LAGNIAPPE


And how!
How2, the original riot girrl moderninst gangsta publication, is dedicated to investigating women's writing, and carrying the torch of its predecessor However's "orginal spirit of inquiry into modernist and contemporary innovative writing by women." But best of all, it's a good read.

Poetry Calendar
In another stroke of self-promotion, Daniel M. Nester wrote an article for the New York Poetry Calendar that outlines Painted Bride Quarterly's switch to a web publication. We bring this up, along with a link to the article, because starting a dialogue of whether journals are more or less presitigious by being on the web has long been a debated issue in certain circles. Like, the man says, "reasonable people can disagree," but the bottom line is in a racket like literary magazine publishing, there's no question that the web is cheaper.

Points of Interest, on the web and elsewhere
In Quest of the OuLiPo
From Lacanian Ink. Despite its awkward title, an informative article on a French thinktank that's getting more and more popular in creative writing programs where it's really cold or where the faculty are desperate to jumpstart their students' creativity.

Poems using OuLiPo techniques, as well as other ad hoc organizations and collectives with language-y stances, are fast becoming as commonplace as the "lyrical vacation" poem clique, or, what the late William Matthews called, the "Going Out to the Woods and Feeling Vaguely Religious" poem. All of this is good thing, don't get us wrong. Any movement exploited to get a good poem is right and just. Still, the lyrical poem is tired, and even if you wanna be lyrical—which is fine by us, there's songs in the old girl yet—there seems to be better methodologies than your average imagic denoument in the last three lines, looking up into the sky for a middle-class mirror into one's tired, suburban soul. As one editor friend said to us recently, "it's gotta be an urn in the first place, before it gets to be well-wrought."