I have mentioned Chain on several occasions on this blog, for good reason – it is the premier hard copy poetry journal of the day. My first piece on September 11 touched a nerve in a way that hopefully has been productive. Co-founder Juliana Spahr responded to it on the 14^th of September. Jena Osman, the other co-founder, used the occasion of the First Festival of Literary Magazines in New York to respond to these issues. Here is her talk:

As a poet I have long been interested in chance occurrences, in unpredictable sense created by different languages meeting inside of a page-bound framework.  My work has been informed by theater, in the way that language performs in various contexts, in the relation of spectator to stage and reader to page. I experiment with the collision of narrative and anti-narrative strategies and take notice of the various registers of attention that we bring to what’s before us.

I met Juliana while I was a grad student at SUNY Buffalo. Some other younger poets in town when I arrived included Peter Gizzi, Lew Daly, Pam Rehm and Liz Willis. We all had quite various concerns, and I was interested in finding a way to create a conversation through our work. At the end of my first year, I organized an experiment called The Lab Book where eight of us wrote poems and then each of us wrote responses to the poems written by the other seven. The book that resulted began with a poem, followed by the seven responses, then another poem, followed by seven responses, etc. I was interested in the idea of writing as reading and reading as writing in perpetual exchange.

Such forms of exchange and investigation are crucial to my process as a writer.

A couple of years later (in 1993), Juliana and I decided to start a magazine. I don’t remember the exact moment when we made this decision, but we knew it was possible, there was a beautifully simple access to funds, and we went ahead with it. For me, the idea behind the first issue was something of an outgrowth of the conversation begun in the lab-book experiment in that the structure allowed for a diversity of content. As we said in the introduction to the first issue, we weren’t interested in making a journal where the editor was “objective talent scout” controlling the content; instead, we were interested in providing a forum for conversation, where we couldn’t predict what would happen when the various pieces were placed side by side.

Such uses of procedural form are important to my process as a writer.

In the introduction to the first issue of Chain we said “It is ironic that in order for dialogue to take place, conversational limits must be set.” And so for each issue there is a limit—a special topic—around which a large number of writers and artists gather. Sometimes the gathering is cacophonous, sometimes eerily synchronous. In my opinion, it’s often a source of delight and surprise. No matter how much time I spend with the contents—reading, selecting, typesetting, proofreading—I never have a real sense of what the issue is until it arrives from the printer, bound between its covers. And even then I can never know it completely because it changes every time I sit down to read it.

This is often the way I feel about my poems.

Each of the limits/special topics of the magazine come out of concerns that Juliana and I are thoroughly engaged with in our own work: documentary poetics, hybrid genres, procedural writing, visual poetics, different languages, subverting/converting memoir form, performative forms, etc. Because we both actively investigate the relation of forms of life (aesthetic, biological, cultural) to forms of writing, these organizing structures make sense to us. The work we publish feeds us, further informs us about these areas we’re already in. In many ways the journal is an investigation into what we want to know, an attempt to find some answers to questions we have.

There are certain pieces that we’ve published that continue to haunt my own writing. Looking back at past issues, I’m amazed at how many have crept into my aesthetic consciousness and stayed there.

In a recent web-log entry, Ron Silliman critiqued Chain for its policy of organizing authors alphabetically, rather than structuring the book as a kind of narrative that could properly honor its writers. He suggests that because of Chain’s inclusivity, it lacks influence on the literary landscape—the birth of future poets—and that the overall effect of the journal is one of muteness rather than speech. He suggests that accident caused by alphabetic chance is perhaps of less value than the deliberate and “heroic” arguments of past journals, and that unlike Origin (which was responsible for making Blackburn and Zukofsky major figures on the literary landscape), Black Mountain Review (responsible for Creeley and Duncan), Caterpillar (which brought Antin, Rothenberg, Mac Low, Kelly, Joris, Palmer and Bernstein onto the scene), Chain can not claim such strong parenting skills because, well, who can name its progeny?

My interest in hybrid genres is due in part to a disinterest in the perpetuation of linear heritage. Combinations, interruptions, complex conversations and crossings over, provide much more appeal than following respectful and respected maps of canon-building. Conversation is not for canonical heroes. Can you really converse with an unproblematized construct? Or can you only listen?

I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed in Silliman’s list of heroic editorial gestures the lack of women’s names (although he did make a weak attempt to remedy it by claiming that the magazine However was responsible for bringing Lorine Niedecker back into the world (but why was she ever gone? and is that really what However is known for?).

