FOUR ON THE HORIZON
PERIPHERY IS HERE! It’s been a while so, if you missed it, issue 3 is OUT NOW and you can find it HERE! Go check it out if you haven’t already (or if you have!), and let the writers know you loved their work! It’s been in the works for a while and everyone who’s a part of it is so talented and came together to create something really cool! Thank you as always to everyone who contributed, and to all of you for your support!!
ISSUE FOUR subs are still open! Our theme is CAVE CANEM, and we want you to send us your most warning-sign-worthy pieces. We have received exclusively poetry submissions, so in an attempt to diversify the issue a little more, we are open until May 30th for visual art, creative non-fiction, short essays and micro fiction, and you can find the full guidelines HERE. Go submit!!! Issue four is a special one because, accounting for my extremely long hiatuses, it’s our TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY! Stay tuned to see what we have planned around issue four’s release to mark the occasion! Thank you all for your patience - DOG TEETH means so much to me, and I’m so grateful for everyone’s continued support.
Also! We are moving to Bluesky! You can find us HERE or, if you’re not on bluesky, you can check out our website as always. We will be leaving Twitter within the next two weeks, so those two places will be the only ways to keep up to date with DOG TEETH news outside of this newsletter. Go follow us over on Bluesky!
COMMUNITY COLUMN
We want to make a masterpost for the website of global community aid; if you know of any mutual aid, fundraisers, or charities that you think would benefit from having eyes on them, send them over and we will take a look! Email your picks to dogteethlitmag@gmail.com.
We also gathered together interviews from some contributors to issue three! Check them out below and go read their pieces in PERIPHERY! Let them know how talented they are!
PERIPHERY INTERVIEWS
FROM ISSUE THREE: PERIPHERY, AN INTERVIEW WITH EVELYN VOZAR
i. Your piece, ‘my grandmother pressed her hands to her heart after she prayed’, was published in the last issue, PERIPHERY. What does periphery mean to you?
To me, periphery means out of bounds, or pushing the boundaries (the place where a writer thrives).
ii. ‘my grandmother pressed her hands to her heart after she prayed’ is such a visceral piece built on lessons and being and love; what do these themes mean to you in relation to periphery?
I felt that my poem fit Periphery because it was as raw as it is real, something I could really sink my teeth into, that love is as messy and stinking as it is beautiful.
iii. Do you have any works that serve as consistent inspiration for you, or that you like to emulate in your own writing?
Emily Dickinson has always been an inspiration for me, I got really into her work when I was in high school. I always admired how many of her poems and short and sweet, and biting at times- something I try to emulate.
iv. Are there any patterns within your own works that you love?
I try not to make my poems like the other, and, because I am restless, I love giving myself that challenge if I start to sense a pattern. I guess I have a habit of getting bored of my own writing, so I shed its skin.
v. I’d love to hear about your creative technique, if you’d like to share!
I wish I could say I have some beautifully crafted writing technique, but I often come up with a ridiculous poem title in my head, I write it down- and later I have to figure out how to make it work, haha.
FROM ISSUE THREE: PERIPHERY, AN INTERVIEW WITH ZIP G.
i. Your pieces, ‘Untitled (are you there?)’, ‘BE NOT AFRAID’ and ‘Hallways are always the worst part of the house’, were published in the last issue, PERIPHERY. What does periphery mean to you?
I see the periphery not just as a pretty epic band, but as something beyond the self. Maybe, like a window looking in? If you get what I mean. I feel it's more of a concept that I feel deeply and nothing that I can accurately verbalise.
ii. ‘Untitled (are you there?)’ is dreamlike and by its very nature, deals intimately with periphery! Was there a particular inspiration for this piece?
Looking back at it, it feels a little silly. I wanted to show the voice/the reader of the piece as like a shapeless being, and the little cut-out as something that they had been chasing to fix themselves. I think that it reflects myself at the time, and it was so cathartic to realise that I don’t need to be confined by the prison of the flesh to be myself.
iii. ‘BE NOT AFRAID’ plays with form in such a fun way; do you often work with form this way in your work?
