Practitioners Speaking About Their Work Amongst Themselves
“Actors always judge each other on their range,” says Sergio de la Pava in the spring 2018 issue of BOMB. “But writers don’t tend to think that way.” Happily, BOMB’s editors do think that way. Since its founding, BOMB has been one of those rare literary magazines that embraces more than just literature, following its founders’ decision “to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves.” To nobody’s surprise, then, most of BOMB’s contributors work in multiple genres and modalities in addition to writing—installation art, photography, painting, filmmaking, performance, drama, and music, to name just some.
The editors have front-loaded this issue with interviews and reviews. This structure reduces the temptation to read these pieces as supplemental materials, things to read only after all the poems and stories. Placing them near the front gives them more relevancy, shifting readers’ focus to creative processes, as though the rest of the issue were a response to the aesthetic, political, and theoretical concerns raised earlier. The result is a faint passage from one work to the next.
For example, in interviews with Lydia Ourahmane and Kaneza Schaal, both artists talk about the role of disappearance. Ourahmane, whose installation Finitude falls apart as it is displayed, says that the important element in her work is memory as it “exists in the realm of interpretation, which…decays over time,” not the physical form the work has to take. Schaal, a performance artist, doubts that “performance can be made into an object at all. It disappears. Isn’t that the glory of it?” The relationship between art and disappearance still occupies my thoughts later in the issue, where I reach Sammy Stein’s “Archives of the Crystal Museum.” This comic’s last panels show someone touching one of the titular museum’s exhibits, which contact causes the building to explode—a jab at wanting/expecting/archiving permanence, a complication of the border between memory and interaction.
The issue’s reviewers take advantage of BOMB’s range, showcasing work that spiders into many creative corners. Highlights include Jon Dieringer’s review of Manuel DeLanda: ISM ISM and Emmy Catedral’s review of Ellie Ga’s Square Octagon Circle, books that could be hung on the wall.
Creative work appears under “First Proof”—a provocative heading, proof as though simultaneously evidence and pages awaiting alterations before final printing. In addition to the comic already mentioned, there are four prose pieces, three poems, and one art portfolio. I write “prose” and “poetry,” although there exists no easy classification for these pieces. Simone White’s “Messenger” is a combination of the two, the prose interrupting the poetry “in the middle of our conversation.” And Valerie Werder’s “Remainders” is a series of vignettes straddling fiction and a suggestion of self-referential memoir: “she shouldn’t write about catastrophes or invented places, but should instead focus on the mundane, trite aspects of being a woman in the world…. Might as well be specific, address the problems at hand.” The portfolio, by Ville Kumpulainen, features physically altered photographs—like with their subjects cut out so that the negative space becomes the focus.
In terms of poetry, check out the impressive enjambments in Stacy Szymaszek’s “Owl with Monobrow”:
if the conditions for learning aren’t humiliation
then I must be alone in order to be a modern
kind of student one whose failures have not made them
so anxious they are unable to be a steady archer
this lesson explains my imperfections as a friend
and in Mark Francis Johnson’s “A Small Sheaf from Sham Refugia”:
I am old,
and this dish of vanilla melts,
this dear spoon I can’t remember
buying or stealing or accepting
remains a bent example
of pure invention….
If these lines were curves in the road, you’d skid off them in the middle of the night, so tight are they.
My favorite piece in this whole issue is Dylan Landis’s “Embouchure, 1970.” It starts like this: “‘Nothing you will see tonight is normal,’ said Elihu’s mother. It was the first exciting thing she’d ever said.” The pacing, subtlety, and characterization herein show Landis’s skills. I keep rereading this story, hoping that it is part of a larger project.
The penultimate piece, Yun-Fei Ji’s “Village Wen, Fragrant Brook, and Other Vanishing Townships,” is a combination of sketches, ink-and-watercolor illustrations on Xuan paper, photographs, and lyrically tinged historical notes. Again disappearance grabs the artist’s attention, this time in the form of villages after China’s Great Leap Forward.
This issue’s arrangement reveals the editors’ attention to their submissions, not only to the quality of the pieces but also to their resonances with one another. BOMB’s subtle coherence gives submitters a great chance to juxtapose their work with other genres and modalities. Such juxtaposition is especially useful for those submitting excerpts as a way to judge them against a wider range of form and content, an indirect feedback that can inform their work.
BOMB is available in print and PDF versions. What was most useful for me, though, was reading it online, at bombmagazine.org. Not only is the magazine’s online design excellent, but you can access everything the magazine has published since its first issue, in spring 1981. According to its website, BOMB has a million and a half online readers, “44% of whom are under 30 years of age.” Submissions are accepted July 1–31 and December 1–31.
