Curtis Faville is on my case for my footnoted critique of No.

 

Dear Ron:

 

Re: Your crit of a new magazine striving for a little format sparkle.

 

This is going to sound really off the wall and irrelevant, but I can still remember the day over 40 years ago when I picked up my first The New Yorker on a magazine stand in Napa. I was only 13, but fairly precocious and well-read. The format in those days was identical to what it had been since about 1928 — "Goings On About Town" in very fine print detailed virtually every cultural event in the New York City area, and then the lead masthead "Talk Of The Town" ran about 2-4 pages of paragraphs, crucially UNCREDITED. Then came two, sometimes three fiction pieces, and then usually a longer piece, either a "Profile" piece on a person, or a subject essay, followed further back in the pages by regular columns on travel, sports, books, etc., all interspersed with snappy cartoons and a couple of poems. The fascinating thing was that the stories, essays, and poems all had the authors' names discreetly at the end of their piece(s), and the magazine had NO contents page. In effect, the editors wanted you to read a piece first, without regard to its authorship, then "discover" who the author was at the end. Of course one could skip and look, but it wasn't the point. For the Town pieces, you could only guess who had written them, since they had no by-line at all. Later, of course, Tina Brown changed all that. But to get to my point — there was a certain sotto voce modesty built in, which was stylish, and not constructed around personality, reputation or publicity. The WORDS sold themselves, not the fame or glitz of the contributors. I've always felt that was a kind of ideal. A table of contents isn't irrelevant, but it's often done for the wrong reasons. I always liked the feel of the first 50 issues of the Paris Review, the texture of the paper, and so on. The style of Black Mountain Review was nice, but the paper stock was too stiff, making the binding crack. Now that Poetry (Chicago) has its millions, one hopes they'll redesign the old galloping warhorse — if anyone still reads that rag anymore. A poetry mag that had the old New Yorker attitude towards CONTENT might get my attention.

 

Curtis

 

One approach that I have seen several little magazines take over the years has been the “anonymous” issue – publishing an entire edition either with no identification of the authors, or only with their names listed collectively, usually at the end. The point seems to be to demonstrate the value of a text sans the “prestige” (or lack thereof) of a given author’s name. This has never made much (any?) sense to me simply because context is always already a part of the content of the poem. The absence of context is rather like watching Gone With the Wind on a black & white TV. It’s one of those “yes, but . . .” phenomena. What does, in such context, make of the writing of a younger poet who has cloned or otherwise channeled the style of an elder, the way, say, Antler does Allen Ginsberg. What if one was to publish a newly found Ginsberg poem alongside one by Antler in such an issue? Would readers be able to detect whose was whose?

 

This is where I think the indoctrination of the well-wrought urn leads readers (and writers at times as well) astray. The history of poetry is not – and never has been – a history of the most finely crafted poems. It is rather, the history of poetic change – formal change, the transformation of literary devices. Precisely because this is the point where literature engages the history of society. So the perfect historical recreation of an Allen Ginsberg poem fails to connect with literary history in a way that that a discarded, decidedly imperfect text by Allen himself engages it. And that, I would argue, is a fuller definition of content than the New Yorker has ever offered.