Hotel Amerika is the strangest new magazine I’ve come across in some time. Published out of the English Department at Ohio University, Athens, the first issue – dated Fall 2002 but only recently turning up in my mailbox – has a cover image by David Wojnarowicz, part of the late artist’s Rimbaud-in-NY series. It is not, however, the famous image of a junky shooting up while wearing a mask of Rimbaud, but a far safer scene, man in a Rimbaud mask standing at the edge of a body of water, a fishing trawler foggily silhouetted against the horizon. As it turns out, this dynamic between edgy, innovative artist and famous name-safe scene is a drama that is enacted throughout the entire issue.

 

Hotel Amerika appears expensively produced, but the visual decisions have a quantitative feel to them, as though more were always better. The logo has a professional design look to it, but is a little busy for a work employing just 12 letters – Hotel is san serif, the larger, lower Amerika is not – the k always is shown in a second color, for example as gray when reproduced in black-&-white. The same impulse to excess applies to interior page design as well. Outside of work titles, the logo is always the largest type on the 8½ by 11 page. Even more disconcerting, however, is the presence of the author’s name vertically down the outside margin in lower case italics:

 

n

a

t

h

a

n

i

e

l

 

m

a

c

k

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y

 

This distracting & difficult to decipher device is skipped on the title page for each work, where the author’s name appears above a gray bar in which the title is set in drop-out type. If nothing else, the design should be an incentive for future contributors to submit their most concise pieces.

 

The contributors to the first issue are no less overdone. Poetry from John Hollander & Charles Wright, but also from Nate Mackey & Rachel Blau DuPlessis. As well as Diane Wakoski, John Ashbery, Susan Griffin, Hugh Seidman, Jean Valentine & Colette Inez. Fiction from Guy Davenport & Alyce Miller. Essays by Charles Bernstein & Andrea Dworkin – that’s a combination worth thinking about – as well as by Carol Bly & Phillip Lopate.

 

Finally, there is a category in the table of contents called Prose Poetry / Short Prose, which includes Lawrence Fixel, Eduardo Galeano, Rosmarie Waldrop, Tom Andrews & Killarney Clary. As a grouping, this is the one category in this issue that makes sense. Not because Clary or Galeano are doing anything remotely similar to Waldrop or Fixel or Andrews, but because the parameters of the genre (at least as defined here) are such that it raises issues that one can see being worked out in consistently interesting, if different, ways.

 

Given where she usually publishes, Clary might be seen as part of the new quietude, but in having to work through her impressionistic & deeply personal pieces in prose rather than verse, she forces herself to a formal rigor that’s uncharacteristic of that scene:

 

As she woke from her screaming dream she heard her voice – a weak, worthless gasp, little more than air. On that seam she heard herself before her shame – an odd shame in the dark alone as she was – before leaving into sleep, before leaving on the liner from the quay with her parcels. We test goodbye new every time, to tear out a few stitches, to measure what enters.

 

Andrews is the sort of comic poet who would have done fabulously living in New York City, hanging out with 3^rd & 4^th gen St. Marks poets, but who instead did the small city MFA & tenure route until he died way too young from a rare blood disorder. The curious result is that Andrews is a well-known poet, but not by the readers who would probably have appreciated him best. It would be interesting to see his work set alongside the likes of, say, Joe Brainard or Tom Veitch or an Actualist such as Darrell Gray.

 

Lawrence Fixel in some respects is the really great presence in Hotel Amerika. At 85, Fixel has been a quiet – indeed almost silent – presence on the San Francisco scene for at least five decades, coming to readings, sitting in back, saying little or nothing, leaving as soon as the events were over. His own prose works, which have appeared in little magazines & small volumes also for decades, may have started out of an interest in surrealism but have evolved into a meditative terrain all their own. In some respects, Fixel, who is characterized as a “guardian spirit” by David Lazar in a prefatory editorial note, may be the one poet included in this issue not because he (or she) was a “name.”

 

Andrews has five works in Hotel Amerika while Fixel has four – and, if anything, the magazine would have been stronger had it included more of their writing & had fewer cameo appearances by more famous names.

 

From the perspective of a reader, the disparate hodge-podge of writers comes across as a lack of editorial vision. The absence of an articulated aesthetic stance most clearly impacts the poetry. On the plus side, Hotel Amerika includes Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ “Draft 53: Eclogue.” It’s absolutely worth reading – this is true for every section of that work – and is reprinted in full on the website. And it’s good to see Hugh Seidman & Diane Wakoski given ample space for their poems as well. But John Hollander’s offering of what can only be called an Armand Schwerner imitation, “Antique Fragments,” is a howler even by Hollander’s standards. Here is the VII^th  and final section:

 

This boat that holds us near the edge of the lake

Has quickly run over the evening water

Now [ . . . ] at rest [ . . . ] rocking [ . . . ]

I am in your arms [. . . ]

Our lives in the arms of the waves.

 

If the sentimentality of those final lines are intended to be satiric, they fall so far short of Schwerner’s far more comic, erudite & pointed Tablets as to be embarrassing. What is even more startling, I suspect, is the idea of Hollander imitating Schwerner in the first place. It has even occurred to me that Hollander might not be imitating Schwerner, however badly, & that maybe Hollander doesn’t know Schwerner’s work. That would be a far more damning conclusion.

 

As is often enough the case when new journals start with a burst of name writers & no clear direction like this, it may be that Hotel Amerika’s actual aesthetics won’t become evident for a few issues. Looking at the table of contents for the second issue posed on the website, only one of the ten or so names I recognize, John Latta, isn’t associated with the school of quietude unless one includes the right-wing author, Mario Vargas Llosa. All in all, it’s a curious mix, even more so perhaps because George Hartley is on the masthead as a contributing editor.