Starting up a new magazine

Like everyone else I have my own specific taste in art. I particularly like that which has a high degree of fantastic elements, that is, divorced from a high degree of realism. I feel that most literary magazines these days tend to favor realistic and especially slice-of-life narratives, both in prose and poetry.
That's why I decided to set up my own magazine, THE KLECKSOGRAPH. With enough appropriate submissions, I plan to publish the first issue in January 2020. It'll be both free to subscribe and to submit to. Please check out the website for more information.

The Old Merry-Go-Round

With its gilded decorations and panels with bucolic landscapes it stood out among the other merry-go-rounds with their cars, airplanes and bright yellow lights. At its heart, walled with mirrors in rococo frames, was the central pillar, large enough to make me think inside must've been a spinning palace. The fierce wooden horses were white, with carmine nostrils and mouths, pulling dainty carriages with cushions for the girls to sit in.

Away we went to the shiny music from the barrel organ, the horses bobbing ever faster. We children were now separated from the revolving adult world beyond the brass poles.

But curiosity made me look down the hole in the wooden floor beneath me. I saw a remorseless crankshaft, tarnished with age, thrust my horse up, then pull it down. Beneath this baroque jungle lay a machine that would crush me if I fell into its gears.

Every time since, when I saw the merry-go-round, I'd see the metal bars that fanned out underneath the floor, like a giant rasp to shred whoever fell through the wooden floor. Every time I got off the merry-go-round, I felt I'd survived a brush with danger.

This beautiful work of art, this bringer of pleasure, hid a mangling machine under its skin. And no parent could save me from it.

POEM: AFTER A CLOUDBURST

Pause and gaze in awe,

At wonders you alone can see,

The wet sunlit city stones

Shimmer like drawn swords.

Their surfaces cast

An inhuman glow,

The fire of self-creation

Published Weyfarers 71, Guilford Poets Press

When I wrote this, I was particularly interested in alliterative verse, a form of poetry peculiar to Germanic languages, among them Old English. In it, the number of stresses per line is important, regardless of the number of syllables, also the initial sounds of the stressed syllables are often similar, so “awe,” “wonders,” and “wet,” further on they move to the rear “drawn,” “glow.” I still used internal rhyme as well: “sunlit,” “city,” “shimmer,” “inhuman.”

The seed of the poem lay in the image of wet stone after rain, from that emerged the rest of the poem, meant to express the idea of the whole of the self-created Universe manifesting itself in me seeing the light reflecting off the wet stones. However, this idea also contains many paradoxes, among them the glow of self-creation shimmering like a sword, a symbol of destruction. The poem itself exhorts the reader to see something no one else can see, thereby setting up a contradiction. The purpose of this was to remove the distinction between the one uttering the poem and the one reading it, and so to express the idea of monism, that we’re all part of one existence.

Expressing poetry through imagery, as opposed to sound, is also called phanopoeia, and is especially used in the poetry of China and Japan.