In 1979, Michael Andre – perhaps best known now as the impresario of the Unmuzzled Ox listserv (technically it’s a Yahoo group) – published a special issue of his journal by that name devoted entirely to The Poets’ Encyclopedia, which was exactly what it said it was, “the world’s basic knowledge transformed by 225 poets, artists, musicians & novelists.” I’ve always been fond of that edition, perhaps because I had, literally, the last word, Zyxt. Part of what made the encyclopedia work was its irreverent tone throughout. Here is Hugh Kenner’s entry for Encyclopedia:

A compendium (using the alphabet for a filing system) of statements that seem not to depend on other knowledge. Aardvark is independent of Mammal, Angel of God. The unit of the Encyclopedia is the Fact. A fact is a corpsed deed; from L. factum, done, but with the residuum of accomplished action subtracted. Facts lie there pickled and are generally wrong, scribes’ minds having swerved from the continuum of action. Guy Davenport notes that the Britannica “has Waley sending Ez off on the trot to translate Cathay, unruffled by picturing an event of 1917 causing an event of 1915.” Shun all encyclopedias but this one.

Nor is this the sole entry on Encyclopedia in Andre’s volume, the Canadian poet A.M. Fine also offering his own in a font that mimicked a schoolboy’s printing. Under Sex you will find two entries by Jim Quinn, one of which reads, in its entirety, “The clitoris is found in all Carnivora,” plus an entry by Anne Waldman, along with a couple of photographs of Ms. Waldman mostly au naturale by the late Joe Brainard. You will find entries for Barf by Kenward Elmslie and Baseball by Senator Eugene McCarthy. It is, in short, a document of its time & an excellent encapsulation of what was going on in the arts scene, especially in & around Manhattan, in the 1970s. The lengthy piece – a poem really – on B-Girls by Jackie Curtis, perhaps the most famous of any of the Encyclopedia’s entries, seems remarkably in place. Underneath, however, it wasn’t just a 1970s compendium, as such, since many of the entries in Andre’s collection were co-authored by Armand Schwerner & Donald M. Kaplan, taken directly from their 1963, Domesday Dictionary, Schwerner’s one commercially successful publication from a trade press.

All of this comes back to me today, as I thumb through the first volume – of a projected five – of Encyclopedia, the first publication of the Encyclopedia Project: as Yogi Berra would have put it, it’s déjà vu all over again. There are a few differences between Andre’s Poets’ Encyclopedia and this, tho it’s worth noting at the outset that both volumes clock in at just over 300 pages. For one, this first volume of the new Encyclopedia goes only from A to E – thus the last word here is Morgan Adamson’s entry for Exposition. Unless you consider a portfolio of more than 30 color plates, illustrating many of the earlier entries, Competition and Domesticity most of all. Another is that the 8.5 by 11 inch page size of the new Encyclopedia offers twice the area of the page in Andre’s book, and thus is printed in two columns with an impeccable page design.

Like Andre’s book, this new Encyclopedia is a superb time capsule of current perspectives in the arts, although if the earlier volume was NYC-centric, this one tends more toward Providence, RI, where the editors – Tisa Bryant, Miranda Mellis, Kate Schatz and Joanna Howard – all first met,  and immediately beyond to that ring of elite academies known at the B-Schools:Brown, Bard, Boulder (Naropa campus), Buffalo & Berkeley. Contributors include (but are not limited to):

Susan Bernstein
Rebecca Brown
Barbara Christian
Jaime Cortex
Brenda Coultas
Brent Cunningham
Samuel R. Delany
Rikki Ducornet
kari edwards
Mikhail Epstein
Thalia Field
William Gillespie
Michael Gizzi
Robert Glück
Laird Hunt
Carol Maso
James Meetze
Talan Memmott
K. Silem Mohammad
Eileen Myles
Kofi Natambu
Alice Notley
Akilah Oliver
M. Nourbese Philip
Deborah Richards
Lisa Robertson
Jocelyn Saidenberg
Carolee Schneeman
Gail Scott
Prageeta Sharma
Christopher Stackhouse
Fred Wah
Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop

With slightly less than half the number of contributors as Andre’s Encyclopedia and twice the amount of content – spread out here over five letters, not all twenty six – the actual feel of this new Encyclopedia is quite different. Here, for example, the primary entry for Encylopedia is Jorge Luis Borges’ eight-page parable, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” There are no entries for either Barf or Baseball, but Padcha Tuntha-Obas has a great entry on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, editor Schatz has a great one on Celebrity (as 2006 a concept as you can get), balanced by Diana George’s entry on Bondage & Kasey Mohammad’s on Authenticity. It’s worth noting also that there is a broader range of genre forms at play in these entries – George’s piece is a narrative, Schatz’ a play of sorts (albeit one scripted for some version of poets’ theater), Mohammad’s is an essay I think, tho written in long lines with hanging indents and numerous lines or bars at the end of paragraphs (or stanzas).

Carolee Schneeman is the one contributor I could find who is in both books.

Thus this new Encyclopedia is much more multi-cultural than its predecessor, and generally less satirical – or at least its humor is not the pratfall mode of the NY School at its most flamboyant, which is pretty much what you find in Andre’s volume. Both volumes are transgressive in their own ways, but the new one will give you an essay by Talan Memmott on Georges Bataille where the earlier book offered Anne Waldman’s tits. The new volume includes an entry on Kathy Acker – a delightful rebus/narrative by Anna Joy Springer – where the earlier volume had an entry, Slavery,  by Acker herself. From such differences one could surely articulate a history of the evolution of the arts over the past 27 years.

The new volume, regardless of its wit & its transgressiveness, is always much more serious in its tone. The web site even offers a teaching guide for use of this book in classrooms (Like that’s gonna happen!), which begins:

The Encyclopedia Project is at once an international literary journal, an anthology, a reference book, an art book, an art object and an educational tool. Its hybrid identity is a boon to educators, as it encompasses many forms and functions, and reflects the rapid cultural blending and transformation of our times. This gives Encyclopedia all the more versatility as a teaching tool in English, literary criticism, creative writing, modern culture, and contemporary arts coursework. 

