The new issue of Chain is out and continues the magazine’s run as the premier American literary journal. No other publication in the past decade has envisioned the breadth of American literature (defined here as more than just U.S. writing) with the reach, complexity, completeness and nuance of this publication co-edited originally by Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman, now with the assistance of Thalia Field and Cecilia Vicuña. For a reader of my generation, the experience of Chain harkens back to the heroic period of postmodern literary publications – Origin, Coyote’s Journal, Yugen, Black Mountain Review, Caterpillar, Sulfur, This, Hills, Temblor, Roof, Poetics Journal, the original HOW(ever) & their peers. Chain is the one print publication right now that can be said to change writing as it publishes it, in the sense that a reader comes away with a sense both of what is possible and what is necessary that is wider and deeper than before.

So why am I unable to look at an issue of Chain without thinking about a question that Jena Osman put to me several years ago at a Writers House event?

I had mentioned the disproportionate hoopla that had greeted a little journal called Apex of the M, edited by Lew Daley, Alan Gilbert, Kristin Prevallet & Pam Rehm*. To oversimplify only slightly, Apex took a confrontational view of literature, arguing that the language poets had largely been a rationalist movement, excluding mysticism in general and especially Gnostic views of Christianity. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary (such as the poetry of Susan Howe, one of the journal’s advisory editors), Apex presented a range of American postmodernist work that could be read as an inconsistent critique of langpo – John Taggart, Will Alexander, Elizabeth Robinson, Ed Dorn and Gustaf Sobin were among the contributors in its first two issues.

Identifying the boundaries of langpo, as Apex seems rather effectively to have done, is not the same as identifying an alternative, let alone an anti- (or post-) langpo movement, particularly given the famously isolative nature of several of the writers listed above. Apex came and went rather quickly in the larger scheme of things, but continued to be discussed for several years after. “So why is it,” Jena asked (I’m paraphrasing here from a mediocre memory), “that Chain, which was begun at the same time in the same city, which has a much broader and more democratic view of the possibilities of literature, receives so much less attention?” [It is worth noting, of course, that in the long run, this is certainly not the case. If it were a contest of which publication best manifested lasting literary value, Chain won hands down. But the question as I understood it had more to do with the proportionality of response.]

Part of the answer, of course, was that Chain lacks Apex’s hyperactive & self-important presentation. Apex led off its issues with fiery editorials proclaiming its revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary, depending on your perspective here) world view. Apex offered the charm of the quixotic. Chain, on the other hand, was from the beginning inherently inclusive and its impulses democratic. Language poetry was presented as though it were only one of several sources every young writer would want to think about. Apex by contrast put langpo on a pedestal only in order to take better aim as it attempted to knock it off.

But having said all this, there was – and still is – an inherent muting within Chain’s editorial position, one that has limited its impact and runs oddly contrary to the extraordinary intellectual ambition that otherwise informs every issue. And that is its use of alphabetical order to present content.

I obviously am not one to speak ill of the alphabet as an organizing principle, but in writing my own poem of that name, I know that I’ve had to take special to deal with the narrative needs of the poem. Narrative in this sense means literally the unfolding of meaning over time. This isn’t possible when the elements of the ordering are the surnames of authors.

I have never been fond of the use of themes to organize literary journals – it feels to me far more stifling than generative, causing many publications to include second-rate work that “fits” while ignoring far better writing that doesn’t. Chain, which has used themes from its initial issue, has avoided, or perhaps transcended, the usual limitations of the thematic by envisioning each of them so broadly, and so creatively. There is a sequence in Chain 8, on comics, that moves from Leslie Scalapino (whose conception of genre is itself worthy of a doctoral dissertation), through Lytle Shaw to Sally Silvers, that is worth the price of the 300-page journal.**

But such moments are fortuitous and accidental. What if Lytle Shaw had been named Bruce Andrews or Al Young? The problem is that, editorially, magazines are always arguments: their mode is exposition. What comes first and who goes where matters. Nobody understood this better than Clayton Eshleman with his journals Caterpillar and Sulfur. Eshleman’s issues were composed almost musically. Thus, for example, Sulfur 3, published in 1982, begins with one of Robert Duncan’s last Passages and closes its literature section (Eshleman’s journals followed the editorial mode set by Harriet Monroe with Poetry, placing reviews at the “back of the book”) with selections from the correspondence between Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg. In between, works were positioned primarily for the sake of contrast.

[Following Duncan in that issue was a prose poem of mine – one of the first sections of The Alphabet to appear in print & something that at the time must have appeared antithetical to Duncan’s poetry – followed by a young British poet with more overt “New American” tendencies, Allen Fisher, and then a young East Coast writer still working under the visible influence of George Oppen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis. That Eshleman intuited correspondences between my work, Allen’s and Rachel’s I can only imagine. In 2002, it seems immediately apparent in ways that still appear unfathomable to me if I look at these texts of two decades ago.]

Like Apex, Eshleman’s Sulfur’s influence among writers, especially in its early years, far outstripped its distribution. But each issue was always making an argument about value in writing. It is precisely that argumentation by editorial placement that disappears into the arbitrariness of alphabeticism in Chain. At best, one can intuit one by the range of inclusion, but this is a second order of editorial exposition.

Clearly, the use of the alphabet corresponds to Chain’s democratic impulses. Nobody gets to go first but by the accident of their father’s last name. But argued thus – or perhaps not argued thus – it’s a bureaucratic democracy at best, and one that carries within it the not so dim echoes of patriarchy in the use of surnames.

In one sense, this editorial muteness may make Chain an even truer representative of contemporary literary culture, which in the past 15 years has tended to be both progressive and yet firmly committed to thwarting its own political efficacy***. It’s a curious position, ultimately, and one that seems very much at odds with the journal’s own ambition, as though it were ambition itself with which Chain might be at odds. In the long view of history, the test of a journal is best gauged by the writers whom it brings forward to broader audiences. Thus, in addition to their editors, one associates Origin with Olson, Blackburn and Zukofsky, Black Mountain Review with Creeley, Duncan and again Olson. One associates Caterpillar and Sulfur with David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Kelly, Pierre Joris, Michael Palmer and Charles Bernstein. HOW(ever) proved decisive in the renaissance of interest in Lorine Niedecker. But after nine issues, one associates Chain only with its editors. And that I think is the answer to the question that Jena Osman posed. Though it has taken me years to respond.

*This was the order as presented in Apex’s masthead, very much a “boys first” vision of literature.

** At $12 for issues that typically weigh in at over 300 pages, Chain is also one of the great bargains in literature.

***Not unlike the way the Green Party helped to put George W., Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft into their current positions.