43 by TriQuarterly

1ii.Quarterly 43 EDITOR:

Elliott Anderson

EXECUTIVE EDITOR:

ART DIRECTOR:

Mary Kinzie

Cynthia Anderson

MANAGING EDITOR: Michael McDonnell

ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Tracy Harris, Julia Katz, Mariam Lease, Sylvia Martin, Michael Schleif, Mary Elinore Smith, Mitchell York ADVISORY EDITORS:

Lawrence Levy, Charles Newman

WORD PROCESSING:

Richard Hay, Jr.

FULFILLMENT: Leigh Alexander,

Judy Marrs, Mary M. Zakrasek

Robert Alter, Michael Anania, Gerald Graff, John Hawkes, David Hayman, Joseph McElroy,

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:

Peter Michelson, Robert Onopa, Tony Tanner, Nathaniel Tarn TrlQuarterly is an international journal of arts, letters, and opinion published in the fall, winter, and spring at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 6020l. Subscription rates: One year $12.00; two years $20.00; three years $30.00. Foreign subscriptions $1.00 per year additional. Single copies usually $4.25. Back issue prices on request. Contributions, correspondence, and sub scriptions should be addressed to TrlQuarterly, 1735 Benson Avenue, North western University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. The editors invite submissions, but queries are strongly suggested. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts ac cepted for publication become the property of TrlQuarterly, unless otherwise indicated. Copyright © 1978 by TrlQuarteriy. All rights reserved. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors sponsors. Printed in the United States of America. Claims for missing numbers will be honored only within the four-month period after month of issue. or

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PREFATORY NOTE

OF LIVING BELFRY AND RAMPART: ON AMERICAN LITERARY

SINCE

MAGAZINES

1950

Michael Anania ACADEMIA AND THE LITTLE MAGAZINE

Charles Robinson FELIX POLLAK, AN INTERVIEW ON LITrI.E MAGAZINES

Mark Olson, John Judson & Richard Boudreau THE L ITTL.E MAGAZINE IN ITS PLACE: lITERARY CULTURE AND ANARCHY

Robert Boyers 1939-1 no

THE KENYON REVIEW,

Robie Macauley THE SOUTHERN REYIEW AND A POST-SOUTHERN AMERICAN LETTERS

Lewis P. Simpson 100

ON EDITING FURIOSO

Reed Whittemore ON.AN.Y!!..

1 1 1

Jack Conroy 130

ON PARTISAN REVIEW

William Phillips MEMOIR OF A

50-YEAR-OLD PUBLISHER ON HIS VOYAGE TO OUTER SPACE

Seymour Lawrence Qll: HALLELUJAH ON A STRAW

164

Theodore Weiss A MANIFESTO

(SOTTO VOCE)

185

James Boatwright KARL SHAPIRO, AN INTERVIEW ON POETRY

197

Michael Anania & Ralph J. Mills, Jr. THE CARE AND FUNDING OF PEGASUS

216

Joseph Parisi ORIGIN

239

Cid Corman ON BLACK MOUNTAIN REVIEW

248

Robert Creeley DAISY ALDAN, AN INTERVIEW ON FOLDER

Dennis Barone KULCHUR: A MEM01R

281

Lita Hornick

Nort�westerJ] University Ubrary Evanston, II ..

263

143

298

NEQN,KULCHUR,ETC.

Gilbert Sorrentino LEROI JONES, AN INTERVIEW ON Yl.lillili

317

David Ossman A BACKWARD GLANCE O'ER BEATNIK ROADS

324

Krim ON BIG TABLE, CHICAGO REVIEW, AND THE PURPLE SAGE

341

Peter Michelson ON'IBM&

376

James Boyer May THE GALL OF WORMWOOP IN PRINTING OVER 66 ISSUES AND STILL CONTINUING

389

Marvin Malone ROBERT KELLY, AN INTERVIEW ON TROBAR

398

David Ossman EL CORNO EMPLUMADO,

1961-1969: SOME NOTES IN RETROSPECT, 1975

405

Margaret Randall 1llISI: A TRIBAL SEED

423

Len Fulton ON KA.XAK

438

George Hitchcock DOING CATERPII LAR

450

Clayton Eshleman BLUE SUEDE SHOES, ISSUE

379 (THE BABE RUTH ESSAY)

473

Keith Abbott 1964-1976 Richard Grossinger

A HISTORY OF lQ,

482

DISCUSSION OF LITTLE MAGAZINES AND RELATED TOPICS

496

Anne Waldman & Larry Fagin

515 Mark Jay Mirsky

ON FICTION

ENTERPRISE IN THE SERVICE OF ART

524

George Plimpton STRIDENCY AND THE SWORD: LITERARY AND CULTURAL EMPHASIS IN

AFRO-AMERICAN MAGAZINES

538

Eugene Redmond THE LITTLE

MAGAZINE/SMALL PRESS CONNECTION: SOME CONJECTURES

Tom Montag

575

BEHIND THE WRITER, AHEAD OF THE READER: A SHORT HISTORY

595 Ted Wilentz & Bill Zavatsky

OF CORINTH BOOKS

ON PUSHCART PRESS

614

Bill Henderson WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE? THE FICTION COLLECTIVE

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF

625

Jonathan Baumbach REPORT ON THE FICTION COLLECTIVE

635

Gene Lyons THE LITTLE MAGAZINE TODAY

648

Felix Stefanile AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SELECTED LITTLE MAGAZINES

666

Peter Martin

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the

following: To Donald Allen and Creeley's 1969 essay on The

Robert Creeley, for permission to reprint Mr.

by Grey Fox Press. To Mrs. Margaret Robinson and to James Boyer May, for permission to reprint "Academia and the Little Magazine," by Charles Robinson from Trace magazine, © 1964 by James Boyer May. To Joan and Ted Wilentz of Corinth Books for permission to reprint interviews with LeRoi Jones and Robert Kelly from The Sullen Art: Interviews by David Ossman with Modern American Poets (Corinth Books, New York, copyright © 1963 by David Ossman). To George Houde for his photographs of magazines. This issue of

TriQuarterly is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines.

PREFATORY NOTE The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary His tory was conceived as a companion to a study by Frederick J.

Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Mag azine: A History and a Bibliography, published by Princeton

University Press in 1946. The Hoffman-AlIen-Ulrich volume of fered a twelve-chapter history of the various movements, themes, causes, and types of little magazines, as well as a 1 50-page bibliog raphy. Frederick Hoffman's interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis, the literary imagination, and the avant-garde in formed the book's structure and focus, although there were chap ters on political movements, regionalism, and the critical and eclectic magazines as well. What was missing, and what we have tried to include in the present volume, is a sense of the living reality of the publications. Rather than offer a historical overview, or collaboration between historians, we have assembled a large collection of essay-memoirs by prominent and representative even

little magazine editors, publishers, and contributors, including a generous selection of photo-documents and an annotated bibli

ography of 84 important magazines of the period. Although such a documentary project inevitably lacks the integration of more conventional histories, our basic concern has been for the phe nomenon of little magazines-for the curious and oftentimes ec centric processes of the field-not for one or another interpretation of their collective merit, however congenial. The field today is so large, the kinds of magazines and the attitudes of their editors so diverse, that no literary historian could hope to offer more than a gloss. It is a commonplace now to say that commercial magazines and publishers no longer offer the full range of literary services that they once did, and that as a result the little magazines offer newer writers-as well as more difficult or "literary" authors-their only publishing opportunity. Little magazines generally put experiment before ease, and art before comment. They can afford to do so because they can barely "afford" to do anything; in other words, as a rule they do not, and cannot, expect to make money. Consequently, the ways in which they appeal to their readers need 3

not be

coercive, stylistically uniform, or categorically topical, as

the ways of commercial presses must be. There is something edgy, something peculiar and asocial, about

great many little magazines. Those who write for them are in some sense the disadvantaged, at least by commercial standards: people who have a bone to pick, people who are writing against the a

grain, but who nevertheless want recognition. Not content to wait until the new sensibility of which they may be the harbingers has proven itself in time, they insist upon a revolution in taste now. In important respects, the meaning and value of the contem porary little magazine exists between the lines of this volume, in the spoken and unspoken alliances and antagonisms that exist between the various contributors, and in the larger differences that should be perceived between past and present, between magazines of the pre-World War II period and those published since the war. It may be that the modern world is no longer as receptive to intel ligent meditation as it may have been through the 1940s, and that our culture will no longer support the literary judgments of a rela tively small number of literate commentators. It may be that the advances in publishing technologies and the conglomerations of their economies militate against the cultural coherence of the past. Or it may be, too, that such coherence is an inevitable function of

nostalgia and that commercial publishers were no more representa tive and supportive before 1950 than they are now. When a historical survey of the more recent period is written, what will be elusive about the literature of the postwar period will not be just the moment of personality-which is, after all, hard to

chart in any history-but,

narrowly, the determination of

the little magazine enterprise to resist any such systematic re-crea tion. What becomes clear, in other words, from the memoirs and documents here is the determination of many editors and writers from the fifties to the present to reject all paraphrase, to insist on

the absolute inviolable idiosyncrasy of their endeavors, not simply as

writers but also as editors. Oddly enough, this is often just as

true of the academic editors as it is of the avant-garde and polemi

cal-mimeo editors. The history of this period in little magazine

editing is one of egregious and splendid bias. Not the least among the causes are the effort, the cost, and the fatally meager rewards of small publishing ventures-and the change in the audience for literature suggested by those diminishing returns. 4

history, little need be said. It took four years. Many people have contributed advice; As for the process of compiling such

Once the deci

many more have volunteered practical assistance. sion was taken to assemble a documentary history, it became first a matter of establishing a shape, a profile, then of backing and

filling to provide substance. Our concern from the beginning was to be comprehensive-that is, representative-including work not only about the most significant magazines but about each of the kinds as well. Whom have we left out? In quantity a great many. In kind, not many at all. We would have preferred a broader representation of ethnic and minority publications, and we would have preferred a coherent, linear view of the reasons for magazine proliferation during the sixties and seventies. Nevertheless we be lieve that the documents which follow-the essays, memoirs,

notations, and photo-materials-constitute a comprehensive mea sure of the past three decades of little magazine history. We owe special thanks to Hanna Gray, formerly dean of the

College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, and to Richard Press, formerly assistant librarian for collection develop ment at Northwestern University Library, who originally encour aged this project; to contributing editors Robert Alter, John Hawkes, Tony Tanner, and Nathaniel Tarn, for conferring with us in the early stages of planning; to Thomas R. Buckman, Joseph Epstein, Melvin J. Friedman, Bill Katz, Robie Macauley, Nicholas Nyary, Felix Pollak, Ishmael Reed, Walter B. Rideout, Frances Steloff, and Robert Wilson for their advice and suggestions; to John Jacob and Marjorie Smelstor, S. c., for substantive information and materials on little magazines; and to Russell Maylone, curator of special collections at Northwestern University Library, for his generous support. We would like to acknowledge our particular debt to Marvin Malone, poet, editor, and bibliophile, for making available to us not only his extensive private collection but also his considerable knowledge of little magazines. We would also like to thank the Illinois Arts Council, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Charles Newman and the Huston Foundation for financial assist ance

without which publication of this volume would not have

been possible. E.A. M.K.

July 4,1978 5

OF LIVING BELFRY AND RAMPART: ON AMERICAN LITERARY MAGAZINES SINCE 1950 Michael Anania Michael Anania contends that where many magazines of the fifties still exhibited strong ties to the modernists, especially Pound and Williams, such historical consciousness is largely absent

from the magazines of the past two decades. As a result, a proper historical appreciation of them requires not only the scrutiny of the literary historian and the literary critic, but that of the social psychologist and perhaps the political scientist as well. Among the magazines founded since 1970, the field of true experimentation has been limited to fiction, while poetry has been excused from polemic to retreat into a licensed narcissism. As president of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines from 1975 to 1976, Mr. Anania was in a good position to gauge the paradoxical politics of the little magazines, especially those of editors who styled themselves populists yet sought government money. In one of the few attempts that have been made to gain for literature the kind of massive support given by federal, state, and local governments to opera and theater companies, symphony orchestras, and ballets, Mr. Anania was instrumental in obtaining Ford Foundation money to finance distribution and promotion grants to little magazines of all kinds. Michael Anania edited the little magazine Audit/Poetry at SUNY-Buffalo from 1964 to 1967, and served as poetry editor and then literary editor of Swallow Press in Chicago from 1967 to 1974. He has also been an adviser to the New York State Council on

the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. His second volume of

Riversongs, has just been published by the University of Illinois Press. Forthcoming is a book of nonfiction, The Red

poetry,

Menace-about, among other matters, growing up in the fifties, the Bomb, the ritual uses of peyote, and radical street politics. 6

A number of years ago the editor of Young Guard, the principal

literary magazine for Soviet writers under forty, visited my office in Chicago. He and several companions were touring the United States west to east-Hollywood, Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, a Kansas wheatfield, an Iowa cornfield, Chicago's Michigan Avenue, and, by sheer social accident, the Swallow Press: a dusty, chaotic loft, half a block from police headquarters, south of the Loop in the natural habitat of marginal commerce and the half-pint bottle. We drank coffee, exchanged cigarettes, and through a translator talked about literature and publishing. We toured the offices and

the warehouse. It must have been

strange experience for the

Soviet editor-that

gaping old structure, with wooden beams exposed above pallets of unsold poetry books, the busy disarray of the offices, the blare of WVON Soul Radio from the packing table in the back room, classical FM in stereo from

atop the file cabinets

in the office space in front, the regular thud of falling

objects in

the Senior Citizens'

Workshop one floor up. State Department sight-seeing at the raffish edges of capitalism. I couldn't tell whether he thought we were dilettantes or lunatics, but it was clear that our experience had tours

do not,

matter of course, feature

very little in common with his. Back in my office, he browsed through the shelves of literary magazines on the wall beside my

desk. "What are these things?" he asked, holding an early copy of

Toothpick, Lisbon and the Orcas Islands until the translator fin ished the question in English.

"Literary magazines." The answer made its way to him in Russian. He

glanced at the shelves again, then at his companion, an agricultural economist in amber-tinted glasses, and asked that the answer be repeated. The shelves held three or four years' worth of fifty or so

literary maga

zines. "How can there be so many?" I explained that what I had

barely a sample of the number of magazines being produced across the country. Again he questioned the translator about my

was

"And do they all have many readers?" I told him that some had very few readers. "How many?" He was doing arithmetic in his head, trying to figure the enormity of a literature that could sustain all this, I suppose. His magazine in Russia had a circulation of more than 200,000, with and ethnic It answer.

regional

was

supplements.

the point of entry for most young writers into the writers' 7

union, and so was essential to employment. It was also the key to publication by the

magazine's book publishing affiliate. "A few-just two or three-have circulations of about 10,000,"

I said. "Most

are

printed in runs of less than 2,000 copies, and

many have fewer than a hundred readers." The translation reached

him like a cool breeze, and he relaxed a bit. If this was to be the

day on which the literature gap was discovered, at least he would be on the high side. He was still puzzled. What was the point of having so many magazines with so few readers? Wouldn't it be better to have just a few magazines that everyone interested in literature could read?

magazines down from the shelf: an Antioch Review, thick as an anthropology textbook in paperback; Kayak, bantamweight in rough paper with untrimmed edges, on the cover an old engraving demonstrating the use of an antique prosthetic device; a yellowed Floating Bear in uncertain mimeograph; Exten sions, deliberately international and tidy as a French suitcoat; a more ample Chicago Review with a busy post-psychedelic drawing of a tree on the cover; Goliards in high-gloss newsstand format and disjointed graphics, like a top hat decked out with fishing flies and campaign buttons; Poetry, as thin, sedate, and costly as a dowager empress. There was a last question-unasked, perhaps unformulated. He shuffled through the pile of magazines he had He pulled

moved to my desk, confused and a little embarrassed. I tried hard to explain the kind of diversity the magazines

represented and said something, oft-repeated during years of fund-raising, about their place in the history of modem literature. The translator worked away at this like a tireless journeyman with a bad set of blueprints and knotted lumber. The Russian listened, trying to arrange the magazines at hand into a pile that would not fall over. I wanted to convey something of the romance of little magazines, their indi viduality and the deep personal commitments that sustain them something, that is, of my own attachment to them. My interroga tor nodded at the translator's version of my

flourish, but without

conviction. He was acquiescing, not agreeing. I consoled myself with the notion that in riffling through those

magazines in a disheveled Chicago editorial office he had seen more of American literary publishing than most literary visitors, and I confess to a certain perverse pride in the irregularity of it 8

all-the odd idiosyncrasies of magazines so intent on individuality that they refuse to share a format that will make a neat stack or

orderly shelf. But where I saw freedom (or, at least, license), he saw ineffectual diffusion, yet another Disneyland where the illusion of choice is the disguise of limitation and fidgeting activity replaces movement. His questions were clearly rooted in Soviet literary and political bureaucracy, but they are not easily dismissed. Why are there so many magazines? Who reads them, anyway? an

Wouldn't it be better to have fewer magazines with larger resources and more readers? I have heard the same questions asked by U.S.

government officials, foundation executives, and little magazine editors. Go in for scribenery with a satiety of

arthurs malady of milady made melodi of malodi. -James Joyce ...

In the introduction to The Little Magazines: A History and a Bibliography, authors Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich estimated that six hundred little magazines had been published in English between

1912 and 1946. Informed guesswork-not much else is possible

suggests that at least fifteen hundred such magazines are being pub lished in the United States right now. The figure is

approximate Coordinating many magazines briefly. Council of Literary Magazines, a nonprofit organization that distributes state, federal, and private funds to magazines nation wide, has a current membership of over six hundred publications, and the organization requires that each member magazine must have published three issues and have existed for at least a year before applying for membership or financial support. The Direc

because

exist

The

tory of Little Magazines and Small Presses poses neither of these restrictions and offers a longer list, nearly a thousand; and it has to be assumed that magazines are published that do not find their

way onto either list. A great number of magazines die before the appearance of a second issue. Three issues, the CCLM require

ment, is a tough distance for most beginners. A modest first issue is likely to consume all the ready cash its editors can muster; with luck and a fair-sized circle of friends, donations and subscriptions can

support a second number; but the third issue has no natural 9

resources.

It is the one that naive editors

suppose will be supported

by sales, but it is a rule of literary magazine publishing that there are no sales, certainly none sufficient to sustain publication. Each year hundreds of magazines are born and die with one or two issues that never find their way onto lists or into copyright registry. So the numbers are conjectural but extremely high-twice as many magazines in print at any moment in the mid-seventies as existed altogether in the first thirty-five years of little-magazine history. An explosion in little-magazine publication occurred in the late sixties and continues. It is supported in part by the avail ability of grants-from CCLM, state arts councils, and the National Endowment for the Arts-but depends, as well, on a growing population of writers and on access to various kinds of printing technology. Nearly 67 percent of the magazines in CCLM's most recent catalogue (May 1977) have come into existence since 1970; less than 9 percent existed before 1960; and

only eight magazines from Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich's extensive bibliography survive. The world of little magazines is characterized not only by growth but by incessant change. Magazines die, not only because they lack funds but because their editors, often quite deliberately, allow them to die-sometimes out of frustration or exhaustion and sometimes because they feel that the task of the magazine has been accomplished. This last is especially true for magazines with a closely defined literary point of view and a tightly knit group of writers. Little magazines have always functioned primarily for writers. Readers are desirable, sometimes even actively sought out, but the impulse behind most magazines is the writer-editor's conviction that there are writers who are not being served by existing publi cations. At their best, little magazines draw together groups of writers and, however marginally, find them an audience .&..1 con trast, commercial magazines find audiences and financial support and then, almost incidentally, find their writers. Because of their attention to writers the little magazines register, in their numbers and shifting variety, the literary activity in the country. The modern quarterly emerged from a period of intense interest in .

criticism in the late thirties and forties and seemed to dominate

the literary scene well into the fifties. Yet

retrospect 10

as an

we see the fifties in intense period of activity, particularly in poetry,

supported by a number of remarkable small magazines-Ark, Contact, Folder, Circle, Measure, Poetry New York, Big Table, the Black Mountain Review, and others-that deliberately set themselves against the larger magazines' reliance on criticism.

they had an entirely new group of writers to publish, among them Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Merton, Olson, Levertov, Merwin, O'Hara, and Snyder. None of these magazines survive; of the "Chief Periodicals" listed by Donald Allen in The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, only two magazines are still publishing: Poetry and Chicago Review. The interplay between eclectic quarterlies and highly individualistic smaller magazines continued into the sixties; but the sharp line between critically buttressed work in quarterlies (once called academic) and newer work faded quickly as the numbers increased and as writers of all kinds found their way into expanded versions of academe. More important,

In the sixties and seventies, the audience for serious literature

has not grown nearly as fast as the number of writers. Some have claimed that the actual number of readers has diminished. None

theless, writers' workshops proliferate in colleges and universities (the final redoubts of failing English departments), and poets and fiction writers in increasing numbers enter the world in search

of publication. For the first time in history, we may have more writers than readers. Editorial offices of established magazines are drifted over with manuscripts, and

new

magazines are born to

meet the writers' needs for print. Increasingly, magazines seem to

reflect a sociological circumstance as much as an aesthetic one.

Aesthetically most new magazines declare themselves to be avant-garde. Very few are. The declaration is ritualistic, a part of the magazine's acknowledgment of its lineage among the magazines of the first part of the century. Many of the recent magazines are

really involved in the eccentric use of literary precedents-a useful procedure, but one that is more cautious and traditional than most editors would like to admit. Typically, a magazine will be generated out of

sense

common

interest---even of immediate

com

munity-among writers. The editors write to one or two prominent figures they admire, asking for contributions. Sometimes, in less coherent groups, all that is being sought is a little authority with which to launch the project, that and some validation of the less notable writers the magazine will include. In more carefully 11

organized groups, the figureheads define the magazine's aesthetic precedent. Thus the magazine's orbit is in perigee around its most notable contributor. Usually the writers chosen for these roles are not broadly accepted national figures-never a Lowell or a Roth or Cheever-but are the distinguished vestiges Berryman, of previous new waves. Modern American literature has seen a succession of avant-gardes; very few have captured an enduring authority. For all the ballyhoo, the center of American letters has remained fairly conservative since the 1930s. An example of a magazine that started in this way is Milk Quarterly, a Chicago publication that emerged from a group of writers which met regularly. The magazine began as a forum for writing done by members of the group, but declared at the outset an allegiance to the New York School with regular appearances by Ted Berrigan. Berrigan gave precedent to much of what appeared in the magazine, though very little of what was published was directly generated from Berrigan's work. This kind of situ ation can be seen in magazines with precedent-figures as different as

Thomas

McGrath, Thomas Lux, Charles Bukowski, Harold

Norse, and Ed Dorn. In the almost totally decentralized literature of the late sixties and

early seventies,

these

associations

are

measures of what was once called influence. Magazines of this sort

can

be seen as developmental. What's going on is an experiment

with the possibilities of a fairly well-articulated aesthetic; the play is outward from, then back to, a source, like a game of hide-and

seek-furtive, sometimes daring, but always in sight of home base. When the

exploration of possibilities is especially thorough or eccentric, the magazine can be very exciting. In their attachment to the very recent past (the day before yesterday, in some cases), many magazines reflect a general trend in the society; in America, after all, nostalgia has replaced history. The association of literary movements with precedents is obviously not new. The magazines that presented the "new poetry" of the 1950s all exhibited strong ties to the modernists, to Pound and a tradition of experimenta the twenties tion in and before, and beyond that to Whitman. What

Williams most firmly; they looked to

is peculiar to the contemporary use of literary precedent is that it is 12

willing to take its masters from so close at hand. With few

exceptions, history, at least literary history, is largely absent from newer magazines. In addition to their role as adversaries to popu lar literary trends, the magazines of the early part of the century exhibited a number of broad historical and critical concerns. In The Little Review, Dial, and Hound and Horn there appeared

regularly essays by modern writers that treated historical figures reclamation, even conscription for the movement of Dante, Homer, Blake, Shelley, the Elizabethans, the Metaphysicals, the French. Ezra Pound's brief essay, "The Tradition," first appeared in Poetry (III, 3, December 1913); essential essays by Eliot and Joyce first appeared in The Little Review and The Dial, along with essays by Santayana and Bertrand Russell. If the modern movement was intent on reinventing the past to suit its own purposes, contem porary writing seems preoccupied with knitting up the tattered edges of the present. Few contemporary magazines take a critical stand; essays, even book reviews and correspondence, are less and less common, especially in newer magazines. Perhaps the weight of criticism that filled the quarterlies is still being counteracted, or it may be that the excesses of academic, scholarly criticism are now too apparent. There are exceptions. lo, which is involved pri marily in myth and cosmology, is full of prose discourse by poets, but by design none of it is what would traditionally be called critical. At the other end of the scale is Parnassus, a magazine composed entirely of critical reviews of books of poetry. Some quarterlies still attempt a traditional balance of fiction, poetry, and criticism, but few of these have much critical authority among writers. Partisan Review sustains itself but with far less of the

political and cultural focus it once had. American Poetry Review includes a great deal of commentary through a number of regular columns, and Salmagundi and Massachusetts Review are note worthy for the consistently high quality of their critical essays. There are also some notable smaller magazines that have reserved space for closely focused commentary. Kayak, an exemplary smaller magazine in a number of ways, still includes letters and comments that have a clear relationship to the concerns of the magazine. Robert BIy's magazines (The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies) have been models for idiosyncratic editing and highly personal critical commentary. Somewhere between the 13

larger magazines with balanced content and these smaller, more personal publications is Field, a magazine with particular interests in translation and in surrealism, which has engaged a number of important writers in important theoretical discussion. There are broad literary differences among the magazines of the last three decades: university-based reviews with eclectic interests; quarterlies with distinct critical frameworks; independent eclectic magazines that have invariably served the centrist literature nobly and well (Poetry Northwest and Beloit Poetry Journal are just two examples of this type of magazine); and adversary magazines, those quicksilver enterprises that hold much of the romance of the little magazines in their invariable insistence that everybody in print is wrong about nearly everything literary and cultural except the few people published in their thirty-two saddle-stitched, un trimmed pages. Distinctions among very recent magazines--the 69 percent founded since 1970-are less easily drawn. Obviously, the field is too big and too crowded. Differences are also confused by quarrels about size and funding. In the clamor for grants and the squabbling that has ensued, literary matters have been en tangled with financial statements. "Hard-pressed" has been taken to include experimental; "independently owned" in some circles is synonymous with avant-garde. Except for the activities of a few publications involved with conceptual art, like Vile or Northwest Mounted Valise, most experimentation in magazines seems inter necine or elaborately involved with the play of precedents discussed earlier. Concretism came into American magazines late and was introduced here by a university magazine (Chicago Review). As far as I know, there was never a magazine in this country comparable to Ian Hamilton Finlay's Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. or a publishing program like Agenzia in France. The most intense literary experi mentation in the last decade has been in fiction, and the economics of magazine publication kept most of the little magazines out of

the center of these activities. There was also an area of conflict between the new fiction and small pressmanship. In addition to

demanding increased expenditures for typesetting and paper, the new fiction's antirealism became the focus for charges of social elitism that poetry-its mantle of sentimental individualism and licensed narcissism still intact-was spared. Fiction, it seems, invokes a politics from which (sadly) poetry has been excused. 14

When I was a director of CCLM, I was accused in public of being antirealist, and therefore elitist, by a small-magazine editor who in the previous breath had proclaimed himself a member of the

avant-garde and one of the few true heirs of the modern magazine tradition. If the new fiction wanted magazines, it would have to make its own. In the 1960s little-magazine publishing, like much of the rest

of the culture, was suffused in politics. Poets who would have

never

allied in

spoken to one another on literary grounds reading against the war in Vietnam, and there was a companion solidarity among magazines. As in the general culture also, there remains in the magazine world a residual leftism, focused occa sionally on conservation or on a particular struggle, which surfaces in literary discussion here and there. Institutions are still distrusted. A populism never required of poetry is frequently demanded of fiction, and experimental fiction is seen as dangerously self involved. The editor's inherent interest in production and dis tribution veers dangerously close to capitalism. With all the cosmological froufrou of the Whole Earth Movement, do-it yourself printing and binding is often raised from its place as economic necessity to a level of singular and unassailable virtue. As I suggested before, the magazine boom requires sociology as much as it does criticism or literary history. There are basic contradictions between the obvious goals of most magazines and the political sentiments that seem native to meetings of little magazine editors, and are part of the relationship of literature to the society as a whole. Magazine editors, as much as any group, are concerned about the dangers of growth. There is a sense were

among them that whatever it is that makes literature most valuable and vital cannot survive corporate climates and the manipulations

of large amounts of money and resources. The problems are quite

real, but the emotional recoil from them frequently results in limits set

close at hand that

they make any development impossible. meetings at which any editor who talked about professionalized production or energetic distribution so

I have attended

was hooted down as a sellout.

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audit, Vol. 4, No.1, 1964, edited by Michael Anania and Charles Doria; extensions, Vol. 1, No.1, 1968, edited by Suzanne Zavrian and Joachim Neugroschel; Lillabulero, double issues Nos. 10/11, 1971, edited by Russell Banks and William Matthews; Unicorn Journal, Vol. 1, No.1, 1968, edited

by Teo Savory (courtesy Michael Anania).

Antreus

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Transatlantic Review, No, 58/59, 1977, edited by I,F, McCrindle; Antaeus, No, 27, Autumn 1977, edited by Daniel

Halpern; The Hudson Review, Vol,

31, No, 1, Spring 1978, edited by Paula Deitz and Frederick Morgan;

Chicago Review, Vol, 22, No.1, Autumn 1970, edited by Harry Foster (courtesy Michael Anania),

Where there are angels. there are

wrangles, where there are editors, there are creditors

...

it is as

simple as that. -Cyril Connolly (1964) 3

Literary magazines are all failing business propositions. That any survive at all is a tribute to editors skilled at everything from typesetting to down-home flimflam. Traditionally, magazines were supposed to be supported by angels, creatures as implausible in contemporary literature as they are in modern theology. There are some magazines that still have benefactors left over from the fall of the patronage class. Some rely on university support-a financial base that has grown less dependable as universities them selves have lost much of their financial stability. It was once assumed that a university-based editor was on easy street; now he has to be seen as someone deftly juggling a small morsel above a tank of piranha. The majority of contemporary magazines are supported almost entirely by their editors-in cash and labor. Even with the infusion of editorial labor, most magazines have fairly high unit costs; magazines with cover prices of a dollar to a dollar and a half frequently cost two or three dollars to produce and distribute. Some larger magazines can manage better cost figures because of larger print runs, but distribution barriers seem to exist that keep them from taking advantage of favorable num bers. Simply put, all magazines need money, and money for litera ture is hard to get. Foundation support for literature nationally is less than 1 percent of all grants made, and the National Endowment manages less than 2 percent. Literature is altogether too private, both in its production and consumption, to gather the support given to operas, orchestras, theater companies, and ballets. There are no

opera house overheads, no unions, no guarantees, no advance ticket sales, and, finally, no grand openings to ooze social prominence and drip jewelry.

Since 1967 the

Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines grant-giving agency for literary magazines, dis tributing funds from the Endowment and a few private sources. Because the organization deals in funding magazines and has a large membership, it is a good context in which to test the possibility of cooperation suggested by my friend the Russian has served

editor. If the total consolidation of production, distribution, and editorial judgment he had in mind are both impractical and

undesirable in our situation, some sense of common purpose once seemed possible through CCLM. The grants program brought the

magazines together, however churlishly. The initial notion was to fund quality magazines according to their needs. The idea never sat well with the small-magazine editors, who argued that because of large costs of big magazines, they would get all the money. Figures sailed back and forth between CCLM and COSMEP, a coalition of small magazine and small-press editors, with attendant accusations. Grants committees

were

editors and writers involved with the

elected from among the magazines, but since the

amount of money available in grants was never large

enough, no ever hope to get a grant that would make a useful dent in its deficit; the smaller magazines were never persuaded that deficits were anything more than the numerical record of the capitalistic vices of larger magazines. The fracture between large and small, in many ways unjustifiable on hard evidence, was fairly permanent. Also, the Endowment seemed eager to be swayed by the quarreling that went on, largely because the CCLM grant represented a large portion of Literature one was ever

really satisfied. No big magazine could

Panel funds that had gone out of the Panel's control. The arena for charges, accusations, and threats simply expanded. Eventually

the Endowment established two grants programs for magazines independent of the CCLM program. The future of CCLM in the midst of such fractured funding is

uncertain. Certainly the sort of magazine unity I had once thought

possible has been foreclosed. The grants procedure has always posed a threat to the independence of the magazines, though it was hopelessly exaggerated by all the quarreling. If judgments were made on the basis of quality, then marginally, at least, the organi zation was monitoring the editorial content of the magazines. It was presumed that the elected grants committees would disarm this concern. They did not. The degree of distrust was so high that everyone involved was suspect. The final stage in the grants com mittee system was reached in 1977, when an elected committee decided that it would not make qualitative judgments of any kind. The funds were simply divided equally among all the applicants, 19

giving each a grant of about $900. In this gesture some of the grantees received more than

year's total budget; others were

stuck with far less than a meaningful sum of

zation, which had spent years building

money. The organi of noninter

assurances

ference into the rules governing committee

procedures, was forced magazine funding fall victim to a single committee. Unity had come to mean equity, and equity finally became equivalency. Quite apart from issues of literary quality, but in keeping with the populist attitudes within the organization, CCLM has under gone another set of strains on its potential unity. Along with the society as a whole, the organization has been forced into an awareness of minority needs. A program was established to bring minority magazines into the grants procedure early by waiving the three-issue rule. Affirmative action resolutions were passed. The to sit by and watch its basic assumptions about

scenario is a familiar one, but CCLM, more than most institutions, is ill suited to the situation. Its

history has been completely in volved with independent, highly individualistic operations, the literary equivalent of Jefferson's American frontiersman, nervous when anyone else has settled within ten miles. For political and social reasons, minority magazines tended to be the work of coalitions. A very nearly atomized pluralism that had just been served by replacing judgment with long division was being asked to deal with a series of collectivist groups. Although the goals of ethnic literary magazines were acceptable, the nature of their demands was dangerously close in dollars to the amounts requested by larger magazines, but in this instance accusing the magazines of rampant capitalism seemed implausible. Because CCLM had been involved primarily with editors and their magazines, their needs came to overshadow the concern with writers and their work. Magazines can easily become their editors' primary form of self -realization-peculiar monads of intense self-reflexivity. The tendency is probably endemic and not altogether bad, for it carries some of the essential brave lunacy that keeps editors and magazines going. Still, it is hardly conducive to organizational strength. When self-realization is a primary goal, then one self-realization is as good as any other; the more liberal sanctity a demand has, the less likely it is to be treated in any sort 20

of measured way. The alternatives are simply capitulation or self

serving retreat. Like the welfare system, CCLM has identified a community it has neither the resources nor the will to serve. It has made enough effective grants at lower levels to insure the marginal survival of much of its burgeoning population, but in the process has generated

expectations that it cannot fulfill. All this could be an incentive to positive action if some sense of common purpose could be agreed upon. A Disneyland without Disney's resources, my Russian friend might argue-a system of illusions at the point of collapse, praising its own tatters as signs of virtue. a new range of

Nothing much then in the way of sights for sore eyes. But who can be sure who has not been there, has not lived there, they call that living, for them the spark is present, ready to burst into flame, all it needs is preaching on, to become a

living torch, screams included. -Samuel Beckett

The

questions posed by my Russian friend-Why are there so

magazines? Who reads them? Why aren't there fewer magazines with more readers?-are troublesome because they sit so readily among the anxieties I have had about them as a writer, what's a good term for a CCLM director? editor, and strategist (perhaps). They also play evil tricks with the deforma tions of my own nostalgias. I have a fondness for the magazines of the first half of the century. I keep them around-not a collection, nothing so orderly as that, just a scattering of things: a few Poetrys from 1913, a Horizon from 1944, some early Partisan Reviews, some few Botteghe Oscures, a Dial from 1929. What I do have in

many

sequence begins in the 1950s when I started subscribing. The earlier things are talismans, magical remnants of a world made

orderly, even heroic, in retrospect. The great magazines of that era seem so singular that, taken one by one, they suggest an overall clarity of literary purpose that could never have existed. Of course, the Russian did not understand the import of that stack of magazines he could not keep upright. How could he? Their significance so easily eludes us. The answers to his questions are 21

altogether too simple to give us much comfort. Why are there so many? Because that's how it is for a literature committed to change. Literary magazines today fill the same functions they filled at the beginning of the century. They give a place to writing for which no other place has been made. Criticism is slow and cautious; popular taste, as important as it is in other contexts, has nothing to do with the development of writing; commerce is too cautiously trying to pace a slow criticism to quixotic popularities. The world of literary magazines is raffish and irregular because nothing else will do in a setting in which the best hope of every serious writer is to undermine every notion of what makes

good

piece of writing

and durable.

Of course there are too many magazines. The genius that maga zines have shown for graceful dying has not been entirely lost, and it should be cultivated. Yet the magazine explosion, finally, is not

the fault of editors or national endowments but of writers. More and more we have drawn the magazines to our various isolations,

instead of moving on,

should, into riskier associations. If the magazine community is past fragmentation and nearer atomiza tion, so are its writers. The magazines have always moved with as we

writers. In our fear of any authority we have accepted a certain

protective diffusion, and the magazines have responded by repli cating and amplifying that diffusion in ways which make authority nearly impossible. In a symbiosis refined to neural complemen tarity, they serve our fears as well as our more cogent desires. Who reads magazines, anyway? Again the answer is too simple. Editors and writers, mostly, and a few stray fans. Some of the larger magazines have enormous impact. Most small magazines are communications among contributors. In a CCLM survey of maga zine subscribers,

found the readers

largely writers, then teachers, followed by librarians and students. Most are highly we

are

educated and underpaid, not the sort of community that would make for a good advertising sales campaign. Perhaps magazines that have very small readerships are occasionally read by editors of

magazines with larger readerships; it's hard to know. In some in stances, magazines serve largely as the medium through which writers give their work its public gesture-that crucial, if phantom, reader out there who is often important chiefly as a hypothesis. The Russian's last question is the one I have spent the most time 22

puzzling over, here and elsewhere. I became involved with CCLM in the conviction that some unity among magazines could be fashioned which could be a service to them without getting in their way. Obviously, we cannot have a Young Guard taking the place of our fifteen hundred magazines. Throughout the century, American literature has taken its vitality from its own extreme edges, since its center is too often lifeless and boring. This last is not only a corollary of the tradition of the new; it has to do, as well, with the desperation with which status is held onto in a society that claims not to value status. Without the graduated steps of a writers' union and an official publishing bureaucracy, we cling to our little tracts of notoriety with all the tenacity and imagination of suburbanites. American letters can survive only by confronting change, and the magazines serve as both belfry and rampart in this essential con frontation.

flook, in

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CAL"U� 8r:u(O."'N" Poetr), Chtatticlc

Spring 1978

The Massachusetts Review (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and

Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts), Vol. 18, No.3, Autumn 1977, edited by Lee Edwards, John Hicks, Mary Heath, Robert

Tucker; The Antioch Review (Antioch College), Vol. 36, No.2, Spring 1978, edited by Robert S. Fogarty; The Sewanee Review (University of the South), Vol. 86, No.2, Spring 1978, edited by George Core; New Letters (University of Missouri, Kansas City), Vol. 39, No.1, October 1972, edited by David Ray (from TriQuarterly).

ACADEMIA AND THE LITTLE MAGAZINE Charles Robinson According to the late Charles Robinson, little magazines no longer offer the unified resistance to the forces of popular taste that they once did. He contended that university-based magazines have a academicism as sterile as the policy of popular adopted peculiar magazines turning out formula pieces and have thus divided the field. Mr. Robinson saw the proliferation of little magazines in the 1960s as responsible for the division of loyalties, and maintained that independent and university magazines alike publish far too much material. As a result, the material is often imitative and mediocre at best. He concluded that unless little magazines impose their own restraints they will lose much of their vitality. Mr. Robinson was born in 1939 in Scranton, Kansas. He grew up in Waseca,

Minnesota, and was graduated from Waseca High

School. He attended the

University of Minnesota and Mankato State College, Mankato, Minnesota, where he received his B.A. degree in 1965. He received an M.A., with a thesis on poetry, from Colorado State University in June 1967. He automobile accident on August 16, 1967.

was

killed in

Little magazines, which have always pursued a kamikaze course, are now confronted by a new peril: the encroachment of uni versities which, for reasons of prestige, have started publishing their own little magazines with unimaginative gusto. The perennial

suicidal tactics of operating on shaky finances while heralding the

avant-garde writers are still part of the pose struck by little magazines; but the creeping influence of university reviews and quarterlies is usurping their unique position. Unlike the independ ent littles, university-based magazines have secure financing that ensures them a longevity which the independents have never had, seldom have desired, and often have scoffed at. In addition, they can afford posh formats the independents seldom approach. Originally published in Trace, ed. James Boyer May, no. 64 (1967).

The psychological value of

tidy periodical of ninety-six or more pages, replete with drawings, engravings-often vari-colored printing-is devastating. The majority of independent magazines are hand-set or mimeographed (often from incomplete or mixed fonts) and shoddy by comparison. They may be more ingenious and experimental with layouts; but, on the bookshop magazine shelf, the university magazine is immediately more appealing. Prospective readers are drawn to the university magazine's attractive cover just as prospective auto buyers are drawn to the sleek-line car with a plush interior. In both cases external appearance is a more decisive influence than relative horsepower or performance. But the predecessors of the university magazines, the little magazines that got their start from 1912 to 1925, demonstrated their capabilities, careening into the calm highways paved by Howell's middle-classism and insipid realism with a candor and brazen self-assuredness which most Americans weren't ready for and couldn't accept. The new generation of writers-from Frost, Pound, and Eliot to Anderson, Joyce, Hemingway, and Faulkner -found sympathetic editors, not at the publishing houses, but in the little magazines: Poetry, The Little Review, transition, and the Double-Dealer. America's roving literary impresario, Ezra Pound, forwarded manuscript after manuscript to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, Little Review editor Margaret Anderson, and others. The thirties brought several changes: many of the magazine editors had served their literary cause and, like Margaret Anderson, decided to stop publishing, while many were forced to stop publishing by lack of funds. Though other little magazines were beginning to fill the void, most of them switched emphasis from literature to politics, filling their pages with left-wing treatises the intellectual's answer to the depression. And the universities began to publish little magazines-Prairie Schooner at the Uni versity of Nebraska, Kenyon Review in Ohio, Southwest Review at Southern Methodist University-s-many of them to provide markets for inland writers who were finding it difficult, if not impossible, to publish in the East, the center for both magazine and book publishing. After a temporary lapse during War II, the late forties saw a 28

revival of interest in little magazines which has continued through the fifties and into the sixties, particularly at the universities. Almost every major university has now placed an entry in the not

been

altogther

starting a literary magazine

at a

university

little-magazine field, but

the results have

favorable. The are

reasons

for

not in accord with the idealism that prompted the independent

magazines to crusade for the new writers with the unorthodox forms, confusing syntax, and obscure symbols. For the most part the universities is interested in establishing its own reputation and image via the literary magazine much as Kenyon College has with the influential Kenyon Review. Although there are editors, like John Crowe Ransom, who are involved with and concerned about literature and

might use a magazine as a vehicle to carry out their own particular concerns and involvements, they are handicapped because the magazine is also a vehicle for the school. Most editors recognize this dilemma, even though they do not feel it as a handicap. The editors of one university review, for example, have said: "We are grateful for the support In return we hope given the magazine by the University to add to the' prestige of the University by publishing a good magazine. There are no disadvantages that we can now discern." The editor of Trace, James Boyer May, has noted: "No matter what may be said [about university attempts] to alter policies or influence to bear with contributors-I believe and/ bring personal independence of the editor is vital. If a conscientious person, he [the university editor] will be bound to modify more or less his decisions--even though no actual pressures may be to bear brought Intervention and/or censorship by university administrators has been more direct, however. Last year the University of Oregon ....

....

withdrew its support from the Northwest Review (later restored). Karl Shapiro, who has edited two of America's most distinguished

little magazines, Poetry and Prairie Schooner, elaborated upon university administrative meddling with both, during a Library of Congress symposium on Literary Publishing in America, held last spring. He had this to say about his dismissal from Prairie

Schooner: 29

I edited the Prairie Schooner, said to be the oldest in the country, also for about six

campus literary magazine

years, and was forced to resign (or was fired) over a question of censorship. Evidently a chemist who had become a Dean was informed by a telephone operator at the university press, who read proof in her spare time, that I was printing and obscene literature. I took

irreligious of Lincoln, Nebraska. No one objected

to the radio and read it to the citizens

to the story,"

Shapiro's conclusion was: In every campus literary venture there is a chain of command that runs from

the magazine itself, through the English and other Humanities Departments,

through the university press, the administration, and on to public opinion. In the controls can go as high as the governors of states and involve the expression of historical fact itself.

extreme cases,

This

...

control, whether subtly oblique,

May suggested, or

overt, has resulted in university magazines which are conservative, even staid. And, quoting Shapiro again: magazines that "

...

that is amazing, but that is all

may develop they can do."

stylistic expertise Thus, university-based

little

magazines

tend to

establish coteries of writers who reappear with boring frequency.

Only token, if any, attempts are made to "discover" new writers; and often when new ones are published, there is a surprising similarity between their stories and poems and those of the established coterie. All of which suggests that it is virtually impossible for the university magazines to cause any upheaval in current literary practice or tradition--one of the most important functions of the genre. Some of the

independents of course are still crusading for the new writers and schools and publishing avant-garde and experimental stories and poetry. R. R. Cuscaden, editor of Midwest, has pointed out that "none of them last very long and perhaps their real function is not to outlast Poetry but to provide, however temporarily, the loyal opposition." And: "Thank God for the mimeograph machine, anyhow. There is a kind of rise and fall in editorial direction and is no doubt

inescapable.

Midwest is

purpose in little mags that probably now at its apex;

I hope to maintain the present all this are immutable.

issue:

are

the

plateau, but the laws governing ." And here is the real problem and

independents furnishing the opposition, and, if

*See the interview with Karl Shapiro, p. 197. (Editor)

they are, will they be able to withstand the surge of the university magazines and offer them continued opposition? Because of their financing, universities have the advantage not only of offering a better-looking product but of being able to peddle their product more effectively. For instance, libraries, which are a valuable source of income for any little magazine, are more likely to subscribe to the university magazines, since they will continue publishing (the independents probably will not) and they will be publishing reputable writers (the inde pendents may not be-at least, not from the contemporary perspective); yet it is the independent magazine which is in dire need of the libraries' financial support. Too, universities often provide their magazines with enough money to conduct

subscription drives; if they do not, the magazines can continue at a loss (such periodicals, independent and university alike, rarely operate in the black) and build subscriber lists. Though they would like to conduct subscription drives, the independents do not have the necessary finances or, in most cases, enough money to let them continue appearing until their subscription lists can be built up. In addition, the university magazines can pay for secretarial and editorial help, pay contributors, purchase advertising, and in other ways function much like commercial magazines-if on a smaller scale. All these advantages-the combination of good packaging, marketing, and respectability will eventually result in the university magazines' accumulating the bulk of the little magazine readers. Or-considering the other face of the process-independent little magazines will not be able to perpetuate themselves because they are no longer reacting solely against the mass-circulation magazines (as they were twenty or thirty years ago), but also against members of their own family, the university little magazines. Thus, the whole battle has changed. Where once there was a unified force of little magazines and supporters fighting for recog nition against popular tastes, today the forces have split. The independents feel that not only have the popular magazines sold out, but that the university magazines have followed suit-that, although the latter may not appeal to popular tastes, they have adopted a peculiar academicism as sterile as the policy of popular magazines turning out formula pieces. The university magazines, 31

deny the charge. And while this ordinarily might be a healthy literary fight, the overwhelming advantages commanded by the latter will eventually destroy the "loyal opposition." For the most part, university magazines are unconcerned with this situation. Involved with assembling their select coteries and enhancing their magazines' literary prestige-and, tangentially, that of their benefactors-the overall state of literary publishing is of little or no concern to them. Being academically oriented, many of them deemphasize creative literature, with scholarly criticism, reviews, and articles taking up two-thirds or more of their pages. This is not altogether surprising. The insistence upon teacher-publishing necessitates more and more outlets-and, since a university is footing the bill for a magazine, it is not unreasonable to expect the magazine to be an outlet for academicians. What is surprising is that such a magazine should also attempt to be a literary showpiece. Not that the two aims are incompatible, of course,

but that this schizoid ambivalence seems to have resulted in the

mediocrity of these journals. If the university magazines would abandon their ambivalent role and concentrate on criticism and reviews, their relative value and

position

would be

considerably enhanced. Criticism, for

instance, has been the forte of the Kenyon Review; and it is with the criticism-not the stories and poems-that Kenyon Review has established its

reputation.

And if little magazines are to remain a vital literary force, they will have to reassess their positions and attitudes. In the past, they

largely refrained from attempting to play a dual

role. When criticism was part of their content it was relevant to the original

work

being published. Margaret Anderson and the readers of on a steady dialogue about the arts, a dialogue that was both stimulating and pertinent to many of the works being published therein, such as Joyce's Ulysses. Now there is a trend toward the type of criticism found in the university magazines-of late, concerned with such recently current authors as Hemingway and Faulkner. The Little Review carried

This, of course, isn't the entire story. There are other reasons

why the present bumper crop of little magazines generally lacks the vitality of its illustrious predecessors. If, for instance, university magazines are guilty of functioning primarily as public relations 32

enterprises for their benefactors, then far too many independents. under the guise of grandiose proclamations, are founded and main tained solely to satisfy the egos of their editors and the editors' friends. The result of such an objective is as staid a type of maga zine, printing as repetitiously boring and uniform kinds of material and names as any academic university-oriented magazine with its coterie. Far too often an independent magazine is begun because a group of friends want an outlet of their own; and it remains just that, not attempting to expand either its contributions or its quality. And as Robert Bly and others pointed out in "something like a symposium" (Carleton Miscellany, Spring 1966), most little magazines. university and independent alike, are publishing far too much material; and, consequently, the material is imitative and mediocre at best. Perhaps the present proliferation of little magazines does not permit selectivity; faced with filling X number of pages four times a year, an editor has to take what is available.

If true, this in itself is antithetical to the expressed aims of most

editors:

" ...

to print the best poetry being written

today,

" ...

etc. And in the final analysis, indiscriminate editing results in self

annihilation-usually an early death for an independent magazine and nothing more than an innocuous, inane life for a university magazine. Unless, then, little magazines begin to be more discriminatory and impose restraints upon themselves, their vitality and ultimate worth will be negligible. The independents will have to expand their coverage and actually attempt to print the best-not just the best that the editor's friends are writing. And only if the university magazines recognize their relative strengths and weaknesses which are so intimately connected with their academic umbilical cords-can they be an effective force. Were they to limit them selves to criticism and reviews, their academic forte, they would then avoid the control problem. Regardless of where the support is coming from, little magazines will have to become more selective and begin to publish what is deserving and exciting rather than what simply fulfills a coterie-academic or otherwise-require ment. When these things happen, little magazines can once again forces to Kultur to America. join bring

FELIX POLLAK AN INTERVIEW ON LITTLE MAGAZINES Mark Olson, John Judson,

& Richard Boudreau Felix Pollak was born in Vienna in 1909, where his early literary mentor was

the Viennese dramatist, satirist, and eloquent gadfly

Karl Kraus. Pollak

began simultaneously to study jurisprudence

and stage directon, the latter under Max Reinhardt, until the rise

of Hitler forced him to leave Austria. He arrived in Paris with roughly two dollars, and had not much more than that when, principally through the efforts of the Jewish refugee committees, he came to New York. He did odd jobs in New York and Buffalo until he became a clerk at the Buffalo Public Library. After a year of library school at the University of Buffalo, he was inducted into the U.S. Army in 1943 and made a U.S. citizen a short time thereafter. Later he studied library science under the G.I. Bill at the University of Michigan. Mr. Pollak was curator of special collections at Northwestern University from 1949 to 1959, when he first began to pay professional attention to little magazines. During that time he returned briefly to Vienna to receive his doctorate in jurisprudence, an undertaking which the Nazis had once made him promise not to do. In 1959 he became curator of rare books at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he was in charge of the Marvin Sukov Collection, one of the most extensive libraries of little magazines in the world. The determinants for choosing the magazines that would be purchased by these libraries, says Mr. Pollak, were not "good" and "bad," but "significant" and "irrelevant," or "characteristic" and "faceless." Felix Pollak has published many essays and poems in little magazines such as Pegasus, Kulchur, Whetstone, and The 34

Wormwood Review; in large-circulation magazines like The American Poetry Review; and in academic magazines like The Library Journal, The Prairie Schooner, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Chicago Review, and Shenandoah. His work has appeared in more than a hundred magazines. He has published five volumes of

poetry. Currently retired, Mr. Pollak lives in Madison, Wisconsin. held at the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse on May 11, 1977. Mark A. Olson, then an under graduate at LaCrosse, was the principal interviewer. Also in This interview

was

Richard O. Boudreau, who is on the English department faculty, and John Judson, also on the faculty and

attendance

were

editor of the magazine Northeast and of the Juniper Press.

In your article "Elitism and the Littleness of Little Magazines"

(Southwest Review, Summer 1976), defining the character of a little magazine, you wrote: "A little magazine does not necessarily denote literary quality, for God knows that it is compatible with horrible trash, but it always manifests itself in a kind of reckless openness, an idiosyncratic subjectivity, that the slicks and the bigs cannot afford. And this also means, of course, the irresponsible freedom to experiment. The big mags are guardians of old revolu tions. The little mags, at their best, are still fighters for freedom." In the foreword to the Comprehensive Index to Little Magazines, you use the phrase "the little-magazine spirit" to describe the little magazine's distinction. How did you arrive at these definitions? Well, one has to try to make some abstractions from what one sees. If you see many of the little magazines, as I did in my job, you have to try to find some kind of common denominator and define them

in some fashion. People have tried to define them before me,

Hoffman did in his book The Little Magazine: A History and a

Bibliography (1946) and in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article. Little magazines share certain characteristics: they are primarily literary, often experimental, and typically unfettered. Virtually all have a small circulation, and they are usually published, edited, and financed by one person or by a small group of persons who are amateurs-that is to say, people without a profit motive. These qualities, taken together, give some indication of what a little 35

magazine is. But definitions are difficult. It is easier to recognize should you see it than to describe it. A man who do "What asked have known better, a librarian, once me, you a little mag when

by little magazines? Little vertically or little horizontally?" Of course I was appalled and indicated that it was a matter of small circulation. And smallness is not only a matter of necessity but also a matter of choice. Now, when you are limiting yourself by choice you tend toward what I call the "elitism" of little magazines. But that's another subject and maybe another question.

mean

Are little magazines an art form in themselves, purveyors conveyors of art, or both?

I would say both. Little magazines are certainly here to convey art,

but they

are

shaping it too. Every little-magazine editor who is

worth his salt knows that he's creating a work of art and, in the

aggregate, creating a new genre. Every title, if it runs for any length of time, takes on some character and voice of its own and becomes a

work of art as well.

It seems that a great number of taboos so many of the little maga

zines were trying to break down have now become the mulch 0/ the commercial garden. Does a little magazine still characteristi

cally have an iconoclastic function? When you consider European magazines, and particularly some of

the German magazines like Der Querschnitt and even Der Sturm, and when you think of some of the little French magazines that started in the nineteenth century and incidentally were called

avant-garde and not petite revue, you are talking about general-interest magazines that simultaneously show a lot of the spirit that characterizes little magazines. These magazines suggest there was no need for little magazines in the American sense because these bigger magazines themselves were open to new ideas, experiments, new modes of saying things-and also open to new writers who didn't have to be already proven before they could find entrance. So actually the American little magazine comes out of a special need to say things that our big commercial magazines will not accept. It is perhaps correct to say that, since our taboos have broken down-sexual taboos, for instance, have been practically elimirevue

nated even in the bigger magazines-the little magazine thereby iconoclastic function. But there are many other loses its

original

features that make little magazines necessary and viable. First, the

bigger magazines and the commercial magazines are not accessible to new writers per se. They like names that have already been established, whereas little magazines are usually wide open to newcomers. Second, advertisers still control our big commercial magazines, and that is where the real censorship comes in. In America we don't have state censorship or governmental censor ship as in Russia, in Nazi Germany, and in many of the authori tarian states. The state itself doesn't censor news. Of course, we might not get the whole news, or we might get slanted news, but content isn't really censored from above. It is the advertisers who

the real censors in our magazines, and if anything in a story or poem or essay displeases a major advertiser because of its are

language, because of the views expressed, because it is pro-abortion or anti-abortion, or what have you, he will simply tell the editor, "Listen, cut that stuff out or else I'll withdraw my ads." And

naturally the ads are what make those big magazines flourish. Without advertising, they would probably go under, because news stand sales and subscriptions alone cannot take care of those big, expensive publications. So, many publishers and editors are subject to the advertisers' whims and will give in to them. This the little magazine will never do. In the first place, it carries no advertising or only a minimal amount. Furthermore, little magazine editors typically resist any indebted ness to patrons, even patrons who don't want to dictate taste. They are always afraid that if they are paid by somebody, they will be beholden. Most editors don't even want school sponsorship, because once a board of regents, a college president, or a department head puts his hand into the pie, he's likely to make demands or set restrictions. There have been such cases of censorship. Could you mention any?

Oh, for example, there is the celebrated case in which Paul Carroll and his whole editorial staff resigned from the Chicago Review in 1958 because the University of Chicago objected to their printing of

chapter from William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Carroll thereupon printed the chapter in his new magazine, Big Table, a

which was launched through a benefit reading by Allen Ginsberg,

Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovski, and William Burroughs. Earlier than that was the split-up of The Beloit Poetry Journal and Beloit College because of a falling out between the editors and the college administration over an "underground issue" of West Coast poets. This took place around 1957, I'd say, after eight years of the magazine's publication by the college. Thereafter the editors financed the magazine out of their own pockets and have been doing so ever since. Other college cases pertained to the secession of Coyote's Journal from Northwest Review, also because of "filthy and way-out" material. That must have been in the late sixties. And there were other cases in which the censorship was not exerted by

college but actually through the police. I'm thinking of the magazine of the fifties, The Miscellaneous Man, and the alleged obscenity of a gay short story. Those are examples of the little magazines' obstinate and rambunctious independence and their a

determination to brook no interference from whomever. And this

distinguishes them very essentially from all other types of publi cation.

magazines resist the imposition of standards. Editors may take the risk of printing work There is

even

sense

in which little

that isn't so hot but shows a certain new trend, or at least a will

try something new, and that's valor in itself. The experiment may fail, but at least it gives somebody the opportunity to experi to

ment.

The big magazines cannot afford to do this because they

have to go with the proven, the staid and stable and acknowledged. I don't deny that Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker,

and

high standards. There's no question that they publish very good stuff, but it is safe stuff. It is the stuff that is already recognized as being good. Little magazines can afford to print trash and frequently use this liberty to excess. It's quite true that many of the people who publish in little magazines couldn't get into the big ones because their work is not good enough. But there's always the chance that something exciting will happen in little magazines that cannot happen in the bigs. so

have

What did a magazine such as Der Sturm do to remain big and yet have the focus of a "little"? 38

Well, its time was the nineteen-tens and twenties. What its editors did was to espouse isms. They were interested in new movements, ideas, and they had that same kind of excitement about new art, new writing-for instance, the Neue Sachlichkeit (which means a new kind of realism), or surrealistic experiments, or dadaism, whatever. They were not really big circulation magazines. But they were read not only by the people who wrote for them; new

they were read by a general group of artists in different fields sculptors, musicians, painters and photographers, etc. This was the Sturm Gruppe, a focus for new, younger artists who had something new to say and who were against the established modes, whatever they had been. In that sense Der Sturm was a little magazine. In format it looked a bit more like the New Republic or like a tabloid, but it had the little-magazine spirit. Do you think a magazine could exceed a circulation of 15,000 and

still have a little-magazine spirit?

Well, I don't know about that figure exactly. There is certainly nothing precise about it, but I believe, for example, that the Evergreen Review had the little-magazine spirit when it started out, though its circulation far exceeded what is normal for a little magazine, which I would say is between 200 and 1,000. But when its editors started out,

they had a starry-eyed, excited interest, a willingness things and be literary-minded, and they published a lot of translations to show what was going on in other countries. It was really a literature-oriented magazine, and it published people like Ionesco, Beckett, Albee, etc. Then it became a kind of whore, publishing soft-core pornography, titillating its readers with pictures-not Playboy girlie pictures, but smirkier and dirtier in some way. I have nothing against girlie pictures, but the more recent Evergreen didn't have anything to do with litera ture or with its spirit. It was just out for the buck. So the Evergreen Review wilted and became very brown around the edges and finally folded, after changing format several times. When I was in charge of the Sukov collection at the University of Wisconsin, I incor porated the original Evergreen Review into the little-magazine collection, but gave up on it when it became a different magazine. That's what I mean by a spirit that is usually more important than to print new

anything else, but that spirit is usually connected with a certain limitation in means and a certain willingness to stay small. The larger little magazines are exceptions to the rule. Those fat ones like TriQuarterly or The American Review, formerly New Ameri can Review, can still be considered little magazines. Many of the larger quarterlies can likewise be considered little magazines because they have that particular feature of bringing in new writers. Many publish foreign work in translation and most, if not all, would be willing to print a story that was different from others. If a new James Joyce should suddenly turn up on the horizon, these magazines might still be willing to print him. The Paris Review would, I assume, be one of those that have a

bigger circulation and is still a little magazine. Reed Whittemore once asked, "Does the little magazine of today occupy as important a place as those founded by William Carlos

Williams, Margaret Anderson, and Harold Loeb?" I'd like to ask you the same question.

I don't think so. When the Little Review was being published, Ezra Pound was scathing about it. He thought the editors accepted an awful lot of trash, and that Margaret Anderson in particular was some

kind of scatterbrain who didn't know what she was doing.

And it's true; I think Jane Heap was more intelligent than Mar

garet was. Margaret had the enthusiasm and the naivete. Now, of course,

the Little Review is something of a legend,

holy cow,

and it's only spoken of in capital letters. But I still think it had

something. Also, there were fewer magazines then; they were more centered; they were the meeting places of the important writers, who today are more scattered. And I think that in many ways they had different roles from the little magazines of today, although I would say that something like Kayak has a place. Kayak has a face among fairly recent magazines, as-for another example-has Poetry Northwest, and a number of other contemporary mags, which in retrospect might be considered quite important. Among less recent magazines, the New Orleans Poetry Journal stands out in my mind as a gem. In general, I would say the earlier magazines

were

portant. They had a bigger role to play, and we must not forget 40

the twenties, the so-called golden age of the little magazine, a time of great excitement and of great innovation and those

were

of many isms, and schools, and movements. Do you think that it made a difference, too, that little magazines

then were centered in the East, where the input from Europe was more

continuous?

I would think that had something to do with it. The Little Review,

for instance, started in Chicago, then moved to New York, then moved to Paris. However, one really doesn't have to be on the spot in order to know that a Sartre may be writing something

interesting. If you're looking for things, you can also send a correspondent abroad, if you have the means, or you can utilize people already living abroad as correspondents. So when a maga zine moved to New York or Europe, that was probably indicative of its interest in the place, but I think the openness to new ideas came

first.

It seems that magazines today don't have that openness. Would you agree?

Well, there's Robert Bly, who brings out a lot of translations, except that he doesn't print regularly. The Sixties appeared spo

radically, and The Seventies has come out with one issue so far. But whatever he does publish has translations from the Spanish and Portuguese of South American writers. Paris Review and Quarterly Review of Literature publish translations, as do Mundus Artium, Field, Bitter Oleander, and Modern Poetry in Translation, Moons and Lion Toiles, etc. And among a number of magazines

there is also a great interest in the American Indian. So I wouldn't

quite say that there's no openness, but there is a certain chauvin ism, a certain American nationalism in many magazines that are not interested in writers from the rest of the world.

regional emphasis. Many

are

Many have a

provincial, local even. I have heard

Kenneth Rexroth say in San Francisco that "all we need are California poets; we don't care about anybody else." The New York poets have their New York School and are

only interested in that. In these cases, writers put themselves under a voluntary limitation based mostly on chauvinism or ignorance, which runs 41

contrary to the example of men like Robert Bly, who has many foibles but in this case is right in complaining that we are closing our eyes to

important things going on outside this country.