Ultimately, this push-pull between straightforward seriousness & post-avant impulses comes across as a mode on uneasiness. If Andre’s collection is perhaps a little too self-satisfied with its relationship to the world, this new book seems always a little uncomfortable, a little unhappy. Perhaps it’s because of the difficulty of getting together such a massive hard-copy project as this in the age of Wikipedia, which, before long, is going to dispatch the Britannica itself into the dustbin of history, let alone all these mockers thereof. This is one encyclopedia you can almost bet will never see the letter Z. This uneasiness comes out everywhere here, in articles, in its too perfect portfolio of color plates, its too exact seven-point reading guide at the beginning –

TITLES are centered, in small caps, and italicized. In some cases, the entry name is the title.

– as between the almost pornographic contrast set up by Jim Meetze’s elegant page & type design and Jason Pontius’ spectacularly ineffective cover, pink & teal, a combination fit for a child’s nursery (but only if you have mixed gender twins) that renders the typesetting on it all but illegible. The design of the Encyclopedia website, also Pontius’ work, is so much more effective that I’m driven to conclude that the cover is intentional.

Discomfort, like a bad conscience, like writing poetry while contemplating Adorno’s admonition that lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, is integral to certain states. If there is a thesis that inscribes Encyclopedia, I think that’s it. I’m not quite sure what to make of this, whether or not, for example, it’s like the aggressive abdication of editorial perspective Chain used to demonstrate by organizing issues around themes, then leaving everything within to the accidents of alphabetical order. My gut sense, tho, is that these phenomena are linked.

For what it’s worth, both encyclopedias contain entries for Anxiety, a word worth noting given this editorial stance, but both strike me as dodging the question, Andre’s version reprinting Schwerner & Kaplan’s entry from the Domesday Dictionary, a volume that was a clever way to pose an anti-nuclear tract with a Freudian tone, while the new book has a jokey piece by Praba Pilar that reads, in part,

“A” is for Afro-Geeks, the mind meld meeting of cyberloving media masters spewing forth on technophobia and the technophilia of the left out, knocked out, or dropped out. All they really want to know is: Are you in, or are you out?

The new Encyclopedia is out now, at a cost of $25 for the first volume or a subscription of all five for $300 (these are not math majors here). It’s available online or from a list of exactly eight bookstores, six of which are in Providence.

When I reviewed that anonymous collection of poetry on Tuesday of last week, I knew of course that Larry Fagin had a hand in the project, although I didn’t realize that the collection was to be considered Sal Mimeo #6. Larry wrote, sounding a little peeved, wanting to push the question of anonymity further:

I don't care if people know it's me and Sal (my return address is on all the envelopes) even though that knowledge provides them (and you) with yet another scrim, i.e. it's my taste, my sensibility, and maybe I did write all the poems. But what puzzles me, aside from your insistence on tracking and exposing the author / personality context, is your resistance to looking at the poem itself, without immediately contextualizing it. Of course, context is always in the foreground, no matter how we set or re-set our response dials. But, as Curtis says, "Remove that context, and Ron seems out to sea, wondering how to 'read' the poem." In an effort to study one's own case as reader-critic, to review one's lifelong habits, why not study a poem ab ovo, without a predetermined (in most instances) mindset, and only after that, if you must, bring on all the cultural-socio-political-personal baggage? The whole point is to entertain the complexity of the mind, without falling back on predictable habits of judgment. Judgment has been my interest all along, and anonymity / identity is only one aspect of it. As a child of the 1950s, I hated the New Critics (their taste in contemporary poetry above all) and, only recently, have re-read Cleanth Brooks. But there you go, more identity…. I think all the points you make about context are valid. I only wish you could see the nature of their limitations.

My immediate reaction to this is that one can’t remove context without getting into enormous trouble of the sort that Oliver Sacks likes to write about in books with titles like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Or, to turn to an example Wittgenstein used on occasion, there’s a survival value in understanding – instantly – the difference between a wolf & a dog.

What I think Larry is after here is an attempt to read without expectation, to let the text control the reception without recourse to extraneous inferences, as if somehow their “filling in” blank spaces were not integral to the process of reading itself. I think that the mind does this almost automatically & almost instantly upon the confrontation of any text whatsoever – the last time we read without such expectations is, in fact, before we have learned to read at all, when we are hearing stories for the first time from our parents, when we might not yet realize that Babar is a recurring character, long before we note the comingled history of his landscape with the misadventures of French colonialism.

I don’t think you can divorce the New Critics’ call for the elimination of such outside information from their own aesthetic motivations – their taste in contemporary poetry, which ran to the fugitives & the Boston Brahmins & to the meditative tradition within the history of British letters, led them not to any desire to free the text of such outside considerations, but rather instead to hide them. This enabled them to associate themselves with modernist criticism of the visual arts, notably Clement Greenberg, while avoiding any confrontation with the fact that they were propagating a pre-modernist, if not overtly anti-modernist aesthetic in poetry. It also enabled the New Critics to parrot “scientific objectivity,” then much in vogue throughout all disciplines, in order to argue that they were especially qualified readers – this was an essential component of an overall campaign to literally take over English departments throughout the U.S., which they very successfully accomplished between the late 1930s & the period right after the Second World War.

At the same time, close reading is an inherently powerful & valuable practice. It can be employed to good effect regardless of what your aesthetic commitments might be. But at the same time, it also entails – at least if it is used in conjunction with methodologies derived from contemporary linguistics, such as the use of framing schemata & processes like cognitive blending – the incorporation of “externalities.”

This incorporation of outside data occurs even at the most micro levels, and a good name for the process is ”reading.” For example, when you’re absorbing a text such as this one, most people don’t see all of each & every word as their eyes scan the page or screen. Instead, the eye proceeds far enough into the word from its “entrance” at the left for the mind to decide what the remainder of the word is apt to be, at which point it jumps to the next word. Reading in this sense is far from being a continuous or unimpeded – or unaided – process. Older readers, with larger vocabularies, will have more data points in their memories as to what possible words in this context are apt to be, and therefore will have an easier time making their way through the thicket of printed language. But even for experienced readers, if we suddenly come to a string of words that seems discordant – colorless green ideas sleep furiously – the disruption is palpable. That language appears to have no purpose in this text, even though it is grammatical and, in this case, has a significant history within both linguistics & American poetry.

