How did Shiny get to be 16 years old already? Michael Friedman’s journal of poetry, now a biennial, has pushed quiet excellence just about as far it can go & managed to do a marvelous job in making each issue an event. Number 12 arrived just in time for Christmas & it’s hard not to simply throw out an infinite number of Christmas present/stuffed stocking tropes to indicate my pleasure at its arrival and all the great work inside.

When I lived in Berkeley & San Francisco, I would never save a magazine unless some of my own work was included in the issue – it wasn’t a question of desire, but of room. There is a point, somewhere around 2,000 books, when the amount of space to physically store a library becomes limited. I blew past 2,000 books years, maybe decades ago. A secondary result was that, since I knew in advance that I would not save the publication, I virtually never subscribed or bought copies of mags. The downside of this, of course, is that there is a lot of work, especially by newer writers who have not yet had a “big book” that you can’t learn about in any other fashion.

But we had long since maxed out of our book space in Berkeley, even with built-in bookshelves and a fairly impressive bricks & boards system in several rooms. When I was first contemplating the job offer that brought me to Pennsylvania, Krishna tells me that she could tell I was seriously thinking about because I went & got some cartons just to pick up the books that were lying around in stacks on the floor in case I wanted to invite a realtor over to talk about selling the house. It came to 13 cartons.

Now that I live in Pennsylvania in a house close to three times the size of our home in Berkeley, I still have stacks of books lying around everywhere – even as we’ve added nine book cases. So I’m still pretty rigorous about not getting or holding onto too many journals – my periodical collection has only five shelves allotted to it. Yet I’ve noticed that there are some magazine that are just too important to ever throw away – Chain is an obvious one, as is Combo – and I realize now that I’ve been saving Shiny for the past ten years. My only regret is that I didn’t get those early editions way back when.

I think of Shiny as being one of the last truly articulate manifestations of the New York School, the sort of generalization that is both true and not true at the same time. The journal started, I believe, in New York & didn’t acquire a Denver address until double issue 9/10 in 1999. Some classic New York School figures show up in every issue: Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, Kenneth Koch, Alice Notely, Ron Padgett, Tom Clark, Brad Gooch, Joe Brainard, Tim Dlugos, David Shapiro, Larry Fagin, Paul Violi, Clark Coolidge, Michael Brownstein, Ed Friedman, Charles North, Steve Malmude, Tony Towle, Eileen Myles, Susie Timmons, David Trinidad, Elaine Equi, Jerome Sala, Kim Rosenfield, Lewis Warsh, Ted Greenwald, Michael Gizzi, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, Bill Berkson, John Godfrey, David Lehman & Clark Coolidge have all appeared in these pages. Yet langpo has never been neglected – in the current issue alone, I can find not only Greenwald & Coolidge, but also Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Alan Bernheimer, Stephen Rodefer & Kit Robinson. There are also a number of younger writers who resist any sort of grouping: Alan Gilbert, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Davies & Dierde Kovac, Andrew Levy & Mark Wallace, just to pick a few. Plus a few older folks likewise hard to pin down: Steve Ratcliffe, Bill Corbett, Tom Raworth, Terence Winch, Anselm Hollo.

What makes Shiny a New York School magazine is Michael Friedman’s sense of active editorship – and here the contrast with Chain is fairly pronounced. In addition to the high design value and the inclusion, in every issue, of recent visual art*, Shiny uses positioning – Ted Greenwald leads off the current issue, Ted Berrigan led off 9/10 with a 25-page selection from his journals  -- interviews (Brad Gooch, Harry Mathews) and design to focus its aesthetic concerns. & while Shiny is quite ecumenical with regards to current poetries, it has generally shied away from non-NYS friendly poetries from the generation of the New Americans, including only John Wieners (twice), David Meltzer & some Allen Ginsberg photographs over the years. The current issue is dedicated to Kenneth Koch.