No, actually! I began to write all of my poetry by hand over the past year and a bit, wanting a change of pace from just staring blankly at a screen and hoping the words would come out. BE NOT AFRAID had its humble beginnings over like 5? pages of my red notebook, scribbled in margins with notes about how there are two voices and little drawings of biblically accurate angels and how I should perform this next time I go to a spoken word night. Still, in the end, I found that the charm of my crossed-out words and the funky spacing won me over. And who doesn’t love a visual that lines up with what you’re writing about?
iv. Are there any patterns within your own works that you love?
Anybody who has been around me for longer than 5 minutes knows that I love talking about the void, the rot, and the otherness of self, and juxtaposing that with mundane occurrences. I also love intertwining these with circular narratives and the idea that fate rules all, which you may see in the future ;)
v. I’d love to hear about your creative technique, if you’d like to share!
I notoriously “get very mentally ill” during the process of making anything, finding myself in some sort of state where I just need to get the images or the words I see in my head that are in some way plaguing me out onto a page or into the ether. I’m very much moving to change that, trying to create when I can with no expectations, so I’m not just pent up and bothered by my stagnation, being stuck in unhealthy cycles and hoping that the words that come out will fix me.
FROM ISSUE THREE: PERIPHERY, AN INTERVIEW WITH SEAN GLATCH
i. Your pieces, ‘Green Eyed Monster’, ‘The Rhinelander Hodag’ and ‘Faggot Jesus Lives!’, were published in the last issue, PERIPHERY. What does periphery mean to you?
I think about periphery as the border of “here” and “not here,” which is an experience most people have of their own lives—especially queer people, or anyone marginalized. The way society functions, we are all raised to reach towards the center of something, and to be excluded when we aren’t “deserving” of that center. More concretely, we’re all raised to perform for the benefit of a cis, white, male-oriented culture; those of us not meeting those identities or benefiting those identities are sent to the peripheries, surveilled only for whether we try to disrupt the way society functions. We are threatened with being “not here.”
My poems are often about (unmet) queer desire. What does this have to do with peripheries? Of course, queer desires are always being policed, sorted into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” categories, but the issue runs deeper than that. When our own needs for queer love aren’t met, we are also made periphery. Love is a way of seeing someone, and to be unseen is to be sent to the border of “not here.” And there’s a very real politics to this, too: who isn’t allowed to be seen in the queer community? Why don’t queer folk try more to see each other? I can only speak from the perspective of a gay man, but, in my experience, many of us are so focused on escaping our own marginalization that we don’t notice how we’re marginalizing others.
I’ve written a lot of poems from this periphery—of feeling like I don’t belong, even in the queer community. The feeling transcends romantic or communal love: queer folk are in desperate need of love in all forms, but don’t know how to give it to themselves or to each other. There’s a lot of beauty to be found in the periphery, but also peril. If we must be here, may we at least tether each other to this world, love each other into being.
ii. All three of your pieces are gorgeously queer; it’s a joy to read unabashedly gay work. Would you mind speaking on the importance of making queer art, to you?
I think queer art is a way of making the peripheries of life habitable, even beautiful. To say that queer art saved me is an understatement: I needed art to show me that it was possible to live as a queer person, to help me find beauty and liberation in queerness. And I needed queer art to help me make sense of the world, how it functions, what my place is in it, what I can do to make it better.
Most of the poetry I write is an attempt to organize my life into some kind of meaningful experience. What do I make of this persistent sense of alienation? How can I understand the struggle for love at both a romantic and communal level? I make queer art because I need to make sense of the bullshit. And, we need queer art so that we know we aren’t alone in our struggles. If I know one thing, it’s that my experiences are not unique, and if I can turn my art into a conversation about the queer experience—if I can somehow illuminate this experience through language—then, maybe, I can save both myself and someone else whose hurt and hope both burn the way mine do.
iii. Do you have any works that serve as consistent inspiration for you, or that you like to emulate in your own writing?