What occurs at the micro level does so also for every text. Fagin’s anonymous anthology doesn’t eliminate this realm, but merely occludes it. The process actually foregrounds questions of context & authorship, rather than the opposite. A better test might be to read a text that doesn’t set up this little mystery, but which operates outside of what Fagin likes to call judgment, which is really the reader’s positionality with regards to whatever the context might be. Here is an example:

My girlfriend sings in the kitchen, she has given me
a grasshopper in a cola bottle
it chews on stalks and gazes with wonder
at the constellation in my eyes. So
I became a grasshopper god, I think
and put the bottle down

My girlfriend has no family, she sings
from the bottom of her loneliness
and lies in the garden in the summer
while I stand with my eyes turned to the sky
and think that everything is good

There are times when we love each other so much
that somebody has to drive us out
of their thoughts

This is a poem by Lars Skinnebach, a Danish-born poet now living in Norway. I took it from The Other Side of Landscape: An Anthology of Contemporary Nordic Poetry edited by Anni Sumari & Nicolaj Stockholm, which contains the work of 17 poets born in the 1960s & ‘70s from five Nordic nations: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland & Iceland. This is an interesting, even exciting book, but perhaps largely because I know so very little about its context. My direct experience of these countries is two days spent in Helsinki in 1989. I know some Nordic poets who write & publish in English, but otherwise my knowledge of the poetry of these nations can be reduced to the work of Inger Christensen, the Danish poet who has both used Fibonacci series to organize works & written a booklength poem entitled Alfabet, but who is older than the poets included here.

What Lars Skinnebach knows or thinks about American poetry I have no clue. Nor do I have any idea, really, what fault lines might apply to the Nordic context – do they have their own School of Quietude, their own post-avant tendency? Where would these poets then fit? Also, does it even matter that Skinnebach is a native Dane or writes now from Norway? To say that I’m clueless here is almost to overstate what I know.

The first line of this poem immediately drew me into it. I like the optimistic tone & domestic scene figured by the first phrase and I like also the idea that the line keeps going. I’m already getting a sense of the poem’s form – my eye has already noted the difference in line length between the first line & the others, & noted that the stanzas are of differing lengths. The specificity of the image in the second line deepens my attraction to the poem as does the absence of a capital letter at the lefthand margin. I don’t know if I’ve ever read about a grasshopper in a cola bottle before, tho I’ve seen them in enough improvised containers during my life to be able to believe the image completely.

The third line begins what might be a new sentence, although there is no opening punctuation of a capital letter nor any terminal punctuation at the end of the second line – this seems completely consistent with the informal, domestic nature of the poem to this moment. The first half of the line offers another concrete image, building on the grasshopper theme. The second half of this line, tho, begins to be a problem: gazes with wonder is an anthropomorphic projection as well as a cliché. Both aspects make the phrase feel far less specific than the material that preceded it. So here I feel as tho something has been blunted. This sense of vagueness continues in the fourth line with the constellation in my eye, an image that brings to my mind the “galaxy” in a cat’s pendant of the film Men in Black. This is my first “importation” into the poem of anything outside it, unless I think about the lack of capital letters at the lefthand margin & the role of such punctuation in the history of verse. But literally I didn’t think about that until I typed up this previous sentence (at which point, frankly, I had now read the poem several times). I find it interesting or intriguing that what occasions these importations is the weakness of imagery itself. Had the poet not fallen back on clichés, would I have gone searching “elsewhere” for ways to shore up the language?

Still, I haven’t given up on the poem yet. The promise of the first two lines may have been challenged but it hasn’t been broken. Again the fourth line ends with a word that a more conservative poet might have dropped to the next line. The fifth line’s primary phrase, I became a grasshopper god, doesn’t do a lot for me, or to me. It sounds vaguely surrealist but in a lighthearted way – it reminds me of poetry I’ve read before, say in a journal like Exquisite Corpse or just possibly by the likes of Anselm Hollo, a poet whose I work I always enjoy. A second-layer thought occurs that Anselm Hollo is himself Finnish & I wonder if any of the poets in this anthology know his work. Could Lars Skinnebach be influenced by Hollo?¹ The last line in the first stanza completes the physical description of action & serves to “tie up” loose ends in the stanza. It’s not terribly ambitious as a line, but it doesn’t jar my sensibilities in any way. [It’s not until a few more readings of this poem that I think to myself that this line might have been necessary primarily to make it run 14 lines. But even recognizing it as a sonnet, recognizing the lurking shadow of the sonnet as a form, would be an importation.]

The first phrase in the second stanza throws me – there is nothing in the first stanza to prepare me for it, unless the figure of the girlfriend itself is thought of in such terms. If the first phrase of the first stanza drew me in with its optimism, this one – which feels more parallel to the previous one than it really is, grammatically – almost breaks my heart. Again the line continues beyond the first phrase and again we greet the figure of singing. But now, in the next line, it is the girlfriend who is being cast parallel to the grasshopper of the first stanza. It sits in its cola bottle, she sings from the bottom of her loneliness. There is a certain creepiness in the comparison here – this guy is equating his girlfriend with an insect – that might be overbearing if there were not a tenderness of tone here as well.

The stanza turns at this point on the word and, a conjunction that has a precedent in the first stanza as well. Here it proves to be far more crucial, since what is now being set up is this larger image of the girl in the garden & the narrator turned with his “eyes turned to the sky,” a tableaux so overdone in its mock profundity that the deliberateness of the humor is tangible. It’s quite a comic scene, actually, but part of the comedy comes from knowing that the assurance that everything is good is patently false.

The third stanza is much more problematic for me. First, it makes us recognize that the first two stanzas function much like the first two components in any syllogism: If X & if Y. The third stanza is the Then Z. Except that it is much more vague than the material that came immediately before it and that the image in the last two lines is again in that tone I think of as Surrealist Lite or Exquisite Corpse-like. It’s intended to make the implications of the first two stanzas feel both intense & likeable, which I suppose beats unlikeable but doesn’t feel terribly ambitious to me. Again, I think of the requirement of 14 lines and wonder if the poem might not be better if it had ended at the conclusion of the second stanza.

I have no way of knowing how accurate the translation might be, so I’m treating it here as tho it were a cipher. At least nothing in the poem has that “this is not in its first language” feel, which is the death blow of bad translations.

Overall, the poem isn’t great, isn’t terrible. It tries some things that are interesting, but not all of them are equally successful. So it has a mixed feel to me. Nothing in the poem makes me dislike it, and yet nothing compels me to read every other Skinnebach poem here & find what else may be available in English. If that first line hadn’t popped out at me when I was thumbing through this anthology looking for an example of “work without context,” I probably would have finished reading & never thought to have written about it here. I certainly wouldn’t be able to tell you who Lars Skinnebach is.

