The Pursuit of Imperfection.

"Lying and poetry are arts - arts, as Plato saw, not unconnected with each other - and they require the most careful study
. . . Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. But in modern days while the fashion of writing poetry has become
far too common and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into disrepute."
- Oscar Wilde,The Decay of Lying

"What bleeds worse than a misguided stab at the truth?"
- Alberto Lanciani, La Fabbrica del Fabrication

Would I lie to you? Of course I would. With a certain verve & glee. Not out of malice or Machiavellian desire. But because lies are all we have & each one is a treasure. I lie out in the sun, I lie in my house, I lie on the phone, I lie out of the sheer enjoyment of communication & connection that only falsehood can engender.

All information contains by its very reductionist nature, a certain degree of untruth. The dissembling inherent in all dissemination. The santeros allowed their religion to survive the trip from Africa to the new world only by disguising their gods behind the names & iconography of Catholic saints. The syncretism essential to Santeria's perseverance has been instrumental in sustaining the core of other notions that operate outside the bounds of what's deemed acceptable. By deliberately telling something wrong you can get them on the right track more readily than you could by telling them something correct but which they already knew.

To take on the impossible task of conveying directly an altogether new & alien concept would be to appear ridiculous or vulgar. But telling the truth about more mundane ideas & events is just as impossible. To convey experience into discriptive language necessitates boiling it down to whatever's salient & pouring it into acceptable categories at the expense of nuance. But in taking the infinite of a circumstance & crunching it to the manageable, yr lying if only by omission. The unbridled scientific positivism of the Journal of the American Medical Association for example & the rigorous sensualism of Penthouse, both fail to capture the complete picture of what it is to have a human body. Even to declare that all talk is based on collateral falsehood is itself a kind of lie by oversimplification - but we have to start somewhere.

Oeuvre simplification

Any attempt to get beyond that & actually arrive at the whole truth leads to wholesale trouble. Leo Tolstoy's poor Levin was so adept at seeing every side of an issue that he lost every argument & ultimately couldn't budge. Hapless political footnote Al Gore became the one person in America who couldn't beat Bush in part because he tried to cover too much ground every time he opened his pie hole. I know plenty of outstanding writers who will sabotage themselves into remaining nameless. Writers who don't publish their work or perform it because they've never considered a piece done. But here I am digressing worse than all of them, laying so much foundation that the house itself never gets built, making excuses for lies that I haven't even told yet.

So here's one for you, the central lie of this publication: Lungfull! magazine is different from any other literary journal insofar as we print the rough draft of contributors' work alongside the final version so you can see the creative process from beginning to end. That's the nutshell description of the magazine's vision, designed to deliver the gist of what's what with Lungfull! in as few words as possible. As a soundbite it works but as a description it's grossly inaccurate.

It implies some fallacies about writing itself that weaken the magazine's emphasis on work as a verb more than a noun. It's pretty clear that the poems in Lungfull! don't actually begin with the draft printed next to them. Even when the draft exists in a secret scribbled notebook or the back of an ATM receipt, the poem begins much earlier, culled from vastly wider sources than a single draft could indicate. Even the pieces that writers claim to have come to them in a flash of genius, have their origins in far flung experiences, trials & amusements. The prior conversations, poems, songs, acts of visual art & other cultural detritus. The prep work involved in being receptive to a great poem, that prep work can take years of daily work. The clearing away of leaves before you get to the ground of good writing is as much a part of the writing as the brilliant gems that follow. Right now, unbeknownst to even herself, the first strains of the fabulous sestina-cycle "Clueless Tuber" are gestating in the mind of a young poet who won't be identifying as a poet for another ten years & won't actually consider the poems done for ten after that.

Of course no poem is ever done. For many, their publication in this journal - despite claims that the version facing the rough draft is the final one - is just a step in the poem's ongoing evolution. Contributor Rachel Levitsky wrote in to let us know she'd changed bus to boss in a poem that ran in issue 10. The editor's poem nepotistically published in issue one was subsequently & for good reason edited out of existence. We recommend anyone who has these issues take out a pen &, after making the corrections, be prepared for others. In the future, Lungfull! will be printed with a blue pencil sewn into the spine for quicker edits.

Subsequent to being printed in journals many poems go on to experience a rich series of metamorphoses appearing "in slightly different form" in a chapbook, in a perfect bound edition, in the selected then collected works of. Then there are the translations & adaptations for the screen. & even after the poems continue to reshape themselves in performance.

Horrible workers eating hors d'oevres

Add to the mix a poem's generative qualities, its ultimate role as the starting course for the feasts of later writers. Once written, a poem becomes the received heritage of every other writer, part of the terrain we walk through. Where a poem is working well, its final lines will open up entirely new fields of perception, & unpave the way for new forms of exploration. There are clear examples of lineage, of one poet's vision being impossible without other poet's having been at play prior & then there are specific works, like Tender Buttons, Howl, Convex Mirror, The Sonnets, that have acted as starting points for still others. Tom Phillip's glorious A Humument is testament to how far one person's opus can be another's source material. "Other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen," said Rimbaud in a letter to a justifiably concerned friend.

Even this essay, this letter to you, its implicit claim to be etire of itself is another falsehood. It's just the latest section of a much longer essay that began six years ago in issue one with "not another goddamn zine" and will end several issues down the line with "now that I am your benevolent dictator" or "now that I am a misspelled historical footnote out of context." It's a falsehood that emerges from the tradition of the fallible or the not entirely benevolent narrator. To express anything one must be prepared to express it succinctly & inaccurately. "If you screw up, well you better screw it tight," says Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe. But bolloxing something well is a skill. Failure demands a certain dedication. Practice makes imperfection & imperfection makes room for the amazing. Only outside the bounds of acceptable conclusions can the astounding transpire, can writing contain anything beyond twittering snackfood logic & the utilitarian pistons of mundane engineering.

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