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.
