Edition #1 Launch: Mollusca

Home at last.

The mollusca chain moved its quiet way through various tribes of words, came full circle and brought them back to me, where they have now found a snug home in the gorgeous anthology Mollusca. I feel privileged to have had these vibrant poems pass through my mailbox, and to lay them out together now, established voices beside newer works, all evidence of an enthusiasm for new directions in poetry.

It is with pleasure, then, that we will launch our lucent baby during this year's Overload Poetry Festival.

FRIDAY 11th AUGUST at 6.00 pm, at DANTE'S (the festival club), CNR GERTRUDE AND NAPIER STREETS, FITZROY, MELBOURNE

The Melbourne Arts Factory's Spoken Treats poetry choir will get us reved up, followed by much anticipated readings from some of the beloved poets themselves: Dan Disney, Luis González Serrano, Amelia Walker, Tana McCarthy, Andy Jackson, Fiona Stuart, Geoff Fox, Kate Middleton and more. Expect word games. Prizes. Belly-warming wine. Much salivating over the luscious publication of course, and many more forms of poetrylove.

The second edition of the chain letter will also be launched that night, so make sure youse and yours are there to take up your link.

See the Overload website and fatten your calender with events from the aptly named festival. Many thanks to all who passed their poems along the mollusca chain, who showed so much enthusiasm for the process, and looked forward with me to the results.

Image by Zbigniew Twardowski for openphoto.net

Edition #1 (oct 05-jan 06): theme : in translation

The Birthing of Words

Words, Anne Carson has said, bounce. Words, left to their own devices, will do “what they want to do and what they have to do.” This agency, or power, of words is their needing to be said. Often a thing will occur only because words preceded it, creating the conditions for its existence. But experience can also transcend its skin, and cause the birth of words where there had been none. This is the opportunity that translation presents. Disparate experiences will find congruence in a new, hybrid language when they seek to inhabit the vessel of each other’s words. Wherever two traditions rub up against each other, this will be what words must do. There is always the borderless imperative of words.

For this edition of the mollusca chain, you are invited to inhabit translation: birth new words, and some new way to hold them together. Taste-test an unwieldy translation schema. Homophonic. Lexical. Homolinguistic.* Is residing within an interlanguage ever residing comfortably? Is there such a thing as a private, inner 'language of thought' to which we are all confined? If interpretation is near enough, is it good enough? Chop some words up, or chop something up with words. Parsi into French, Spanish into Hebrew, Yeat's English into Forbes' English. Japanese hiragana to invented hiragana. Play multilingually. Transliterate your favourite poem, your failed poem. Be strict with yourself. Be disciplined. Then indulge in slabs of poetic licence. Let words do what words will do.

Preserve your wordbaby. Snail-mail it gently on to the poets on your list.

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*Homophonic: translate the sound of a foreign language poem into your own language. *Lexical: translate a foreign language poem word by word into your own language. *Homlinguistic: translate a poem of your own language into a new poem of your own language, word by word, or phrase by phrase, or trope by trope, etc. for more ideas try these on for size.
[Image 'familial' by Joel Bombardier.]

technical stuff: who am I?

WHO AM I? I am no one you'd know, and this is the point. I am not a famous poet. I do not pretend to be an editor of the mollusca chain process, merely someone with an idea who periodically sends a letter to some contacts to get the ball rolling. All things being equal, once a year I will enter the poems that others have selected onto a computer, lay them out neatly, and publish a smart little chapbook. This is not my process, it's your process - if you have received a letter and you follow its steps, you are a soon-to-be editor.

technical stuff: how it works

HOW IT WORKS: If you have received a letter, you must closely follow the steps outlined therein. Let me be clear about this: if you do not, you will NOT encounter a bizarre run of bad luck, your friends will NOT all turn against you, you will NOT doom an orphan with a rare dermatological condition to a life of suffering and misery. But you WILL miss an opportunity to continue the flow of poetry along the chain.

