Harp & Altar
POETRY
Stephanie Anderson is the author of two chapbooks, In the Particular Particular (New Michigan Press, 2007) and The Choral Mimeographs (Dancing Girl Press), which is forthcoming in 2009. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Handsome, Octopus, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she is the co-editor of Projective Industries.

 

Walter Arndt is Professor Emeritus of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth. He has produced a number of notable translations including Goethe’s Faust, Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. His translation of Eugene Onegin won the Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize in 1962.

 

Jessica Baron is finishing her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The poem that appears in this issue is from her thesis-in-process, “My Art in Play,” based on the work of Constantin Stanislavski. While pursuing poetry, Jessica also continues to act professionally in Colorado. She has work out or forthcoming in Matter, Wheelhouse, Listenlight, Parcel, Reconfigurations, and Mrs. Maybe.

 

Joshua Cohen is the author of four books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press, 2007) and A Heaven of Others (Starcherone, 2007). Another novel, Graven Imaginings, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Essays have appeared in The Forward, Nextbook, The Believer, and Harper’s. North Vain, Bluff, from which the piece that appears in this issue is excerpted, is the second book of a series entitled Two Great Russian Novels. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

Julia Cohen has six chapbooks out or forthcoming from horse less press, Small Fires Press, H_ngm_n B__ks, Dancing Girl Press, Transmission Press, and Greying Ghost Press. She lives deep in Brooklyn and blogs at www.onthemessiersideofneat.blogspot.com.

 

Claire Donato is an MFA Literary Arts candidate at Brown University. Recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in Coconut, Caketrain, Shampoo, and Cannibal. A first chapbook, Someone Else’s Body, is forthcoming from Cannibal Books in 2009. Her hometown is Pittsburgh, PA.

 

Evelyn Hampton has fiction forthcoming in Unsaid Magazine and published in Smokelong Quarterly, among other places. She lives in Seattle. Occasionally she updates her blog at endtable.net/evelyn.

 

Mark Harman, a native of Dublin who has written extensively about modern German and Irish literature, is a professor of German and English at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, PA. His translation of The Castle received the Modern Language Association’s first Lois Roth Award in 1998. His newest book is a translation of Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person, published by Shocken in November 2008.

 

Matthew Henriksen edits Cannibal Books and Typo from Fayetteville, AR, and is the author of Is Holy (horse less press, 2006). Two new chapbooks will appear in 2009 from Cue Editions and Single Sheet Press.

 

Lily Hoang’s first book, Parabola, won the Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest. She is also the author of the forthcoming novels Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press), Invisible Women (StepSister Press) and The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press). Her eBook Woman Down the Hall is available through Lamination Colony. She currently teaches English and Women’s Studies at St. Mary’s College in Indiana.

 

Peter Markus is the author of three short books of short-short fiction, Good, Brother (Calamari Press, 2006), The Singing Fish (Calamari Press, 2006), and The Moon Is a Lighthouse (New Michigan Press, 2003). His newest book is the novel Bob, or Man on Boat, published this year by Dzanc Books.

 

Patrick Morrissey’s poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Typo, Tarpaulin Sky, and Colorado Review. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

Bryson Newhart holds an MFA from Brown University. Recent or forthcoming publication credits include No Colony, Sein und Werden, Defenestration, 5_trope, Caketrain, elimae, Tarpaulin Sky, The Dream People, and BDtDaEAtC. Older writing can be found in Taint Magazine, Snow Monkey, 3rd bed, Failbetter, and others.

 

Michael Newton’s gallery reviews have appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar.

 

Formed by choreographers Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs in 2003, robbinschilds presents performance, installation, and video works that explore the intersection between architecture and human movement. The company’s work has appeared in venues including Dance Theater Workshop, the New Museum, BAM, P.S. 122, and Autumn Skate Bowl in New York; Fritz Haeg’s Sundown Salon and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in L.A.; and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. robbinschilds was recently commissioned to create original choreography for David Byrne on his world concert tour and is currently preparing a new performance work, Sonya and Layla Go Camping, to premiere at The Kitchen in May 2009.

 

Elizabeth Sanger graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh in 2004 and received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 2006. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Phoebe, Meridian, Touchstone, Past Simple, Typo, and Verse Daily and is forthcoming in the Saranac Review and Drunken Boat. She lives in Florida with her partner and three wildly spoiled cats.

 

Peter Jay Shippy is the author of Thieves’ Latin (University of Iowa Press, 2003), Alphaville (BlazeVOX Books, 2006), and a novella-in-verse, How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic (Rose Metal Press, 2007). His poems have recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Shenandoah, among others. He teaches literature at Emerson College in Boston.

 

A.L. Steiner is a Brooklyn-based artist whose photo and video installations, curatorial, and performance work has been presented internationally. Steiner is a member of the collective Chicks on Speed and co-curator of Ridykeulous. She is represented by Taxter & Spengemann, New York.

