prosinec 2006- styczen 2007

corresp. from france & quebec, can., via indiana
décembre 2006 — janvier 2007

People have asked how I found participants.

A lot of the contributors had been people I knew in Southern California in the 1980s and very early 1990s.

Some were co-workers from international banks or from aerospace, some bartenders or busboys & wait staff in various bistros & restaurants & diners.

Many of the more recent project participants just happened to be volunteers or interns for, or contributors to, Gobshite Quarterly, the polyglottal magazine I founded and edited the magazine.

Some were friends seeking post-graduate degrees in Europe.

If I noticed a foreign address on email or snailmail I would query them as to their willingness to participate, and/or if they knew anyone else who would/could/should particpate….

For each language we always sought second & third native-language speakers, so as to capture dialect variations, & also catch any errors unintentional or any errors intentional….

Below is a typical chain of call-&-response for more recent participants:


7 decembre, 2006

Dear F.J. ____________,

Sorry for not getting back to you yesterday, as promised.

I read yr pieces, & wanted to offer the following comments, thinking the works singular enough to merit comment/criticism.

Yr work submitted is intriguing but these pieces at least are not quite there yet.

D________, the last of these 3 submissions, seems to work best. I like yr mutant (?) couple & how they are so mismatched as to be perfect for each other. Still, the poem meandered. (Which is hard to avoid when you are using surrealist tropes.) But I like your the sense of narrative closure, which works best in this poem.

I__________ is droll & amusing, but too gnomic. & you have to be careful with your rhetoric in this piece.

P________ worked the least for me, in part because of the title, but only in part. Still, there are good images, & the images seem to be in service of an idea. (It also made me think of Wallace Stevens -- not at all a bad thing.) But P_________ is too ponderous, too portentious. Again, the rhetoric is a tad too close to the fatuousness of official speech to come off as parody or satire or comedy.

Let these fester a few months, look at them again, & do some revising & some cutting. You have a real knack with surrealist tropes, & good feel for the merging of the quotidian & the marvelous, & that's not nothing. & also you strive for a narrative thread -- at least in these three poems -- again, that's not nothing.

I like what you are doing, & it is different from what most people in North America are doing with poems, even some very talented people who are tunneling through dead-end projects but Surrealism is really exacting in its deceptive off-handedness.

& yes I would definitely be glad to see more from you, but after May 1, 2007, at the earliest

But not these pieces please.

There is something in editorial work called a palimpsest effect -- also in workshops. If I have read a piece which I somehow find wanting & cannot see a way to fix it, then I have a hard time reading revisions with the original piece bouncing around in my head. Unless the revision is very radical I tend not to want to see them.

Unfortunately things are on hiatus with the magazine because we are working on a special project for Soft Skull. It is a multilingual project (just 90 or so languages – we had to jetison 110 languages a couple of few months back because things were too-too & tutu unweildy), & we have to get the first 1/3rd in by January, & the rest by April. I hear a thuderous HA booming,ka- and thundering from the skies.

So unless you are a polyglot, or can proofread or typeset in Urdu, Bengali, Arabic, Belarus, Cambodian, Cypriot Greek or Russian, please wait until May (at the very earliest) for any new submissions.

However, IF YOU ARE POLYGLOT or HAVE CLOSE FRIENDS OR FIENDS who are polyglot, please contact us about this project.

yr obdt svt

rvb, / Gobshite Quarterly / rvb, editor / P.O. Box 11346 / PDX OR 97211-0346


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8 decembre, 2006

Dear R.V.,

Thanks for responding to my inquiry so quickly. I really appreciate your thoughtful and helpful comments on my work, and will definitely submit new work in May.

Unfortunately, French is the only language in which I am fluent; I have a minor familiarity with Latin. If that could be helpful, let me
know.

Sincerely,

F. J. ___________


=======================

8 decembre, 2006

If you would like to proof our French entries, & emmend, ammend, or modify, your contribution would be welcome & we might be able to get a contributor copy to you.

The same applies for Latin.


yr obdt svt

rvb, / Gobshite Quarterly / rvb, editor / P.O. Box 11346 / PDX OR 97211-0346


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29 januarius 2009

I don't think I'm sufficiently familiar with contemporary slang in French. However, I have forwarded your e-mail to a friend of mine, the poet and performance artist Francine Conley, who has a superb facility with colloquial French, in hopes of a mutually beneficial relationship.

F. J. ___________


[note: through the next several months this contributor helped us with both French & Latin, as promised.]