Chip Livingston

Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

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“FIRE AND RAIN”

Republished on the CHELSEA STATION magazine website, my short story “Fire and Rain” is excerpted from my story collection, NAMING CEREMONY. The collection gratefully was published by Lethe Press, and Lethe’s publisher in chief, Steve Berman, was the guest editor of CHELSEA STATION this week and selected my story to run here. Hope you enjoy the story … and if you do there’s more where that came from at ……  and check out more from Lethe Press here … and more from CHELSEA STATION here. Dig in, there’s links to lots of good stuff right up in this mug.

..  WAXWING ISSUE 3

The conditional response I initially got for the acceptance of my essay, “The Psychic Dentist,” was so helpful, asking me to go just a little bit further in my reflection of the events I describe of this healer in Gainesville, Florida. Thank you, Eric Stalcup, nonfiction editor, for caring about the contents that much and pushing me to return to my essay and make it stronger. I appreciate this magazine and am so happy to be a part of it.

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<< and check out the awesome cover art by Jeremy Singer.

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and check out the other writers in this and previous issues >>

As It Ought To Be   

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Okla Elliott’s smart poetry blog, As It Ought To Be, was kind enough to reprint this poem of mine, “Poem to my boyfriend’s Human Immunodeficiency Virus,” from my book CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK here.

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While you’re there, look around. Elliott’s got a lot of good things to say and good words to share.

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ILLUSTRATED POEMS … QUEER ARTS … OCHO 32

.. Leave it to the illustrious Didi Menendez and sharp Matthew Hittinger to so artfully relaunch OCHO: A Journal of Queer Arts.

.. I’m so thrilled that these two illustrated poems I collaborated with illustrator Tim Goldman on — SUNDAY, TEA DANCE and CREPI IL LUPO — can be shared more widely than the personal gifts they were originally intended to be. 

… pretty neat I think … my illustrated poems were inspired by collaborations between Joe Brainard and Kenward Elmslie.

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Memories of Uruguay

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Two poems set in Uruguay, one here in the photographed Cabo Polonio and another in Punta del Este,
are thoughtfully reprinted from the SING anthology and my own collection, CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK,
on the BLOOD, RIVER AND CORN website edited by the dedicated Terra Trevor.

Speaking of my Twin Peaks sestina, it’s also going to be reprinted in the Joel Allegretti’s upcoming, soon-to-be released (stay tuned) anthology RABBIT EARS: The First Anthology of Poetry about TV.

Chip reading “with fire”

You can see me read the poem in front of the opening scenes of the influential TV series that asked “Who killed Laura Palmer?” at this link to the Rabbit Ears YouTube channel, where you’ll find other contributors presenting their poems and various links to more interesting information about television, poetry, and more.

And for more information on the anthology, check it out from Poets Wear Prada Press.

Sestinas are probably my favorite poetic form, and all three of the sestinas I wrote — (with fire) a Twin Peaks sestina, Nelson Family Dance, 1911, and Coon Was Here, 1985 — are gratefully republished here at the Festival of Language website. The poems were originally published on the McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies website and in Barrow Street.

From the Poetry Foundation website, the sestina is “A complex French verse form, usually unrhymed, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoy. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoy contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. The patterns of word repetition are as follows, with each number representing the final word of a line, and each row of numbers representing a stanza: 

          1 2 3 4 5 6
          6 1 5 2 4 3
          3 6 4 1 2 5
          5 3 2 6 1 4
          4 5 1 3 6 2
          2 4 6 5 3 1
          (6 2) (1 4) (5 3) 

See Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “The Complaint of Lisa,” John Ashbery’s “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” and David Ferry’s “The Guest Ellen at the Supper for Street People.” Browse more sestinas.

bluestem magazine 

My contributor copy of the new BLUESTEM literary magazine arrived in the mail. It’s gorgeous! And I’m thankful to be among such good writers. I’m especially grateful to nonfiction editor Ruben Quesada for his care in editing my essay, “Jo-Jo’s Three Cents,” which appears there. Can’t wait to read all this good stuff!

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  ………..THE .. PSYCHIC .. FAIR ………….

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My brand new essay, “The Psychic Fair,” appears on Jameson Currier’s new GLBT literary journal, CHELSEA STATION MAGAZINE, along with a host of other exciting new writing.  Hope you enjoy.  I’m working on a number of these brief treatments – mini essays – about my experiences with the paranormal over the  years. Hope they’ll all find as welcoming homes as this one did. Thank you, Jameson and Chelsea Station Mag. It’s an honor to be here.

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