without a private Internet connection and sans the expectation that anybody realizes this blog exists. Considering the unavailability of a readership we have been sporadically posting material with, as our exclusive design, the lackadaisical hope that traces of pertinent data are made available for a possible audience curious about this dawning project. The editor-in-chief has been assuring the lot of us that the manuscript was going to print “this Saturday” every week for nigh three months⎯but alack: new problems are wont to arise unexpectedly, the book is apt to be gently revised, expanded, or otherwise tinkered with, and haste seems unwarranted considering there is no clamor from the general insisting we immediately produce the saleable product. A brief explication of our retardation, dear non-existent reader, would surely include mention of how we lost the entirety of our funding in two casually injurious blows, how we waited in perpetuity for revisions from lethargic contributors, how we had to flaunt our amateurism by asking the printer how one goes about designing a spine, how we are ignorant if not contemptuous of publicities that might drive us on to necessary exposure, and suchlike impediments⎯but it is senseless to analyze the matter in earnest in this context. Apparently the proofs have been shipped; a prediction of availability of the first issue of Correspondence within two weeks might not prove entirely spurious. The enthused words we have been offering about the work in essays posted on this very blog still apply, reasonably. We want to offer this exciting work to whomsoever we can elicit an interest from⎯at an idiotically affordable price (set according only to the dream of selling our whole print run and recouping enough to pay for a second issue). That is what’s going on.

Letter from the Editor

Oh, silly world, how drunk am I, and it isn’t even worth it. I have edited afore said journal—spending the majority of such time high on amphetamine-like pills, or sloshed on booze, or hoping to be somehow fucked up on a combination of those two. There are few poets in these dark ages, I say, few, few poets. These are loud, loud ages—a strange staccato, strange tremble of image-sounds that are microwaving brains. Oh—waste. I have wasted many dollars on these silly ways. I say—oh, fuck it, blow your brains out, what a waste; there are many worthless motherfuckers claiming they can write and draining all my time away.

You are all fucking worthless, you wouldn’t notice meter if it wasn’t scanned before- hand, and you wouldn’t even chance to do a scansion if a text wasn’t clearly broken off in lines.

There are few, few poets, barely any writers, and you all think it’d be worth it, if we somehow had a cause that was fore-front in our skewed and empty minds.

There is writing here that’s worth it, but you’re not smart enough to see—issue two, I swear’ll be full of some words ‘bout police and poverty—you are small, small minded, not worth a shit or glance—I hope I die and shrivel up, before I join that worthless dance.

—Christopher Sweeney (Editor-in-Chief)

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)

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)

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...”