When we read about the literary movement of the nineteen-tens and twenties, we sense that there was a lot of input from other arts.

The movements weren't formed just by literature, but by theater and painting as well. True. Kindred spirits were collaborating then, and the same ideas

People who formed little-theater groups, which were very much the spiritual twins of the little magazines, worked closely with writers. Clifford Odets had a group of actors around him. He wrote his plays for them, but they all worked on the plays as they rehearsed. In Germany, there were were

at work in all the arts.

groups of artists-die Briicke, der Blaue Reiter-that consisted primarily of painters but drew in sculptors, writers, musicians, and also dancers, set designers, mimes, in later years even filmmakers,

satirists, political celebrities, poster artists, etc. The composer Ernst Krenek, for instance, who was one of the disciples of Schoenberg, was also interested in literature. So is Kokoschka, the painter, who is still alive. What they accomplished is illustrated by the movement

"Secession," after which one of our American magazines

was

named. In Vienna, the painters moved out of a museum that wanted only to show rehashes, the same old paintings over again.

They wanted to work in a new mode so they built a new museum in Vienna called the Sezession. The editors of Secession thought theirs was a brilliant title, and of course, having this same outlook and being avant-garde, they said, "We are going to do the same thing in our own way." You mentioned in "Elitism and the Littleness of Little Magazines"

that Margaret Anderson had considered the term "little review" a

badge of honor and an expression of defiance. Regarding Secession and the mixing of media, is the genre of the little magazine still viable? Does it shape anything new in literature? Or is it time to look to a newer type of display form? Is the whole foundation of the little magazine bankrupt? I am an adherent of the printed word, and I believe in writing, and

I believe language will go on as long as the human spirit goes on. So while you may have recordings instead of print, and while

tape

of all you may have TV performances and movies and visual aids sorts, I still think that the printed word is of primary significance in the end you come back to the book. In the end it's also the easiest way of carrying words around, carrying ideas around. And

only if we raise a generation that is illiterate, educated solely by television-a deplorable kind of education, I should think-only then will the word have disappeared. As long as you have print, I think the little magazines will be an important part of that method of expression. All the music of the world is contained in the keys of a piano, and it is inexhaustible. All the literature of the world past, present, and future-is contained in the keyboard of a type writer. All the possible games of chess that can be played are contained in the squares of a chessboard, and yet the moves and

combinations are inexhaustible. So I'll take the word over "input" and "feedback," and print over "printout" any day. In the same way, I would say that the little magazine, as an idea and as a way of communication, is not obsolete and cannot be supplanted

by anything else. Have the isms of the fifties--eclecticism, academicism, and so on

disappeared? Is the time of these schools over? And would their passing be to the detriment of the little magazines? Yes, I believe the time of isms is over. There are no more flaming

magazines. This is to the detriment of the little magazines insofar as it takes away the intensity, the commit ment, the involvement, the passion with which those magazines originally set forth their particular programs. "Schools" acknowl edged a sense of mission: they knew the Truth, not only about substance but about form. The imagists knew that there was no other writing but imagism, and they were passionate about it. Of course they were not right, but they were passionately wrong which in the domain of art is close to being right. Actually, the Little Review people bragged, I think, that in its span the maga zine had supported twenty-three different isms; that is, systems of art. They were always sailing with the wind. Margaret Anderson was always eager for the new because that was her philosophy. She

manifestos in little

always had her ear to the ground, or to the air, or wherever. But at least she had an enormous enthusiasm for certain kinds of writing, and that, I think, is missing in what we have now. However, I don't think one has to be committed to just one kind of school in order to be good. If it is a matter of real taste, and of real creative instinct, and of the ability of an editor to pick out the best, the result can have great merit even without any particular ism. What about regionalism in little magazines, in the Midwest par

ticularly? Well, of course, I'm the wrong guy to ask about regionalism because I have never quite distinguished it from

provincialism.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I've always felt that one has to be somewhere, like the little man in the closet. When the husband came home and smelled cigar smoke in the house, he said, "Who was here?" And his wife said, "Nobody," and he didn't believe her, so

he went

searching around the house, and when he opened his

clothes closet there was a little man hiding between the coats, and the husband thundered, "What are you doing in my closet?" And the little man said, "Well, sir, everybody has to be someplace." That's what I feel about regionalism: you have to be someplace, and so you write about what you see, which doesn't

necessarily

make you a regional writer. I don't know how it works to pick one

region and be committed to it, nor whether that is a virtue in itself. I certainly have my childhood memories connected with Vienna, and I write about Vienna occasionally. But I don't think that makes me a regional Austrian writer, and nobody can call me a Wisconsin writer now.

Was Mark Twain a regionalist? Hardly. He wrote a lot about

Hannibal, Missouri, and life on the Mississippi; yet he is under stood and admired all over the world, particularly in Russia, curious to say. And what about Faulkner? You know what he wrote about. If anything, his region is perhaps the only place where he is not read. And how about Dickens? Or Dreiser? Or Thomas Wolfe? Or Sinclair Lewis? Or Thornton Wilder? (Main Street and Our Town are everywhere.)

[There followed a lengthy discussion between John Judson and Felix Pollak, interspersed with remarks by Richard Boudreau and Mark Olson, touching on urbanization, the hippie movement, back to the soil, and the real or alleged regionalism of little magazines. The South Dakota Review and the Little Farm were mentioned by John Judson as true regional magazines, while Felix Pollak pointed

for one example, was for a long time published in Milwaukee, and is now being published in Indiana and may some day be published in California, and will still be called Minnesota Review while really not having any local or regional ties at all. It was finally decided that the problem would need a greater in-depth treatment and Mark Olson continued

out that the Minnesota Review,

with his next question.]

Another question: In a symposium held in the pages of the Carle ton Miscellany in its Spring/Summer 1966 issue, the editors largely

agreed with the statement attributed to Bly and Duffy that most of today's poetry is too old-fashioned. But none of them seemed to spell out ways of updating the magazines of poetry. "Make it new" is just a phrase credited to Pound, who is now a solid member of the kulchur he despised. Do you see this as a time of experimenta tion, or are the younger writers having such difficulty understand ing what happened in the first half of the century that it seems impossible to come up with anything new? The question probably boils down to asking if we are in a time of playing catch-up ball. Well, I think that anything new, any kind of experimentation, is an organic thing that has to grow out of somebody's mind and out of the conditions of the time; it has to evolve organically, not syn

thetically. Nobody can get it by sitting down and saying, "That was the old. Now I'm going to do something new." That isn't what Pound meant at all. What Pound meant was that you must see as a child sees for the first time. Look at things as if you were seeing

them for the first time, and you can talk about them--even the moon in June when new

you first experience it-in ways that will be

and fresh.

Newness, in any case, is merely a new way of using old materials. I don't think even the surrealists can really create something new without using real (old) materials. We always have to work with

age-old motifs-pain, grief, joy, ambition, envy, lust for power, 45

etc.-emotions that have come to us from the time of Homer or before. We just present them in new costumes and different words. That's why I think that anything which tries to be so original that it disregards tradition and believes it can start from scratch is bound to fail. Even the surrealist has to use birds' wings to put them on

frogs so as to create a creature that normally has no wings. Would you say that writers come out of schools of thought rather than that schools of thought come out of writers?

Well, I don't think writers come out of schools of thought at all. Schools of thought come later. We are influenced, however, by our environment and the socioeconomic, political, and technical condi tions of our period, and now there is no way of not writing about

them. Certainly no subject in poetry or fiction is taboo and some

subjects are imperative for a contemporary writer. After all, we live in a time of computers, nuclear fission, pollution, racial tension, population explosion, and so forth, which previous ages have not had. In the "Elitism" article, you said that the mimeo revolution has

brought about a proliferation of titles unmatched before, and thus an abundance of the mediocre. Robert Bly has said that too much is published, and he goes on to state that the best thing that could happen to American literary publishing would be for editions of little magazines to voluntarily reduce their numbers. Do you think that the sheer numbers of littles today is detrimental to them? I'm not sure. I think it certainly would be more convenient and more comfortable to have

just a few places where you know all the important writers are congregating in writing. Then you wouldn't have to go through too many little magazines in order to find what is going on and what is good. But convenience and comfort are not the main objects of the game. The mere fact that every type of expression can find a forum is more important, I think, than to have a few recognized littles, which are already in danger of becoming establishment. If you don't somehow conform to them then you can't get in anywhere again, and that is the grave danger. The great antidote against this is the variety and the number large of outlets. Even if they are not so good, and even if readers have to go around searching for good material in innumerable magazines 46

and find it embedded in a great amount of junk, you still have a better chance of giving a hearing to everybody who is important.

Therefore, I think that the very vitality which is expressed in a high death rate and a high birthrate is an essential feature of the

little-magazine scene and a value in itself. Can a little magazine create an audience? This question brings to

mind the work of the CCLM. I'm sure you've heard about their efforts to put magazines in libraries and set up distribution co-ops

and things like that.

Well, I think that only

little

magazine, only

individual

magazine, can create its own audience. I think all the mechanical ways of trying to get an audience, of increasing circulation, of getting new outlets that will store the little magazines and put them out for sales, are all very well but all artificial. Nobody's going to buy a magazine just because it hangs on a newsstand somewhere or

sits on

shelf. I think what does build audiences is

com

mitment to this kind of magazine, a conviction that whatever is in that magazine will be of interest and quality and appeal to some

body. In that way, slowly and surely, circulation is built. Of course, it doesn't hurt to make the mags widely available, and if distribution schemes by organizations like CCLM and COSMEP can advance that cause, I'm all for it. However, this is all secondary to the magazines' own efforts. When I think about the magazines that flourished in the heyday of the littles, it seems to me their editors would be anyone but themselves would be distributing them.

appalled that

True. There's also the idea of

staying small-not wanting to compete, say, with the underground presses that are on all the newsstands and all over the supermarkets. To become a mass medium would be so foreign to a little magazine that the genuine little would shy away from it. There is also the hassle of putting magazines into bookstores on consignment, as many editors have told me. The bookstores don't bother to pay, and the editors have to run

after their money. The booksellers sometimes assert the

mags were not sold but stolen, and sometimes issues are found tucked away in a corner, looking much the worse for wear. The

whole

thing is cumbersome, the kind of machinery the editors 47

would rather do without. I think

they would rather have their

subscription lists, however small, and know that whoever wants to subscribe will be interested in getting the magazine. Whether the public of a little magazine consists primarily of its contributors is another question. happened in the fifties and the sixties was that writers tried to make their living by also being teachers. How strong, how good or bad have been their effects as members of the

Another thing that

academic institutions? Is it only natural that there would be an increase of academic quarterlies growing out of the Fugitive group

emphasis and the New Criticism? Or is this an unnatural phenome non forced by people who want to get into publishing? I don't know whether it has really to do with the Fugitive group or

with the New Criticism-which certainly was,

the name itself

says, interested mostly in criticism rather than in creativity. I think what it has to do with is simply economics. Most people who are interested in writing are likely to study English in college and then

become college teachers, and I don't see why somebody has to be a bad poet just because he makes his living as a teacher of literature. I don't see why it would make him a good poet to dig ditches, or

sell vacuum cleaners, or live on handouts, or push dope, or what

academy baiting that is carried on primarily by people who make their living in academies and have an inferiority complex about it. They feel that they are really cater ing to the establishment or that they are bourgeois or that teaching in colleges makes them somehow pale and academic (in the sense of anemic, acad-anemic, so to speak). I don't feel that way about it. When I was a librarian, just the mere fact that I couldn't really do anything particularly interesting during the day made me feel that writing in the evening was what made my life meaningful. I suppose an English professor might also feel that he could be only partially creative in his daily teaching and that he must draw on his own creativity to fulfill himself. I think there is a certain openness and a freewheelingness in being a vagabond, but this kind of romanticism is first of all overrated and, second, good only for people under thirty. After thirty, if you're a hippie, you're a bum, and then it isn't so funny or so good any more. This whole question has many specious facets to it. I firmly believe that the mere fact of teaching cannot make a bad poet out of a good poet, or that by ever.

I don't understand the

teaching a bad poet will turn into a good one. One can experience life even if one is employed in a college.

not

Many editors of true littles have said that we're being overwhelmed by quarterlies and reviews and that they're corrupting the whole idea of the little magazine. Do you believe that? The academic quarterlies are, in my opinion, relatives of the little magazines, and they are, as you'll remember, included in Fred Hoffman's book. When he and I, just before his sudden death, contemplated a new book on that subject, we decided that they must be dealt with in a chapter by themselves. They may lack the

irresponsibly free and unfettered spirit that characterizes the genu ine little mags, but the best of them-like the old Accent, to name

just one-contain very creative materials: stories and poems by new writers, translations of foreign authors, and criticism usually so original and lively that it is just as creative as poetry and fiction. The pages of The Little Review, of Hound and Horn, Broom, The Seven Arts, etc., have exposed the prejudice that criticism per se is dull and uncreative, and names like Edmund Wilson or Lionel

and Diana Trilling in themselves bear witness

against that bias.

I'll admit that the publications devoted to the New Criticism of the forties and fifties were usually dull and pedestrian and pedantic, but these no more constitute a threat to the little magazines than do the slicks and pulps, the girlie mags, and the astrology mags, etc.,

against which the complaint you mention is not made. The very fact that some little-mag devotees appear paranoid about the academic quarterlies would seem to prove that the best and liveliest of them-Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Ohio Review, etc.-are

indeed of a kindred genre. But some competition is good for stan

dards, and the true littles have unique positive features which their more

stable and respectable rich relations lack.

Incidentally, the

writers who appear in the best of the littles and in the best of the

quarterlies are frequently the same, which confirms what I just said. One final question. Do you think you could summarize in one or two sentences the most important characteristic of a little magazine?

If I would have to put it into one sentence, I would say that a little

magazine is much more than a small magazine that would like to be big. 49

THE LITTLE MAGAZINE IN ITS PLACE: LITERARY CULTURE AND ANARCHY Robert Boyers Robert Boyers' essay explores the dangers of an indiscriminate love of experiment, of manic eclecticism, and of anti-intellectualism in

little magazine

editing. His attitude suggests a consistent adversary relationship between editor and reader in the presenta tion of criticism and original poetry and prose. Mr. Boyers began Salmagundi on the model of Partisan Review as a left-wing journal without parochial commitments, but soon became less topical and current where contemporary fiction and poetry were concerned. He decided to promote contemporary arts primarily through the publication of critical essays, interviews, and combative book reviews. Probably the likeliest models for the issues of Salmagundi during the past decade would, Boyers says,

be the intellectual quarterlies of the nineteenth century, The Westminster Review and The Edinburgh Review, with their long

theoretical and practical essays. In its hospitality to the outsized essay, Salmagundi has undertaken a job of critical inquiry no other

intellectual quarterly of the period has continued to do. Among the

topics engaged by some of the magazine's writers are the Frankfurt school's critical theory, pornography, the family, the psychoanalysis

of lying, the aesthetics of the dance, and the major cultural historians (Gershom Scholem, Max Weber, Ortega y Gasset, Havelock Ellis, and Herbert Marcuse). The favored contributors to

the magazine include

Henry Pachter, Philip Riefj, George Steiner, Christopher Lasch, John Bayley, Erich Heiler, Barry Targan, Martin Pops, John Peck, Ben Belitt, and Howard Nemerov. Mr. Boyers is the author of more than seventy essays on contemporary poets and novelists, film, politics, psychoanalysis,

and contemporary culture. He has written and edited nine books, D. among them anthologies of essays on Robert Lowell and R.

Laing, original monographs on Lionel Trilling and F. R. Leavis, and a collection of essays on the writer and contemporary culture, Excursions (1976). Boyers is also the editor of the newly founded arts magazine Bennington Review (1978+), in which he attempts to reproduce contemporary arts graphically as well as critically. Bennington, like Kulchur and Partisan before it, publishes contin uing columns on the art scene by critics, poets, and art historians.

The little magazine as a general subject has been talked almost to

death, and it is an unavoidable fact that, while so many specimens currently exist, only a handful are worth examining. There are, though, several worthwhile distinctions yet to be made without which it is difficult to understand the situation of our literate cul ture and the function of little magazines in that

culture. It is not

necessary to read through large numbers of little magazines to discover these distinctions, but familiarity with the appropriate

publications should certainly bear out our experience in other areas-as filmgoers, classroom teachers, conference participants, or readers of popular monthlies with substantial circulations. To describe this experience is inevitably to speak of the audience for serious works of literature and art; for when we are speaking of so intimate a phenomenon as the little magazine we cannot but dwell upon the quality of its appeal to a particular readership. To put it bluntly, the audience for serious works of contemporary literature has fallen prey to an appalling and undiscriminating habit of alternating cynicism and enthusiasm: cynicism about in telligence, about critical thinking, about the premises and uses of evaluation; enthusiasm about creative energy (no matter how obviously misdirected), about anything politically a la mode (new

styles in feminist ideology, for example), and about the "good sentiments" (liberality, love, innocence, simplicity). There is at the same time, of course, a strangely modish attrac tion to writers like Borges and Pynchon, neither of whom is the chanticleer of a new dawn of liberality, love, innocence, or sim plicity. Clearly the cultural situation, while unmistakable, is any thing but monolithic. It is surely possible to cultivate an appetite for 51

Borges while spending much of one's time touting phony nativist verses or singing the praises of naked poetry. No doubt it is the academic who is most professional literary susceptible to this divi sion of loyalties. With one foot in the youth culture-combing the pages of Rolling Stone, Village Voice, and some variant of Poetry Now-and the other in the college classroom, the with-it literary

professor is bound to find value in maintaining flexible sympathies. Writers like Pynchon and N abokov are, after all, creators of eminently teacherly volumes, spawners of soon-to-be-accredited "texts" whose interpretation provides busywork for employable pro fessors, most of whom-with-it or not-wouldn't know a genuine little magazine from a cardboard box. In a culture that, as Lionel Trilling recently remarked, "fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence," it is fully possible to look in two oppo site directions at once without feeling committed to choose be tween them or to consider seriously their relative merits. The little magazine, then, finds itself in a precarious position. Massed on one side of the potential literary market are the professors, with their specialties, their linguistic codes, their heavy artillery apparatuses. The appetite here is not a literary appetite but a hunger for publishing outlets, for interpretive gimmicks, for professional status accreditation. The magazines that cater to this predictable hunger are not little magazines or literary journals, but professional journals with a card-carrying readership that is anything but loyal or intelligently committed. After all, if these journals represent nothing to speak of, if their business is simply to promote professional careers and to accumulate research mate rials for use by prospective Ph.D. candidates, they are not likely to develop identifiable profiles or to work out positions on living issues. The libraries are stacked with such journals, and a recent survey records that fewer than one hundred persons may be supposed actually to read through any single item in a particular

issue. Want to know what Borges really had in mind in Tlbn? Answers are readily available. Need to trace the possible sources of tag names in Pynchon? Help is not far away.

Massed

the other side of the

potential

market

are

the

inevitable camp followers of one fashion or another: the naked

poetry crowd, feminist ideologues, back-to-nature freaks, 52

even

the insistent structuralists with their diagrams and their program matic Each camp following will have its own favorite

rigidities. journal, or several, which participant members study more or less carefully, swear by, and aspire to publish in. From these phalanx formations various cult figures are born and, if they are lucky, quickly fade to be replaced by others, usually less interesting and less given to the possibilities of accommodation to other angles of vision. What, then, constitutes a favorable profile by which to measure and recognize a little magazine, and what sort of audience may be expected to support "the real thing"? Perhaps as good a place as any to begin an investigation is the volume A Return to "Pagany": The History, Correspondence, and Selections from Little Magazine, by Stephen A. Halpert with Richard Johns (Beacon Press, 1969). The volume opens with a statement from the poet William Carlos Williams which, though probably re

sponsible for some of the inane crap promoted in little magazines, accurately represents the sentiments of many creative artists and legions of would-be creators: The little magazine is something I have always fostered; for without it, I myself would have been early silenced. To me it is one magazine, not several. It is a continuous magazine, the only one I know with an absolute freedom of editorial policy and a succession of proprietorships that follows a demo cratic rule. There is absolutely no dominating policy permitting anyone to dictate anything It must be a person who does it [edits a little magazine], a person, a fallible person, subject to devotions and accidents. ....

Williams's statement belongs at the front of the Pagany volume, for in the years of its brief life, from 1929 to 1932, it managed to be very much what Williams wanted. It published

a wide range of writing, was frequently brash and opinionated, and found room

for writers who in time went on to great influence and achieve ment.

If, as one correspondent wrote in 1930, it "struck a fine

balance between extreme

experimentalism and the rather rigid Dial standard," it was not averse to trying out unfamiliar work by unknown writers, nor to irritating members of its potential readership by taking unpopular positions on this or that. Though Pagany did print a good deal of criticism, it tended less and less to see its mission in terms of evaluation and precise analytic dis crimination. 53

But what could Williams have meant when he wrote of the little magazine's "absolute freedom of editorial policy," of "demo cratic rule," of the absence of a "dominating policy"? To impose literal

reading on anyone of these earnest formulations is to recognize at once how fuzzy Williams could be when he wrote a

outside the formal constraints of a poem, or novel, or story whose

self-generating conventions he respected even as he worked to free himself from what he took to be the burdens of inherited form. In fact, Williams could not have responded favorably to any

magazine that had no discernible policy or canons of taste. He liked Pagany,

he intimates, because it

was

vehicle for his

work in progress-including his first novel, White Mule and because in its editor, Richard Johns, he recognized a com

own

panionable spirit committed to vitality and experiment rather than to closure and caution. And though Williams staunchly supported Pagany, he could acknowledge its important deficiencies, some surely implicit in his own muddleheaded conception of the little magazine in general. In a letter to Johns dated May 1, 1930, Williams wrote that "Pagany is and must be a miscellany, a true, even a realistic picture of the rather shabby spectacle America still makes from the writer's viewpoint. At least you are not 'decent' even though you are not organized-as perhaps you should be." He even agrees with critics of the magazine that some of its material is "especially poor," "punk stuff," and though "Pagany seems not to be taking any stand [especially on political issues] at all.

it is better than some of the stands that have been taken."

Surely a dubious apology at best. Williams's concession to the claim that Pagany might usefully get itself organized only confuses still further our sense of his call for "absolute freedom of editorial

policy," and we come increasingly to feel that he really didn't know what he thought, much as he felt intermittently in his blood what he liked. Now there is no doubt that the happy accident is as desirable in the

editing of a magazine as it is in the composition of a poem, and Williams's predilection for finding things by the way, picking them up, and making them work for him somehow did surely account for special and valuable qualities in his verse. But one may be forgiven for expressing some suspicion of a method which is no method at all, and which when freely indulged is as 54

likely to defeat as to enhance one's prospects for genuine accom plishment. Pagany surely meant a great deal to the various writers who found a home in its pages, but it seems likely that Williams and other ambitious figures would have gotten their writing done even had they never met Johns or heard his clarion calls for material. More important, what about the various people who never amounted to anything as writers, who were encouraged by their appearances in Pagany and other little magazines to think of themselves as destined for literary careers, when in fact their talents were less than meager and their ambitions preposterously inflated? Is it ungenerous to suppose that such people might in the long run have been better off had they never been so en couraged, had there been some marginally definable criterion of professional competence by which hopeful contributors to Pagany might plausibly measure their chances of acceptance? Perhaps it is unreasonable to suggest as much, and surely no editor owes it to potential contributors to explain to them the limits of their ability and the precise nature of professional achievement. Be sides which, there aren't many aspiring writers who tend to listen to chastening advice, no matter how well intentioned, and editors are usually wise to avoid comment altogether when they have nothing flattering to say. The issue at hand is larger, though, than we've yet been able to suggest. If Wi1liams was somewhat incoherent when he spoke of a program for Pagany, he and others who spoke like him came to have great influence-both on the development of little maga zines and on the shape of literary experiment in America. When Williams spoke of democratic rule, of freedom, and of happy editorial accidents, he was already moving in the direction of a creative bias which has come increasingly to dominate American cultural life. This bias has it that, when you come right down to it, there is only one real enemy to creative inspiration and achieve ment. Although it is called by many names-caution, timidity, hairsplitting, and compulsiveness-it is best known by one: critical thinking. And if critical thinking has often been known to align itself with such characteristics as analytic scruple, concern for de tail, organizational coherence, insistence upon clarity and reason ableness, these are then to be the characteristics most despised by creative spirits. 55

Erskine Caldwell to Richard Johns, July 12, 1930: "Personally, I like anything that has the utmost in vitality, no matter the style,

subject, or point of view-God, as long as you don't grind any axes [Take a position? Discriminate severely?] or let some scented paper drive you off your wheels, I'm with you.-I hope you don't change your mind about having done with pieces-about-pieces. Criticism wears out the best of creative work, after a time." Not all of Pagany's influential correspondents shared Caldwell's views. Ezra Pound, for example, wrote in Pagany itself that "the

(benevolent and beneficent) is to select"; more, that "critical writing is ancillary. It is the shoe-horn not the foot. The attempt to pass it off as peer to creative writing is rooted in inferiority complex, the jealousy of the eunuch for Don Juan." Though there are at present several important ac function of the critic

ademic critics who continue to press the latter argument, from a position distinctly opposed to Pound's, the issue has never seemed to me of compelling interest. Whether or not criticism is

"peer to creative writing" is less important than the fact that at its best it serves a variety of purposes which no one interested in language and literature ought entirely to overlook. One does wonder, though, how a critic may be asked to be benevolent and also to select, for of necessity to select means also to reject, to discriminate better from best, good from bad. Pound, like Williams, was of two minds on how to organize a magazine and to promote standards of genuine literacy, but his sympathies were clearly with those who wanted to keep criticism well in its place, to keep the world safe for the more unruly and exciting creative energies. Why should the critical enterprise have come so to dominate the anxious reflections of editors and poets in the early years of this century, and why should it remain at present more a threat than a promise? The writers in the Pagany circle are not, after all, easily distinguishable, in some of their attitudes, from contem porary literary people-including directors of federal humanities endowment programs and other artsy-craftsy bureaucrats who be lieve that the word is sacred only if it's patently poetical, less than referentially precise, and oh, so sincere. The road from Williams to such governmental spokesmen for the arts is long and tortuous, of course, and no one will suppose that similarities in their attitudes

toward critical thinking reflect other and more crucial similarities. a Williams was not poet; he knew better than the rest

only

great

of us, in his verse at least, how to be at once precise and passion ately sincere while largely avoiding the more obvious sentimental ities in behalf of which the government is told it must support the arts. Chief among these sentimentalities is the absurd notion that hairsplitting damages the brain, that poets walk about under

divine spell which dissolves upon contact with analytic rigor even when directed by other friendly creators. At a time when most of our best poets and novelists manage to do superb work a

while teaching in the academy, beset on every side by critics and hairsplitters, the government agencies and their "informants" still think it especially useful to protect artists wherever possible from

abrasive contact with what Pound found it easy to call the com

munity of "eunuchs." No wonder so much government money has lately been spent in support of virtually worthless little maga zines, the main function of which is to prevent their editors and contributors from discovering what they

are

to do. How often in recent years have I

from

and

are

not

suited

winced while

reading another, discovering their

grant printouts agency continuing support of magazines whose editors have proven time one

again their inability to distinguish a poem from a bit of self-congratulating nonsense. We have not the leisure here to trace in detail the process by which all this came originally to pass, but it is clear that the relative marginality of poetry-and, to a lesser extent, of serious fiction-in the reading habits of otherwise serious people has had significant effect in converting vague tendencies to firm predis positions. In the twenties and thirties, when Pound and Williams were young and the little magazine seemed full of promise, it was no doubt appealing to think of a publication directed mainly to one's peers in the community of letters. In time one might and

a range of other readers, and very few artists believed it might be possible to produce important work actually

expect

to win

without ever passing beyond that original little-magazine reader

ship. In our time the literary situation has decidedly altered such expectations. One needn't have precise figures to know that the wider readership earlier anticipated by the poets does not exist; that volumes of poetry, even by established and clearly "successful" 57

older poets like Stanley Kunitz, will find readers only in the tiny

community which reads and aspires to publish in this little magazine or that; that a brilliantly accomplished and not im possibly difficult novelist like William Gass will be lucky to find ten thousand readers for his book over a period of ten years. Nor do exceptions to the rule tell us much, except that the publicity apparatus in American publishing and reviewing circles is unstable and occasionally subject to unpredictable whims. Contemporary writers, when they are not themselves subject to delusions of grandeur, come early to recognize that what now passes for the little magazine may be as much as they can aspire to succeed in; that they may be more certain of a genuine reader ship, though small, for periodical publication of a poem or story than for subsequent book publication. They will not on this ac count forgo the modest advantages of book publication, but will understand that more often than not the only fate of a good volume is to stand virtually unread on the shelves of a university library, while books of an entirely journalistic and ephemeral character are widely reviewed and disseminated. These are facts of life, and one would be foolish indeed to grow indignant over so trifling a matter. There are innumerable opportunities in this country for writers to break into print, and there is always the chance that a writer with fine talent will be discovered by the media and permitted to "make it" as fully as he deserves. In the face of all this, it is not surprising that writers should be jealous of the limited advantages they have; that poets and other self-conscious keepers of the sacred flame should want to bar critical voices from the sanctuary; that questions of the relation between authority and revelation, as it were, be all but denied. Criticism does tend frequently to confuse matters which had once seemed to enthusiasts perfectly clear. If one is determined to admire "anything that has the utmost in vitality," in Caldwell's phrase, one will not like to be told that vitality in itself may con stitute

insufficient virtue, or that what seems vital to one merely shrill and arbitrary to another. The little

reader seems

magazine, unfortunately, has had an important role in encouraging writers to think of themselves as somehow beyond criticism and as working in the service of goals to which only they and their creative peers may suitably testify. Nor does the mere presence 58

critical essay or two guarantee that a little magazine will perform its function better than publications restricted to poetry or fiction. Much that passes for criticism in the little magazine is no better than a plug for an aspiring local boy, or a species of of

coterie commentary which certifies that a given figure belongs among the circle of writers and readers associated with that

journal. Besides, no one would be so foolish as to require a magazine to publish a particular quota of critical articles. Critical thinking is what we must care about, and it can as well be present in a little poetry magazine as in a journal predominantly com mitted to the publication of literary essays. The critical function is performed whenever a magazine editor severely discriminates among the MSS submitted to him, and indicates by his selection of material for publication that he knows what he is doing and could more or less readily account for his choices in a way that would do credit to his judgment and interpretative faculties. Is this the case where most little magazines are concerned? Surely it is not possible to discern a consistent pattern of taste or judgment in the selections from Pagany printed in the recent volume. And Pagany was, by all odds, a distinguished little magazine. We are back, then, to what Williams called organization, and to issues raised by his calling for a little magazine that is at once miscellaneous and realistic in representing the spectacle of the culture to which it is addressed. The central question raised has to do with the relation between the magazine and its audience. At its best, I would contend, the little magazine always cultivates something of an adversary relationship with its readers. It is, by intention, at least occasionally upsetting, always provoking, and eager to remain a step ahead of most of its readers in recalling to them their obligations as literate persons. None of this is possible without organization, for if readers are to be genuinely provoked, if they are to submit to literary experiences which are often un familiar, difficult, or unpleasant, they will have to trust their editors to provide consistently valuable provocation. Otherwise readers will simply resist what they read, or turn their attention elsewhere at the first sign of difficulty. The trust in editorial judgment re to a sustain fruitful adversary relationship between reader quired and journal is a function of an organized vision of literary possibil ity to which every item in the magazine implicitly subscribes. Con59

fronted again and again by this organized vision, the reader has a basis on which to evaluate individual items against the

developing

broader pattern, and to consider the effectiveness of the pattern in promoting literary projects which might not otherwise

particular

have been conceived. This experience can be a good deal more complicated than the observation that a certain film critic would have written a given essay had he not been commissioned to do so by a given journal. The issue is, what kind of essay was never

conceived, and how would the essay have had

to be different

it conceived for the pages of another journal, or written into the void with no thought of context, format, or audience

were

all? Similar

about poems or undeniable fact that many younger writers

questions may even be asked

stories; for it is an

cultivate an ideal of themselves as adequate to a certain kind of

literary expression largely because they have been responsibly and critically encouraged by one or more editors. While writers of major talent, even when young, may not be susceptible to that kind of encouragement, most of what appears in any magazine will be something less than major work, and most writers will surely consent to be "brought along" by gifted and helpful editors. The little magazine as miscellany, though-in the sense of the word "miscellany" intended by Williams-is not a good bet to provide professional help, or to attract a serious audience willing to be challenged at the very heart of its ideas, self-images, and aesthetic predilections. If the journal is miscellaneous only insofar as it reflects the obscene pluralism of a democratic ethos gone awry, it cannot concern itself with differences in quality, scope, and moral tone that make the selection of one item rather than

another an interesting and fully significant decision. The culture in which the little magazine must make its way is a novelty culture, as we are so often

reminded, and it is hard to imagine what possible

of a journal's attempting to encompass the sheer

good variety of models, images, artifacts competing for attention against a background of limitless possibility. The miscellaneous quality of Pagany was a function of a particular kind of abdication for which editor, contributors, and readers may be said to share responsi bility. We know what the abdication amounted to, and signifies still, when we try to bring ourselves to speak without embarrasscan come

ment of such things as quality and standards in a magazine. The

words seem somehow-do they not?-to compromise our allegi and courageous. We do not ance to to the

experimental

vitality,

like to think ourselves hung up on narrow loyalties, and we take as humanly offensive the very idea of a code or tradition of standards which may be legitimately applied to works of liter ature. No matter the esteem in which Eliot and other spokesmen for a traditional culture are said to be held in academic circles: what is

genuinely prized, by most academics as by writers and

editors, is the individual talent. We have, in fact, the full realization of what Philip Rieff has called an experimental ethos, according

fruitfully creative in the degree that he expresses his feelings without undue restraint, and uncritically to which every

man

opens himself to the music of his creative peers, most of them blithely sawing away on tuneless instruments. How little aware of the situation I was when, in 1965, I began to conceive the publication of a little magazine may be

surmised

from the fact that my friends and I chose to call it Salmagundi. As the original designation of a stew consisting of various and sundry

oddments, yet not without a certain spice, the name was bound to conjure up an entirely miscellaneous phenomenon; and though

for thirteen years now Salmagundi has published a wide assortment of materials, it cannot be said to have spoken for that various and

protean spirit all too casually announced in its name. As I think of our first issues, however-of the promise others saw in them and the particular satisfaction they gave us then-I think it fair to claim an early intuition of what Salmagundi was intended

accomplish. I'd hesitate now to promise anyone "a unique reading experience" such as we promised readers on the covers of early issues; still we have always thought it useful to consider what we could enthusiastically provide which no other maga zine would be likely to publish, or at least to feature. Editorial emphasis in the early years had more to do with the mix of to

materials than with the tonal thrust of individual items. When, on the basis of three published issues, Lionel Trilling wrote in May 1966 that "Salmagundi gives every promise of becoming one of

truly distinguished inteIIectual quarterlies," we thought the ex pression "intellectual quarterlies" caught precisely the kind of little our

Salmagundi ' K·M" M-M""--

....

Lionel

Trilling

Essays on Trilling by Joseph Frank, Helen Vend ler, Robert Also. a Sincerity & Authenti ity Langbaum, Mark Shechner symposium with contributions by Trilling. Irving Howe, Leslie H. -_

Farber, and others. Books and Films in Review: Alan Spiegel, Film-Flam/ Peggy Boyers. Girard & Freud

Adrian Kuzminski. Professionals I Eduardo Gonzalez, Fuentes New poems by Wagoner. Keane, and others

Salmagundi, No. 41,Spring 1978 (courtesy Robert Boyers).

magazine we were in process of creating. Nor were we resistant to Irving Howe's 1966 description of Salmagundi as "a magazine run by young people who are struggling to develop a serious critical re lationship to American life and writing." "Struggling" was-in some sense still is--quite right, and though by now we have surely indicated many times over a profile of our "critical relationship to American life and writing," we have never managed to be more than ambivalent about many cultural issues to which some journals respond with almost perfect ideological consistency. The critic Robert Alter, in a letter responding to our first issue, remarked on the "good range of subjects, writers and viewpoints-little threat of the stifling coterie quality one feels in so many of our intellectual publications." Also, he went on, "I much preferred the pieces that argued a viewpoint rather than being merely expository-Sagarin's sharply written statement on hatewhite, and your own attack on the sentimentalizing of Negro folk culture." It was possible, so it seemed to us, to make Salma gundi at once various and sufficiently organized to present an identifiable profile. We could print articles with widely differing views without compromising our devotion to critical care and responsible political commitment. While our political sympathies were decidedly leftist-they still are-there was no reason to buy the ongoing cultural revolution as though one had no choice if one's radical credentials were to be kept in order. And finally, granted that the magazine was to be directed primarily to the literary community, there was good reason to suppose that our readers would especially benefit from just the sort of social and political commentary that other literary publications had narrowly excluded. Where Salmagundi was concerned, the necessary adversary relationship with readers was to depend on our steady introduction of unfamiliar perspectives on materials that were, with few excep

tions, at least marginally familiar. There were "discoveries," of course, but we tended not

beg patience

so much to insist upon priority as to for what often seemed-even to us-intimidating.

While we were the first general American journal to run extended articles on writers like T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, R. D. Laing, Philip Rieff, and Witold Gombrowicz, we were not averse 63

to printing essays in cultural

history which focused upon "classi

cal" writers like Sartre, Ortega y Gasset, Nietzsche, William James, and Havelock Ellis. Though we devoted entire issues in 1967 and

1977 to

appraisals of Robert Lowell-hardly a stranger to the

American literary community-we assiduously promoted the work of other poets with little or no reputation. We never went out of our way to cultivate controversy, but we knew how to get trusted con tributors to press and probe in places that proved frequently

susceptible to analytic attack than anyone had yet imagined they would. Finally, we made room for a kind of literary display which, when less than perfect, is apt to strike readers as com promising that standard of high seriousness to which we had unashamedly dedicated the journal. In ambitious works by Martin Pops, by Edward Said, even in portions of Philip Rieff's "Fellow Teachers," we published a rare and splendid sort of item which C. S. Lewis, speaking of More's Utopia, once described as the "holiday work," reflecting an "overflow of intellectual high spirits, a revel of debate, paradox, comedy and (above all) of invention, which starts many hares and kills none." Happily, most Salmagundi readers have understood precisely in what spirit such works were more

intended to be read, and have been satisfied to search out the thread of intermittent practical comment or serious theorizing wherever it might be found. Fortunately, too, many other works have featured, including several which could never have been conceived with anything approaching comic intention, have we

taken heart, as it were, from our "holiday works," and have thereby been able to poke and prod readers as no sober academic treatise is likely to do. In the past few years alone, in such pieces as

Leslie H. Farber's "Lying on the Couch," Robert Weisberg's

"Civility and Its Discontents," John Lukacs's "The Future of Historical Thinking," Tony Tanner's "Games American Writers Play," and others, we have given readers sometimes dizzying speculative displays about which they could naturally speak in tones of real enjoyment. As editor of Salmagundi, I have found that the literary situation in this country is as open to influence from within as one has any

right to hope. Where powerful institutions are concerned, changes are likely to occur slowly, if at all, and the fact that one is listened to with a degree of respectful attention does not ensure that one's 64

seriously. Acknowledging as much, I have tried to worry as little as possible about the views of this contribu tor or that, and have thought instead to present an attractive model of mind doing its appointed work: inventing, evaluating, interpret ing, establishing necessary priorities, filling in obscure back grounds, and so on. Though I have been accused of willfully turning my back on experimental writing, of virtually ignoring the feminist revolution, of (God forbid!) actually promoting the work of stodgy or reactionary figures like Philip Rieff, John

views will be taken

Lukacs,

even

Saul Bellow, I have made decisions out of the

conviction that, as editor, I know what best represents and tries the parameters of literate discourse. The

verse

collected in the

magazine Unmuzzled Ox may be someone's idea of experimental writing, but it is not mine, and I am quite willing to settle for "traditional" verse if it can do consistently more exciting and exacting things than what passes for the new. Besides, common designations really do not serve very well to describe our experi ence of particular books or poems. Howard Nemerov, known to many observers as an academic poet, has done more to extend the language of poetry than any dozen self-conscious avant-garde

litterateurs. And Philip RiefI has, from

"reactionary" position,

done more to strengthen the critique of late capitalist

consumer

culture than any of the popular self-styled radicals who write for

Rolling Stone or The Village Voice. The point is made with devas tating accuracy in a 1975 Salmagundi essay by Charles Moles worth, in which he argues that "only by whoring after the new and the experimental can capitalism maintain its cultural grip on

people." Recommending a careful reappraisal of Herbert Mar cuse's theory of "repressive tolerance," Molesworth goes on to describe a "confused 'public' badgered by a thousand spokesmen and faddists and practitioners of universal brotherhood all trying to shape taste and influence history. This unfortunately remains true in the 'fields' of academic learning, pop music, pharmaceutical sales, high-fashion designing, and women's liberation, as well, all fields that reflect in exaggerated and distorted ways the structure and mores of monopoly capitalism." But let us press the analysis a little further, particularly as it affects our account of literary culture and the function of little

magazines. Contemporary literary culture, in its commitment to 65

the new, in its amiable pluralism and openness, has proven more

repressive in its impact than most of us are willing to acknowledge. As it wants so badly to accept everything, to impugn no credential and erect no barrier to any ambition, it stands, really, for nothing, and may be said to furnish no whit of guidance to anyone con cerned with elementary canons of taste, decorum, wit, or intel

encouraged to create, to think themselves "liberated" to self-expressive experimentalism, there is finally little sense of gratifying achievement, of limitations absorbed and fitfully overcome, of instruments finely honed to register particular elusive scales. The debasement of discourse consequent upon the unlimited expansion of literary possibility is quickly apparent in the contents of the most energetic and widely distributed literary magazines, including several whose tabloid formats clearly announce their intention to be done with pretension and the "scented paper" syndrome. In these current versions of the little magazine, one is likely to find a fine poem buried at the foot of page 47, and an absurdly mawkish little power-to-the-people exercise proudly emblazoned on the front cover; or, following a careful, discriminating piece of criticism, a bit of self-promoting propaganda for immediacy and self-exposure. No one is honor bound to stand firm against immediacy or self-exposure or experimental intensity, but it is surely obvious that unless we grow somewhat more skeptical of such qualities, and resistant to their allure, we shall be in a good deal of trouble. Unable to resist anything new or vital, we shall succumb with all due speed to that condition in which all we can comfortably manage is to lie still, smiles idiotically fixed on our faces, while the dance of creation spins frantically about us. The answer to what Marcuse and his colleagues called repressive tolerance is not, of course, repressive intolerance, and it would be foolish indeed to expect anything hopeful by closing off the legal freedoms literary people were for years avid to win. No one is forgetting Lady Chatterley or Tropic of Cancer or Lolita, and we all know of gifted writers who have died of neglect. All the same, it is time we spoke of censorship, more particularly those powers of rejection and discrimination which literary editors are especially suited to exercise. The only possible way that and can address the human intellectual literary people challenge lectual

acuity.

While all

are

of a commodities culture is by insisting again and again that there are fundamental differences between one object and another; that

judgments are not simply and irrevocably arbitrary; that there are viable standards whose perpetual application enables resistance to just those spurious appeals that a commodities market will make to each of us-whether the object peddled be deodorant, pop music, books, or new styles in humanist ideology. The little magazine has an important role to play in this. Directed as it is to an audience presumed to have some feeling for genuine literary values, and to be at least somewhat disaffected from the mass media and its staple literary outlets, it has a basis on which to cultivate a creditable countercultural profile. By promoting in its selection of materials a bracing, elusive notion of literary value, by being less open to innovation and more respect ful of literary and intellectual traditions that have generated un deniable achievements, the little magazine may come in time to stand for something, to suggest in what degree it may be worth fighting for and against. The function of the little magazine is, must be, to serve to erect and stand by principles of intelligent and imaginative discourse. Its function is not to serve the professors, or to provide indiscriminate encouragement to poets, or to build an audience responsive to particular experimental forms. Any of these objects may incidentally be realized as the little magazine does its appropriate work, but its primary object will always have more to do with providing a living model of the literary mind struggling to nurture and preserve-in Arnold's tainted words the best that has been thought and said.

The Kenyon Review, Vol. 18, No.1 (courtesy Michael

McDonnell).

THE KENYoN REVIEW, 1939-1970 Robie Macauley Robie Macauley,

Houghton Mifflin, edited The Kenyon Review from 1959 to 1966, and was the fiction editor of Playboy magazine from 1966 to 1977. He owes his education in editing to Ford Madox Ford, once editor of The English Review and later The Transatlantic Review, and to John Crowe Ransom, who edited The Kenyon Review. Macauley has been a longtime now

senior editor at

admirer of book editors Maxwell Perkins, Saxe Commins, and Albert Erskine, and, among magazine editors, of H. L. Mencken, Kerker Quinn, Reed Whittemore, and William Phillips. His

favorite little magazines are Hound and Horn and The Southern Review when it was edited by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Mr. Macauley was educated at Kenyon

College and the Uni University of Iowa, the University of North Carolina, Kenyon College, and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. He is the author of a novel, a collection of short stories, and two books of criticism. His work has appeared in Esquire, Playboy, The Partisan Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic, and a number of his stories were selected for the O. Henry Prize Stories and Best versity of Iowa. He has taught at Bard College, the

American Short Stories.

In 1939, Kenyon College was a small liberal arts college with about three hundred students. Hidden on a green hilltop in rural

Ohio, it was noted-when noted at all-for having produced a number of Ohio

politicians

and

Episcopalian clergymen. John professor of English who

Crowe Ransom was a fifty-one-year-old

had just arrived, after becoming unwelcome at Vanderbilt Uni versity for his modernist views about literature. He had published four first-rate books of poetry and had taken to criticism

recently

with The World's Body. He had begun to feel that a revaluation of literature by new critical methods was the important work of the time. Gordon Keith Chalmers, former Rhodes scholar, was the ambitious young president of

Kenyon. Roberta Teale Schwartz (Chalmers), his wife, poet. Mrs. Chalmers suggested that what Kenyon-and the country-needed was a literary-critical review in the grand style of the nineteenth-century Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's. I was an uneasy sophomore. Like my friends Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Peter Taylor, I had been drawn there was a

because I'd heard that Ransom was a great teacher. Like all literary magazines, the Review was the combination of a

lot of enthusiasm, a little money, and high intentions. Its chief

assets were the talents of Ransom and his

associate editor, Philip

Blair Rice, and an innocent assumption that one could produce a major literary magazine in a sleepy village in Ohio, far away from the vortex of New York. Ransom was, by philosophy, a confirmed provincial, and he believed that as long as the postal

system existed, no place was better than any other. He thought of the Partisan Review, then the leading magazine of the literary metropolis, as a little flashy and curiously Trotskyite. For him, the Republic of Letters existed in no particular geographical place and Gambier, Ohio, with its good garden space and croquet lawns, was

better than most.

In almost every observable normal way, Ransom was con servative-a soft-spoken, smiling, elaborately courteous southern

gentleman with a classical education and a high regard for all the most proper traditions of life and letters. But he had one dan

gerously subversive idea. He felt that the whole matter of writing about literature, and thus of teaching it, had been loose, ill considered, and largely irrelevant. For him, psychological or biographical studies of writers, historical examinations of their times, descriptions of their sources and influences, scrutiny of their moral values were satellite affairs that revealed only vague intimations of the real thing-the work itself. A study of the work itself could show that an author sometimes wrote better than he

knew, sometimes wrote counter to the culture that produced him or counter to his most ostensible meanings. This, I think, is what the New Criticism (his book gave the school its name) was largely about. Kenyon Review was to be an instrument for bringing to 72

bear the kind of criticism he believed in.

(Later on, the New

Criticism was to become such a widely accepted-and mechanical -part of academic study that Ransom himself shuddered at it.) I think that I made a fair general statement of Ransom's and Rice's intentions in a foreword to the Review's twenty-fifth anni

versary issue:

Although

never

published a manifesto, credo,

formal statement of

editorial policy, what the Review stood for was always perfectly clear. It stood, first of all, for the discussion of values in literature. As Mr. Ransom said, "One of the saving gifts of our age, against the many ways it has devised for being wretched, is its turn for literary criticism, and for a literary criticism

evidently so enterprising and acute, and so grounded in good conscience, as can scarcely be predicated of the other periods of literary history." He thought of the era in which the magazine appeared as one of evaluation and critical comprehension rather than one of high creation; it was a time of literary conscience rather than of literary passion. The function of the Review was to express that new capability. Indeed, it was new. The writers who have recently been deploring "the age of criticism" and writing essays "in defense of ignorance" ought to remember that there was very little American criticism of any value before the 1930s. We were almost totally lacking in what Edmund Wilson described as the "interest of the intelligence fully awakened to the implications of what the artist is doing, that is to say, to his responsibility."

Literary journalists often

repeat the [alsism that the Review was simply an organ of the New Critics. The truth is that, in 1939, almost any kind of intelligent critic was new-and over the years the Review has been hospitable to all varieties of them.

I suppose that in the history of American literary magazines Ransom's volumes of the Review will always be labeled, a journal of criticism that

published R.

Blackmur, Lionel Trilling,

William Empson, Richard Ellmann, Robert Penn Warren, Irving

Howe, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, and many other eminent critics of the time. But that ignores the fact that its pages also included a brilliantly creative collection. Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, James Dickey, George Seferis, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, W. H. Auden, and Robert Graves are just a few of the poets who appeared in the Kenyon Review. Some of Bertolt Brecht's plays were printed there for the first time. Boris Pasternak-then quite unknown in this country-contributed a story. But lists of names are not very revealing. It is sufficient to say that the Review, in Ransom's time, represented some of the best imaginative writing of the 1940s and 1950s. Some, but not all. It had its shortcomings and omissions. T. S. Eliot did not appear (until much later, just 73

before his death, when I published an interview with him). Saul Bellow was given a cold shoulder. The French existentialists were

ignored. The remarkable group of Italian fiction writers who appeared just after World War II went almost unnoticed. Lorca was there, but Neruda was not. There was one story by John Wain, but the "angry young men" in postwar England-Braine, Osborne, and Amis among them-were never represented. Nor was

Graham Greene or Frank O'Connor.

Fiction

was

always one of John Ransom's blind spots.

considered it an interesting semi-art, necessary but usually tedious,

and he did not read it often. Once, in the 1950s, he told me that he had discovered a new, clever, young English fiction writer who for some reason had taken the name of a Japanese drink for a

pseudonym. I refrained from telling him that "Saki" was not "sake" and that H. H. Munro had been killed in World War I. It was

this lack that had something to do with my interest in becoming the second editor of the Review. I respected criticism and wanted to keep up that Review tradi

tion-but with rather more maverick critics than John Ransom had printed. I also wanted to do well by the poets, though knowing that my editorial insight could never equal his. But chiefly I hoped

that the Review could display some of the new talents in fiction. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a promising time for fiction

writers. Bellow, Cheever, and Updike had established themselves. Isaac Singer and Bernard Malamud were doing fine work. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man seemed to be the forerunner of

new

accomplishments by black writers. Kerouac and other Beat gen eration writers were getting much attention. Under Ransom's

editorship, the Review had tended to favor southern fiction: Robert Penn Warren's, Flannery O'Connor's, or Andrew Lytle's. My theory was-and is-that a good literary magazine ought to be about ten years ahead of general acceptance, as experience has proved. This is what avant-garde really means, although the term is often confused, in the minds of editors, with pure experiment for experiment's sake. The chief work of a literary journal is to print the early writing of Hemingways, Faulkners, Marianne Moores, and W. H. Audens rather than the literary curiosities of, say, Gertrude Stein, Eugene Jolas, or Donald Barthelme. That, of course, is not its only obligation but it is a central one. 74

So in the 1960s I hoped to find the unknown generation of the 1970s---or at least some worthy part of it. Most literary magazine editors share this hope and almost all of us are doomed to half success. My first teacher and editorial mentor had been Ford

Madox Ford who, through the luck of good connections, excel lent taste, and the ability to be in the right place at the right time,

produced two excellent magazines. His English Review, published in London just before World War I, prospered with such writers as Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis. The transatlantic review, edited by Ford in postwar Paris, rode with a generation of writers like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, and John Dos Passos. In two relatively brief spans, Ford had brought out the best English magazine of its time and the best Paris magazine of the 1920s. That kind of success is difficult, perhaps impossible, had

to repeat.

When John Ransom turned the Review

over

to me,

he said

simply, "Now I can get a good night's sleep for the first time in years." One of the reasons for an editor's insomnia is the thought of talented writers he may have rejected, overlooked, or failed to

Robie Macauley, editor of The Kenyon Review (right), with Assistant Editor

Irving Kreutz (left) and John Crowe Ransom, circa 1959. Photograph by Thomas B. Greenglade. 75

find. I don't mean that later reputation and acclaim are the sole, or even

the most important, criteria; there are a number of now

glad I rejected and would reject again today. But one does have long-lasting feelings of regret about having turned away or left unnoticed quite a few of the writers who have since proved themselves. With such hindsight, one could produce the most brilliant literary review of its time-but every editor, even the best, is granted no more than his share of foresight. Still, there are satisfactions. Among fiction writers in my volumes of the Review appeared the then unfamiliar names of Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, V. S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, R. Prawer Jhabvala, Mordecai Richler, and Julia

well-known writers I'm

O'Faolain. More familiar were Nadine Gordimer, Frank O'Connor, J. F. Powers, Christina Stead, Jessamyn West, and Flannery O'Connor. Sylvia Plath, James Dickey, John Berryman, William

Stafford, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and James Wright were just a few of the poets. In the mid-1960s, I began to have a sense that the purely

literary review was becoming outmoded. It was rather like a Conestoga wagon in the day of the automobile. It arrived four times a year, two hundred pages heavy, and demanded some long evenings of attention. It carried no news-literature is very seldom a matter of news. That was perfectly suitable for Victorian readers but not for modern Americans. We are conditioned to a life of instants: fast food, quick travel, speed reading. Along with

that, there was the plain fact that Americans, even the most intelligent, were concerned far less with imaginative writing than with politics, social questions, factual writing of all sorts. It was natural, then, that the most widely read literary journal in the country should be replaced by reviews in a newspaper format. The New York Review of Books was full of news (or pseudo news)-the newest reputations in New York, who was savaging

whom, what Mary McCarthy thought about Vietnam. The days when crowds waited on the New York docks for the ship carrying the latest installment of Oliver Twist and when the backwoods

Ohio store of William Dean Howells's boyhood was the scene for debates about Don Juan

were

over.

Readers wanted to know

immediately what Norman Mailer had felt at the peace march last week in Washington. 76

All of this, happily, has no effect on the "little" literary magazine (as distinct from the quarterly review). That kind of magazine has the freedom of its enthusiasm and its poverty. It is published for a small group of like-minded readers with enormous tolerance for the worst and the best. It can ignore every rule of current taste and fashion, pay no attention to a hydrogen bomb dropped on Washington, be as eccentric as it wishes, and-this is its reason for being--occasionally find a genius. The quarterly review, however, in its responsible role as culture

bearer, is constantly encroached on. Its news value is gone. Its

developer of new talent has been lessened by the quicker receptivity of the commercial press. I once published in the Kenyon Review sections of a novel that became a Literary Guild selection by the next year-and, in different ways, this happens frequently. Once upon a time the Saturday Evening Post and Hound and Horn were totally different worlds of writing. That

function as

is not true of their successors, and, for better or for worse, there are no

longer strict highbrow-middlebrow-lowbrow lines in pub

lications. For these

reasons

and some personal ones, I left Kenyon in

1966. The Review continued for four more years under the editor

ship of George Lanning until, at last, an economy-minded presi dent of the college decided to end it. There was a little show of mourning when the New York Herald-Tribune and the Times Literary Supplement deplored its passing, but every publication has its given life span and many of the best die young. In its thirty-one-year history, the Kenyon Review did contribute a good deal to the "interest of the intelligence fully awakened to the implications of what the artist is doing, that is to say, to his responsibility," among American readers and teachers. And by that, all John Crowe Ransom's long labor is rewarded.

THE SouTHERN REvIEW AND A POST-SOUTHERN AMERICAN LETTERS Lewis P. Simpson "After Louisiana nothing has been real," Robert Penn Warren said about the early days of The Southern Review at Louisiana State

University in the Huey Long era. Mr. Warren and Cleanth Brooks by a young and remarkably intelligent dean, and encountered a flamboyant university president who, before he was put in jail for misusing college funds, asked the two professors to edit a literary quarterly. Both Brooks and Warren were graduates of Vanderbilt; both had been Rhodes scholars in the early thirties; both were Agrarians and involved with the New Criticism. The magazine they edited tried to interpret

had been brought to Baton Rouge

the South to the nation, and to relate national issues to the southern

literary scene. Lewis P. Simpson places their Southern Review (old series) in the context of the history of southern magazines, both after the Civil War and after World War I. He then relates the magazine's new series (since 1965) to the dialectic between history and tradi tion carried over from the earlier phase. The main focus of the magazine during the past eighteen years has been, he admits, "retrospective," looking back to the issues of modernism and to the great modernist writers. Speaking as the co-editor of The Southern Review, Mr. Simpson writes: "We have said, if mostly by inference, that the sixties and seventies are not a time of literary origination but a time of falling off from the literary intelligence." He sees a contraction of what he calls "the public space of literature." Lewis P.

Simpson, William A. Read Professor of English at Louisiana State University, is a literary historian with a particular interest in the history of the literary profession in America. This interest extends to the history of American periodicals,

especially

those published in New England and the South. The present essay is part of a work-in-progress on the continuity of the southern lit erary expression from colonial times to the present.

Mr.

Simpson is the author of The Man of Letters

in New

England and the South and The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature. He has also written a history of The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review (1803-1811),

pub

lished together with selections from its pages as The Federalist

Literary Mind. He has edited the writings of Cleanth Brooks in The Possibilities of Order, which contains a long theoretical and

retrospective conversation between Brooks and Warren. Mr. Simpson is the editor of the Library of Southern Civilization series of the Louisiana State University Press; has served on the editorial board of American Literature; and has received fellowships for his scholarly work from the Guggenheim Foundation and from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The historical character of the literary periodical is immutable. It cannot for a moment be separated from its context in the accu

mulative literary record. Unlike a play by Shakespeare, an ode by

Keats, a lyric by Wordsworth, a novel by Joyce, a periodical never achieves-in a single issue, in a single volume, in its whole serial run--even a quasi transcendence. Its historicity is germane to its origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the ex tension of the printing technology brought literature and printing

into

relationship and literature became identified primarily with what is made public in printed form. The periodical became the answer to the need for conveying literary news and argument. Its historicity was greatly reinforced when it took the form of the review journals of the nineteenth century, like the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review. It then became the an

absolute

record of a critical debate or dialectic about the nature and influ ence

of literature

institution. It became

record of the

struggle of literature for self-interpretation and historical definition in a civilization that, in embracing science, technology, and indus

trialism, had entered into a state of continuous revolution. Today when we pick up, say, a forty-five-year-old number of an American

literary quarterly (often a hybrid form, a mingling of the critical 79

quarterly and the general literary magazine, containing not only essays and reviews but stories and poems), we may find in it a poem, a story, or an essay that we have long regarded as speaking with its own luminous autonomy. We are slightly shocked to see it in a magazine. Marked by periodicity, it seems to bear the aspect of mortality. It assumes the appearance of an artifact of literary history; and we are averse to relics, sharing as we do the inclination of men over the last two centuries to be so historical that we are impatient with history. Nothing is so old as yesterday's news, and this includes the literary news. Many of us have probably not heard of the journal or the editor, but the

archetypal literary

periodical is Pierre Bayle's Nouvelles de fa Republique des Lettres (1684-1718). I set down these observations not for what they may be worth summary wisdom, which is no doubt very little, but because they have grown out of my effort to inquire into a seemingly small as

and specific question: the circumstances under which the publi

cation of the Southern Review at Louisiana State University was renewed in 1965 after a lapse of twenty-three years. The circum stances-I realize now far more than I did ten or twelve years ago-were something more than adventitious. Indeed the histor ical connection between the Southern Review of the 1960s and

1970s and the Southern Review of the 1930s and 1940s is abso

lutely fundamental to our place in the present-day spectrum of American literary quarterlies. I shall not only dwell on this con nection but expand upon it-at the expense of ignoring other im portant aspects of the present Southern Review which wou1d be included in a longer discussion, as, for instance, our publication of a variety of young poets, fictionists, and critics. 1

preface to the first number of the new series, in January 1965, recognizes the outward circumstances of the resumption. These were quite regular. Certain persons who were strongly inter ested in renewal were located in the right niches of power, including the late Nathaniel M. Caffee, professor of English and dean of the Baton Rouge campus of the university; the president of the university system, John A. Hunter; the dean of the Graduate School, Max M. Goodrich; and the chairman of the English 80

The Southern Review, Vol.2, No.4 (N.S.), Autumn 1966

(courtesy Northwestern University Library).

department, Thomas A. Kirby. In 1963 an administrative decision to renew publication was implemented by the appointment of a committee to assist in faculty planning the resumption. This pre pared the way for appointment of the present staff. Donald E. Stanford and Lewis P. Simpson, of the Baton Rouge campus, were

made co-editors; and Rima Drell

Reck, of the New Orleans campus (now called the University of New Orleans), was named associate

editor. Patt Foster Robertson

was appointed the first business manager. (Subsequently Karen R. Paterson served as business manager, succeeded by Sarah E. East and Susan Polock.) Tem porary office space was secured in the administration

building of College of Agriculture. (This had nothing to do with the association between the original series of the Southern Review and the Agrarian Movement.) By mid-1963 we were in business, and before long had arranged to engage the services of Franklin Press, Baton Rouge, printers of the 1935-1942 series. Save for an alteration of the cover design, the editors decided that the the

second series of the Southern Review

identical with that of the

would appear in a format

original series. Later, when the William 81

Byrd Press of Richmond, Virginia, took over the printing of the magazine (in 1975), the paper and typeface were altered, but the general resemblance to the original series has been maintained. There was an element of the purely fortuitous in the printing arrangements, yet they were symbolic of a continuity between the original and the new series of the Southern Review that was deeper than appearance. The continuity was not sought as a matter of deliberate editorial policy. When Cleanth Brooks-who, with Robert Penn Warren, served as managing editor of the original series-was questioned about the direction a reinstituted Southern Review should take, he remarked that it should take one as dif

magazine of 1935-1942 as the literary situation demanded; and this, he thought, might mean a quite different direction. But the road taken by the new series of the

ferent from that of the

Southern Review has not been a different one, because its editors have found that the literary situation requires a sequential direc tion. A divergent road might have been taken in the new series

if its co-editors had been younger. But their literary education was primarily shaped by the age which nurtured the original series-that

the

southern

renaissance

or,

broadly

speaking, of the second American renaissance. Their response to literature at any time could not fail to be governed, in considerable

part, by the powerful sensibility of

age that seemed to be

revolutionary but is to be understood in perspective as one which found an often contradictory, though massive and brilliant, motive as it struggled to recover the use of letters as a functional arena of civilization, as an arena of discourse, as a public space-the literary res publica-in which the drama of existence is portrayed and the proper relation and separation of the elements of order is discussed. 2

The reconstruction of the public space of literature in the post World War I situation

notably involved the relation between

history and tradition. Nothing had so decisively manifested itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the concept of the

historicity of man, society, and the world. All concepts of per manence were abandoned; all forms of order, including all forms of transcendent order, seemed to become irreversibly subject to 82

the process of historical transformation. The modern historical sensibility began to appear in the disappearance of the corporate sensibility of Christendom-at that point marked, T. S. Eliot says,

by a "dissociation of sensibility." In the vacuum left by the separation of sensation and intellect, poets and philosophers per ceived with uneasy and increasing conviction the total historicity of perception itself. And yet it seemed-and has not yet seemed too late-to defy such a closure of vision by the truth of tradition: to assert the past in the present, not as integral to ongoing process, but as integral to the ongoing incorporation or assimilation of literature to the mystery of existence, which is, properly speaking, the reference of all history. The effective representation of the arena of discourse, of the literary order, has depended on the portrayal in poetry, fiction, drama, and essay of the struggle that, myriad in its definition of issues, has fundamentally assumed the form of a conflict between history and tradition as modes of existence. But as the struggle in most respects has become more and more weighted on the side of historicism-on the side of scientific determinism in the inter

pretation of the consciousness of man, society, and the world-the historicist interpretation has tended to close around the public space of letters. This tendency could result, we may suppose, in the absolute alienation of literature from existence, and hence the

destruction of the peculiarly modern realm of moral and spiritual

literacy. The American republic has a significant source of origin in an

unprecedented extension of the public space of literacy. In Amer ica it has been assumed that the existence of the state is synony mous

with the lettered condition of its citizens. In actuality, the

autonomy of the Republic of Letters has been modified, if not disposed of, by the American assumption that this realm could be incarnated in history. An American destruction of the literary

realm,

to be sure,

was

seen

to be a distinct

possibility by the

Federalist literati during the first two decades of the new nation. One of the early nineteenth-century New England periodicals, the

Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, expresses the fear that the American attempt to be the historical embodiment of the Republic of Letters may convert the literary order into an amor83

phous "democracy of letters." From this time on, we can trace a quarrel in American magazines between an endorsement of the prescriptive custody of literacy and the advocacy of its democ ratization. In mid-nineteenth-century America the issue gets rather neatly dramatized in the opposition between the Whig Review and the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. But it is too simple to say that the one magazine supported a tradi

tionalist view of culture and the other the historically determined rise of democracy. Writers

were

often

pulled different ways. It

to belong either to the movement

always easily possible employ the Emersonian terms, to the of the Past" or the "Party "Party of the Future." Neither Emerson nor Thoreau, although denying the past at their backs, divested themselves of classicist attitudes. While they internalized the dialect of tradition and history, it is a major force in the works of both. In spite of their vision of an anti-traditionalist, auton omous self triumphing over history, they were participants in the literary dialectic and helped to prevent the realm of discourse from closure. either by assimilation to the democratic state or to the compelling historical determinism which culminated in a Henry

was

not

the establishment-to

Adams. The literary situation in the nineteenth-century South was not the same as that in New England and the East. In the South the realm of public

slavery.

literacy was virtually closed by the defense of

The dialectic of history and tradition ceased.

