Blackbird Fall 2009, Volume 8, Number 2--Literary Review

The most recent issue of the online literary magazine Blackbird, Fall 2009, Volume 8, Number 2, contains an assortment of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including reviews of poems appearing within the issue. The featured poet of this issue is Katie Ford, the recipient of the 2009 Levis Reading Prize. Five of her poems are featured in this month’s issue. “Linnets” by Larry Levis, the poet and former Virginia Commonwealth University Professor for whom the prize is named, is also a featured poem in the most recent Blackbird. Blackbird is organized online in such a way that it can be read chronologically, in the order that the editors suggest it to be read, much like an actual periodical.
As a poetry student this term, I focused on the poetry contained in this issue of Blackbird. Admittedly, I found some of the poems unfocused and ineffective. Among them was Peter Jay Shippy’s “Self-Portrait & Other Calculation.” Shippy’s poem is basically a litany of describing everything that he is not, full of cheap rhymes (“explosives”/”plosives”) and ineffective and extraneous repetitions (“The instant replay may prove to be not inconclusive”). “Self-Portrait & Other Calculations” ends rather indecisively (“We all feel comfortable with ourselves/ I’m not—check”), leaving the reader scratching their head about what exactly Shippy’s self-portrait says about himself.
Luckily, however, a few bad apples do not spoil the bunch in this case, as the November 2009 Blackbird features gems from likes of Sherman Alexie, Jake Adam York, as well as featured poet Katie Ford. My favorite from Alexie is “Powwow Ghazal,” in which Alexie provides a portrait of a Native American powwow. I always enjoy reading about Native American culture, particularly in the form of Alexie’s short stories, but I had never before encountered his poetry. Vivid and rhythmic, “Powwow Ghazal” modestly pays homage to his culture, divulging deference to his culture rituals, in which “During powwow, even God wants to sing and dance/ So God makes thunder, lightning, and rain with drums.” The final line reiterates the importance of drums in his culture, as he asserts, “I sometimes think that every Indian is made with drums.”
Jake Adam York’s “And Ever” is a heartfelt elegy for Medgar Evers a civil rights activist who was murdered some forty years ago. York’s poem opens with vivid imagery of a morning:
You rise
To watch the leaves
Breathe life into their edges
and burn,
drawing day from the night
to wake the birds.
It continues to depict the murder of Evers, the lynching of another African-American, and the emotion that is felt as a result of this. Although vivid and evocative, it seems as though York’s poem would be more effective if it were a bit shorter, as some of the sections appear to be somewhat redundant.
Katie Ford’s “Easter Evening,” which begins with a physical description of “cold April,” moves to the abstract (“the clear glass a starved sheet of mind/ with something finally written on it/ by that anonymous finger”), to the emotional. Amidst a failing relationship, Ford yearns to find theistic confirmation, but fails to do so:
This is what we ask the dead god to rise into.

But it isn’t the right request, and he grows quieter
Than the silence he already kept,
As when a man decides to leave a woman, decides this is
The only thing that can be done to save both.
In this way we are told it is over.
Thus, Ford effectively inverts the connotations of Easter, a day that is traditionally met with family and celebration, with heartbreak and despair. Ford’s ability to conjure such unfavorable emotions is most likely the reason why she is selected as the winner of the 2009 Levis Reading Prize.
Overall, I would say that the Blackbird Online Journal of Literature and the Arts is well organized and well compiled. Of course, as mentioned earlier, there are poems in the collection that are expendable, but this is to be expected of any literary magazine. In addition to the ones mentioned, other effective pieces include Lisa Fay Coutley’s “Why to Buy a Parrot,” Kevin Cantwell’s “The Apple Pipe,” and Danielle Hanson’s “Near Sleep in a Smoky Room.” I would recommend this issue to any literary enthusiast.