Another magazine that has emerged as one of the better publications of our time is Kiosk, published out of the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo, tho it is clearly a project of its three editors – Gordon Hadfield, Sasha Steensen & Kyle Schlesinger – & not at all your usual college-sponsored creative writing mag. It’s younger than The Poker, having just released its fourth issue (front cover at the head of this note, rear cover at the end), but it has one of the most distinctive visual presentations of any journal I’ve ever read – 30 years from now, someone will mention Kiosk & everyone will think of its impeccable design in much the same way that people do Locus Solus today. But Kiosk is also one of the best buys in the world of letters as well – just $5 for an issue of 250 pages plus, in number four, an audio CD that includes, amidst other delights, a complete 51-minute reading by the late Robert Creeley – an utterly fabulous event recorded originally in Plainfield, Vermont, in May 1998 that made my heart ache all over again at the idea that he’s gone.
If I look at Kiosk in the same framework as I have Jacket, How2 & The Poker, there is a little less both of poets I would characterize as masters – Creeley, Ken Edwards, Michael Davidson, Rae Armantrout (an interview conducted by Eric Elshtain & Matthias Regan), Bruce Andrews – and those who are midcareer – Cole Swenson, Jessica Grim, Craig Watson, Michael Basinski (both textual & on the CD) – but a lot more who are either younger, like Ben Lerner or Brendan Lorber, or are more or less new to me – such as husband-wife team of Robyn Schiff & Nick Twemlow, who a little Googling reveals are part of the post-School o’ Quietude (SoQ) Iowa City wave of younger poets.
But Googling is, in fact, necessary. Kiosk’s one serious failing is its editors’ reticence toward connecting the dots. This shows up in the curious use of page numbers, which are given only at the start of each selection – a format I associate with annual reports prepared by corporations for their shareholders – and a total lack of contributors’ notes. Now contributors’ notes are often the most banal things in the world, but for readers coming across writers for the first time, this can make a serious difference. How else, for example, might someone who doesn’t read contemporary philosophy know that Alphonso Lingis isn’t just another grad student? Or that Eliza Newman-Saul comes out of the MFA visual arts program at
Indeed, Kiosk’s disdain for context obscures not only larger potential frames for reading these works, but obscures the fact that the journal contains some 88 pages of critical opinion, including a terrific piece on Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days by Jon Thompson. Not to be confused with Tom Thompson, another member of the post-SoQ
If an editor’s first responsibility is to provide the best possible context for the work s/he publishes, Kiosk’s argument might be that it wants readers to take on these works & authors totally fresh, as tho we never heard of Rae Armantrout or Cole Swenson before. That works just fine if you’re Armantrout or Swenson or Bruce Andrews, but it seriously compromises anyone’s experience of new writers, such as Thompson & Thompson, Newman-Saul, Twemlow or Schiff. A total absence of context isn’t, ultimately, the best possible presentation, regardless of how terrific the visual presentation might be.
My frustration here is not unlike my reaction to Chain’s unwillingness to impose anything more meaningful than the accidents of last names as an ordering principle. Kiosk, like Chain, is a magazine that is soooo close to being truly great, its refusal to take the last few tiny steps is maddening. Chain at least understands that page numbers & contributors’ notes have a function & gives each issue an overarching theme. Kiosk, in contrast, just wants to look great.
