The literary journal Spork is durable, with cardboard covers, stiff paper and stitching as strong as marlin line. Unfortunately its toughness is a gross overcompensation for the sugar-crystal writing inside. Two professors could tug-of-war with it all day and get nowhere. The journal starts on page 1,647, because, you know, it’s all a part of the endless continuum, dude. Richard Siken, the editor, opens with a post-modernist interpretation of Hansel and Gretel, and what a trail of crumbs it is.
After that, Julie Doxsee tests our mettle with her gauntlet of prose poems. Listen: “When eyes meet they don’t touch. When I shuffle the ledge, my skin in the night opens.” If the dream drool of the first one doesn’t “startle you into awareness”, don’t worry, there are 5 more just like it.
Maria Robinson has written a story called “Humunculous”, a word which tells me right away she is smarter than I am. She begins: “Immediately following my miscarriage, my brain took off on a week-long vacation.” What is this, a comedy? She’s trying to “hook” me, but I can’t believe anything she says from here on out, I don’t trust her, she is playing with me. Later, she roars: “I had to piss, and I decided to do it standing up—the hell with sitting down!” Then she finds a bloody part of her miscarriage in the toilet, and names it Tiny. Riveting.
Later in the journal Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis collaborated with Caleb Adler in the pieces “I don’t Know How Many Souls You Have, My Feathered Fernando” and “Ourselves Woo Yourselves, Pretty Bird”. The authors blend their voices harmonically in stanzas like this: “Semiotic bird/object-coding Barthes’ bliss/einfuhlung abates.”
Many of the pieces in Spork are excerpted from longer works, such as Kristi Maxwell’s “Log of Dead Birds”, spanning ten pages, which seems like a lot of dead birds but is only a part of the greater whole. There is also “A Sci-Fi Lesbian Pirate Bodice-Ripper” by Trista Emmer, which is taken from her longer work “No Normal Love”. This piece starts in “Part the Fourteenth”, moves on to “Part the Twelfth” and then through “Part the Third”, “the Seventeenth”, “the Twenty-sixth”, “the Sixteenth”, “the Twenty-third”, “the Fourth”, “the First”, “the Forty-eighth”, and finally “Part the Fifty-second.”
John Emil Vincent has a 5 page piece called “from Girls in Reruns, Deleted Scenes, K: Barb’s egg salad.” His voice is a fart-flame in the dark: “And it seemed a shame/she chose-/what with the devoted/and treasured/cut-glass dishes’/not to devil them.” I skip to the back and read his bio: “John Emil Vincent is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University and the author of ‘Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry’”.
I am sickened when I finally finish Spork, and I think about the people who applaud such work. Who are they? A race of protected snobs ensconced in the plush chairs of expensive clubs, pinkies raised on their tea cups like the slimy red hard-ons of their homosexual lapdogs.
Mather Schneider is the author of Drought Resistant Strain (Interior Noise Press, 2009).
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