Silliman is part of the Language Poetry movement that informs much of what I do as a writer. And what I take very seriously from the writings of the Language Poets is that there is a value to reader activism, to not simply consuming, but creating through the act of reading. And I bring this idea with me to the forms that I use when writing poetry or when editing Chain. Chain is not about “making” writers by publishing them in its pages (although its tables of contents list many writers—established and emerging—whom I believe to be of great significance). Chain is about providing a place for a reader to engage with an idea—to think, to argue, to write in response. In other words, it is putting the theory that informs my own writing as a poet into practice in an editorial forum. Rather than what Silliman has called “editorial muteness,” I believe that Chain invites an animated conversation between reader and text that is generative in its necessary unpredictability.

Which is also an invitation I hope my own poems deliver.

In closing I’ll quote once more from the introduction to the first issue of Chain, where it all began: “any printed text is a gesture toward conversation; it’s a presentation that invites response. We’re trying to create a forum that takes that invitation seriously, that is not just going through the motions of what it means to instigate response; it requires continuation.”

The reduction or narrowing of discourse that is a fundamental dynamic of the thematic exists for publications as it does for poems. One project in which I once participated, chronicling the first hundred days of the Jimmy Carter administration, was almost luridly obsolete before the ink dried. The present spate of literary publications “in response” to 911 are themselves doomed to the same sad fate.

Two journals have shown that the ability to concentrate can be expansive and inclusive rather than restrictive. Chain demonstrates how to avoid this impoverishment largely by focusing on programmatic themes:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Gender and editing

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Documentary

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Hybrid genres & mixed media

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Processes & procedures

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Different languages

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Letters

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Memoir/Anti-memoir

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Comics

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Dialogue

Chain characterizes these not as themes but as topics. Each, in the description posed on the journal’s website, is

a yearly issue of writing and art gathered loosely around a topic. The topic serves as an editorial limit and changes the question asked of each piece submitted from "is this a great piece of art" to "does this piece of art say something about the topic that is not already known." This makes Chain a little rougher around the edges, a little less aesthetically predictable.

Only the initial 1993 issue on “gender and editing” can be said to completely focus on a topic as such, in the sense of content. The others can be more accurately characterized as identifying a genre or strategies of writing, without specifying further where any given project might choose to focus. One might say anything in a dialogue, write anything in a letter, remember (or anti-remember) anything, draw a comic on any subject whatsoever. Chain’s strategy maximizes its contributors’ degree of freedom, one reason that it has become, as previously noted here, “the premier American literary journal.”

An interesting comparison might be made to Poetics Journal, the publication edited by Barrett Watten & Lyn Hejinian between 1982 and 1998. With its commitment to serious in-depth critical discussion, Poetics Journal is Chain’s most direct ancestor. From its second issue onward, PJ also organized each issue around a theme:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Close reading

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Poetry & philosophy

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Women & language

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Non/narrative

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Marginality: public & private language

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Postmodern?

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Elsewhere

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>The Person

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Knowledge

With the exception of “non/narrative,” Poetics Journal’s topics were more thematic than formal.* But the topics were so global – the last three could be read as primary ontological categories – that any sense of limitation was minimal.

The two issues that come closest to one another are “Woman & Language,” the fourth issue of Poetics Journal, and “Gender & Editing,” Chain’s focus in its first issue. The proportional scale that each theme proposes – Chain conjoins a broader first term to a narrower second one – seems completely accurate to the editorial inclinations of that journal.

Both publications show what can be accomplished via an organized, topic-driven strategy to editing. My own hesitation toward this approach is not fully resolved, however, simply because two exceptional teams of editors demonstrate that it can be done right. Because mostly in the world of little magazines (and big), it’s not done very well at all. To some degree, my own sense reverses the questions staked out in Chain’s website: Would this text have been written without the artificial stimulus of pre-assured publication? Is the work, on its own terms, necessary? Chain & Poetics Journal exemplify what can achieve when only the highest standards of writing & thinking are accepted. Would that more journals were like this.

* “Close reading” could be characterized as formal, but on the side of the reader rather than the writer. Given its appropriation & reframing of the major methodological device of the New Critics, one could argue that this was Poetics Journal’s most radical intervention.