Chattel slavery, a traditional

it existed in the American South,

was

not

but a novel institution. It began in historical contin

gency and was perpetuated first as an expediency and then as a singular historical necessity in the planting states. When the

"peculiar institution" came under attack, its defense ultimately demanded its identification with the state. The assimilation of

slavery to the state meant also that the realms of both religious and literary expression were assimilated to the state. Before this finally happened, a notable tendency in the southern literary mind was to evade the relationship of literature to slavery by iso lating literature in a classical piety. This motive is implied in Hugh Swinton Legare's depiction of the holy commonwealth of secular letters in the leading essay of the first number of the first quarterly to bear the title The Southern Review (published in Charleston, 84

South Carolina, 1828-1832). Legare says that a classical literary education will let a young man "into that great communion of scholars throughout all ages and nations-like that

awful

communion of saints in the Holy Church Universal," and he will

"feel a sympathy with departed genius, and with the enlightened and the great minds of other countries, as they appear before him,

in the transports of a Vision Beatific, bowing down at the same shrines and glowing with the same holy love of whatever is most pure and fair and exalted and divine in human nature." As the assimilation of letters to the state proceeded in the Old South, the purity of the literary realm began to be defined in prescriptive

terms-which is to say in terms of whether or not literature in any way questioned the institution of slavery. When the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger was accused of "injudicious

leniency towards Northern books and authors," Paul Hamilton Hayne of Russell's Magazine offered a curious defense of his fellow editor: Now, it seems that when a work is purely literary, interfering in no way with the "peculiar institution," or our rights under it, common honesty requires that it should be reviewed without reference to the birth-place of its author, or the locale of its publication. A true literary spirit is essentially liberal, and the Editor who should arraign Irving's "Washington" or Hawthorne's Tales, upon the charge that their authors were Northern evidently of the grossest absurdity.

men,

would be guilty

That a young southern man of letters could make such a statement in the late 1850s indicates the extent to which the literary order and the world of the slaveholders had been joined.

The reopening of the public space of literacy in the South after the Civil War was signified by the inauguration of the second

quarterly to be named the Southern Review. Published in Balti more from 1867 through 1879, the second Southern Review was edited by the aging Albert Taylor Bledsoe. Known in the ante bellum South as a proslavery advocate and in the Reconstruction as an

unreconstructible

fire-eater, Bledsoe was a man of letters

and mathematician of very considerable learning. In the first essay

in the initial number of the Baltimore Southern Review, as

taking

his point of departure the works of Vico, Lessing, Hegel, and

Schlegel,

Bledsoe

anticipates the disposition of the twentieth century southern literary mind to enter into the deeper levels of the relationship of tradition and history. "The history of civili85

zation," he says, "is nearly, if not absolutely, the same as the Philosophy of History, or the Education of Mankind." (This state ment is prefaced by the remark, "The Philosophy of History is one

of the creations of modern genius.") The sense of history as

the symbol of civilizational existence, expressing itself in one way in the formation of

Old South-New South

opposition, was

embodied in William Porterfield Trent's founding of the Sewanee

Review, a magazine which has had continuous publication since its inception and is justly entitled to its claim to be the nation's

quarterly. A few years later, a similar sense of history was embodied in another continuing periodical venture, the South Atlantic Quarterly, which was launched in 1902 by John Spencer Bassett at Trinity College (now Duke University) in Durham, North Carolina. Other significant periodical ventures responded to the impulse of the southern literary mind to recon struct the literary polity. Among these were the Texas Review, established at the University of Texas in 1915 (transferred to Southern Methodist University in 1924 and renamed the South oldest literary

west Review),

and the Virginia Quarterly Review, established at

the University of Virginia in 1925. Meanwhile the reopening of the literary realm in the South evidenced itself in the appearance of several independent little magazines, among them the Double Dealer in New Orleans and the Fugitive in Nashville. The last

(published from 1922 through 1925), like the Dial of Emerson England eighty years earlier, has exerted a lasting literary power. The Fugitive of John Crowe and Margaret Fuller in New

Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren

only expanded the realm of literary discourse in the South pushed its boundaries outward to embrace the modernist discussion of history and tradition. not

but

Poetry, the oracle, is gone. Our time cleaves to no racial myth, its myth is the apotheosis of machinery. Perhaps Oswald Spengler is right: a man is a fool to be an artist or a poet in this age. But at least our poet is aware of his own age, barren of any art though it may be, for he can't write like Homer or Milton now; from the data of his experience he infers only a distracting complexity .

Thus Allen Tate in the Fugitive in 1924. He is

continuing a

"discussion of the future of modern poetry" begun by Ransom in the preceding number. Within

few years several of the

prominent Fugitives would inaugurate the Agrarian Movement86

which, although it has been widely misinterpreted as a political movement (a misunderstanding promoted by the agrarians' own misinterpretation of their basic motives)-was a literary move ment. As the Transcendental Movement opened the New England

mind fully to nineteenth-century literary discourse, the Agrarian Movement opened the southern mind fully to the discourse of the twentieth century. In so doing, it substantiated the modern realm of letters in the South and provided for the southern literary renaissance. The third southern quarterly to be called the Southern Review (1935-1942) was the most effective critical expression of this flowering. It appeared at the point when the dialectic of history and tradition, focused and developed by the Fugitive group and

agrarians, was ripe for consolidation on a broader, more reflective, and more sophisticated level. The story of the publication of the Southern Review at Loui siana State University in the years of the Louisiana hayride has acquired an aura of legend. Looking back on that time, Robert Penn Warren commented, "After Louisiana nothing has been real." He was no doubt thinking about the strange improbability of certifiable circumstances in the Louisiana of the Huey Long epoch. Among these was Warren's reunion at LSU with the slightly younger Cleanth Brooks. Both graduates of Vanderbilt, both fresh from the experience of being Rhodes scholars at Oxford (Warren, B. Litt., 1930; Brooks, B. Litt., 1932), both close to the Agrarian Movement (although Brooks had not been a con tributor to I'll Take My Stand), they were joined in academic destiny as though by happenstance. But it was, in good measure, owing to a greater improbability of the time: the appointment of Charles Wooten Pipkin to the deanship of a fledgling LSU Gradu ate School. Pipkin, a native of Arkansas, was thirty-two years old when he became the graduate dean at LSU. He too had been at Vanderbilt; he too, after a short period at Harvard, had been at Oxford. A political scientist whose fame in his field made him a full professor at twenty-eight, Pipkin exemplified the recrudes ence of Jeffersonian cosmopolitanism in the post-World War I He was a a forceful advocate age. twentieth-century philosophe, of the League of Nations and of the "redemption of the South through education." Alex Daspit, who knew Pipkin both as a student and a colleague, has recently said of him: the

He [Pipkin] criticized university programs which "had grown from catechisms

of denominational colleges to the vast catholicity of curricula which mean nothing [,J this animated academic circus of mediocrity and miscellany." He derided the "righteous contentment of many college professors who are embalmed within the shroud of a Ph.D." and, surveying the result of much of what has passed for academic research, observed that if Dr. Johnson were alive, "he would not overlook the vast possibilities of the word 'research' as the last refuge of the scoundrel." ...

Pipkin set as the minimum objective of the LSU Graduate School

(in his own words)

"a greater immediate realization of

the inherent capacities of the southern regions and a more vital

reintegration of the regional culture in the national scene." Neither his emphasis on employing graduate education in the pursuit of, as he said, "the optimum conditions of the good society," nor his contention that "the American is a world citizen inheriting his internationalism from the great power of the industrial potential of the United States," was compatible with the agrarian per spective. But Pipkin's stress on the southern intellectual as a cul tural redeemer fell within the ambience of literary modernism. While his outlook was directed toward historical necessity (industrial ism) rather than traditionalism (agrarianism), Pipkin had the vision to allow for the marshaling of all "the skills necessary to utilize the existing resources of the [Southern] land and the peo ple." Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, opponents of the industrialization of the South though they might be, were among its promising cultural resources. Pipkin brought them to LSU, as he did Albert R. Erskine, Jr., a student at Vanderbilt

during Warren's brief teaching stint there following his Oxford days. Erskine was the first business manager of the Southern Review. (In 1940 John Palmer, another Rhodes scholar, replaced Erskine.) Another person in the

improbable mix of the times at LSU was the president of the university, James Monroe Smith, whose misuse of flamboyant university bonds eventually resulted in his incarceration in the state penitentiary at Angola. (A photograph in Lite shows Smith in striped prison garb at work in a prison sugarcane field.) Fortunately, Smith had a regard for the uni versity as well as for himself. Somehow (on this point the record seems to

be obscure) he saw, or was made to see, the attractive

possibilities of a first-class literary quarterly at LSU. Emulating 88

the administrative style of the Long era, on one improbable Sunday afternoon in late February 1935 he drove up to Robert Penn Warren's residence in Baton Rouge and invited Warren and his guest, Albert Erskine, to go for a ride. The story is told by Brooks and Warren in their introduction to Stories from the Southern Review: While the official black Cadillac crunched the gravel of the back roads, President James Monroe Smith revealed the motive of his invitation. Was it possible, he wanted to know, to have a good literary and critical quarterly

Yes, was the answer he got-yes, if you paid a fair rate for contributions, gave writers decent company between the covers, and concen trated editorial authority sufficiently for the magazine to have its own at the university.

distinctive character and quality. There was one more stipulation: that quality must not be diluted or contravened by the interference of academic commit tees or officials. How much would it cost? Toward $10,000 a year.

Smith suggested that Warren and Erskine confer with Pipkin and Brooks and promised to authorize funds for the magazine upon

receiving a statement of the plans for it. He received this the next day. In June 1935 the first issue appeared, the masthead carrying Pipkin as the editor and Brooks and Warren as the managing editors. So in an improbable time and place-in a time of bizarre political corruption mingled with intellectual and literary excite ment, in a provincial state university in the Deep South-a distin guished literary magazine came into its improbable being. A few years later, when the scandals broke at LSU and Smith went to prison, the unlikely circumstances which had created the Southern Review disappeared. The entrance of the United States into World War II was sufficient reason for an institution still

affectionately known, in tribute to its origin, as the "Ole War Skule," to remove the Review from its budget.

The first number of the Pipkin-Brooks-Warren Southern Review had been preceded by a prospectus which avowed that the chief aim of the quarterly would be "to define

large issues" and "to

attempt interpretation of the contemporary scene." To this end it would publish essays on "social, economic, political and literary

topics, fiction, poetry, and reviews of current books"-these to be written by a cosmopolitan authorship which would include not only established writers but new ones, their works to be judged 89

uniformly on the basis of "significance and artistic excellence." It was within the amplitude of such intentions that the Southern Review would "aim at presenting and interpreting Southern prob lems to a national audience and at relating national issues to the Southern scene.?" To the extent that the original series of the Southern Review carried out its ambitiously broad editorial policy -and this was to a considerable degree-the new series is ob viously not continuous with it. Our policy, set down early in the planning stage of the resumption, was more narrowly literary. That policy, however, represented more decisively the editorial practice in the original series: to make literature the most promi nent subject. It may be observed, too, that the continuity of the original and the new series does not lie merely in subject-matter emphasis; it lies in similarity of tone and temper. Some of our readers have remarked,

a matter

of fact, that

chiefly retrospective, and their criticism is not without justification. The first issue of the new series begins with an essay on Ransom and includes essays on the agrarians, Yeats, Celine, Faulkner, and D. H. Lawrence. Throughout the first eleven

our

endeavor is

volumes of the new series, and in the two numbers of the twelfth

volume published by the time of this writing, similar attention is

given to writers who had their beginnings in the twenties and thirties. No special number has been devoted to writing during the sixties or the seventies. Special numbers or special sections of the magazine have been devoted to Frost, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Caroline Gordon, Faulkner, and Mark Twain. Other special issues deal with such general subjects as the French literature of the past 150 years and the literature of the 1920s. Five numbers given over to the subject of writing in the South have mostly looked backward. I may be

giving the impression that the continuity between

the original and the new series of the Southern Review has the character of a pietistic response to a brilliant past. Yet I would say that whatever piety there is in our inclination to retrospection is dominated by a more complex impulse toward continuity: the *1 am indebted to Ronda Cabot Tentarelli for the quotations from the prospectus, which she discovered in the files of the LSU student newspaper, The Reveille (April 16, 1935). See Tentarelli, "The Life and Times of the Southern Review," Southern Studies 16 (Summer 1977). This essay places the first series of the

Southern Review in the context of the thirties.

perpetuation of the dialectic of history and tradition. This motive has never been formally recognized by the editors. They have accepted its presence as implicit in the historical act of resuming the publication of the Review. Because it is a policy statement as well as an advertisement, a few words from a brochure prepared by the editors during the fourth year of the new series are worth quoting. Addressed to potential contributors and subscribers, this states in part: The new Southern Review is maintaining the original high standards [of the 1935-42 publication] by drawing on the resources of writers from the South

and other regions of the USA and abroad. It continues to bring the readers a variety of poetry, fiction, critical essays and book reviews of lasting merit. The editors believe that a serious interest in literature starts from the present and that contemporary literature matters because it is the consciousness of our own age. Emphasis is on the twentieth century, although criticism that furnishes fresh insights into the literature of the past and essays that deal with the culture and history of the South are also published. There are frequent bilingual poems and essays dealing with contemporary European literature. Emphasizing technical discipline in fiction and poetry and clear thinking in critical essays, The Southern Review invites you to recognize new talents and rediscover established writers.

After the passing of another eight years or so, I find this statement both puzzling and illuminating. (Of course I do not speak for the other editors.) What is meant by the declaration that "a serious interest in literature starts from the present"? What present? What is meant by the term "contemporary"? By the phrase "the consciousness of our own age"? What, in fact, is meant by "our

age"? And why are readers and/or other writers invited to In 1968, when the above statement was published, had established writers become so dis established that they needed "rediscovering"? Who are "estab lished" writers anyway? Our advertisement of our virtues in 1968, it seems to me by hindsight, is ambivalent. If we attempted to devise a similar advertisement today, would it be less so? I doubt it. In its uncertainties the 1968 statement reflects a long term situation in America, one in which an unprecedented degree of literary activity is accompanied by an unprecedented literary eclecticism. It is a time when not only a great literary movement modernism-is ending, but a time when the very power of literature as a civilizational order seems to be suffering depletion. As can be seen in the light of eleven years of publication, the own

"rediscover established writers"?

Southern Review, new series, has assumed a certain editorial mis sion of

continuity through retrospection. In doing so we have possibly thought to influence the literary future. In the 1930s the modernist recovery of tradition often bore the paradoxical guise of an avant-garde mission (T. S. Eliot being the exemplary instance); and the original series of the Southern Review, in its association with the "new criticism," seemed prospective instead of retrospective. Its editors believed that a "serious interest in literature starts from the present," for the present comprehends the past and in this comprehension implies the future. The Southern Review of the sixties and seventies has remained within the aura of modernism:

seeing contemporary writing not as post modern but as related to the continuity of modernity, seeing our immediate age as still giving literary expression to the sense of history and tradition as conflicting modes of existence. The orig inal series of the Southern Review commented on this conflict in the leading essay of the first number in 1935. Entitled "Culture Versus Colonialism in America," the essay is by Herbert Agar, who a year before had won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his

book The view of

People's Choice. Accepting the Spenglerian cyclical history, Agar questions whether the struggle between

"the

deep instinctive faith which is the essence of the Culture abstractly rationalizing self-destructive element which is a feature of man's mind" must necessarily be resolved in favor of doubt, disillusionment, and death. America's large cities, he contends, are colonial outposts of Europe; in them America imitates an "alien old age." The saving native American tradition lies in the provinces. Agar expresses the general hope of the agrarians: the redemption of America by a provincial assertiveness, particularly in the South. But the fundamental sig nificance of his essay is more general. Projecting the dialectical drama of history and tradition in the initial essay in the Pipkin and

...

Brooks-Warren Southern Review, it suggests this drama contextual image of the magazine. We have

the

sought to perpetuate this image. We have said, if mostly by inference, that the sixties and seventies are not a time of literary origination but a time of falling off from the literary intelligence. We have said, if only by implication, that the falling off from the literary establishment-which has included the dis92

avowal of Eliot and Hemingway, though not so much of Joyce and Faulkner-has left a vacuum. In contrast to the disassociated War II poets and novelists, the writers of

personalism

post-World

(Malcolm Cowley's term) represented the tradition that literature is integral to the corporate structure of the "second flowering"

of civilization. Their thrust was toward the restoration of this structure; they aspired to contribute to the literature of civilization. The Southern Review of recent years, aspiring to recover the

impulse of the second flowering, has represented a critical effort that might be dubbed the recovery of a recovery. Like our most direct competitor, the Sewanee Review, we have affirmed the validity of the great literature of restoration created by the "tra ditionalist moderns." Underlying this critical redundancy is the concept that the literary quarterly functions, as Allen Tate said in the Southern Review in 1935, through the "conviction of being a

part of literature." In the late twentieth century the best news the literary journal

can

report from the failing Republic of Letters is the feasibility

of its restoration and perpetuation. Approaches to this subject in

(as a result of the editorial energy and acumen of Donald E. Stanford) essays both by and about Eric Voegelin, whose monumental Order and History is becoming recognized as one of the key works of the twentieth-century restorationist movement. Other Review essays pertinent to this movement are those by and about Brooks and Warren; several essays by Cowley should be mentioned, including one in the Winter 1976 number on the concept of literary gener ations. Then, too, there are the writings of younger authors who the new series of the Southern Review include

may be referred to as neo-restorationists; prominent among them is Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet-novelist-essayist, whose

search for a relation to the land is at once a repudiation of agrar

ianism and a quest in its own right. But it must be admitted that the restorationist motive is haunted

by the suspicion of its mere redundancy. This is especially so in the South, where the twentieth-century literary flowering has been not truly a second flowering but more nearly a first one, which moreover, holds no promise of a second. Moving into the last quarter of the twentieth century, we may well have reached the

point from which we can look back on southern writers from 93

1920 to the 1960s

belonging to a distinct phase of modem literature-as, in spite of their diversity, having made in sum a literary movement, one distinguishable from the cosmopolitan modern movement by its own historical coherence, yet deeply identified with it as a symbol of the corporate activity of the literary order. By the sixties the southern movement, like the New England movement of 1820-1860, was reaching a stage of exhaustion. Unlike the New England movement, the southern as

movement is not, it would seem, to have a long aftermath contin uous with a still

unfolding literary modernity. The southern E. A.

Robinsons, Robert Frosts, Robert Lowells will not appear; for the southern movement (continuous with Proust, Yeats, Joyce, Mann, Kafka, Pound, Eliot, Ford, Auden) has symbolized literary mod

ernity in its finality, and itself has been one of the final phases of modernity. When it is hinted that the postmodern world-announced by Hiroshima but struggling to be born long before Hiroshima may take the shape of a nonliterary world, we are extremely resentful of such a notion and are helpless before it. We cannot discuss a nonliterary world, for a world in which the public space of literacy has disappeared is undiscussable. Standing in the evanescent margins of the dialectic of history and tradition, we seek the shape of postmodernity by trying to imagine a world without the antithesis of history and tradition. The shape of such a world may already have formed; it may be familiar now in existentialist interpretation. We are inclined nonetheless to see existentialist concepts as versions of historical interpretation and to oppose these to traditionalism. We want desperately to hold onto the tension between history and tradition as modes of exis tence; for in this tension we have defined the modern mode of existence we call literature. But the tension is no longer a vital

izing experience, a ratification of being-even in the literary mind of the South, which recently knew it strongly and intimately. The

lapse of the literary dialectic is variously recorded in the Southern Review: one powerful instance is Walker Percy's essay "The Delta Factor"; other striking instances are Walter Sullivan's essays "Death by Melancholy" and "The Decline of Myth in Southern Fiction." The dialectic of the secular realm of letters a

context for the discussion of the

provided

opposing theories of man as

organism (physical and social) and man as soul; for the drama of the false divinization of secular letters (Hegel called this the "secularization of spirituality") and the rise of the writer as pseudo priest. In the void left by the depletion of the literary dialogue, we have the anguish of Percy and Sullivan about the meaning of language and about the status of the literary vocation. In different ways, Percy and Sullivan intimate a reunification of church and letters in a reclamation of the religious view. In the broadest sense, the significance of the Southern Review, new

series, has been its continuation of the argument between

history and tradition as modes of symbolizing existence. But the very act of continuation has constantly insinuated the question, is the continuity meaningful? Have we entered a completely his torical age-an age so possessed by history as process that it has no past at all? If so, there is no need for literary journals. There is no news from the nonexistent Republic of Letters. Yet, locked in the history it depicts, a literary quarterly like the Southern Review cannot predict the end of the literary world, but only record it. So far, it seems to me, the Southern Review has in the

past twelve years recorded-a century after the lapse of a New

England American letters-the coming of post-southern American letters. And this may be

less conclusive situation than I have

indicated. Academic insolence we can detach ourselves from

compels one to prophecy; but if

the dialectic of history and tradition,

may find that we have scarcely imagined the possibilities of literature under the conditions of a fully realized historical

existence. A note on the Southern Review authors

The Southern Review

(1935-42) was a young person's enter Writers in their like John Crowe Ransom and Wallace fifties, prise. Stevens, constituted a minority of its authorship, which included several poets (among them W. H. Auden, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell) and a number of fiction writers (among them Andrew Lytle, Peter Taylor, and Eudora Welty) who were barely beyond apprenticeship. Robert Penn Warren was only a slightly older presence among the poets and storytellers of the original series; "How Willie Proudfit Came Home" introduced the mem orable character subsequently to appear in Warren's first novel,

Night Rider. The original series also included several youthful critics, notably R. P. Blackmur ("Humanism and the Symbolic Imagination") and Cleanth Brooks ("Three Revolutions in Poetry"). Allen Tate, whose career as poet and critic was fully mature by 1935, was thirty-six years old the year the original series commenced. His contributions to it included "Literature as

Knowledge," a key essay in the southern movement. The Southern Review series beginning in 1965 displays a numerous and diversified authorship. But among its important contributors are more than thirty writers who appeared in the original series. These include Ransom (who died in 1975), author of three essays, one being his significant revisionary estimate of Eliot; Warren, the author of no less than seven essays, the latest being a portion of his recent book, Democracy and Poetry; and Brooks, the author of five essays, one of them (Fall 1976) being

interesting appraisal of "Allen Tate and the Nature of Modern

ism." Other contributors to the present series who had been asso ciated with the southern movement of the twenties and thirties Eudora

Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, Donald Davidson (died 1968), Jarrell (died 1965), Lytle, and Tate. Of course numerous writers of non-southern origins appeared in the 1935-42 Review, and several have reappeared in the new series. Kay Boyle, Mary McCarthy, Josephine Miles, Kenneth Burke, Howard Baker, and Arthur Mizener may be mentioned. Nor should we fail to mention Joseph Frank (distinguished stud ies of Chemyshevsky and Dostoevsky), the late Yvor Winters ("Forms of Discovery" and "The Poetry of T. Sturge Moore"), and James T. Farrell (an evocative prize story, "An American Student in Paris"). Malcolm Cowley, who appears in the original series only as a correspondent but whose acquaintance with the American literary scene of the twenties and thirties is unparalleled, has been an outstanding contributor to the Southern Review in the past ten years. His essays--on Conrad Aiken, on the concept of literary generations, on a visit with the agrarians in the depres sion years-are rich in literary history and in critical suggestion. Cowley's contemporary, Matthew Josephson, has also contributed are

valuable reminiscent views. Writers of first

importance in the new series whose careers

originated in the twenties and thirties but who cannot be conve96

niently categorized are the emigres Rene Wellek and Eric Voegelin. Voegelin is especially to be noted, for when he left his homeland in the thirties he came to LSU; there (although not a contributor to the original series of the Southern Review) he wrote much of his monumental Order and History. The impact of Voegelin's mind on historical, political, and philosophical studies is begin ning to be grasped; the relation of his thought to literary studies is scarcely yet appreciated, but its relevance to literature is cogently suggested in his essay on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (new series, VII, Winter 1973). While the prevalence of an older generation of writers in the series indicates its restorationist quality, a mingling of gener

new

good many writers whose in the late 1940s and in the 1950s appear:

ations is evident in most numbers. A careers

originated

Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Thomas Parkinson, Sherman Paul, Elizabeth

Spencer, Walter Sullivan, Thomas Daniel Young, John Hazard Wildman, Walker Percy, Charles East. More significant, possibly, is the presence of a considerable number of writers whose careers are more or

less contemporary with the new series.

Joyce Carol

Oates has made repeated contributions, not only as storyteller but

poet and essayist. H. E. Francis, Philip O'Connor, Gordon Weaver, and John Gardner (a part of the novel Nickel Moun tain) are in the pages of the new series. Reynolds Price ("The as

Knowledge of My Mother's Coming Death" and other stories), David Madden

("Traven" and "No Trace"), and John William

Corrington ("Pleadings") are among new series fiction writers who are associated with southern writing. The more recent poets in the current series make up a large and eclectic group,

including

W. S. Merwin, James Seay, Daniel Hoffman, Robert Hollander,

James

McMichael, Mona Van Duyn, Stanley Plumly, Turner Cassity, Catherine Savage Brosman, besmilr brigham, Wendell Berry, William Heyen, and Miller Williams (a group of his poems was featured in the Summer 1976 issue as he prepared to leave for a year abroad on a Prix de Rome fellowship) Younger critical voices heard in the new series include George Lensing, Ronald Moran, Kenneth Fields, Marion Montgomery, George Core, and Maureen Henry. An analysis of categories of authorship in the new series should include foreign authors. The bilingual publication of .

such poets and

Eugenio

Osip Mandelstam, George Seferis, Pablo Neruda, Montale has been

British and Irish writers

(George

feature in many numbers. MacBeth, Kathleen Raine,

Patricia Hutchins, Graham Hough, W. W. Robson, Mary Lavin, Denis Donoghue) have often been present.

Significant articles reftective of American literary life Wendell Berry, "The Regional Motive," Southern Review, n.s. 6 (Fall 1970).

Cleanth Brooks, "The Current State of American Literature," Southern Review, n.s. 9 (Spring 1973). Malcolm Cowley,

'And Jesse

Begat

...

A Note

Literary Genera

tions," Southern Review, n.s. 12 (Winter 1976). William C. Havard, "The New Mind of the South," Southern Review, n.s. 4 (Fall 1968). Andrew Lytle, "The State of Letters in a Time of Disorder," Sewanee Review, 79 (Autumn 1971). Walker Percy, "The Man on the Train: Three Existential Modes," Partisan

Review, 23 (Fall 1956) ________

"The Delta

Factor:

How

I Discovered the Delta

Factor Sitting at My Desk One Summer Day in Louisiana in the 1950s

Thinking about an Event in the Life of Helen Keller on Another Summer Day in Alabama in 1887," Southern Review, n.s. 11 (Winter 1975). John Crowe Ransom, "Art and the Human Economy," Kenyon Review (Autumn 1945). ________

"The Concrete Universal: Observations on the Under

standing of Poetry," Kenyon Review, 17 (Summer 1955). Adrienne Rich, 'The Kingdom of the Fathers," Partisan Review, 43, No.1 (1976). Louis D. Rubin. Jr., "The South and the Faraway Country," Virginia Quar terly Review, 38 (Summer 1962). ________

"Southerners and Jews," Southern

Review,

n.s.

(Summer 1966). ________

"Uncle Remus and the Ubiquitous Rabbit," Southern

Review, n.s. 10 (Fall 1974). Walter Sullivan, "Death

by Melancholy:

Southern Writers in the Modem

World," Southern Review, n.s. 8 (Fall 1972). "The Decline of Myth in Southern Fiction," Southern Review, n.s. 12 (Winter 1976). Allen Tate, "The New Provincialism, with an Epilogue on the Southern Novel," Virginia Quarterly Review, 21 (Spring 1945). "Our Cousin, Mr. Poe," Partisan Review, 16 (December 1949).

________

4 (Autumn 1951).

"To Whom Is the Poet Responsible?" Hudson Review,

________

"The Man of Letters in the Modern World," Hudson

Review, 5 (Autumn 1952). ________

"A Southern Mode of the Imagination: Circa 1918 to

the Present," Carleton Miscellany, 1 (Winter 1960). Lionel Trilling, "Art and Neurosis," Partisan Review, 12 (Winter 1945). ________

________

"The Kinsey Report," Partisan Review, 15 (1948).

"William Dean HoweIIs and the Roots of Modern

Taste," Partisan Review (September-October 1951). Eric Voegelin, "A Letter to Robert B. Heilman

[on Henry lames's The Turn

of the Screw]," Southern Review, n.s. 7 (Winter 1971). Robert Penn Warren, "Faulkner: The Negro and the South," Southern Re

view, n.s. 1 (Summer 1965). ________

"Democracy and Poetry," Southern Review, n.s.

(Winter 1975). ________

"Homage to Theodore Dreiser on the Centenary of His

Birth," Southern Review, n.s. 7 (Spring 1971). "Mark Twain," Southern Review,

________

n.s.

(Summer

1972).

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Furioso, Vol. 1 No.1, Summer 1939 (courtesy Reed Whittemore). Reed Whittemore has edited Furioso (1939-1952) and Carleton

Miscellany (1960-1964), and was literary editor of The New Republic from 1969 to 1973. He was one of the founders of the Association of Literary Magazines of America (ALMA), which later became the

Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM). He is also the author of a pamphlet in the University of Minnesota's Little Magazines series. Mr. Whittemore finds maga zines with a political edge more interesting than "pure ones" like Poetry. The wild ones like Big Table and Neurotica are, he says, always good: "We need them, although sometimes their arrogance is oppressive." To the question, "Have you been able to support

yourself by editing and publishing?" he answers, "Has anybody?" He lost about $4,000 a year when he edited Furioso. Losing money

is, in his view, a "given"; the problem is to lose for some grand cause.

100

Reed Whittemore has taught at Carleton College, the University of Maryland, and Princeton University. In 1971 he was the recipi ent of an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Numerous volumes of his poetry have been published, as well as

William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey (1975) and The Poet as Journalist:

Life at the New Republic (1976). and I

began at Yale in 1939 was a late showing of the odd twentieth-century art beast, modernism. I say it was a late showing because in 1939 Jim and I were undergraduates, yet the modernism that we latched onto was middle-aged. Or maybe old-aged. Looking back now, I have the impression that we were much more antiquarian, at least in our first issues, than we knew. We were, if inadvertently, putting together in each issue an anthology of poets mostly a generation or more older than ourselves-and doing well at it too, printing Pound, Williams, cummings, MacLeish, Stevens, and Auden as well as dozens of other lesser known figures. All our teachers were impressed by our industry but must have understood that the industry was not matched by wisdom. Publish ing the magazine became a big part of our college education, but there were qualities in most of the poetry we published that I The

magazine Furioso

that James

Angleton

didn't understand until later. I didn't understand, for instance, the dimensions of the modern ist war we had jumped into. I knew that the war existed; I had read "Don'ts for Imagists." I had begun to verse

struggle in my own

(none of which, luckily, was printed in Furioso during the

early years) with the curious modernist game of avoiding the poetic in order to be poetic; and I had been indoctrinated in who the important modernists were. I knew also that the war was going on throughout the whole of literary Yale, faculty as well as students. But what the fuss was finally about was another matter.

I received a number of clues from my parents, though I didn't

recognize them then as clues. Both Mother and Father took the position that Furioso was a strange and marvelous invention that was quite beyond them. I think I was pleased it was beyond them, to to snob with be able pleased play my Book-of-the-Month Club I but I don't think elders, imagined myself going so far as to become what they must have thought I was becoming-incredibly 101

arty. No, I had democratic yearnings mixed in with my snobbery. I thought I was disposing of old cultural and artistic pretensions and reaching down to fundamentals. The elders knew better but

they didn't mind, and Mother was a great help, selling subscrip tions to her friends-who also kept insisting that Furioso was beyond them. Even when we had Ezra Pound himself as guest in my parents' apartment for a night and he was very pretentious about his cultural accomplishments, I did not think of him as representing us and what we were doing. He was just EP, the great eccentric. Do I now know better? I think so. I think I

now

know that

modernism, though one of the most confused of isms, least

steady

and clear in

middle class. It

was

the

being long conspiracy against produced few Marxists, it produced few artists a

who had social interests of any kind, but it was a social rebellion

right, a rebellion against the likes of my parents. In other words, it was beyond my parents because it was meant to be. Though Pound reading Rihaku in our living room was beyond the beyond, he had as attendant lords a great many poets who were also thoroughly capable of his kind of cultural snobbery in the name of the modernist cause. For instance, e. e. cummings was (I realize now) a cultural snob. So, for all his democratic gesturing, was MacLeish. And Eliot surely was, Eliot by reputa tion the greatest snob of all-but we never met Eliot, nor printed him, but only dreamed of doing so and walked about New Haven quoting "Prufrock." Instead we met Williams, Eliot's mortal enemy, and Williams told us to steer clear of Eliot. We printed, all

in our second issue, a Williams letter to me that was full of anti snob advice, but we didn't listen really, and we were not at the

time even aware of how deep were Williams's feelings. His letter dealt with the role of ideas in poetry,

especially political ideas, tipped us off

but had a paragraph about Eliot that should have

about the war: Take an extreme case, take the concepts that walk around as T. S. Eliot. We know that they are completely worthless so that aside from Eliot's being a poet we do not have to pay much attention to him. He is strictly limited even as a poet but for all that we may speak of him as a good poet, good, that is, far beyond his other limitations.

course

Williams himself

was

less of

snob about the

middle class than any of the others-which may be 102

reason

for his

popularity in the new anti-Eliot age of poetry around

us-and he lived the middle-class life didn't. Yet

even

he had his troubles

Early in his

living

most of the

others

that life and

being

he sometimes didn't

doctoring doctoring, didn't think he could continue to live in Rutherford, New Jersey, and at the same a

modernist.

career

think he could stick it out in

time write the poetry that he knew he had to write. Later on, when he was mostly reconciled to the town and the life, he

unusually sensitive to the relationship of the poetry to that life, was thoroughly aware that his neighbors thought the poetry beyond them. So though he hated Eliot for having, as he conceived it, taken modem poetry off in the wrong direction -the direction we might now call elitist-he couldn't finally escape such a tag himself. He could merely try to, by swearing, playing tough, telling dirty jokes-only to have a neighbor come up to him and say, "Well, Doc, how you doin' with your shitty little

was

still

verses?" We turned out only four issues in the era of our undergraduate

ignorance, but they may have been the best of all of Furioso's thirty-two issues because we kept our mouths shut and drove around in my Ford picking up works by the masters. The issues were also handsomely printed, though for the first two or three we were plagued by the typos of a drunken linotypist. Jim was interested, as I was not, in format and makeup, and he insisted on good, heavy, expensive paper for these remarkable productions (for which we charged 30 cents a copy, $1.00 for four issues). We put too much poetry on a page, and we allowed insufficient margins for the prose in the back, but otherwise we did our publishing chores pretty well. Our editing was another matter. We had a large cardboard box into which we threw manu scripts. We kept the box in a closet in our college room and didn't allow it, sitting there in the dark, to disturb us much. Every month or so we would haul it out, reject a few poems that could have been rejected by an illiterate, then put it back in the closet with all the problematic poems unsullied-that is, the poems that might be good. We kept being annoyed by plaintive notes that arrived in the mail asking about those poems, but there was one poet, Oscar Williams, who sent us an envelope of his verses almost daily for a period of months without once complain ing. One night we spent several hours struggling with all those 103

envelopes, then sent them all back in a bundle by parcel post. Two days later we received a curious one-line communique from him: "This will teach me never again to try to fuck a rathole." With no other poet were we, I think, so undiplomatic, but then no

other poet so flooded us with verses. Later, much later, I was

to learn that with poets like Oscar Williams speedy rejection didn't

work either.

They would tirelessly ship poems to the magazine slowly aggravated, whether the rejection slips were polite or surly, at anything but acceptance. They be lieved they could wear an editor down. They believed an editor anyway, and become

was an editor so that he could be worn down. When he didn't wear

down he was a bad editor.

Of course it is not beyond possibility that while we were in

college we were in fact bad editors. Anyway we emerged from college finally with four issues behind us, went off to war, re turned from war, and resumed the magazine with all our new maturity. Or rather, I resumed the magazine with new editors, since Jim stayed in the intelligence work he had entered during the war.

I now had

different vision of what the

editing act should

be. I was as anxious as ever to avoid looking middle class, but I had been out in the big world now and thought I knew what my middle-class targets were. They were chiefly two. They were the commercial publishers, who were evil because they published

bad literature that drove out the good literature (the good liter ature that at the time I mistakenly thought was being written), and

they were the cultural pussyfooters in the English depart

ments, the ones who turned out scholarly monographs about minor matters in old literary works, and read no new literary works. I

in the process of becoming an English teacher but I thought I could distinguish English teachers of was

myself, the pussyfoot variety from myself and my teacher allies. Mean while I was about to start a golden age of poetry on my own, but was ready to share the golden age with Howard Nemerov, John Pauker, Ambrose Gordon, W. R. Johnson, and Irwin Touster. They joined me in editing the sheet for a bit and pro ceeded, as I did, to fill it with their own work. When that set of editors tired, I gathered together my colleagues at Carleton College to make up the staff: Arthur Mizener (Arthur'S wife 104

Rosemary served as managing editor for a time), Scott Elledge (Scott's wife Liane did the managing-editor thing too), Charles Shain, Edwin Pettet, and John Lucas. But it was not a golden age (I see now). It was not as foolish age in its pretensions as the age just around the corner-the apocalyptic age that would descend upon us in the fifties just an

Furioso was folding; but it was an age of withdrawal,

age

of a greater cynicism than some ex-GIs and young teachers should

have been able to muster. We knocked off the publishers in

single blast in 1946, then moved on to the pussyfooters in our reviews, but in our poems and stories we did not display such activism. My own aesthetic inclination at the time, shared in some measure by the other editors, was to write about the futility of action. My most-read poem then was "A Day with the Foreign Legion," a narrative describing the incapacity of aging, alcoholic legionnaires to do battle with the enemy in the desert. And despite its campaigns, Furioso was, after the war, a magazine oddly dedicated to incapacity. Put it that the writers closely connected with Furioso in the years 1946-53 were a small-scale lost generation, a lost generation of World War II. Our trouble was that we had no Paris to go to and be lost in. Instead we had a legacy of literary ideals that

unable to put wholly aside, around told us that the legacy had

though the evidence depreciated. We had the and we had to it-which no lost generation legacy responsibilities ought to have-and we also had enough self-confidence to think we would make a go of our own writing; but we had no home, no real home, for either our legacy or our talent. We were lost in that sense, and my own private lostness was aggravated by

we were

even

the death of both my parents, in 1943 and 1946. I was alone in the world with a little capital. I bought a cabin in the woods what else?-and my lost writer-friends joined me there irregularly, and the magazine emerged from those woods. Its isolation seems now

its most poignant feature. For even when I determined for

myself that I could not just live and write in the woods but had to be something in the world to survive, the woodsiness of the magazine remained. That is, it remained essentially a product of cultural and social isolation, even when it was moved to the offices of an English department. 105

Perhaps I should blame my own private withdrawal tendencies for the magazine's fate; yet there was more to that fate than my troubles. The legacy of modernism that I had partaken of so ignorantly while at college was now, in its depreciated state, thor oughly a part of my writing consciousness-and of Nemerov's, Pauker's, and the others'-and it gave us depressingly conflicting instructions about what we had to do with our writing lives. It instructed us, for example, to cultivate and preserve our isolation

(else we would turn into stockbrokers and the Word would not be saved); but it also instructed us, with great ambiguity, in all the lessons of the thirties, lessons we were too young to know except vicariously, lessons about commitment and the dangers of commitment, lessons tending to cancel each other out, but still les sons.

In the very first issue of Furioso Jim and I had been treated

least three thirties' lessons, all different. There was, first, the lead article-put forth as a letter-by Archibald MacLeish,

to at

which represented well what has been called his "American front"

period and advised young poets to avoid being little aesthetes, advised them to walk out into the big world and write for people (the way to do this in 1939, thought MacLeish, was to write radio drama). Then in the back of the magazine there was a blast at usury by Pound, presented in the form of an "introductory text book" and representing Pound's own frenetic and unheeded way of removing himself from his aestheticism. And third, there was the very funny "Proletarian Poem" by Dudley Fitts that was a satirical answer to all the Marxist literary activists of the thirties, perhaps the first of the inactivist recommendations we were to print. It described a momma and poppa trapped in the industrial mess, sitting around in the parlor and, with true prole realism, doing little else-just sitting there "darkling" as the rich got richer. It ended: When Momma came home from work Poppa was waiting. Poppa was waiting. When Momma came home from work Poppa said Darkling I hear thee.-Momma sat down Completely. Then it was afterwards. Later when Momma came home from. Poppa was waiting.

Momma was coming. Poppa sat home from work. Momma said We're here as on a darkling Plain. Poppa sat in the dark without saying.

106

always wished I had written that poem, especially the line, "Then it was afterwards"; but when Dudley Fitts wrote it there was a freshness of reaction to thirties' prole literature I've

could not be sustained after World War II. The postwar era was not so much one of reaction as of a vacu

that of

course

um, an age to start allover in, but we were not in

position to

heritage and it kept telling us on the one hand that our literary mission was a high and lonely one in a world that had gone to hell, and on the other that we should forget about missions and save ourselves. We would have been better off, perhaps, as members of the other, earlier lost generation. We worked too hard. We were uptight. I remember a dreadful summer when Nemerov was in the living room of the cabin trying to write a novel, and I was in a bedroom of the cabin trying to

start over. We had our

write

novel, and on weekends there would be other writers,

there would be wives and guests and partying, but always the typewriters sat there making their demands. They were vicious,

those typewriters. And though the missionary spirit in us kept being aborted, it should not therefore be ignored in favor of looking at the poems and stories we printed. We did

print some good ones, and the

stand for a kind of literature that I would still

magazine like to imagine could be preserved-a literature of the mind, of intellectual awareness and spaciousness-but beyond the works there was always the missionary thing and I was dead set on it, wouldn't let it go. I imposed it steadily on the review section in the back, and when that wasn't enough I started a regular column, called "The Department of Culture and Civilization," in which I tried, over a period of several years, to make our (my?) mission clear. The mission? Somehow, despite the modernist failures, to keep literature from being as isolated as we were. The Department went at that mission backhandedly because we could see no other way. When we prattled about culture and civilization, we took potshots at the glib ones who thought they had a handle on culture and civilization. In fact, what we meant by came to

the title of the column was that the culture and civilization out

beyond our woods were neither civilized nor cultured. We aimed some of our shots at popular culture but some at the highbrows too, some in our own backyard. We ranged from complaints about 107

corrupt cigarette advertisements and dishonest reportage, to annoy ance at the Hudson Review and the KeatsShelley Society. Most of the editors tried their hand at writing for the Department, but

the steadiest contributors were Wayne Booth and 1. (Later Wayne was to work

at it solo for the Carleton Miscellany, calling it "The

Department of American" and concentrating on jargon and mis cellaneous verbal nonsense, especially in the social sciences.) We were

not nearly solemn enough to win the war against

the solem

nities around us, but if we had been solemn we would have lost the war within ourselves, that war being between our solemn high mission and

deep awareness of what happened, in empty places, to solemn high missions. I think we did well with the Department, and if 1 were ever to start another magazine (I won't) I would want to have another one; but the Department was not a success. It was largely misunderstood by those it at tacked, and it did not get out into the big world as it was supposed to. When

our

started it,

were

uncertain about the title and

called it

tentatively (in an advertisement in College English) Department of Culture, Agriculture, Forestry and House keeping"-and sure enough a number of agricultural schools rushed to subscribe. Everybody out in the world wanted us to be specialists at something, wanted us to be a trade magazine. And because we didn't want that, we ended up being considered as one confused reader conceived us-Curioso. Surely that is the "The

end of modernism?

Each writer has to work his way out of the box he grows up

in, and for a remarkable number of American writers that process has involved editing

little magazine. A little

magazine is not,

normally, the kind of enterprise that Jim and 1 began at college but the kind of enterprise that the postwar Furioso was-an enter prise where the editors of the thing are also its chief writers and where the editors' own literary destinies are muddled away at. After the war we certainly did muddle, and so we were then in the great tradition of little magazines. The results of the muddling are now in: we slowly discovered that we couldn't make a living, or a life, out of muddling. But there was a happier result, too. We found that though we had muddled we had at least sometimes muddled at something of consequence, something beyond ourselves, something that made 108

moral act, an act with some (we were never sure what) social meaning. At least I know

the literary act also an ideological act,

that I personally, looking back on the muddling, think that our lost generation was not as lost as the present one.

according to my mathematics, two literary generations now since ours: the apocalyptic Beat generation, with what the social scientists call its alternative life style, and the new quiet generation, with its attentiveness to its poetry and its poetry only (or its art and its art only). I had no time for the Beats when they were around, but I grant that they achieved a measure of social success in their writings-success of the wrong kind, but There have been,

success; and I grant also that the success was not inadvertent. The

Beats were interested in culture and civilization, wanted to change

it, thought that literature had a role in changing it, and were even annoyed with our generation because they found us too literary and inactivist. Big Table in Chicago was a good example of a lively magazine of that generation, busy printing Burroughs, busy

disturbing the peace. And of course the Ferlinghetti publications out of San Francisco were good examples too, at the center of the action, thoroughly social in their belligerently antisocial way. But when their day was done-and it was not done really until Allen Ginsberg began doing funny little Eastern chants (accom panying himself on his one-handed accordion) rather than poems -they were replaced by a generation of literary isolationists who were, I see now, a natural development out of the frustrations of my generation. These new young writers learned that culture and civilization were not, after all, to be saved by blue jeans and drugs and the open road, and so they lowered their sights, con centrating on their poetry, renewing their faith in it as an art. The trouble was not simply that they took it on alone in the woods, as we had, but they took it on without the past that we had, took it on essentially as an art of isolation, an art of the solitary sensi bility, an art determined to stay in the woods and like it. The result? Maybe something or somebody wonderful will happen soon, but I can't imagine what it (or he, or she) could be. The best magazine that I have seen lately-and I know there are dozens and dozens I have not seen-is The American Poetry Review, which must have a fairly large circulation and is certainly an

ambitious venture that attracts poets of different

shapes and 109

destinies. I think the editors should be happy with their creation,

but I do wish that the creation, as it poeticizes, would also make gestures out of, away from, poetry. My experience tells me that such gestures are the only way literature can survive. A literature as narrowly conceived and practiced as the current woods-poetry makes of literature at best

craft, at worst an indulgence.

Maybe there is no alternative to woods-poetry. Maybe culture and civilization do indeed need to be run, from here on, by the journalists and social scientists, who certainly want to run them. But if that is so, then there would seem to me to be little reason to trouble with literature at all.

Looking at the young writers around me, and their magazines, I keep asking myself questions about them: What do they want? Where do they think they are going with their craft? And the best answers I find are that they don't know what they want, and don't want to answer for themselves where they might be going. They know only what William Carlos Williams knew when he couldn't write; they know only that when they cannot write they are un happy and sick. To know this much about writing is fine and im portant, of course, but it is not enough. Williams at any rate knew something else too, something beyond the private imperative. He knew-because such knowledge was conventional knowledge in his time-that poetry was important to culture and civilization as well as to the self. Unfortunately we now seem to have con stantly less and less reason to know this.

Reed Whittemore, circa 1948 (courtesy

Poetry magazine). 110

ON ANVIL Jack Conroy Jack Conroy's interest in little magazines began at an early age, stimulated by the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books and by their

weekly magazine, and then by his association with Charles J. Finger and his All's Well, a continuation of Reedy's Mirror. In 1927, while living in Hannibal, Missouri, Mr. Conroy joined David K. Webb in editing The Spider, an American "college radical" magazine. Later, he visited Noah Whitaker in Springfield, Ohio, where Whitaker was editing Pegasus and printing it in his base ment. He admired The Double Dealer in New Orleans during the early 1920s, and The American Mercury, whose editor, H. L. Mencken, published a number of his stories. Mr. Conroy founded Anvil in 1933. In an appeal for funds for the New Anvil, written in collaboration with Nelson Algren and John T. Frederick, state director of the Illinois Writers' Project, he describes his little magazine as follows: "The Anvil is recalled for the success with which it tapped new veins of realism. It was publishing such novelists as Nelson Algren, Benjamin Appel, August Derleth, Harriet Hassell, Josephine Johnson, Karlton Kelm, Edward Newhouse, Joseph Vogel, Richard Wright, and Louis Zara before these had yet emerged from obscurity. More Anvil fiction found its way into the estab lished anthologies than from any other magazine of approximate scope. It consistently rejected all mystical aesthetic formulae, and much of its meaning derived from this rejection. From its first issue, it sought the work of the affirmers of life against death, of progress against reaction, of struggle against acquiescence. Miners, mill hands, and factory workers gave it their confidence because of the accuracy with which it expressed ideas and emotions relevant to their own lives, because in its pages they felt themselves at last becoming articulate. College students and instructors began sub scribing to the unprepossessing little journal. Established writers contributed stories representative of their finest efforts. Erskine Caldwell's 'Daughter,' for example, was turned down by half the

111

slick magazines in the country before its publication in Anvil, and its subsequent republication in several anthologies. Its theme was too

bold for conventional editorial tastes."

Mr. Conroy has made his living at literary pursuits since 1935. He worked on both the Missouri and Illinois Writers' Projects. In

Chicago he was an editor for Nelson's Encyclopedia and the Universal World Reference Encyclopedia, and from 1947 to 1966 was senior editor of the New Standard Encyclopedia. His published work includes two novels, The Disinherited (1933, reissued in 1963) and A World to Win (1935), and a history of Negro migra tion entitled They Seek a City (1945, with Arna Bontemps). In 1966 Mr. Conroy returned to his home town, Moberly, Missouri. In partial recognition of his contributions to the literary arts, the University of Missouri, Kansas City, awarded him the degree of L.H.D. in 1975.

When I was a lad of eight or so, with

little learning acquired

from infrequent attendance in the one-room Sugar Creek school

house, I decided there was a decided lack in the reading material available for the miners and their families who lived in Monkey Nest coal camp, clustered in

ragged semicircle on the hillside

beneath the somewhat more pretentious story-and-a-half house we

occupied. There was too little that gave their side of the social situation-that invested them with the dignity and importance they deserved. Mother was a subscriber to Comfort, which ran serials written

by such practitioners of the ultrasentimental school as Mrs. E. D. E. N. (standing for, I learned years later, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte) Southworth and Bertha M. Clay. The latter was a pseudo nym used by a number of English and American novelists, both male and female. The Clay novels frequently dealt with a lovely but lowly born maiden (often the lodgekeeper's daughter) who aspired above her station and fell in love with the young lord of the

(like as not a wine-bibber and rakehell before her love redeemed him). We also read Hearth and Home, one of those monthly periodicals having a subscription price of only about 25 cents per year, but, as I recall, its stories-though customarily 112

manor

r f

STORIES

FOR

WORKERS

Edited by Jack Conroy

CONTENTS for May, 1933

Anvil, Vol. 1, No.1, May 1933 (courtesy Jack Conroy).

more American in locale-were no better when it came to

dividing

the classes into upper and lower.

Mother, who had literary ambitions and was well read for a miner's wife, deplored this tendency. One of her favorite com plaints was a song that emphasized the baser traits of miners but wound up charitably, "It's not the collier's heart that goes astray." For one thing, I don't think any Monkey Nest miner ever would call another a "collier" unless he was

prepared to fight. I suppose there was some writing with a proworker emphasis in circulation at that time, but it was unknown to us. Hardbound editions of the juvenile novels of Horatio Alger and the prolific Englishman G. A. Henty could be had for two bits at

Robinson's bookstore in Moberly. By retrieving bottles from trash

piles left near the camp (the offal of more prosperous town dwell ers), stealthily gathering walnuts and hickory nuts from farmers' trees, and snagging gunnysacks that had held hog or cattle feed for farmers and were left behind or lost by them, I managed to collect a sizable library of Algers and Hentys. In the Algers, the poor boy who escaped to a higher social level usually did so more by fortuitous accident, such as saving the local banker's daughter from a runaway horse, than by dint of long, faithful, and unques tioning service. The lesson, nevertheless, was clear: the poor will always be with us, dependent upon the bounty and wisdom of their betters, the well-to-do. In the Henty historical novels, the class lines were even more sharply delineated. The boy miners who thwarted a strike in Facing Death were depicted as heroes and examples for their fellows rather than as finks or scabs, as they would have been regarded in Monkey Nest camp. So on fine large sheets of yellowish butcher paper, with only a

fleck of blood on it or a spot of grease

out the

Monkey Nest Monitor and

now

printed

and then, I laid

it with lead

pencil.

There were news sections in addition to stories and poems and

strip-I think an imitation of the Katzenjammer Kids with miners' children substituting for the mischievous little even a

cartoon

Deutschers. The stories

about miners in heroic roles, not relegated to the menial roles assigned to workingmen in Comfort and Hearth and Home. I printed only one copy of each issue of were

the Monkey Nest Monitor, but it circulated around the camp so

that quite a few people read it. 114

traveling around the country as a free-riding boxcar passenger and working at all sorts of musc1e straining and low-paying jobs, I learned that the workers engaged in such tasks often have something vital to add to the body of American literature-something rarely tapped by more aesthetic A good many years later,

and more insulated authors who operate in more rarefied realms of experience. After I came to Chicago in 1938 to establish The New Anvil, with the help of Nelson Algren, I collected a number of stories and recalled others for an "industrial folklore" collection for the Illinois branch of the Federal Writers' Project. But this is

anticipating a bit. I was a young married man with

wife and two children to

support when I moved to Hannibal, Missouri, in 1927 to work in a rubber-heel plant and write poetry and letters at night. Soon I was in touch with Ralph Cheyney, an anarchist poet who had been jailed during World War I for resisting the draft and who, with his wife Lucia Trent, also a poet, had organized Rebel Poets, the Internationale of

Song. Both had strong anticapitalist and

antiwar sentiments, and had just edited America Arraigned, a collection of poems protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. The Rebel Poets organization was truly international, with mem bers in a dozen countries, but mainly in the United States, England, and France. Since its membership represented about every variety

of rebellion, it was not long in inviting the reproach-but not at first the

active

condemnation--of Marxist

theoreticians

who

deplored its lack of the correct revolutionary direction. The first official organ of the Rebel Poets was a bulletin turned out on a

hectograph by its secretary, Hugh Hanley (pseudonym

of Emerson Price), in Columbus, Ohio, where Price was

bank

clerk soon to have a story, "Ohio Town," published in the American

Mercury. (His 1939 novel, Inn of That Journey, was republished in 1977 by Southern Illinois University Press in its "lost novel" series.) Shortly after I moved to Toledo, Ohio, to work in the Overland automobile plant, I called on fiery old Jo Labadie in his Bubbling Waters sylvan retreat near Detroit. The spunky old anarchist printed booklets of his own verse on an antiquated hand press at very little cost. An excellent collection of radical

literature called the Labadie Collection was later gathered at the

University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I realized then that good 115

March. 1939

The

15c

NEW ANVIL THE PAID NURSE by William Carlos Williams

•

Martin Savoia. lee Hays. Stuart David Engstrand leonard McCartby.El1rieda Babney.OavidGreenhood • Don Gordon len Zinberg • John Malcolm Brinnln • Alexander F Bergman. Henry Seidel Nelson

A1gren

Top: The New Anvil, March 1939; Nelson Algren, circa 1939. Photograph by Robert McCullough. Bottom: Jack Conroy outside Ed Nyquist's Chicago studio on Rat Alley, April 1940. Photograph by John G. Rogers (courtesy Jack Conroy).

poets need good printers and that rebellious poets (and publishers)

self-sacrificing printers who will print for whatever sums you can rustle up for them. If The Anvil, in its period of greatest but again circulation, had been conducted on that principle I anticipate. Such a printer, to be sure, was Ben Hagglund from the Minne sota muskeg country. He was still setting type by hand for another issue of his quarterly Caravel when he died on December 18, 1975, in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. He had come home after working and printing in many sections of the country. His native village, Holt, no longer existed, so he settled as near to its site as he could. While I was living in Hannibal, Ben began printing and distributing need

(later Northern Light) when he could spare time from hay baling or working on a railroad section crew. Most

his Western Poetry

magazines began with a statement of policy or manifesto. In (December 1928) issue Ben deplored the lack of social expression in current verse and demanded that poetry "come into its own again, as the militant foe of injustice." A month earlier, D. Maitland Bushby had launched a new quarterly out in Arizona

new

his first

with the declaration:

"Tom-Tom is conventional in form and

spirit. We rarely use free verse and have no time for radical or sex poetry." During the same month, Janus ("a quarterly review of letters, thought, and the new theology") surfaced in Washington, D. C., and Solon Barber, its editor and publisher, emphasized that the periodical "is sincerely and honestly devoted to the policy of having no policy. It symbolizes individualism gone loco and ideational freedom carried to a licentious excess." With

growing membership (in the New York chapter,

least), it was felt that the Rebel Poets needed

somewhat more

ambitious organ of expression than Hugh Hanley's hectographed

bulletin. A call went out to the Minnesota muskeg country, and Ben Hagglund answered. Therefore, the first issue of The Rebel Poet appeared on four 8V2" x 11" pages of rough paper in Jan

uary 1931. B. C. Hagglund was listed as both publisher and editor, but he protested that he was only printer-publisher while

Conroy actually was

the editor, and thereafter the masthead indicated that. The front page was occupied by a manifesto that

dwelt at some length on the tribulations of insurgent literary maga

zines, and the final paragraph read: 117

Nothing but general sympathy with our aims is required of members. Affiliated with no political party, we stand unequivocally for the defense of the Soviet Union against the enemies that are massing for attack, we champion the cause of the weak and defenseless, we combat the greed of industrial barons who are converting American laborers into abject serfs, we decry the spirit of intolerance that endeavors to abrogate the inherent rights of free speech as demonstrated in the recent Marcus Graham case and in the raiding of union halls in the South and the attempted electrocution of four workers in Georgia for the crime of striving to better the conditions of the textile slaves. We ridicule the musty echoes of the fin de siecle slogan "Art for Art's Sake," and inscribe on our banner: ART FOR HUMANITY'S SAKE.

::;

September, 193:!

THE REBEL POET l}lIitj�J ()r�.m.,1 n ... Ihl· .ll',,,,�.

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Number 16

The Rebel Poet, Nos. I, 16, 17 (courtesy Jack Conroy).

The manifesto was a joint effort of Cheyney and myself, and

reflected, I fear, a shared tendency toward floridity and flamboy ance.

But the spirit and fervor were

genuinely sincere. It was a

time for choosing sides. Since the publication of Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology, 1933-1940, edited by Curt Johnson and myself and published by Lawrence Hill and Company late in

1973, I have discovered that I am a "Populist" and always have been-or so a number of critics have deduced from the contents of the anthology, which were gleaned from the three magazines I edited, and my introduction thereto.

While The Rebel Poet prospered moderately, all was not har monious in the New York chapter of the Rebel Poets organization. Some time earlier I had asked a young Russian-Jewish immigrant named Philip Rahv to take part in its activities, after he had done some

translations for the magazine. Walter Snow,

Yankee, poet, and journalist, was also 118

Connecticut

active member; the two

soon were

at loggerheads and leaders of rival factions. The all

inclusive policy of The Rebel Poet irked the

superrevolutionary

Rahv, who was fond of pyrotechnic tirades against the capitalists and glowing prophecies of the imminent

triumph of the class

conscious proletariat. Here is a sample of his customary manner

review

in what may be called his Stalinist period, taken from

of Scottsboro Limited-four poems and a play by Hughes-in the August 1932 issue of The Rebel Poet:

Langston

The sophisticates and the Montparnasse Brahmins are fond of asserting that the Negro knows how to laugh beautifully; they go into raptures over the urban Negro's bluesongs and the country Negro's "spirituals." With charac teristic cruelty they sadistically exploit the colored people's "picturesqueness" as an aid to their attempt to cover up and conceal the misery of the Negro masses sweltering in the hell of bourgeois rule in the city and on the farm. But the halcyon days of culture by immaculate conception, unrelated to the economic bases of existence, are now a thing of the past. The Negro may know how to laugh beautifully, yet on the day when together with his white fellow-worker he will come into his own in the new Socialist society, the lackeys of the moneybags will not enjoy it so much The gruesome specter of death awaiting the Scottsboro boys in Alabama is routed by the overwhelming joy of proletarian brotherhood-"together, black and white, up from darkness into light." ....