Truthfully, no—but I am constantly experimenting with different artists, styles, and inspirations. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time emulating the kind of poetry that Richard Siken writes. (I was a Gen Z gay kid on Tumblr—go figure.) Nowadays, I just try to pay attention to unexpected language and let it move through me into my own work.
I run a bimonthly poetry group in NYC called Poets Out Loud, and that’s been a real boon for my own creative growth. We read, as a group, different queer poets each session, and I have us write to prompts inspired by those poems. Some prompts are formal, others topical, others a bit more abstract. For example, a few months ago, we read a Bradley Trumpfheller poem, and my prompt was to write a poem that is “uncategorizable.” Even now, I don’t know what that means, but I really like the poem I wrote, and I adored the poems that everyone else shared that day.
In other words, I don’t have any static inspirations, but I do find there’s an endless amount of queer art to take inspiration from and channel into my own work.
iv. Are there any patterns within your own works that you love?
This is a difficult question for me, 1) because I have a high standard for what I consider to be “good” writing, and 2) because I’ve been lately re-evaluating what I was taught in terms of how to write poetry.
Namely, I’ve been thinking a lot about our culture’s preoccupation with identity, and how that preoccupation informed what I was taught to write. I often felt that the only way my work would be “good” is if I focused intensely on my own queerness. Which isn’t to say that the poems I’ve written are unnecessary or navel-gazing, or that we don’t need poetry about queerness (we certainly do), but that I wonder what art I haven’t created by having my focus so lasered into this question of identity. What have I put in my own peripheries by solely writing about my queer experience?
This answer probably seems out of place, given that both my poems and my interview responses are focused on some aspect of queer identity. But what I mean to say is that identity only scratches the surface of queerness, because queerness isn’t merely a category, it’s a reaction to and subversion of the cultural norms regarding sex, gender, what we consider “taboo” and how we treat it. And I’ve wondered, am I only interrogating the surface of my queerness? Have I dug deep enough to access something more political or universal about the queer experience?
This isn’t a very good answer to your question. I’ve responded your question about “love” with self-criticism. But, I do appreciate my own pattern of self-interrogation, and of trying to find the universal in the particular. Poetry has allowed me to see my own experiences in the lives of people I’ve never met, and I hope that will remain true of my own work no matter how my preoccupations change.
v. I’d love to hear about your creative technique, if you’d like to share!
As I mentioned before, I run a bimonthly poetry group, and that’s really been a lifeline for my own creativity. I find it really beneficial to write alongside community. When we read poems together, I get to hear different perspectives on those poems, which I then consciously or unconsciously infuse into my own poetry. And there’s something very stimulating about writing in a room with other writers. I also know that, when the writing period ends, I’m always going to read the poem I wrote to our prompt, which typically scares me into writing something that will be at least half-decent. I’ve got a reputation to uphold!
As for revision, some poems take me years. I really need a fresh perspective to tackle a poem, and I can’t get that if I’m using the same mind I used to write the first draft. Getting feedback from others helps, but I typically find I need to visit and revisit a first draft many times over many sessions to see what the poem wants to become—which is usually an effort of tinkering with form, rather than language, as I usually get most of the words out in a first draft, but struggle with how to best arrange them.
FROM ISSUE THREE: PERIPHERY, AN INTERVIEW WITH T!K! WILLIAMS
i. Your piece ‘Barely Human’, was published in the last issue, PERIPHERY. What does periphery mean to you?
Periphery is a vantage point. It's an analytical framework. If you occupy it right, you can see the whole gestalt of an object/person/idea/scene while still being a part of it. It's you, making sure the dialectics that you make yourself a part of don't ever end. It's not a place of gaining complete awareness, but a knowledge of processes, of inputs and their effects. It's having a years-long conversation with yourself and being able to extract the whole meaning from just a snippet. It's scary and it's fun, and it needs us to keep it that way.
ii. The non-human aspect of this piece really hits hard - how do non-humans and humanity intersect for you?