This is the point where, Tuesday a week ago, I tried what I called my magic tricks. I can imagine reading this poem as tho it were a piece by Anselm Hollo, but I could just as easily imagine reading it as tho it were a poem by Dean Young, a far more conservative & derivative writer. Or I could imagine it as a sluggish example of the NY School, gen 7 or whatever. I don’t think anyone will have trouble acknowledging it as a work by a male heterosexual or, for that matter, as a poem of this cusp between the two millennia – it’s very much a work of our time, tho it might be interesting to see at what moment that time will have passed, at what moment this poem will suddenly look as “quaint,” say, as the Sherwood Anderson chants I wrote about not quite a month ago.

Does invoking such names, playing my “magic tricks,” change the text in any fashion? Not really. Does it change my reading? Not much in this instance, tho that may be because of the inherent weakness of the poem. There is a good piece on the psychology of expertise in the current issue of Scientific American, tho, which may explain why some readers invariably invoke such information while others do not. This is something called, literally, chunk theory. The difference between experts in many fields, including music, math & chess, and us mere mortals is not that experts are any smarter or can remember more, but rather that they have organized whatever it is they’re experts in into larger chunks. Whereas in chess I can think through the next move or two in any given chess game, I have to do so by thinking through the possibilities of each piece on the board in its current (and potentially future) position – a lot of different things, especially once we’re past the immediate opening of the game. A chess grandmaster will see the same combination of pieces, tho, as if it were a single formation or two that she or he has probably seen before. They can therefore think out many more future moves because these now seem much more predictable. It’s not unlike the trick of memorizing phone numbers as a predictable sequence of three numbers – area code, prefix & suffix – rather than as a scramble of ten different numbers, each of which can be anywhere from 0 to 9, which is far harder.

More experienced readers, my hunch is, look at a text on a page rather like the chess masters. Even before they recognize a word, they visually absorb stanzaic patterns & structures & associate this with what they already know about the history of poetry. A work is perceived as having visible kinship to a Creeley or Zukofsky or to a Carolyn Kizer or David Ignatow, whomever, before even the first word of the title is interiorized through actual reading. It’s the same process we have of recognizing words individually, simply carried out on a different level. What Fagin calls “all the cultural-socio-political-personal baggage” is, in fact, just a second tier of literacy, and a not terribly exceptional tier at that.

Now it’s possible that a reader can import material that is truly irrelevant to a given text – there are incompetent readers. But a much larger problem in our society is that of inexperienced readers, particularly in MFA programs. The problem that Fagin should be addressing is not how to take such information out of a text, but rather how to contextualize works so that these relationships are even more perceptible. That’s where an exceptional literary journal – whether Jacket or Conjunctions or Shiny or Combo or Sulfur or How2 – excels.

 

¹ Later, looking to see who the translator might be – it’s Barbara Haveland – I see that Anselm Hollo has translated some of the Finnish poets in this anthology. Hardly “evidence” one way or another, but a sign at least of the compactness of these literary communities.

Is it possible to produce a quality anthology of poetry on a single theme? More dreadful collections of poetry have been organized around the idea of the thematic than anything else, it would seem. Weddings, cancer, jazz, baseball, relationships with our mothers, relationships with our daughters, cats – a quick search on Amazon turns up six different anthologies of poems for or about cats, tho none that I could see by them. If it’s a noun, chances are it has an anthology of poems dedicated to it. Don’t even get me started on anthologies about Iraq, migration, nuclear disarmament or African debt – any anthology of the thematic is really a book about cats.

Mark Lamoureux knows this & has decided to up the ante some by requiring his new collection fit into the space of a chapbook, one generously filled with illustrations at that. And the noun he has chosen is decidedly at an angle also, as the title underscores in its wording: My Spaceship. The illustrations come from a black-and-white coloring book Lamoureux had as a kid – apparently he never colored it in!

My Spaceship is both a thematic anthology, as a result, and a send-up of the form. Precisely because Lamoureux isn’t the sort of guy to do anthologies on Corgies or faeries or childhood illnesses, the work herein is, shall we say, different:

When Mars Was A Candy Bar

I saw Captain Video
Scale the heights of Pluto,
But it was Al Hodge
Crawling across the studio floor.
Tree people, ray guns, machines
Arriving on God’s celestial shores.
I saw Flash Gordon,
The swimmer Buster Crabbe,
Battle Ming the Merciless
Space ships the size of light bulbs
Filmed in shoeboxes.
Sputnik soared over the Danbury Fair
I met Gus Grissom’s girlfriend
My name rhymes with orbit
I write in the name of my brother
Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.

Thus Bill Corbett. There are some really great works throughout this tiny collection: Jill Magi, Eileen Tabios, Catherine Meng, Noah Falck & Jon Leon all have terrific pieces here. I’d never heard of Magi or Falck before, so that is real plus. And if I don’t quite hear Christopher Rizzo’s piece, if Maureen Thorson’s couplets go limp after the third one (with 11 more yet to go!) or Scott Glassman only proves that what Bruce Andrews does is really much harder than it looks, that’s just the price you pay for organizing around a theme, even here.

My real quibbles – and I have some – have to do with design. The header typeface is Imazeng & mostly demonstrates why you should not buy your fonts from somebody who calls himself Pizza Dude – it is semi-legible at best & only the “cheat” of a table of contents in Zia Gera permits me to know that Steven Roberts really has work in this issue. That is, however, more than I can say about Nathan Pritts, whose name is left off the table of contents altogether.

So this pamphlet isn’t a home run, but it does make for a tasty palette cleanser (yeah, yeah, mixed metaphors, tsk) after all the dense Olson I’ve been wading through of late & I’m totally happy to have it in hand. Think of it as a paper airplane.

The day my piece on the PIP 5 anthology runs, what do I get in the mail but a package from Joshua Kotin, managing editor of the Chicago Review, sending me a reminder that once upon a time I also co-edited something akin to a regional anthology, a 63-page feature entitled Fifteen Young Poets of the San Francisco Bay Area, which appeared in the Summer 1970 issue of ChiRev. My partner in that project was David Melnick, during that relatively brief moment when we were both students at Berkeley.