Soon Editor Conroy was beleaguered in his Moberly isolation

with demands for

revolutionary affirmation in the magazine, demands that it unequivocally identify itself with the avant-garde of the proletariat, as represented by the Com a

definite

munist party cultural apparatus. The militant Rahv assumed com mand of a faction which eventually outvoted Snow and his two

(and sometimes three) followers. Then it was demanded that Conroy yield the editorial reins to an editorial board composed of Rahv, Walt Stacy (a Rahvite), Fred R. Miller (another Rah vite) Edwin Rolfe (a neutralist), V. J. Jerome (the CP's cultural commissar), and (as a Conroy representative) Leonard Spier. Another demand was that the magazine's name be changed to something more assertive, such as Red Dynamo, Pen and Gun, ,

Advance Guard, Red Express, or Class Front. I decided with some

misgiving that the last of these names might not be too obnoxious if it meant keeping the magazine afloat. To Spier's suggestion that all members take a bundle of magazines, say ten, and hawk them at meetings, Rahv replied that somebody should be hired to do this. With no money in the till, that idea seemed impractical to 119

Spier, to say the least. He had handled distribution to bookstores and newsstands and had collected accounts

(when he could)

while, he complained, the Rahvites spent most of their time in polemicizing and planning the rearrangement of the magazine. Before the transformation could be effected, Snow and Spier only other Conroy loyalist,

had seceded-taking with them the

the poet George J arrboe. The junta had decided to fire Hagglund,

being classy enough. (They were to learn that altruistic and philanthropic printers were hard to find.) So with no printer to work for whatever measly sums he could get, and no workhorse Spier to distribute the magazine and cajole book stores and others to stock it (and pay for the copies sold!), The Rebel Poet died of malnutrition. I had by this time succeeded Cheyney as president of the Rebel Poets organization, he being alarmed at the turmoil in the New York chapter and the growing leftward turn of the magazine. So I exercised my executive priv ilege and declared both the magazine and the organization kaput. his printing not

Walter Snow had discussed with me on several occasions the

possibility of publishing a magazine devoted to fiction-with some verse

but

theoretical articles such

those

dear to the

hearts of most left-wing editors in those days. Hagglund, the non

pareil printer, once more signed up for the duration.

He had

turned out seventeen issues of The Rebel Poet, often receiving little more than the cost of the paper; its size had increased from

four pages to twelve long before the final issue of October 1932. I chose to call the

new

magazine The Anvil, with the subtitle

"Stories for Workers." Our motto was declared to be, "We prefer

crude vigor to polished banality." Friction between socialists and

communists had become more intense, and, upon being told of the plans for the magazine, Cheyney offered this statement for the first issue: Please let me urge you to support The Anvil if you are a Communist or broad minded enough and financially able to be interested in a Communist poetry

magazine. I believe that The Rebel Poet accomplished much good but that the change

of name and the fearless acceptance of a role in the Communist movement is probably an inevitable development. The Rebel Poets, the Internationale of Song, was founded as a non-sectarian comradeship embracing Socialists, Com munists, Anarchists, and those without definite affiliations but on the side of

120

labor in the class struggle. The Unrest anthologies represent pinks, reds, many shades. Some of us felt that poets could serve the social revolution best by not being affiliated in our poetic capacities with any political or industrial group. But the logic of events seems now to be indicating that each rebel poet should himself actively, openly, specifically, with the general organization with

align

which he is most in accord. I am not a Communist. Neither is Lucia Trent. Both of us are left-wing Socialists. As such, we reach a parting of' the ways with The Anvil. We are not deserting.

They are not deserting. Simply a new chapter of more intimate

integration with life has been opened in social poetry. May it speed social revolution! Emphasis should not be on personalities but social movements, yet in clos ing I want to say that, though Jack Conroy may regard me as a double-dyed villain, I admire him as a gifted author and self-sacrificing rebel who should have the utmost loyalty of Communists. Other charges that may be brought against me ever I shall be glad to answer, but there is one to which I must plead guilty. I should have rendered more aggressive service to those ideals I always have served and always shall serve. That I have done my best under the financial circumstances is no alibi for not having accomplished more. But what are you doing?

Ralph Cheyney This was my reply: I've no intention of denouncing Cheyney as a double-dyed villain. On his part,

he seems determined to warn everybody that I am a wicked Communist and if you have aught to do with me, you're not only aiding and abetting the Reds but are renouncing the world and the flesh in the manner of a nun taking her vows. I've never attempted to disguise my belief that the literary movement revolving around The New Masses is the only one in this country possessing any degree of vitality. Furthermore, I deny that there is any "Socialist" (left wing or right-wing), Anarchist, Syndicalist or any other radical movement of any consequence standing in opposition to and clearly distinguished from the bourgeois tradition other than the movement of which The New Masses is the pole-star. Cheyney himself, writing in Poetry World, has mourned that the League for Industrial Democracy (which he characterizes as an admirable organization) has absolutely no use for verse as propaganda. "Social Vision verse is mostly bad verse, and who wants to encourage bad verse," an official of the L.I.D. said. Contributors to The Anvil, successor to The Rebel Poet, and members of the Proletarian Writers' League, successor to the Rebel Poets, need not be Communists, of course. My associate editors and I are going to try to present vital, vigorous material drawn from the farms, mines, mills, factories and offices of America. We'll not devote much space to theoretical problems. For theoretical guidance, we refer you to The New Masses and International Literature. I cannot think that the polite evasions used by Cheyney to mollify timorous readers have any positive effect in bringing about and fostering a revolutionary literary movement-rather they help to nullify its beginnings. We shall never

121

bring the revolution inside the walls of literature within a Trojan horse camou flaged by such euphemistic phrases as "social vision" (a pleasant substitute for the harsher "revolutionary") or by soothing reformist publication by advocating "the revolution of the spirit." I don't think that many playboys "broad-minded enough or financially able" to support a Communist magazine will come to our aid. Communists being taken too seriously. Whimsical wealthy people sometimes toy with radicalism by subsidizing "social vision" or bohemian periodicals that care more about sexual freedom than industrial freedom-but whenever one strikes vigorously at the roots of private property, these synthetic radicals howl louder than J. Hamilton Fish himself. "You want to keep the Communists out of your unions. They will cause you trouble," said a representative of lllinois' governor to a delegation from the "radical" Progressive Miners' Union. Apparently the editor of this union's official organ is willing to take the reactionary politician's advice, for every issue of the sheet contains vicious vituperation directed against the Communist Party and its press and sarcastic references to "Big Joe Stalin." While I am assuredly not asking every contributor or reader of The Anvil to become a member of the Communist Party, I wish to make it clear that it will never give aid or comfort to any publication, individual or organization that joins in the wolf pack yelps against the only Workers' and Farmers' government in the world. I believe that every honest intellectual should be able to say with the liberal author, Waldo Frank: "What is taking place in Russia is the most precious social event, the most We must defend the Soviet Union precious social life, of our crucial epoch with our spirit; if need be, we must defend it with our lives." The publisher, several comrades and myself have kept The Rebel Poet going for several years, often at the cost of severe personal sacrifice. And other friends have helped when they could ill afford it. I should be very sorry, indeed, to lose the esteem and confidence of these friends, some of whom may not see exactly eye to eye with me. Cheyney's reasons for indiffer ence toward the magazine since it turned more sharply leftward are best known to himself. I believe he was once a Syndicalist and suffered persecution for his courageous stand against the imperialist holocaust beginning in 1914. For that he deserves credit. But his classification of himself as a "left-wing Socialist" I hold to be a retreat. It is perhaps inevitable that, with the sharpen ing of the crisis, some will travel in one direction-to the right-while others will veer to the left. We'll publish The Anvil as frequently as we can. We are issuing it tenta

are

....

tively as a quarterly. But with any appreciable degree of support we hope to issue bi-monthly or monthly. I've learned that it is useless to plead trumpet

tongued for support. Those who can help us and want to help us will do so without excessive urging. You may be sure that every penny donated, every subscription (new or renewal) will be appreciated tremendously. Jack Conroy

publish only creative works, I hoped to avoid ideological disputes. At the same time, the only movement with a great deal of vitality or potential for distributing Since The Anvil intended to

122

magazine without any other source of revenue than its circula tion, with no advertising income, with no fairly generous angels such as those enjoyed by some other periodicals voicing revolt of a less explosive nature, was support that used the Communist party cultural apparatus as its polestar. Having never been east of a

the Hudson, I was still full of naivete as to the theories and prac tices of New York's coffee shop revolutionaries. Ben Hagglund knocked out the first issue of The Anvil, and in 1933-34 he journeyed down to Newllano Cooperative Colony in

Leesville, where he had the help of Marvin Sanford, a veteran socialist printer, and the use of a much larger press, including

linotype. Sanford was for some time listed as publisher. The Anvil Press in Newllano printed a number of other left-wing jour a

nals, among them Blast, The Little Magazine, Scope, Left Review, and Pollen. Walter Snow, the New York editor, began to take a vigorous hand in the magazine's editing and distribution. A skilled public relations man (he had served in that capacity for several New York

publishers), he put a large share of his somewhat meager earnings as a newspaper editor into a campaign to make the magazine to the New York Seaboard CP pundits. I was then acceptable almost oblivious to the partisan disputes raging among the various factions in New York, each of which professed to expound the only true and valid gospel of Marxism. My awareness was sharpened after I ran a story called "On the Sea," by Robert Whitcomb, which later formed part of his novel Talk United States. This seemed to be pretty good proletarian fare, though the slangy, breezy talk was a bit affected. According to Snow, when Philip Sterling, a writer of true Stalinist faith and allegiance, beheld the story in The Anvil, he recoiled in horror. It seemed that Whitcomb, once on the staff of The Daily Worker, had turned Lovestoneite and was hence beyond the pale. Philip Rahv and a new disciple, Wallace Phelps (soon to change his name to William Phillips), were just about solidifying their de facto control of Partisan Review, official organ of the John Reed Club of New York, and were quick to

announce piously that if Snow had aught to do with this heretical outrage, he should be

brought up on charges before the John Reed Club. "Out in Missouri," Snow wrote me, "you probably don't realize 123

the war-to-death

waged against Lovestoneites, Trotskyites and other renegades. No United Front proposal ever includes such elements. How can I impress this fact on you strongly enough? Maybe in this way: if Whitcomb or any other renegade ever appears again in Anvil, I will be compelled to sever all connections with the magazine and publicly dissociate myself from you--even you!" Heywood Broun proclaimed in his newspaper column that, after reading the first issue of The Anvil, he had decided not to make his next book a proletarian novel. Some of the stories, he complained, put Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick in reverse: from riches to rags, rather than the familiar formula. Left-wing critics in general were more lukewarm than were conservatives. Harry Hansen of the New York World Telegram, for example, usually managed to give us some publicity in every issue of his column, which was syndicated rather widely. He said this of the November December 1933 issue: It would be great to turn Erskine Caldwell loose in a mob and have him come

back with a report of what he has heard. At San Jose, California, he would have collected some remarkable exhibits in the vernacular. This comment is prompted by my reading his very short tale, "Daughter," which opens Jack Conroy's paper, The Anvil, for December. Here Caldwell tells the story of a Negro sharecropper who killed his daughter because she

complained constantly of hunger. The Negro had been robbed of his share by the wealthy landlord. The technical adroitness of the author is revealed in his description of the crowd which gathers outside to free the Negro, and which slowly makes up its mind. None of the other stories in The Anvil quite come up to this, but several invite interest. Paul F. Corey, of New York City, shows office clerks at the mercy of shifts and changes, and Louis Mamet describes a factory tragedy in a new technique. Joseph Kalar's "Funeral" is given a star by Thomas Uzzell, who will reprint it in his next Short Story Hits. Other contributors are Helen Koppell, John C. Rogers, Eugene Joffe, and Joseph Vogel. Jack Conroy edits The Anvil in Moberly, Mo. He wrote the other day: "I live here like Thoreau beside his pond and you can throw a cat through the walls of my shack in a dozen places." A few subscriptions might help Conroy to plaster up the holes; besides, it would make life easier for the cat.

ripple of response did result, with a handful of welcome subscriptions. When "Waldo Tell" reviewed the January-February 1934 issue in the first (February-March) issue of Partisan Review, official organ of the John Reed Club of New York, he spoke with 124

condescension of the fiction and dismissed the verse as "painfully sincere, but, with the exception of two poems by Walter Snow and Edwin Rolfe, of little value as poetry." It was several years before I learned that "Waldo Tell" was a pseudonym for Edwin Rolfe. When I arrived in New York City in 1935 to attend the first

Congress, The Anvil had, as the song about Kansas City puts it in the musical Oklahoma, "gone about as fur as it could go." A printing of 4,000 had been ordered for the October-November issue, the final one as it turned out. The fancy printing of the Liberal Press had been more expensive than the Hagglund-Sanford issues turned out at Newllano, which cost only about $52 for 200 copies on cheap paper. Snow felt he could no longer underwrite the debt of about $100 on each issue, and thus was receptive to a suggestion from Alexander Trachtenberg

American Writers

that The Anvil merge with Partisan Review, now under the com

plete control of Philip Rahv and William Phillips. Recalling the coup engineered in the New York Rebel Poets chapter, I became suspicious as to the nature of any "merger" that might be effected. I wrote to Snow: I understand your discouragement about The Anvil. It does seem impossible to keep it going alone. I had been

hoping that Mike Gold and Trachtenberg would be able to suggest some way to keep it afloat independently. Trachten berg, especially, seemed enthusiastic about its possibilities and the desirability It might be possible to call the merged magazine of keeping it going The Anvil, since it is undoubtedly the stronger of the two. It has more circula ....

tion, has had more recognition, and has appeared steadily, while almost no issue of Partisan Review has been on time.

Snow, bone-weary and broke, still saw the merger as our only as a founder-editor, have a voice in selecting material. The magazine's name was to be Anvil and Partisan Review. When it actually did surface (February 1936), its name was Partisan Review and Anvil. The editorial board consisted of Rahv, Phillips, Alan Calmer (a polemicist in the Rahv-Phillips orbit), Ben Field (a short story writer), Edwin Rolfe (a. k. a. "Waldo Tell"), Clinton Simpson (a New York editor and critic friendly to Conroy), and myself. Simpson soon informed me that Trachtenberg wanted the new magazine to be more or less a counterpart of the French Commune, salvation. I would always be honored

...

125

the literary magazine which holds fairly close in critical attitude to the

CP, points out divergences

and welcomes

sympathizers

among the writers and acts as a literary and ideological journal

representing the Party." Alas for Trachty's grandiose dream, as we shall see! In a long review entitled "Papa Anvil and Mother Partisan," printed in the February 18, 1936, issue of The New Masses, Michael Gold saluted the new hybrid: Partisan Review and Anvil is a curious name for a literary magazine. Like many such compound names, it means that a shotgun wedding has taken place. It represents a merger of two magazines: that spunky pioneer of mid west proletarian literature, Jack Conroy's Anvil; and Partisan Review, organ of the New York left-wing intellectuals. Well, the child of roughneck Father Anvil and his thoughtful college bride has at last appeared. It's a vigorous male, retaining the best features of both parents; papa's earthy directness and mama's erudition and sensibility. Hand some and clear-cut in appearance, pulsing with revolutionary life, Partisan Review and Anvil is now on the newsstands and as a magazine promises to be a success.

News of the impending merger had inspired Malcolm Cowley's muse, as follows: I'm glad to hear the Partisan Review

Will soon appear in an almost wholly new

Format, combined with the fiction-flaunting Anvil And print young writers, so people will know that Granville H. and Isidor S. and Michael G. Joe F. and Robert F. and Robert C.

And others of us graybeards aren't the only Prose proletarian pundits, and the lonely Young poets won't be lonely any longer And stories can be shorter, sharper and stronger A nd critics lay a heavier barrage And all reporting can be reporting And talent flourish, And in short I mean Hurrah, Red Front, hats 00 to your new magazine.

It soon became obvious that not a merger but a takeover had

occurred, as I had anticipated. Rahv and Phillips and the com

pliant Calmer regularly vetoed any suggestions of Clinton Simpson after Ben Field and Edwin Rolfe retired from the editorial board.

I, far away beyond the Mississippi, was never consulted even be fore the Anvil was dropped from the title in the October 1936

issue-the final one. After six issues, the magazine had suspended

126

publication. The irrepressible duo, Rahv and Phillips, hibernated for a year and then launched a new Partisan Review with a slightly Trotskyite, surely anti-Stalinist flavor. The sacrifice of The Anvil had been in vain from a CP standpoint, and V. J. Jerome (the cultural commissar selected from the editorial board to displace Conroy as editor of The Rebel Poet) cried out in anguish: Who in the world of bourgeois letters had ever heard of or given a hoot for Rahv and Phillips, for example, amateur literati who mishandled a magazine that started out with all the auspices and forces to make it a success.

Papa Anvil, as personified by Conroy, had never been privileged to share the nuptial bed with Mother Partisan, so did not feel too

completely disillusioned or bereft. At about that time, some who remembered the old Anvil wondered whether it might not, like Lazarus, be made to rise again. One of these was Nelson Algren in Chicago, some of whose very early stories had appeared in The Anvil. I had previously met with Nelson in Chicago on several occasions. He and Richard Wright, another Anvil contributor, were working in the Chicago office of the WP A Writers Project, and Nelson had thought that project director John T. Frederick, with whom I had been in touch when he edited Midland, might find a place for me on the project. Frederick agreed that he could. So when Nelson managed to get me a bus ticket to Chicago in return for an article to be written for the Midwest Daily Record, I set out to plan with him a revival of The Anvil. He put me up in

his pad in one of the storefront studios that once had housed shops

catering to visitors to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. This was in March 1938, and a year passed before we were able to put out the first issue of The New Anvil. In the meantime we

had begged, cajoled, thrown benefit parties, and sponsored lectures

by Richard Wright, Peter DeVries, Shaemas O'Sheel, and others to raise funds. Our most effective source of revenue was

music

hall style melodrama named The Drunkard's Warning, or Chicago

by Gaslight, with Algren and myself assuming leading roles. This and other of our activities caused some left-wing condemnation of Algren and myself as bohemians. Frank Myers, a cultural attache of the CP then stationed in Chicago, asked us to come in to discuss the magazine. He kept us waiting in an anteroom for about an hour, then delivered a stern lecture about the necessity of publish127

ing material that made explicit a Marxist moral. Myers, as has been the case with several gung-ho Marxist authoritarians of that period, later swung to the other extreme of the spectrum and became a right-wing doyen in the Buckley camp. Hagglund printed 2,500 copies of the first issue, of which about 2,200 were sold. William Carlos Williams contributed the feature story. John Malcolm Brinnin, Don Gordon, and Nelson Algren were among the five poets represented. For a time we were able to rent from the Institute for Mortuary

Research, a public relations service for undertakers, a cubicle just vacated by Sidney Justin Harris, whose liberal magazine, The Beacon, had had to give up the struggle. We had access to a large quantity of stationery bearing the Institute's imprint, of good qual ity but a rather depressing shade of blue. On these Nelson and I often tried to offer suggestions that we thought might help the authors. One Jerry Salinger (a. k. a. J. D. Salinger) thanked me for my "warm note" which had taken "the chill off many a re

jection slip." The New Anvil by then was on its last go-round and I had been compelled to tell him so. Algren's kindly and shrewd rejections, too, left lasting impressions, as he learned years later from Joseph Haas after Haas had been made literary editor of the Chicago Daily News. Frank Yerby told us when he submitted his story, "The Thunder of God" (published in the April-May 1939 issue), that it was his first published piece, aside from poetry in college magazines. Yet most biographical sources date his career from the short story "Health Card," which won the O. Henry Memorial Award in 1944. This

so-benign neglect

was

characteristic of the not

accorded The New Anvil

by east-of-Hudson

arbiters. The retreat from the Burnham

Building cubicle to Algren's studio on Cottage Grove A venue began a steady decline in sales and revenue. An urgent appeal, "Look into the Future with Us," in the final (May-June 1940) issue evoked only a small ripple of response. The squelching of Hitler then seemed to be the main order of business for progressives. I often wonder what became of the zeal for human betterment that inspired so many writers in the thirties. The Korean "police action" and the Vietnam adventure disillusioned many poets in particular. Al Masarik, a Korean vet, wrote a collection of poems 128

called Invitation

Dying (Vagabond Press, 1971) with introduction by Charles Bukowski, who observes: to a

I feel that the

breakoff of real poetic talent began with W orld War II and that it never returned. What the causes were (are) I don't know. But from the beginning of World War II and up to 1971 it has been a very barren time for poetic production, not only that form of production but, I feel, creation in other art forms and originality outside of the art forms. The sort of material The Anvil pioneered in publishing is now diffused throughout the "little In Minne

magazine" community.

apolis, whimsically

named Moons and Lion

Tailes welcomes

Meridel LeSueur, Thomas McGrath, and other former contrib utors to The Anvil and The New Anvil. The revolutionary note is still sounded by TRA (Toward Revolutionary Art) in Los

Angeles, where an edition of 5,000 can be distributed by its non professional staff, to bookstores, at meetings. etc. College-based reviews such as New Letters (University of Missouri at Kansas and The Chariton Review City) (Northeast Missouri State Uni versity) do not even blanch at the once-dreaded word "proletar ian." In Kansas City, The Foolkiller magazine, organ of the Folk University there, has borrowed the Anvil slogan, "We prefer crude vigor to polished banality." Even the name of The Anvil, as well as its insurgent spirit, sur vives in North Country Anvil, a sort of New New Anvil edited, published, and printed by Jack Miller in Millville, Minnesota. Miller, following in the footsteps of Ben Hagglund, managed to establish his own print shop and has survived for nineteen issues. Now and then he reprints something from the original Anvil. of there are different things to worry about: ecology Today, course, and abuses of our natural resources, for example. In the thirties we

didn't have nuclear waste to

pester us.

129

ON PARTISAN REvIEW William Phillips

20e

by: Obed Brooks Granville Hicks Wallace Phelps

Philip Rahv Waldo Tel) A

BI-MONTHLY OF REVOLUTIONaRY LlTERA.TURE

Partisan Review, Vol. 1, No.1, February-March 1934 (courtesy

Northwestern University Library).

"We were cocky kids," writes William Phillips about himself and

Philip Rahv in the early thirties. "We had the idea of launching a new literary movement, combining older with younger talents, and the best of the new radicalism with the innovative energy of modernism." Intellectually, Mr. Phillips says, he was born in the thirties: "Perhaps it is egocentric to identify one's formative years with the beginnings of this era. But I think it can be said that the thirties were the cradle of our entire epoch, and that we are all living out of the unsolved problems-intellectual as well as po litical-first posed at that time." For Mr. Phillips, the contempo rary mind, as well as the past three decades of Partisan Review, had their origins in the traumatic shift of consciousness that took place then. William Phillips has edited Partisan Review since 1934. He has also served as a consulting editor at Dial Press, Criterion Books, and Random House, and has taught at Columbia, the New School for Social Research, Sarah Lawrence College, and Rutgers Uni versity. He has published numerous articles in literary quarterlies and is the author of A Sense of the Present (1967). Mr. Phillips is a member of President Carter's Task Force for the Arts and Humanities.

I have been asked how Partisan Review has weathered so many

political and literary storms. As far as I know, it is one of the few magazines of its kind that have spanned several different periods, and still occupy a central place in the literary scene. Literary publications, unlike journals of opinion that reflect the changing intellectual climate, usually have their moments of glory, after which, if they survive, they carry on like old soldiers. Literary magazines, like writers, appear in a certain time and place, out of some literary current or sensibility. Thus Partisan Review was born in the thirties, actually twice-born, and originally bore the stamp of that era. If it has not been restricted by its origins, if it has defied all the pressures of a time and a country that has cele

brated youth, novelty, and escape from tradition, I think this is

mainly because of the continuity between the thirties and the following decades. Of course, when Partisan Review was started in the thirties, 131

first as an organ of the John Reed Club and then as an indepen dent journal, the concept of the future to me and the others was

nothing more than a personal and historical abstraction. None of us thought of the magazine as anything but an instrument for dealing with the pressing literary and political problems of the time; we never dreamed that Partisan Review would not only influence writing and thinking but would also set a pattern for literary publication in the following decades. But in retrospect it can now be seen that our idea of the maga zine provided an approach to new situations as well as a response to the immediate one. The problems to which we addressed our

selves at first partially, then more fully, turned out to be the main concern

of the period.

Essentially our aim was to reconcile the

modernist spirit, which was often conservative and

antihistorical,

with a political consciousness that emphasized the radical and his

torical dimensions of art. Since the thirties, definitions of literary modernism have been shifting,

has our political thinking, but

the fate of modernism and the relation of writing to the pressures

of the culture as a whole have been key questions throughout. Of

prime concern has been with literary quality, new talent, and new ideas. But the criteria for judging originality as well as accomplishment obviously have to do as much with literary course, our

direction as with taste.

Anyway, it was with the most blatant and extreme form of these matters that Partisan Review was concerned in the beginning. The magazine started out as the organ of the John Reed Writers' Club, an organization within the orbit of influence and control of the Communist party. Since the Communists fell far short of state power, such control consisted not in following strict orders, as it did in the Soviet Union, but in setting the limits of dissent. In prac

tice, this meant that members of the club could hold a variety of

literary beliefs as long as they did not question the authority and the general line of the Communist party. One could even be cynical and somewhat disaffected (as I understand Soviet intellectuals can be) so long as one did not write about it or make it too public in any way. And while the Communists in that period supported the idea of proletarian literature and took the position that art was a weapon in the class

preting these doctrines 132

struggle, there was some latitude in inter even in questioning them--especially

since they were soon to be abandoned entirely as the party shifted

popular front policy, which was geared to recruiting writers who might balk at such sectarian views of literature. to the new

The New Masses, the official cultural organ of the Communists, was

the stronghold of those who had the strictest and most vulgar

interpretation of the "party line" in literature. The John Reed Club, however, had some writers who came out of a bohemian and a more freewheeling literary tradition-though, in keeping with the spirit of the times, they were willing to go along with what they thought the Communist party ultimately stood for, how ever disillusioned they were with its current practices. Philip Rahv and I were the most dissident members of the John Reed Club, and we were most concerned with keeping literature free of illegitimate political pressures. But others were also interested in countering the factional approach of the New Masses, which converted all literary questions into political ones, and they agreed to join Rahv and myself in starting a literary magazine in opposition to the New Masses. The New Masses, however, was subsidized by the party, while we had to scrounge for money. Fortunately, a fund-raising lecture by John Strachey, a suave British literary Marxist, brought in $800, enough to finance a magazine for a year at depression costs. We had no rent or staff,

and, as I recall, Rahv got twelve

dollars a week to do the production, though I helped too. From the outset, the policy of the newborn Partisan Review was

rather clearly defined. Our outlook

was

Marxist, and our

sensibility had a radical bent, but we stressed the relative auton omy of writing and were open to work that had been influenced by the experimental currents of the twenties. The magazine lasted a little more than a year as the publication of the John Reed Club, but from the beginning Rahv and I felt more and more hemmed in by the restrictive atmosphere of the Communists. Many gifted writers were on the Communist index, and thus the range of ex

ploration in fiction and poetry, as well as in criticism, was limited. Even more important, we were finding it impossible to live with the corruption, the lies, and the authoritarian structure of the party. And it was becoming clear that the Communists, to whom many people stuck because they believed their ends were more important than their means, were themselves the main obstacle to the realization of a socialist society. 133

Still, our discontent was concrete. It came not so much from a yearning for some abstract ideal of freedom, of the kind conser vative rhetoric celebrates (though that was there too), but from the feeling that we were cut off by the doctrinaire and factional policies of the party from the free play of the critical mind and from the modernist trends and experimental talents to which we were drawn

by our radical ideas and sensibility.

The next phase of the Partisan Review, our second birth, began in the late thirties, when the magazine broke with the John Reed

Club and with the Communist party and started up

again as an

independent, radical literary journal. Rahv and I, the surviving editors of the old PRJ were joined by Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, F. W. Dupee, and George Morris to put out the new

jaunty, raucous, quarrelsome group, always dis agreeing about something, but all of us were intent on printing the best and most advanced writing and on maintaining a radical, anti-Stalinist intellectual and political position. I think the essence of our stand was that we assumed both aims went together. One might say there was a simultaneous widening and narrowing of PRo We were

focus, which is at the heart of any effective critical stand; our con cern with the most advanced forms of modernism mous

variety

of talents to the

magazine,

brought an enor

while

our

social and

historical bias gave it direction and influence. This double vision, as

it were, sometimes seemed to lead to contradictions-as in our

publishing of the leading New Critics, who certainly did not rep of literature. However, it did indicate a more fundamental principle: that only ideologues con

resent our more

historical

sense

ceive of the culture as a monolith.

It might be

interesting to quote from the editorial statement

in the first issue of the new PR and to cite some of the contributors in the first couple of years, who ranged from Leon Trotsky to T. S. Eliot. It would also serve to illustrate how a policy that combined a

radical but anti-Stalinist

was

politics with a modernist sensibility

translated into the contents of the magazine. The issue in

cluded Delmore Schwartz's famous story "In Dreams Begin Re

sponsibilities," poems by Wallace Stevens and James Agee, essays by Edmund Wilson and Lionel Abel, reviews by Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, Arthur Mizener, and William Troy. 134

The editorial statement was not free of the ponderous political rhetoric of the period, but it did introduce for the first time the

combination of social concerns and literary standards that guided a new

creative and critical movement. And it is

interesting to

quote from it at length, if only to see how well some of its for mulations have stood up. As our readers know, the tradition of estheticism has given way to a literature which, for its origin and final justification, looks beyond itself and deep into the historic process. But the forms of literary editorship, at once exacting and adventurous, which characterized the magazines of the esthetic revolt, were of definite cultural value; and these forms Partisan Review will wish to adapt to the literature of the new period But Partisan Review aspires to represent a new and dissident generation in American letters; it will not be dislodged from its independent position by any political campaign against it. And without ignoring the importance of the official movement, as a sign of the times we shall know how to estimate its authority in literature. But we shall also distinguish, wherever possible, between the tendencies of this faction itself and the work of writers associated with it. For our editorial accent falls chiefly on culture and its broader social determinants. Conformity to a given social ideology, or to a prescribed atti tude or technique, will not be asked of our writers. On the contrary, our pages will be open to any tendency which is relevant to literature in our time. Marxism in culture, we think, is first of all an instrument of analysis and evaluation; and if, in the last instance, it prevails over other disciplines, it does so through the medium of democratic controversy. Such is the medium that Partisan Review will want to provide in its pages. ....

early years might be said modernism, a radical sensibility, critical intelligence, and a variety of talent that had not yet been siphoned off by the larger and the com mercial publications. And though this coalition seemed to last until the fifties, the fact is that it was gradually being split apart. On the political side there was a slow movement to the right, due partly to disillusionment with the Communists, but mainly to the increasing prosperity of the country and the feeling that the youth The energy of the magazine in its

to have come from the unusual combination of

ful radicalism of the thirties had been outgrown. A number of anticommunists left their radical base and became more and more

conservative, to the point where they were not only more critical of all socialism but also less critical of the status quo. Anti-Stalin

ism first turned into anticommunism and then into antiradicalism. In addition, those who remained on the left were being splintered

by all kinds of ideological and tactical differences. Some opposed World War II on the old Marxist grounds; some became pacifists; 135

but most shifted to support of the war in the belief that fascist totalitarianism represented a new kind of barbaric society. There was

also

strong pull toward anarchism, which came from the

feeling that the answer to communism lay not in another variety of Marxism, however much it might profess to be dedicated to the ideals of democracy, but in a stand that elevated morality over expediency and decentralization over discipline. By 1944 the other members of the board had left, leaving Rahv and myself as the editors, and shortly after this William Barrett and Delmore Schwartz joined us as associate editors. Mary McCarthy and Fred Dupee had left for personal reasons. Dwight Macdonald resigned mainly because of political differences, and he subsequently founded Politics, which was less literary than Partisan Review and leaned toward

a more

anarchist and moral

view of politics. It is impossible to reduce editorial policy to a single definition,

but it might be said that we had several aims, partly conscious, partly unconscious. Basically, I suppose, we tried as much as possi ble to sustain the grouping of ideas and talent that was brought to

gether originally by the magazine. We also tried to maintain the earlier combination of literary modernism and political radicalism,

though our own beliefs and perspectives were also shifting. We too were part of the swing away from the doctrinaire positions of the thirties. As I look back, it would appear that we swung too far, though I must say that we always dissociated ourselves from the conservative anticommunists and the magazine always re mained critical of the culture and politics of our country. In fact, as the temper of the nation became more conservative, the maga zine became more critical of the adjustments to the new political

and literary mood. But our primary aim, as it had been even in the

earlier, more homogeneous period, was to keep that difficult bal ance

between representing new ideas and talents and maintaining

our own sense

of values and direction. By trying to uphold what

the highest standards of quality, we felt we were thought not only representing the best of contemporary writing and think ing, but we were also promoting and illustrating our own views about the current state of culture and politics. During this period we published most serious writers who were we

136

were

either already established or who became known later, but always in a context that indicated the policies of the magazine. At this

point, it might be informative to list some of the contributors to indicate both the range and the accent of the poetry, fiction, and criticism published in those years, and to note the shift in the ac cents of the

magazine.

The early issues included: Andre Gide on the Soviet

Edmund Wilson

Henry James, Meyer Shapiro American

Union,

Lewis

William

Mumford, James Burnham on capitalism, on Marxist F. W. aesthetics, Phillips Dupee on Malraux, Philip Rahv on contemporary fiction, Max Brod on Kafka, Harry Levin on Heine, William Troy on Thomas Mann, Leon Trotsky on art and politics, Clement Greenberg on avant-garde and kitsch, Harold Rosenberg on myth and history, Eliseo Vivas on John Dewey, R. P. Blackmur on current poetry, W. H. Auden on Yeats, Louis MacNeice's diary; fiction by John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Franz Kafka, Ignazio Silone, Eleanor Clark, William Carlos Williams, Charles Jackson; poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, e. e. cummings, D. S. Savage, Julian Symons, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, R. B. Fuller, George Barker, David Gascoyne, Wallace Stevens, Allen Tate, Robert Fitzgerald; also theater criticism by Mary McCarthy, Letters from Prison by Rosa Luxemburg, and a symposium on The Situation in American Writing, with John Dos Passos, Allen Tate, James T. Farrell, Kenneth Fearing, Katherine Anne Porter, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, W. C. Williams, John Peale Bishop, Harold Rosenberg, Henry Miller, Sherwood Anderson, Louise Bogan, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Fitzgerald, R. P. Blackmur, and Horace Gregory. Among the contributors to later issues were Leslie Fiedler, Stephen Spender, George Orwell, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Koestler, John Berryman, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, W. H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, John Crowe Ransom, Elizabeth Bowen, Tennessee Williams, Graham Greene, Albert Camus, Andre Malraux, H. L. Mencken, Robert Lowell, Jean Genet, Alfred Kazin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, 1. A. Richards, Henry Miller, Paul Goodman, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Schlesinger, Jorge Luis Borges. In the fifties, the divisions that were tearing apart the earlier 137

becoming clearer and sharper. Neoconservatism was in full swing, as former radicals began to sing the praises coalition

were

of the country and the culture. The conservative anticommunists no

longer regarded the Soviet Union as an obstacle to socialism;

it was now simply a threat to the existing system, which suddenly

became full of newly found virtues. The slogan of the new con

by which was meant the end of radical ideology. To speed up the end of ideology, the new conservatives mounted a high-powered attack not only on Marx servatism was "the end of ideology,"

ism but

attacks

were

all other forms of radicalism. That

some

of these

justified is beside the point, for the impulse was

polemical, The fifties, which have become the favorite arena for revisionist history, were of course memorable for the exploitation of the anticommunist position-originally kept within bounds by radical opponents of the totalitarian turn Stalinism had taken-by reac tionary and chauvinist ideologues. The culmination was reached in the wild, irresponsible, and pathologic campaign of Senator McCarthy who, besides persecuting innocent as well as guilty people, not only succeeded in distorting the issue of communism, but also set back the cause of genuine radicalism in this country. Partisan Review again, in this muddled and unsavory situation, saw its task as that of opposing both the crackpot politics on the right and the lies of the Communist left. Culturally, the spirit of retrenchment showed itself in a tum against experiment and avant-garde attitudes in the arts, and in a general reaction against the idea of modernism. It meant, too, that the mass media were looked at more indulgently; con ventional writing became more acceptable; and academicism became the dominant mood, particularly in poetry and criticism. In the fifties, too, the assault on the idea of a minori.y, or adversary, culture-the idea that had sustained the modernist movement-gained respectability. Before that, it had been the philistines and the commercial writers who had acted as the apolo gists for the mass culture. But in the fifties many of the young, serious writers began to appear in the more popular magazines and to propound a number of ingenious theories rejecting the old division of high, low, and middle culture-theories that could not open-minded.

138

publications like Playboy and journals like Partisan Review. And although the magazine had addressed itself earlier to these questions, most notably in Clement Greenberg's famous essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," we now felt it necessary to emphasize the old distinctions that separate entertainment and literary packaging from the less be used to obliterate the difference between

popular forms of serious writing. Ironically, it should be added, the populist strain in the vulgar Marxism of the thirties helped prepare the ground for the later reconciliation with the commer cial pressures of the mass market and its need for more conven tional forms of art. In fact, Partisan Review

was

also

swayed by these powerful

currents, but I think only in a small way. The main effort of the

magazine was to counter the conservative push, yet without giving in to those radicals in politics and in the arts who had resisted the tide but had swung to a nutty or sectarian extreme. The prob lem, however, was further complicated by the radical-conservative polarization that affected writing as well as politics, though it might be said that in the fifties the culture was still mostly on the side of tradition. In this situation we saw that our role was to maintain

literary standards while being open to new work, and to reexamine liberal and radical positions while being critical both of the new Right and the lunatic Left. We were, of course, subjected to pressures from both sides: from the Left for having abandoned our radical heritage, from the Right for not being anticommunist enough or for being tolerant of youth and their half-baked experiments and ideas. At this time, for example, we published an assault on the new conservatism by Irving Howe, which-excessively, I think-also accused the magazine of giving in to it. At the same time, I myself wrote several pieces critical of the move to the right, politically and culturally; the title of one of them, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man," clearly indicated our bias. But it was the sixties that brought the earlier tendencies to a head-and sharpened the dilemmas of the magazine. The blos

soming of the New Left and the counterculture not only drove the conservatives more to the right but further splintered the rem139

hostility of the New Left to the so-called Old Left further complicated the role of the magazine. Politically, the problem was to steer a course that was, on the one hand, sympathetic to the innocence and idealism of youth, who were trying to escape from the system without getting caught in the rigid ideologies of the communists, and, on the other hand, was critical of the counterculture and the New Left for converting their ignorance, their petulance, and their self-indulgence into an infantile left in politics and a pop culture that managed to be both alienated and modish. Culturally, the polarization tended to highlight the celebration of experience, sexual freedom, and half cocked experiments at one extreme, and a devotion to order, rationality, and tradition at the other. But there was a good deal of sanity and talent in between, which was ignored by obsessive polemics on both sides. Partisan Review-acting on the assump tion borne out by cultural history that ideological extremes play themselves out and that in the long run only talent and genuine ideas survive-tried to foster the kind of writing that was not affected by either conservative or radical postures. To be sure, this was not easy, since distinctions are not as clear-cut in practice as in theory, and I must admit the magazine was swayed by the nants of the Left.

And the

crosswinds as it tried to stay on its cultural course. But in the over

heated atmosphere of the sixties the magazine got it from both sides, as it was accused both of swinging with the youth and of

holding the line with the old guard. Where

are we

now? The frenzy of the sixties has cooled off.

But if some of the

nonsense

has gone, so have the energy and a refusal to adapt to things as

the restlessness that come from

they are. The dominant mood is one of confusion. The plastic arts, particularly, are in a state of chaos, as fashion ability and experiment are mistaken for each other. Even though a good deal of serious poetry, fiction, and criticism is being written, an air of uncertainty about our relation to the modernist tradition and to the mass culture hangs over us. In four decades the face of the country has changed. Wars, revolutions, and liberation movements have torn apart traditional

politics and have eaten away at the idea of an elite culture. Dis affection and the feeling that America is going down are wide140

spread; and earlier radical impulses have been supplanted by the mushrooming of cults, breeding an optimism of political and psy chological self-realization. These dislocations have naturally had their effect on writing. And though many strong talents have emerged, on the whole the current moods have not so far been transformed into a literature which has outgrown its peripheral and eccentric origins. Perhaps it is my bias that leads me to hear echoes of the thirties in the issues we face today, issues that basically have to do with the relation of literature to politics. But it is the bias that has, I believe, kept Partisan Review on top of what is going on.

William Phillips, editor of Partisan Review, circa 1977 (courtesy William

Phillips).

141

WAKE the creati'Ye magazine

Seymour Lawrence Jose Garcia Villa editors

WAKE EDITIONS r:"pyri"I,1 I'I',() .\ ..... York

tit)'

Wake, Vol. 1, No.1, September 1944 (courtesy Seymour Lawrence).

MEMOIR OF A 50-YEAR OLD PUBLISHER ON HIS VOYAGE TO OUTER SPACE Seymour Lawrence The magazines Seymour Lawrence took as models when he edited Wake from 1945 to 1953 were transition, Hound and Hom, This Quarter, and The Little Review. He has worked in the field

of publishing for thirty-three years: for the D. Van Nostrand Press, the Atlantic Monthly Press, Alfred A. Knopf, and the publishing house of Seymour Lawrence, Inc., which he founded in 1965 and which has published the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., J. P. Donleavy, Katherine Anne Porter, Tillie Olson, Richard Brautigan, Dan Wakefield, John Malcolm Brinnin, Robert Coles, Robert Musil, Jorge Luis Borges, and Miguel Angel Asturias. Mr. Lawrence is also indebted to the editorial and literary manners represented by Gordon Cairnie of the Grolier Book Shop, Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart, Maxwell E. Perkins, and Alfred A. Knopf. He belongs to the Harvard Club, the Century Associ ation, the Signet Society, and the Union Boat Club.

during World War II and the postwar years was a an undergraduate. Many of the students came on the GI Bill-highly motivated, career-bent veterans who had seen combat. Among them were decorated war heroes, former colonels, fighter pilots, ass paratroopers still in their early twenties who as a generation were regarded as tough-minded idealists. To the incoming eighteen-year-old freshmen from high schools and Harvard

marvelous place to be

prep schools these older veterans, in their uniforms of J. Press tweed jackets, khaki chinos (or officer "pinks"), and combat 143

boots, represented experience and romance. But Harvard remained Harvard. In 1944 it still had the quality of a self-contained New England community, rather than the rive gauche scene of coffee houses, bistros, boutiques, street musicians, and astrological head shops that it is today. The faculty was extraordinary. F. O. Matthiessen, in nervous staccato sentences, conveyed the achievement of the American writer-Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Dreiser, Sher wood Anderson-and the American loneliness. Theodore Spencer urbanely discussed the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare. Harry Levin lectured brilliantly on Proust, Mann, and Joyce, each lecture a carefully wrought essay. Walter Gropius spoke from direct experience of the Bauhaus School. I. A. Richards dazzled and mystified audiences with Seven Types of Ambiguity and the Meaning of Meaning. The great anarchist-scholar Gaetano Salvemini lyrically re-created the Italian Renaissance and the Risorgimento. ("History is never black and white, only grays. History is not made of wars and generals and tyrants. History is the story of the common people.") The world-renowned German classicist Werner Jaeger inspired overflowing lecture halls with his pure vision of the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides and the Golden Age of Pericles. And at dusk on warm spring evenings, Harvard and Radcliffe lovers would stroll along the banks of the Charles. Groups of students sat and gossiped while a solitary oarsman silently rowed by. It was in this setting that Wake was born. The magazine was founded by Harvard freshmen in 1944 as a wartime measure to fill the vacuum left by Mother Advocate (the oldest American undergraduate literary magazine) who had "folded her wings for the duration in November 1943, leaving a definite gap in the undergraduate literary world" (from an unsigned Wake editorial in Volume I, number 1). Without the war there would have been no

Wake. The first issue of The Harvard Wake

appeared in September

1944. There was no masthead. The stories and poems were typical

undergraduate magazine anywhere: introspective, soul searching, entirely undistinguished and unmemorable. Not one of the contributors is known today as a professional writer. Nor of any

144

originated. I later learned, perhaps apocryphally, that it was christened by the novelist John Hawkes (Class of '47), but to this day I still was

there any indication of how the

name

Wake

have no idea what Wake stands for. An Irish wake? The verb

wake? A ship's wake? You pays your money and you takes your choice. This pilot issue ran to 36 pages. The cover, on coated stock, was illustrated with a black-and-white

drawing of a unicorn, a harp, and a tree sprouting leaves and naked young men (the kind you might see on Muscle Beach in Southern California) minus their private parts, and in the corner was the Harvard seal inside a broken chain. The issue sold for twenty-five cents a copy and I can't imagine who would have bought it. Number 2 appeared in December 1944. The cover, again on coated stock, was illustrated with a black-and-white drawing of two hands (male) reaching for two other hands (male). This time the editors came out of the closet and declared themselves. The masthead listed a president, an editor, a secretary, an editorial

board, and a business board. Seabury Quinn was the editor, and we shall return to the mournful, moustachioed Mr. Quinn in a few moments. The only name I recognize today is Craig Gilbert, a

successful television dramatist and the creator of a devastating

documentary called An American Family. As for the issue itself, the editorial (unsigned but presumably written by Mr. Quinn) stated

that

the

eminent

Harvard

sociologist Pitirim Sorokin example of the social

thought the first issue was "an excellent sewerage raked around continued:

by contemporary artists." The editorial

Granted that this first issue impressed many as a tour de force in morbidity, let us remind you that the adolescent mind, to whose production the Wake limits itself by policy, tends in this direction anyway, and as most of us know, there's a war on. Future policy, however, will try to lean more to the healthy outlook towards life, the lack of which in our first endeavor was so widely To this end in order to get the benefit of the female view deprecated point the present edition contains our first contribution from Radcliffe. ....

What follows are "A Moral Tale: Honi soit qui mal y pense" by

Seabury Quinn, and other stories and poems of no particular character except for

two-page exercise in slice-of-life realism

titled "Washington, Southwest" by Austryn Wainhouse (who later

became an expatriate in France, a superb maker of furniture and an

equally superb translator of the works of the Marquis de Sade 145

and other French writers, including Chance and Necessity by the

eminent biologist Jacques Monod, for which Wainhouse received the National Book Award for Translation in 1972). This second issue ran to 32 pages and sold for a quarter. Number 3 appeared in March 1945 with a classier cover than

predecessors: straightforward typography on coated white stock, listing the contents and having a Harvard seal inside a broken chain in the left-hand corner. The masthead changed a bit, with Seabury Quinn now editor in chief, a business manager, its

and a much reduced editorial board. The Contents listed "Seven

Prophecy" by I. A. Richards, a poem by Theodore Spencer, and a poem by a talented Radcliffe contributor, Alison Lurie (who later achieved success as a novelist and as the author Points on

of a remarkable novel, The War Between the Tates). The editorial for this issue opened on a note of despair: The Wake has fallen on comparatively evil days. As yet the prognosis is not definitely negative, but we have taken council to change our policy.

Apparently, the editors had not been able to find enough good material from the undergraduate body to fill an issue, and decided to print contributions from "faculty members, graduates, post graduates, and anyone else we can lay our hands on." Which accounts for I. A. Richards and Theodore Spencer. The issue ran

to 64 pages and included 27 pages from a novella in progress

by Jay Lafferty, which concluded with the following notation: To be continued. Mr. Lafferty'S novella was never continued. Number 4 appeared in June 1945 with a light gray cover on uncoated

stock,

Harvard seal inside

broken chain in the

center, and the Contents printed in blue ink. That issue marked a turning point in the life and nature of Wake. A mild palace revolution had occurred

the editorial board. A group of us

succeeded in pushing Seabury Quinn upstairs as president, and a troika of editors was formed, consisting of two upperclassmen and myself. We were supported by a group of associates composed of several

freshmen, including my then current lady love, S. S. Phillips (now Sayre Phillips Sheldon, a member of the English department at Boston University). Gone was the self-serving editorial, and in its stead appeared a "Note on Contributors" column.

Among the contributors to this issue were 146

Conrad Aiken,

cummings, Kenneth Patchen, F. O. Matthiessen, Harry Levin, Jose Garcia Villa, and ten undergraduates. Among the noncontributors was William March, a neglected

e. e.

writer and the author of Company K and The Bad

Seed, who

had generously contributed a humorous story called "The Borax Bottle." The story concerned an old man recalling his early court

ship of his wife and how they met as small children. They were playing in an open field when the little boy showed his private parts to the little girl and vice versa. A bee stung the boy's peeker and it started to swell. The little girl found a bottle of borax and told him to stick his wounded member in borax to ease the sting and reduce the swelling. But alas, it became even more swollen and got stuck in the bottle. The rest of the story described how the

children hid from their parents, not wanting to explain how the

boy got stuck in the borax bottle. Seabury Quinn, as president, was offended by the story and voted against publication. There were enough of us, however, who voted to publish it. An outraged Mr. Quinn took his case to A. Chester Hanford, dean of Harvard Col

lege, a gentle, kindly man of the old school. The following morning I was summoned to the dean's office in University Hall. Dean Hanford's desk was bare except for the manuscript of "The Borax Bottle." He asked my intentions and I told him that the editors had voted to

publish the story. He allowed that he had read the story, found it embarrassing, not in the best of taste, and certainly not appropriate to an undergraduate magazine bearing the name of Harvard. He went on to say that he could not prevent us from publishing the story and he had no intention of being a censor. However, if we persisted, he had no recourse but to

suspend the magazine and to suspend me and my associates from Harvard College. We bowed before the crimson glove and scepter, and "The Borax Bottle" did not appear in Volume I, number 4. And Mr. Seabury Quinn did not appear in number 5 or in any issue thereafter.

Regarding the contributors to number 4, Professors Levin and Matthiessen had been approached on the basis of Harvard loyalty. The work of Conrad Aiken, e. e. cummings, and Kenneth Patchen had been acquired with the help of the Philippine poet Jose Garcia

Villa. I had met Villa in 1943 when I was living in New York

City, taking random courses at Columbia as a special student and working part time as a clerk in the Columbia University Book147

store where Villa worked full time.

enrolled at Columbia

Although not actually being

College, I was allowed to audit courses:

literature with Mark Van Doren and F. W. Dupee, philosophy with Irwin Edman, and Moby-Dick with the great Melville scholar

Raymond Weaver. I also served as an editor of the Columbia Jester Review (a wartime merger of the humor and literary maga zines). Besides knowing Villa, I had occasional escapades and encounters with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and the legendary Lucien Carr (who killed an older friend with a boy scout knife during that period). After a year of so-called la vie boheme I decided to go legal and at the age of eighteen I took College Entrance Board examinations to qualify for Harvard. Does anyone still read the work of Jose Garcia Villa? When his first book of poems-Have Come, Am Here (announcing his arrival on the scene)-was published in

1942, it was hailed

literary bye. e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Mark Van Doren, and others. Villa lived alone in one room near the as

event

Columbia campus, surrounded by books of poetry and his own

Modigliani-like paintings. (He was also an accomplished short story writer, and his work appeared in several O. Henry col lections.) He worked all day in the Columbia bookstore, where he sold more poetry than anyone else before or after him. He was an unofficial member of the faculty, and in the evenings he would discuss modem poetry with selected undergraduates. His taste was practically flawless (he could not bear the work of T. S. Eliot), and he adhered to rigid standards and self-discipline. He knew and understood poetics, and he communicated his knowl

edge of poetry and his love of the English language. But he was a demanding teacher and something of a despot; like Gurdjieff, his disciples inevitably left him. It was Villa who introduced me to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hart Crane, Ernest Walsh, Wallace Stevens, Henry Miller, Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, and D. H. Lawrence. I learned about transition, Hound and Horn, This Quarter, The Little Review, Harry Crosby, and the Black Sun Press. Mark Van Doren and Jose Garcia Villa were my essential teachers at Columbia. Before I entered Harvard, Villa had brought me to tea with e. e. cummings and his wife, Marion Morehouse, at their tiny house in Greenwich Village. And it was Villa who conceived the idea of devoting a special number of Wake to cummings. 148

A PLAY-A FAIRY TALE-A POEM by E. E. CUMMINGS CONRAD AIKEN

PAUL ROSENFELD

JACQUES BARZUN

KARL SHAPIRO

JOHN DOS PASSOS

THEODORE SPENCER

LLOYD FRANKENBERG

WALLACE STEVENS

HORACE GREGORY

ALLEN TATE

ALFRED KREYMBORG

LIONEL TRILLING

HARRY LEVIN

MARK VAN DOREN

MARIANNE MOORE

WM. C WILLIAMS

FAIRFIELD PORTER

MARYA ZATURENSKA

WAKE

Wake, No.5, Spring 1946, inscribed to Seymour Lawrence by E. E. Cummings (courtesy Seymour Lawrence).

published in the spring of 1946. I was in my sophomore year, and the preparation of this issue That number, Wake 5,

was

consumed most of my spare time. I had to abandon honors tutorial work with Harry Levin, and my grades probably suffered, though I don't recall being concerned: I was learning to be a publisher.

I rarely skipped classes and took every course I possibly could that

by F. O. Matthiessen, Gaetano Salvemini, I. A. Richards, Werner Jaeger, Renato Poggioli, and Albert J. Guerard.

was

offered

The masthead of Wake 5 read as follows: Editor: Guest Editor: Associates:

Seymour Lawrence

Business Manager:

Amos L. Hopkins

Jose Garcia Villa Donald Berlin, Robert Creeley, Race Newton

Donald

"Buddy" Berlin was a cool, self-contained Andover

a successful Brookline, Mass., doctor, who wrote boy, Kafkaesque stories, played a tenor sax, and was a friend of the jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie "Yardbird" Parker. Last heard of, "Buddy" Berlin was running a foreign car agency son

in New Mexico. was my freshman roommate. The son of a in Little Falls, N. Y., Race had studied poetry doctor prominent

Race Newton

at Choate with Dudley Fitts,

and had read most of Gertrude Stein

and the surrealist poets by the time he entered Harvard. Like Berlin, he was a skillful musician and played jazz piano. At sixteen, he had been seduced

by the wife of a Choate master, a scene right out of Tea and Sympathy. Race Newton is now a gentleman farmer living in the west of England. Robert Creeley, class of '47, had returned to Harvard after having served with the American Field Service as an ambulance driver in India. His family lived in Cambridge, where his mother worked as a registered nurse. Creeley had lost an eye in a child hood accident and always wore a black patch. A lean, rangy, soft-spoken New Englander, Creeley loved to listen to jazz at the Savoy in Boston. He was very much his own man, as he still is, and he has followed a true and steady course-a poet of great integrity, much admired by the young. Creeley brought back from India a knapsack full of ganjha, a hallucinatory drug which we occasion ally smoked (twenty-five years before the pot scene). We would 150

empty the contents of half a cigarette, replace the tobacco with the hemplike weed, light up, and off we'd go. But this was a rare occurrence.

We were a booze generation, and some of our parties

lasted several days. Amos Hopkins was my sophomore roommate,

Boston blue

blood, son of a banker and a wise, widely read southern mother. Amos, or "Mouse," studied biology and irregular German verbs and managed Wake's business affairs. He is now a research scien

tist at Case Western Reserve Medical School.

Hopkins and I shared a suite in Lowell House, on the top floor of G Entry (known as Gentry). Two floors below us lived Professor Gaetano Salvemini, who had escaped from fascist Italy after having failed in a plot to assassinate Mussolini. We each had our own

bedroom, a bathroom with shower and two sinks, and an

enormous

sitting room with fireplace. It was a great place for

parties, Wake and otherwise. At one of these parties the Spanish/ Philippine painter Fernando Zobel, fresh from Manila and on his second day at Harvard, recalls walking into a candle-lit room and being approached by a stranger who asked, "And what do you think of Pavel Tchelitchew?"

Hopkins had "borrowed" a complete skeleton from the biology department, which we dressed in a dark three-piece suit, scarf, socks, shoes, an old fedora pulled down over its forehead, and a book in its lap. The skeleton was always seated in the corner of a long leather couch, with its back to the entrance of the suite. Unsuspecting visitors, on entering the room, thought a person in a hat was reading quietly, and got the shock of their lives when they looked closely. Hopkins had also tacked a huge map of the United States on one wall of the sitting room, on which he would affix red pins whenever we established a new outlet for Wake.

The cummings number brought us national attention-and a visitor from Vassar. One morning there was a knock on our door. We opened it, expecting the laundryman (in those days Harvard

undergraduates had daily maid service-"biddies" from North Cambridge-and laundry service once a week). Standing in the doorway was a tidy, small man with glasses, correctly attired in a boy's Brooks Brothers suit. He hesitantly introduced himself as Howard Moss, a teacher from Vassar, and he wanted to know if 151

this was the place where the cummings number was edited. I didn't know what to make of him and was neither courteous nor hospita

ble, and he went away. In later years I came to know and respect this shy, diffident man as a superior poet and critic, the discerning poetry editor of The New Yorker, and someone who helped people

they needed help. (Howard, if you happen to read this monologue and have got this far, what I want to know is, What the hell happened to the laundryman that morning?) Back to the cummings number. Villa not only conceived of this special issue, but he was instrumental in acquiring new and unpublished material from cummings himself: a fairy tale called "The Old Man Who Said 'Why,' a poem, and a morality play called Santa Claus. Villa was also primarily responsible for soliciting and gathering original essays and statements in apprecia tion of cummings from Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Karl Shapiro, Jacques Barzun, Harry Levin, Paul Rosenfeld, Lloyd Frankenberg, Alfred Kreymborg, Theodore Spencer, Fairfield Porter, Horace Gregory, and Marya Zaturenska. There was a splendid frontispiece photograph of cummings in profile, taken by Harry Dunham, and there was a brief bibliography. The issue ran to 96 pages of which the cummings material occupied 77 pages. The remaining pages included new poems by

when

Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, William Carlos Williams, Mark Van Doren, Jose Garcia Villa, and the very young work of four

Harvard undergraduates: Robert Creeley, Race Newton, Donald

Berlin, and the author of this long-winded exercise who squirms every time he looks at his juvenilia to

(a word too close for comfort

genitalia). The cummings number sold for

2,000 copies

a dollar a copy. We printed and the sainted Frances Steloff-an extraordinary

presence and a dedicated bookseller, as shrewd as they come (she taught me what an invoice was and how to write one )-bought copy and stored most of them away in her cellar. Some years later, when there were no copies to be had, Frances had them. There was 500 copies for her Gotham Book Mart at 40 cents

pristine white cover on uncoated antique stock, with the words "cummings number" in bright red script across the top, selling at five dollars a copy. Lord knows what it would sell for today. that

152

We received orders from all over this country,

England, and

the Continent. Amos Hopkins ran out of red pins. An exhibit of

cummings' paintings was held at the Grolier Book Shop in Cam bridge, whose proprietor, Gordon Cairnie, will be remembered and cherished long after most of us are gone. Much has been man whom so many of us loved, who browse for hours in his bookshop (No Text

written about that dear

encouraged

books!) without ever suggesting that we buy anything or saying a word except to tell us to be sure to shut the door when we came

in.

Shop I first met Conrad Aiken, in for a visit from his home on Cape Cod. He would invariably invite At the Grolier Book

Gordon Cairnie to the Harvard Club for martinis and lunch. No

escaped Gordon or would want to escape him. An innocent undergraduate, sitting in the corner of Gordon's old broken-down sofa (with Gordon in the other corner writing invoices and gently complaining), would suddenly be transfixed by the appearance of T. S. Eliot or Edmund Wilson or Robert Lowell in the doorway. I may have spent as much time in the Grolier Book Shop as I did at Harvard College; I know that I spent more time there than at Widener Library. one

Gordon was our friend, and to many he was Harvard. We are all his customers in one way or another, and all the money in Boston could never repay him for what he gave us. When I cele

brated my twenty-fifth Harvard reunion in 1973, I had to wear a top hat, white tie, and cutaway because I was a marshal's aid,

regarded as an honor for so-called distinguished alumni. My job in the academic procession was to carry a banner and lead the classes of 1962-1972 through Harvard Yard into the Tercentenary Theatre, where speeches are given by prominent folk and recipients of honorary degrees. After leading my flock, I returned the banner to its home, walked out of the Yard, and made a beeline for the

Grolier Book Shop. I opened the door, shouting, "Have you got any textbooks on physics?" Gordon looked up, about to tell me to go to blazes or to shut the door, when he saw me in my fancy

regalia. He immediately wanted someone to take our photograph together in front of his shop, so he phoned Elsa Dorfman, his friend and one of the most sensitive photographers of poets and writers I know. She took

pictures. Gordon was wearing a tweed cap (which Alastair Reid and I had bought for him in our

153

Scotland), scruffy tweed jacket, and disreputable khaki pants. I stood next to him in my top hat, et cetera, carrying a black baton with a red ribbon around it. The pictures were never developed. Gordon Cairnie died a few months later, and since these were the last photographs ever taken of him, Elsa Dorfman, who revered Gordon, could never bring herself to print them. It was two years before we published the next issue, Wake 6.

Why the time lag I don't rightly remember. Studies, girls, lack of funds, an honors thesis, my senior year-it could have been any one of these reasons, but most likely it was a combination of all. Race Newton had been expelled from Harvard. "Buddy" Berlin had lost interest in Wake and writing, and had gotten more into jazz. Amos Hopkins was involved in research and laboratory work. Bob Creeley had married his first wife by then and was living in Provincetown. A new staff was created, comprising myself, John Hawkes, who had

already begun work on his first novel, and John Rogers, a laconic New Englander with a painstaking sense of craftsmanship, like a good carpenter or shipbuilder. In the intervening years, the Harvard Advocate had been class of '49,

revived, so there was no real reason to retain "Harvard" in the name of our magazine. I approached one of the deans, told him I was graduating in June, and asked if I could continue as sole owner

of Wake after graduation. Since the university had never

contributed any funds or office space to Wake, and since we had assumed responsibility for printer's bills from the very beginning

(we rented a Cambridge post office box for mail, manuscripts, bills, etc., and the editorial office was my suite at Lowell House), Harvard had no objection to our dropping its name from the magazine. I could own Wake if I wished, provided I personally assumed full responsibility for any debts the magazine might have incurred while I was an undergraduate and afterward. I accepted these conditions and Wake 6 was published in the spring of 1948. The issue ran to 96 pages and sold for a dollar. We printed 2,000 copies, as we did with Wake 5; but unlike the cummings number, which sold out entirely within a few months, we were left with half the printing unsold. Printing costs had risen, there were only two ads, and we ended up with a deficit of $1,500 owed to the printer. 154

I had devoted several months to preparing the issue and had to abandon my honors thesis on Sherwood Anderson, which was

great loss to scholarship. Since I had no interest in graduate study, my not writing a thesis simply meant no cum laude, no magna cum laude, certainly no summa cum laude. Wake 6 was a varied and interesting issue, with poems by William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, Richard Wilbur, Louis Simpson, Robert Cree1ey; a fairy tale bye. e. cum mings, "A Little Girl Named I"; fiction by John Hawkes, Albert J. Guerard, Austryn Wainhouse; and the "comma poems" of Jose Garcia Villa, an innovation that disconcerted many readers (comma, poems, are, poems, conceived, with, commas, in, which, the, com mas, are, an, integral, and, essential, part, of, the, poem, enabling, each, word, to, attain, a, fuller, tonal, value). I remain a devoted ad mirer of Villa's work, and some of his most beautiful poems are no

"comma poems" which,may,be,enjoyed,with,or,without, commas. I graduated from Harvard in June 1948, without honors and without a penny to my name. The final thrust was having my "class

poem" rejected as being unsuitable and inappropriate to the occa sion-which it probably was, since the poem was against ambition, the business rat race, money grubbing, etc. On Commencement Day in Harvard Yard, class officers always lead their class; they are distinguished by red tassels on their mortarboards, while the rest of the class have black tassels.

Since there was to be no class

poem, I saw no point in being the class poet,

post to which my

class had elected me. So I marched in black-tasseled cap and gown with a thousand other undistinguished Harvard citizens, next to

Amos Hopkins, the man who helped me put Wake on the map in Suite G-42, Lowell House. We were admitted by President J ames Bryant Conant to the fellowship of educated men. I spent the summer after graduation as an itinerant house guest,

visiting friends in Bucks County and Long Island, swimming, playing tennis, and wondering how I would get $1,500 to pay the printer and how to get even more money to finance Wake 7,

which Villa and I were preparing. I always knew that I would be a publisher but the question was, How and where do you begin? The previous spring I had been

interviewed

by Frank Taylor, then a senior editor at Random

House, in his spacious moderne Madison Avenue office. As I sat 155

uncomfortably in a canvas sling chair, Taylor told me how he had begun as an advertising copywriter-s-or was it in publicity? for a publishing firm. He then described his meteoric rise, first becoming editor in chief of Reynal and Hitchcock, a small, distin guished firm now defunct, and later attaining his present position. He pointed to a fancy Ronson cigarette lighter on his desk and said, "I'm now a luxury item in the industry, like that expensive lighter." The interview left me in a mild state of shock. Taylor seemed to me to be no more than a slick Madison A venue huck ster and not the image of a

publisher I always had in mind. At

Harvard I had read and reread the Letters of Maxwell Perkins,

those beautiful, wise, and compassionate letters to Fitzgerald and

Hemingway and Wolfe. And at the Grolier Book Shop I would constantly examine Gordon Cairnie's outstanding collection of first editions, none of which I could afford. Early on, I became aware that the Borzoi imprint of Alfred A. Knopf stood head and shoulders above every other American imprint. This was how books should be designed and made. These were the standards I wanted to maintain. This was what publishing was all about. Wake 7 appeared in the fall of 1948 with this title page: WAKE the creative magazine

Seymour Lawrence Jose Garcia Villa editors WAKE EDITIONS New York

It was a thick issue of 104 pages and sold for one dollar a copy. I had found an excellent printer near the Bowery who was willing to extend credit.