A thoughtful response to my comments on Chain from Juliana Spahr:

i like to think of magazines not as arguments but just as conversations or as possibilities. i think the job of the editor is to put forward and stand back at the same time. and i think this is the big difference between what you say and what i think. we started chain b/c there were too many arguments being made. we started it in the climate of apex and o-blek. there were arguments already and we needed other sorts of conversations to happen. this felt crucial to us. we needed to make a place for us to think about things in our way--a more sideways way or a less declaratory way. now, perhaps, we/poetry community need arguments again. it is sad that apex and o-blek are gone and really haven't been replaced. and somehow for some reason that i'm not sure i know yet, we keep doing chain. but i'm not the person to do this sort of editing. i'm just not interested in doing it (although i always like to read apex and o-blek).

i think this is not a thwarting of political efficacy. i just think it might be something different than you are used to seeing. similarly, with the "writers a journal brings forward" issue. i think there are writers to which chain as been especially committed. or writers that i really feel are important and worked hard to make sure they got into the journal, bugged them a lot, etc. but i've always hated that idea that editors "make" writers. i would feel weird making a claim on any we've published.

i do think that the one argument that chain is making loudly is that poetry has a lot of various uses and positions and a lot of connections that are often overlooked. i've been editing from the middle of the pacific for six years now. and i've thought a lot about the sort of work chain can do/attempts to do from this place because it isn't all that evident everyday here (susan schultz is our only regular subscriber in the Pacific). one thing chain does for me here is it keeps me reading writing from over there (continent). which is good for me but that isn't enough finally. from here, however, it has felt crucial to include more international work (which we have done to the best of our abilities), to be more devoted to cross talk among things that don't cross everyday, to more clearly address poetry's cultural role, to support poetry as a genre of subcultures with ties to various locals/locales, to put writing in both idiolects and in dialects together in the hope that a larger and more complicated critique of standard English would happen in both sorts of poetry, to make room for work about identity and nationalism (those things the avant garde seems to spend too much time seeing as reductive) and yet not to sacrifice the work that gets done in more avant garde forms at the same time, to support both works written from the local and works written against the global, etc.

The new issue of Chain is out and continues the magazine’s run as the premier American literary journal. No other publication in the past decade has envisioned the breadth of American literature (defined here as more than just U.S. writing) with the reach, complexity, completeness and nuance of this publication co-edited originally by Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman, now with the assistance of Thalia Field and Cecilia Vicuña. For a reader of my generation, the experience of Chain harkens back to the heroic period of postmodern literary publications – Origin, Coyote’s Journal, Yugen, Black Mountain Review, Caterpillar, Sulfur, This, Hills, Temblor, Roof, Poetics Journal, the original HOW(ever) & their peers. Chain is the one print publication right now that can be said to change writing as it publishes it, in the sense that a reader comes away with a sense both of what is possible and what is necessary that is wider and deeper than before.

So why am I unable to look at an issue of Chain without thinking about a question that Jena Osman put to me several years ago at a Writers House event?

I had mentioned the disproportionate hoopla that had greeted a little journal called Apex of the M, edited by Lew Daley, Alan Gilbert, Kristin Prevallet & Pam Rehm*. To oversimplify only slightly, Apex took a confrontational view of literature, arguing that the language poets had largely been a rationalist movement, excluding mysticism in general and especially Gnostic views of Christianity. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary (such as the poetry of Susan Howe, one of the journal’s advisory editors), Apex presented a range of American postmodernist work that could be read as an inconsistent critique of langpo – John Taggart, Will Alexander, Elizabeth Robinson, Ed Dorn and Gustaf Sobin were among the contributors in its first two issues.

Identifying the boundaries of langpo, as Apex seems rather effectively to have done, is not the same as identifying an alternative, let alone an anti- (or post-) langpo movement, particularly given the famously isolative nature of several of the writers listed above. Apex came and went rather quickly in the larger scheme of things, but continued to be discussed for several years after. “So why is it,” Jena asked (I’m paraphrasing here from a mediocre memory), “that Chain, which was begun at the same time in the same city, which has a much broader and more democratic view of the possibilities of literature, receives so much less attention?” [It is worth noting, of course, that in the long run, this is certainly not the case. If it were a contest of which publication best manifested lasting literary value, Chain won hands down. But the question as I understood it had more to do with the proportionality of response.]