When I first met David in 1968 – hitchhiking back to Oakland after a Harvey Bialy-David Bromige reading at the Albany Public Library then on Solano – we discovered that we both knew Iven Lourie, then the poetry editor of ChiRev. Melnick, who had studied at the University of Chicago, had been a roommate of Iven’s, whereas I’d been one of Iven’s “discoveries,” poets he’d consciously decided to promote aggressively in the review. (Some others in that group included William Hunt, Dennis Schmitz & Robin Magowan.) Melnick recruited me on the spot to join him in his attempt to bring the UC Berkeley magazine Occident into the post-avant world (where its roots could truly have been said to belong, with such prior student poets as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer & Diane Wakoski having all been active with the journal).

As success wasn’t immediate in that campaign (we gradually had a little, but only after I’d transferred over from SF State to Berkeley), we decided to pitch the idea of a collection to The Chicago Review. I think we may have posed it as a special issue in the mode of the great second issue of the Evergreen Review. That proposal promptly hit a brick wall, but Iven had agreed to take over as the general editor for one issue before he graduated & for that issue he proposed a scaled down version, which is what we ended up editing.

When I look back with 35 years of hindsight at the list of poets we included –

D. Alexander

Harvey Bialy

David Bromige

John Gorham

Kenneth Irby

Joanne Kyger

Robin Magowan

David McAleavey

Rochelle Nameroff

David Perry

Anthony Shonwald

George Stanley

Julia Vinograd

Paul Xavier

Al Young

– my immediate thought is that we didn’t do half bad. Al Young is California’s Poet Laureate today & several others – Bromige, Irby, Kyger, Stanley – have achieved some measure of recognition. David McAleavey just published the biggest & most ambitious book of his career, Robin Magowan has recent books out that are well worth reading & Julia Vinograd is something of a Berkeley institution, “the bubble lady” who wanders the streets selling her chapbooks of verse.

D. Alexander died far too young, Harvey Bialy went off to Africa & appears to have only recently gotten back into being a visible presence in print. Shelley Nameroff – my wife at the time – published one excellent book with Ithaca House (the editor there was McAleavey, who proved to be an early force in bringing the language poets into print, Melnick & myself both as well as Ray DiPalma & Bob Perelman), but Shelley moved away from her post-avant youth toward a more conventional mode & has appeared only in journals since then. David Perry is not the poet David Perry who seems these days to be calling both New York & Kansas City Home, but rather a one-time student of Robert Kelly (along with Bialy & John Gorham) who last I heard was a therapist in upstate New York. Gorham dropped out of UC Berkeley & became a freelance writer. The last time I saw his work in print was in Forbes a couple of years ago. I never have found out what’s become of Paul Xavier – he was calling himself Paul X much of the time back when this was published – like Vinograd very much a street poet. It was Paul who had gotten me (and quite a few other people) into the Berkeley Poetry Conference back in ’65. By the time we edited the ChiRev feature in ’69, Paul was working as an aide to a member of the Berkeley City Council. Tony Shonwald, on the other hand, was the one person in that selection whom I felt certain would be a constant presence on the scene, co-editing a journal on those days called Cloud Marauder that was, with George Hitchcock’s Kayak & Robert Bly’s The Sixties, a mainstay of School of Quietude surrealism. At 21, Shonwald was the most ambitious & aggressive young up-&-comer on the entire poetry scene in the Bay Area. But, once Cloud Marauder shut down, Shonwald seemed to disappear – I can find his name only twice through Google, once (misspelled) in a memoir of these same years by John Oliver Simon in Poetry Flash, the second time among “missing alumni” from the Class at 1965 at his old high school, Lowell, in San Francisco.

Melnick & I tried to represent all of the active formations we saw around the Bay – we wanted the best School of Quietude (SoQ) poets & thought Magowan & Shonwald met our criteria. We knew we had other options there – Chana Bloch was literally my next door neighbor in Berkeley, I’d known Stan Rice for years out at SF State, Arthur Sze was a visible presence on the Berkeley campus. Joe Stroud had just finished up at State. Had we stretched our definition of the Bay Area to include Sacramento, we would certainly have added Dennis Schmitz. In retrospect, I think we showed where our hearts were in having as many street poets as SoQs.

If Melnick’s particular contribution to the overall tone of this project had been his insistence on the street poets, mine was the circle of writers who were either former students of Robert Kelly (Bialy, Gorham, Perry) or else visibly around the magazine Clayton Eshleman published with Kelly’s assistance, Caterpillar (Alexander). A part of me finds it odd & a little sad that that scene evaporated as completely as it did, tho it may have been my own wishful thinking back then to have called it a scene in the first place. Alexander was a fairly isolate character, as was Perry – I don’t think they ever even met one another. Gorham’s departure from poetry was one of those larger scale rejections, disapproving of the progressive politics that were virtually universal among poets during the Nixon years. (Only a couple of years earlier, he’d been the one to drive me to the hospital after I’d been beaten by the Berkeley police during an anti-war demonstration on the UC campus.)

But, as I’ve said more than once here, the first & best test of an anthology is invariably what’s missing, and I cringe at the realization of what’s not included in our ChiRev feature. First, there were two poets whose work Melnick & I both liked a great deal, but it wasn’t at all clear to us in 1969 that there might be any sort of scene evolving around such writing – Rae Armantrout & Robert Grenier. In retrospect, I think it was as much our lack of self-confidence as well as not being able to see the forest for the trees that kept us from proposing their inclusion. Grenier’s poems were already telescoping down to the miniatures that would make up Sentences. Armantrout had not really begun to publish, tho frankly neither had David Perry or John Gorham. Melnick & I discussed both at length & came to the wrong conclusion each time.

The other major omission is any clear representation of the women’s writing scene, as such, in the Bay Area, especially Judy Grahn, already a major poet in 1970 but one who was only then beginning to move beyond the early chapbook versions, say, of Edward the Dyke. There were other possibilities here as well – I’d known Pat Parker since we’d read together in the open reading series at Shakespeare & Co. in Berkeley in the mid-60s, Susan Griffin had been in classes with David Perry & me at SF State, Alta was just then making the transition from being one of the street poets in Berkeley. Melnick & I weren’t able to take that critical step back & see how all these separate poets & events were part of a larger picture.

There were other poets whose work we might have included – Aaron Shurin was a poet we thought about, but we weren’t sure that he’d arrived at his own writing yet (we were right). Others like Steve Ratcliffe & Michael Davidson were around, but not showing their work to anybody. Barrett Watten & Curtis Faville – two other poets we knew who weren’t showing their work to anybody yet – had gone off to the Writers Workshop in Iowa City.

