The Tiny is perhaps the first little magazine ever to be named for its typeface, that nine-point Times Roman that always looks smaller than it really is & which even mass market paperbacks have begun to abandon. Maybe it’s a strategy to ensure that the journal will read primarily by younger readers, tho I can’t recall a magazine that deliberately limited its readership since J in the early 1960s made a point of not distributing anywhere east of the Oakland hills. There’s no editorial tome either in the journal or on its website, tho one of the first issue’s 32 contributors, Mary Ann Samyn, offers “Two Bits of Tiny,” the second of which, “What’s this about smallness?” just might be addressing the question here:

The other thing I want to say is this: consider dolls when you consider smallness. sure, there are scary-lifesize dolls, dolls that walk and talk, but I’m thinking of regular dolls, a few inches high, a foot maybe. Dolls with eyes that open and close, dolls with blank stares, dolls that take your inquiries and turn them right back on you. That kind. You know the ones. You remember. Some people are scared of dolls. This makes sense. All over America, whole closets full of dolls. And under-bed boxes. And atticsd and crawlspaces. You can put dolls away, but will they stay? They’re small but not easily managed. Anyone who knows dolls knows this. You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.

Hence, “small” poems. The blank-faced dolls of the literary world. So harmless: stiff armed, blue blue eyes, a bit of ruffle. We all know how that adds up.

Even the smallest doll comes with a carrying case, a wardrobe. They’ve got baggage, is the point, and who do think will carry it? The doll cannot do this. Her hands only look useful. There’s heavy lifting to be done, and that’s where you come in.

 

There appears to be a pronoun missing from that question in the last paragraph, which is one of the ongoing risks of the small press (webzines have the advantage of always being correctible). Not quite half of the contributors here are bloggers, as is Gina Myers, one of the editors. (Gabriella Torres, Myers partner in this project, is not.) Names that will be familiar from the blogroll to the left include Jim Behrle, Del Ray Cross, Noah Eli Gordon, Shafer Hall, Geof Huth, Erica Kaufman, Mark Lamoureux, Aaron McCollough, Daniel Nester, Katey Nicosia, Danielle Pafunda, Sarah Rehmer, & Maureen Thorson. All of these poets are names known to me & while there is a fair amount of good work of theirs here, I find that I have an experienced that I’ve noted before with small press zines: the people who surprise me most are the ones I’ve never ever heard of before. Mary Ann Samyn would be one case in point – she has several complicated, hard-edged pieces here. Travis Nichols is another, with several short sharp prose poems from a sequence called “from Iowa.” Maggie Nelson is the third. Amira Thoron another.

This is perhaps the most important thing that a little magazine can accomplish, yet at the same time it’s predicated on a double movement – the people whose work is new to me has to stand out & have some kind of edge. But also the people whose work I already have to know has to “fit in” with what I know about their poetry already. Of the poets who are known to me already here, the most ambitious pieces – the ones that push at me – are those by Huth, especially his essay which has some of the gall of a manifesto (“Concrete poetry was the first world-wide movement in poetry….”), and by Lamoureux, whose pieces here take on a formal rhetoric I haven’t heard much of since the days of Robert Duncan.

Part of what this reveals is that The Tiny does have a visible aesthetic, more given to works that edge toward pushing the envelope, relatively little of the 17^th generation NY School pieces one sees around in other rags both physical & virtual. The Tiny appreciates complexity, a dimension that seems to unite a number of otherwise disparate poets here. This is to the good, since the journal clearly isn’t part of a regional scene as such – there’s probably a preponderance of poets from the Northeast here, especially Brooklyn, but the Bay Area (Del Ray Cross, Hazel McClure), Michigan (Aaron McCollough, Aaron Raymond, Nathan Hauke), Texas (Katey Nicosia), Oregon (Sarah Rehmer) & Georgia (Danielle Pafunda) are also included. Philly is represented by Nick Moudry, but since the New York Times just declared Philadelphia to be “The Next Burrough,” I’m not sure if that counts as out-of-town anymore.

Does The Tiny constitute a community? Only in the provisional sense that an audience that forms at a reading, then disperses again into the night, might be said to be one. But the fact that so many of the poets here are trying out a more difficult poetics suggests that a lot of them will have a fair amount to say to one another. If they read one another, not just here but anywhere they find each other's work, who knows what might be possible? And that would be much more than a tiny contribution to American letters, regardless of point size.