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Poem, Oct 2015

Tablet of Blood by Brandon Marlon

It spoke in haunting words of ominous conflagration ordained on high long ago.

And so only with trepidation did I dust its powdered surface, decoding Aramaic calculations.

Deciphering warfare and death, I double-checked translations, quavering in the chilly cavern.

Fiery verses portrayed atrocity, testifying to widespread terror: I prayed its claims were in error.

Shuddering at grim divinations foretelling macabre bloodshed, I reinterred the inscribed slab.

Unwilling to reoccupy oblivion, its limestone resisted chalky rest; my palms bled smothering protest.

***

Brandon Marlon is a writer from Ottawa, Canada. He received his B.A. (Hon.) in Drama and English from the University of Toronto and his M.A. in English from the University of Victoria. His poetry has been published variously in Canada, U.S.A., England, Ireland, Greece, Romania, Israel, India, Pakistan, and Singapore. www.brandonmarlon.com.

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Fade is open for submissions.

You have from 01/08 until 31/08.

For the first time, I am accepting fiction submissions. One story per author, no more than 2000 words. Please refer to the submission guidelines.

Also, a lot Fade activity can be found on the facebook page: facebook.com/fadejournal

PS I have been adoring the work of Neil Gaiman lately

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SUBMISSIONS

Keep them coming everyone!

Richy

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“Given all the wit and intellect that animate her poetry, why has she been forgotten?”

Diane Mehta on the deceptively breezy poems of Stevie Smith.

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Paul Bavister - Catering Services

We pulled racks from the van, checked plates of food against print outs, trolleyed a buffet and coffee pots up to the boardroom. I came to know the smilers from the scowlers, those who scattered chicken bones and those who kept their mess on the plate. In the lift back down I vultured a couple of half-dried cheese and coleslaw sandwiches. I checked for cameras then samosas, prawns on sticks, sausage rolls, soggy crisps were all washed down with fizzy water from a lipsticked cup. I reeled to the back door. The supervisor leered, he knew me. I scraped leftovers, checked printouts then filled a trolley with afternoon coffee. * http://www.paulbavister.co.uk/ http://www.writershub.co.uk/poetry-piece.php?pc=1084

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Sarah Findlay - Natural Distortion

Grass blades guard the path; Upright, they glisten. Jewelled…but, no, Not jewels, Not snatched from the earth Or warped for man’s pleasure. Silent blades proudly Adorned with beads of light. Ripped from the river and Stolen from the stars; A natural distortion, For it is nature’s own treasure.

*

Sarah is a writer living on the west coast of Scotland and has a blog http://geekwithapen.wordpress.com/

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Stevie Smith - `Not Waving but Drowning'

Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

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1. No response - when the publishers are either too disorganized, busy or… whatever… either way, move on to the next one.

2. Form rejection: this usually happens when an agent or editor has too much on their plate, and doesn’t reflect the quality of your work.

3. Personalized rejection: It can...

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Update.

Hello all. I am still looking through submissions and Fade is very much within my thoughts. I have been inunduated with work and writing related stuff, so my time has not been as free. I promise to let all poets who submitted work know their submission status as soon as I can. Thank you for your patience! Richy

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Book review: William VanDenBerg `Lake of Earth'

William VanDenBerg’s Lake of Earth contains an array of worlds within each of its seven pieces. The collection opens with `Treatment', a short piece which puts a multitude of questions to the reader with the opening “This isn’t working, he says. We doubt your commitment to the program”. Throughout the piece, we are narrated by an individual who has been instructed to “sit here and keep an eye on the bench outside”. They are kept in a room and the room is their world, a claustrophobic one evocative of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The story is replete with enigma and the protagonists' focus is the mundane view of the street through the window. This normality is disrupted right near the finality: “The next day the people on the bench are erased by it”. All around the individual disappears and, enigmatically, the piece concludes with “something has changed”.

A couples' journey from city to city is the focus of `Five Cities’. The story is composite of five vignettes, which allows it to jump across time with ease and to dissect each experience of each city. Themes of adapting to domestic life prevail in segments such as “you sewed a shirt wrong—you sewed the sleeve shut” and “I exhibited my maturity by cleaning with bleach”. These moments are countered with bizarre and disturbing sections such as “I put your hair in my mouth as a sign of respect and we wore sandles all the time because that's the kind of town it was” and “You came home one day and wordlessly removed all your hair”. Beneath the story presides a desperation and there is a sense of the couples' desire to escape a city whenever it becomes familiar. This sense of the temporary commences in the first vignette “”We slept on the floor” to the closing line of the final vignette “We slept the last night in a locked, disgendered bathroom”.

`Wife of Elijah' deals with a husband and father who “sometimes viewed the wife as a curse” and regarded his children “ungainly”. Each paragraph represents a large passing of time, the children being at school in one paragraph and two later growing up and leaving home. In this instance this efficiency is at detriment to the story; more detail would have benefited the piece that the spare nature of the prose does not give. However, there are moments of this, such as “The younger girl regressed and had to be sent away. Her last act in the house involved a baking sheet and a pair of blackened hands”.

