Writing about ezines Jacket & How2 last Thursday, I ended with this question:

Where is the journal that steps up to looking at the world with such rigor, but from the framework of poets age 35 & under?

One possible answer to that question, certainly, lies in The Poker, Dan Bouchard’s journal out of Cambridge, MA, settling now into its own adolescence of sorts with issue number 6 just out. Like the five issues that have preceded it, numero six is impeccably edited, combining work by newer poets (Nancy Kuhl & Deborah Meadows, both of whom are new to me), lots of well-known mid-career writers (Joe Elliot, Rodrigo Toscano, Lee Ann Brown, Bouchard himself, Bill Luoma, John Latta, Jennifer Moxley, Mitch Highfill), some American masters (Jackson Mac Low, Rae Armantrout, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Keith Waldrop), plus a serious swath of critical writing (34 pages of essays, roughly a third of the journal, none of which could be called a book review, tho Steve Evans’ “Field Notes” does include a little omnibus blog review of sorts & touches on recent books as well).

Bouchard clearly understands that an editor’s first function is to offer context – Evans’ notes are deservedly legendary for the work they do in this regard, critically, for example. Here, in addition to Evans, Bouchard includes Ben Friedlander’s selection a poem by Fitz-Greene Halleck, a neglected 19^th century American poet associated with the Knickerbockers, the major School of Quietude (SoQ) group prior to the Civil War, who has not had a volume published since 1869. Friedlander’s introductory essay makes a decent case for this conservative poet – something the current SoQ is notoriously poor at doing.¹ Similarly, Jackson Mac Low’s poem, “Feeling Down, Clementi Felt Imposed Upon From Every Direction,” a late piece from last year, is followed by a brief appreciation of Jackson by Mitch Highfill, an appropriate commemoration of Mac Low’s importance to American poetry over the past half century. Waldrop’s contribution to the issue consists of translations from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, one of the first great texts of what would turn out to be the avant-garde tradition.

Print journals have a materiality that an ezine can never match, of course. You can put it in your backpack & read it at convenient moments all day long as you travel about the city. On the other hand, there are limits to any print journal’s distribution, and print lacks the potential for readily accessible archives that ezines have (tho not all e-journals take advantage of this, to my constant & utter dismay). Bouchard’s commitment to print extends to his refusal to look at manuscripts sent electronically, a little Luddite touch that The Poker might just be the last journal to employ.

With the Mac Low, a new Drafts by DuPlessis & what may be the title poem of Armantrout’s next book all included here, it’s really worth noting just how much important verse Bouchard is able to get for a publication that includes just 65 or so pages of poetry, including both Baudelaire & Halleck. It is apparent that many poets now act as tho The Poker might just be the closest thing we have to a poetry journal of record in these United States. Given the comically bathetic narrowness of, say, Poetry, which has not performed this function since Henry Rago died while on sabbatical in 1969, it would be an interesting project for a sociologically minded critic – Alan Golding? – to trace just where poets have turned in the years since in the absence of such a journal. In 2005, however, it would seem clearly to be The Poker that takes on this responsibility.

 

¹ Since to do so would require confronting a literary history about which they are mostly in denial. So much better to pen another appreciation of Rilke than to investigate their own tradition’s roots & by-ways.