Running between 160 and 250 pages, each issue of Shiny has many, many treasures. It’s rare & wonderful to see four new Rae Armantrout poems in a single journal. And it’s simply wonderful to come across the long (14 pages) ”A Burning Interior” by David Shapiro, Kenneth Koch’s serial poem,  “The Man” –

Teeth

Coldly the knife is Montana

– two pieces by Terence Winch (a D.C. poet whose work I haven’t seen in far too long), two pieces by Jacques Roubaud (my personal favorite of the Oulipo writers), 16 sections from Mark Wallace’s ”Belief is Impossible,” three poems by William Corbett, two by Ashbery, excerpts from a collaboration  by Dierdre Kovac & Kevin Davies (“The cultural badger is hungry”), two poems in tercets by Kit Robinson & an excerpt from Bruce Andrews’ “Dang Me,” part of his turn to a new mellower tone (“Treat me as well as your pets”).

There are pieces to which I want to direct closer attention. The first is Alan Bernheimer’s “My Blue Hawaii,” The first stanza establishes the poem’s sense of style & the kind of world it projects:

Every queen loves a lobster

with the nerve to kill time

since it’s easy to be sure in a bistro

where more than dogs are turned away

This is the kind of pop art landscape that John Ashbery pioneered & the second generation New York School virtually patented – Ron Padgett, Joe Ceravolo, Bill Berkson are all superb at this. Bernheimer uses the same devices not so much to focus on style as such – this is why he’s not “really” a New York School poet – but on the language beneath:

Your mother had the particle

but key words are too brittle

to warp the probity of a lifetime

for a perp walk through a wafer fab

While “wafer fab,” a facility that manufactures silicon chips, turns up more times in a Google search of the web than Anna Warner’s hymn, “Jesus Loves Me,” none of the 48 occurrences on a page that also includes “poem,” “poetry” or “poems” actually appears in a poem.** What we have here is not merely a moment of marvelous prosody – let those last two lines roll around on your tongue for awhile – but also an instance of the culture coming into the language of a poem for the very first time.

Lisa Jarnot’s two pastorals also jump off the page & into the ear. Here is “Hound Pastoral”:

Of the hay in the barn

and the hound in the field

of the bay in the sound, of the

sound of the hound in the field

of the back of the field of the

bay and the front of the field

of the back of the hound and the

front of the hound and the sound

of the hound when he bays at

the sound in the field

with the baying of hounds in the

baying of arms in the field

of the hound on the page in the

sound of the hound in the field

of the hay that unrests near

the hound in the barn in the field

of the bend in the barn in the

sound of the hound in the bay

by the barn in the field.

Jarnot may have the best ear of any poet under 40 – Lee Ann Brown is really the only other poet who comes close – so it’s no accident that she is willing to take risks like this – the actual climax of this poem comes with the word “bend” in the first line of the last stanza, the introduction of a new sound that completely shapes everything around it.

At the age of 21, Jarnot published a book entitled Phonetic Introductions. The collage that serves as the frontispiece to her 1996 Burning Deck volume, Some Other Kind of Mission, is built around a Perec-like phrase: “there are no ‘e’s’ in the other language.” Ring of Fire, published by the late, lamented Zoland Books in 2001, is filled with works that no other poet in the world could have written. I’d wondered at first why Jarnot, who seems so out of place generationally, could have been selected to fill out the Curriculum of the Soul series of critical pamphlets, but her volume, One’s Own Language may in fact be the strongest one in that entire series. It’s one of those “knock you on your butt” kinds of books – reading it reminded me of what reading Tristes Tropique, Proprioception & The Mayan Letters felt like when I was a youngster reading them for the first time. It also made realize just how very long it has been since I have had a reading experience like that.

I noted before that Shiny has generally steered clear of the likes of projectivism – Robert Creeley seems never to have appeared in its issues. Yet here is Jarnot, Duncan’s biographer & perhaps the closest thing in her age cohort to an extension of that aesthetic. Her appearance in Shiny 12 is not her first, either.

It has been Shiny’s particular contribution to poetry to show to us what has evolved out of the original (or at least second generational) New York School – it’s really the only publication now doing that. That it can also show us how this vision of poetry ties into everything from langpo to this multigenerational gumbo of mavericks is a test of what a great journal can (& maybe even should) be.

* Duncan Hannah has been Shiny’s art editor since the move to Colorado, and this has shifted the art included to figurative works mostly in neo-Pop post-post-impressionist modes, somewhat away from the more conceptual work of its earlier issues. Every artist in the last two issues has been represented by a New York gallery.

** I’m not certain how encouraged I am to discover that the editor of Chip Scale Review has penned editorials in verse, however.