internalizing paint splatters and poems-that-fuck

I managed to get my hands on the October 5, 2006 copy of Another Chicago Magazine. The cover’s black typewriter splattered with pink paint and with hearts on some of the keys kind of gave me the image of a young punk. A repeated little graphic inside was that of a book with “ACM” written on it on fire, and the page numbers were inside little ink splatters. Author names were in a cute cursive font. The type was spaced out nicely. My compliments to the designer - while literary magazines have to be about the words of course, too many other literary magazines I’ve looked at have small type inside and a boring cover. The one problem I had was that there were occasionally typos like missing tabs at beginnings of new paragraphs and missing apostrophes – the first time I saw it I thought it was maybe a weird stylistic thing, but then I saw the same problems in other stories erratically.

The particular issue I picked up has poems, translations of foreign poems, stories, nonfiction, one excerpt from a longer work, short shorts, one interview, and a small reviews section at the end. Each set of poems in translation was preceded by a translator’s note explaining that individual translator’s methodology, which I thought was really cool. I’m not too up on any foreign language myself, but from what I’ve heard each individual translator puts a different spin on things, especially in poetry, where transferring things like alliteration and hard/soft sounds from language to language can be difficult. In theory, two translators could start with the same source material and end with two different poems in English. So it was nice to hear what was going through the translators’ heads. Also, in most cases the magazine printed the original language versions of the poems too.

Particular pieces in the issue that grabbed me included “Soy extranjera/I am the Foreign One,” by Graciela Reyes, its vision of the interconnected and disconnected nature of all humans in simple, but striking images of the author’s experience with travel. The lone interview with fiction writer and Bosnia refugee Alexander Hemon was grabbing for his unconventional views on writing – he claims that creative writing programs often tend to discourage things he calls “mistakes,” breaking-the-mold writing that may end up being worthless but also may end up being something worth saving. He said he didn’t write every day either – only when he felt like he had something to say. I’ve been reading a lot of advice from writers lately and most seem to be professors not willing to discuss negatives of creative writing programs and also encourage writing every day. A dissenting opinion was kind of refreshing.

The poem “Fuck You” by Nin Andrews stood out for its comparison between humans and poems; the narrator, addressing the audience, calls both “small in size but not meaning.” At the end, the narrator declares that no matter if you liked this poem or not, it is inside you, fucking you. Funny image out of the way, I suppose this pointing narrator wants us to know that we internalize some of everything we read, whether we like it or not, whether it’s the news or a NASCAR romance novel (yeah, I heard about that), or the new fad novel. I thought this issue of Another Chicago Magazine was a pretty good thing to internalize on a cloudy afternoon.