Author: M. Bartley Seigel

The year in PANK

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2009 ended, I’m told. Whew. For PANK, here’s what was.

PANK 3 sold out, though “sold out” is a bit ‘o reassuring obfuscation. We did run out of copies and for the first time in our brief 3 years sold more than we gave away. Huzzah!

PANK 3 appeared in bookstores, on Amazon, and in Kindle format in 2009. That beats a closet full of copies any day.

PANK Magazine online logged almost a half million hits. Hardly the Huffington Post, but what the hey.

Adjusted for something more meaningful (I learned all about bounce rates, unique visitors, etc. in 2009!), and including print copies,  PANK Magazine had more than 65,000 readers in 149 countries, including 232 souls from the soveirgn territory of Not Set (which I can only hope resembles Htrae in appropriately cubist ways).

PANK received approximately 5,000 submissions in 2009, of which we accepted a little more than 300. This gave us, according to my most excellent arithmetic skills, an approximate acceptance rate of 6%. Whatever that means. Figuring this out gave me a headache.

PANK held a contest and chose winners and selected its first chapbook.

And finally, in 2009, people said nice things about PANK, like this,  this, and this.

As for 2010, it’s anyones guess, though I’m seriously thinking of adopting a second dog and naming it Pank…

Friday Five!

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We do a lot of rounding up on the PANK blog. It has its uses. But my favorite posts are the “writer’s life” ones. Our contributor interviews and ask-the-editor Q&As, the moms and dads and identity exploration posts, these I have really enjoyed. And if I am to believe the number of responses these posts have received, not to mention the creepy Google Analytics reports on these posts (big brother, big scary numbers, oh my!), I am most certainly not alone.

So this Friday, I’m using my five to sketch out some submission guidelines for a new PANK column, This Modern Writer. Yes, I am ripping off the New York Times and maybe This I Believe. And, please, spare me your grief over my use of “modern”.

As  follows:

1. Send PANK 1,000 words on what its like to be writer today.

2. I’m brainstorming here… In an age when we’re told that everybody writes, but nobody reads, what are the ups, downs, pros and cons of the business at a personal level. How do you manage? How don’t you? How do you work? How don’t you? Worst rejections? Most surprising successes? Biggest misconceptions? Editing and working with “writers”? What’s it like to be a working, divorced mother of twenty who still finds the time to be a novelist? What’s it like to be a single, childless trustfunder worrying over those line breaks? What’s it like explaining to your dad that you want to be a poet when you grow up? Bad MFA program? Good one? Who doesn’t have a good workshop story? Who did you blow or do blow with at that writer’s retreat? What’s the worst thing you’ve ever written? I’m guessing you get the point.

3. Remember to tell us a good, evocative story. Don’t just rant about your undergrad creative writing class, etc.

4. Any form or formlessness, 1,000-words max, but keep in mind this is PANK and we appreciate some style.

5. Send submissions and a very brief biography in the body of your email to editor@pankmagazine.com, subject line “This Modern Writer.”

Future PANK in 3

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1. PANK 4 coming down the pipe, featuring new work from Jennifer Pieroni, Taylor Mali, Matt Bell, Bill Yarrow, Summer Block, Ethel Rohan, Laura LeHew, Bob Hicok, Karen Gentry, and many, many others. Delicious. Get some.

2. Aaron Burch’s chapbook HOW TO TAKE YOURSELF APART, HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF ANEW. Startling. Beautiful. Guaranteed to sell out quickly. Get it with PANK 4 and save money.  Pre-order today.

3. DOGZPLOT and PANK host a joint reading at AWP 2010 in Denver at  Forest Room 5 on Thursday, April 8, 7:30 pm. Featuring  Aaron Burch,  Anne Valente,  Beth Thomas,  Tim Jones-Yelvington,  Matt Bell,  JA Tyler,  Erin Fitzgerald,  Molly Gaudry,  Kathy Fish,  Angi Becker Stevens,  Matt Salesses,  Pedro Ponce,  Dave Clapper,  Jac Jemc, and  Lauren Becker. Mark thy calendar!

A ‘lil Hicok with your Monday morning coffee?

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Bob Hicok has new poems forthcoming in PANK 4 (order it!), one coming out on the website (as Roxane keeps the queue I’ll just say presently), and if you don’t read Hicok, well, you should. Begin anywhere, or here, or begin with this very blog, to which I post this Monday morning with pure childlike joy.

PANK YOU VERY MUCH

by Bob Hicok

There came a point when I knew I hadn’t known
the word pank existed. Spank clank drank tank shank
wank (er) thank (her for the roses) shrank (the t-shirt
in the dryer then the dryer then the universe
if you stick around) but not “to pack snow for purposes
of walking on packed snow.” Now to use it in a sentence.
Remember that from school? It was never the interesting
words: “now children, please use the word gonorrhea
in a sentence; After much panking, the mayor expired
of gonorrhea.” I’m larger now by pank as measured
in angstroms. My brain is physically altered. My psyche
feels more prepared for jargon emergencies. And to those
who say life is predictable, I say I didn’t see
pank coming. In that, it’s a shooting star. It’s the vagina
as described to me when I was nine as an opening and I saw
hairy door. It’s a black president of the United States.
My ignorance of pank had kept my ignorance of the word
for the space that closes behind crowsong or a bullet
or me as I move unknowing through time
company: how to apologize to the void
for diminishing it of the nothings it holds? On whispered knees,
certainly, in a suit, a black suit, a black-light
suit, while thinking: isn’t the night every shadow
packed into a long moment of shadow
around our shoulders, around our sleep, around the depth
from which all feeling rises and to which it returns?
And what is the word for knowing your bones are made
of midnight? The dictionary that knows the answer
is a poet and she’s not talking. She’s moody
and not talking. She’s hungry and her heel is broken
and it’s snowing and she’s looking up and trying
to follow a single flake all the way to the ground.
Where she watches it die. Where her watching it die
is a funeral, a celebration, a shiver
as she stands in mostly skin, mostly feeling
this doesn’t end anything, for look how thirsty
concrete is, look how sunflower taxis are, listen how hubbub
53rd is with the tapping of a blind man’s cane.
Who touches his face where snow has touched
his face and smiles and she smiles
in her invisibility back at his smile, completing
a circle of sorts. The circle
of the honor system. The circle of yes. The circle
of believing everything is broadcast, everything
is listening, everything has a word, and even
the things that don’t have us wanting them
to have words. Have us saying, how do you say,
and expecting the air to confess what it knows.