The issue

was

divided into four sections:

"Poetry," "Prose,"

"Translations," "New Writers." In the "Poetry" section were new poems by Edith Sitwell, Stephen Spender, Henry Miller, Conrad Aiken, Richard Wilbur, Walter de la Mare, W. S. Graham,

Frederick Prokosch, more "comma poems" by Jose Garcia Villa, and an unpublished poem by D. H. Lawrence. In "Prose" there

story by Theodore Spencer, an essay on Tristan Corbiere C. F. by MacIntyre, and a treasure which Villa somehow managed were a

to unearth from a collector he knew:

156

unpublished notes and letters

translations of Rimbaud, Stefan and Tristan Tzara. In the "New Writers" section were

of Walt Whitman. There

were

George, poems by Robert Creeley and Louis Simpson; short stories by Alan Harrington, John Lawson, and C. C. Brelis (Dean Brelis, my "blood brother" at Harvard-war hero, novelist, foreign corre spondent, a fiercely loyal friend, and the most incurable romantic I know). To pay the piper, I took a job as a college traveler with the venerable firm of D. Van Nostrand Company, publishers of text books in mathematics, the sciences, and engineering-which were Greek to me. After several months of training on New York's "Publisher's Row" (lower Park Avenue near Eighteenth Street), I was given my choice of a company car and chose a Chevrolet convertible. Equipped with two suitcases, catalogues, and sample books, I drove west to visit colleges in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri. My salary was $2,600 a year plus all ex penses on the road. I instructed the office manager to send my monthly paychecks to a bank in New York, and by the end of the year I had over

$2,000 in savings, which covered not only the Cambridge printer's bill for Wake 6 but a down payment to the New York printer for Wake 7. Seeing America as a college traveler was the finest graduate course I could have had. I drove and drove and drove, seeing as many as thirty or forty professors in a day, securing classroom adoptions of Van Nostrand textbooks, flooding the home office with weighty, unpublishable doctoral dissertations (and occasion ally a marketable textbook). On weekends I would read manu scripts for Wake which Villa would send ahead to hotels in places like Chickasha, Oklahoma. I would also visit college bookstores, after a day's work, and open up new outlets for Wake. I was on the road four months at a stretch, returning to the home office during the Christmas recess, then going back on the road again. Wake 8 appeared in the spring of 1949. While I traveled, Villa did most of the acquiring of manuscripts by established writers. The four categories established in Wake 7 continued. In "Poetry" were new poems bye. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Richard Eberhart, Jean Garrigue, Paul Goodman, Sir Osbert Sitwell, James Laughlin, Horace Gregory. In "Prose" appeared "The Baby Elephant," a play by Bertolt Brecht, and 157

short stories by Paul Bowles and Mark Van Doren. The translation section

was

exceptionally fine, containing Eluard, Baudelaire,

Mallarme, Claudel, and Bertrand. Plus poems and short stories by nine "New Writers," among them James Broughton, Barbara Deming, Jane Mayhall, Stanley Moss, and Katherine Hoskins. The issue ran to 128 pages and sold for a dollar.

My college traveling efforts were rewarded that fall with a raise in pay to $3,100 a year, and my territory was expanded to include Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana,

Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, in addition Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri. I saved money, paid all Wake's bills, and the magazine flourished as new outlets were created on college campuses in the Midwest, Southwest, and to

always sold on consignment, and what the bookstores did not sell they would return, paying only for copies sold. Since we continued to use an uncoated antique white cover stock, the returned copies were usually soiled and Northwest. The magazine was

unsalable. Wake's

availability on Midwestern campuses was a blessing for some. The West Coast poet Michael McClure recalls passing around tattered copies of Wake to other kindred souls while a student in Kansas. At the University of Missouri I was invited by William Peden to address his class in advanced creative writing, and I took an hour off from selling chemistry textbooks to discuss little magazines. One evening at dinner in a professor's house in western Iowa, I was introduced to a young Scot clad in kilts and

navy blue blazer bearing the crest of St. Andrews University. His name was Alastair Reid, and this was his first visit to the a

States as a teaching fellow. When Reid learned that I published

Wake, he cried: "What on earth are you doing out here? I've been sending my poems to Wake in New York." Reid had come across

Wake in the St. Andrews library, and more than anything

else he wanted to be

published alongside cummings, Stevens,

Aiken, et aI., whom he admired far more than their British contem poraries. At times I felt like Johnny Appleseed distributing Wake across

the prairies.

After two years of traveling in the West, I joined the Ronald Press

field editor in the humanities.

My territory was New

England, and I decided to live in Cambridge. Wake and I were back home. 158

appeared in the spring of 1950 with six poems by Wallace Stevens and poems by Marianne Moore, William Carlos Wake 9

Williams, H. D., Mark Van Doren, Richard Eberhart, Jean Garrigue; translations of Mallarme, Lorca, Mistral, Kastner, Rimbaud, and Villon; a fairy tale bye. e. cummings called "The House That Ate Mosquito Pie"; prose by William Carlos Williams, Theodore Spencer, and Mark Van Doren; and twelve new writers including Robert Creeley, Jackson MacLow, John Clellon Holmes, Francis Golffing, Eugene Walter, David Marcus, and James

Broughton. The issue ran to 128 pages and sold for a dollar. Although Wake never paid its contributors, we barely managed to break even and there was often a deficit after paying printer's bills, postage, stationery, etc. Neither Villa nor I ever received a salary. The only person who demanded payment was Vladimir Nabokov (or perhaps it was Mrs. N abokov?), whom I visited at his apartment while he was teaching at Harvard. Since we could not pay him without paying other contributors, we parted amicably and Wake endured without Nabokov. I also recall being berated at length by F. O. Matthiessen while having lunch at the Signet Society, Harvard's undergraduate literary club. Matthiessen said that it was unprofessional of us to accept contributions from writers without paying for them. Several of my friends and class mates witnessed this scene as I stammered, quite shaken and red-faced, "But, Professor Matthiessen, no one has ever asked for payment, and if we started paying there would be no Wake to publish." Matthiessen was, of course, entirely right, and as a

professional publisher I believe that writers should always be paid when there are profits to be made; but Wake was never a

profit-making venture. Matthiessen was also astonished that we could consistently draw first-rate work by established poets without payment. Jose Garcia Villa had a great deal to do with this, but I also think our contributors appreciated Wake, what it was trying to do and what it stood for. They may have liked its karma, aura,

"vibes," or whatever it had. Fundamentally, I think they trusted Wake and they enjoyed being published there. Wake 10, which appeared in the spring of 1951, was the last issue co-edited by Jose Garcia Villa and myself. Nothing really caused the parting of our ways except that I was mostly in New England and seldom in New York. Out of sight is out of mind, and we were also out of touch; it was a friendly geographical 159

divorce. Villa's final coup was a sequence of eight original draw

ings by Saul Steinberg, which served as a preface to the issue. There were poems by Mark Van Doren, Richard Eberhart, John Hay, H. D., Brewster Ghiselin, William Jay Smith, Michael Hamburger, and Jean Garrigue; prose bye. e. cummings, David Cornel Dejong, and Kenneth Lash; translations of Holderlin, Laforgue, Novalis, Mestrovic, and an ode by Dante translated by Howard Nemerov. In the "New Writers" section were poems by Daniel G. Hoffman, Alastair Reid, Denise Levertov, Barbara Gibbs, Gene Baro. The issue ran to 112 pages and again sold for a dollar. I had known Conrad Aiken since my undergraduate days, when

Gordon Cairnie introduced us at the Grolier Book Shop. Aiken invited me to visit him and his wife at their house in Brewster

Cape Cod. He said, "Come for orange blossoms." I had no idea what they were. I went down by bus, and five or six orange blossoms later I staggered out into the night and got lost in the woods. I never did get back to Cambridge and ended up spending the night at their house, "41 Doors." I had long admired Conrad

Aiken as one of the few true men of letters in America, and the

totality of his work was impressive: poetry, novels, short stories, CONTENTS I

CO:->."RAD AIKEN'

W A I<

UJoI,ant

edited by Seymour Lawrence MAR.{ANr:-..E MOORE MARK SCHOR.ER

A Note

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"' ....

Wake, No. 11, Spring 1952, a special Conrad Aiken number inscribed: "For Seymour Lawrence and Suicide from Cyanide Aiken" (courtesy

Seymour Lawrence).

160

criticism, drama. But he had never been fully appreciated and always stood in the shadow of his Harvard contemporary, T. S. Eliot. When I first suggested to Aiken the idea of a special number of Wake devoted to his work, he was more fearful than flattered. "Don't do it! It's suicidal. I've never been fashionable

in the

public eye." All the more reason for doing it, I told him. Wake 11, the Conrad Aiken number, was published in the spring of 1952. I had corresponded with Aiken and with many villa in Positano, where I lived for several months during the fall and winter of 1951. After three of the contributors from

years of selling and acquiring college textbooks, the honeymoon was over. I had learned a great deal about marketing but not about

quit. And in the summer of 1951 I drew all my savings out of the bank, packed all

the kind of publishing I

was

interested in. I

my clothes, all my books, and with a trunk full of Wakes sailed on the ize de France. I spent a few weeks with my future wife in

England and Wales, went on a walking trip with Alastair Reid in Scotland, and distributed copies of Wake to London book shops. I then went to Paris, where I opened up new outlets for Wake on the Left Bank and on the rue de Rivoli. From Paris I went to the south of France and spent a week at St. Paul de Vence,

where I met the poet Jacques Prevert in the bar at La Colombe

d'Or. Prevert was the village character, a Rabelaisian figure in a

bright red shirt, bursting with life, constantly talking and gesturing. I could understand only a fraction of what he said, but I enjoyed his company immensely. After traveling to Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples, I reached my final destination-Positano on the AmaIfi Drive, where a Harvard classmate, the composer Douglas Allanbrook, was

living on a Fulbright. Allanbrook and piano occupied the

lower half of a villa, and I, with trunk loads of books and Wakes

occupied the upper half. My plan was to live there a year, reading, writing, and editing Wake. But I became restless after several months and sailed home.

The Conrad Aiken number

appeared a few months after my European interlude and around the time I was hired as special assistant to Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic Monthly (re ferred to by Aiken as the Atlantic Weakly). The issue ran to 128 pages and sold for $1.50. It included a section from Aiken's

autobiographical novel Ushant, nine new poems, and his brilliant 161

essay on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land which originally appeared in the New Republic in 1923. There were essays on Aiken's work, letters and

personal memoirs by Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate, Marianne Moore, Mark Schorer, Henry A. Murray, G. Rostrevor Hamilton, Malcolm Lowry, Jean Garrigue, Julian Symons, Calvin S. Brown, Marcello Pagnini; and a comprehensive Aiken bibliog raphy by R. W. Stallman. The cover drawing of Conrad Aiken in profile was by his wife, Mary Hoover Aiken. The final issue, Wake 12, was the contemporary foreign number and was published in the fall of 1953. After that I felt it was time to close shop. I had other commitments, personal and pro fessional, which occupied me. Moreover, Wake was primarily a magazine of poetry, and I had become increasingly concerned with publishing good fiction, which I did at the Atlantic and which I do to this day under my own imprint. Finally, and quite seriously, I am superstitious, and I did not want to publish Wake 13. The foreign number was devoted to the work of writers from France, Italy, Germany, and Greece. A leading authority on each country wrote a literary and cultural overview. The issue was not meant to be comprehensive or a world anthology. It was a selection of contemporary writing abroad, and the main criterion was well-translated material. If a particular author's work, no matter how historically important it might be, was ill served by the translator, it would not pass. I had hoped that this special issue would

serve

introduction to show American writers

and students what was being done abroad. It was one of the most

satisfying numbers to publish. The section on Italy included an essay titled "The Italian Success Story" by Renato Poggioli (whom I'd studied with at Harvard), followed by the poems of Morarte, Penna, Ungaretti, Scotellaro, Montale, and Quasimodo; and fiction by Pirandello, Natalia Ginzburg, Tecchi, and Alvaro. The section on Greece was prefaced with an essay, "The Greek Tradition," by the anthol ogist Kimon Friar; he selected and translated all the material, which included "The Odyssey" by Kazantzakis, with illustrations by Ghika, and poems by Seferis, Papatzonis, Ely tis. The section on France included a general essay on the intellectual and cultural climate of postwar France by the poet and Resistance leader, Pierre Emmanuel. There were translations of work by Valery, 162

Cocteau, Michaux, Larbaud, Emmanuel, Segalen, Claudel, Jarry, Reverdy, Apollinaire, J ouve, Prevert, and Rousselot. The section on Germany had a long essay on German postwar literature by Edgar Lohner, a brief essay on the poet Christian Morgenstern by E. M. Valk, and translations of the poetry of Morgenstern, Trakl, Benn. The contemporary foreign number ran to 148 pages and sold for $1.50 a copy. Next to the cummings number, it was the most successful issue of Wake. Three of the poets-George Seferis of

Greece, Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo of Italy received the Nobel Prize for Literature in later years. Since this was the farewell number, I felt it might be appropriate to say a few words about Wake and what we tried to achieve during

its ten-year span. I put it in the form of a "Note," and I will quote the opening paragraph and the final sentence. Wake has never been a crusading magazine in a partisan sense. What it has attempted to do during its life is present the finest possible poetry and fiction. If it has taken any anti position, it has been against the constricting effect a certain kind of critical-academic thinking has had on the minds and work of young writers. Wake has been primarily for things-for good poetry, for good prose, for unknown writers and for their recognized elders. Wake has served, more than crusaded. The search for distinguished writing has been its sole

and guiding force

....

This final issue is dedicated, with pleasure, to young writers everywhere.

163

QRL: HALLELUJAH ON A STRAW Theodore Weiss

QUARTERLY REVU:W OF L,n",,"

•,.,"'" "IIOtijr�TI

f.JIU��':

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Quarterly R0iewof Uterature

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'RJ::::

By the time poetry had become Theodore Weiss's chief interest in life, he had discovered a number of magazines whose work he considered important. Among these were The Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, The Sewanee Review, and Poetry. He also valued The Nation and The New Republic for their literary sections. None, however, seemed quite so exciting as Accent, which although it had been founded in 1940, only three years before QRL -served as both model and challenge. Mr. Weiss considers the influence of Pound and Williams on QRL, as well as on his own poetry, to have been greater than that of the New Critics, whose criteria for excellence in poetry he found dissatisfying. Mr. Weiss is the author of eight books of poetry, among them The World Before Us: Poems, 1950-1970 (1970); Fireweeds (1976); and Views and Spectacles: Selected Poems (1978), as well as numerous poems, articles, and reviews in a variety of little magazines and anthologies. He has received fellowships from the Ford and Ingram Merrill foundations and has twice been a member of the National Book Award jury for poetry. Three issues of the Quarterly Review of Literature showing format changes.

Left to right: Vol. 2, No.4; vstn, No.4; Vol. 19, Nos. 3-4; (courtesy Theodore Weiss).

164

The first ten years or so of the Quarterly Review of Literature might well have satisfied us. As little mags go (and of course

they usually have the good sense and tact, if not exhaustion, to go quickly), had we not, from 1943 to 1953, without any help or support from foundations, good angels, etc., carried out an adequately honorable tour of duty? By the very nature of the little mag, a ten-year life span already far exceeded the normal, decent run of the best of them. For people who had never expected or wanted to be editors, let alone sole custodians, of a magazine, we had certainly proved ourselves. We had done what we could to forward the cause of the writing we believed in; we had published unknown or little-known young writers on whom, at least in part, the future of literature would depend, and older ones-like cummings, Williams, Stevens, Pound, Marianne Moore, Rexroth-not yet acknowledged or read in anything like the degree their work deserved. Thus Williams wrote us in September 1944: I feel very grateful to you for your support, you'd be surprised how isolated

feels at times and how many small irritations one must face to keep writing. I was sixty-one a few days ago, let's hope that in the next twenty years I shall

one

find more ease.

Also, as every magazine and literature must-not alone to fill out pages but to provide a larger context in which writing might thrive-we had published writers who produced only a few things, failed their promise, or simply fell silent. More than that, we had attended to our sense of the importance of importa tions: the way, subtle and otherwise, foreign writing (either of other lands or other times) can enrich local products, add exotic spice to them, or show them new directions. So the pages of our first ten years had sported translations of Andrade, Stefan George, Heredia, Sappho, Broch, Ramon Sender, Alberti, Corbiere, Juan de la Cruz, Yvan Goll, Jimenez, a collection of recent Japanese poets, and a host of others.

Early on, Robert Bly had rebuked us for our editorial policy. Polemics, he assured us, was what was most needed. We countered by remarking that polemics already filled his magazine and one such was quite enough for us. Furthermore, our choices of material entailed criticism and judgment of, as far as we were concerned, the best kind: in action. But, as though to give personal point, a sense of program and commitment, to a magazine otherwise rarely 165

overtly polemical or manifesto-minded, I had engaged in a doughty set-to with Yvor Winters, especially for his all-out attacks on writers like Pound, Eliot, and Stevens. This vehement flurry of fisticuffs attracted very considerable attention. What sympathy I might have had, even then, for many of Winters's reservations anent modernism was dissipated by the absolutism of his position. Meanwhile all kinds of correspondence occupied us from every corner, it seemed, of the United States and from distant parts of

the world

well. Indeed

began to feel like some sort of

international central. Writers like Williams and Rexroth, in their generous warmth yet hotly asserted and guarded stands, reassured us even while they kept us happily hopping. Williams, by his

spontaneous enthusiasm no less than by his complaints about him self and his work, gave us a sense of importance,

fundamental

reason for being editors. Rexroth peppered away at us in a Poundian style, with impatient yet affectionate pedagogic ukases.

One could not want

entertaining, irritating, ingratiating

communiques; this was truly avant-gardism at its most exuberant, and we were in the middle of it.

Nonetheless, whatever our cordial participation in the views of both men, we held out, as we most fervently wished to, against the sirenic seduction of

voice, no matter how alluring, as against another; we skirted the Scylla of one extreme: all-out experimentation, say-and the Charybdis of another: constricted formalism. For in the felicitous example of Pound at his best we meant to serve literature itself, considered it more important than anyone of its most persuasive practitioners. We wanted to keep the writing in our pages as open and various as possible. Thus, already anticipating the civil (and not so civil) war of the different camps-to-be-among the poets and fictionists shortly after, among critics and/or academics naturally later-we could one

present with similar enthusiasm the floribund work of a Stevens, the international (if not inter-epochal) complexities of a Pound, and the much sparer poetry, with its passion for the plain and the

local, of a Williams. A poet friend told me that in my own work I

was

attempting to combine the two Bills: Shakespeare and

Williams. Much

both meant to me, this formulation did not

have an entirely implausible ring. Certainly I had read, loved, and

taught both of them for many years. Yet lest this seem impossible 166

and egregious even to me, let's propose the likelier combination of Williams and Stevens, something like the language of the former and the syntax and reach of the other. So we hoped to have our

them

and

their

living happily

cheek

by jowl

magazine.

As writers

less than

editors

inclined to

one

style,

especially when it seemed to us unfairly or unfortunately neglected, rather than to some other immensely popular style

ing-and-balancing has

always been

our

(such check

impulse). We wanted to

encourage and to urge the lost-sight-of and to challenge the acclaimed-not out of simple perversity or anti-joinerism, but out of an

abiding sense of the costliness, to writing and to us,

of such exclusiveness. The writer in ourselves well understood

the monomania creative people often have to entertain to justify their own practice. But editorially we resisted such restrictedness;

printed work we might not fundamentally and personally care (these we felt, if they were serious, we must not quarrel with), its legitimate accomplishment. In our Lord's house of literature there had better be room enough for the whole multifarious show, including some of its sideshows. The one thing we did not wish to do was to deprive literature or ourselves of the genuine, whatever shape it might happen to take. Already, as in 1950, we had displayed our appetite for gamut by featuring Giraudoux's lovely, suave memoir "From My Window" and (in two issues) Louis Zukofsky's extraordinary novella, "Ferdinand"; a selection of Gongora's hermetic poetry and Paul Goodman's heel-kicking three playlets, "Theory of Tragedy," and of "the Pathetic." All we

for but in which we recognized, given the writer's premises

this we followed with Lorca's essay on Gongora, the ultramodern on the remote but

highly relevant; slices of Paterson; and a three act play, "Stevie Guy," by Gil Orlovitz, a writer of mammoth ambition and boundless energies who, becoming a close friend,

increasingly wrested from us editorial comments like, "You have great guts, as good as any in the business; now if only you could find a belly to put them in!" And an issue later we ran "Amphion," a play by Valery, and a suite of poems by the exciting young Robert Duncan, already as devoted as Pound to avant-gardist past and recent greatness in the arts.

Accordingly,

1953, with

ten

years

completed

and with

167

my first year off from teaching-made possible by a Ford Founda tion fellowship which suddenly and blessedly descended on us

the cessation of the magazine might have seemed sensible, even judicious, especially since my own writing had become increasingly

urgent. But beyond letters like Williams's which helped to keep us

editing, my chief goddess, Inertia, scorned such an obvious, sane course. And before leaving for a year in Europe, we readied what now strikes us as quite incredible-three issues. Their con tents ranged from Seferis and cummings to the young short-story writer George P. Elliott, from Williams to eight young Dutch poets. When we left Yale for Bard College in 1947, Stevens had written, "You carry the Quarterly Review around with you the way a Chinaman carries his bird." He was right, right perhaps beyond his intention; for this bird--even as it provided us, in our

moving about, with a kind of home, a nest full of incessantly hungry mouths (mouths of those who somehow never grew up or

left}-tried to warble out the whole summer of literature. Or

hallelujah on a straw! One feature in Volume VII, number 3, had particular resonance

for us: three essays that were the consequence of a poetry confer years earlier at Bard College on "Experimental and Formal Verse." Williams and Louise Bogan, each holding forth ence

some

his and her

specialty, were the main speakers. To give the

occasion additional eclat, we invited younger poets, most of whom had appeared in QRL, to participate. To our delight almost

all-Elizabeth

Bishop, Richard Eberhart, Robert Lowell, Jean Garrigue, Lloyd Frankenberg, James Merrill, Kenneth Rexroth, and Richard Wilbur-accepted. The conference, one of the great grandfathers of a later frequent kind, went off with a bang. Aside from the initial formal session in which Williams and Bogan delivered their papers and the younger poets as well as the audience responded, parties and impromptu readings followed, with the poets sometimes reading their own work, or that of other poets present, or of someone else. Robert Lowell was an

enthusiastic, large presence. The second evening, clearly moved by the whole affair, he held a group of us captive while he delivered a several-hour monologue on what now seems to have been the whole of English literature. In fact, he liked Bard and its country side enough to spend some time after the conference in the nearby house of Fred 168

Dupee. As exhilarated

he had been at the

conference, so mild, gentle, quietly kind was he afterward. Kenneth Rexroth wrote on November 30, 1948: Look honey-you don't want my report

1 am on what the poets did much more interested in other things-some blonde, some brunette. Me, 1 had a very good time-and it was wonderful, sitting & singing all night. And 1 was

....

very happy meeting you & Renee & Senior-and Wilbur whom 1 hadn't

met before. My only regret is that I didn't bring down my girl at Smith-who

would have transferred to Bard right then. When 1 teach Bard is where. Told my wife all about it-and it fascinated her, too.

Among the writers and artists in the audience was Mary McCarthy, who had taught at Bard the year before. She found the conference fruitful enough to inspire some considerable part of her novel The Oasis. The conference did now provide QRL with three essays. The first consisted of a brief, fairly typical, staccato, if not impatient

piece by Williams. In his words-even as he denied "that imper tinence," poetry, for his true interest, the poem-"I would be the poet, not the one to talk about it [poetry]." But he did make much of the fact that modem poetry, since "it had gone back to the roots," was a

baby art, a screaming, brawling brat. It is in a primary phase and needs to

be understood lest we be tempted to strangle it-for relief. We can get little

adult pleasure from it as yet

We catch only a longing glimpse of what it might be-hopefully desired by all. It is not finished. ....

He also stressed "poetic structure," "a field of action worthy of

masculine attack," and deprecated the valuing of a poem for "what is said in the poem" rather than for "what we make of it, in what it stands to be as a metrical invention, something new in the world that

once

asserts

the world

And he named "the really great names of the past

real for us." .

Sappho,

Sophocles, Dante, Villon," who "seem comparable in our day to the great inventors." Then he reached his basic theme: American,

"dynamic" language, versus English, with its "static nature" and remote from us. So too its prosody. Louise Bogan's paper began by agreeing with Williams'S, "If a poem has measure it is a poem." But then, by way of experi menters like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Laforgue, she main as we look back on 'modem' poetry as a whole, we tained, ". find as much experimentation in form as out of it." In the not a

169

distant past, it is true, if we wished to praise a poet for his daring, his experimentation, it was for his ability to exercise his so

art in a great variety of forms, some of them his own or extensions

of, departures from, established ones. Today many poets seem to

by experimentation no form at all. As a consequence, a shapelessness, an anonymity, settles on most of their writing. as rhythm Pointing out how rhyme "became necessary Gilbert to effect: weakens," Bogan quoted Murray good

mean

Greek and Latin could do without rhyme because they had clear meters. Rhyme is needed to mark clearly the end of the line, and to provide the ear with fixed resting places. Without such divisions the metrical form would become dull and obscure. The hearer would not be sure where one line ended and the other began; he might not even be sure whether he was listening to prose or to verse. It is worth noticing that Latin took to rhyme when it began to lose the sense of quantity. Chinese insists on rhyme because it has no meter.

rhyme having disappeared for most poets, and other features of poetry as well, rhythm has been in increasing trouble. Thus a growing number of writers, once declared poets, have understandably and sensibly abandoned the line about which they had long been uneasy, its arbitrariness, in their work. We have, then, that hybrid called the prose-poem, often not poetry, not prose, a poor, wingless, footless bird that can neither fly nor walk. Such writers, I would suggest, have abandoned the teachings and the example, not only of Pound, but of Williams as well, who was deeply concerned with shape, structure, especially "measure." Recognizing the exhaustion that can set in in meter and the need for change, Bogan says aptly that free verse "becomes as hamper ing as any rigid meter when it rules out any return to form."

In recent times,

Some time after the

conference, Richard Wilbur sent us his

reflections on the subject in a paper entitled "The Bottles Become

New, Too"-as cogently reasoned an apologia for formal verse as

have

seen.

Praising Williams's work and the theory he

needed for it, Wilbur finds that theory "not judicial but strategic" and Bogan, not Williams, critically right. He maintains: "In each

difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty If you of direct apprehension and expression of the object. know can only approach you respect the reality of the world, you that reality by indirect means." He admits that "any basic rhythm is a perfectly artificial and abstract thing." He shares none of the modern illusion that art, by being spontaneous outbursts, art the

...

170

can be life or,

for that matter, art. He considers rhythm "as time

less and noncommittal as the triangle. The horses of the nineteenth

century did not run in iambs, any more than the Studebakers of the twentieth do." Like Bogan he calls on one of the most basic

arguments against free verse: "Another point in favor of formal structure is that there is no way of noticing certain subtleties and stresses and variations unless there is a norm, an

structure from which

divergences

are

apparent regular

made." It is the

touching

desire of the modern artist to capture the uniqueness of each moment, not realizing that if it is indeed preciously unique it

repeated without losing that very quality and, alas, often having no other. Beyond that, one might wonder where free verse will be when it is altogether triumphant and common place, with no formal work to react to, nothing to resist or over come. Perhaps out of a sense of insurance, the free-versifiers ought to see to it that a real measure of formal verse be kept going! I have gone into all this because-late though the day may be for such arguments, with the almost total capitulation of the bulk of poets to free verse-the relevancy of the issues raised may prove precisely all the more urgent. In many ways prose is winning another battle, here perhaps a fundamental if not final one, over poetry in poetry's own bailiwick, not to say nature, and by its own consent. It is one thing to see how close poetry can come to prose without losing itself, to reclaim material from prose, and to learn-as Pound urged-the best lessons of great prose; it is another to succumb to it completely and often at its sloppy worst. As though in answer to all this-and so we did see it-the fol lowing issue featured Williams's very lovely, very important trans lation, "Dactyls-from Theocritus," composed in the triads that Williams had recently discovered for himself. It reflects his splen did, usually unerring ear; at the same time )ts being a translation of an ancient classical poem in a traditional, highly artificial genre, the pastoral, demonstrates the exciting freshness available in the past and shows Williams for what he fundamentally was, even in grimy, Manhattan-shadowed Rutherford: a bucolic poet. The same issue also presented eight Dutch poets, very clearly the able heirs of modern foreign influences, and went back to the rigors, still with us, of Gottfried Benn, translated by Edgar

cannot be

Lohner with a modernist, Cid Corman. 171

We had an extraordinary year abroad, living at Iffley, a tiny village outside Oxford; sharing a house with Mrs. Collingwood,

the tart old Scottish wife of the former eminent philosopher and aesthetician R. G. Collingwood; visiting T. S. Eliot at Faber and

Faber; and spending a most memorable afternoon and evening pub-crawling at Swansea with Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins (a frequent contributor to QRL whom we had come to see), and their childhood friend, the painter Fred Janes. On our return we continued our devotion to the liveliness of the best parts of the past, properly confronted. We published an all-Leopardi issue this after our Kafka, Valery, Marianne Moore, and Pound issues. A poet still little known in this country, Leopardi is surely one of Italy's and his time's major poets, and in mood and spirit most pertinent to our age. We appealed to a number of people for help in translating some of his poems and were fortunate in their response, as we were in William Fense Weaver's translations of various examples of Leopardi's extraordinary prose. We wanted some critical intelligence to accompany his work. Despairing of

finding anyone to supply it, late in our stay in Iffley I girded myself for an all-out effort and, ensconcing myself in the Bodleian, I read in several all-day sessions whatever Leopardi, in whatever translation and comment, I could find. Then I batted out a brief

chiefly valuable, perhaps, for the absence of any preconceptions or prejudices. Bard's program in its freedoms had no doubt helped to encourage me toward such sudden sorties. An issue later, we were delighted to publish a one-act play, The Bait, by one of our regular contributors and now our friend, the immensely talented James Merrill. From the start, his gifts had been conspicuous and astonishing, gifts that fortunately were superbly managed. We had never met anyone quite so precociously capable. In 1949 we had published a group of Merrill's poems, and the year before we had been involved in his becoming a special instructor at Bard for one year-and at the advanced age of twenty-two. James or Proust was already the atmosphere article on him,

he seemed to carry around with him, and Proust was what he taught at Bard. (In that 1949 issue we had also featured another

extraordinary poet and man of letters, Ben Belitt, with his "School of the Soldier," a most imaginative memoir to which we gladly gave our first annual award for fiction.) At this time we also 172

printed poems by young writers like John Ashbery and Jean Garrigue, David Galler and Jane Mayhall, who soon became good friends and QRL regulars, and Lorine Niedecker. The third number of Volume VIII opened with "Poetic Acts," a speech that Wallace Stevens, recently dead, had delivered at Bard College in accepting an honorary degree. Williams, a recipient of a degree a year earlier through Bard's emphasis on creativity, was supposed to speak on that occasion, but a few days before the ceremony Flossie Williams phoned to inform us that Bill had just had a stroke. Then, to my amazement and consternation, she said, "Here's Bill. He wants to talk to you." And in broken, scarcely intelligible syllables Bill apologized for letting us down and launched a long, doctorly explanation of his illness. After a day or two of depression, with the event almost on us, I aroused myself and decided to phone Stevens to ask him if he would replace Williams. An older man, Stevens agreed with cheerful alacrity to make an acceptance reply. That weekend, involving Stevens, Kenneth Burke, and Glenway Wescott, was an awesome one, especially the first evening, when Stevens, imposing yet tiny-voiced, read his paper to the obbligato of thunder and lightning, and the stentorian clatter of rain on the tin-roofed gymnasium (Bard's only large auditorium). He could not be heard beyond the first row or two, but the sight of him and the surrounding accompaniment were quite enough to keep the audience spellbound. As Wescott told us, "I came down on the same train with Stevens, but though I watched him all the way, I didn't dare approach him." Other events paled beside this one. Burke, however, after a faltering start, forgot or abandoned his announced subject when he happened to mention the Oresteia.

Taking off like a rocket, for well over an hour he filled the hall with crackling Greek and Trojan fire; the whole trilogy, Furies and all, came crashing down on us. That issue, along with Stevens's speech, also had fourteen poems by Rene Char; three remarkably commodious poems by a recent Bard student, Raphael Rudnik; and a selection of Louis Zukofsky's poems including a long extract from section 12 of his most ambitious work, A, and an essay on his poetry by Lorine Niedecker. Up to now I have failed to mention the fiction writers given houseroom in QRL; as with the poets, quite a few of these came 173

to Bard to teach. So a congenial company, in print as in person, was

cultivated. Among the most striking was William Humphrey.

A young goat-herder with his painter-wife Dorothy

(that is, they

tended a weekend commuter's fantasy of a farm), he had come to our attention with his first story in Accent, now sadly neglected

but at the time

exciting a little literary magazine as existed.

Humphrey's distinction was at once evident. When we met Charles Shattuck

(an editor with Kerker Quinn, the magazine's prime

mover), visiting Vassar for a year, he informed us of Humphrey's proximity and fairly desperate situation. We got in touch with him, arranged for visits, and promptly saw that we must bring him to Bard. A special one-year writer's fellowship was established, since he had no degrees and no teaching experience. The closest he had come to literature, beyond his own work, was a stint at the New York Gotham Book Mart, but we felt that a term with Mrs. Steloff should more than adequately prepare one for the ardors of Bard. That summer Humphrey, with his customary ravenousness for books, prepared for a course by ramming through the eighteenth century. Like a true autodidact, he shamed most of his well-degreed colleagues. His seriousness, his fiery enthusiasm made him an instant success as a teacher. A fellowship at Bard, it should be said, meant doing at least as much work as anyone else carried-a superhuman load of three different classes, plus many faculty meetings, plus meeting ten to twelve students for an hour or more each week in individual, substantive tutorial, or actually thirteen to fifteen courses a week! It soon became obvious that we must keep Humphrey, so he became a regular teacher until his first novel enabled him to go off to Europe for a long

spell and a career of writing. In short, Bard's Language and Literature Division had a heavy preponderance of fiction writers and poets alike. Among the former, at one time or another, were Warren Carrier, Jack Ludwig, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Robert Coover, and Mary Lee Settle. And the division was probably as lively, as dedicated to literature, the making and the keeping thereof, as one could find in the United States. In 1957, with the arrival of poems by Theodore Enslin, another

intense correspondence began. Enslin was already something of an

underground figure in poetry. A man altogether devoted to his 174

work, he anticipated the physical as well as spiritual retreat from the modern "established" world that later became quite common.

(He lived in Temple, Maine: "Have you ever tried 50° below in a drafty old farmhouse?") After many compatible years we hit a snag. In a letter I had remarked on "the broken-down, beat-up character of much that tries to pass itself off for poetry." He agreed in part, then went on, "But if you mean the jagged bright edges that are a part of our speech, which is from our life, then emphati

cally no." He praised those who had been "known as beat a few years ago. They really did clear the air of a lot of old heraldic hangings that ought to go." I had no quarrel with this; it was the hot air or simple flatulence frequently substituted to fill the emptied spaces that disturbed me: my awareness that a new academicism, at least as rigid as the old, was hardening into place. Enslin continued, "I think a poem should be in plain sight, plain workaday dress for the most part, although there are times for fancy dress balls, too." Whatever our shared enthusiasm for Williams, I maintained that style should be free to change with the occasion; that the so-called plain style, usually serviceable and apt for much of our world and time, should not be allowed to outlaw other "changes of clothes." Poetry, by its nature as by ours, ought to enjoy as various a wardrobe as possible. Even the plain style, not to say nakedness, if exclusively insisted on, could become as drab,

limited, imprisoning a uniform as any. Beyond the poet's own deepest impulse and intelligence, no one could tell him what to do, but there would be a moment now and then when inversions, multiple adjectives, etc., might be useful and expressive, if not also natural and necessary. Fortunately one could find plenty of these

in Pound and Williams; as practicing poets they were too good to be bound by rules,

even

their own and even those dedicated to

freedom. In his next letter Enslin countered: But the "plain workaday dress" I must insist upon. It is a constant-always has been in good poetry, I think-I do not put on a cutaway coat when I go out to cut weed. It doesn't need to become plain. It does with many, I know, but I'm talking about well-made things, not the drab, or shoddy no prescrip ...

tions before the poem, O.K., but that has its limitations too, as anything else.

It was not cutaway coats I was after, though I might have de murred at cutting weeds as a norm of conduct. But I feared 175

the puritanism the plain style often tended to bring with it, and the diminution of wit, gaiety, and rich variety that might ensue. In addition to cummings and Williams and Horace

Gregory,

to, QRL in 1957 printed, sometimes twice, memorable young poets like Nemerov, Finkel, a

poet at present inadequately attended

Leonard Nathan, Goodman, Golffing, Gibbs, and James Wright. The second issue we gave over to an early long poem by Rexroth, "The Homestead in Damascus," and an article on Rexroth by Lawrence Lipton. At this time also our relationship with M. L.

Rosenthal, John Simon (who later taught at Bard), and James Dickey began. Simon, as one might expect, produced tight, witty, brilliantly acerb poems. Rosenthal, on his way to being one of the principal critics of modern poetry, already revealed the feeling, the tenderness that were to characterize his work

as a

poet. We

correspondence with the young James Dickey, encouraging him in his obviously distinctive, powerful poetry and advising him-foolishly, as it turned out to continue (since he and his poetry were doing so well) as an advertising writer rather than take a teaching position. He had told us he required $25,000 a year, his then salary. Out of our long academic experience we believed the expectation of such a salary in teaching was pure fantasy. We had not reckoned with Dickey's personality, did not know his talents as a public reader and performer. In good American style, he proved that even had carried

considerable

poetry can be made to pay. QRL opened 1959 with a Holderlin issue. This we especially valued. Not only did it make available a very great poet, one little known in the United States, but it brought together the labors of

people we admired and were very fond of: our close colleague and dear friend Heinrich Bleucher, and his wife, Han nah Arendt, powerful critic and splendid person; the acute, engaging Paul de Man (teaching at Bard College then); friends from our University of North Carolina days-Earnest Morwitz, once an important member of the Stefan George circle, and his collaborator Olga Marx (we had been delighted to print their superb Sappho, which Williams praised most enthusiastically); the sharp, capable John Simon; and a brilliant student at Bard, many

Alice Gladstone. Add to this list Vernon Watkins,

poet often

in our pages, plus Erich Heller and Willard Trask, and one had a

176

happy company indeed. Volume X, number 3, followed, with a section from Ralph Ellison's novel-in-progress (we would be fortunate enough to print more from it later) and a suite of poems by W. D. Snodgrass, among them "A Flat One," perhaps his most powerful poem. We devoted Volume XI, number 1, to the prize winning work from our competition for a long poem, story, or play. Two zany, free-for-all plays by Holly Beye had been chosen by our judges, F. W. Dupee and Randall Jarrell, and ourselves. We began 1962 with a double issue that gave us additional space for longer work and the good material now pouring in. Double issues would become our practice. This one featured a fascinating two-act play, Faustina, by Paul Goodman-a "ritual tragedy," he called it. Accommodating most modern interests and dramatic devices, it seemed to us one of the most successful ventures in modem theater. Here too we printed Denise Levertov and Richard Hugo for the first time. Denise Levertov's ten poems

splendidly exhibited her strength out of lyrical delicacy, already fully at her command. She soon became a good friend. Hugo, at that time working at Boeing, sent us some memorable observations, applicable to his work and to the poetry of our time: I have developed several elaborate theories, but my poet-friends tell me that the best thing about my poems is that when I write them, I ignore my own

theories. This much is not theory: Often I start a poem with a place or scene in mind and then work to leave the place and arrive at the poem-to "get off" the subject and "onto" or "on to" the words. In such poems, the most common cause of failure seems to be my inability to leave the scene. It helps to love the scene or place. When you love something, you can leave it because I have no objection to any you know it will be there when you return "kind" of poetry--Campus NeoClassical, Beatnik, etc., but I do consider a clamor for originality a mistake. Originality cannot be willed. The original poet will be original even if he tries to write like somebody else-he will ....

mis-hear other poets [foreshadowings of Harold Bloom's "strong" poetl], because his obsessions interfere with his hearing. So, when he tries to imitate, he really has it all wrong [And then a comment that seems even more ....

pertinent today:] Technique seems to come a little too soon for many young American poets. When a 22 year old poet appears to have as good a command of rhythm as did Yeats after 25 years of writing, I can't help but wonder if something isn't missing. It's hard to believe that we are a nation of poetic

geniuses.

No doubt there

are

people who, following the most highfalutin

notions of Blake and Whitman, do so believe. All you have to do is abandon all standards, at best pesky things, and we are a nation

of poetic geniuses. The amount scribbled today in the

name

177

poetry would certainly indicate that the scribblers think so. That issue also contained four short works by Robert Musil, for us a

major modern much neglected in the United States. In 1962 our all-Mont ale issue, guest-edited by Irma Brandeis, close friend and colleague, favored Montale with what he deserved, the best translators we could find: the poets Lowell, Merrill, Belitt, Nims, Corman, English, and Raiziss, with de Palchi, and such Montale experts as Brandeis and Cambon. We also ran some of Montale's short fiction and two essays on him. The third issue of Volume XII (1963)

was

enhanced by four elegies from Ovid's

by Horace Gregory, four poems by Robert Duncan, long poem by Louis Simpson, nine poems by David Ignatow, and a story by a young fictionist, soon to emerge as

Amores translated a

one

of our best, John Gardner.

twentieth-anniversary poetry issue of 1964 opened with eight hitherto unpublished Whitman poems, in their brevity and point particularly apposite to our day's poetry. Michael Hamburger's translation of Holderlin's play The Death of Emped odes appeared prominently, and four later Alberti poems, trans lated by Belitt. In addition, the issue printed many of our regulars and, for the first time, Ammons, with seven poems; six poems of Anthony Hecht; a long poem by Carolyn Kizer; and five poems each by Christopher Middleton, Josephine Miles, and William Stafford. Next, our twentieth-anniversary prose issue featured a difficult, stunning story, "The Death of Martin Presser," by H. D.; Ralph Ellison's "Juneteenth," one of the most extra ordinary black sermons ever delivered; and William Humphrey's timely "A Job of the Plains," about a poor white boiled in his own oil, discovered on his land. Three other distinguished writers present were the ubiquitous, astonishing Joyce Carol Oates and two English fictionists, the experimentalist Christine Brooke-Rose and Hilary Corke. In the next issue, besides running many poems of QRL familiars, we offered for the first time poems by the coruscating, sophisticated Richard Howard, Michael Benedikt's translations of Max Jacob, and six poems of the ingenious, pro foundly searching Mona Van Duyn. One suite we were especially pleased to present in translation: fifteen poems by the German Our large

poet Johanness Bobrowski, who had died a little while before. Volume XN, number 3/4 was remarkable for the brief extract 178

Dostoevsky's notebooks, his reflections on death and im mortality, written at the bier of his first wife (brought to our attention by our good friend and Princeton colleague, the dis tinguished critic Joseph Frank); The Tower, a Peter Weiss play translated by Michael Hamburger; and three stories by Robert Coover, a young writer emerging as one of our more notable,

from

inventive fictionists, then

teaching at Bard.

In 1965 I was invited to be writer-in-residence at Princeton Uni

versity, and we spent a delightful 1966-1967 in Princeton, though of

QRL continued to appear under our Bard address. XV, number 1/2, announced that henceforth QRL would appear twice a year with double issues (each over 200 pages), one of poetry and one of fiction and drama, each "a yearly anthology of new creative work." That issue offered course

Volume

Helen

Barolini's

translation

eleven

new

Montale

poems,

"Xenia," in memory of his wife-poems that were personal, im mediately and poignantly available, unlike much of his earlier work, in their often wry feeling. We printed four Seferis poems and his diary account of his meetings with T. S. Eliot, translated by Edmund Keeley (the director of the Creative Arts Program at Princeton and eventually my chief colleague and friend), Philip Sherrard, and Mary Keeley. And there was a long monologue of my own, "Caliban Remembers." I had read the poem, just newly finished, for the first time and as my sole offering-perhaps half

defiantly, very possibly desperately, but at least with the excitement of its writing still on me-at the New York YMHA Poetry Center after hearing my co-reader James Dickey deliver himself of a series of poems on adultery. Whatever the effect of my disclaimer -"After Mr. Dickey'S poems mine, I fear, must seem a little like post-coitum triste"-no doubt many members of the crowded audience, even if they had read The Tempest, must have been baffled by my unabating assault. Asked to remain permanently at Princeton, we moved with QRL to Haslet Avenue, our private as well as editorial address. In the double prose issue, Volume XV, number 3/4, still bearing the Bard address, we announced the removal and QRL's affiliation with Princeton's Creative Arts Program. The issue reflected the

change by featuring two early Borges stories translated by one of my Princeton colleagues, the important Borgesian James E. 179

These stories, with the earlier Keeley-translated Seferis, marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with Princeton

Irby.

University faculty members, accomplished writers, translators, and critics like Clarence Brown, John Peck, Robert Fagles, and visiting writers in the Creative Arts Program. Even as, in our twenty years at Bard, we had been involved in the establishment of

literary community, so now at Princeton we were happy

to call on the company of gifted people available.

Our twenty-fifth anniversary poetry issue, appropriately the first under our new address, rounded up many of the poets familiar to QRL readers and, in addition, for the first time exhibited work

by Amichai, Ted Hughes, Enzensberger, Saint-John Perse (trans lated by Richard Howard), Sylvia Plath (a section of her radio play, Three Women), Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton. We were also delighted to present Wallace Stevens's chief play, Bowl, Cat and Broomstick, and a most engaging "Conversation with Marianne Moore," recorded by Grace Schulman. Our twenty fifth anniversary prose issue ranged widely indeed-with the first general publication of Walt Whitman's "Notes from a Train Journey" (from Camden, New Jersey, to Colorado and back); Richard Howard's translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to a volume of Mallarme's poems; and the third section of Ralph Ellison's novel-in-progress to appear in QRL. Robert Coover and W. S.

Merwin, QRL oldtimers, further enriched the issue

with samples of their highly original,

experimental prose, which

close to poetry yet preserved the virtues of prose. In our double poetry issue, Volume XVII, number 1/2 (1970)

was

two of our poets-W. S. Merwin with seven prose poems and

Wright with six poems-shared top billing with Francis Ponge's "The Parti Pris of Things (II) ," translated by Lane Dunlop. Also prominent were such distinguished poets as Donald Davie, Richard Eberhart, and GUnter Eich, whose nine poems were translated by David Young. In his introduction, Young remarked Eich's unique importance to postwar German literature: his making poetry possible again after Hitler. Young cited Celan and Enzensberger, two very considerable contemporaries of Eich, on this fact. In Enzensberger's words: J ames

a speechless country. After the entry of the Allies, Germany was mute There is a poem in which this paralysis has itself become language and which simultaneously describes and overcomes the situation: it has become famous ...

180

and is regarded today as the birth certificate 0/ the New German literature. The poet is staking a claim to the Gunter Eich wrote it: "Inventory." The text sounds like a man learning to absolute minimum that remains ...

....

speak; it is with such elementary sentences that language courses begin. Lane Dunlop translated one of Rene Char's surrealistic playlets,

"The Man Who Walked in a Beam of Sunlight," and John M.

Gogol translated three prose poems by Solzhenitsyn as well as a large group of poems by the contemporary German poet Reiner Kunze. Beyond our usual company, other poets-represented, when possible, by a group of poems-appeared for the first time: Galway Kinnell, Reginald Gibbons, Greg Kuzma, Linda Pastan, Stanley Plumly, Dabney Stuart, Brian Swann (who also provided us, in collaboration with Ruth Feldman, with a selection from Lucio Piccolo's poetry), and Karen Swenson. The double prose issue, completing the volume, printed a moving, painful novella by the gifted Greek writer Kay Cicellis, and stories again by John Gardner and Joyce Carol Oates. The next volume (XVIII, number 1/2) concentrated on three

major poets: Cavafy, translated by Keeley and Sherrard, and two tragic figures-Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger (one poem, "Afternoon with a Circus and Citadel," addressed Mandelstam), and one of the greatest Russian poets, this same Osip Mandelstam, fourteen of whose poems were translated by W. S. Merwin and Clarence Brown. Jean Garrigue (our contribu tor column called her one of our "prize perennials") also appeared with "Studies for

Actress," the title poem in what would

become her last book. One other unusual entry was the work of Charles and

Raphael Rudnik. Charles, the father of Raphael,

after retirement "became interested," as our note says, "in poetry with his son's work"; eventually, for the first time, he began to write

poetry himself-becoming, in a sense, his son's son. The poems we printed were Charles Rudnik's first to be published and later, with others, were included in his first volume. Also noteworthy were

the fifteen poems of John Peck,

soon

to be

collected in a

splendid first volume, Shagbark. The prose issue that followed reinforced the Mandelstam poems with an astounding fireworks of a "travelogue" by Mandelstam: "Journey to Armenia," also translated by Clarence Brown. In Brown's words, Mandelstam's "highly placed protector, Nikolai Bukharin, arranged for the poet / and his wife to be sent off to distant Armenia in order to 181

be out of harm's way"; thus the commission to write this piece,

surely one of the most amazing to come out of Soviet Russia. Robert Coover, an old friend and a writer-in-residence for the year at Princeton, supplied the issue with a modern racy version of Snow White, and Wright Morris, writer-in-residence at Princeton the year before, appeared with a matter-of-factly sinister New York story. Three other unusual works in the issue were a remarkable exchange, involving the painter C. D. Friedrick, between Kleist and Brentano, edited and translated by a former Bard student and Princeton colleague, Philip Miller; Howard Moss's play, "The Palace at 4 A.M."; and Stratis Tsirkas's "Seferis' Last Days," translated by Minas Savvas.

Now, with our thirtieth anniversary upon us, we decided to celebrate in a large way with several commemorative retrospec tives. The celebration, once it began, exceeded our expectations. We had

thought preparations would be easy, but the physical of job cutting up issues and arranging the pages proved enormous. Even before that, plunging into the Herculean process of selection

(easy! ), we discovered to our dismay (and pleasure too) that we could not possibly limit our choices to two volumes--one poetry, one prose. And gradually, as the work proceeded, we saw that even three would not satisfy us, let alone the thirty years of QRL's contents. So, the poetry issue having appeared and the prose already in preparation (these almost 600 pages each), we realized that two more issues lay before us: one devoted to the special issues-Kafka, Valery, Pound, Leopardi, etc.-that we had published over the years, and another containing the maga zine's miscellaneous criticism. The poetry issue, presenting 146 poets, elicited a gratifying response. Princeton University Press decided to bring out a second edition of it as Contemporary Poetry in its paperback series. The prose issue, despite its size, had to be limited to only thirty-one writers, and selecting them proved excruciating. But eventually the Special Issues Retrospective and the all-criticism issues came out. Surely all four issues constitute the biggest little mags in the history of little maghood! But in America one might take it for granted that even the small must be large. Now we look to the future with a possibly somewhat different publishing program in mind. After the criticism issue we intend to 182

devote an issue to the complete poetry and whatever else we can

find of the poet David Schubert. We hope to include memoirs of him by friends and statements from poets who have recognized his unique worth and benefited from his brief yet signal practice.

And after that? What notions we have so far entertained require

brewing (brooding?) time. After thirty years of experience we count on being overtaken by surprise. Let the straw be ready when the music comes along. Postscript Now, many months later, we are happy to be able to say that the music has declared itself. We

plan to undertake something we consider fairly novel-namely, to cross the border between books and magazines. Many little mags

already devoted to miscel being written, commercial publishers are printing fewer books. We have therefore decided that, starting with our next volume, we will present, within a two-issue-per-volume subscription, several collec tions of poetry in each issue. These may consist of a single long are

lanies of poems. And, despite the great amount of poetry

poem or a suite of connected poems, a group of miscellaneous poems, a poetic play, a work of poetry translation. Since we know the trouble even well-established poets often encounter, the manu

scripts need not be first volumes. Each accepted work will receive a prize. This fellowship of several books together, and the fact of our subscriptions, should ensure each collection a readership much exceeding what individual books of poetry can normally expect. At some later date, as times and our mood change, we may devote our pages to prose instead, possibly long stories or novellas. Mean time, we feel we can most usefully employ our energies and QRL's space in this fashion. We have, it seems, decided to attempt our hallelujah on a larger scale.

183

James Boatwright, editor of Shenandoah (courtesy James Boatwright).

A MANIFESTO

(SOTTO VOCE) James Boatwright James Boatwright has taught at Washington and Lee University since 1961, where he began editing Shenandoah in 1962. He has served on the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and has

been a fiction judge for the National Book Awards. When he is not in Lexington,

Virginia, Mr. Boatwright travels in Greece and around Key West, Florida. He has published essays and reviews in The New Republic, The New York Times Book

Review, The Kenyon Review, Carleton Miscellany, and Revue des lettres modernes.

Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals

with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants

...

-Frank O'Hara

I come to this job of writing about Shenandoah with

almost

paralyzing diffidence, and one of the strategies it decrees is to examine the diffidence itself. What's behind this hesitation, this inability to be straightforward? Is it fear? Am I reluctant to be

explicit about editing because deep down I'm afraid I'll be found out, the old fraud at long last exposed? Or is it mere timidity, passivity, absence of purpose, waffling? Or is there some nobler, more honorable buried motive, growing out of the vague feeling that certain things (e.g. magazines) had best be left to speak for themselves, an uneasy impatience with those brave manifestos that often promise the world but deliver something less. The manifestos are fresh in my mind (this past spring I gave a short course on the literary magazine), their voices ranging from Wyndham Lewis's Blast to Lincoln Kirstein's elegantly sounded Hound and Horn and the opera buffa tomfoolery of Reed Whittemore's Furioso. Even more daunting than these manifestos are the essays that appear every seven years or so to pontificate 185

serious matters with a positively Amoldian weightiness: "The

Idea of a Literary Review" (Eliot); "The Function of the Critical

Quarterly" (Tate); "The Present Function of the Literary Quar terly" (Monroe Spears); "The Intellectual Quarterly in a Non Intellectual Society" (Philip Blair Rice). These essays and manifestos are daunting to me because they so little reflect my own experience with a magazine. I read them admiringly and with envy, on the one hand, the suave or fiery assurance of the manifestos, and, on the other, the essays' clarity of purpose, their coherence of thought, their loftiness of ideal. I come away chastened but somewhat puzzled. None of these pieces has much to say about the personal-about how much accident and serendipity may have to do with an editor's becoming editor and with his work as an editor, about the less exalted

circumstances and ambitions that are part of the editor's life (at least this editor's life). By now we've pretty much accepted the notion that writers write because they have to; it's a secular calling. Do editors edit because they have to? Am I being too Hobbesian

and small-minded in suggesting that these questions about personal

history and motive are too often glossed over, the editor springing before us full grown as spokesman for culture? When faced with the rhetoric of TriQuarterly's prospectus for this issue, I see something not far different from the rhetoric of those essays and manifestos, and I have the same response: a testy determination to play Peck's bad boy, to lower the tone of

discourse about certain

literary

institutions.

(This deflation is

desperately needed in our new literary bureaucracies where the language has gone berserk:

witness the solemn

designation of

master poets for hundreds of unknown poets in the schools, or the

shy-making prose and poems issuing from the office of the director of literary programs for the National Endowment for the Arts.) I intend to do this by looking at my own career with what I hope is a sufficiently cold and skeptical eye. It may be that mine is a unique history, in which case it could have at best only a mild clinical interest, but I'm obviously convinced that it's in some ways representative .

the fundamental ideology of little magazine editing since William Dean Howells took over at Harper's Monthly, the syncretic enthusiasm for a mixture .

of high and low...

186

-TriQuarterIy prospectus

What's mainly missing in my character, I think, is the kind of historical

sense

well demonstrated in the

preceding quotation.

William Dean Howells, syncretic enthusiasm, fundamental ideol

ogy! What editing a literary magazine provided me with was an escape from such language, the kind of language I associate most vividly with exams in graduate school. I began working with Shenandoah when I was twenty-eight, two years out of Duke, still fondly expecting to complete a doctoral dissertation (a critical edition of one of James Shirley's plays; no doubt some one has edited the play by now). In my early years at Washington and Lee I was teaching freshman English, the British survey, seven teenth-century poetry, getting up for eight o'clock classes six mornings a week, grading mountainous piles of papers, serving on the Registration Committee (i.e., doing what the computer does now)-when suddenly the job of editing Shenandoah dropped into my lap. Douglas Day, who had arrived at W. & L. the same year I did, had been offered that job and refused it. (Instead, he left for the University of Virginia, went on to write the biography of Malcolm Lowry and win the National Book Award.) I leaped at the chance to edit a magazine; I knew that in some obscure fashion it was what I had always wanted and been working toward. I had no preparation, no particular qualifi cations other than an intense interest in contemporary literature, no

training, no experience. As early as my grammar school years, when one of my friends

would take me to his grandmother's print shop, I had discovered

in myself this peculiar, almost erotic interest in papers and inks, in watching the

operations of the presses. In high school I did better in English than in any other subject, and when I reached the University of Georgia I studied journalism; I thought that was the way you became a writer. I tried working for the college paper but quit when they turned down my first story and put me to writing headlines. One summer during my college years I "interned" for a weekly paper in a small north Georgia town, and learned then that I didn't want to be a journalist. The only other literary job I had as an undergraduate was editing my fraternity "rush" pamphlet. But I was also taking creative writing courses, turning in tortured stories that all ended in suicide, reading Oscar Williams's anthology of modern poetry and the paperbacks 187

of Gide and Moravia and Hemingway and P. G. Wodehouse-any

novel written in the twentieth century.

My closest hometown friend, a student at Washington and Lee, had as a fraternity brother a boy named Tom Carter, who edited a magazine called Shenandoah. I had seen copies of it; there was nothing like that at the University of Georgia. The Georgia Review (the only academic magazine I'd heard of in high school; an uncle sent it to us) was a (literally) gray magazine devoted to tales of the Old South and to an annual bibliography of Georgia authors. Shenandoah edited

was

remarkable because it was

by a contemporary of mine (how could that be?) and

featured exotic writers (e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens) whom I knew

were

important even though I didn't know much about

them. I had even met Carter when I went to W. & L. one party

weekend, and I was surprised to find that he seemed only a little different from your ordinary KA. But the difference was significant.

by some young instructors in the English department, who within a couple of issues had selected Carter to be the editor, a job he held until .he graduated. Carter made the magazine; he gave it a stamp. He had edited a magazine when he was still in high school, and he was a great letter writer to the famous, including Pound. In the early years of the maga zine-in addition to CUltivating student talent like T. K. Wolfe, Shenandoah had been started

Jr., the contributor of several stories and now better known as Tom the Scourge of Mere Fiction-he pushed Pound and related

magi and hierophants like Wyndham Lewis, Peter Russell, Hugh Kenner, and Kenner's colleague Marshall McLuhan. After Carter graduated but continued to serve as adviser, there was also, per haps inevitably, a strong Agrarian bias in the magazine; it was too late to be Agrarian but not too late to act as the historian of the movement. I think what this all means is that the early Shenandoah had a real, if not altogether clear, ideology and identity. In retro spect it looks like an amateurish, smaller, somewhat more single minded version of the Sewanee Review or Southern Review.

Carter, following graduation, went to graduate school and taught; he also wrote criticism, receiving one of the Kenyon Review fellowships in criticism during these years (not very long

untimely death at thirty). At the magazine he was followed by other student editors, who published early after that came his

188

Flannery O'Connor and a Dylan Thomas issue. But none of them was a Tom Carter, and by the late fifties the editorship of the magazine had slipped into the hands of the faculty, where it lost whatever sense of identity it had made for itself. There it remained. Until I was made editor, for several years

each issue

was

edited

by a different member of the board of

drawn from the various academic departments: thus

publishers, the magazine had issues devoted to contemporary German litera ture, to Robert Graves, to Sherwood Anderson, etc., which made for great variety but not much continuity. Behind the placid and

simple exterior of those slim issues, all was chaos. A student more or less handled the meager subscription list (there was no secre tary) ; manuscripts were dutifully opened but, because most issues were special ones, they mostly got returned unread. In my first year or so, I found myself stuffing envelopes and licking stamps (the magazine didn't have second-class mailing privileges since it had been coming out only three times a year) and wondering what I was doing. What was I doing? What was I up to sixteen years ago? I was

only a little fuzzier on these matters then than I am now. I had and have no program, no plan, no easily articulated cause. As I've said, it was a job I simply wanted to do, from whatever obscure motives. Over the years, though, I have discovered some thing of what I've been up to. I didn't know it when I started, but editing Shenandoah would be a way for me to beat the system, to move on up the academic ladder without getting the sacred Ph.D. It would make my life

complicated, more interesting than the life of teaching and scholarship that graduate school seemed to be preparing me for. The editor of an academic literary magazine not only teaches (and basks in the security of tenure and dependable paychecks), but he works directly with writers and becomes the friend of

some.