On the other hand, the Chicago Review was a major publication – at least in terms of distribution – for all of the poets we did include & one of the first such instances of this for all of the poets there. Bromige, Irby, Kyger & Stanley really were the center of the feature, tho I’m not sure that David or I fully appreciated that at the time. Bromige & Irby were clearly the major young poets in the Berkeley scene, both already nationally recognized in New American Poetry circles. I think that we thought at the time that Stanley represented San Francisco & Kyger the writing scene that was just then starting to emerge in Bolinas (within the next year or so Robert Creeley & Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Lewis MacAdams, Tom Clark, Phil Whalen & others would all be living in that town of 300), tho in retrospect what I really see is how deeply the old Spicer Circle had become the visible force in the writing scene in San Francisco, just five years after Spicer’s death. Indeed, it is Al Young in the issue who directly addresses the influence of Spicer.

So we got some things right even as we had a couple of major misses. If we’d edited the feature just one year later, Armantrout & Grenier surely would have been included & we might have opted for a different SoQ poet than Shonwald. Would we have included feminist poetics? I’d like to think that the answer is yes, but that might be wishful thinking on my part. Another couple of years beyond that & all the langpos who had moved into the Bay Area – Kit Robinson, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Bob Perelman – as well as the returned Watten & Faville – surely would have been there.

It’s interesting how one can sort of peel back the layers on an almost year-by-year basis like that. Even tho it came out in 1970, the ChiRev feature is a snapshot of the scene in 1969 – it would have looked so totally different by 1974 that it’s almost unimaginable. I can only wonder if younger poets in the Bay Area have the same sense of the scene as evolving with such rapidity now.

This completes my selection of “essential works” for Peter Davis’ anthology.

 

Kathy Acker, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula

In 1973, Kathy Acker was writing and self-publishing this novel one chapter per month, handing out individually bound chapters each month at readings around San Francisco. Indeed, these short pamphlets listed their author only as The Black Tarantula, a persona Acker used during much of that period. The only woman in San Francisco that year to have a crewcut, Acker came across as the essence of punk generation extremism, although once you got to know her – a woman whose book crowded apartment included parrots named Art & Revolution & hamsters or guinea pigs named Cage & Mac Low, you realized that the persona was exactly that – a protective shell than enabled Acker extraordinary freedom as both individual & artist. When you read the chapters, already stamped with their distinctive genre formula of plagiarism + pornography = autobiography & realized that this was not a con but an attempt to re-invent fiction from the ground up, the bravery of it as a writing project just made your jaw drop.

 

I use the word plagiarism, which Acker did as well, especially after she was sued by a hack novelist, but in reality what Acker did was to appropriate texts in ways that foregrounded their social presumptions. In this sense, she carried the use of found materials beyond the primarily combinatory functions found, say, in early works by Jackson Mac Low to a mode that has more in common, say, with the films of Godard or the murals of Diego Rivera. To this material, a second layer of discourse derived from the most exploitive modes of porn was superimposed, a method that allowed Acker to approach & address the abusive conditions of her own childhood. Thus, in fact, she could write a work that was, at one level, precisely about the construction of the master tropes of fiction, such as character, while in the same moment presenting autobiography almost in its purest form.

 

While Acker’s genre was always fiction, her use of the devices of writing as a primary mode of intellectual investigation made her an integral part of the poetry community, especially in San Francisco. From her and Grenier, in particular, I learned that one must be willing to go exactly where your vision leads you, even if that place seems not to exist or otherwise be impossible.

 

 

Barrett Watten, Plasma / Paralleles / “X”

I’ve been influenced by every book Barrett Watten ever wrote, including Radio Day in Soma City, but the one that has had the greatest impact on my own writing, the one I’m still apt to find myself reading in a dream, is this Tuumba Press chapbook from 1979. In it, Watten uses a combination of syntax, surrealism & philosophical investigation (both with & without the caps) to arrive at a New Sentence entirely different from anything any other of my peers had ever written. The opening passage of “Plasma” is as powerful anything I have ever read:

 

A paradox is eaten by the space around it.

 

I’ll repeat what I said.

 

To make a city into a season is to wear sunglasses inside a volcano.

 

He never forgets his dreams.

 

The effect of the lack of effect.

 

The hand tells the eye what to see.

 

I repress other useless attachments.   Chances of survival are one out of ten.

 

I see a tortoise drag a severed head to the radiator.

 

They lost their sense of proportion.   Nothing is the right size.

 

He walks in the door and sits down.

 

It gives me shivers just to type that up. Watten here has arrived at a space in which the referential content of the language can be seen clearly for the machinery that it is. Rather than draining syntax of its power the way, say, Clark Coolidge’s long poems from this same period do, Watten underscores the grammatical imposition of drama. All three of the pieces in this collection work, to one degree or another, from the same principles, demonstrating that the most investigative & intellectually demanding writing can employ all the devices of fiction without ever surrendering to them. If for me the lesson of Grenier’s Sentences was how to hear the phrase & how to recognize the beginning, middle & end of even a single vowel as separate moments in the poem, Plasma / Paralleles / “X” taught me how to read within the sentence as a dynamic architecture. That’s a lesson I use every day of my life.

More entries for Peter Davis’ Barnwood Press anthology on “Essential Titles” in contemporary poetry. Again the order is chronological in terms of when these books had their impact on me as a reader & in this instance the anomaly of Williams is significant.

 

Jack Spicer, Book of Magazine Verse and Language

I discovered the work of Jack Spicer when Shakespeare & Co. Books in Berkeley, where I’d been participating in a weekly open reading series, decided instead to devote one Sunday afternoon in early 1966 to a memorial reading for this poet around what would have been his 41^st birthday. The reader was someone of whom I’d never heard before either, Robin Blaser. But the work connected with me in ways I could not account for just from listening, so I went hunting for Spicer’s books. In 1966 (and for much of the ensuing decade), there were really just two that were readily available and each was profoundly unsettling.