 

G.C. Waldrep is the author of Goldbeater’s Skin (Center for Literary Publishing, 2003), Disclamor (BOA Editions, 2007), and Archicembalo, which won the 2008 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press and is due out in 2009. He is also the author of two chapbooks, The Batteries (New Michigan Press, 2005) and One Way No Exit (Tarpaulin Sky, 2008). He lives in Lewisburg, PA, and teaches at Bucknell University.

 

The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) was a self-taught and prolific artist who published three novels and ten volumes of short prose during his lifetime. Despite the praise he received from figures such as Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, much of his writing remained unpublished or unread until the rediscovery of his work in the 1970s. After a period of time in Berlin, he returned to Switzerland in 1913, where he lived for the rest of his life. Confined to a mental institution in 1929, he spent his remaining decades in asylums. His books available in English include Robert Walser Rediscovered, edited by Mark Harman (University Press of New England, 1985); Jakob von Gunten, translated by Christopher Middleton (NYRB Classics, 1999); and The Robber, translated by Susan Bernofsky (University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

 

from The Evolutionary Revolution
Lily Hoang

Water World

A long time ago, long before man walked, this planet was filled with water. Its center did not derive of a core so hot that it melted itself; rather, the earth was a sphere of solid liquid. Above, the atmosphere exists as it does today, only cleaner, much cleaner. The surface of the water did not splash waves because there was nothing for the water to collide with except air. A long time ago, the water was so clear that man flying in the air could see directly through the water, straight to the other side of the planet, except back then, man had horrible vision. It was a rare exception if a man could even see the surface of the water because her eyes were so small. The mean size of the pupil was only 0.5mm, whereas the average diameter of the entire eye was scarcely any larger than 2cm. As such, man was forced to rely on her other senses, such as memory, kindness, and dream interpretation.

There was, in fact, a fairly extensive period of time, approximately an era or two before the Evolutionary Revolution, that man could hardly open her eyelids out of sensitivity to hydrogen. The moment she opened her eyes, they would sear with such ferocity that as a sub-species, man decided to never use her eyes again. As such, men would flap their little red wings to stay as stationary as possible as friends used strands of hair and mucous to seal eyes shut.

It is said that man started using her eyes again when a young girl named Emily heard the song of a merman twinkling from the surface of the water. She’d never dreamt of him before, she had no memory of his voice, and his song contained such sadness that out of kindness, she pried her eyes open with the tips of her talons, using all the force she could, and it is said that the tears from the tearing flesh melted the cemented spit enough for her to open her eyes, and from those eyes, she saw deep into the ocean, deep into the most tortured song.

 

Opened Eyes

Emily’s eyes, being unaccustomed to the hydrogen, crackled, but she was unafraid. Her eyes, being unaccustomed to wind and height, automatically barricaded themselves behind moist lids, behind darkness, but she, being the bravest of men, was determined to maintain strength.

It is said that the merman’s song seeped its melody deep into her liver, where all impurities are filtered and the contamination of her body by his song made her pry her eyes open with her toes, and when her eyes opened and she could finally see, she fell deep into the merman’s song. It is said that she was the first to fall, but this cannot be substantiated. Although she is the first recorded man to be lured by a merman’s song, oral stories offer many more examples of men who have ripped cement from their eyes, begging other men to bite off the seal, so that they could finally see what kind of being could create melodies of such penetrating sadness.

It is said that mermen dream only in shadow and light. Shapes are never definitive and sound is muted so that semblances of noise can be heard but never defined. It is said that mermen actively chose to dream this way. Mermen were particularly divisive and because they knew that man above the water could not see but relied solely on her other senses, mermen created dreams that man above water could not navigate. It was a strategic move.

The day Emily divided the atmosphere, falling freely, hydrogen cutting her freshly opened eyes, she was unafraid. She somehow knew that she would survive, that in the water, her eyes would no longer hurt, that his song would always be near, and even though she, our young heroine, wasn’t frightened, we know better. We know that even though she’s strong and unafraid, she most certainly ought to be. Yes, she would have known better, and even now, even now that she’s sinking lower than man has sunk since they lived under water, she should know better than to think she can still be a heroine, but she doesn’t.

 

The Extinction of the Poets & Philosophers

There was a time when all men lived in the water. Back then, there were more than ten species of human, some of whom have survived, such as men, mermen, and arguably, prophets and storytellers. There are many who have gone extinct. Poets and philosophers were the first to die off, their lungs unable to withstand the gravitational weight when they emerged from the deep ocean. They were delicate creatures and not particularly smart. They were much akin to goats and sheep of today. They would follow each other, without a clear leader, huddling in packs, pushing each other forward. It was the force of that push that allowed any sort of movement at all. If a poet was pushed westward, the whole pack would follow, and it was quite common for these species of man to be particularly vulnerable to bruises and skin breaks. Often, a poet or philosopher would cut his own skin and let his blood lead the pack, and they, faithful followers, would shimmy their loose bodies around the water, meandering behind the blood, until the blood, being thicker than water, floated upwards and upwards, until the humen felt their small bodies expand and contract, but they could not discern this as pain. They continued their mission, pursuing the strand of blood until their bodies started to retreat into themselves. First, their skin would sink into the muscles, diving deeply into their own pores. Then, the muscles would dissolve into the bones until even the bones had nowhere left to go. As the bones floated away, the surviving poets or philosophers would follow and follow until nothing remained of them but a large number of free floating bones.