Ever since I got my right hip replaced when I was 25, I've found the idea of being non-human very comforting. For as long as I've had a conscious relationship with my humanity, it's been one of interrogation, which wasn't always my preferred mode of interaction, especially not with something that close to What I Am. "Humanness" has always been primarily associated with diminishment to me, or as a vector through which I could be damaged. Obviously this is just as true for many nonhumans and their nonhumanness, but - I know how a body breaks. I know how bones and lungs and skin can fail. Do I know how a less complex machine would break? Do I know how a pack of wolves fixes itself? Do I know how bats feel as their colony collapses? Maybe I'll find out someday, but there's a lot of learning for me to do until then.
iii. Do you have any works that serve as consistent inspiration for you, or that you like to emulate in your own writing?
These are strange answers, but yes - Moxie Saturday's watercolor paintings and J Dilla's approach to quantization while producing his beats. The way Moxie used color and draws bodies (human and non-) and portrays the things those bodies can experience fascinates me. I don't quite know how to articulate this any more clearly, but the way they blend colors in their paintings is very similar to what I want the natural meter - the way I specifically read - of my writing to be. As for Dilla, he was coming up as a producer around the same time that commercial digital music production systems started including a feature called quantization, which automatically snapped input beats to a grid to make them musically precise. Unfortunately, this also removed most of the emotion & human feeling from them. J Dilla didn't simply turn the quantization feature on his MPC3000 off, but he isolated each track of his songs & did the process manually, viewing all the beats as their own important moments and placing them individually on each beat. The feel of each component part was the most important part of the whole, not complete, academic correctness.
iv. Are there any patterns within your own works that you love?
I'm a big fan of repetition in my poetry, so I tend toward forms that allow for play with that device - sestinas, pantoums and villanelles in particular - but in general I'm very interested in renegotiating the space in words that spoken language affords them. I like surprising rhymes and using large words in perfect meter whenever possible, but I think my most prominent pattern is that of establishing a rapport within my works. My poems are snapshots of moments in conversations I've been having with myself for year, and they need to sound like speech to reflect that. My best poems, I feel, are ones that approach connection not merely as informational or experiential, but as reaching out a hand to give the subject a pat on the head.
v. I’d love to hear about your creative technique, if you’d like to share!
Most of my creative processes deal with opening myself to as many speech patterns and traditions as possible. While I'm working on a piece, I'll usually bounce between music in a language I understand, conversations in languages I don't understand about things I do, stage performances, rap battles or freestyles, then switch to a drone record and let my language rise to meet the level of stimulation I'd been experiencing. Lots of pacing, lots of writing & erasing on whiteboards, lots of changing tense or conjugation or viewpoint until I find what works, almost like a point-and-click adventure game. My poems tend to present themselves as fairly developed pieces even on a first draft since so much of the processing and thought that goes into them has been happening in my mind for years, but that belies how precise I have to be when I'm shaping them to make a tangible, visible thing with parameters mimic years of shifting thought.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
DOG TEETH is excited to announce its newborn little sibling: UNHUMAN is a zine built by the non-human for the non-human. I love DOG TEETH with all my heart and it's a project I'm really proud of; I'm trying to work on its capacity for community and build it up as a space for interaction and solidarity and kinship. But one thing that my heart aches for, whenever I'm editing or looking back over DOG TEETH issues, is a more defined space for art from explicitly non-human voices.
If you are a non-human of any description; be it were-beast, mechanical being, extraterrestrial, heavenly body, therian, undead, or inhuman creature of any stripe, we want to hear from you!!! This space is for you and your art; we want to see your world, your heart, your inhuman spirit.
IF YOU AREN’T HUMAN, WE WANT YOUR WORDS:
THANK YOU as always for reading and for being here! DOG TEETH loves you! Stay weird + stay safe + take care of each other!
hi! excited for issue 4. just one question: i can't seem to access the submissions guidelines bc it says my email address doesn't have access, is this an issue on my end? thanks!