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Thursday, April 7, 2011

Get Drunk in a Public House of Literary Art: Serving House Journal 3 is now available!

by Thomas E. Kennedy

A Serving House is another term for a Pub or a Public House or Road House or, to put it more bluntly, a bar: a place we visit to drink and get high, to get drunk.

Thus, the name Serving House Journal is constructed of a couple or three puns: It serves America—nay, it serves the world!—by serving fine poems and prose; it is a house in both the literary sense and the bar-room sense of the word; and it is a journal. And like a Serving House, it serves the purpose of literature prescribed by Baudelaire: Enivrez vous! Translation: Get drunk! Or as Odin put it in The Sayings of the High One, Get drunk on the best kind of drunkenness—where afterwards your head is returned to you in better shape than it was before.

Let’s cut to the chase: Serving House Journal 3 (SHJ-3) is now available, and under the guiding literary consciousness of Founding Editor/Novelist Duff Brenna, Creative Nonfictionist R. A. (Ricki) Rycraft, Poet Extraordinaire Steve Kowit, and the gorgeous technical ministrations of Clare MacQueen, it shows itself—once again—to be, quite simply, an outstanding bar to hang out in and eat poetry, drink ink, get drunk in the best of ways where you escape for a little while—in a flagon of fiction, a pot of poetry, a keg of prose—only to return afterwards with a greater understanding of literature and its relationship to existence, not to mention the good time you will have had!

In SHJ-3, we have a taste of This River, a memoir by James Brown—no relation to the musical king other than that they both put some quake in your quaker, some shake in your shaker, some rock in your sock! Read Brown’s excerpt, “Some Kind of Animal”—a harrowing explosive account of road rage—and we dare you to resist running out to buy the book! (You don’t have to run out—you can buy it via the link provided.)

Among the essays and CNF, flash and short fiction, interviews, poems, reviews, translations, and three distinguished poets talking about their poems (with a full-length conversation between Duff Brenna and Jack Driscoll), you will meet exceptional authors like Chauncey Mabe, Walter Cummins, Vance Bourjaily, Dorianne Laux, Thomas Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, and no less than a new translation of a poem by Johann Wolfgang Goethe—to name but half a baker’s dozen—and find a multitude of words to quench your thirst for beautiful language and bring you closer to an understanding of existence.

You will also read an account by publisher-poet David Memmott of yet another local American attempt to override the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America and abridge the freedom of speech—(Mommy and Daddy? Which words do you not understand of the following: Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...)—in this case yet another group of “concerned parents” (god save us from “concerned parents,” especially the church-going sort!) versus a high school play. The beauty of the story Memmott tells, however, is that this time the First Amendment wins!

Side features of SHJ-3 include “The Bookshelf” —a thumbnail reference to timely titles and what they are about.

Poem for poem, story for story, essay for essay, word for word, Serving House Journal 3 is a bargain. How much does it cost? Nothing. That’s right: Zip. All it takes is to click the link below and imbibe your fill.

Hey, man, free drinks! Let’s go! Run—don’t walk—to the nearest Serving House!

www.ServingHouseJournal.com

About Thomas E. Kennedy