From the Editor’s Desk  Kate Bernadette Benedict

The Winter 2009-2010 edition marks Umbrella’s third anniversary as a quarterly and like the Morton Salt girl’s umbrella, ours is evolving too. Henceforth we will publish twice a year, on May 1st and November 1st. The Bumbershoot Annual will publish August 1st.

We are also tickled to announce the addition of a new ’zine to our roster: Tilt-a-Whirl: A Poetry Sporadical of Repeating Forms. The Tilt will publish on an irregular basis; its archive will be arranged by poetic form rather than by issue; it is designed to be a comprehensive resource for the study and enjoyment of repeating-form poetry (villanelles, rondeaus, pantoums, sestinas, etc.).

Your editor is energized and excited by this new scheme. Publishing Umbrella over the last three years has only strengthened her resolve to feature high caliber poems which work around an “umbrella idea” and which exhibit fresh, nongeneric diction. Only a tiny minority of submissions meet these criteria.   Good poems are often declined because they simply do not fit Umbrella’s mission; they may be descriptive in nature—beautifully so—or retrospective or experiential, but they do not work around a central conceit or idea. I have been fairly flexible about this criterion in the past but more and more I want to remain faithful to it. A twice-yearly publication schedule will, I hope, make this goal more achievable, for poems of this nature are hard to come by.

Even harder to come by, I’ve found, are poems that are free of what I dub syntactical arrest. Press the link for my essay on the subject. In a nutshell, contemporary poets often favor a locution in which gerunds and participles are jettisoned in favor of clipped phrases in which two verbs are separated by a comma. (“The cat in the backyard lopes, stops” . . . “You mentioned Cairo, said the Nile smelled vile” . . . “The editor at the computer balks, barfs.”) Poets often point out to me that there is nothing ungrammatical about the construction. I agree—but let’s recall that plenty of awful sentences are awful for reasons other than their grammar. The construction, awkward in prose, is even more so in poetry. If it doesn’t sound peculiar to your ear, this is probably because poets use it so often that it’s become a sort of white noise.

Peronally, I’ve always flinched when syntactical arrest pops up, as it constantly does in Umbrella’s mailbox, on the various daily poem pages online, and in just about every venue where poems are published. It’s a pandemic, the swine flu of Parnassus, and I’m hellbent on keeping Umbrella uninfected! If you are a poet reading this, and chances are you are, then I would plead with you to break the habit if you have it. There’s more going on here than questionable syntax. Often the poet has chosen two inexact verbs instead of the one perfect verb, the mot juste. Or the poet has let the diction slip into a highly prosaic mode, with little phrases marching forward like good little soldiers and no phrase “telling it slant,” as Emily D. so sagaciously advised. Other times just one line of an otherwise fine poem takes the lazy way out and goes choppy. Revise, revise, I say—or if you do go the choppy-prose route with serial double verbs, at least use the technique mindfully and don’t o.d. on it. (And don’t send it to Umbrella!)

We are not sure yet if we will be publishing a theme “extra” in spring-summer or in a later issue, but we do have a theme in mind and we invite work for it.  The theme is “gall” and the Free Online Dictionary describes the word as follows:  Bitterness of feeling; rancor.  Something bitter to endure.  Outrageous insolence; effrontery.  We want to see poems that draw their inspiration from states of mind or experiences that are the opposite of sweetness and light.  They are unconcerned, these poems, with decorum, uplift or redemption. They do not soar but rather dig, thrust, keen or shudder.  The province is not the mountain but the valley; not the cloud but the cave.  The type of poem some readers might shun because its vividity drums up feelings that are difficult to handle.  Lest it not be clear, we also seek poems that are of literary value, that are well-crafted and that work around an umbrella idea.  For this “extra” we will allot some space for poems that have appeared previously in print.  Your editor is quailing already, but she can’t wait to read these submissions.  We reopen for submissions January 10, 2010.

Umbrella’s nominations for The Pushcart Prize are as follows:

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz: For the People Who Keep Asking Me Why I’m Still In Slam
Jill McCabe Johnson: The Absence of Paranoia
Rose Kelleher: The Knight’s Tour
Matt Merritt: Stanislav Petrov
Joe Mills: Left Behind
W. F. Roby: For a Relapse

Our nominations for Best of the Web are as follows:

Moira Egan: Sleeplessly: Sapphics
Anna Evans: The Art of Childbirth [scroll down]
Saeed Jones: Beatrice: Canto II
Quincy R. Lehr: Minor Character
Karen McPherson: Foregone
Yun Wang: Destiny

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