And he has unmediated access to the world of literature

raw, not yet anthologized-where he is able to taste some of the

bohemianism and anarchy, the freedom from tacky academic do

mesticity which that world promises (although it doesn't always come through on its promises). If he gets drawn into the burgeon ing literary bureaucracies, he even experiences the jrissons of dab189

bling in the hard-nosed world of business and money. (Literary magazines don't have enough money; they are the victims of the vast commercial system; they deserve money. The magazine editor likes dropping by the Ford Foundation; he appreciates more than just the comedy as he sinks into a plush sofa and expatiates on these themes in the steely-eyed presence of a Foundation execu tive.) But the most important thing I learned about

editing is that

being close to a life I knew to be irreproachably plain to me that there are basically two kinds of editors of literary magazines: (1) those it was the surest way of my

desirable. It

who first find themselves

seems

writers and then go

to act as

editors for a variety of reasons (to use up excess energy, to fulfill an

authentic desire to mold taste, to shape the course of the art)

(2) those who first find themselves as editors, the next best thing to being writers. (Here, I guess, should also be included most editors in publishing houses.) These editors may go on to actually become writers as well. In the first group are such obvious examples as Pound, Eliot, Tate, Marianne Moore; in the second, Harriet Monroe, Margaret Anderson, George Plimpton, Ted Solotaroff, and (humbly, humbly) myself. I see myself as being further representative of an at least numerically significant sub and

group, the would-be writers who became teachers of literature (how many unpublished novels lie in the dark recesses of other wise respectable filing cabinets: "English 2 : Notes," "English 254:

the British Novel from Richardson to Dickens"?) but I find this insufficient gesture toward that luminous icon, the writer's life. Teaching and editing is a more intimate tactic, a multiplying an

of intensities, as the supplicant presses nearer the flame. of some of the political issues which inevitably arise in publishing a magazine, and which took particular form where the publishing of Shenandoah is concerned (a letter from the editors of We are interested in direct statement

TriQuarterly). I've been surprised by what I've learned about politics-that for me it's

interior, not exterior; personal, not public. My first response

to the above was, "What politics?" The only conventionally poli

tical incident happened a couple of years ago. The trustees of the university receive the magazine as a courtesy, and one day I had a

telephone call from a dean asking if a certain trustee's name

190

Shenandoah, Vol. 28, No.1, Fall 1976 (courtesy James Boatwright).

was still on our

mailing list. Yes, it was. Unfortunately the trustee's brother was receiving the magazine (the trustee having died with out the magazine's taking notice of that fact); he was a "friend of the university" and he didn't like what he saw. Would we kindly remove that trustee's name from our mailing list? We would and did. Otherwise, nothing. As far as I can tell, the powers-that-be approve of the maga zine, although there's little direct confirmation of this. The indirect confirmation is the continued approval of our modest budget, which has been allowed gradual increases similar to those granted to departments. 1 have never been directly criticized by anyone within the university for anything I've published (although there was some criticism in the early years for failing to review books by faculty members, but that has died down). The conclusion I draw is that it's largely unread on campus; certainly there aren't many faculty subscribers. 1 suspect that some of my colleagues disapprove of the magazine, see it as a waste of money or worse, but they don't tell me these things themselves. They might say them to the chairman of the board of publishers, but he and I have always had friendly relations. He has always seemed to respect, if he didn't necessarily admire, what was going on. It's been a marvel to me how little trouble there has been. Of course 1 realize the

situation could change overnight if there were a new president or other powerful figure who actively disliked or disapproved of the

magazine, or if 1 suddenly had grandiose notions for expanding it. Washington and Lee is a small private university; it has nothing to fear from outraged state legislators; and it probably sees Shenan doah as a relatively inexpensive means of certifying its interest in the arts, both within the university and in the outside world. But 1 know there is a political question, a personal one, dis turbing to me and many other southerners: what are my alle giances, how southern am I? And what is the relationship between my sense of being a southerner and the magazine? One thing is clear: a magazine in the South is expected to be southern. The only really nasty letters the magazine has received came several years ago when two reviews in the same issue were less than favorable to some fellow Southerners. My credentials as a southerner are in

order. 1 was born and bred in the South, and my ancestors fought on the

192

right side in the War. But I've already admitted to a deficient

historical sense, and I have no more than a passing interest in southern history. Although Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty are two of the writers I most admire, although the magazine has

gratefully published and interviewed writers like Peter Taylor, Reynolds Price, and James Dickey, although the last two have generously served as advisory editors for many years, I keep telling myself that it's not necessarily their being southern writers that draws me to them, and I bridle at the idea of Shenandoah as a southern magazine. What's the origin of these renegade feelings of mine, this fatal flaw? I am caught in that famous ambivalence of attitude toward this place, simultaneously grateful for what it

gives me and offended by what it demands of me. I have con sciously tried to reject the Calvinist, family-obsessed, bear-huntin' Faulknerian world for reasons fairly pure and desperately simple: I don't see how I can have my life and be a good 01' boy. I was criticized some time ago when I wrote a piece saying that I found Gone with the Wind a bore now, twenty years after I first read it, and the criticism

came

both from

columnist in an Atlanta paper) and from

expected sources (a surprising one-an

exceedingly intelligent and gifted writer friend who has, I think, less clay between his toes than I have but who expressed dismay that I had sold my birthright. Sold it? I'm still here, forty-five years on; I can't write an account of the dispossessed southerner, crouching ironically in a Manhattan cave or discovering in a chic Long Island resort touching reminders of his southern boyhood. I've stayed here, willy-nilly. For sixteen years I've edited a maga zine in a place where Robert E. Lee is not altogether humorously referred to as St. Robert, and I've more or less kept my wits about me as I walk a thin line between those who see me as a betrayer of the motherland and those who see me and the magazine as her embodiment. What I've done as an editor or reviewer has never

proceeded from a coherent, well thought-out position on Being a Southerner. Far from it: it has been truly reactionary-an un certain, faltering effort not to use my being southern, not to exploit it and make a career of it, not to sing those Rebel Blues. Alas, it's likely to end up one more lost cause. When I read Portnoy's Com plaint, it struck home like a hammer blow. For Jew I had only to substitute southerner: Sophie and Scarlett are kissing cousins, and not many of their kin escape their loving clutches. 193

They were right, my dear, all those voices were right And still are -w. H. Auden ....

And there have been other discoveries, some

surprising, some not. I've been chagrined to learn how unoriginal I am, how de pendent I am on other magazines for my conceptions of what Shenandoah ought to be, how much plain envy and Schadenfreude I'm capable of. The most obvious case: the Paris Review. I've al ways admired inordinately the format, the artwork, the fiction (the poetry is another matter), and the interviews (how shamelessly I've imitated those!). I liked the air of gentlemanly diversion the magazine sported, and Styron's introductory note in the first issue (it adamantly refuses to be a manifesto) struck a sympathetic chord, with its emphasis on fiction, its potshots at academic crit icism, its blithe indifference to politics. A few years ago, Plimpton became involved in a complicated controversy with the National Endowment for the Arts, and many of his fellow editors (myself included, I'm ashamed to say) self-righteously accused him of censorship. It seems clear to me now that envy of Plimpton's worldliness, assurance, and success had as much to do with our attack as any more virtuous motives. In other words, I don't think I'm alone in my uneasy, ungenerous feelings about the competition, but this isn't a sentiment that I've often heard expressed. Nor does anyone say much about the limitations of his maga zine, those limitations imposed not by the philistinism of the

stinginess of foundations but by the paucity of worthwhile manuscripts. Am I the only editor who has no backlog

culture

the

issue ahead, who wonders if there will be a next issue? (This doesn't hold true, I assume, for editors. The poetry editor of

of fiction, who has

never

been

poetry, poetry magazines, poetry Shenandoah, Dabney Stuart, recently resigned after ten years of hard work, and he always had more poems on hand than we could

publish.) This particular problem is no doubt closely linked to other defects of my character, including my inability to hustle; I'm shackled by my nice southern-boy politeness and dilettantism. Even my best friends (especially my best friends) have chastised me for not doing more with the magazine, for being lazy, hap hazard, unimaginative, for not giving it enough time-and they 194

right, my dear, all those voices are right. It's significant, isn't it, that when someone asks me how the magazine is doing, I invari ably say, "Oh, it's limping along." That poor invalid. And yet, despite the mea culpas, the perhaps overly masochistic inspection of the soft underbelly of the creature, despite the fact that I'm still bemused by all the larger questions, I do know why I edit. I believe there are reasons neither trivial nor self-serving, but they are still relentlessly personal, private: to celebrate and what? Disseminate? Promote? (Ah, the stiffening rhetoric!) I have wanted to celebrate those writers whose work has figured strongly in my life-Yeats, or Welty, or Auden. On two occasions not long ago I was moved to celebrate a place-Greece-and its literature, because coming to know that place has been as momentous for me as encountering "Among School Children," or Losing Battles, or "In Praise of Limestone." These passions are joined with a third, more general one: a passion for prose, fiction or nonfiction (did anyone else lament the disappearance of that surpassingly beautiful magazine Prose?) -regardless of length, or style, or subject matter, the authors famous or unknown-any prose that interests and moves me, heightens my sense of things. Dabney Stuart's dedicated and exacting work excepted, whatever value Shenandoah has had stems, I believe, from these passions. When I've been good at my job, I've acted freely; I've made unfettered choices and published them without any consideration other than their quality. A rare transaction, the real thing. are

...

195

Poetry yol. 85 no. 2

NOVEMBER

P R I Z E

AWARD

FRANK O'HARA

WILLIAM SAUNDERS CID CORMAN

$5.00 a year

1954

NUMBER

ROSALIND LEVINE TOM SCOTT DONALD JUSTICE

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY

JOHN J. GILL

HOLLIS SUMMERS

MERRILL MOORE

WILLIAM PILLIN

LAWRENCE P. SPINGARN

Reviews

MARY FRASER WALKER RICHARD EBERHART

by LEONIE ADAMS, REUEL DENNEY,

ANTHONY KERRIGAN, BYRON VAZAKAS & ROSS WURM

SO cents

Poetry Prize Award Number: winners for 1954 included William Carlos Williams (The Levinson Prize); Anne Ridler (The Oscar Blumenthal Prize for Poetry); Reuel Denny (The Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize); Reed Whittemore (The Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize); Hayden Carruth (The Bess Hokin Prize); and Dorothy Donnelly (The Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Prize).

KARL SHAPIRO AN INTERVIEW ON

PoETRY Michael Anania & Ralph J. Mills, Jr. Of Karl Shapiro's generation of poets, "the generation of Jarrell, Wilbur, myself, Roethke, Lowell, Schwartz, Bishop, Ciardi, Berry man, Kunitz; Nemerov, Whittemore-one is almost inclined to add Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith," Mr. Shapiro has written: "Our generation lived through more history than most or maybe any. We lived through more history even than Stendhal, who fell, as he says, with Napoleon. We were reared as intellectuals and fought World War II before it happened and then again when it did happen. We witnessed the god that failed and helped trip him up. We predicted the Alexandrianism of the age, and like everybody else, we throve on it. We drove our foreign cars to class to teach. And we bit the hand that fed us, but not very hard, not hard enough. The hand went on signing papers. Once upon a time we were all revolutionaries of one stripe or another, but when we got married and settled down, with tenure, we talked technique instead of overthrow. Half of us stopped rebelling and not because of middle age. The age made it so easy to be a poet, or to survive on

lobster, the age gave in so sweetly to our imprecations, the age so needed us to help it hate itself, this spineless age ended by soften ing the backbone of poetry." Karl Shapiro has been connected with libraries and universities most of his life. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945, served as the Librarian of Congress from 1946 to 1947, and has edited the following magazines: Poetry, from 1950 to 1956; the Newberry Library Bulletin, from 1954 to 1955; and The Prairie Schooner, from 1956 to 1966. He is currently serving on the editorial board of The California Quarterly at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches. Random House has published Mr. Shapiro's Collected Poems 1940-1978. 197

This interview was held in Chicago in November 1976, when Karl Shapiro was the featured poet on Poetry Day. In attendance and were Michael Anania (see his essay, the first in this volume) Jr. Mr. Mills, who was a member of the board of J.

Ralph

Mills,

trustees of Poetry in the early sixties,

has written about numerous

volumes of poetry. contemporary poets and is the author of several He teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.

Karl Shapiro, Summer 1954 (courtesy Poetry magazine).

In 1950, the first year you were editor at Poetry, you wrote

editorial which answered a letter from T. S. Eliot. There you agreed with Eliot that Poetry was not a little magazine but an institution. Eliot had said that little mags should have short lives and should exist under only one editor, and even referred to Criterion

little mag of that kind. In the editorial you said Poetry had several

functions. One was to discover and encourage new talent; a second was to print the new work of poets already known; and a third was to represent current

tendencies in poetry.

1 remember that shortly after 1 came to Poetry, Time magazine sent a

reporter over to Erie Street, and he said, "What is your

policy?" 1 was sort of horrified because 1 never thought of a literary magazine having a policy in Time's sense. 1 just said that well, we wanted to print the best poetry we could find, and new poets, and so on, and that 1 consciously tried to publish people who had never been published in a magazine before. Now, 1 may have over done that. 1 don't know. Some of those poets I've never heard of since. But some 1 have, like Frank O'Hara and Tomlinson.

Hayden Carruth was your predecessor. How long had he been editor-just a year or so, wasn't it? A very short time. There was

philosophical crisis then, and 1

have never really got to the bottom of it. (I think it was some factionalism over the New Criticism.) 1 don't want to get into a

fight with Allen Tate, but Allen was living here at the time and Hayden was his protege and had been made the editor of Poetry. Allen, I think, believed that this could be another organ of the New Critics. But anyhow, the old-timers got rid of Hayden. People couldn't get along with him. Was that the period when they were doing those critical supple ments, which were like teacher's guides to Poetry?

That's right. I couldn't understand the New Critics, so I thought it would be a good idea to get a glossary. The William Elton supple

ment, "A Glossary of the New Criticism," sold like crazy. Really esoteric. I knew that Poetry magazine carried a great deal of critical

weight, and so-in the same way Harriet Monroe used Ezra Pound as her foreign correspondent-I got Wallace Fowlie, who was a friend of mine and wrote some very good stuff, to get 199

good translations. And I didn't know Hugh Kenner, but I was leaning over backward to take away some of the obloquy or what ever it was that I had heaped on Ezra Pound, and I leaned over backward to get Kenner to be the critical editor. He wrote a lot of stuff there. He played some awful dirty tricks on me too, like

the attack on Delmore Schwartz, which was completely uncalled for. And I think I did get an article to sort of balance that, a kind of a pro-Schwartz article. You published eleven of Schwartz's poems in one issue.

Well, I was an admirer of Schwartz, but Kenner was out to get him. That happened to

several times.

Probably the best piece of

prose I published was an essay on Sandburg that William Carlos Williams did at my request. Maybe I was critically naive not to know what Williams was going to do-although it is one of his best essays-but it was a bad blow for Sandburg, who was never

friendly to me after that. I can't blame him. There was also a great fuss over the Dahlberg piece on Aiken.

Edward DahLberg. Photograph by Gerard Malanga.

200

Now that was another thing. Dahlberg, I think, is a kind of nut. He

asked

if he could review Conrad Aiken's

autobiography

Ushant, a beautiful book, and I was naive enough to think, well, if a man asks to review a book, it's because he likes it. How wrong I was. And Aiken wanted to sue Poetry. He made us reprint parts of his original text-there were so many errors. I lost his friendship over that.

But you used Dahlberg?

I tried to avoid him, but he was so persistent. And I must say I do

admire the cranky kind of prose he writes, with a sort of Old Testament nuttiness. And I admire the beautiful books that New Directions used to make out of it. You did an issue on two poetry workshops. Paul Engle presented some

of his students from the University of Iowa workshop, and

Theodore Roethke presented some of his from the University of Washington. I don't think there's ever been another issue like that. Roethke wrote that piece "The Teaching Poet" for it.

Another thing I tried to do was publish special issues of foreign

poets in translation. We did a Greek one with Kimon Friar. In my last year as editor I was in India, getting translations. (I'd already left Poetry but was collecting material for it.) I think

Henry Rago did publish an Indian issue later on. But that material was very hard to get because most people in India write what I call Anglo-English-weird English. You published that issue which Wallace Fowlie edited on the postwar French poets, and you usually published translations. You did six poems of Max Jacob's and some of Marianne Moore's La Fontaine fables. Did you feel that American readers ought to

know more about European literature? I published all those translations partly because of my interest in

foreign poets and partly because I was a bad linguist. I was very much in love with poets like Rilke and Lorca, but I could read

them only in translation. In my own work I relied very heavily on

foreign poets as well as contemporary English and American ones, so I liked to get as much of them as were

possible-when the translations

good and had some life in them. 201

People like Robert Bly have maintained that in the forties and fifties there was a tendency to block 00 A merican literature from foreign influences, that only a few poets like Valery or Rilke were translated, and that therefore American poets became somewhat insular.

Well, I wasn't aware of that then because I was publishing transla tions of Rilke and Stefan George and so on. It seemed to me there was quite a lot going on in translation of foreign poets. Wasn't there an issue of Poetry that was mostly devoted to Juan Ramon Jimenez?

Yes, I guess so. Shortly after he had won the Nobel Prize. What do you think about the business of a magazine's

being an

institution?

I've thought a lot about that over the years, and I really do believe this isn't just a puff. I really believed then, and I do now, that Poetry could not have been founded anywhere but in Chicago, and it could not have survived in any other place. I can't see that magazine in New York or London or Paris. It wouldn't work there. It rose out of the Middle West poetry movement, which was the

big authentic American poetry movement in the country, and it was a perfectly natural flowering of the whole Chicago renaissance. When I lived in Chicago and the Middle West I always felt that I was somewhat protected from what is nowadays called the New York/ eastern establishment. In those days I didn't believe in what some people have called the Jewish literary Mafia in New York you know, the New York Review of Books and all that stuff. New York was not so coordinated then, literarily speaking. It was mostly

just a center of publishing. The literary magazines were not pub lished in New York; they were published in other parts of the country and in universities, except for commercial ventures like the Saturday Review. I felt very strongly that Chicago had the right kind of insulation for Poetry magazine to flourish and survive.

In that sense I think Eliot was right: Poetry did become a Chicago institution. But in another sense, as I soon discovered, it really institution because of being a part of other institutions

was an

the Newberry Library, the University of Chicago, the opera, the

Arts Club, the Art Institute-because the magazine was backed 202

by the same people who were backing the big institutions in Chicago. For a while I thought, well, that's a bad thing. It's a kind of a gang. There were some people who said it was terrible for all of these aristocrats to be running this magazine. But then I began to see that this was why it existed. Yes. It's still that way, I think. Look at the patrons and the members of the Modern Poetry Association; they're essentially the

people-or members of their families, or relatives-who back the Art Institute and are trustees of the University of Chicago.

same

Except for a kind of cornball city like San Francisco, this is really the only city in the United States where that kind of patronage works well-as it might in, say, a European city. I think that's great.

In the early sixties, I guess, I was at a meeting in Washington which was

conducted

panel,

by the Carnegie Foundation.

You

talking about the disaster of magazines'

were

the

being funded by

universities and eventually, as it turned out, by the government.

Well, you know, I do these redneck things. That meeting was at the Library of Congress, on the little magazines. Well, I was telling the little magazines to stay away from government money. That was my position and everybody said, get rid of him. In fact Allen Tate and Wayne Booth very carefully planned an attack on me, to cut me to ribbons. They said, don't pay any attention to him.

He's just an entertainer. I don't think Allen Tate ever got over the shock of In Defense of

Ignorance. That book made me lose practically all my friends. It was the end of my

friendship with Allen. I had a bitter experience at the Prairie Schooner, where I was fired--or, rather, urged to quit. (Now, that was interference, academic interference.) I had wanted

to publish a story that mentioned a homosexual. It was set in galley

proofs, but I went away, probably to Europe, and the acting editor held the galleys for a whole year. When I came back I demanded that the story be published. The staff went to the chancellor, who used to look over the galleys of the Prairie Schooner-which I didn't know-and his decision was to cut the story. So I resigned from the magazine and began to look for a job elsewhere. 203

Ezra Pound shown shortly after his release from

Washington, D.C. (the Bettmann Archive).

St. Elizabeth's Hospital,

T. S. Eliot diagramming a play at Princeton University (the Bettman Archive).

Then you said you were going to go on the radio and read the story.

Oh, I did. And they said if you did that, they would have you arrested. I did that heroic thing. They had a nice little FM station there in

Lincoln, Nebraska, and I said, I'm going to read the story on the radio. The university said that if I did (they had a sheriff's car there), they were going to arrest me and also the guy who owned the station. But

they didn't. I read the story and everybody in

Lincoln listened to it. You wouldn't believe how innocuous that

story was. What got the university administration was that it men tioned homosexuals in an English department.

Nobody interfered with anything when you were at Poetry maga zine? Never. No, wait a minute. As a matter of fact, there was one thing I tried to do that I shouldn't have done because Poetry was not the

right place for it. I had a friend at the Newberry, an ex-German who was very aware of all the Nazi business. He was also an editor at

the University of Chicago Press; Fred Wieck, his name was.

The Press was going to publish a book by Morton Grodzins that was the first

really good sociological study of the Japanese concen tration camps out west. The University of Chicago Press had accepted it and it was going to be published; but here's where we get into big politics. Hutchins was persuaded by Governor Earl Warren of California to suppress the book. So one of the editors

from the Press came to me for help. He said, "Will you publish

suppression?" I said yes, and he wrote the letter. I was going to have it set-maybe in Poetry

letter that I will write exposing this

it was set-when the magazine's board got wind of it. Now, there was some

interplay between the trustees of the University of Chicago

and the board of Poetry Magazine. They got wind of the letter and

they persuaded me not to publish it-I forget how, but I knuckled under. Maybe Poetry was not the place for it, or maybe it was. I don't know.

though, do you think that dealing with an institution, one guided by the kinds of culturally concerned people who exist in Chicago, was much better than dealing with a university? In general,

206

Yes, because I was let alone. You know, as editor of Poetry you really did have autonomy. Maybe I was conditioned to a certain extent. For example, I remember that Paul Goodman once sent a group of obscene poems. Now, I had published some of Paul's poetry, and some of it was very good. But I couldn't print

these. You know, you couldn't use "shit" and "fuck" in Poetry; it had never been done, and back in the fifties it would have meant the suppression of the magazine. Wouldn't it? In the fifties? Any way, Paul wrote back a huffy note, saying I was a prude. Do you recall that the first issue of Big Table was originally set as

of the Chicago Review? The problem there was the material by Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, and others which offended some people.

issue

I've often asked myself what I would have done. I left Poetry magazine just at the time that "Howl" was about to be published.

Well, I was a great admirer of "Howl," but if Ginsberg had sent me that poem, would I have put my life on the line? I don't know the answer to that. You did publish it in your anthology. I

was

the first

one

publish it in an anthology. I told Bill

O'Connor, who was the general editor of that series, that I would do an American anthology on one condition-that he would let

publish that poem in it. And O'Connor said fine. A secretary at the publishing company, Crowell, actually went out of her mind. She had to be put away because of reading that poem.

You never got poetry manuscripts from any of the Beats? I was going to Japan about that time. I was in San Francisco, and I got in touch with Ferlinghetti. The trial was going on, the "Howl"

thing, and I told him that if I could be of any use, as a favorable witness or something like that, I'd be glad to appear. But the trial went very well and I was never asked to do anything. I think they considered me a sort of friendly enemy-or not really that; they considered me a sympathizer, but somebody from the other world, which they had long since dropped out of. Even Rexroth used to say that whenever he went across the bridge to Berkeley he needed a passport. That was when Berkeley was a university, and not a nest. 207

I think I was a very terrible business manager, and still am. I mean, if it weren't for Teri I'd be on welfare. But financially at

Poetry magazine we went from bad to worse. We were supported or four years, secretly, by the Bollingen Foundation. did not want it to get out because a lot of other magazines They would say, well, help us, too. Without Bollingen we wouldn't have survived, and when that support ran out, we were really in trouble. That was when Ellen Stevenson remodeled the house she lived in, for three

the castle she was born in across from the Drake Hotel, and we moved our offices there. There were other cultural on

things going

in there, too.

Didn't they have something like a poetry club?

Well, the idea was sound, but the papers ridiculed it out of existence for political reasons. They were out to get Adlai through his ex-wife, whom they delineated as "this crazy woman." But the idea was sound. The Modern Poetry Association Club, or whatever it would be called, was to have a public membership. You paid

something like twenty-five dollars a year and you could use the bar, which was a beautiful bar, and also attend the poetry readings, and other stuff went with the membership, too. If we had had a good business manager, which we didn't-Mrs. Stevenson's busi ness manager didn't give a damn about poetry and thought it was a waste of time because there were better things she ought to be doing with her money-it might have worked. When I precipitated a crisis on the board, in which she was forced to resign and so was I-at that point the magazine collapsed. And so we had to move to the attic of the Newberry Library, which we got rent free. In the wintertime we almost froze to death. We drank vodka to

keep warm. But we got the magazine out. Those issues are inter esting; they're printed on butcher paper-you know, very cheap paper, the cheapest paper there was. That went on for about a year, and then I got this job at Berkeley. What was the circulation of the magazine then?

Well, I'm just guessing, but I don't think it was over 5,000. I don't know what it is now.

Oh, it's about 10,000. I think it runs between 8,000 and 10,000. One of the problems with editing the magazine now is that there 208

are so many poets and the

weight of manuscripts is just incredible.

I don't know what Daryl's [Daryl Hine, editor] numbers are

...

They're getting something like 5,000

He told us the other day.

poems a month. When I edited poetry for Partisan for a while,

26,000 poems

they were getting

year and published only fifteen or twenty. And

the whole period when I was at Swallow we got about 3,600 book

length manuscripts a year. That's like ten a day. What do you make of that? I think there are too many poets now. There was a kind of Arcady

back there in the fifties when there were fewer poets and a more coherent sense of who was who. I've now come back to what I call the B-S-K Theory of Poetry there can be only three poets at a time, such as Byron,

Shelley,

and Keats. At least two of them died early. Well,

now

there are a thousand

magazines in America that publish poetry. And dictionaries of names, addresses, and phone numbers of poets which the taxpayers are paying for because they

are

covered in

part by the National Endowment for the Arts. That's really funny. Somebody's got to write a poem about that. I've tried. I'm going to. And the supplements

bureaucracy

we're

...

living

in.

I think it's all part of this whole sick

Everything else has been bureau new generations of

it's poetry. Look at all these cratized; people who've taken creative writing classes. now

What was your sense of the world of people writing poems and

contributing to Poetry in the fifties? We used to complain then that there were too few places for poets to

get published and that there were too few readers of poetry,

but we certainly did not feel that we were being overwhelmed by paper. We had three or four or five readers. I discovered Isabella Gardner. She sent some poems to me, and I thought they were

very good. I published them and asked her to come and be a reader. She was the most faithful one I had in five years. She was there every morning at nine o'clock and would stay all day long, 209

reading, weeding out the bad stuff. I think it must have been easier in the fifties to weed out bad

poetry than it is now, because now

everybody who takes a creative writing course has a bag of tricks which can fool you. Louis Simpson says they write one damned thing after another. They can't bring a poem to a conclusion; they just keep going at a

certain momentum; they don't know how to stop.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

....

I'm thinking of another thing that

didn't happen then. There were some classic bohemian bum poets, like Bodenheim and Dylan Thomas, living out a kind of nine

teenth-century Bloomsbury style. But there were only a few of those. Nowadays "poet" also means what they call a life style. You mayor may not write poems, but you can call yourself a poet, and you have a set of values which you can throw at anybody at any time. There are millions of those people running around loose in California. The English have a certain fascination with Bukowski and Norse and people like that. Now Bukowski, I think, is an authentic poet He was over at our

house and threatened to tear it apart. A wonderful artist had loaned us a

couple of his paintings, beautiful abstractions. Bukowski sat

down on the sofa, and somebody said to him, "What do you think of that painting?" He said, "Vulgar bourgeois shit." The idea of Bukowski's using the word "vulgar" is priceless. He

gives readings and a lot of people you'd never associate with poetry come to the readings in leather jackets, carrying six-packs of beer and bottles of whiskey, to egg him on, and then he sits there and belches through a reading. The British, though, love this. London Magazine, which has a publishing subsidiary, has published two or three of Bukowski's books over there, and they got big reviews. People talk about him as if they were talking about Hemingway. The multiplication of poets-it sort of leaves my mind blank. I

don't know what to do with them. I get all these magazines-they

just come flooding in-and they all sound the same. Now and then there's a good one. Kayak is a good one; Hitchcock knows what he's doing. It's consistent and it's amusing. It's a lot of fun sometimes, 210

but that's pretty rare nowadays. The other day somebody sent me copy of Sewanee Review, which I hadn't seen for years. I was amazed-such big beautiful black type, and poems in stanzas, and a

serious articles about Elizabethan plays. So I guess the old tradition

persists in pockets. Am I mistaken? I have a feeling that Poetry magazine is still holding its own, and is still strong. It's always been lampooned by the avant-garde from the day Harriet Monroe started it. But I always have the feeling-I get it every month, and sometimes I can't stand it when the poems are kind of dead-that it is still the touchstone. When Henry Rago was editing the maga

zine, I was kind of bewildered. I could never quite grasp Henry's poetry, and the poems he published seemed to be of his kind. I mean, they had a certain diffuseness, which could have been in some

European symbolist tradition or something like that.

He also had a strong feeling for the Black Mountain

people

Duncan, Creeley, and Levertov-and also for the neglected ob

jectivists. He gave a whole issue to Louis Zukofsky, and a whole issue, or almost a whole issue, to Basil Bunting. And he published David Jones. But then he had a set of extra-poetic interests, which were theological and mystical.

Maybe I'm getting mellow or something, but I like the physical appearance of the magazine. I think Daryl Hine has done some thing with it, and I like whatever that artwork is. It's interesting certainly more so than just printing names. And it does seem to me that, whenever I get it, it is a magazine I read through. I don't do that with many literary magazines, at least with many poetry magazines. I can't bear most of the stuff; it seems so ill written and so ill

conceived.

Would you want to be editing a magazine now?

No, and I often thank God I'm not. We started a magazine called California Quarterly, but it's partly a teaching tool. It's not a great magazine, but it helps us in our creative writing program. We're now using it to teach our graduate students how to edit, which I think every writer should know. When I was editing, I did like it -it's exciting. But I think you have to be younger than I am to want to do that now.

211

What was the atmosphere around the

Poetry offices during the time you were editing? Were there lots of people who came in from out of town? Was it a place people would visit when they came through? It

rather

exciting, because poets from all over the world Chicago, and when they came to Chicago they would always come to the office. We'd take them out for martinis. Once there was an English poet who, I found out later, hadn't eaten for three days. And all we gave him were martinis! Then he got on a bus and went to Seattle or some place. There were literary get-togethers, and we gave T. S. Eliot a cocktail party, which was a kind of highlight. And we had good relations with English department people at the University of Chicago. But then, of course, there was the Hayakawa crisis. Marge, his wife, was was

would come through

associate editor and, I believe, was still associate editor when I arrived. There was a South Side poetry magazine faction that cen tered around

Hayakawa-not around his wife Marge. I think Hayakawa wanted to be the editor. He was editing Etc., the semantics magazine, and he had a strong interest in Poetry. As far as I know, he himself did not write poetry, but he always had poets at his house. Anyway, I did a terrible thing, I fired Harriet Monroe's secretary. She'd been there since the magazine started and was a very close friend of Hayakawa's. This was a shock to them. First Don tried to get me fired, but I was too new, and I had allied myself with the North Side faction. So I was protected. It was kind

of a civil war. Everybody who was on his team resigned from the board. There were also literary quarrels at the mag during that time. The essay Williams did

Sandburg, for one; and then that brief

exchange between Carruth and Yvor Winters. It had something to do with new critics, or maybe with Winters'

peculiar ideas of what was a good poet. You know he would say things like "the four greatest poets in English literature are Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marilyn Schmiddling" (who was sitting in the first row). He came to a poetry reading of mine once. I didn't want him to come, but he came and sat in the first row. Afterward he didn't say one word about my poems. We just talked

about Airedale dogs, which he was raising. 212

I think the Carruth thing had to do with poets who were teachers.

Carruth was down on the idea of poets' teaching. He had had a very bad experience with teaching. I'm glad to see

that he's now writing and reviewing. I think he would have made

good editor, but he might have been too limited and maybe his tastes were too sharp. A poetry magazine's got to have some play in it, some flexibility. The Poetry editor I liked best was George Dillon in the late forties. He was the one who originally printed my poems in Poetry and really got me going. And under his editorship the magazine was printing those early Auden poems and beautiful MacNeice lyrics, and it was very fresh and bouncy. a very

You published one of the important Auden poems, "The Shield

of Achilles." We gave him

big special prize for that, in 1954. Sort of a

cooked-up deal,

in a way. I think Auden knew about the prize

and knew he would win it. * Do you remember all those auction dinners? When the auction

started, after dinner, waiters would go around with trays of cham pagne. All the librarians would come, and they kept drinking the

champagne and raising their hands and, of course, my God, some beautiful items were auctioned off. The time Auden was there, they had one of his manuscripts to auction off. I think it was just a fine copy, a handwritten manuscript, of "The Shield of Achilles." Beforehand Auden said, "l have to get the hell out of here." John Ciardi was the auctioneer, and Auden said, "Ciardi's going to make me come up there, and stand there while they auction oD this poem."

Poor Auden, I was really shocked when he died. I don't think he had lost his touch at all. It reminds

poetry.

much of

Augustan

I mean Roman poetry. All that beautiful indirection and

sophistication Looking back, I am rather pleasantly surprised to see that I did publish so many good poets. .

"Editor's note. As announced in Poetry (May 1954), the award was made to Auden "in consideration of his entire lifetime's work." The statement of the award committee said in part: "Auden is a man who expresses himself acutely, and with

poetic vivacity. In his identity as an American he has become a permanent part of American poetry."

213

You did those nonsense poems, the children's poems-and a whole group of Roethke's.

And then I got Roethke to do a review of a Dylan Thomas book

(In Country Sleep), which he wrote under an assumed name. Yes, "Winterset Rothberg." He called it "One Ring-Tailed Roarer to Another."

And I published John Logan. Ben Belitt. And Merwin, very early Merwin.

Marianne Moore, Patchen, Stevens, Viereck

...

And a chunk of Williams' Paterson. At the same time, I think the magazine itself has got to take credit for a lot of this. How many places were there for poets to send their stuff to? What other place was there to send it? Maybe there were

half a dozen suitable magazines around, but Poetry was the most

dignified. Was The New Yorker competing, in the sense of publishing good verse at that

point?

I think so, although I've always been a little bit puzzled by The New Yorker's literary policy. I sometimes think they were publish

ing the not-quite-best poems of the good poets-not Roethke's really good poems, or Auden's, because the readers had their own limitations too. I mean, the guys who ride the New York New Haven and Hartford trains to Westport are not going to read "The Shield

of Achilles." But they'll read a poem about Central Park. Were there any other magazines you thought of as being your com petition? Some that would want to get a poem before you got it? I don't recall that we had that problem. How many purely poetry

magazines were there? The good magazines, like Partisan Review, and Kenyon, and so on, had some poetry, but they came out only three or four times a year. I think we had the pick. For one thing, Poetry magazine was and is in every university library. English professors read it. Critics read it, no matter what they say about it. They look at it, they're aware of it. And having been published in Poetry is a good mark, a plus that counts when they're up for a promotion. You know, Poetry has authority. 214

The reviews were

interesting because they came from so many different directions and because there was no policy governing them, so you could always be surprised by the position some re viewers would take. I think Paterson got a negative review in

Poetry. That might have been Randall Jarrell's review. He liked books 1 and 2, but he didn't like 5. I loved Jarrell's prose. There are some other poetry magazines that would like to take a

general eclectic course, like American Poetry Review and Poetry Now. I like Poetry Now better because there are more poems in it. I do too. I really read it through, because it does print lively, good

writing. I'd be interested in what you thought of APR when Stephen Berg

doing it all by himself. He was making the choices, and doing bold and, I think, exciting things. Now what has evolved is a board of editors-six editors-whose personal taste I can't figure out. was

I agree with Eliot. 1 think the editor of a literary magazine should be an autocrat. It should be one guy. I once sent a poem to one of those tabloid poetry magazines; they rejected it.

(I don't know whether you noticed, in Poetry magazine, that long translation from Metamorphoses about Philomel.) 1 sent it to Daryl, and put at the bottom of my letter, "A certain magazine (that looks like a newspaper) sent this back saying the plot was weak." 1 think he liked the poem for that reason. One of these days I'm going to write a novel (I think it's got to

be a novel) of that period when I was at Poetry because of all the weird involvements, even including national politics.

215

THE CARE AND FUNDING OF PEGASUS Joseph Parisi

to right: Henry Rago, W. H. Auden, Poetry Prize Day, November 1958. Left Karl Shapiro; (right foreground) Marion Strobel and Mrs. A. Rowe; (in doorway) Robert Mueller and John Rowe (courtesy Poetry magazine).

As associate editor 0/ Poetry magazine, Joseph Parisi has numbered among his duties the first reading 0/ the 60,000 unsolicited poetry

manuscripts received each year, the production of the magazine's monthly issues, fund raising, and liaison between the magazine and its board of trustees. Houghton Mifflin has just published The

Poetry Anthology: 65 Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine, co-edited by Mr. Parisi and former Poetry editor Daryl Hine. Mr. Parisi has been the associate editor of Poetry since 1976. He is a specialist in eighteenth-century literature, has a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and is writing a book on his period called Mobs and Lords. He has published several articles in the Contemporary Poets, Novelists, and Dramatists series edited in London by James Vinson, and has written numerous reviews on poets and novelists for The New Leader, Poetry, and the Chicago Tribune.

Poetry in a sense ceased to be a little magazine almost two decades before 1950. Conventionally defined, as T. S. Eliot wrote Karl Shapiro in that year, the little magazine has a single editor, a small circulation, and a short life span, rarely exceeding that of the founding editorship. Poetry, Eliot continued, was no longer a little magazine but an Institution. How the magazine achieved its special status in literary history is well known. Less familiar are the financial and administrative

affairs of the magazine-a complex, evolving story often as entan

gled as its literary correspondence and relationships. If, as Stephen Spender has written, Poetry is unique in having published virtually every important poet in English of the century, it is also sin gular in its economic resourcefulness. For all its years of continuous monthly publication, and even with its illustrious roster, its exis tence has been precarious. Had the magazine been forced to depend solely upon poetry lovers or literati, it would have gone the way of so many of its fellows and rivals who had equally distinguished contributors and

even

better known editors. It has survived to

become an internationally recognized forum because it has been a

Chicago institution. Poetry is still very much the magazine

Harriet Monroe founded. 217

Anyone acquainted with the history of Poetry cannot help being struck by its continuous adherence to the first principles of its founding editor. From the beginning, Miss Monroe declared that Poetry would have an "open door"; it would not be a factional organ or the mouthpiece of a coterie or currently fashionable move ment. (That is why, when she frustrated his attempts to campaign in the prose section, Ezra Pound resigned as her first foreign correspondent.) Nor did she want it to be an academic or scholarly journal; the magazine would avoid critical and theoretical biases. Only in its most desperate hours did her successors consider university affiliation. Thus, whatever the disagreements about the particular tastes of individual editors-and there have been plenty -their integrity has not been in doubt. Miss Monroe knew that to establish the magazine and keep it going with editorial freedom required money, without strings. To their credit, her first sup only gave generously-they never interfered with editorial policy. This pattern of private philanthropy with editorial independence has continued to the present. In 1912 the annual budget for the magazine was $5,000, much of it going to pay contributors. Harriet Monroe was not rich herself, but she was well known, at least in Chicago. She was

porters

not

also well connected, since her father, H. S. Monroe, had been a

prominent lawyer. On the advice of well-placed friends she made her rounds to the socialites and to the leading industrialists, bankers, and lawyers. Appealing to their civic pride-these were, after all, the people who funded the Art Institute, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the University of Chicago, the museums she got 108 backers to pledge fifty dollars apiece annually for five years. Her list of guarantors reads like a social register of Chicago in the teens of this century: Ryerson, Lathrop, Moody, McCormick, Insull, Palmer, Pullman, Field, Burnham, Borden, Blair. Beyond the listing in the magazine, and the personal satis

faction of helping the "experiment," the guarantors got little else, not even good publicity. Literary magazines do not offer the

glamour that other, more highly visible cultural enterprises can afford.

Poetry

at this time had no board of

trustees,

nor

would it

thirty years. Miss Monroe did select an but it was only advisory. (Even in awarding advisory committee,

have

218

one

for almost

Poetry

Arthur Davison Ficke

I am the Woman

William Vaughan Moody

To Whistler, American

Ezra Pound

Middle Aged

Ezra Pound

Fish of the Flood To One Unknown

Emilia Stuart Lorimer -

Helen Dudley

Symphony of a Mexican Garden Editorial Comment

Grace Hazard Conkling

As it was On the Reading of Poetry of the Magazine -

The Motive

Notes and Announcements

543 Cass Street, Chicago Copyrfllht 1912 by Harriet Monroe.

All rlllhta r_ve4.

Poetry, Vol. 1, No.1, October 1912 (courtesy Poetry magazine).

the prizes, the committee merely confirmed whomever the editor

chose.) There was no doubt about who ran the magazine. But Poetry in those days, and for many years after, was a very informal organization. The atmosphere at Cass and Erie streets was more like that of a club than

editorial, let alone business, office.

Poets and friends (but only a very select group of guarantors) were

continually dropping by to read manuscripts, argue, listen to

chief assistant Alice Corbin Henderson's witty remarks, and to eat Miss Monroe's candy and the impromptu meals she whipped over

starving,

bonfire out back.

and Miss Monroe

Many of the poets were literally was

known

soft touch. The

custom of entertaining traveling poets was important not only for

indigent rhymesters but also for support of the magazine. It kept Poetry's sponsors "involved"; thus Miss Monroe could always count on her friends to help meet the deficits. With Pound exporting material from England and Alice Corbin Henderson sifting through the daily domestic sludge, Miss Monroe had little difficulty filling Poetry with interesting work during the first five years or so. Although she printed poems by well-known figures such as William Vaughn Moody and William Butler Yeats, she discomfited the literary establishment by presenting then radical work in vers libre. Along with Pound's so-called Imagists Richard Aldington, H. D., Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), and James Joyce-she published the earliest works of several future standard authors: T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost. Marianne Moore. Ever the populist, she

also presented and continued to champion Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and other midwesterners, and devoted several issues to American Indian, Negro, southern, and

"folk" poetry, as well as to cowboy songs and ballads. Other special issues featured poets under twenty-three, verse by children, and war

poems.

When costs doubled after the First World War, she found it increasingly difficult to balance the books. Like the poets, she had to keep knocking on doors. In the 1920s she lent her pages

Objectivists (edited by Louis Zukofsky), to a Spanish American number and an English number (edited by Basil Bunting and Michael Roberts), and to the "social poets" (edited by Horace Gregory). But as financial problems grew, editorial quality diminished. Along with the guarantors, she was losing to

the

220

important contributors to rival publications which had sprung up after her pioneering success. Luminaries were being replaced by ladies with three names; a distressing number of dull issues in the twenties and thirties

are

filled with mediocre and paro

chial verse. Harriet Monroe did not believe the magazine could continue after her death. With

typical generosity, she stipulated in her

will that all of Poetry's papers and books should go to the University of Chicago. An anonymous donor also provided a fund to buy books, to add to what became the Harriet Monroe

Collection. Had the magazine been able to retain and eventually sell this treasury, it would, of course, have been financially secure,

perhaps indefinitely. After her death in Peru in 1936, tributes poured into the office, along with protests from writers, editors, and friends around the country that a magazine with such an unprecedented history should not be allowed to die. Despite the depression, staff and supporters decided to persevere. Morton Dauwen Zabel, who had been acting editor during Miss Monroe's trip, took over, staying for a year. The high point of his brief tenure was the famous English Issue (January 1937), which he invited W. H. Auden and Michael Roberts to edit. Zabel too became

occupied with raising money and put together a brochure featuring all the poets whose works had appeared in Poetry during the past twenty-four years. When he returned to teaching, George Dillon, with Inez Cunningham Boulton as first reader, took over the gravely ailing magazine. Things continued touch and go, then became critical when the second of two emergency grants from the Carnegie Foundation ran out in 1940.

As it

happened, that year Inez Boulton had introduced the young Dillon to Augustine Bowe, later chief justice of the Chicago Municipal Court, and his wife Julia, who were staying at their sum mer place in Palos Park. Theywere immediately charmed, especially JUlia, who shared Dillon's knowledge and love of French poetry. This meeting, along with Gus Bowe's love of poetry of all kinds, helped form one of the most important relationships the magazine has had. In the evenings the judge argued politics but wound up discussing poetry with a Palos Park neighbor-industrialist and financier J. Patrick Lannan, who more than anyone responsible for rescuing the magazine in later years.

was

Since current fund-raising was ineffective-and especially difficult 221

because of the war-Judge Bowe suggested the magazine try the

techniques that the Art Institute and other Chicago cultural institutions used, and immediately had his nephew and law partner, same

John Casey, draw up papers of incorporation. (Through the years,

lawyers have played prominent roles at Poetry.) The papers arrived in August 1941, giving the Modern Poetry Association not-for-profit status. At the same time Julia Bowe and Marcia Masters (the poet Edgar Lee Masters' daughter, who volunteered reader at the magazine) decided that, to get anywhere or anything, the backing of Chicago's "old guard" was essential. They as a

asked Marion Strobel

Mitchell, herself

with

Poetry,

MacLeish read

help.

poet long associated

Washington, ex-Chicagoan Archibald

benefit whose list of sponsors was headed Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Leading writers and editors in

California and

at a

the East Coast also contributed. Within six

weeks, $3,000 was raised, enough to get the magazine through the current year. Earlier, Dillon had had to print an announcement that the June 1942 issue might be the last; in October he was able to list 180 sponsors. Since the magazine continued to need money, Julia Bowe, who chaired the Committee on Funds,

organized a lecture series on

modern art. Frank Lloyd Wright, David Daiches, Arthur Meeker,

Jr., Daniel Catton Rich, president of the Art Institute, and Rudolph Ganz, president of the Chicago Musical College,

enlightened good crowds at the Arts Club in 1943-and broad ened the support of Poetry. Peter DeVries, who was editor with John Frederick Nims, Marion Strobel, and Jessica Nelson North while Dillon was in the service, also invited James Thurber to speak; Thurber provided Poetry with a new drawing of the

Pegasus. (DeVries eventually joined The New Yorker.) Thus began the benefits and other ventures that have helped sustain Poetry until now.

Important as they were, the Committees on Funds at first had no formal standing. Indeed, the most important contributors often weren't members of the Board; even today, many of the most generous patrons have no official connections with Poetry. In 1941, the Board of Trustees was composed of staff only; there were just four members. In 1945, the Board grew to eleven; the staff, as officers, were joined by William Monroe, Judge and Mrs. Bowe,

Arthur Leonard of the Continental Bank 222

(business expertise was

sorely needed), sometime staffer Katinka Loesser (Mrs. DeVries), S. I. Hayakawa, then an assistant professor of linguistics at Illinois Institute of Technology, and circulation manager Margedant Peters (Mrs. Hayakawa). In 1947, the Board was further enlarged to thirteen, and the bylaws were changed to admit sustaining, but nonvoting, members (i.e. sponsors). Bylaws notwithstanding, a casual atmosphere still prevailed. All the trustees were old friends, and the social and literary aspects of Poetry were pleasantly combined, particularly on Saturdays when staff, trustees, and visiting poets, many returning from the war, formed a kind of Algonquin Round Table West at Mike Fish's Restaurant. In 1946 Julia Bowe organized a "Purse for Pegasus" benefit at the Casino Club, at which Thomas C. Lea, a retired businessman, expressed an interest in Poetry. He soon became treasurer of the Modern Poetry Association. (The treasurer, who had no discernible literary expertise, also came by the office to read manuscripts.) He lost no time in writing the Bollingen Foundation and getting a $10,000 grant for 1947, which was renewed for 1948 and 1949. It looked

benefits

would be required, at least unti11950. Fanny Butcher, book editor of the Chicago Tribune, also joined the Board and saw to it that

Poetry got good press coverage. In 1947 the magazine brought out its first Critical Supplements, edited by John Frederick Nims, who with Marion Strobel continued to help edit the magazine. In 1949 the magazine also reprinted, in pamphlet form, William Elton's Poetry articles on the New Criticism, and the Glossary (and later Guide) proved popular enough for four more printings. Dillon, upon his return to civilian life in 1947, had resumed the editorship. But soon his parents required him at home in Virginia, and early in 1949, with the Bollingen funds running out, he decided to resign. He felt, as he wrote Paul Mellon in May, that his own fund-raising resources were at an end (he had always been shy about soliciting money), and without further funding-the deficit now stood at $20,000-the magazine would also come to an end. Poetry was now known worldwide, he con tinued; it would be hard to replace. Inez Boulton, then living in Washington, also wrote Mellon. Meanwhile Don Hayakawa inquired whether the English department at Northwestern Uni versity would take over, but nothing came of this idea for educa tional sponsorship. 223

Hayden Carruth followed Dillon, ostensibly as editor in chief; Nims and Strobel (who was by now president of the Board) remained editors as well. Selections were to be made by mutual agreement of the three and, somewhat redundantly, of the Execu tive Committee-at least for Carruth's first six months, until the Board "knew his abilities better." The old communal arrangement

proved less than satisfactory-perhaps inevitably, considering Carruth's tentative status. He had made known some "Observations on

Direction of Editorial Policy" when he took the post:

and

should be

longer poems by established poets presented; publication of younger poets should be more selective; the prose section should be expanded, especially if there were not enough good poems. Eventually some issues contained more prose than poetry. By late fall of 1949, as the money problems remained unsolved, the office grew tense because of "the mutual lack of respect between Miss Strobel and Mr. Carruth." By December the situation became intolerable.

Although the Board decided, by a very close vote, that Carruth complete editorial authority, he resigned at the beginning of 1950. Marion Strobel became editor pro tern, and Julia Bowe was instructed to ask Karl Shapiro to assume the editorship. Formal policies now replaced the previous casual procedures. The Executive Committee would select the editor, should have

who in turn would select the staff and determine the contents of the magazine. On January 14, Shapiro accepted the job. He also became secretary of the Board, a position he, and later Henry

Rago, kept throughout their tenure. Though relatively short, Shapiro's four-year term as editor was very active, not to say controversial; and it was significant not only because of the caliber of the content of Poetry but also because of a change in policy. Steering away from the critical and academic direction the magazine had recently taken, Shapiro reasserted the traditional editorial policy of printing "the best new and unpublished poetry. regardless of school or clique." .

His report to the Board in 1952 continued: "Because of the tendency of little magazines today to become semi-scholarly jour nals of literary history and aesthetics, Poetry must keep its pages

open to writers outside the universities and orthodox critical circles." In a detailed "History and Summary of Activities of 224

Poetry Magazine," he reminded the Board that, "Because of its long reputation for high standards and complete integrity, Poetry is the magazine to which all serious poets turn for publication of their work.

by publishing

Poets can obtain a considerably wider audience

their work in Poetry than

they

can

publishing

in books."

Among those poets who began appearing during the 1940s and continued to appear during Shapiro's editorship were David Wagoner, James Merrill, John Berryman, Leslie Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Vernon Watkins, e. e. cummings, Delmore Schwartz, George Barker, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Randall Jarrell, and Robinson Jeffers, with occasional appearances by Robert Graves, Muriel Rukeyser, R. P. Blackmur, Weldon Kees, W. S. Merwin, W. H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens. Equally impressive was the prose section under Shapiro-perhaps the most distin guished and lively in the history of the magazine. There were regular contributions by Hugh Kenner and Wallace Fowlie; historical and critical articles on Baudelaire, Apollinaire, St.-John Perse, Mallarme, Jean Cocteau; a history of Imagism; an interview with Auden; Schwartz on Eliot and on "The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World"; Cleanth Brooks

F. O. Matthiessen;

Eric Bentley on the Abbey Theatre; Theodore Roethke on writers'

workshops; Dudley Fitts on Ezra Pound; Horace Gregory and Edouard Roditi on Cavafy; Jacques Maritain on "The Poetic Sense." In a sketch of the magazine prepared for the Board, Shapiro also clearly outlined the respective duties of the Executive Com

mittee and the branches of the staff, editorial and business. The

bylaws establishing the editor's authority were soon put to Shortly after arriving in Chicago, Shapiro fired Harriet Monroe's old secretary, Geraldine Udell. Though a "faithful employee of Poetry for twenty years," he explained in a confidential letter to the Bollingen Foundation, he had found her inefficient. Money and time were being wasted, especially as Miss Udell's friends and certain trustees had made the Poetry office "headquar ters for their own interests," chiefly general semantics. There was a suspicion that the Hayakawas had personal designs upon the magazine; perhaps their efforts to "save" it during the Carruth crisis were not wholly selfless. In any case, they and their faction

new

the test.

225

the Board

new

resigned en masse. This cleared the way for a

Board.

In its ten years of existence the Board had been composed of a rather

close-knit group, dominated by the staff and the literary

old guard. It was defined geographically, and hence socially, by the Near North Side, which centered on Astor Street, and to a lesser extent by Hyde Park, the environs of the University of Chicago.

(Today this pattern still holds, though the change in social history since the fifties has been reflected in a sizable shift to the North Shore, particularly Lake Forest. As in the past, many trustees also sit on the boards of the Art Institute, Chicago Symphony, and various museums and universities.) Although some of the old trustees expressed reservations about the possible "literary sympathies" of any prospective new mem bers, several "influential" and "well-known Chicagoans, actively engaged in businesses related to literature," were recruited, bring ing the Board membership up to twenty trustees. With the addition of these business leaders, the Board's fund-raising improved and civic interest increased, as did publicity in the Chicago papers and around the country. Even Time ran a story. While recognizing the value of individual donations from long

time friends

Shapiro

well

benefits, lectures, and other activities, were no longer

told the Board that such contributions

sufficient and were

"always of a problematic success." He soon

found, however, that the alternatives were perhaps more problem atic. His wife Evalyn took over the business side of the magazine, until the greatly increased duties proved too great for her. the

magazine

found

could not

afford to

(When

replace her,

budget hired.) to letters and a deficit, $20,000 trips prepared, revealing an and the Bollingen Foundation followed, unpubli eventually cized grant of $15,000, to be divided over two years, was promised. To develop a broader base of support, Shapiro wanted to increase memberships in the M. P. A. Associates program. (For $10 members received a year's subscription, special publications, and reports of the Proceedings of the Board.) For the same reason, accountant was

After the first detailed annual

was

the Associates program was reactivated as late as three years ago, but while the extra income has been welcome, it has amounted to less than 4 percent of the total budget.

To cut costs, the magazine was redesigned. Julia Bowe recruited

226

dozen volunteers to do clerical chores. Isabella Gardner also

manuscripts. Circulation went up, more ad vertising appeared. Shapiro later solicited, and got, letters of endorsement from prominent poets-Eliot, Spender, cummings, Williams, Edith Sitwell, MacLeish, Graves-which ran monthly in 1954 and 1955 on the inside front cover of the magazine. After the Bollingen money ran out in 1952, descendants of the original guarantors were asked to contribute to a special fund for the fortieth anniversary. The most grandiose plan was to persuade Robert Maynard Hutchins, in his capacity as head of the Ford Foundation, to build a poetry center in Chicago. For this, John Nef of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago submitted a draft proposal to the Board: Poetry and the Committee would request $250,000, which they would split, to support them both, set up the center, and use to "sustain people of artistic talent" through fellowships awarded by the editor. Dylan Thomas came to read; publicity was good, but receipts were not. Readings from the magazine were broadcast over radio station WFMT. Despite these efforts, it appeared in August 1952 that unless more money were forthcoming, the magazine would soon came

in to read

go out of business. That was not the time for strained relations to the Board. But Shapiro created a flap by

develop with

"firing" the wife of a

Board member. Disturbed by what he felt was damaging in the

public relations work she had been doing, voluntarily, for the maga zine, he dismissed her without consulting the Board. Word had got out to her friends in the Chicago press, who were already curious about the doings at Poetry, especially its relationship and possible political connections with Mrs. Ellen Borden Stevenson, another Board member. In a heated meeting, Daniel Catton Rich, the Board president, rebuked the editor and wanted to know why he had taken such action. Shapiro cited the bylaws that granted him control over editorial policy. Rich denied that public relations fell under the editor's jurisdiction. As arguments intensified, tempers flared, Rich threatened to resign, and eventually Shapiro agreed to consult the Board on public relations matters in the future: a small concession, since the situation was not likely to come up again. Rich stayed until the end of the year, when Mrs. Stevenson became president. Early in the summer of 1953, the magazine was forced out 227

of its Erie Street offices by another great Chicago tradition, the creation of parking lots. Mrs. Stevenson had recently converted the old family mansion into what was now termed the 1020 Arts

Center, where she offered to rent space to the magazine. Ensconced in their new home on Lake Shore Drive, sharing quarters with several service organizations and station WFMT, the staff and the Board could contemplate Lake Michigan-and the $6,000 deficit. As the usual

fund-raising measures proved insufficient and the

financial situation became grim,

new

sources

of revenue had to

be explored. The magazine arranged to sell the papers in its files from 1936 to 1958 to the University of Chicago for the surprisingly modest sum of $3,000. Poetry also entered into negotiations to have the University of Chicago become its printer. Besides doing the printing, the university would keep the subscription lists (at that time taped to the office walls), fill orders, do the advertising, and handle

promotion. (This was the first serious effort in its history to sell the magazine itself.) Despite a clause stipulating that the Board of University Publications had to approve of the editor, the contract was signed, to go into effect in January 1954. When the University of Chicago printing department began production, the M. P. A. Board, all of whose members had examined the contract, discovered that a detail had been over looked: the new arrangement effectively froze all the magazine's

operating capital. Already in debt to the old printer (the paper company had graciously wiped out its bill), the Board would have to borrow to meet day-to-day expenses. Mrs. Stevenson hoped that her Arts Center would generate income, but until it did she made two $1,000 loans to the M. P. A. What happened next is not entirely clear. However, Julia Bowe, in her unpublished memoirs, remarks, "The meals were wonderful, but we had no money coming in and Ellen refused to raise any funds." When the magazine hit rock bottom-by June there was only $100 on

hand-the Board met in an emergency session chaired by Stanley

Pargellis, director of the Newberry Library. Amid upset, confusion, and misunderstanding-among other things, Shapiro and the Board had mistaken Mrs. trustees threatened to

Stevenson's loans for

gifts-several

she had said she would

resign. Although responsibility for the magazine until the end of the year, Mrs. Stevenson changed her mind. Then she resigned. assume

228

financial

Dr. Pargellis became president of the Board and offered Poetry space in the Newberry attic. Late in 1954 Karl Shapiro moved to California, where he offered to edit Poetry without pay. But of course Poetry had

always originated in Chicago, and Shapiro suggested that Henry Rago be made editor. At the Board meeting of November 29, 1954, the trustees voted that Rago be given a temporary ap pointment, with the understanding that "his position [was] not to be regarded as a succession." He stayed on for fourteen years, the length of his reign second only to Harriet Monroe's. (Here it may be noted that although it is clearly written in the M.P .A. bylaws that the Board of Trustees will appoint the editor, since 1954 each new editor has been chosen by his predecessor, then confirmed in the position by the Board.) Besides the change of editorship, November 1954 marks another turning point in the fortunes of the magazine. From the lowest point in its financial history, the Modern Poetry Association climbed to its highest and most stable period of fiscal health. This happy and unprecedented state re sulted chiefly from the efforts of J. Patrick Lannan. Though not on

the Board, he had been

now

promised

a faithful contributor for years, and underwrite deficits for the first quarter. Then,

like his friend Judge Bowe, he became

adviser, suggesting

first of all

active but unofficial

professional approach to

the

management of the Association. While volunteers were useful, it

appeared that Poetry should

have a regular paid staff, including a public relations person. To

succeed, it would have to generate more Chicago involvement and support from the rest of the country. Julia Bowe and Mrs.

Clinton

King (Narcissa Swift)

Gogarty

to the Arts Club to read his work in 1954.

had

brought Oliver

St.

John

Early in

1955 Dame Edith Sitwell recited her poems, and attended a party hosted by Mrs. John Wentworth at the Casino. Both events were

great social occasions and generated lots of publicity. But

when Mr. Lannan

saw

the pitiful

receipts ($109 and $1,298),

he suggested a better idea.

Robert Frost

was

invited to read for what became the first

annual Poetry Day, in November 1955. At the same time Lannan,

with Dr. Pargellis and book collectors, organized the first auction, to be held in conjunction with the public

reading. With Professor 229

Bergen Evans of Northwestern as auctioneer, fifty-four rare lit erary items went up for bid before 168 people-none of them poets, though a few were "literary": presidents and directors of several large corporations, from IT&T to Lipton Tea, as well as the directors of the new Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Morgan Library. Though not as famous then as he was to become, in part because of Poetry Day, Frost drew a large crowd, and the proceeds from the reading and auction were a great relief to the budget. A major feature in Life Magazine spread the fame of Poetry, and did not hurt Frost's career either.

Following this success, the pattern was set. Carl Sandburg, who first appeared in Poetry in 1913, read for the next year's Poetry Day. The 1957 benefit required more effort, since John Crowe Ransom, the featured poet, was not well known to the general public. So Mr. Lannan invited several important New York publishers to the Harvard Club and asked them to search their files for interesting items for the auction, which they did. Archibald MacLeish appeared at the benefit the following year.

Then in 1959, a banner year, T. S. Eliot read in Orchestra Hall, which could have been filled twice. That year also Mr. Lannan,

who, besides organizing the events, contributed substantial sums each year, finally accepted the chairmanship of the Board. By 1961 Poetry was the largest little magazine in the country, and second or third among the general literary-academic group, quarterlies included, with a print order of 5,500. Costs of publica tion, however, had also risen-to $64,000 in that year, with substantial increments each year thereafter ($68,000 in 1965, $73,000 in 1967, and $83,000 in 1970). Thus, while Poetry Day had become a very popular attraction for the Chicago public and a tremendous aid to the magazine, as usual the funds were still not enough. Reprint rights to the magazine were sold to AMS

inaugurated. The Board was increased to thirty-seven trustees. Further manuscripts and cor respondence were sold at a very low price to the University of Chicago. Poetry arranged several exchange ads with other journals, while it tried to find a sponsor for the 400 foreign subscriptions to the magazine originally subsidized by the Ford Foundation but carried by the magazine since 1958. Press. A

230

new

lecture series

was

Henry Rago found himself spending a great deal of time writing letters, making applications, and travel ing for funds. He got the long-suffering Bollingen Foundation to provide another two-year grant to help publish the special British (May 1962), French (July 1962), and Double (October 1962) issues prepared for Poetry's fiftieth anniversary. (While his taste was catholic enough to include nearly all the serious, famous, or fashionable American and English poets of the time--except the Beats, who got a negative review in November 1958-his guiding spirit was ecumenical. He had already devoted special issues to Japanese [May 1956], Modern Hebrew [July 1958], Indian [January 1959], and Italian [August 1959] poetry.) He also negotiated a more favorable disposition of the Poetry papers with the Lilly Library at Indiana. He attracted several new foundations and individual donors to the cause. Among them was David Rockefeller, a friend from his service days, whom he persuaded to offer a personal grant of $22,500, to be matched over a three year period by other new contributors. The future began to look brighter. Even when the subscription price and the M.P.A. mem bership fee had to be raised, circulation continued to rise, until in 1966 it reached almost 9,000. By 1967, Rago was able to report to the Board that the magazine had earned all but $20,000 of its Like his predecessors,

costs.

Meanwhile, back at the office, the old clubby atmosphere vir tually disappeared. Karl Shapiro had already drastically curtailed casual visitations, and under Rago the shop was run in a very businesslike manner. Although he always maintained the closest and most cordial ties with the trustees, he managed, in his friendly but formal way, to run not only the editorial but also the broader administrative operations of the M.P .A. (through his office as secretary of the Board) largely according to his will. At 1018 State Street, whither Poetry repaired in 1957, he ran a tight ship. His penchant for orderliness manifested itself in his insistence that only new bronzette paper clips be used; and on those days when he worked at home, he was wont to call the staff at 4:55

P.M.

make certain they were still on duty. Unfortunately, this passion

for detail was not foolproof. In 1968, when the first thorough audit of the Modem Poetry Association was completed, it was discovered that the corporation had been dissolved. Since 1960 the M.P.A., 231

through a simple clerical error, had neglected to send in the annual two-dollar filing fee. (Lawyers were quickly dispatched and the decree of dissolution was soon vacated, retroactively.) At the time of the 1968 audit, Lawrence Towner, director of the Newberry Library and recently elected president of the Board,

proposed new bylaws for the Association. The number of trustees was reduced from thirty-nine to thirty, to be reelected or replaced on a regular schedule. Voting privileges were now restricted to the trustees (formerly, all M.P.A. members could vote, and often did so by proxy); old members and new contributors could, however, become nonvoting Associates. There was also some feeling that other changes were needed. Perhaps sensing this, Rago requested a year's leave of absence to permit "a more leisurely enjoyment of his teaching and reflection at the University of Chicago"-he had always kept up his ties as humanities professor in the College and theology lecturer in the Divinity School-"more time to work at his new book of poetry, and in 1969 a long summer on the Con tinent with his family." As Shapiro had done before him, Raga invited in a "visiting editor." Henry Rago was not terribly familiar with Daryl Hine, but they were acquainted, since Hine had recently taken his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, where he had started teaching. When Hine came on, in October 1968, he had had little editorial experience, but now had time to get it, since Rago had thoughtfully left manu scripts to be used. Rago would also call and drop by on occasion, to indicate typographical errors in an issue or other fine points to his stand-in. This aid was not always appreciated. After his long association with the magazine, Rago apparently had a hard time letting go. But early in May 1969 he made his leave of absence permanent, and Daryl Hine's appointment as editor was formally announced on May 18. On May 29 Henry Rago died of heart failure. In personality,

background, and tastes, Daryl Hine was quite

unlike Rago. When he assumed the duties of editor, he had had

little administrative experience, nor did he develop much ability

along that line. He had little interest in, or capacity for, fund raising, and even less for public relations, although at first he did what had to be done and worked hard on editorial matters. The Board

232

seems

to have understood his limitations when he was

hired. In any case, there did not appear to be much reason for worry about the business side of the magazine, since it was now

footing economically. Further, it was expected that Hine's term of office would probably last only five years. The Association had voted to pay Mrs. Rago a modest pension, but this extra ex pense, and even the low returns from the 1969 Poetry Day (In Memoriam Henry Rago), created no problem. In fact, that year income from sales and subscriptions exceeded costs by $3,000. This improbable stroke of good fortune was, of course, too good

on a firm

to last.

