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| O'hara realizing the sky must be above the earth. |
PageBoy Magazine is now accepting submissions for our upcoming (tenth!) issue. We are following our Writers on Writers issue with an issue devoted exclusively to 17 word poems, or "17s" (see below).
Please send 5-10 of your best works in prose or poetry - as long as each is exactly and only 17 words short - to pageboymagazine@hotmail.com by March 15, 2018. We are open to any style, any voice, as long as it "works," so do whatever you like with the form. We're curious to see what you come up with!
-The Editors.
A word on the form:
- 17s are an old form, invented at Harry's Bar on 15th Ave E in Seattle during the fall of 2016.
- 17s consist simply of 17 words, that is their ONLY constraint.
- That said, 17s rely heavily on / seek to encourage Keats' idea of Negative Capability, when one is "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
- 17s are meant to wrest language back into the imagination and out of the mundane, "to get that intensity back into the language." (Gertrude Stein)
A few (further) quotes that were instrumental during the gestation period of the 17s:
"a word is a bottomless pit"
-Lyn Hejinian
"I sometimes think that Leaves of Grass is only a language experiment - that is, an attempt to give spirit, the body, the man, new potentialities of speech."
-Walt Whitman
-Robert Kelly
"I have news for you ... verse has been tampered with!"
-Stephane Mallarme
"The extraordinary nature of language is that it attaches to the prior, to the before one, and to the after one."
-Robin Blaser
"It is my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth."
-Frank O'hara
"I do not use the language, I interact with it."
-Rosemarie Waldrop
"fragments are our wholes"
-Clark Coolidge
