The sixth installment of Words Without Borders’ International Graphic Novels issue series is up online—their February 2012 issue. The above picture is from French artist/writer Mazen Kerbaj’s “Letter to the Mother”; the below one is from Polish artist/writer Krysztof Gawronkiewicz’s “Romanticism.”

[The New Yorker] published 116 poems in 2009. At about four poems a page, that makes 29 pages, which means, with a circulation of roughly a million, The New Yorker prints approximately 29 million pages of poetry annually. That constitutes a considerable corporate commitment to verse.

—from “A Passion for Poetry” by Spencer Bailey in The New York Review of Magazines

(Adam Robinson noticed this first.)

Smuggling Afghan heroin or women from Odessa would have been more reprehensible, but more logical. You know you’re a fool when what you’re doing makes even the post office seem efficient. Everything I was packing into this unwieldy, 1980s-vintage suitcase was available online. I don’t mean that when I arrived in Berlin I could have ordered more Levi’s 510s for next-day delivery. I mean, I was packing books.

Not just any books — these were all the same book, multiple copies. “Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, Volume 1” is published, yes, by Triple Canopy, an online magazine featuring essays, fiction, poetry and all variety of audio/visual culture, dedicated — click “About” — “to slowing down the Internet.” With their book, the first in a planned series, the editors certainly succeeded. They were slowing me down too, just fine.

—from “My Berlin Airlift” by Joshua Cohen from The Sunday New York Times Book Review, January 15, 2012

The works presented in this issue either started out hardcopy or writers were asked to mail in a hardcopy form of a digitally accepted work; the piece, after arriving in the post, then became re-digitized in transfer to this particular here. Why go through all the bother? What interested us for this issue was the bother. How the tangible work becomes assimilated to a(n in)tangible era, showcased in 0s and ones, and the labour, increasingly more invisible, behind it. While some writers chose a literal embodiment for their poems—such as glass (Sargent), pen-in-hand (Booth), or another’s book (Reimer)—others leaned towards a more abstract representation, printing out their pieces directly from Word, letting the materiality show its face in a specific font (Seidner), a small ink smear at the top of each page (mclennan), one tracked change (Price).

—excerpt of editorial from issue 8 of Dear Sir,

As a distant planet was destroyed by old age…
—Action Comics No. 1, 1938

He heaves the automobile into glowing sky, headlight popping off, bumper succumbing, windshield bursting, white rubber tire hurtling away. Machines beware of this force. The automobile is green. Bad guys shudder. The future runs faster than an express train.

The plant is mostly shuttered. If I could get any closer, I could say more about its inaction, but I’m lost on its periphery, above the valley that holds it. The bridge on the map is a road ending in a concrete barrier and chain-link fence. On the other side of the chain-link fence is a chain-link gate, open. Beyond the gate, the asphalt sprouts a Russian olive bush, bright weeds, a green beer bottle. The road crumbles off a cliff. Far below, a rail yard. At the brink, on the road’s surface, someone has spray-painted, in white, something that seems to read PUSH…

—from “Steel: Products of Cleveland” by Mary Quade from West Branch Fall/Winter 2011

OCCUPY! seems like one of the most important texts to come out of U.S. literary magazine publishing in recent history, and probably from the publishing world in general. This newspaper—an “OWS-inspired gazette”—is a fingerprint of the occupy occupations, protests, and thinking since September 2011, as well as a look at the influences, origins, and goals of the movement. Obviously many magazines publish necessary, often essential writing, magazines as different as Guernica, Paris Review, and Annalemma. What makes OCCUPY! so different, why it has reinvigorated my faith in the power of publishing, is that the newspaper is of-the-moment, for-the-moment in the best sense. As opposed to the randomness of YouTube videos and most online commentary on OWS, n+1′s newspaper is filled with finely edited, chosen, and arranged texts, letters, commentary, diary entries, manifestos, and responses that vividly and powerfully communicate the diverse nature of the people and thoughts and struggles behind this movement. It is publishing at its best: both relevant and well-produced. OCCUPY! serves as—to rewrite Arthur Miller’s famous dictum about playwrights—a litmus paper of a moment. It is, as Frederick Barthelme once told me was the main concern of the novelist, “these people, this place, this time.” It’s writing and publishing that seems essential when you hold it in your hands, how I feel when I hold Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the first issue of New York Quarterly. And isn’t that what we always want?

NOTES: OCCUPY! issue 2 has recently been released, though I haven’t read it yet. A copy can be downloaded for free here. And Verso Books has “turned [the] gazette into a book, with a fair amount of added material,” titled Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America. The Verso launch party for the book is December 16.

Granta publishes an animated graphic novel inspired by Roberto Bolaño’s short story from Granta 117: Horror, “The Colonel’s Son.” Here’s detail about the project from the Granta website:

In Roberto Bolaño’s ‘The Colonel’s Son’ – published in Granta’s Horror issue – the narrator recounts a B-grade horror flick he sees on late night TV. A girl gets bitten by a zombie; the boy he loves tries to save her; the father of the boy, in turn, tries to save him. Bloodshed spreads across the city, as one by one witnesses become victims . . . and then killers . . .

Nothingbutamovie.com is an HTML5-based animation inspired by Bolaño’s piece, and has been brought to life by Granta illustrator Owen Freeman and the innovative web designers at Jocabola, who collaborated on Arcade Fire’s The Wilderness Downtown. Click here to start spreading the contagion.

We were all great in the observatory.
We were having a star party,

Fields of ions unfolding.
Our faces were intense, as the faces

Of shells,
Where we could hear a certain song

Go by…

—from “The Observatory” by Noelle Kocot in 6×6 #23 

The Minus Worlds are a bunch of fucked-up, unfinished or rejected levels that the programmers left floating around in the game, and some of them are almost, what, like, psychedelic. Mario swims through a water level of black water where all the tubes are neon pink., shooting fireballs at neon blue plants and yellow squid, and there are these big, blank blue rectangles where there’s simply nothing there, like a whole in the universe of Super Mario. It’s as if Mario had traveled to the distant, frayed edges of space and time. He must look into the void. It’s a little frightening.

—from “The Minus World” by Benjamin Hale, from Conjunctions:56

The mask? Because we were never ugly
enough. Because our ugliness was epic.
Because we were given to it, because
we were so misgiven. You wear one. I
wear one. Yes. Kings, Pharaohs had them
fabricated, poured out in gold and beaten.
Most wore them to the grave. In Mexico
the living wear them, not to scare the dead
away, but as invitation. They leave candy
on the mounds of those they mourn. New
Orleans? Women wear them in order
to bare everything else. Men wear them
in order to watch.

—from “Gotham Wanes” by Bryan D. Dietrich in the October 2011 issue of Poetry Magazine