At around forty pages, title story `Lake of Earth' is the longest piece in the book. It is a magnificently expansive and dystopian piece, where citizens have names such as “A” and “S”. The reader is introduced to the protagonist immediately, who is cuffed to a boat which floats towards an unknown island. Finding a small civilisation in a large building nearby, they are thrown into a strange and feral world, one defined by a conflict between two characters called The Woman and A. The story is interrupted by mini stories rendered in italics, that could be taken for folk-tales. Throughout the language is beautiful and passes such as “A naked male body hangs unassisted in the air. Someone enters completely swaddled in baggy realms of cloth, pulls a scalpel from one of the folds, and begins to work” remain in the mind's eye long after reading.

`The Lake, The Other Lake, and All the Blood Gone Out of Him' reads as an evocative and richly textured prose poem, that recalls the precision and imagery of T E Hulme. It is photographic in its description, such as in the first line: “The water passes long and wide. I float and watch the pillars of earth that have risen from the lakebed”. This beginning deftly brings the reader to the focal point of the piece: the water. It is used as a device to take the reader around the scenery of the world within. It “drifts me to the steep banks” and takes the narrator to the water's end. The volta of the piece occurs when “The filthy children” who are implied to have followed the narrator are introduced to the story. The tension builds as they follow, crowd around the protagonist and push them to the shore. The ending is incredibly powerful “I scream and scream. I hear them roar until I am empty, under, and gone”.

As implied by the title, `Characteristics of Aberrational Cultic Movements' deals with religious themes. The narrator depicts a prophet, Martin, introducing his fellow citizens to “The Book of Light” a text that “Details the true nature of light – how it acts”. The citizens interest and fear of this news increases when Martin “explains how light will become deadly”. Scared, the citizens are left under the growing influence of Martin who has inexplicable power over them. They move to a building to shield themselves from the light. There is a harrowing scene when Martin asks for a volunteer to make a martyr of themselves and to walk into the light when it comes. Chillingly, the people in the house learn of the sacrifices' fate and hear their screams outside. The situation from here gets more desperate. Food runs out and they start to suspect Martin, who evades big questions asked of him such as about God; they start to long for the old world.

Wallace Stevens' `Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' is brought to mind in `This is How We Move through Homes' in the way it ruminates, in small sections of text, around one topic. The subject here are houses and their surroundings, beautifully depicted as “the common, puncturing memory of a gate: metal scraping on metal, the bottom right corner digging into dirt, a sharp real”.

Lake of Earth is an expansive, surprising collection of stories that, formally and otherwise, deals with extremities. A key strength of the book is VanDenBerg's prose style, which has a brevity that caries his stories efficiently and evocatively; also impressive is the manner in which the writer renders the fantastical the usual.

By Richy Campbell

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David Gascoyne.

I love his work at the minute. I am currently working through his Selected Poems and there is such variety, from his imagistic early work, to Surrealist poems to the long poem Night Thoughts, which deals with internal conflict, anxiety in a night-time setting. His precociousness is one of the most impressive things about him; at 17, he was able to fund a trip to France on the back of sales from his first novel. He is underappreciated in the UK but really worth investigating. Sources are hard to come by about him but I have put a few below. The `Bio, poem samples' link has a pdf of a lot of his poems if you want a sample of his work. `The Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis' is a brilliant starting point. Finally, I must make it clear that Gascoyne was bisexual; I only mention this as it seems to be written out of his history by some. The tragedy of this is highlighted especially when one considers that poems such as `The Cold Renunciatory Beauty', are about homosexual love.

LINKS

Bio, poem samples

David Gascoyne - Selected Poems (Enitharmon)

Ian Sinclair - Review of Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of David Gascoyne (Biography)

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I highly recommend this book.

On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight: Surrealist Poetry in Britain.

It is amazing. Great poetry and really interesting articles on a under-appreciated part of British literature. I am really into Surrealism in general at the moment.

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Geological Evolution - Salvador Dali

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Suggestions?

Is there anything you would change about the Fade blog? Anything more or less that you would like to see? I would love to know :-)

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Hello / Update / Open for submissions.

Hello all! I hope you had a good New Year. Lately I have been working on my own writing and have had some recent publications -- which you can see here if you want to! I have also been working on an album of songs, which can be listened to for free.

In other, more personal, news, I have also been looking for employment in addition to my indexing, which has tailed off somewhat. Luckily, I seem to be getting a few more indexes lately so I am hoping it will pick up. The lack of work has been a stressful element in my life of late. Now that I feel more clear-headed, I believe that I am able to focus on the journal, so Fade is now open for submissions. Please feel free to send your poems over.

Finally, I am thinking of accepting flash fiction at some point. Not for this submission, but it is something I have been thinking of. Best wishes RIchy

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Call for submissions vol 2: -Indent The new international annual journal for prose & poetry: READING WINDOW: DECEMBER 1, 2012 - JANUARY 31, 2013 We are looking for work that is evocative and pr...

Hello all. While Fade is currently closed for submissions, there is a great publication you can submit to-- Staffordshire University's INDENT.

It publishes annualy and is in its second year. I was published in the first issue and the production values and general aesthetics of the journal are very good.

Ignore that it says they are closed; I spoke to Poetry editor Lisa the other week and they still want a few more poems and stories. Do hurry though!

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Stephen Philip Druce - `Whisper'

There is an intimacy in the lurid, an icy-turn to a torrid story, like ash falling from a cigarette in the stillness of a travellers lips, where a breath through the mist of a silk-carrying ship, is now a wave of galloping messengers with hushed secrets, that crash like symbols onto the honoured land of the softly trusted.