The Poker is back, issue number 5, demonstrating all over again what it is like to be shockingly good. Shockingly because the presence of an editorial vision not only gives the journal an impressive coherence, it also makes you aware of just how often it is absent, even from fairly decent periodicals. Along with John Tranter’s Jacket, which has many of the same strengths, The Poker is a how-to course for editing a magazine.
Editor Dan Bouchard’s secret is not just balance & order – those he demonstrates the virtues of these in practice – but also because he deliberately combines newer poets with canonically famous elders, both living (John Ashbery, Robin Blaser) and not (Laura Riding, Jack Spicer). In doing so, Bouchard is making an argument that Rachel Loden & Chris McCreary, Kevin Davies, Kaia Sand, Drew Gardner et al can stand as equals with any of the anointed. And for the most part, the work Bouchard prints makes the case for him. And he is making a case for a particular kind of context: these elders, these young’uns.
The issue begins, not unlike The Nation, with letters, in this issue from Nathaniel Tarn & the ubiquitous Kent Johnson, both in reference to Steve Evans’ “Field Notes” from the fourth number. This is followed by two suites of poetry from Loden & McCreary, followed by a longish essay by Riding on the subject of letter as a legitimate literary mode. This is followed by two new poems by Ashbery, and then a quartet of younger poets: Kevin Davies, Kaia Sand, Marcella Durand & Drew Gardner.
Then come five “new” poems by Jack Spicer, part of a trove of 100 or so lost works that have been discovered by Peter Gizzi & Kevin Killian during the process of their editing a compleat (as distinct from Collected) Spicer for UC Press. Like the others I’ve seen from the new ones, they generally don’t stand up to Spicer’s best work. On the other hand, they’re still the chilling, riveting poems of a deeply troubled guy who knew a whole lot more than he was telling. Thus, for example, “Blood and Sand” from 1958:
It is as if the poem moves
Without the poem. I have captured you.
Done all my will. Have done with all
Emotion.
There is something that bothers me about the poem
Not anything real. But a poem. Your body
The noise that nothing makes upon the shore of an ocean
The big without.
It is as if a poem moves
Without your reality. Your not being there
That defines a nice set of arms
Not holding.
Not holding what. An absentness of you.
This bed is there. Defines,
Without the poem.
This poem predates the opening poem of Language, “This ocean, humiliating in its disguises … “ by four years. Yet it is at least as tight & well written as anything in The Heads of the Town, Billy the Kid or Lament for the Makers. It makes you wonder why he didn’t publish this earlier, save that he probably then couldn’t have written the later poem, which has become (for better or worse) his signature piece.
Spicer is followed by Blaser, in this instance an interview (with a tiny elegy for Don Allen at the postscript). Then two more poets, one who is entirely new to me, Michael Carr, and one who is eminently familiar, Fanny Howe. Tim Peterson’s review of books by Brenda Iijima & Allison Cobb virtually ties a bow around the issue.
This isn’t a perfect magazine – I’d redesign the cover myself – and one can certainly argue that Bouchard’s vision gives too much weight to this or that (I might include more young poets, not to the exclusion of the older ones, but in addition). But when I contrast this with the bland bureaucratic mode of the alphabet-driven table of contents, it makes me painfully aware that any vision trumps none at all.
For reasons that are utterly obscure, this magazine has no web presence at all. Bouchard discourages submissions via email even. This may be the modern equivalent of Jack Spicer’s refusal to distribute the journal J east of Berkeley – it will limit the impact of Bouchard’s argument in a way that, say, a journal like Sulfur was not constrained. As Kaia Sand would say, that was then, this is now.