In 1970 Poetry was again displaced, this time by a plaza, and

the office moved to its present location on North Dearborn Parkway. Along with the rent, printing and mailing costs went up drastically, while income from gifts fell sharply. A matching grant from CCLM helped soften the blow, and there seemed no immedi ate cause for alarm. But in 1971 circulation dipped from 9,000 to

7,400, and the magazine experienced a deficit of over $12,000. (Federal grants to universities were cut back at that time, reducing their

ability to buy journals.) Dr. Towner suggested that the Board consider hiring an "executive director," who would "free the Editor from most of the burdens of fund-raising, administra One trustee pointed out tion, and planning of social events that this sort of arrangement usually did not work. The motion was tabled, and nothing came of it. In September 1972, Poetry's anti-Vietnam War issue appeared. In the past the magazine had carefully avoided political com mentary, although during World War I Miss Monroe had pre sented "War Poems," and later editors had also printed many poems about war in general and the Second World War in particular by men in the service and other poets. But the Vietnam War was, of course, quite different from previous conflicts, and Rob Allen, the associate editor at the time, had suggested the idea of a special issue when anti-war feeling was high. The Board itself had already taken a step unprecedented in its history. On May 10, 1972, ten trustees approved, in a telephone vote, a "

....

proposal that the Modern Poetry Association should send President Nixon, Secretary Kissinger, Senators Stevenson, Percy, Fulbright, McGovern, and others in government a telegram "protesting recent American aggression in Vietnam." At a Board meeting later in the 233

year, the editor was able to report generally favorable responses to the Against the War Issue, and a big demand for reorders.

Aside from the war, during 1972 there was reason, if not for

excitement, at least for celebration, since that year marked the sixtieth anniversary of Poetry. Douglas Macdonald, proprietor of Two Hands Books and at that time a member of the Board, organized a Chicago Poetry Festival for March 5-7. This was the first time the magazine had co-sponsored such an event, and it was successful. For Poetry Day, Allen Tate was invited to read; a

group of actors also gave recitations from Harriet Monroe's

correspondence. From 1973 on, editorial and fairly normal routine. In 1973

managerial matters returned to yearly subscriptions had to be raised to $15, and they were again raised, to $18, in 1976. The Board contemplated buying a building, rental income from which might help offset costs, but this plan fell through. The annual Poetry Day continued, along with other efforts at raising money, which included another sale of papers to the Lilly Library. Mean while printing and mailing costs rose 20 percent in two years. In 1976 and 1977 there were some months when not enough re mained in the checking account to pay the printer. The Association was forced to dip into its capital reserves, already much reduced by recent downturns in the stock market, to balance the budget. By the summer of 1 977, Hine, who had considered resigning for some time, was thoroughly dissatisfied with the job. In June, somewhat precipitously, he decided to quit. He asked John Frederick Nims, whose most recent association with the magazine was that of visiting editor during 1960-61, to take over. The choice was confirmed by the Executive Committee and then the Board. When the new editor assumed his post, in was

January 1978, he

immediately faced with a novel crisis: The Readers' Guide to

Periodical Literature, which had indexed Poetry since 1915, de cided to delete the magazine from its listings. Since the majority of Poetry's subscribers are libraries, and many of them will sub scribe

only to publications listed in the Guide, this action was potentially dangerous. Supporters around the country wrote in protest, praising the magazine and pointing out Poetry's important history. (Even the staff was surprised by the size and warmth of 234

the response.) The Guide, however, decided not to reconsider the

listing until 1983. While several former contributors have started submitting work

again, the editorial course of the magazine is, at this writing, not established. The financial problems, however, are clear. They remain what they have been since the beginning, except that fund raising is perhaps more difficult today. Ironically, the very lon gevity of the magazine creates the erroneous impression that Poetry must be well off. But, as it has throughout its history, the maga zine operates at a substantial deficit and continues to depend on its friends to bail it out. After sixty-five years of continuous monthly publication, Poetry would prefer not to retire. Judging from their past response, the friends of the magazine will keep it going. In the depth of loyalty

Poetry has always elicited from its supporters, as well as its staff, one realizes how much affection exists for the magazine. In that way, too, Poetry is unique among cultural institutions.

235

featuring

Charles Olson

II SPRING -

1951 -

Origin, Vol. 1, No.1, April 1951 (courtesy Northwestern University Library).

oRIGIN Cid Corman In his first and almost only publicity for Origin, Cid Corman an

nounced that his magazine would be devoted to "giving adequate outlet to those new/unknown writers who have shown maturity /

insight into their medium"; "to giving the push to creative minds, to demonstrate the going concerns, (and) directions of contempo rary creativity." This editorial ambition gradually extended to in clude work by writers "no matter their age or even if long since dead," who seemed to Mr. Corman "alive" and inadequately known in this country. Mr. Corman was born in 1924 in Boston. In 1954 he left the

United States and has subsequently lived mostly in Europe and

Japan. Of his more than forty books, the most readily available are Livingdying and Sun Rock Man (New Directions), and volumes of translations of Basho, Kusano Shimpei, and Francis Ponge (Grossman).

Perhaps Mary Kinzie's questions to me-based on the introduction to The Gist of "Origin" (Grossman/Viking, 1975)-can serve as a lead-in here. From them 1 can expatiate on a few notions about the nature of the "little magazine." She asks me (in a letter dated 22 August 1975) "whether [I] consider T. S. Eliot's five-year run a valid restriction (since neither The he, with Criterion, nor you have taken it that seriously) been answered both Eliot and has question clearly by myself al ready, and MK answers her question as well-differently. A one man operation is best paced, 1 feel, by such an approach, and it allows a more open attitude toward other mags. My own reasons for curtailing the 2nd series of Origin are amply explained and it was NOT planned-nor desired. A number of other mags-including Caterpillar and L'Ephemere (Paris)-have picked up from my stance and-I think-to good effect. On the other hand-Ted Weiss has had his QRL going irregularly for a long time and evi"

....

239

dently finds it both worthwhile and effective. Each must judge for himself. There is no RULE. The next question runs: "Can you expand on the idea of refusing to take contributions from poets not 'from any sense of connivance,

but because it was a question of taking the full risk'?" I fear MK may not have grasped my point or that, in any event, the reader will miss the point in her out-of-context query. I was referring to

monetary contributions. And it should be obvious to anyone from Lockheed executives on down-that gifts of money bear with them certain obligations whether stated overtly or not. In the case of a little mag-say-it should be transparent that I would feel

obligated to use writing from anyone who contributed notably to the magazine's existence. Perhaps other editors would not feel such an obligation. I cannot speak for others. My point was simple and clear: I preferred scraping along and being independent. As I have often had cause to note: if one means to be free in that sweet land of America, one had better be prepared to be brave. Next: "Does the idea of the give-away journal clash at all, for you, with the marvelous $17.50 price of the anthology?" I might add for those who may not know: Origin 2nd series was

given away to those who wrote me regularly for it (including li braries) and indicated they genuinely wanted it. I still like the idea-though it requires enough economic support at root to allow for it. I'll expand upon this idea a little later in this article. MK's query seems gratuitously querulous. Only someone who is being paid a regular salary and has never had to cover publishing costs could come on so. It is evident that the price of the anthology -though painfully steep to my sense of wanting it to be generally available to the younger generations-is strictly controlled by the economics of publishing. No publisher prices any book higher than he needs to-normally. Even so--if one examines Gist-it will be found to be worth its weight in gold. "Do you in some way think of the magazine's three series as three different journals?" The question is like asking a novelist if he or she thinks his or her books are different works. Yes--and no. All one's works are one work-but in differing ways. And in the case of

Origin, where the intentions have been frankly maintained

through one series to the next-what happens is rather more rami fication and perhaps clarification. Perhaps the novelist should be 240

regarded in the light of a trilogy: like Joyce Cary's-say. Is The Horse's Mouth and Herself Surprised and To Be a Pilgrim--one book or three books? Or The Oresteia? Pardon the excessive im

plications. But Origin has, in fact, been edited upon "large" lines. "In what way does one's/your editing provide an unexpected context for poems?" I believe there is no little magazine heretofore or since that has

been edited with as much care for the placement of works, not only within a single issue, but within the run of a series and even from series to series. Readers who

are

interested

can

look into the

matter for themselves-since Kraus Reprint Co. has made all the

issues newly available.

Many writers who had never been aware of each other were suddenly brought into contact. And it isn't by any means the least service of a little mag. In Origin's case the relationships expanded with unusual fruitfulness. And here too those who have special interest can go to the sources and find for themselves. Much of what I say will gradually become apparent through letters when

they are, as they are bound to be, published. In sum, there is a great deal of mutual stimulation in such editing. For myself, of course, as well as others.

Or look at my Albers issue in the 3rd series-where many poets and writers are culled unexpectedly in reference to his work-and the reverse implications. And all this can be, and should be, done

without big editorial comment. An editor should make his feelings and attitudes implicit in the very way he edits.

Messages by editors are invariably forms of self-publicity. And the heavy blurbs that editors of so many mags-big and little allow themselves make me wonder where integrity begins in such matters.

"Are your assumptions, do you think,

editor of poems,

different from those of fiction and/or essay journals?" And the re lated question: "Are little magazines by definition poetry rather than eclectic?"

By "eclectic," presumably she refers to the use of other ma terials in addition to poetry. Again-her question makes me wonder if she has read Gist--or even looked beyond the introduc

tion. Half the book is prose-including essays and fiction. Origin has printed a short novel-many short stories-and many essays. 241

I tried short book reviews or

early on. Yes-the clear emphasis is on toward poetry. That is my bias. It also leads into the issue of

the outlets for poetry.

Everyone who reads will be aware of the fact that poetry books by major publishers are few and far between and they rarely get much circulation-unless the author has some claims to celebrity status-which has nothing to do with poetry per se. At this point -the need for small-press poetry publication becomes crying. And there are a host of "brave" small presses that often do magnificent work and fulfill an important function in offering outlets to the increasing number of poets "around." The little magazine-which is invariably dedicated (whatever tastes are involved and invoked) to publishing people whose out lets tend to be minimal-naturally espouses poetry. University-affiliated "little mags" (for me a little mag is only such when independent of such clear sponsorship by an institution) usually must provide outlet for the academy and that means they MUST carry articles. Not every academician is a poet.

I do think that a little mag should have stimulating essays dealing

with any work that has implications for poetry-which means

Iiterally=-Axv work. There are countless books that I have found stimulating and warranting consideration in little mags that never come under scrutiny. I think of books like Zuckerkandl's on music or

Buchler's The Main of Light or Beckett's The Lost Ones or

Vicker's book Towards Greek Tragedy or Ian Robinson's exciting books on Chaucer or various books-in various

languages-s-on

form in plants or the nature of history-plus reviews of interesting selected foreign volumes of poetry. So that even the academic little mags could be several hundred percentage points more interesting and engaging than they now are-instead of always discussing the same books and issues.

But the real crux in all this is twofold: the sense of the editor

and the quality of the work received. No editor can print better work than he obtains. This truism cannot be repeated often enough. And it has its corollary in the capacity of the editor (-s: the

plural added reluctantly) to recognize the excellent or valuable when received. No one is infallible. We have Gide's famous exam ple apropos of Proust as personal caution. But there is no substitute for honesty. 242

(As I like to point out to students of English-in

shape and sense, words like "honest" and "modest" are superla tives and cannot be further inflected. )

My "assumptions," then, are no different from those of any other editor who means to be honest-and who is allowed to be

independent: I will draw on the best work that comes my way or that I can elicit. And-perhaps my difference-I will edit-place -the work in such a way as to enhance it both for writer and

reader within a given issue/context. To the extent that I can. The matter of independence may perhaps warrant stress here. The little mag has as its major raison d'etre-e-in my eyes-this very

possibility of independence. And it is-I think-the hallmark of every little mag worth our attention. It means frank bias. But the very proliferation of such mags permits ample range and a full

spectrum. The grab-bag mag that has one or two or three poems by many poets of many varying qualities seems to me to be "cop ping out." A handful of poets in anyone issue is more than enough and the presentation should always be enough to give a clear sense of poetic identity----or identity of mind/spirit no matter what form the writing takes. If a poet is very modestly represented, it should be as a hopeful

lead-in to future extension.

And-again-a look at Origin will

reveal how many of the writers were pre-sented-pre-sentimented.

And-again-errors are made and the writers don't pan out----or not for myself. During the course of the three series of Origin many "rejected" writers found ample outlet and reputation elsewhere. But it isn't a matter of "rejection": it is a matter of helping to the degree that one can. Young writers often-in their greed and need for atten tion-fail to allow for the fact that they are dealing with human

beings who have daily cares too and have many others to attend to as well as themselves.

MK asks: "How does the

'speed of transference' operate in engendering community?" I'm not sure the question is apt. But let me discuss briefly the idea of "speed of transference" (Olson's) and "the sense of com munity" (in the world of poetry, etc.) separately and we'll see how and if they connect. For myself a little mag should appear at regular intervals and thus become anticipated. If it is openly limited-say-as Origin a sense of

243

has been in each series-to a five-year span-it can never be taken

for granted. And its time-limit provides in advance a sense of shape and of shaping going on. The 64 pages I have espoused seems to

"just right": it isn't so heavy that it cannot be enjoyably read through at a sitting and at the same time is weighty enough to make a decisive impression as "something." A mimeo of 100 pages feels like a telephone directory. And a printed mag of 120 pp. or more seems also like a job and one only browses. The most recent economics of time valuation makes it painfully patent that in developed countries people buy more books than me

ever, but the bulk of them go unread and remain

part of the

interior decoration of a room/house-like art work. My own sense is to face the facts. To address the little mag to its precise audience

-which is small in number though very large in spirit and which includes the finest reading audience (I believe) in existence-and not to strain the bounds of anyone's "time."

The speed-however--of

quarterly-of transferring writing

to the page to the reader-while not that of a newspaper or weekly

-is ideal. The material is taken out of the

merely passing or

fashionable and given a larger hold-while at the same time not

holding up work for a year or years-as is the case with book publication generally. (Gist-for example-was sent to the pub lishers nearly 4 years ago.) 1 had the notion many years ago-as a

graduate student at Chapel Hill-s-of doing film reviews AFTER the film had had its run-so that the concern should not be with its commercial success or failure-but with discussing its content and value with whatever audience it had had. Not

IN ADVANCE

then-but while the material was still alive in the mind.

question of the avant-garde: it is a question of keeping community alert to its own best possibilities. Which may, in fact, be via writers whose works are in "the past," but have for whatever reason-remained untapped. As Roussel or Bataille It is

never

Blanchot remain unknown to most readers in America, since

the regular publishers haven't gotten around to them yet. Or so many of the poets Origin has brought over from "abroad." 1 have always felt that writers everywhere should be aware of and stimu

lated by each other-beyond camps. And beyond special issues of little mags. As if TriQuarterly with this issue can wash its hands hereafter with the

little-mag thing and say, "We've done that

now-what next?" As if French poetry or that of any other coun244

try were a package and had to be treated as such-and then for gotten. I believe in the continuity and relation of writers. Not as com

petition, but AS community. As I indicated in the intro to Gist much of the fiercest criticism I've received as an editor has come from those I published objecting to other work I've published. How

Creeley fulminated against Paul Carroll, how Levertov blasted me for printing the Zukofskys' Catullus, etc., etc. But this is part of the life of the thing. An editor tends to receive little credit for his work and when he does he should have sense enough to realize it may be misapplied. Editing is a job and no one is forced-least of all in the little mag scene-to take it on. No more or less

one

lives without

abuse. I am at least as sensitive as any other poet

but also-like the survivors-tough too. And no one will say I am not abusive at times in turn.

This is part of what community is all about: there is interaction many levels and involvement. If Diane Wakoski-say-has a penchant for attacking me in public-it may relate to the fact that on

I often "rejected" work of hers. Not that I dislike her work-there is much of it I like-but simply that what she sent me didn't make it with me. She is-needless to say-not alone in this situation. But then my work has been even more frequently rejected by other

editors. I've never been subjected to the "scratch-me-back" that Olson seemed worried about.

"Do you feel largely responsible-are you, in fact-for intro

ducing Artaud in the States?" The intro to Gist states the situation exactly and again those who would research the question can do so-easily. Before I left the USA in 1954 I'd already translated a fair amount of Artaud and it was his work that I largely went into on my arrival in Paris that year. Since two of the main protagonists in America of Artaud

today are Jack Hirschman and Clayton Eshleman-both of whom came to know his work via

Origin-I'd say there is some basis for

my being a key factor in the first real wedge for the man in the New (Old) World. It seems to me of minor import-however. The

bulk of Artaud's work is still unknown outside of France. The Letters from Rode: and the bulk of his poetry. But the strength of his work may be best gauged volume of poems: Moments.

by reading Michaux's splendid

But beyond all these questions that may seem too detailed for 245

specific concern with recent little mag history-let me examine the "field"-such as it is-during the most-unless there is

past 25 years. Editors of little mags often-sadly-have a sense of dispropor tionate self-importance. If I focus on poetry here-as I tend to do

-it serves only as a focus-an extreme focus-but what I say touches on all such periodicals-whatever their contents. That is, the small mags too often have small minds running them. I find few who have any larger sense of commitment. In the university

set-ups, they are often way-stations for those seeking tenure or

jobs in the larger publishing world. OK. Why not? But in the native form-the little mag tends to be the effort of one person to feel more

accurately what is going on with his or her contemporaries,

to enlarge or enter the community, such as it is. A way of paying

dues, of learning "on the job." Fine. It is an engagement. The extremely ephemeral approach of some--one or two--is a poor sense of management and And planning. though the issue or two may look promising and sues

is unfortunate. It means

something 1 st rate-it serves only a very small audi of more regular publication. It can be a too early burial of fine work. Yet-and I score the word--everything helps. For the writer-the young writer above all-merely seeing his work presented in a form available to others makes him or her feel like he or she exists-approaches a certain professional status and even the least feedback can prove remarkably stimulating. And periodical publication often gives the writer his first chance even include

ence IN ADVANCE

to look at his work with cold, or colder, eyes. A distance accrues.

It is not "final": revision is possible. The experience of an "ad vance" audience is offered. And this is the writer's immediate

community. Poets-like Larkin-may pooh-pooh what seems like a highly restricted public-but one has to begin somewhere. And the little mag is where most of us begin. Including Larkin. Yes: there is a larger audience waiting to be tapped. I have unbounded faith in the power of poetry. I feel it has potentially a larger "market" (a larger audience) than ANY other form of art. And I think it will expand to that public in due time. In the mean while-the little mag acts as go-between. The writer may be ab1e to wait for his wages-but he cannot get on without some response.

Even Emily Dickinson had to turn to Higginson.

246

My wish to serve that audience-that inner core of audience I have defined as "elite" is not in order to single such people out but to be honest. In America-say-there are not more than 1,000 readers of poetry who will genuinely attend. And the figure may be no more than several hundred. I would-with Origin-like to

put the magazine at once into the hands of this readership-with

hangup (price). The cost is one of care and attention. And certainly for the writers involved this would be tremendous-to tap in at once upon this readership-to know that one's work would enjoy so fine a public at once. What payment can equal this? In addition-these finer readers-mainly writers themselves are invariably those who share their affections-so that audience would-in effect-be immeasurably larger and keep opening out out interposing an economic

ward. This can only be done-in my experience-by one's own efforts. I have enjoyed no access to special funds. Origin has had more

lip-service than any other little mag in existence-that I am sure but there has been little concrete support for it. My intention to do a 4th series I know already will only be realized through my own efforts. Being penniless is a steady state with me-but perhaps that may change yet and if it does-Origin may appear again-for five years. A little remains a little-but a little can go a

long way.

247

ON BLAcK MoUNTAIN REvIEW Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley with Ann Creeley on Mallorca, 1953. Photograph by Jonathan Williams.

Robert Creeley was part 0/ the "Black Mountain group" at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, first as a student and then instructor. What gave rise to his own poetry and to the avant-garde poetry he published in The Black Mountain Review,

as an

he says, was a dissatisfaction both with what was being published -and rejected-by magazines like Hudson Review, and with the prewar "solutions" of the Establishment, which did not relate to

the postwar "global nightmare." The new poetry of the fifties and

magazines, like Origin and Creeley's own, were part of his generation's solution. By the 1960s, Mr. Creeley had begun to receive recognition from an Establishment that he in part had helped to change. He has won prizes from Poetry magazine and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, and has taught at a number of universities. He is the author of some twenty-five books of poetry and fiction; his Selected Poems were published in 1976. The following essay is reprinted without changes from Mr. Creeley's introduction to the 1969 AMS Press reprint of the con tents of The Black Mountain Review, 1954-1957. new

In hindsight it is almost too

simple to note the reasons for the

publication of the Black Mountain Review. Toward the end of 1953 Black Mountain

College-a decisive experimental school early by John Rice and others in Black Mountain, North Carolina-was trying to solve a persistent and most awkward problem. In order to survive it needed a much larger student enrollment, and the usual bulletins and announce started in the

thirties

ments of summer

programs seemed to have little effect. Either they failed to reach people who might well prove interested, or else

the nature of the college itself was

little known that

one

quite trusted its proposals. In consequence, a summer workshop in pottery, which had among its faculty Hamada, Bernard Leach, and Peter Voulkos, found itself with some six rather dazzled persons for students. Whatever the cause-and no doubt it in

volves too the fact that all

experimental colleges faced a very marked apathy during the fifties-some other means of finding and interesting prospective students had to be managed, and so it was that Charles Olson, then rector of the college, proposed 249

to the other

faculty members that a magazine might prove a more active advertisement for the nature and form of the college's program than the kind of announcements they had been de pending upon. This, at least, is a brief sense of how the college itself came to be involved in the funding of the magazine's publication. The costs, if I remember rightly, were about $500 an issue, so that the budget for a year's publication would be about $2,000-hardly a large figure. But the college was in such tight financial condition that it could not easily find any money for any purpose, and so its support of the magazine, most accurately the decision of the faculty to commit such an amount to that purpose, is a deeply generous and characteristic act. Too, it's to be acknowledged that Olson's powers of persuasion were considerable. The nature of the magazine itself, however, and the actual means of its publication, that is, literally its printing, are of another story which is really quite separate from the college itself. In the late forties, while living in Littleton, N. H., I had tried to start a magazine with the help of a college friend, Jacob Leed. He was living in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and had an old George Washington handpress. It was on that that we proposed to print the magazine. Then, at an unhappily critical moment, he broke his arm; I came running from New Hampshire-but after a full day's labor we found we had set two pages only, each with a single poem. So that was that. to

What then to do with the material we had collected? Thanks the occasion, I had found excuse to write to both Ezra

Pound and William Carlos Williams. I didn't know what I really wanted of them but was of course deeply honored that they took

seriously. Pound very quickly seized on the magazine's becoming in some sense a feeder possibility for his own commitments, but was clearly a little questioning of our modus operandi. What he did give me, with quick generosity and clarity, was a kind of rule book for the editing of any maga zine. For example, he suggested I think of the magazine as a me

in any

sense

of our

which, "not a box within which / any item." He proposed that verse consisted of a constant and a variant, and then center around

told me to think from that to the context of a magazine. He sug gested I get at least four others, on whom I could depend unequiv for material, and to make their work the mainstay of the

ocally 250

Charles Olson. Photograph by Gerard Malanga.

magazine's form. But then, he said, let the rest of it, roughly half, be as various and hogwild as "so that any idiot thinks

possible,

he has

chance of getting in." He cited instances of what he considered effective editing, The Little Review and the Nouvelle a

Revue Francaise, when its editor gave complete license to the nucleus of writers on whom he depended "to write freely what

they chose." Williams in like sense gave us active support and tried to put us in touch with other young writers (as Pound also did) who might help us find a company. But with our failure to find a means to print the magazine, it all came to an abrupt end. I remember Pound's consoling me with the comment that

perhaps

it was wise for "the Creel" to wait for a while before "he highflyz as

editor," but things seemed bleak indeed.

Happily, there was what proved to be a very significant alterna tive. Cid Corman, then living in Boston and having also a weekly radio program there called "This Is Poetry," had come to be a friend. I had heard the program, by some fluke, in New Hampshire, wrote him, was not long after invited by him to read on the program, and soon we were corresponding frequently, much in volved with senses of contemporary writers and writing. It was Cid, in fact, who got me in touch with Olson, by way of their mutual friend, Vincent Ferrini-who sent me some of Olson's poems, with his own, for possible use in the magazine that had

collapsed. In returning Olson's poems to Vincent, I made the somewhat glib remark that he seemed to be "looking for a

not yet

language," and got thereby my first letter from Olson himself, not particularly pleased by my comment and wanting to discuss it further, like they say. The letters thus resulting were really my education just because their range and articulation took me into terms of writing and many other areas indeed which I otherwise might never have entered. But the point now is that Cid, once Jake Leed's and my magazine was clearly dead, undertook him self to publish a magazine called Origin. Significantly enough its first issue includes some of the material I had collected-for

example, Paul Blackburn'S, whom I had come to know through Pound's agency-and features the work of Charles Olson, spe cifically the first of the Maximus sequence as well as other poems and prose.

Origin was, in fact, the meeting place for many of the writers 252

who subsequently became the active nucleus for the Black Moun tain Review. More than any other magazine of that period, it undertook to make place for the particular poets who later came to be called the Black Mountain School. In its issues prior to 1954,

and continuingly, it gave first significant American publication to Denise Levertov,

Irving Layton, Robert Duncan, Paul Carroll,

Paul Blackburn, Larry Eigner, myself, and a number of others as

well. Although I had, for example,

published stories in Kenyon place could

Review and the New Directions Annual, neither

afford me the actual company nor the range of my own work that

Origin's second issue provided. For me it was an acknowledgment I had almost begun to think impossible, and I am sure that Cid's consistent support of our writing had much to do with what be came of it.

The point is that we felt, all of us, more

conventional

magazines of that

great distance from the time. Either

they were

dominated by the New Critics, with whom we could have no re

lation, or else they were so general in character that no active center of coherence was possible. There were exceptions certainly.

Golden Goose, edited by Frederick Eckman and Richard Wirtz Emerson, was clearly partisan to myself and also to Olson, and it published my first book, Le Fou, and would have published a col lection of Olson's, The Praises, but for a misunderstanding between him and the editors when the book was already in proof. Both men were much involved with Williams, and made his example and commitment the center for their own. There were also other, more occasional magazines, as Goad-whose editor, Horace Schwartz, involved me in a useful defense of my interest in Ezra Pound, just that it helped clarify my own terms of value. But, with the exception of Origin, and possibly Golden Goose also, only two magazines of that time, the early fifties, had finally either the occasion or the sense of procedure, which served as my own measure

of the possibility. One, Fragmente, edited and pub

lished in

Freiberg, Germany, by Rainer Gerhardt-whose ac quaintance I was also to make through Pound's help-was an heroically ambitious attempt to bring back into the German literary canon all that writing which the years of the Third Reich had absented from it. Rainer and his wife, living in great poverty with two young sons, were nonetheless able to introduce to the German

253

including that of Olson, Williams, Pound, Basil Bunting, and myself. I was its American editor but its literal activity was completely the effort of Rainer and Renate. Their conception of what such a magazine might accomplish was a deep lesson to me. They saw the possibility of changing the context of writing, and I think myself that this maga zine, and also the small paperbacks they were able to publish, effectually accomplished this for present German poetry-despite the bitter fact of Rainer's early death. context

incredible range of work,

In like sense, a group of young writers of various nationalities centered in Paris was of great interest to me. They were led by a

lovely, obdurate and resourceful Scot, Alexander Trocchi, and included the British poet Christopher Logue and the brilliant American translator Austryn Wainhouse. Others too were of equal interest: Patrick Bowles, for example, who translated the first of Beckett's French novels into English-and Richard Seaver, who was later to become a decisive editor for Grove Press. Again, what these men proposed to do with their magazine, Merlin, and the books which they also published with the help of the Olympia Press as Collection Merlin, was to change the situation of literary context and evaluation. I've given a brief, personal sense of my rela tion to Trocchi in a novel, The Island, where he figures as "Manus," and I was also invited by them to be an associate editor on the maga zine-but by that time the funds necessary to continue publication of the magazine were not obtainable. But their translations, of Genet's and Beckett's work as well as their brilliant critical writing, which extended to political thinking as well

literary, made them an

exceptional example of what a group of writers might do. By 1954 my wife and I were already much involved with a small press called the Divers Press. We had moved from France to

MaUorca, and had become close friends with a young English couple, Martin Seymour-Smith and his wife Janet. It was Martin who first interested us in publishing books, since, as he pointed out, printing costs were exceptionally cheap on the island and much might be done on a shoestring. But our initial venture to gether, the Roebuck Press, came a cropper because Martin's interests were not really decisively my own nor mine his. We did publish a selection of his poems, All Devils Fading, but our center 254

finally in writers like Olson (Mayan Letters), Paul Blackburn (Proensa and The Dissolving Fabric), Irving Layton (In the Midst of My Fever), Douglas Woolf (The Hypocritic Days), Larry Eigner (From The Sustaining Air), and, though he comes a bit later, Robert Duncan (Caesar's Gate). We also published Katue Kitasono's Black Rain, and it is a design of his that was used for

was

the covers of the first four issues of the Black Mountain Review as well as another on the credits page. What I felt was the purpose of the press had much to do with my initial sense of the magazine

also. For me, and the other writers who came to be involved, it was

place defined by our own activity and was accomplished alto gether by ourselves-a place wherein we might make evident what we, as writers, had found to be significant, both for ourselves and for that world-no doubt often vague to us indeed-we hoped our writing might enter. To be published in the Kenyon Review was too much like being "tapped" for a fraternity. It was too often allover a

before one got there and few if any of one's fellow writers came too. Therefore there had to be both a press

and a magazine abso

lutely specific to one's own commitments and possibilities. Nothing short of that was good enough.

Origin had already done, in some sense, as much as one could hope for, and I remember having doubts about either the use or the practicality of simply another magazine more or less "like" it. I certainly didn't want to compete with Cid. But one possibility did seem to me lacking in Origin, despite occasional notes and reviews, and that was the ground that an active, ranging critical section might effect. I wasn't thinking of criticism finally as a judg ment of whether or no this or that book might be deemed "good" or "bad." What I hoped for, and happily did get, was critical writing that would be, in Olson's sense, "prospective," a kind of writing that would break down habits of "subject" and gain a new ex perience of context generally. If I have any disappointment in the magazine in retrospect, it's only that this part of it does not extend as far as I had hoped. Still, Jung's "The Mass and the In dividual Process" (in the fifth issue)-which I remember he sent to "The Black Mount Review," which pun, unintentional I assume, was a delight-and Borges' "Three Versions of Judas" (in the seventh issue )-which I read with absolute seriousness, not real255

izing it was a "fiction"-are some instances of what I was after. But, and here I was much influenced by Olson, the possible range of such writing as we conceived of it was never fully demonstrated. There have been various comments and summaries published with respect to the Black Mountain Review's activity as a little magazine. Most lively and helpful, I think, is Paul Blackburn's account which appears in Kulchur (Vol. 3, No. 10, Summer 1963) called "The Grinding Down." Among other things, he identifies the initials used by reviewers in the first four issues, and also the pseudonyms used for signatures in some other instances. Too, Kent State University library, in one of its bulletins, provides an accurate and useful bibliography together with a brief note by myself. But now I think it best that the pseudonyms stay pseu donyms, and that initials, if not recognized (I used three sets, for example), be part of the present reader's experience. Often I, or some friend I could quickly get hold of, had to fill blank pages to manage our length of 64 pages, or subsequently the longer format of 220 plus. I at times had nightmares of having to write the whole thing myself. The contributing editors listed in the first issue conform to that sense Pound had earlier made clear: get a center of people you can depend on for consistently active contributions, elsewise you'll have nothing to build with. Olson was to prove that center almost single-handedly, but Blackburn was also very helpful, with all manner of support including legwork around New York to get the magazine into stores, as well as much sympathetic and prac tical hand holding. Layton I had come to know through a Canadian mimeographed magazine, Contact, which many of us had been involved with as its contents will show. He had an intensive energy

obviously was restless with what was then the Canadian literary milieu. His brother-in-law, John Sutherland, editor of the Northern Review, no longer invited him to literary parties because Irving's conduct was so irascible. So he was an unequivocal cohort and wrote, happily, voluminous amounts of verse. If I remember rightly, I also asked others as well-in particular Paul Goodman, who answered he'd prefer being just a contributor, since his other commitments very possibly would not give him time to do more. Rexroth generously agreed although we had little information of each other beyond his own public figures. Less happily, by the and

256

The Black Mountain Review

Chorle. Ol.on

Allolnst Wisdom A. 'Such Robert Hellman The

Quay

Ren6 Laubles

Eight Reproductions

Spring 1954 75 cents

The Black Mountain Review, Vol. 1 No.1, Spring 1954 (courtesy Peter

Michelson).

time he'd read the first issue, he realized his error, and his with

drawal (as well as that of Paul Blackburn, whose reasons were happily less adamant) is noted at the back of the Fall 1954 issue

along with a defensive comment by myself. Many of the writers who became very decisive to the magazine are not so listed, however, Robert Duncan is very much one of these. His first contribution, sent at Olson's suggestion, was a poem

I in turn suggested we print a section of-and Duncan's response was

to the effect that if he had wanted a section of the poem

printed, he would have sent it-and I learned much from him also. There was one very amusing confusion involved with a poem of his I did print, in the Fall 1954 issue, "Letters for Denise Levertov: For An A Muse Ment." Apparently Denise, for some reason, took it as a parody on her own way of writing, and was thus hurt. And Olson too thought it was some kind of attack on him. I think that poor Duncan and myself were the only ones to unequivocally enjoy it, and it remains for me an extraordinary summary and exemplar of contemporary possibilities in poetry. Denise herself, Louis Zukofsky (whom I found thanks to Edward Dahlberg and also Duncan), Jonathan Williams, and Rob ert Hellman (a close friend first in France, who subsequently came to teach briefly at Black Mountain), all were of great help to me in that they were there to be depended on, for specific writing but equally for a very real sense of the whole act's not being merely a whistling in the dark but something making a way. God knows one often doubted it. Holding to Pound's sense of letting at least part of the magazine seem wide open, I know I printed work at times that any of them must have been puzzled by. Some things I just liked, for example, Gautier's "The Hippopotamus," which appears in the fifth issue. I still do. However, I've never found anyone to share my pleasure in "The Goat Man" by Harold Lee

Drake, in the sixth issue. He wrote, to put it mildly, extraordinary

prose-including one piece involved with masturbating by the seashore, which the condition of censorship in the fifties never permitted me to print. He was one of the contributors who came out of nowhere, and unhappily seems to have returned there, since I've never seen his work printed again. Of contributors generally, I've defined, I think, the character of one group clearly evident throughout the magazine's publication. 258

These are writers who have either come together earlier, in Origin, or

who are "found" by the same nature of attention that Origin's

preoccupations had effected. Louis Zukofsky would be one of these latter as would be also Edward Dahlberg. There are also "occa sional" contributors, as Paul Goodman, and those who simply appear with no previous or necessarily continuing sense of relation ship, like James Purdy. I think we were, possibly, the first maga zine to print his work in America, and that was surely a pleasure. He had found us somehow, submitted the story, and I printed it. The same is true of Sherry Mangan's story (a curious echo from the twenties) in the seventh issue, or of Alfred Kreymborg's "Meta physical Ballad," printed there as well. But two other kinds of contributor were particularly significant. Thus far the relation to the college itself must seem the fact that it was paying for the magazine's publication, and that Olson was the rector of the college. Although Hellman, Duncan, and myself were briefly on the faculty, this was somewhat after the fact because the nature of the magazine was determined otherwise and really prior to that fact. But if those contributors

are

noted who were either

students at the college at the time, or had recently been so, then a

relation of the college to the magazine, and particularly to Olson's influence as a teacher, becomes very clear. First there is Jonathan Williams-who is certainly not a "student" at this point, but who is much interested in the college and in Olson particularly, as his own

publishing (Jargon) makes clear. Look at the advertisements

for his press in the various issues of the magazine, for further in stance. Then there is Joel Oppenheimer, who had left the college not long before the publication of the first issue and so comes into

its activity by that fact. Then Fielding Dawson-also absent at this

point from the college, in the army in Stuttgart, but again much involved by relation to the college and so with the magazine also. Then there are those literally there: Edward Dom, Michael Ru maker, and Tom Field. Dom had published one poem in Origin, in an issue edited by Denise Levertov, and his story in the Black Mountain Review is, I think, his first published prose-and a clear example of what was to be his extraordinary ability in that mode as well as in poetry. Michael Rumaker has his first publication of kind in the any magazine, with two stories I feel to be as fine as ever were published-in fact, "The Pipe" I think as exceptional 259

piece of writing as any of any time. Then, finally, Tom Field actually a painter, but whose writing struck me usefully, though it has not proven of major interest to himself. But think of it-that a college having an enrollment of about twenty people as average the should time have such the was during magazine published gifted men as Dorn, Rumaker, Dawson, Oppenheimer, and Wil liams have so proven themselves to be. Hopefully, it makes excuse for the kind of eulogy these comments must now seem. The college closed in the spring of 1956 and at that point Jonathan Williams became the ostensible publisher of the last a

issue-on the cover of which he put a little sticker to make this

fact clear. There

was

hope we might continue. Some material

for the next issue was in hand, some photos of Frederick Sommer for one thing, and some essays of Edward Dahlberg's. But the last

issue itself

was almost impossible to manage. I had left Black Mountain, had been briefly in San Francisco, and was now living in New Mexico. The printer, of course, was still in Spain, and the delays in proofing, or even getting the initial printing begun, were

almost impossible to manage. However, the last issue-with the addition of Allen Ginsberg as contributing editor--defines the last

group of contributors who have particular relevance. Ed Dorn had moved to San Francisco with his family after leaving Black

Mountain the year

previous. I was in restless state, having from separated my wife, and being really at odds with much in my

life. I wanted a new condition and so went west, where I'd never

been, to see if that might be an answer. So I was also in San Fran cisco, in the spring of 1956-and for a writer there was really no place that could have been quite like it, just at that time. The contents pages of the seventh issue make this much clearer than I

can-Ginsberg, Kerouac, Whalen, McClure, Burroughs (Lee), Snyder-and another man I was deeply pleased to include, albeit from the East, Hubert Selby, Jr. It was unequivocally a shift and opening of the previous center, and finally as good a place as any to end. Other magazines had appeared as well, with much the among them Big Table and the Evergreen Review. Whatever battle had been the case did seem effectually won. same concerns,

A last note, briefly, about the divers reproductions and photo

graphs that appear in the various issues, as well as the covers for I valued these especially, in that they freshened the last three ...

260

everything when otherwise things seemed almost too dense. It was a particular honor to include Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan, because all had been teachers at the college, and, even more than that, had each made so actively clear a new way of seeing in their art. John Altoon I can never thank enough for so much it would be specious to try to list-and he also has made very evident how extraordinary a painter he is. Dan Rice, a close friend of those days and first met at the college-the same. Edward Corbett I met while I was editing the last issue in New Mexico, and though I'm sure he thought I was simply hysteri cal, his cover as well as other generosities is a lovely fact of his concern. As for Laubies-s-he saw it all.

So it's finally all well in the past, either ence of

one's

experi something, or else the communal fact of what the writers of as

own

that situation and time seemed to have had in mind. I don't think it can ever be very different. You want to do something, to see it

happen, and apparently it can't or at least can't with what then exists as possibility. So you try to change it and you do or don't as proves the case. What really now delights me is that a maga zine having a usual printing of some 500 to 750 copies, about 200 of which ever got distributed, could have made any dent whatso ever.

That should cheer us all.

Robert Creeley. Photograph by Gerard Malanga.

261

Daisy Aldan, editor and publisher of Folder. Photograph by

Gerard Malanga.

DAISY ALDAN AN INTERVIEW ON

FoLDER Dennis Barone Folder, edited by Daisy Aldan and Richard Miller, appeared in four issues between Winter 1953 and Winter 1956. Although the New York School poets and painters appeared in the magazine, it was not limited to that school. There were poems and stories by Italian artists (Giorgio Caproni and Pier Paolo Pasolini), Ms. Aldan's translation of Mallarme's "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," silk screen prints by Grace Hartigan and others, song music, and photographs. Folder published the work of James Merrill, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and Charles Olson.

Daisy Aldan has published two books of poetry. She is currently working on her second novel and on a set of translations of the poetry of Swedish-Finnish poet Edith Siidergran. She lives half the year in New York and the other half in Switzerland. Dennis Barone is a poet and editor (Tamarisk) who has con ducted interviews with a number of little magazine editors. This interview was conducted on February 8, 1977, in New York.

When I interviewed Gilbert Sorrentino

few months ago, he

said that in the early fifties there was no environment for artists outside of Black Mountain College and that it was dreadful to live in a big city like New York or Chicago. I was wondering if it was so dreadful

In the fifties? In the early fifties. Without an environment for artists how did a

magazine like Folder emerge? 263

Until about 1953 there were about forty-two literary magazines in the whole country, and most were controlled by the academic

poets. Any so-called avant-garde poet had great difficulty having his work published. In my own work I was involved with new forms. I happened to be starting my doctoral thesis, which because of my affinity was then called The Influence of French Surrealism on American

Literature. At Hunter College I had been an editor

of the literary magazine, and that imbued in me

lasting desire

publish a magazine. I did not publish Folder because avant garde poets were not being published. It was an impulse of my own nature and I happened to publish it when it was needed. I wonder

if you could say something about the technical deci sions concerning Folder. It was such a high-quality magazine. was teaching. A young student poet in the student in the school at the time writing good my class, only

Yes. I was poor and I

poetry-and, incidentally, being discriminated against for it (in the sixties there were many student poets, so the scene had defi

nitely changed)-well, this student, Leon Hecht, and I used to put booklets done in calligraphy. We had a great interest in dada, and one day the idea of a magazine inspired us. We were going to call it Any Minute Now Somebody's Going to Do It! after a poem of mine-an unusual title for those times. We planned to get paper from the supply department (it was an art school), but when we started, nothing but the best laid paper satisfied me. I always loved beautiful books. We had to figure out a way of binding the magazine without paying exorbitant binding costs. By now Richard Miller and Floriano Vecchi were helping, and after experimenting with many forms we designed a cover into which folded sheets could fit. The form also made it possible for out little

each writer to have a folio of his own. I was always interested in an integration of the arts (an avant

garde idea at that time)

and

attempted to incorporate seri

and photographs. In my school they had a

graphs, music sheets, silk-screen shop and there, sitting in with students, I taught my self silk-screening. Subsequently we rented a little studio, called it the Tiber Press, and invited artists like Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, and Joan Mitchell, none well known in the 264

FOLDER 10HN ASHalJY DAISY ALDAN GIORGIO C ....ONI nAN GA•• IOUI' UON HIC"'

i(INNUH .0eM' JAMU .'UJ.LI. ,aANIt O'H.RA

AUXANDI. aANDOLf'H .fAMU '(.Hunl. IDW'N

nu,uI

�ANOItA wOOl:'

Folder, Vol. 1, No.1, Winter 1953 (courtesy Northwestern University

Library).

FOLDER

FRANK O'HARA SANDRA WOOl JOHN ASHBERY

GIUSSEPPE PATRONI GRIFFI EDWIN TREITLER

ALEXANDER RANDOLPH

JAMES SCHUYLER DAISY ALDAN

GEORGE HARTIGAN FREDERICK ENGLISH JAMES MERRILL

ROBERT HELLMAN LEON HECHT JEAN GARRIGUE

WILLIAM FENSE WEAVER

KENNETH KOCH

GIORGIO CAPRON I

Daisy Aldan

William Fens. Floria:no

from Folder Vol, 1, No.1: three original silkscreen prints by "George" (Grace) Hartigan (courtesy Northwestern University Library),

field at the time, to come up and make their own serigraphs under the supervision of Floriano, who made himself into a silk-screen

expert there. The magazine was produced with my own money, earned in teaching. The magazine View had suspended publica

tion, and so Folder became the only good magazine in America publishing exciting new work. Poets like Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Storm De Hirsch, James Broughton, Arthur Gregor, Harriet Zinnes, all largely unknown at the time, were

published in Folder.

How did you meet that whole group? I was involved with the artistic world. Some

were

friends. One

told another. Later on, when I published A New Folder: Ameri cans:

Poems and Drawings, which included work of about fifty

poets and fifty painters, I had met Allen Ginsberg and his circle. Those poets were very generous with each other, recommended each other. In those days I traveled a good deal during my summer vacations and in Paris I met many writers, and so it went.

long, Folder was being reviewed. Arts International gave us a good review. Stuart Preston of the New York Times wrote a great review. It was an exciting magazine, an exciting Before

adventure. I set the type by hand. I bought a Kinsey handpress for ninety

dollars by mail and began to set Folder letter by letter. Later I had the type made in lines and did the pages by hand, line by line. This gave me a lot of leeway with layout. I also chose handset

type for titles. I did this in a little print shop on 82nd Street. When someone entered the shop, I had to stop work because women were

not allowed in the union then and the

printer would have

been suspended or fined. What a lot of work! I enjoyed it.

Why did Grace Hartigan go by the name of George Hartigan? Because at that time women's work was rarely published or ac

cepted in major art galleries. Some gave themselves male names or used initials. However, by the time Folder 3 appeared, the scene had begun to change. Some say that that time was a male era.

268

Yes. If you look at contributor lists, you will see hardly a woman's name, but I published many women. In A New Folder there are at least twenty-five, if not more. In 1954, I actually made a

anthology, which I never

list of women poets for an intended

accomplished. It was not that I wished to take up the standard for women. It was because the work of many fine women poets came

to my

attention, and good women poets were among my

friends, and I felt they should be published. Gray said. She said teaching

I remember something Francine du Plessix

that at Black Mountain Charles Olson did not like women. He said women should never write.

Oh, really? I'm surprised. I met Olson. I liked him. I published his work. Yes, in the fifties there was that kind of feeling among men writers and editors. They spoke about "woman's poetry" as if it had a special sentimental romantic quality or was a kind of

imitation of Emily Dickinson. I was often introduced as "a poetess" or sometimes "a

poetress." An editor once said to me, "If I didn't

know that you, a woman, had written these poems, I would like your work." And

editor wrote me, "Your poems are dynamic, colorful, exciting, but too strong for a woman." I always stated that labels were invalid. I don't believe in "old once

poets," "young poets," "black poets," "women poets." One is a poet, an individual; that's what is important. In the Folder days I followed that conviction. I still do.

You mentioned academic journals-Kenyon and so on

....

Yes.

Well, how, in that environment, did the change in the poetic line come about? You look at someone like Robert Lowell and

then a year later you look at someone like John Ashbery. It was the moment of transition. I often act

intuition and

then find that the activity I set in motion becomes general. I'm not implying that I bring it about.

simply that, as an instru

ment, I have a fore-intuition that is getting ready to become mani fest. The coming to the fore of abstract expressionism in America and poetry which had as its inspiration French surrealism and its

forerunners Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarme,

Apollinaire-who 269

had been waiting in the wings-took the stage in 1953. Folder and the work it published helped in this attempt to liberate static

forms. I started the first big poetry readings in the city, outside the "Y." One midnight at the Living Theatre,

eighteen Folder poets (the list now reads like a Who's Who in poetry)-James Merrill, Michael McClure, Ginsberg, Schuyler, O'Hara, LeRoi Jones, Garrigue, M. C. Richards, and so on-read their work to a back ground of projected abstract expressionist drawings which were in my book: de Kooning, Kline, Pollack, Blaine, Knaths, Frei licher, Goldberg. I could have bought a de Kooning then for fifty dollars. I meant to, but just didn't get to it. It was a time of ferment. The Artist's Club, to which I used to go with Kiesler, was meeting in the Village, and great discussions were held there. Some of the poets and painters used to come up here to this very apartment where, incidentally, I haven't been for twenty years. I've come back here and it's interesting that you should be interviewing me about Folder here, where most of it came to birth and grew. We made tape recordings here; had read A fermentation was on and we were part of it. Folder ings. going became one voice, an instrument of definition. I always hear that the abstract expressionists and the New York

school, so to speak, had a great effect upon one another. Yes, that's so. All were friends. (Later, as they became famous enmities developed. The nature of human ambition, alas!) They met at the Artist's Club, at the Cedar Bar, at Hartigan's studio, in Westhampton or Easthampton. Poets and

painters influenced

each other. For example, Grace Hartigan and Frank O'Hara were

Larry Rivers were friends. They did poetry-painting collaborations, and Richard Miller, Floriano Vecchi, and I were attempting to do poetry-painting collections. You know, Larry wrote poetry also. I published his poems in close friends. Frank and

A New Folder.

Yes, I saw that. I didn't realize that till I saw his poems there. However, Folder was not just a publication for New York poets and painters. I published Pasolini in America for the first time. I was going to ask you about that.

270

A friend of mine, Bill Weaver, who became my Italian editor, was a dear friend and translator of Pasolini. He sent me his work. I published some of the first translations into English of the Greek

poet George Seferis. I published other Italian poets, Haitian poets, poets from the Midwest, from the West Coast, and so on. going to ask you, do you think Montale had a negative influence on Italian poetry? I like that Pasolini translation He seems so much

lot. I

was

conservative than

someone

like F. T.

Marinetti.

What you call "conservative" I call the real

avant-garde, The

surrealist "games" are, or should be, over. The real avant-garde is a

spiritual awakening, and this is manifest in the best work of

our

time. As Tristan Tzara, whom I met in Paris in the fifties,

said to me then, "The trouble with many of today's poets and painters is that they don't know dada is dead." You must have met a lot of interesting people.

Yes, fascinating! The Princess Caetani of Botteghe Oscure

BOTTEGHE OSCVRE

...

Botteghe Oscure, No. 24, Autumn i959, edited by Marguerite Caetani. Botteghe Oscure is the name of an ancient street in Rome which passed along one side of the Circus

Flaminii, built in 220 B. C. in the Middle Ages, after the Circus had

fallen into ruin, merchants began to use its dark arcades as shops, and so the street received the name of Apothecae Oscurae. Later it became known as Via delle Botteghe Oscure, from which the name of the magazine derived. Botteghe Oscure appeared twice a year and contained in each number five sections: French,

English, American, italian, and

(alternately) German and Spanish (courtesy J&F Anania).

271

That was a great magazine! Yes. She published Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Rene Char, hun

dreds of now-renowned writers. I met Caresse Crosby of Black Sun Press, whose Portfolio and other publications brought out some of the best writers of this century. Ruth Witt Diamant be came a

friend.

What about Ruth Witt Diamant? She created the

Poetry Center in San Francisco, the spawning ground many American poets, including the group that became known as the Beats: Kerouac, Corso, McClure, Snyder, et al. The three women have not received their due recognition. Without their taste, courage, initiative, the literary world would for

be much poorer.

Speaking of a poorer world, Man Ray died recently. I read about it. It's hard to believe that he was born in New Jersey,

just about

where I was born. In New Jersey? Really I didn't know that. It's odd to think of. I've always connected him with Paris. The early surrealists included many geniuses, but many did not

really understand what Breton was striving for-a spiritual renewal. They got waylaid into blind alleys: drugs, insanity, suicide, games which had nothing to do with the essence of real poetry. It is the same today. Some poets are just beginning to read surrealist trans lations and are imitating forms of the past without insight. Did View influence Folder?

No. When I started Folder, I had not heard of View, but it was an excellent

magazine.

I was wondering if any other magazine influenced you?

Yes-Caresse Crosby's Portfolio. She had published it during the war when paper was scarce and had used any paper she could

find; all sizes and colors. The pages were unbound. That gave me the initial idea for the Folder format, when some copies came into 272

my hands in connection with my thesis. My format was made neater, could be better handled, and I used beautiful laid paper. But the inspiration came from Portfolio. I think she published the first Charles Olson poem. How did you

get to meet Olson? Were you familiar with Olson's Maximus Poems? Jack

Hammond, of Hammond Organ fame, had

medieval

castle which he had had transported stone by stone from Italy and

re-erected in East Gloucester, Massachusetts. Kenward Elmslie and Ruth Yorke were friends of Hammond, and through them I was invited to this castle. Several poets, including Olson, lived nearby and often met there for readings and discussions. They all knew about Folder, and so when I came it was natural that Jack

would invite

group over to meet me. Olson and I liked each other at once. In the beautiful little chapel, we all read our poetry a

each other, and I remember that Kenward and I did from Macbeth on one of the galleries. to

scene

After that meeting, Olson and I started a correspondence. He was a brilliant person, a wonderful human being. His poems,

though not always clear to me at the time, nevertheless impressed me as being among the better artistic works of our day, full of integrity. Had you been aware of the Black Mountain scene?

Yes,

of it because when I

was graduated from Hunter College, I was invited to go there at about the same time that that famous group was there: Duncan, M. C. Richards, was

aware

Olson. I was in love and wouldn't leave New York. When I think how my destiny later brought me into contact with almost everyone in that group, it seems incredible. I regret that decision. Was it New York that brought you all together? No. What brought us together was Folder. It also brought me into

the literary world. Before that, I was an actress and a teacher who wrote poetry. At the point of Folder, a new stream entered

life. Folder became one of the focal points for artists and writers.

There

others: Ruth Yorke's salons, Johnny Latouche's salons, the Artist's Club, Grace Hartigan's studio. Soon galleries were

273

exhibiting works by the painters involved, and poetry read ings in the city multiplied. I was the first to introduce poetry readings in the Donnell Library. I had to beg the people in charge. The participating poets had to send in the poems they would read to be approved, in order to ascertain that not one obscene word would be expressed. Times certainly have changed. were

You sold Folder for one dollar. That must have entailed a great

loss.

Very great. I still lose money. I publish a book a year-always a financial loss. It was fortunate that I was teaching. I gave extra classes after school so I could earn extra money for the magazine. I stinted on clothes. No one helped me financially. Ever. Lots of times people ask me why anyone would do that.

It's creative. It's exciting. It's alive. I encourage anyone who wants to

publish a literary magazine, even today when about 5,000

exist. Even if you just do it and give copies away to your friends, it's good. The only thing is, you should have an objective sense of responsibility for what you are printing. Then it becomes a definition of life. I was always interested in literature. I was inter ested in publishing. I was interested in magazines, in poetry. I never asked questions. How did you put the magazine together?

It was really amusing. The poets and painters who

were

in the

first issue-Grace, Frank, John Ashbery-they all came to this little studio and we walked around a table putting the pages to

gether like a smorgasbord. Why did you decide to give up the magazine and do A New Folder?

By 1959 there were more than a thousand little magazines where the avant-garde could be published. The need for the magazine, it, had ended. Then I was eager to do a book, a book that was bound and could be put on shelves without falling apart. as I saw

Who was the audience?

Gallery people. I was getting orders from all over the country. I met Caresse Crosby through her cor-

Writers. Painters. Dancers.

274

respondence with me. That's how I met Anais Nin. She was, as it happens, my first subscriber. She wrote to me asking if I had bought her type from her old press, since I was also using Vogue sans-serif type, rarely used at that time. That's how I met Eugene Walter and the Princess Caetani, as well as Ruth Yorke, Kiesler,

Latouche, Varese, Dlugozewski, Erich Hawkins. It is incredible to think how many are dead: Kerouac, O'Hara, Garrigue, Anais. I traveled every summer in those days. One day in Athens I saw a

notice of an exhibit of beautiful books. I went to it and to

my surprise there was Folder on exhibit! I have no idea how it arrived there. But that's how it is. When you send something

beautiful into the world, it finds its

own

way.

What bookstores were they sold in? Gotham

was

one

of the first to take it. Frances Steloff

even

gave us an exhibit in her windows. I appreciated that. The 8th Street Book Shop, Phoenix places like that. I went around .

to the bookstores, loaded down with books.

later said to me, "I

People who met me

always remember you walking around with

heavy bag full of books." I still have to do it. As I said, I try intensity. This year I published Harriet Zinnes's I Wanted to See Something Flying. It received an Elliston AWard mention. a

to put out one book a year, but without the same

I went over to Gotham to see how much they wanted for Folder 4. It was fifty dollars.

That was

cheap. Number I is difficult to find for one hundred dollars. It was printed on laid paper; it contained serigraphs made by the artists, and poems, and stories. I used to sell it to my stu dents for fifty cents. The Museum of Modern Art awarded Grace Hartigan a Graphic Arts prize for her serigraphs in Folder I. I have her extra copies which the museum was selling for ten dollars each at the same time that anyone could have bought all three plus the other stuff for one dollar. Well, if you could find a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's self-published booklet, which he couldn't sell even for one cent, you'd be rich. That's the way it is! Folder I is almost entirely set by hand. There were only five hundred copies. I had to steal my mother's not too long ago. Concerning translations: do you feel

that

one

should

publish

only American works because these need more nurturing? 275

I don't feel that way. I'm interested in good poetry and I don't care

where it's from. I don't believe in any kind of nationalism.

What do you see as the purpose behind a magazine?

Well, it's a way of getting the defined experience, which is poetry, into the world. It brings the book, as Mallarme called it, that are all writing into definition. Even if one person alone is transformed by something he reads there, it's important. It is

a record of the

place people have reached in consciousness at any

given time. The best will remain, will rise to the surface

the

inept gets filtered out, and this will indicate mankind's path on this earth. That's part of it, but I don't think people who publish ask themselves that question. Maybe they should. Also, in our time the written word is important. In ancient times, it was not. Now we get knowledge through the written word. Did you publish only people you knew? No. I read every manuscript that came in. Some

came on tom

dirty paper, written in pencil. Sometimes these works were among the best and I published them. I remember some poems of Gregory Corso came that way. I turned down friends whose contributions

didn't seem at the time to be of the standard I was seeking. For

example, I love the work of Calder and Saul Steinberg, but turned down the drawings they sent in. How does the publication of a poet's work affect the poet?

By reading the work of other poets, which published poets gen erally do, they are inspired to new creativity. Also, a poet is encouraged by approval. All creators have a need, even if it is unconscious, to share their work with the world. Community is created in this sharing. We poets need that-true community of individuals. One must no longer isolate oneself in a cave. Who reads poetry magazines? Mostly poets! A community of poets! Those responsible for the renewal of the word. 1 noticed you published Frank O'Hara in every issue. Yes. In those days he was my favorite. I considered him highly gifted. He had difficulty getting his poems published in the estab

magazines. I felt that his later work, filled with private games and personal allusions, had veered away from what poetry

lished

276

is meant to fulfill. Who is to know whether, if he had lived, his

work would have passed beyond the trivia into

new

creativity?

Once at a birthday party for him in Grace Hartigan's studio, I found him crying and asked him why.

thirty years old and have so little time left. Chatterton died at eighteen, Shelley at twenty-six." "Because today I

When I made my film, Once upon an El, in 1955, when the city was demolishing the Third Avenue el, eighteen poets and

painters participated. In Frank's sequence, he pretends to throw himself in front of an oncoming train. You know he was killed by a roving beach car, a moving machine. Amazing! He was a remarkable individual. Some people say that O'Hara and Ashbery and the group around

them had a destructive effect on poetry or at least on young people

writing today.

though there were many gifted among them, but O'Hara and Ashbery cannot be considered Beats. A lot of things John does I consider un necessary, but a poet is allowed to try everything. His good work is very good. It always was and it still is. He is a brilliant person. Those who say that group had a bad influence are not reading carefully or have little insight, and experience superficially, not I don't believe that. I think the Beats

did,

even

with inner vision. In my work I have almost totally ignored the Beats.

You should not. Just develop judgment to

where

they were destructive and where liberating. I knew most of them and pub

lished them in A New Folder. I

see

of them, although I was never a Beat. They were corrupted by fake Orien was

considered

one

talism, drugs, license mistaken for freedom, and a malcompre hension of the ideals of surrealism. Henry Miller was God to them, and in my opinion, although at his best he is superb, he had a very destructive influence on American life and culture. Did Mallarme influence your own work? Blake and his vision?

Blake had no influence on my work. I just have similar ideas about consciousness. As for Mallarme, certainly there must have

been some influence, particularly in terms of Coup de Des, which I translated. 277

1 saw your translation in Folder 4.

He was perhaps the first to break up the coffin'd poem on the page and let "the light stream, not on, but through." I tried to carry that further in Breakthrough. In his time he was not understood. All his friends left him. In

high school, I gave a talk on T. S. Eliot, whom no one understood at that time. Now every student quotes him. That should answer

your question about

publication.

What do you think of some of the big magazines getting federal

grants? I think the National Endowment for the Arts has been

stim

ulus to the arts. I think its standards might be improved. It should

help only those publications that manifest real quality. I don't find this the case now. As long as government does not attempt directly or indirectly to dictate policy, then I believe government encouragement is fine. Of course, that danger is always there. Kelly at Bard says magazines should not accept unsolicited work. Poets should spend more time at their work, not in the post office. A facile comment. Who will solicit an unknown poet's work? We do spend half our time in the post office, and also our money. A poet can't earn enough to live on with his poetry. Also, one can't deduct expenses from one's income tax, says it won't support

the government

losing business.

Do you remember how much your postage was in the fifties? Four cents for a letter. Eight cents to send the magazine. Sorrentino said that in the Cedar Bar in the

fifties, you could

get beer for a nickel and if you didn't have the money, someone would give it to you. That's true. Poor artist's special-thirty-five cents!

Everything was cheaper in those days. Certainly being poor never deterred a really gifted person from creating art. What do you think is the avant-garde of today?

278

The artist who is

aware

of the evolution of consciousness, and

recognizes that his work must heal a wounded world. Can you

name

some

poets who may be said to exemplify that

concept? Well, Albert Steffen, the Swiss poet, for one. Then many poets in our own country today are writing fine work which inher ently follows that concept: W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Jane Randolph, Zimmer, Hine, Swenson, and many others. Some of the best poetry in the world is being written in America today. What are you doing now?

Finishing a novel, a novel with an atmosphere of poetry in it.

279

il� cents Kulchur, Vol. 1, No.1, Spring 1960 (courtesy Northwestern University Library).

KuLcHuR: A MEMOIR Lita Hornick "l have

unbroken, seventeen-year record of losing money,"

says Lita Hornick of her experience with Kulchur magazine. Al

though Mrs. Hornick began as an academic with a Ph.D. from Columbia ("I was the only pregnant woman on the campus"), the magazine she published in the early sixties was anything but "Es tablishment." Kulchur published writers like LeRoi Jones, Denise Levertov, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Louis Zukojsky, who discussed a variety of topics from film, jazz, architecture, dance, drama, and painting to civil rights and politics. Kulchur was, in Mrs. Hornick's words, "the only journal of criticism and comment in the under ground then." Lila Hornick began publishing volumes of poetry under the Kulchur Books imprint in 1966; to date she has brought out twenty-four volumes. In 1970 she founded the Kulchur Founda tion, which, in addition to publishing books, also offers grants to poets, small presses, and artists. She has sponsored poetry readings at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kulchur was founded in 1960 by Marc Schleifer, who published and edited the first two issues. I became the publisher in February

1961, and formed Kulchur Press, Inc. I shall not deal with the as this essay is conceived issues under my ownership, memoir. the first three In personal

two issues with which I had no contact, as a

I was not involved in any editorial work, but devoted myself to the business end of the magazine, struggling to find a national

distributor and to build a subscription list. Schleifer edited Kulchur 3, and then took off for Cuba without

telling me where he was going or how long he would be gone. That issue was more political than literary in orientation, but nevertheless contained some notable pieces. Most important of all, perhaps, was "In Search of Yage," letters to Allen Ginsberg by 281

William Burroughs, recounting his search for the

drug in South

America. There were poems by Charles Olson and Diane di Prima and "sound scores" by George Brecht. articles

(The printing of scores and

music was a tradition which was to be continued in

later issues of Kulchur.) Joel Oppenheimer wrote a very interesting

piece on the obscure poet Samuel Greenberg, LeRoi Jones an essay called "Milneburg Joys (or, Against 'Hipness' as Such) ," and Julian Beck an article on "The Life of the Theatre." "A Second

Look at Pornography" by Donald Phelps was noteworthy. There were

also reviews of art exhibitions, books, films, and records-a

feature of the magazine that was to be continued.