The steps are:

• i) consider the theme. breathe it in. walk around inside of it.
• ii) write a poem.
• iii) post a copy of your poem (WITH YOUR NAME AND A POINT OF CONTACT, eg. EMAIL or PHONE NUMBER) back to each of the four poets listed in your letter.
• iv) then, ever so gently, remove the poet at the top of the list. Move the second poet on the list to the first position; the third poet to the second position; he fourth to the third. Add your name and mailing address to the bottom of the list. (Ie. move the names and addresses up and tack yours to the bottom. You can do this with the help of liquid paper or sticky tape)
• v) make photocopies of the new letter.
• vi) mail these letters to as many people of your choosing who know how to do unique, divinely explosive, takethetopofyourheadoff things with words. In two weeks (plus postage time) you should begin to receive poems, one each from the poets you sent your letter to. In four weeks, you should receive more poems, one each from the poets they sent letters to. By the sixth week...and so on. After several weeks your name and address will drop off the list.
• vii) of these hypothetical poems by your hypothetical poet peers, some will touch the sublime. Select these, but select well: you will be responsible for their appearing in print. Mail your selection back to me ASAP, at PO Box 4127, Melbourne Uni P.O, Parkville, VIC 3052, from whence they will be compiled annually into a lovely little chapbook, to be distributed by word of mouth and in good book places like Collected Works and Readings.

technical stuff: why it works

WHY IT WORKS: Most literary journals, both in print and online, have tended to have an editorial centre that selects works based on a determined criteria. Often, the criteria will run along factional lines, be this intentional or otherwise, or according simply to personal poetic taste, or, worse, to poetic trends and fashions. In the case of the major conglomerate publishers, poetry is saleable if and only if it is widely consumable.

The mollusca chain has no major problem with this per se - these things will happen. But the chain does see an opportunity to redistribute editorial power amongst the poetic community it seeks to voice. The method allows poets - the practioners - to guide the movement of contemporary poetry in the directions chosen by convergences of interest. The chain emphasizes peer selection: a poet's work is endorsed and encouraged by their elders and contemporaries, providing a process through which a poetic community can strengthen its allegiances. The letter is personal: it is snail-mailed by individual poets to poets they respect or think would say something interesting about the theme, who then personally mail a poem back, perhaps reducing the sense of isolation that can threaten (especially young or emerging) poets. The letters run in editions, meaning each six months sees the production of a new letter, with a new theme, prompting new bouts of creative output. There is no lengthy or overly competitive selection process; there will be no rejection slip. The hard work of reading, rereading, and endorsing poems is divided up between those who are writing them.

why mollusca?

All metaphors, of course, have their natural lifespan. But let me argue with this for a moment. Because I am tempted to extend the mollusc totem out beyond its expiry date, even to risk annihilating what might have been an initially well-behaved pun. A snail is an obvious mascot for a system that operates out of the old-fashioned mail service to stimulate and accumulate poetry; the trail that snails leave in their wake is surely an apt and silvery simulacrum of the tracks a poetic community leaves over and across and behind itself. But can I justify expanding the snail conceit just a little further? Can I tell you, for instance, that the snail trail is in fact a colloid mucus, meaning that its particles bring about the scattering of light and colour? Can I say that in avoiding having to initiate 'the colloid mucus chain', my further research found that snails are of the class Mollusca. They are nocturnal. They are restless, migratory. Moreover, snails will sense what they want, some elusive snail-opiate and, fixated, travel in a direct route towards it, battling through and over obstacles, even if the quicker and easier path would be to go around. Snails are inexhaustible breeders, inseminating each other with frenzied procreative enthusiasm...

But perhaps the trope is drying up. Perhaps it is enough to say that my wish for the chain is that it deliver some deliciously sticky poetry.

[Image 'familial' by Joel Bombardier].

welcome to the mollusa chain

This site is intended as a www place-holder of sorts for the mollusca chain, a literary journal that uses a chain mail method in seeking to generate and publish new, and peer-selected, poetry.

Simply, chain letters are sent by snail mail (ie, actual post - remember what that was like?) to poets who then copy and pass the letters on to people of their choosing from their respective poetic communities. These poets then each write one poem in response to the theme, mail copies of them back to the poets listed in their chain letter, and then pass the letter on to their peers. And so on, in a continual process of poems sent backwards, letters sent forwards (see above for a more detailed outline).

If you are the recipient of a letter, this site should answer any questions you might have about the process, and what you should do to continue the chain successfully. You are most welcome to post a comment, and I will respond as soon as possible.