It is said, however, that the souls of these poets and philosophers still reside in those bones, that they have managed to reincarnate themselves, but this is merely speculation, a rumor that we can neither prove nor deny.

 

Prophets

As a species, prophets were much like storytellers. They didn’t have a specific body type to distinguish them from other species, but unlike storytellers, who were photocopies or clones of other existing bodies, prophets would find a body they liked and imagine death until life is removed and they would shimmy into the vacated carcass. Much like storytellers, it is assumed that prophets have been extinct for many centuries and eons, but this cannot be substantiated because they move from body to body without much effort.

According to the rumors of man, prophets were very cruel. He would kill another body before he has even made himself comfortable in the body just acquired. To maintain strength and insure that there would be no questions or strings, it was typical for prophets to eat the body left behind. Depending on the species he chose to live in, it could be quite difficult to consume another body. Man, for instance, is only accustomed to moon vegetation; flesh of any kind could make her quite ill, but the prophet doesn’t care. He imagines the body can chew through bone and the body does.

Prophets are a frightening sub-species. Long before they went extinct, all the other species had petitioned the Extinction Sub-Committee of the Evolution Council to ask that prophets, as a species, be removed from earth. Prophets, upon hearing this rumor through their man-spies, began to concentrate on extinguishing the Extinction Sub-Committee, and that was the end of the Extinction Sub-Committee. Unfortunately, they had forgotten to destroy the petition itself, and the remaining Evolution Council, upset at the great loss of their fellow council members, quickly signed off on it.

It’s unclear if any prophets survived this cleansing, but it would not be at all surprising if many of them simply disguised themselves, making their prophetic nature invisible for only long enough to survive. It wouldn’t be the first time prophets were forced into extinction.

Before the last, or seemingly last, prophet was killed, he was said to have said that there would be a great revolution based on evolution, that the councils will be to blame, if only in part, but there would be a clash of species, and many would die. He gave the revolution a time, far into the future, so far away that many ignored his words, but they did see the way he crunched his eyelids down so hard that there appeared a small crack on the ridge of his nose. Those that were there claimed that he cemented the future right there, right before his death, this last prophet decided to destroy the earth, just like that.

 

The Spreading of the Word

Word spread quickly that she had fallen into the water. Man by nature enjoys juicy news, and she did not hesitate to elaborate fantasies as to how it had happened. The story of her fall became so distorted that the merman no longer existed. One man’s version of the story went like this:

Emily was flying around as she was always flying around, you know, kind of crooked because she was a crooked kind of girl, and then a whole herd of rhinoceroses came charging at her and punctured one of her wings.

One man interjected, What the hell is a rhinoceros?

The storytelling man said, It’s a large bird with a horn the size of your arm.

The storytelling man said, Emily was so scared, flying with one of her wings hurt that she thought maybe she could take refuge on the surface of the water, poor girl. Without her eyes to tell her that the water wasn’t solid, she couldn’t know. How could she know? Poor girl.

The storytelling man was old enough to remember the day when man had eyes. She rarely mentioned it, but this was a desperate time. A man had just gone missing. For all she knew, the girl could be dead. For all she hoped, the girl was probably hurt pretty bad, probably would never fly again so she may as well be dead, but she hoped for the hurt. It made for much better stories.

Every man’s story was slightly different. In another version, some man was jealous of another man so she gouged out her eyes and tore part of her wing, only to realize that the man damaged was Emily, which was not the man she’d intended to harm. In another version, Emily picked a fight with a small pack of birds, thinking they were bees. She’d been craving honey, being pregnant and all. The birds pecked ferociously, creating holes in her skin and planting mites. The mites ate at her bone until she had no more bone. Luckily, the mites had damaged her nerves so she couldn’t even feel the heights from which she fell.

Either way, the story of Emily’s fall became renowned, and in every version, there was some mistake by some man because of their lack of eyes.

Within days of Emily’s disappearance, the Imperial Council held a public forum to discuss the future of man. Men were becoming increasingly fearful. This was the first disappearance in a century. Men were most frightened because they’d heard stories about the men that lived in the water, how vicious they were, how they ate the carcasses of decomposed men from above the water, how they could both see and sing. The Imperial Council met and discussed the options of how to attain better vision. Days later, the Council had not come up with a decision. Months later, they were still deadlocked. Years later, when men had forgotten all about Emily, the Imperial Council decided that they should stay exactly as they were. They should not open their eyes, they should not look for Emily, for after all, it had been years, and almost everyone had already forgotten her. The Imperial Council itself, after such a long deliberation, had forgotten why they had even started discussing using their cemented eyes again.

Of course, news of their decision spread quickly around the skies of the earth.