 

Language, first published in 1964, was a book that at first felt impossible within the world of the New American poet. To begin with, it insisted on a concept of language for the poem that was not ignorant of linguistics. This meant that all the claims that Olson in particular & the projectivists in general were making about the ear & breath suddenly sounded quaint, romantic, even mystical. Yet in its arms-open-wide embrace of loss & despair, Spicer sounded a completely different note, one that demanded a larger emotional palette for the poem than was being used by the New Americans. In Book of Magazine Verse, published right after his death, Spicer made explicit the degree to which he understood his poetry as an active intervention of the literary scene, figuring the book as a book of “typical” (sometimes comically so) poems that might appear in various periodicals, ranging from The Nation to Downbeat to The St. Louis Sporting News to Poetry Chicago. Book of Magazine Verse is the forerunner of all the critical poetries now being written, from the work of Bruce Andrews to that of Brian Kim Stefans.

 

Robert Creeley, Pieces

In the creative writing program at San Francisco State in the late 1960s, the students were almost all passionate followers of the New American Poetry, differing only in which of its identified trends they considered the “correct” path for poetry. The bulk of the students I knew seemed devoted to various modes of Black Mountain poetry – Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Levertov, Blackburn, Eigner, Dorn et al. As students, we took the theoretical pronouncements made by Olson & Duncan very seriously. So when Edward Dorn & LeRoi Jones both made breaks – Dorn with his comic opera pseudo-epic philosophical tome Gunslinger, Jones with his immersion into black nationalism via (this was always the hard part to figure out) Maoism, they were perceived by many as prodigals. But when Creeley took just as a radical a turn in Pieces, one could not explain the process away so easily. Here was a major New American demonstrating that Olson’s dictum that “What does not change / is the will to change” must also be a personal commitment.

I & my friends should have seen it coming. Already, Creeley’s previous book, Words, had moved away from the romantic neo-Beat lyrics of For Love towards a poetic that was more formal & looking directly to Zukofsky in its sense as to what form might mean for the poem. But the poems in Words still basically looked like poems, or close enough to what we knew as poetry, to fool us into seeing continuities rather than development & departures. With Pieces, however, you could not make the same mistake:

 

Here, there,
every-
where

 

As early as the 1950s, Creeley had written on the question of referentiality, but it was not until Pieces that his work began to demonstrate what a post-referential work might mean.

 

William Carlos Williams, Spring & All

In 1970, Harvey Brown’s Frontier Press published what may have been a pirate edition of William Carlos Williams’ 1923 book, Spring and All, a work that embeds some of Williams’ most famous early poems, including “red wheel barrow” and “The pure products of America,” within a booklength theoretical manifesto, one that defines poetry as “new form dealt with as a reality in itself.” That remains, 80 years after its initial publication, the most concise & accurate definition of the poem I have ever read. The book reveals Williams to have been more than equal to the critical challenges of modernism & shows him to be operating on a level at which among his peers only Pound or Stein could even hope to aspire.

 

Yet in 1970, Spring & All had been out of print for more than 40 years, having barely received any distribution or notice at the time of its original publication. Its reissue literally stunned the community of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. Overnight, Olson’s theoretical writing no longer seemed the latest thinking. But it was especially appalling to discover that somebody had gone beyond Projective Verse decades before Olson had written it. More than any other volume, this book convinced many poets in my generation that we had to go back & look at the early modernists all over again and that we couldn’t trust the general wisdom.

Peter Davis, who is editing a collection for Barnwood Press, a collective from Ball State University in Indiana that has been operating with surprisingly little fanfare for 25 years, recently asked me if I would contribute to a forthcoming anthology by listing “5-10 ‘Essential titles,’ plus a brief commentary.” That’s the sort of query guaranteed to raise all sorts of questions, not the least of which is how – 37 years after post-structuralism first reared its head in the U.S. at “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” conference at Johns Hopkins – anybody can use a phrase like “Essential titles” without giggling. To make matters even more problematic, Davis hasn’t given me much in the way of direction as to what he means by “essential,” although he did share a list of some of the other folks he’s asked, which spanned the entire poetic spectrum. & I’ve heard from others who have likewise been asked. So my sense is that this project has the best of intentions & I’ve been trying to figure out just how I might respond.

 

As of today, I’ve come up with a list of titles that were for me “essential” in that, in each instance, the work forced me to rethink & redefine what I was doing as a poet, artist & person. This does not necessarily mean that these books were “the best” or “most important” from the perspective of a broader literary history, although each is a superb work in & of itself. Nor are these books necessarily my favorite writing, even by these authors. Rather, these are the books that changed me & in so doing helped to shape who I have become. This may have as much to do with when I read them as anything else. Always, it has to do with what each taught me. Here are the first couple of titles, more or less in chronological order – the chronology of my reading, that is.

 

William Carlos Williams, The Desert Music

I have written about this book before. It was through The Desert Music, and especially its title poem, that I first truly discovered poetry & understood that I would some day be a poet. I came upon this volume quite by chance in the Albany Public Library when I was a junior in high school, spending a weekend morning reading, avoiding the chaos of a household with a mentally ill adult. It was, I swear, the oddity of a hardback with pale yellow binding that first drew me to the book.

 

I’d been writing fiction for six years and was beginning to recognize that I would be a writer, although only with the foggiest & most grandiose notion of what that might mean. I’d been unhappy with my fiction as well because what I was interested in most in my own writing seemed to have little if anything to do with elements of character or plot. But what I could not see was how I might at get at this thing – I wouldn’t have called it the sensuality of language because I simply didn’t have the vocabulary for that then.

 

Suddenly, reading Williams’ words aloud, I realized that I didn’t have to struggle for this unnamed object of desire because here it was, absolutely clear, utterly present. Williams depicts a figure asleep on the bridge between El Paso & Juarez and asks:

 

How shall we get said what must be said?

 

Only the poem.

 

Only the counted poem, to an exact measure:

to imitate, not to copy nature, not

to copy nature

 

 

NOT, prostrate, to copy nature

                                     but a dance! to dance

two and two with him –

                             sequestered there asleep,

                                                right end up!

 

Ironically, it was Williams’ most narrative poem that led me to see a possibility for writing that extended well beyond vulgar narrative. But I wasn’t seeing a lot of what was going on in this poem when I first read it – including that playful allusion to Karl Marx in the last line.

 

This is the first of two Williams’ titles on my list & it is worth noting that neither was a New Directions book.