Part of the answer, of course, was that Chain lacks Apex’s hyperactive & self-important presentation. Apex led off its issues with fiery editorials proclaiming its revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary, depending on your perspective here) world view. Apex offered the charm of the quixotic. Chain, on the other hand, was from the beginning inherently inclusive and its impulses democratic. Language poetry was presented as though it were only one of several sources every young writer would want to think about. Apex by contrast put langpo on a pedestal only in order to take better aim as it attempted to knock it off.

But having said all this, there was – and still is – an inherent muting within Chain’s editorial position, one that has limited its impact and runs oddly contrary to the extraordinary intellectual ambition that otherwise informs every issue. And that is its use of alphabetical order to present content.

I obviously am not one to speak ill of the alphabet as an organizing principle, but in writing my own poem of that name, I know that I’ve had to take special to deal with the narrative needs of the poem. Narrative in this sense means literally the unfolding of meaning over time. This isn’t possible when the elements of the ordering are the surnames of authors.

I have never been fond of the use of themes to organize literary journals – it feels to me far more stifling than generative, causing many publications to include second-rate work that “fits” while ignoring far better writing that doesn’t. Chain, which has used themes from its initial issue, has avoided, or perhaps transcended, the usual limitations of the thematic by envisioning each of them so broadly, and so creatively. There is a sequence in Chain 8, on comics, that moves from Leslie Scalapino (whose conception of genre is itself worthy of a doctoral dissertation), through Lytle Shaw to Sally Silvers, that is worth the price of the 300-page journal.**

But such moments are fortuitous and accidental. What if Lytle Shaw had been named Bruce Andrews or Al Young? The problem is that, editorially, magazines are always arguments: their mode is exposition. What comes first and who goes where matters. Nobody understood this better than Clayton Eshleman with his journals Caterpillar and Sulfur. Eshleman’s issues were composed almost musically. Thus, for example, Sulfur 3, published in 1982, begins with one of Robert Duncan’s last Passages and closes its literature section (Eshleman’s journals followed the editorial mode set by Harriet Monroe with Poetry, placing reviews at the “back of the book”) with selections from the correspondence between Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg. In between, works were positioned primarily for the sake of contrast.

[Following Duncan in that issue was a prose poem of mine – one of the first sections of The Alphabet to appear in print & something that at the time must have appeared antithetical to Duncan’s poetry – followed by a young British poet with more overt “New American” tendencies, Allen Fisher, and then a young East Coast writer still working under the visible influence of George Oppen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis. That Eshleman intuited correspondences between my work, Allen’s and Rachel’s I can only imagine. In 2002, it seems immediately apparent in ways that still appear unfathomable to me if I look at these texts of two decades ago.]

Like Apex, Eshleman’s Sulfur’s influence among writers, especially in its early years, far outstripped its distribution. But each issue was always making an argument about value in writing. It is precisely that argumentation by editorial placement that disappears into the arbitrariness of alphabeticism in Chain. At best, one can intuit one by the range of inclusion, but this is a second order of editorial exposition.

Clearly, the use of the alphabet corresponds to Chain’s democratic impulses. Nobody gets to go first but by the accident of their father’s last name. But argued thus – or perhaps not argued thus – it’s a bureaucratic democracy at best, and one that carries within it the not so dim echoes of patriarchy in the use of surnames.

In one sense, this editorial muteness may make Chain an even truer representative of contemporary literary culture, which in the past 15 years has tended to be both progressive and yet firmly committed to thwarting its own political efficacy***. It’s a curious position, ultimately, and one that seems very much at odds with the journal’s own ambition, as though it were ambition itself with which Chain might be at odds. In the long view of history, the test of a journal is best gauged by the writers whom it brings forward to broader audiences. Thus, in addition to their editors, one associates Origin with Olson, Blackburn and Zukofsky, Black Mountain Review with Creeley, Duncan and again Olson. One associates Caterpillar and Sulfur with David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Kelly, Pierre Joris, Michael Palmer and Charles Bernstein. HOW(ever) proved decisive in the renaissance of interest in Lorine Niedecker. But after nine issues, one associates Chain only with its editors. And that I think is the answer to the question that Jena Osman posed. Though it has taken me years to respond.

*This was the order as presented in Apex’s masthead, very much a “boys first” vision of literature.

** At $12 for issues that typically weigh in at over 300 pages, Chain is also one of the great bargains in literature.

***Not unlike the way the Green Party helped to put George W., Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft into their current positions.