 

Donald Allen (editor), The New American Poetry

I attended – more as a teen party crasher than a serious writer – the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 & spent the rest of that year & all of 1966 getting to know the poetry that was included in Donald Allen’s breakthrough anthology, The New American Poetry, around which that conference had been organized. In addition to Allen Ginsberg & Jack Kerouac, the two contributors who’d already broken through into a broader public awareness in the United States, the Allen anthology first made widely available many other poets who would become the foundation for a generation of literature – John Ashbery, Paul Blackburn, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Barbara Guest, Le Roi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Kenneth Koch, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Jimmy Schuyler, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, Phil Whalen & John Wieners just for starters. Over four decades later, the Allen anthology – as everybody I knew called it – remains a touchstone of just how breathtakingly good an anthology can be. The number of writers in the Allen who did not go on to have major publishing careers & profoundly impact the next several generations of poets can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

 

However, because it sold over 100,000 copies, the Allen’s imperfections have had lives of their own. The volume’s single most audacious move, which was to divide its 44 poets into five ”divisions” or “groups” – Allen uses both words in his preface – has proven as troubled as it was inspired. One of the group’s is a hodge-podge, a second – the so-called San Francisco renaissance – is largely a fiction & the one person who could have provided some continuity to that cluster was awarded to the Black Mountain poets. Yet the next two generations of poets would take these divisions much more seriously than their elders, which among other things kept them (us) from asking why the Objectivists are missing from this volume. Their inclusion would have made for a more radical as well as more historically accurate collection.

It’s an old joke among writers that the two ways work can get into a publication – submission & solicitation – entail terms whose sexual connotations are (a) unmistakable & (b) not necessarily representative of free play & mutuality. The problem with the joke is that it isn’t funny. The power imbalance between publisher & the would-be-published remains absolute & more or less unbridgeable: alternatives over the years have certainly been tried – Richard Kostelanetz’ Assembling simply asked contributors to send in a specified number of pages, 8 ½ by 11, which were then merely collated – yet the only one that has ever had any serious impact on literary culture has been self-publication (viz. Whitman), & then only very rarely.

 

These are the thoughts that ran through my mind as I read a comment by the Australian poet Alison Croggon on the British Poets listserv on Tuesday:

 

Examining the New Penguin Book of English Verse, a compendious tome edited by Paul Keegan, it seems to me that women are rarer than modernists in late 20C English poetry.

 

I might amend Croggon’s plahn ever so slightly to postmodernists (or, more accurately, post-avant), but a glance at the table of contents for the work covering that past 30 years or so does seem mostly to be Eavan Boland & the Boys, save for one appearance by Denise Riley – albeit there are some Gaelic names there whose work (& gender) I do not recognize. So while Bunting pops up more than once in the table of contents, names such as Raworth or Prynne or Oliver or Pickard or Harwood sully not its pages for a period whose theme song I imagine must sound rather Wizard-of-Oddish: Muldoon & Heaney & Gunn, Oh My, Muldoon & Heaney & Gunn. Fiona Templeton? Not hardly. Geraldine Monk? Nope. Veronica Forrest-Thompson? Wendy Mulford? Grace Nichols? Hmmmm….

 

Croggon’s point is on target but hardly limited to anthologies. Her observation got me scrolling back among my emails to a note I’d gotten awhile ago from Annie Finch. She had written to the editors of a certain U.S. post-avant publication to congratulate them on a recent issue, and also to ask them why only twenty percent of their contributors happened to be women. Annie was, in her own words,

 

really surprised to hear them say that submissions from women are low in journals committed to the innovative aesthetic, especially considering the (unusually high) significance of many well-known women poets to innovative poetics.

 

This is not encouraging, coming from a journal three of whose four editors happen to be women. In the words of one of its editors,

 

We've discussed the predicament with a couple other editors of innovative work, and they commiserate with the lack of diversity and low volume of women among submitters.

 

We decided in this issue to stick with our aesthetic vision regardless of the gender of the poets, but put out an extra effort to reach out in the next issue.

 

This is where my impatience with the aesthetic passivity of younger post-avant writers &, in this case, editors just starts to boil over. In 2003, with literally hundreds of interesting & accomplished post-avant poets of all stripes actively publishing & reading, why would any journal – & I do mean any – rely on submissions to shape what it will publish?? It’s one thing to accept interesting work that does show up when & as it does, but quite another to depend on it to create your own editorial statement. A journal that hasn’t gone out & actively solicited a good portion – 75 percent or more – of what appears in its pages can hardly speak of having an “aesthetic vision” beyond opening the mail.

 

A•Bacus, edited by a male, has managed to have seven of its last 15 issues written by women authors, suggesting that the approach of going out to find the writers proves to be more inclusive than waiting for the writers to find you. It also enables A•Bacus to create a public presence that articulates its aesthetics vision coherently to a readership in a way that is far harder if one is depending erratically on the unpredictable.

 

Yesterday, Dan Featherston commented on his concern about the “balkanization” of post-avant poetics. From my perspective, that could/would occur only if & when different tendencies refuse to seriously consider one another – it doesn’t necessarily mean that they also need to publish one another, although there will always be interesting possibilities to pick up on writers who demonstrate cross-tendency characteristics. I frankly don’t see balkanization as a danger today nearly so much as I do atomization, hundreds of small press rags publishing good, even great writing will become indistinguishable if they don’t set – and fulfill – readers’ expectations through some mode of aesthetic consistency. That’s why, with all its design flaws, the crumpled issue* of House Organ that turns up in my mailbox is so often a breath of fresh air. It has a point of view.

 

 Annie Finch asked me if the circumstances of this little magazine jibed “with my experience” & if I had any thoughts on why this might be. It has, of course, been over two decades since I edited Tottels &, two years before I printed the first issue I was soliciting the work for it, so I ended up using very few submissions – most notably some from David Gitin – but my memory does in fact “jibe” with that report. Few if any women sent work unsolicited for possible publication even though my first single-author issue back in 1971 was devoted to the work of Rae Armantrout. At one level, I suspect that women – perhaps especially at this moment in history – may just be more sensitive to the implications of the power relationships of editing & publication, and may find them more obnoxious, than do men. That has to do with one’s experience of power & the other experiences to which one might relate it. But even more so, the experience I see that “jibes” with what Annie finds is that far too many journals, by ducking the hard aesthetic questions (i.e., who are you & what are you about?), end up creating the very problems of representation that they then bemoan.

 

It doesn’t need to be the case.

 

 

 

 

* There appears to be a lead poem by Clayton Eshleman in the current number, but I can’t tell you anything about it, because a good portion of the body of the text did not survive the adventures of the U.S. Postal Service.