Before Schleifer left, he appointed Gilbert Sorrentino guest editor of Kulchur 4, and I persuaded Gil to go ahead with the issue. Number 4 was much

concerned with literature and

poetics than were previous issues, and was much more to my taste. Gil had the honor to introduce Robert Duncan into the magazine; he contributed a very important essay, "Ideas on the Meaning of Form." Characteristically, Duncan relates the poetic imagination to the forces of the cosmos and scorns conventional inorganic form. Ed Dorn, also new to the magazine, contributed an im portant essay, "What I See in the Maximus Poems (1)." His writing on poetry was the furthest thing in the world from the New Criticism, and this was what Kulchur was later to strive to feature: poets on poetry in a vein far different from that of the academic quarterlies. Ron Loewinsohn, for example, con comment by

tributed an essay on his poetics called "A Credo Sandwich." Besides these notable essays on poetry and poetics, the issue contained a hard-hitting essay on brutality in mental hospitals by

"Harry Black," pseudonym of Hubert Selby. LeRoi Jones's article on the history of African and Afro-American music was a learned piece that was never pedantic. Although Jones is known today chiefly as a black political revolutionary, the actual range of his intellect can be quickly estimated from the pages of Kulchur. Last but not least among the essays in Kulchur 4 was the first appear ance in the magazine of the great but then neglected poet Louis Zukofsky, writing here on the art of Charlie Chaplin. The issue closed with reviews of books and films but none of art exhibitions or records-the only areas later featured in the magazine that did not appear in this issue.

282

Louis Zukojsky

Photograph by Gerard Malanga.

Not

having heard from Schleifer, I invited Gil Sorrentino to

edit Kulchur 5, but he declined. Marian Zazeela (now married to the eminent composer La Monte Young, but then married to Schleifer) appointed Joel Oppenheimer as editor, with my ac quiescence. Joel continued the policy of publishing Louis Zukofsky

-including "Little Baron Snorck," an account of a child violin prodigy, based on the childhood of Zukofsky's son Paul. Charles Olson contributed a poem, and Kenneth Koch a hilarious parody of Pound. Jones's piece, "Tokenism: 300 Years for 5 Cents," was one of his key works and prophetic for 1962. Gilbert Sorrentino continued the tradition of literary comment with "Reflections on 'Spring and All.' Most notable of all, perhaps, were Louis and Celia Zukofsky's translations of Catullus. Comment on music fell to A. B. Spellman with "The Next to the Last Generation of Blues Singers." Lawrence Kornfeld, a great director who has never received the recognition he deserves, pro vided the theater article, "A Director's Search for a Stage." The piece de resistance was Kulchur's first "Art Chronicle" by Frank "

O'Hara, which I solicited. It included an account of the Abstract

Expressionists and Imagists show at the Guggenheim, a defense of that controversial Frank Lloyd Wright building, and an appreci ation of Claes Oldenburg's exhibition, The Store, which contradicts the commonly held opinion that Frank O'Hara hated all pop art. He also spoke well of the Rauschenberg show at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Film and book reviews followed. Still not having heard from Marc Schleifer, I undertook the editing of Kulchur 6 myself. This issue presented the first publica tion of Louis Zukofsky's great play Arise, Arise. It also had a cover and picture portfolio on the Living Theatre and an essay by Julian Beck titled "Broadway and Living Theatre Polemic." The so-called "deep image poets" made their initial appearance here in Kulchur-the first of my continuing efforts to broaden the base of contributors and cover the whole avant-garde scene. "Deep Image" was represented by Jerome Rothenberg in an exchange of letters with Robert Creeley on the subject of poetics, and by Robert Kelly in the poem "Staccato for Tarots: I." (Of course Creeley did not belong to this group, but was receptive to Rothen berg's argument.) An essay by Denise Levertov on current English poets was also 284

included in number 6; it had been solicited by Joel Oppenheimer, but he had decided against printing it in Kulchur 5. Comment on music was presented in Morton Feldman's "Liner Notes," his first appearance in the magazine, and comment on film consisted of an article by Donald Phelps on Parker Tyler's film criticism. Frank

enthusiastically with the Egan sculptures Study gallery, Alex Katz's cutouts at Tanager, and the Gorky exhibitions at Janis and Anderson. Film reviews by Fielding Dawson closed

O'Hara's second "Art Chronicle" dealt Nakian

the Loeb

Center and at the

the issue. When Kulchur 6 was in page proof, Marc Schleifer returned from Cuba and resigned from the magazine to take off for parts unknown. At that time he

persuaded me to buy his back-issue inventory of Kulchur 1 and 2 so that I might fill the needs of new subscribers who wanted a full set. After the resignation of Marc Schleifer, I appointed an editorial board

Jones, Gilbert Sorrentino, Frank O'Hara, Joe Le Sueur, Bill Berkson, and myself. This group held

composed

of LeRoi

together roughly from Kulchur 7 through Kulchur 12. Kulchur 7 was notable for the reprinting of Louis Zukofsky's "Five Statements for Poetry," which I had solicited. Two of these statements, "Pro gram: Objectivists' 1931" and "Sincerity and Objectification," were first printed in Poetry's historic objectivist issue in 1931. Ed Dorn's "Notes More or Less Relevant to Burroughs and Trocchi" continued the precedent of unorthodox comment on literature. Bill Berkson, at Frank's request, provided the "Art Chronicle." Joe Le Sueur wrote the first of Kulchur's "Theatre

Chronicles," which dealt with, among other things, a fine produc tion of Beckett's "Happy Days." LeRoi provided another of his essays on black music, "Introducing Bobby Bradford." Issue 7 was rich in reviews. LeRoi edited his first jazz record review section, written by himself and A. B. Spellman. The book review section, edited by Gil, dealt chiefly with small-press books, which went unnoted by other magazines at the time and are scarcely noted today. Kulchur continued to review them through out its duration. Perhaps the most important contribution to this section was Paul Blackburn's review of Robert Kelly, "The Amer ican Duende." At Frank O'Hara's request, the issue was dedicated to the late 285

Franz Kline, and

reproduction of one of his paintings, "Car dinal," graced the cover. Reproductions of paintings by De Koon ing and Guston were also included. Kulchur 8 continued the reprinting of Zukofsky's "Five State ments for Poetry" with "Poetry for My Son When He Can Read." Cid Corman, in his first appearance in the magazine, contributed an important essay on Creeley's "For Love." Paul Zukofsky, Louis's gifted musician son, presented us with an essay on the musical setting of one of his father's poems. Another first appear ance was Michael McClure in an essay on Anglo-Saxon words called "Phi Upsilon Kappa"; the title was supposed to be "Fuck" spelled in Greek. At that time (winter 1962), I feared that if "Fuck" appeared as the title the Post Office would impound the issue, so McClure rather humorously agreed to "spell it in Greek." Joe Le Sueur's always interesting "Theatre Chronicle" con trasted the Eric Bentley and Living Theatre productions of Brecht's A Man's a Man, and offered an appreciation of Joseph Papp's productions of Shakespeare in the Park. Gil wrote, to my way of thinking, an ill-considered attack on pop art, "Kitsch into Art: The New Realism," but unfortunately there was no "Art Chron icle." Anselm Hollo provided a report on the somewhat gloomy state of poetry and jazz in England. A long and solid jazz review section, edited by LeRoi and written by Spellman, Jon Rappaport, and Jones himself, was included. The creditable book review section, again edited by Gil, unfortunately did not feature small-press books, but did contain reviews of important avant-garde writers such as Kerouac, McClure, and Olson, written by Sorrentino, Dorn, and Richard a

Barker. Kulchur 9 was a special drama issue edited by Joe Le Sueur.

Larry Rivers did the cover on which, in his own words, he "put Shakespeare behind the eight ball." Although our usual chronicles and reviews were included, there were no essays, only plays. The issue was most notable for the first publication of LeRoi's famous and savage play "The Toilet," later produced off Broadway to much acclaim. Michael Smith wrote an amusing satire of a mother and son in an oedipal situation. Arnold Weinstein contributed a two-page absurdist trifle. Douglas Woolf, a too little appreciated writer, sent us a poignant play, "The Love Letter," and Ruth 286

Krauss a charming little poem-play. Kenward Elmslie's contribu

tion, "The Aleutians," was written in the author's well-known witty manner, and Diane di Prima's "Murder Cake" was a beautiful and

funny fantasy that included such characters as Childe Harold, Richard Lovelace, and Dante. Barbara Guest contributed a short

poem-play. Frank's third and last "Art Chronicle"

appeared in this issue.

He only wrote three for Kulchur, contrary to other information: Donald Allen, in the biographical notes to his edition of Frank

O'Hara's Collected Poems, states that Frank wrote an "Art Chron icle" for every issue of Kulchur! Instead of editing a book review section for Kulchur 9, Gil wrote

"Poetry Chronicle," whichwas in most respects excellent. I was embarrassed by his attacks on Jerry Rothenberg and the "four young lady poets"-Rochelle Owens, Diane Wakoski, Carol Berge, and Barbara Moraff-but of course he had the right to speak as he saw fit. The first of Bill Berkson's three "Film Chron icles" appeared, and the music section, in addition to LeRoi's and A. B.'s jazz reviews, included a review of a GUnther Schuller concert by Morty Feldman. Kulchur 10 featured the wonderful essay by Edwin Denby, "Balanchine Choreographing," with cover and picture portfolio from the New York City Ballet, all obtained by Frank. The issue was also rich in comment on poetry by poets, always the core of the magazine. George Oppen covered a good deal of modern a

poetry in his essay "The Mind's Own Place." Paul Blackburn contributed an important piece on literary magazines, and Louis

Zukofsky his historic essay on poetics, "A Statement for Poetry (1950)." Michael Rumaker also sent us a piece on Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," and Larry Eigner a piece on Gertrude Stein's Three Lives. There were three essays on music: La Monte Young's "Excerpts

from 'Lecture

1960,''' Martin Williams' "Thelonious Monk: Prelude to Success," and Gi1's "Remembrances of Bop in New York 1945-1950." Joe Le Sueur's "Theatre Chronicle" covered "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" by Tennessee

Williams, "Natural Affection" by William Inge, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" by Edward Albee, and "Lorenzo" by Jack Richardson. Bill Berkson contributed his second "Film Chronicle." 287

Above: Robert Ducan; Michael McClure. Opposite: Joel

di Prima.

Photographs by Gerard Malanga.

Oppenheimer; Diane

The book reviews were written by LeRoi, Gil, Charles Olson, and Donald Phelps, and the jazz reviews by A. B. and Joe Early. The issue also included a letter to the editors by Anselm Hollo attacking Gil for his roasting of Rothenberg, Owens, Wakoski,

Berge, and

Moraff and Hollo's own translations of Russian poets, "Red Cats." For the first time, Kulchur became

arena

for

diversity of

opinion. Gil resigned as an editor after this issue, and I took over the editing of the book review section myself,

striving thereafter small-press books as possible. The reasons for his resignation were never very clear to me, but I doubt that they had anything to do with Anselm's letter. He told me he didn't like the direction in which the magazine was going, but agreed to stay on as a contributing editor. Kulchur 11 featured a brilliant piece by W. S. Merwin, modeled on Swift's "A Modest Proposal," suggesting ways in which the mutants produced by nuclear explosions might be put to service in to cover as many

the army. Robert Duncan sent us a story, entitled "Love." Com

literature

provided by Zukofsky's great essay on Pound. Ed Dorn also contributed a valuable appreciation of Douglas Woolf, and Anselm Hollo an appreciation of Jerome Rothenberg. Musical scores and a brief essay by Morty Feldman were in ment on

was

cluded. Joe's "Theatre Chronicle" was devoted to a rave notice of

Living Theatre's production of "The Brig" by Kenneth H.

the

Brown, which Joe saw as a realization of Artaud's "theatre of

cruelty." Bill Berkson's third and last "Film Chronicle" appeared, and there were book reviews by Sorrentino, Kenneth Irby, Jones, and Saul Gottlieb. Most notable was the review of Rochelle Owens'

Futz by Saul Gottlieb, at that time unknown and unproduced and only recently published by Hawk's Well Press. The jazz reviews were

written by LeRoi and A. B., and the issue concluded with

a letter to the

editors by Jerry Rothenberg, refuting Gil's criticism

of him in Kulchur 9. Bill Berkson then went off for an extended stay in Europe; he never wrote for the magazine again, though he never me

formally resigned. However, in a recent conversation Bill told

he never formally resigned because the relationship among the

editors at that time was so casual. This, I think, was entirely true. Kulchur 12 was originally planned as a special issue devoted entirely to civil rights, but not enough material on the theme was 290

submitted. As it finally turned out, the civil rights section extended

only from page 2 to page 32, containing contributions from Jones, Spellman, Robert Williams, Sorrentino, Dorn, Oppenheimer, Don ald Windham, and Denise Levertov. The rest of the issue contained the sort of material usually featured in Kulchur. Undoubtedly the most important piece was Robert Kelly's long analysis of Zukofsky's "A 1-12." LeRoi contributed another im portant article, "Expressive Language," about the social implica tions of speech, especially black American speech. Film was covered by William S. Pechter's essay on Frank Capra. There was no "Theatre Chronicle" by Joe, but Kenward Elmslie contributed a "Chronicle of Musicals," which dealt with How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Oliver, Stop the World-I Want to Get 00, Mr. President, Hot Spot, Little Me, Tovarich, and She Loves Me. Ed Dorn sent us an enigmatic little called and

story "Clay," provided a smashing post-assassination poem called "Exaugural Address (for Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who has had to eat too much shit)."

LeRoi

The book review section included

review of John

Rechy's

City of Night by Frank O'Hara, the last thing he was to write for the

magazine,

and reviews of four

small-press books: Reality

Sandwiches by Allan Ginsberg, reviewed by LeRoi; The Wake by Andrew Hoyem, reviewed by Gil; Residence on Earth by Pablo Neruda (translated by Clayton Eshleman), reviewed Gil, and

by City Lights Journal #1, reviewed by Allan Kaplan. Jazz reviews by LeRoi, A. B., and Marion Brown concluded the issue.

After Kulchur 12, I wrote to Frank, Joe, and LeRoi, telling them I would hold no more editorial but would edit the meetings

magazine myself thereafter, inviting them at the same time to continue as contributing editors for as long as they desired. I listed

them as editors on the masthead for one more issue, but the credits in Kulchur were never a very accurate indication of who was doing the work-more often than not only a courtesy. There was no between us. I was unpleasantness motivated merely by the fact that the poets' own work drew them increasingly away from the maga zine, whereas Kulchur was my only interest at that time. It became more and more difficult to get them to write the chronicles they had agreed to write, to solicit material, or to read There-

manuscripts.

291

fore the last eight issues of the magazine, numbers 13 through 20, were

edited by me, although LeRoi continued to handle the jazz

section through number 15. After that, there

was

jazz

section. Kulchur 13 boasted

cover

and

picture portfolio by Andy

Warhol, from his film The Kiss. Comment on literature was pro vided by two Canadian poets, hitherto unpublished in Kulchur: George Bowering on William Carlos Williams and Warren Tall

Creeley. Gil contributed a very important piece on "The Art of Hubert Selby." Allen Ginsberg sent me a poem, "The man on Robert

Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express July 18, 1963," and Ed Dorn a story, "Rest Stop." Richard Brautigan, then a relatively unknown writer, contributed a characteristic piece of fiction called "The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon." Joe sent me his last "Theatre Chronicle," as well as some brilliant film reviews by Pauline Kael. A brief essay on music by Peter Hartman was included and, much to my satisfaction, twenty pages of book reviews covering a wide variety of opinion. The reviewers were Allan Kaplan, Joe, Jerry

CITY LIGHTS BOOKS 261 COLUM.8� A.VENU� SAN fRANCISCO 11

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Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Lita Hornick (courtesy Lita Hornick and

Kulchur). 292

Rothenberg, Kenneth Irby, George Economou, and LeRoi. Jazz reviews by Martin Williams, A. B., Marian Brown, Kenneth Irby, John B. Litweiler, and James Brody completed the issue. Kulchur 14 had a cover by the wonderful young artist and writer Joe Brainard. The issue was originally planned as a Zukof sky number, but only three writers contributed pieces on L. Z.: Creeley, Jonathan Williams, and Charles Tomlinson. Clayton Eshleman's translations of Vallejo, sent to me by Gil, were, I felt, among the best things I had ever published. There was also a remarkable story, sent to me by LeRoi: "The Fable of Orby Dobbs" by Mack Thomas. Michael McClure reappeared in the magazine with his essay on "Reason" (though I cannot help think ing it was more about instinct than reason). Kenneth H. Brown, author of The Brig, proved in his piece "My Seed Grows Wilder" that he really could write and that The Brig was not merely a director's play. The extensive book review section included four small-press books: The Moderns, edited by LeRoi and reviewed by Gil; Twenty Poems of Cesar Vallejo, reviewed by Clayton Eshleman; Her Body Against Time by Robert Kelly; El Como Emplumado, reviewed by Kenneth Irby; and The World of the Lie by Ron Lowenstein, reviewed by Irby. John B. Litweiler was the only jazz reviewer. Kulchur 15 contained the first piece on art to be published in the magazine since Frank had ceased to write his chronicles-a long and brilliant essay on Robert Rauschenberg by the eminent art critic Nicolas Calas. The Leo Castelli gallery provided the Rauschenberg cover and an eight-page picture portfolio. George Bowering contributed an important essay on prosody. Charles Boultenhouse, the distinguished underground filmmaker, appeared as our new film chronicler with a piece on film time and its rela to real time which commented tionship extensively on the art of cutting. Donatella Manganotti, the most devoted scholar of the works of William Burroughs, sent a very solid essay. Music and musical theory were covered by Barney Childs in "The Beginning of the Apocalypse?"; the article was a refutation of a piece by Leonard B. Meyer in the Hudson Review. Also published in this issue was an interesting story, "To Lie Down in Negritude," by an unknown

writer, Rush Greenlee.

The book review section had the distinction of

introducing 293

Gerard Malanga and Ted Berrigan to the magazine for the first time. The other reviewers were Gil and Rochelle Owens, and four

small-press books were reviewed. The last jazz review section that LeRoi edited appeared in this issue, with reviewers John B.

Litweiler, Joe Early, Frank Busto, and Mack Thomas. The issue closed with the "Hungrealist Manifestos," statements on poetry, the short story, and politics by a group of young writers in India who were very much turned on by the American avant-garde, Kulchur 16 was graced with a cover by the distinguished artist Al Held, and a picture portfolio of his drawings, but unfortunately there was no article to accompany them. The issue opened with two of LeRoi's poems, "A Western Lady" and "Correction." These were followed by Charles Tomlinson's important interview with Creeley in which, as might be expected, the subjects dealt with were Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Olson, the Black Mountain Review, and some of the action painters at Black Mountain Col lege. Jack Hirschman contributed a very interesting essay, "Con stellations," primarily concerned with Mallarme's "Un Coup de des" but ranging over a broad field of contemporary poetry and music. Nicolas Calas' brief "Exercises" was followed by Gerard Malanga's interview with Andy Warhol, in which Andy answered questions in his usual cool and cryptic manner. Martin Williams contributed

article

television and Charles Boultenhouse

wrote a "Theatre Chronicle" instead of a "Film Chronicle" for this

supplemented by Wallace Thurston's essay on "Elga's Incantation," a work in progress by Rochelle Owens, was an early rendering of this gifted writer's now famous style. The issue concluded with John Keys's interesting "Letter to Robert Kelly," which was more general philosophy than poetics, and with the book review section, which comprised reviews by Economou, Bowering, Carolyn Kizer, Allan Kaplan, Berrigan, Malanga, Irby, and Ron Padgett in his first appearance in the magazine. Kulchur 17's startling cover was a reproduction of Robert Indiana's painting DIE, one of several illustrations accompanying Carl Belz's article, "Pop Art, New Humanism and Death." It is uncertain whether the many deathly images in pop art, such as issue. This

was

"The Films of Charles Boultenhouse."

Warhol's electric chairs and auto crashes, represent a criticism of 294

society or mere deadpan cool. Nicolas Calas, a literary as well as art critic, contributed an essay on the poetic image. A poem by LeRoi, "Corregidor," was his last contribution to the magazine. Much to my satisfaction, Clayton Eshleman contributed some more of his brilliant translations of Vallejo. Ron Padgett's hilarious takeoff of some solemn discussions of poetic form struck a new and refreshing note.

our

The inside front cover carried an announcement that I would

publish a poetry anthology edited by LeRoi, first projected as a book and later as the contents of Kulchur 20. Unfortunately LeRoi never did this, having by that time become completely involved in black politics. The next three issues were to see the introduction of a whole new group of writers, who might have contributed much to the maga zine had my time and energies permitted me to continue as editor.

Number 17

was

concluded with Charles Boultenhouse's "Film

Chronicle," Matthew Andrews' "Theatre Chronicle," and the book review section, where Irby, Berrigan, Padgett, Malanga, and David Meltzer reviewed, among other things, eight small-press books. The opening piece in Kulchur 18 was Morgan Gibson's inter view with Paul Goodman. Charles Boultenhouse contributed his last and most important piece about film,

essay on Stan Brak and I watched the film an

hage's "The Art of Vision." Charles together for five hours at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque (then near the Brooklyn Bridge), nourished by brandy and sandwiches. Margaret Randall, the distinguished poet and editor of El Como Emplumado, sent me "Thoughts on the Poetic Line." Another important comment on literature was the first part of a long essay on Wallace Stevens by Armand Schwerner. Music was covered by Robert Ashley's interview with Morty Feldman. "Poem-Plays" by Ruth Krauss was one of the delights of the issue; famous as a writer of children's books, Ruth had not yet attained recognition as a writer for adults. Joe Brainard's story "Sunday, July the 30th, 1964," was a landmark for the magazine. Felix Pollak's "Soirees" was

satire

Denise Levertov which

in retrospect seems to me too harsh. At that time, however, I was

interested in making Kulchur an arena for a diversity of opinion and anxious to prevent it from becoming a coterie magazine.

The notable "Art Chronicle,"

by David Antin, was his first 295

published piece of art criticism and dealt mainly with Duchamp. The "Theatre Chronicle" was by Matthew Andrews. The book reviews were by Fielding Dawson, Berrigan, Randall, Padgett, and John Sinclair. Ron Padgett's review of Joe Ceravolo's un published manuscript, "Wild Flowers Out of Gas," was included. Kulchur 19 was distinguished by a variety of brilliant and funny contributions from the group of then-emerging young writers who are now sometimes called the second generation New York School, though none of them like the appellation. There was Ron Padgett's mad story "Bill" and Ted Berrigan's account of an academic poet on a reading tour, "A Boke." Tom Veitch's "Yoga Exercises" was hilarious and obscene. So was Ron's picture story, "Pere Ubu's Alphabet," derived from Jarry and Bonnard. Ted's "Art Chronicle" was witty and outrageous, and the illustrations were the funniest I have ever seen. Two scenes from Dick Gallup's much admired play "The Bingo" were an important contribution, while the second part of Armand Schwerner's essay on Stevens provided more sober comment on literature. The "Theatre Chron icle" by Matthew Andrews and the "Film Chronicle" by Yale M. UdofI followed. Book reviewers were Berrigan, Sinclair, Margaret

Randall, Eshleman, Malanga, Bowering, Morgan Gibson, Aram Saroyan, Douglas Blazek, and Irby. This section covered a wide range of often conflicting ideas, including Ted's review of Harold

Rosenberg, which was shocking to some people. Though I don't think I was wholly aware of it at the time, looking back through the issues of Kulchur I realize that number 19 may have seemed to reflect a surprising change in editorial perspective. There was really no reason for this except that I felt I wanted to do something different. I was excited by the new writers' work and felt the emphasis of the modern cultural scene had shifted. I wanted the magazine to reflect that change. In Kulchur 20 Ted and Ron continued their wildly funny writing with a series of letters, "Big Travel Dialogues." This was later reprinted in Bean Spasms, a book by them that I published after I had ended the magazine and switched to publishing books. Gerard contributed an interview with the dancer James Waring, accompanied by a cover photograph and picture portfolio, and Ron and Joe had a poem-picture series entitled "Go Lovely Rose." A selection from Ted's wonderful "Sonnets" was included and a

296

long poem by Armand, "Prologue in Six Parts." Comment on literature was covered in an essay on Creeley by Ellen Maslow, comment on art in David Antin's second "Art Chronicle," dealing with current art criticism, and comment on film by Yale M. UdofI's review of Girl with the Green Eyes and Margaret Randall's poem "The Ritual, Antonioni." The book review section, which included six reviews of small-press books, again presented a wide

variety of opinion, provided by Fielding Dawson, David Meltzer, Margaret Randall, George Bowering, David Ross, Ted Berrigan, Tom Clark, and Ronald Caplan. This last issue of Kulchur appeared while it was still at its height. There was no reason to feel that the magazine's energies were depleted and that it had to end; it was only my energies which were depleted. After editing eight issues myself, with quarterly deadlines, I found I had no time for my husband and children. I decided to switch to publishing Kulchur Press books, producing only two books a year and working with only one author at a time. I also felt that, after five years of publishing a magazine which focused mainly on criticism, I would like to change to publishing poetry. Since then I have published twenty-four books. My decision may have seemed confusingly abrupt to some, since Kulchur 20 bore an announcement promising great things for Kulchur 21. I'm afraid it was rather abrupt, but little-magazine editors have never been known for their reasonableness.

Lita Hornick. Photograph by Gerard

Malanga. 297

NEON, KuLcHUR, ETC. Gilbert Sorrentino

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1 Neon, No.1, 1956 (courtesy Northwestern University Library).

•

Gilbert Sorrentino explains that an estimated audience of two hundred readers for Neon sufficed, because in the late fifties in New York the community of poets and writers was so

tight. An

editor could be absolutely certain that the people who wanted to see

the magazine would see it, either by purchasing a copy at the

Gotham Book Mart, the Eighth Street Book Shop, or Make It New,

by meeting someone who would lend him one. Magazines like Neon, the early Kulchur, and The Floating Bear were strong, inde pendent little magazines that grew, as Mr. Sorrentino says in the following essay, out of a specific modern movement, and they were important to that movement's cohesion. As William Carlos Wil liams advised Mr. Sorrentino just before Neon began: "A little magazine's only rationale is its editor's belief that the writers he prints must be presented as a group. Anything else is just a colla tion of pages." Models for Mr. Sorrentino when he edited Neon and worked as book editor for Kulchur were The Black Mountain Review, The Exile, Contact, The Little Review, and Measure. The editors whose or

work he admired were Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, John

Wieners, and Robert Creeley. And the magazines that served as examples of what not to do were The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, Discover, and Botteghe Oscure.

Although eclectic magazines serve some useful ends-and although most magazines, whatever else they may try to be, have something eclectic about them-Gilbert Sorrentino has been most drawn to those that have a bone to pick. Commercial magazines, in his view, can never be focused in this way. By definition, the editors of commercial publications must be interested in turning a profit. They must also create an audience instead of aiming their material at an audience that already exists. For all this, Mr. Sor rentino does not believe that commercial publishing in New York is worthless. When he worked as book editor for Kulchur, he ad vised Lita Hornick not to focus all her reviews exclusively on small press publications, since there was a lot of hackwork there too. Rather, she should mix reviews of the best books from small presses with reviews of books from big houses, which produced a lot of good work to be praised and a lot of sacred cows to be slaughtered. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929, Gilbert Sorrentino has published five books of fiction, eight books of verse, and six 299

anthologies, and has been awarded an Ariadne Foundation Grant, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a National En dowment for the Arts Fellowship, a CAPS grant, and the Samuel Fels Award for Fiction. His work has appeared in a wide range of magazines, among them Partisan Review, TriQuarterly, Caterpil lar, Kulchur, Fuck You, The Village Voice, and Esquire.

The decade between the mid-fifties and the mid-sixties,

larly

rich

for American

singu

reflection, writing, appears, complex in the extreme as far as the little magazine is concerned. It seems to me that, although there were fewer maga zines in evidence at any given time during that ten-year period than there are at present, many if not most of those magazines were oddly interdependent; this gave them a presence and an influence far exceeding their numbers. Those that were involved in publishing what may be called the "new writing"-if that is not too pompous and shopworn a phrase-were possessed by a passion to print what their editors took to be writing that quite literally had no place else to go. Not surprisingly, it fell out that the bulk of this writing was done by a rather small group of writers, so that many little magazines drew on essentially the same authors as contributors. There slowly evolved a kind of network of magazines acting as a general clearinghouse for new methods, techniques, and ideas of literary composition and one

to be

criticism. I think two

things should be made clear immediately. The magazines I speak of were not academic or scholarly, and had little to do with what are called quarterlies; nor were they open to anything at all, refuges for writers who wished to "express" themselves-in other words, they were not what might be termed bohemian publications. On the contrary, they had a definite literary bone to pick, and they set themselves up not as a mere press that considered its criteria to be correct. At this remove, I sometimes detect the wild eye of the fanatic staring out from these defunct journals; yet by and alternative press but as

large they were not fanatical, but revolutionary in a conscious, controlled, and planned way. To call them, even now, "alternative" or "experimental" smacks of the academic patronization that, 300

not so many years ago,

and

even

fear. If this

at his leisure,

peruse, on the "Beat

was seems

made manifest as contempt,

hatred,

farfetched, the reader is urged to

the reams of nonsense written, for instance,

generation" in the popular, slick, and academic

journals of the late fifties. The new writing was bitterly maligned and insulted

by all those who,

Robert

Creeley has noted,

"were dominant in their insistence upon an idea of form extrinsic to the

given instance." A critical-academic structure that rigidly as Williams and Zukofsky did not know

excluded such writers

what hit it in the fifties. In 1953 I

was

discharged from the Army and began work

novel, the first extended piece of writing I had ever done. Concurrently I wrote poetry, which I had begun to write while on a

college in 1949. It became clear as time passed that there were few, if any, magazines interested in publishing the kind of work that I was doing. I don't mean to imply that my work was first-rate; on the contrary, it was the work of an apprentice, one who was casting about to find some form into which he could work his experience. Yet the writing in the magazines I read at the time seemed to be singularly stale, even though it was presented as a model of excellence. Partisan Review, Hudson Review, Poetry, and others were publishing writers who, for some reason, seemed to me to be people who lived at another time in another country. The poetry I read might as well have been written in a foreign language. I had begun to read Pound and had just discovered Williams; in a half-baked way I knew that what these poets had discovered and championed had not been acted upon by the poets who were at that time critically acclaimed. The concerns of the latter seemed to be those of a polite and official intellectualism. Lowell, Roethke, Berryman,

Wilbur, Eberhart, Shapiro, Viereck, Schwartz, et al.-I read them all. And the more I read them, the more I wallowed in confusion. Their poetic concerns seemed oddly fossilized and rigid, and my own poems, in their crudity and ignorance, "floated," as it were, I

belligerently refused to use the poems of my celebrated My slow understanding of Williams' work exhilarated and depressed me-the former since I saw in his writing a method of anchoring my work sans stuffiness and as

masters as models.

301

dullness, the latter because I realized that Williams was not a peer; there was something that I "heard" that Williams did not. How was one to transcribe that sound? Was there anyone who was trying to do the same thing? In brief, who and where were my peers? Did they publish anything? If so, where? All this seems quite extraordinary to me now, almost

it did not happen that way, but I assure you that it did. In 1955 I returned to college, for want of something better to do. I was

still almost totally ignorant of my peers, but I had, I knew

other writers.

they say, Brooklyn

glimmerings, although College I met some young men as dissatisfied as I, who also had begun, in one way or another, to write. We read each other's work; we complained of the insubstantiality of the literary establish ment; we decided, in time-honored fashion, to begin our own little magazine, to be called Neon. (The title referred both to the ubiquitous city lights and the meaning of the word in Greek: "new thing.") I don't think any of us knew what we were doing, only that we wanted to publish our work together, to make a no

statement

of sorts. The friends involved with Neon

Abrams,

John

dedicated

were

Sam

Alfred

Freiwald, Richardson, Siegel (a Poundian), and Hubert Selby, who had, as I recall, Jack

just begun to write. We were, it goes without saying, hopeful and naive. Somehow, through Hugh Kenner, Siegel had put me in touch with Pound, and I wrote to ask if he would be interested in

contributing to the magazine. To my absolute amazement, he replied to me by postcard, giving me the names of two Aus tralians, Noel Stock and William Fleming, both of whom were affiliated with an Australian magazine, Meanjin. Whereupon I wrote to them and they responded with poems. At about this time, early 1956, I met Williams. I had sent him, with misgivings, a short impressionistic sketch I had written while in the Army in 1951. He replied cordially, and subsequently invited me to Rutherford for dinner. As it turned out, he wanted

permission to use a piece of the sketch in Paterson Five,

which he was then in the process of composing. I of course granted him permission, and we began a correspondence. In the course of

it, I asked him for a poem for Neon, but he declined, writing, as

I recall, that it would be much better for

to go it alone

with a first issue. Some time in

302

February or March,

the

mimeograph stencils

were

cut for Neon

1, in Jack Freiwald's basement apartment in

Brooklyn. The bill was paid by Alfred Siegel, and toward the end of March we had 250 copies of the first issue in hand, with work by Abrams, Richardson, Freiwald, Stock, Fleming, and myself. The price was a quarter. Copies were placed in the Eighth Street Book Shop, Gotham, a Bleecker Street shop called the Make It New, operated by John Kasper and William Horton more as a dissemination point for right-wing political propaganda than as a bookshop, and City Lights in San Francisco. As I remember, the Make It New manager, a young woman and a rabid follower of Pound's politics and economics, seemed to think that Neon, perhaps because of the inclusion of "Pound's people," Stock and Fleming, was or soon would be a political broadside. At all events, the store soon closed-what happened to the copies of Neon that they had taken I don't know. The rest of the copies were given to contribu tors and friends, and a few were sold by mail. I'm afraid that after the publication of Neon 1 things happened fast-and it seems, all at once-that I doubt if I can set them down here in any true chronology. I had by this time dis

covered the Black Mountain Review, Origin, the Chicago Review

(under Irving Rosenthal), and other magazines. On the Road had been published, and I had read Ginsberg, Corso, McClure, et al. Then Neon 2 was ready; it included Selby's first

published

story, "Home for Christmas," Williams' "To My Friend Ezra Pound," which he had sent me because of his pleasure in the first issue of the magazine, and some poems by Paul Goodman, whom

Selby had met and requested work from. Selby paid for this issue, which was multilithed. I believe we sold it out, perhaps on the strength of Williams' poem. Neon 2 was much more sophis ticated than the first number, since we had discovered an entire world of writers that we had not known existed just two years earlier.

Everything indeed seemed to be happening at once: Creeley's poems in the Black Mountain Review, his book All That Is Lovely in Men, and in Origin, and began a correspondence with him; unsolicited poems were coming in to the magazine, many of them from Southern California (I was still almost completely ignorant of the writers of the San Francisco area); we had, by some means, obtained a mailing list and the magazine was beginning to receive subscriptions; and Jack I had just read

303

Freiwald, who had moved to the West Coast, had found a printer who said he would do Neon 3 for a reasonable price. Toward the end of 1957 Selby completed a story called "Love's Labar's Lost," which would later be the first part of "The Queen Is Dead." Since his first story he had worked almost

constantly revised, writing rewritten, torn apart. I don't know another writer who so swiftly mastered his statement as Selby. In any event, when I read at

his prose,

hundreds of drafts that

were

then

"Love's Labor's Lost" I was certain that he was well on his way

becoming an extremely powerful and important writer. I badly wanted to publish the story in Neon 3, which was still in gestation, but something had happened to my financial plans insofar as the West Coast printer was concerned and Jack Freiwald was looking about for another one. I suggested to Selby that he send the story to Williams for his comment, which he did. Williams replied, almost immediately, that the story had absolutely stunned him but that it was, as far as he could see, quite unpublishable, given the subject matter and language. However, Williams went on, if anyone would publish it, it would be the men who edited the Black Mountain Review and he had taken the liberty of sending to

the story to Jonathan Williams. Jonathan read it and sent it on to Creeley, who was at the time in New Mexico, and

Creeley scheduled the story for what was

to be the final number of the Black Mountain Review; the college

had closed and there were funds only for that last issue. Neon 3 was finally published, an ill-starred attempt on my part

partially represent in the magazine what I took to be the "California writers." As I look at the issue now, it seems fuzzy, unfocused, hardly cogent, although some individual pieces stand out as having merit-they are lost, however, in this issue, which is, quite candidly, an aberration. God knows how long I had waited for the publication of Neon 3, but in the meantime I had almost completed assembling Neon 4 and, once again, was looking around for a printer that I could afford--or, I should to

say, could afford to be in debt to. Before I write of Neon 4, and the circumstances of its publication, it might be useful to try to make dear to the reader the ambience that existed in New York at that time

(1958).

I suppose what is fondly called by literary historians a "ferment"

304

occurring in the arts at this time-most of it, it seems to me, quite accidental. That is to say, a number of very diverse things all happened at the same time, all of them linked together, however tenuously, and all of them serving to create what I might call, with some misgivings, an avant-garde community in New York

was

that had cultural and artistic ties to other communities in other

parts of the country. At the risk of boring the reader with dry notation, here are a few of the things that occurred in the last three years of the fifties-none of them in itself remarkable, yet

together serving to consolidate what had begun as a scattered movement. Black Mountain College had closed, its students and faculty settling in New York and San Francisco, with Creeley temporarily anchored in New Mexico, where his friends were Max Finstein and Judson Crews, among others. The Beat writers Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, et aI., after "electrifying" the Bay Area, had begun moving back to New York, whence they had originally come.

Don Allen's "San Francisco Scene" issue of the Evergreen

(number 2) had acquainted East Coast writers with McClure, Spicer, Duncan, Brother Antoninus, Rumaker. The writers who were later to initiate the "New York School"-Koch, O'Hara, Ashbery, Field, Schuyler, Guest-had come together in Review

New York as a loosely affiliated group. Ashbery and O'Hara were

deeply involved with painting and the other plastic arts as critics and general commentators (O'Hara was a curator at the Modern), and associated with

painters

and

sculptors

natural

and

easy way. This had not previously been the case in New York, where the abstract painters formed a group sui generis. And among

the younger artists were such men as Dan Rice and John Chamberlain and Robert Rauschenberg, all of whom were alumni of Black Mountain Col1ege. Paul Blackburn had returned from

France to settle in New York. And everyone-painters, sculptors, poets, and writers-used the Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village as

headquarters, base of operations, and home away from home. It was an incredible stew out of which was to come an American a

literature that by 1960 could no longer,

even by the most be nighted, be caned "fanatic," "ignorant," "vapid," or "puerile." By the most curiously unintentional means, as I have said, the

scattered elements of this movement became unified.

By late 1958 Neon 4 was in the process of being printed, but it 305

would be a whole year until I received finished copies. Early in that year Jonathan Williams had written to Joel Oppenheimer to tell him of Selby, and they arranged to meet. Through Joel

Oppenheimer, Selby met Fielding Dawson and then introduced both men to me, as the editor of a magazine that might possibly take on many of the writers who had been affiliated with the Black Mountain Review. Through Oppenheimer I met Max

Finstein, just arrived from New Mexico, and a little later, I met Jonathan Williams, in New York for a visit. Neon 4 had contribu tions from Finstein, Oppenheimer, and a collage cover by Dawson; at the time when I met these men I had begun to read what little

there was available by Louis Zukofsky, and wrote to ask him for a

contribution, which he sent, telling me at the same time to write to Lorine Niedecker, Cid Corman, and Robert Duncan. The fourth issue was rapidly being filled, and contributions also came in from William Carlos Williams, Paul Goodman, and Selby, who gave me a story called "Double Feature." There were many other writers in Neon 4, plus a section of translations of the Chinese

ideograms in The Cantos by Alfred Siegel. While the issue was being made up, I received in the mail

Gilbert Sorrentino (left) and Allen Ginsberg. Photograph by Jonathan

Williams.

306

day the first issue of Yugen, edited by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Hettie Cohen. Yugen's early issues focused on Beat writers-Ginsberg, Corso, Bremser-and also printed work by Phil Whalen and local Greenwich Village writers. I sub sequently met Jones, and we became fast friends; through him I got to know "his" writers, and through me he got to know "mine." LeRoi Jones had a magnetic and powerful personality, and his magazine immediately began to flourish-so much so, in fact, that

one

the poets and writers who contributed to it and who were drawn to Jones's

apartment (first on West 20th Street in Chelsea and

later on East 14th Street) became known as the "Yugen crowd." Jones had informal

gatherings in his apartment for readings, discussions, talk, and drinking, and often these gatherings would turn into all-night parties. A not at all atypical party at Jones's would include Selby, Rumaker, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bremser, Corso, Rosenthal, Oppenheimer, Finstein, and, when they were in New York, Wieners, George Stanley, Dorn, and Burroughs. There was often music played by Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Wilbur Ware, and Don Cherry. About 1960 or so, Frank O'Hara, Koch, Bill Berkson, and other people of the New York School also began to frequent Jones's place. It assumed the character of a freewheeling and noisy salon. By the time Neon 4 was off the press, Jones had just published Yugen 4. Dawson did a drawing for Yugen, black on white his collage for Neon had been white on black-and he had suggested to Jones that his drawing be printed as a negative, so that it too would be white on black and the two magazines could therefore be displayed in bookshops as "sisters." Jones did this, and the magazines were displayed, at least in the Eighth Street Book Shop, side by side. Some months earlier, I had complained to Dawson about the ridiculous length of time I had been waiting for Neon 4. Many people, incidentally, thought that Neon had folded, and some subscribers had canceled their orders. Dawson suggested that we do, jointly, a supplement to the magazine, to be given to subscribers as a sign of good faith and a kind of bonus. We decided to call it Supplement to Now. It was to be small, both in number of pages and format, and Dawson arranged to have it printed at the plant of the Kirkwood Messenger, his Missouri 307

hometown newspaper, for sixty dollars. Its theme was to be, as the title implies, "now." As I look back at the magazine, the theme

thin, tenuous at best, but it provided a hook on which we hung a number of excellent pieces. The issue had Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Max Finstein, Hubert Selby, Jonathan Williams, Dawson, and myself. The cover, a drawing of a linotype machine by Dawson, was especially fitting. Supplement to Now appeared at the end of 1958 and was immediately mailed to subscribers free of charge; it was sold in bookshops for fifty cents, and has become, so I am told, a collector's item, one that is very scarce.

seems

Neon, after the appearance of its fourth issue and the sup

plement, entered a period of extreme financial difficulty. Numbers 3 and 4 had been printed on the West Coast-a situation that had become impossible. There was no way to oversee the printing, there were no proofs, and the low production costs were offset by the freight bills that had to be paid upon delivery. Neon 5 was ready by this time, and what I needed was a New York printer who would do the issue in a month

and at

reasonable

price. LeRoi Jones had found a small printing company in East New York, the Orion Press, and used it to do a reprint of Olson's "Projective Verse" as a Totem Press chapbook (Totem

Yugen book imprint). Nothing turned out well with Neon 5, however, and it was all I could do to get my deposit on the printing bill back from the company. I was very disappointed, since Neon 5 was to have included work by Duncan, McClure, and Loewinsohn, the first time that the magazine was to have Bay Area writers represented in its pages. At this point I was just about ready to give up on the magazine. There was never enough money to bring issues out on a fairly regular basis, but, more depressing, the issues always seemed to be too slender to have any adequate selection of prose among their contents. I wanted to print Selby, Rumaker, and Douglas Woolf I also had begun to think that it was time to use the magazine as a place in which nonfiction-criticism and reviews-might of doing appear as a regular feature. There seemed to be no hope this, and in 1960, with a gift of money from Tony Weinberger, I put together a final issue of the magazine, Neon Obit. Again it was to have a unifying theme-this one on dead Americans who had made a great impact on this country, or on dead currents of was a

308

NEON OBIT

Top: Neon, No.4, 1959; Supplement to Now, including work by Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Max Finstein, Gilbert Sorrentino, Hubert Selby, Jonathan Williams, and Fielding Dawson, 250 copies printed August 1958. Bottom: Neon Obit (courtesy Gilbert Sorrentino).

behavior and thought that were still in the air. The contributors

Dawson, Jones, Selby, Weinberger, Early, Oppenheimer, Loewinsohn, Olson, Finstein, and myself. The cover drawing was again by Dawson, of a Curtiss Robin that had gone out of were

production during the depression. If I remember rightly, 300 copies of the issue were sold out immediately. In the same year, Jones began to run critical articles in Yugen. His feeling about them was much the same as mine; that is, the new writers had been appearing in magazines for about a decade, and it was time for the establishment of a critical position vis-a-vis these writers. The reader must know that, to my knowledge, not one so-called major critic had ever written a word on any of the writers I have here mentioned; indeed it

was

cause

for utter

review, however mindless, of one of their books. If anything did appear in print about any of them, astonishment to be shown

it was usually in the nature of a jeremiad against "the destroyers of letters and culture," etc., etc., ad nauseam. It was quite ap parent to Jones and to me as well (and to many others) that the writers of this new movement should have at least one outlet

for their own critical commentary on their peers. It also seemed incumbent upon us to begin a counterattack against those who had

guardians of letters and arts. Neon was, for all purposes, dead, and the avant-garde community in New York had only Yugen as a medium for expression. And Yugen simply did not have the room to print anything more than short critiques. While this was going on, a young journalist, Marc Schleifer, brought out the first issue of a magazine called Kulchur, with Jones as one of the contributing editors. (The others were John Fles, Charles Olson, Donald Phelps, and Martin Williams.) Kul chur was exactly what we had been looking for-a magazine of criticism and comment, dealing with literature, politics, art, jazz, and popular culture. Through Jones, I met Schleifer and accepted his invitation to write for the magazine, which looked as if it might indeed become that catholic yet eclectic publication which was needed. The problem, as always, was financial: Schleifer had to pay for the printing of Kulchur as best he could, and it seemed as if it would collapse almost before it got started. One uight, Jones, Schleifer, and I sat talking in the Cedar, and discovered set themselves up as the

310

that Schleifer had somehow met

wealthy

woman

who

was

interested in the arts, Lita Hornick. She offered to pay for Kulchur, oversee

its distribution, and assure its appearance, right on time,

every three months. Most agreeably, she wanted nothing to do with the editorial policy of the magazine, nor did she wish to

exercise editorial judgment concerning its contents. It was abso

lutely too good to be true. If I am not mistaken, it was on this same night that we decided to bar all poetry and fiction from the magazine and devote its pages to criticism and commentary. (In later issues this policy was relaxed, but never to the extent that unsolicited poetry and fiction were considered.) It is probably quite unfair of me to say so, but I always thought of Kulchur as the critical wing of Yugen; that is to say, Kulchur seemed to me to be what Yugen might have become had Jones had the money to continue it. The nucleus of the magazine, from the beginning, was made up of those writers who had been affil iated with Yugen and Neon, and, further back, with the Black Mountain Review. (Ultimately, it became the official voice of the entire new movement. Although I haven't the issues at hand, it that every nonacademic writer of value in this coun either try appeared or was discussed in its pages. )

seems to me

At all events, mirabile dictu, we had a magazine of our own, one

that we did not have to worry about funding. I became the

poetry editor with, I believe, number 3, and then book editor. My function was to be responsible for all articles and reviews on

writing and books and to contribute regularly to the magazine. Kulchur published, over a five-year period, twenty issues. I believe it must be considered one of the great magazines of the twentieth century, an authoritative voice, as important as The Little Review, The Dial, transition, The Criterion, and Contact. It had a

clear point of view, an unmistakable position, and its range of

commentary was simply staggering. It was a perfect argument against the idea that a magazine is a hodgepodge of good pieces

by good writers. The articles in each issue complemented and buttressed each other and lent weight and depth to the artic1es in every other issue. It had, in a word, a tone that was unique to itself-Kulchur simply did not read like any other magazine before or

since. The editors all wrote for almost every issue, so that the voice 311

magazine was coherent and located. The regular reader

of the

knew where the editors stood, and hence their criticism made sense; it had roots. Interestingly, Kulchur evolved a review style

that, for better or worse, has persisted in little-magazine writing

day. It was personal, colloquial, wry, mocking, and pre cisely vulgar when vulgarity seemed called for. It was also "careless," by which I mean that it wore its learning lightly, was witty and, as they say, irreverent. Although in its twenty issues at least a dozen brilliant essays were printed, not one of them had the miasmal aura of the "think piece." Most pointedly, perhaps, the Kulchur "style" expected the reader to know what was occur ring in the avant-garde community in New York; nothing was ever explained, the writing was elliptical, casual, and obsessively conversational. We had wanted a flashing, brilliant magazine that had nothing to do with the academic world and we had got one. By 1961 Marc Schleifer, because of an increasing concern with politics, had begun to lose interest in the magazine, or perhaps he no longer had the time to edit it-it came to the same thing. He asked Mrs. Hornick for a leave of absence and requested that I be guest editor for Kulchur 4. I accepted, and went to work on the issue. I asked Zukofsky (whom I badly wanted to begin to use the magazine for an outlet), Duncan, Ron Loewinsohn, and Selby for contributions, and they all responded. Zukofsky gave me "Modern Times," a beautiful essay on Charlie Chaplin, written in 1936 and never before published; Duncan sent his matchless "Ideas of the Meaning of Form"; Loewinsohn sent "A Credo Sandwich," a piece on poetics that complemented Duncan's; and Selby, writing as "Harry Black," submitted "Happiness House," to this

bitter assault on New York State mental institutions. Jones, as

editor, gave me a chapter from his as yet unpublished book, Blues People, and I asked Edward Dorn if I might reprint his "What I See in the Maximus Poems," originally published in an

Gael Turnbull's Migrant. Paul Goodman sent a comment on material that had appeared in number 3. An oddly curious Freudian study of L. Frank Baum, and in particular the Oz books,

unsolicited from Osmond Beckwith, of whom I have never heard, and seemed to me exactly right for the issue. The

came in

again

by Dawson, Jones, Cid Corman (on Zukofsky), Oppenheimer (on Dorn) and Walter Lowenfels, who sent a review reviews

were

312

of Tropic of Cancer, written in Paris on the appearance of Miller's novel in 1933 and previously unpublished. Marian Zazeela, Marc Schleifer's wife, gave me a snapshot of Kerouac and Burroughs taken in Paris about 1955, and that became the cover: the title page identifies it as a photograph of Inspector Maigret and Sam

Spade. Oppenheimer was the guest editor for number 5. He printed a group of the Zukofskys' Catullus translations and a chapter from Louis Zukofsky's novel Little (from this point on, Zukofsky was a regular contributor to Kulchur, all of his "Five Statements for Poetry" appearing in later issues). And he "com Joel

missioned" the first of Frank O'Hara's art chronicles, which were to

become a regular feature of the magazine. After the appearance of Kulchur 6, the editorial staff was set.

Schleifer had not returned, and the magazine, instead of having a

single editor to oversee everything, had an editorial board, each

member of which had absolute autonomy in his field. Lita Hor nick

managing editor; the music editor was art editor; Joseph Le Sueur, theater editor; Bill Berkson, film editor; and I was book editor. The con tributing editors were Diane di Prima, A. B. Spellman, Charles Olson, and Donald Phelps. I should mention that Kulchur 9 was a special theater issue of short plays, edited by Le Sueur. By the end of 1963 my editorial relationship with the magazine was becoming strained, mostly because of editorial differences between me and Mrs. Hornick. Increasingly, she had begun to take a hand in editorial decisions affecting the contents of Kulchur. Pieces appeared without having been seen or approved by any editor. Writers who had very little to do with the tone or position of the magazine were asked, by Mrs. Hornick, for contributions. Kulchur began to assume the look and feel of just another little magazine; it rapidly began to lose its singularity, and the excellent pieces that still appeared were weakened or lost within the context of these diffuse issues. Mrs. Hornick had become not only an editor, but the editor. was

listed

the

Jones; Frank O'Hara

was

One incident that occurred at this time stands out in my memory. Donald Phelps, as a contributing editor--one of the

original contributing editors of the magazine-had sent in a film review that Mrs. Hornick rejected, I cannot remember on what 313

grounds. I protested, as did some of the other editors, pointing out that as a contributing editor he was expected regularly to contribute to Kulchur, and that if his work was to be rejected, what was the point of carrying him as an editor? Mrs. Hornick did not see it that way, and by issue 11 I had asked to be relieved of my editorial duties and listed as a contributing editor. By issue 14, all the editors had been metamorphosed into contributing editors, and the masthead of number 20, the final issue, carries only Mrs. Hornick's name and represents the total change that had come over Kulchur. Of the old contributors, only Fielding Dawson was left. All this happened very gradually, over a period of a year and a half or so. On reflection, it seems unfortunate to me, since I think that Kulchur might have gone on for at least another half-dozen issues had it retained its original focus. At precisely that moment at which the magazine found itself in the

position of being without

peers, it became fuzzy, off-center, and fashionable. I suspect that the reason for this was that Mrs. Hornick wanted to discover her

writers, and ranged all over to get them. So the magazine died-having, at its end, less energy and verve than it displayed own

in its first tentative issue. Kulchur was a remarkable publication

because its strength came from the fact that its editorial position was rooted

in a true artistic community, and that community was

rooted in

a great city. It was not the organ of a precious and isolated "artists' colony," nor was it-horror of horrors-the jour

nal of an academic milieu's rebels. The contributors were asked to submit work on the basis of what the editors took to be relevance to the magazine's overall position, not because they were fashion

(In later issues this changed.) It was alive because it grew out of a specific modern movement and because able or well known.

it was necessary to that movement's cohesion. Williams told me,

just before Neon began, that a little magazine's only rationale is its editor's belief that the writers he prints must be presented as a group. Anything else is just a collation of pages. I have always believed this, and the experience of the past twenty years has shown that the magazines that never really come to life are always those that reveal themselves to be little anthologies of anything at all (as long as it's "good"). I should mention, before I close, another publication that was 314

circulated concurrently with the last issues of Yugen and through out the life of Kulchur. This

was

The Floating Bear, edited by

LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima. I with it but contributed to it on

was

not

directly involved

irregular basis, often under being "Abe Harvard").

one I can remember

pseudonyms (the only The Bear was a mimeographed newsletter of about 15 to 20 pages, and distributed solely by a mailing list, free of charge. It can best be explained by the fact that its first fifteen or twenty numbers contained all the material that could have just as easily gone into Kulchur had that magazine been a monthly. In other words, it had "hot news"-reviews of movies, plays, recitals, jazz clubs, and the like. It also contained poems, essays, letters to the editors, buyer's guides, notes on trashy paperbacks, reading lists, and an enormous amount of New York "inside" gossip. Hundreds of people contributed to it. It was, at its best, fresh, arrogant, and funny. After 1965 or so, it continued under, I think, the sole editorship of Diane di Prima until about 1973, appearing less and less frequently. Its last issues were almost all

gossip and deeply involved in an alternative politics. The reader will have by now seen that my own view of the little magazine of the fifties and sixties is necessarily narrow, being severely restricted to my knowledge of the workings of my own magazine, Neon, Jones's Yugen, and the magazine we both worked for over a four-year period, Kulchur. There were many other maga zines that appeared at about the time Kulchur was entering its last year of publication, among them Trobar, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., Poems from the Floating World, Some/Time, etc. Many of them were outlets for those poets who at that time had embraced

the

theory, if you will, of the "deep image." I am essentially ignorant of these magazines and never appeared in any of them. Although I rarely agreed with any of those poets on anything, the magazines that presented them were absolute; i.e., they too had a bone to pick, and articulated a position doggedly. When I consider Neon, Yugen, and Kulchur, they seem to me almost of a piece. I often cannot recall what pieces I contributed to which of them. The three of them performed a particular func tion at a particular time, and died, one might suppose, when they were no longer needed. Kulchur most definitely reflected the close of a literary era that had begun in about 1950 and 315

found its first voice in the Black Mountain Review and Origin. By the time it ceased publication, in the winter of 1965, that

community from which it had sprung no longer existed-it had become something else. By that time, most of the writers who appeared in these magazines were known, and some' of them were beginning to be treated with at least a measure of respect; they were no longer considered ignorant beatniks by the great majority of critics and academics. era was

over

and the

A final note. I suspect that a new magazine-perhaps even one of "criticism and comment," like Kulchur-will

soon

be neces

sary. The generation that had just begun to write and publish in the mid-sixties has been around more than a decade. Although the writers of this generation have published in many magazines

(and published many books as well) and founded many others, they have been curiously and inexplicably uncritical of each other and of everybody else; everyone seems to like everyone else's work. The situation is oddly passive, and many of the magazines in which these writers appear read like the later issues of The Floating Bear-all charm, gossip, and news notes. These younger writers have never established a critical position for themselves; it seems to be beneath them. Perhaps it is. Maybe

they are too close to my generation to assault it-certainly they were

born,

it were, into

era

that

was

kind to them. In

comparison to the fifties, it was an era of light, air, and acceptance or, as Frank O'Hara might put it, of girls, grapes, and snow. If the next

this present one as dull and empty, I'm the birth of another literary movement that

generation sees

certain we will

see

will view the present generation of younger writers as the establish

ment, and launch its own rebellious magazines.

Opposite: LeRoi Jones, circa 1962. Photograph by Mario Jorrin (courtesy Poetry magazine). 316

LEROI JONES AN INTERVIEW ON YUGEN David Ossman

LeRoi Jones did not adopt the name Imamu Amiri Baraka until

the late sixties. After the middle of that decade, he turned away

from his literary interests and toward black theater and black politics in Newark. (He ran for community council office there in 1968 to oversee slum rehabilitation, but lost the election.) From that time on he increasingly departed from the white world, favor ing even "a mathematics which would have no whiteness in it." In 1960, when David Ossman conducted this interview, LeRoi Jones had edited his magazine Yugen, along with the Totem Press, for two years (Yugen ran until 1962). It was later in 1960 that he visited Cuba to demonstrate support for Fidel Castro. His poem Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note was published by Corinth Books in 1961, the same year that he became an instructor at the New School for Social Research and a contributing editor to Diane di Prima's The Floating Bear. In

1962 he took the post

of music editor for Kulchur and continued to write his columns jazz until1964.lt was during these years that LeRoi Jones was writing his first important plays-Dutchman, The Toilet, and The Slave (all first produced in 1964).

-:"'.:;,.-.-

AlleD

Ginsbers

Phillp Whalen Judacm Crews Diane Dl Prima Tom Postell LeRoi

Jone.

B_ Hamilton AUen Polite

Ed James Ernest Keau

StopIIen Tropp Jaek Micheline Peter

Schwartsber,

Tom! Ungerer Bodor BIewart

Yugen, Vol. 1, No.1, 1958 (courtesy Northwestern University Library).

318

Yours seems to be one of the three or four

"clique" magazines

around today, in that it publishes a fairly restricted group of so called "Beat," "San Francisco," and "New York" writers. do you publish this group-this "stable" of writers?

Why

Well, it does seem to fall that way. But for a long time Dr. Wil liams couldn't get into the Hudson Review, and several other mature, older poets like Kenneth Patchen were never admitted

there, or in magazines like the Partisan Review or Sewanee. If those editors had a literary point of view in excluding their work, then I feel I have as much right, certainly, to base my choice on my literary taste. If it seems like a coterie-well, it turns out to be that way. There are other reasons-but that's the simplest

explanation, actually. The writers that I publish

are

really not all "Beat" or "San

Francisco" or "New York." There are various people who could also fit into other groups-for instance, the people who went to Black Mountain College-and others not affiliated with any real

group. But they have some kind of affinity with the other so-called groups-their writing fits into a certain kind of broad category.

Many of the same names appear regularly in Yugen, Big Table, Evergreen ...

It's a little different though. Most of the people whom, say, Paul Carroll prints, he wouldn't have printed if it hadn't been for

magazine like Yugen. And Evergreen Review, to a great extent, has picked up on things that I've done already and that have ap peared in magazines like the Black Mountain Review and Neon. They pick them up. As a matter of fact, in Paul Carroll's case, I know of at least two poets who appear in his magazine only be cause of various things he saw in Yugen and in an essay I wrote. He said he picked up some things in that essay that enabled him to understand, or become more sympathetic with, certain people's work. I'd like to have your thoughts on a kind of contemporary writing

that could be illustrated by Frank O'Hara's "Personal Poem" in

Yugen 6. In it he describes his thoughts before and after having This interview is reprinted from a collection of interviews with modern poets by David Ossman called The Sullen Art, published by Corinth Books in 1963.

319

lunch with one "LeRoi." With its highly and specifically personal

references, it seems to be more an anecdote of interest to future scholars than something partaking of the heightened qualities of a more

traditional poetic nature. What is the validity in this kind

of writing? I didn't especially think that there was any charted-out area in which the poetic sensibility had to function to make a poem. I

thought that anything-anything you could grab-was fit material to write a poem on. That's the way I think about it. Anything in your life, anything you know about or see or understand, you could write a poem about if you're moved to do it. I'm certain that if they have to footnote what the House of Seagrams was in his poem, or who the LeRoi was, that will only be of interest to academicians and people doing master's theses. Anybody who is concerned with the poem will get it on an emotional level-or they won't get it at all. Certainly, if I didn't like it, I wouldn't go

through any book to look up those names with the hope that I would feel moved once I knew where the building was or who LeRoi was. I don't think that means anything at all. I don't think that has anything to do with the poem, actually. What the poem means, its function, doesn't have to do with those names-that's

just part of it. It doesn't seem to me to be the same kind of stupidity that's found when you have to go to Jessie Weston's book to find out what a whole section of "The Waste Land" means. The House

of Seagrams is certainly less obscure than certain Celtic rites. And I don't see what makes it any less valid because it's a casual kind

of reference or that it comes out of a person's life, rather than, say, from his academic life. I'd say that if a poem, as a whole poem, works, then it's a good poem

Right

You once wrote that, "MY POETRY is whatever I think I am. I make a poetry with what I feel is useful and can be saved out

of all the garbage of our lives." Would you like to develop that a little more fully? Well, it's part of what you mentioned about "traditional" poetic areas. I believe that the poet-someone with a tempered sensibility 320

PR E 55

TOTEM

1959 PUBLICATIONS

SPRING

prima!;

Diane Di

Ron Loewinsohn

Watermelons

Edward Marshall

The Land and the Water

Frank u'Hara

Second A ven ue

Philip Whalen

Like I Say

Gary Snyde-r

(preface by Gregory Corso) Myths" Texts

This Kind of Bird Flies Backward

(introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti)

(introduction by Allen Ginsberg, preface by William Carlos Williams) (introduction by Charles Olson) (cover by Larry Rivers)

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7. 8.

Antonin Artaud

To Have Done With the Judgment of God

.lean Genet

The Man Condemned

.Joel Uppenheimer

The Love Bit

(private distribution) (cover by Franz Kline 10.

Fielding Dawson

The Drscove ry of America

11.

LeRoi .tones

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

12. 13.

.Jack Ke rouac

Some of the Dhar rna

Gregory Corso Allen Ginsberg

Early Poems Empty Mirror 'y.C/'- i!(,v"l (introduction by William Carlos Williams) Unpublished Poems (a reprint of an early Interlinear translation)

(a nove lette)

H. 15. 16.

Charles Olson The Odes of

Anachreon

Jf-J

Yugen 4, 5, and 6

t�vc

11.c..t-'L

«.

Totem Blue

C!I1:.t'

Plates:

1t.n �.nf'LV

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402 West 20th Street

New York

11, N. Y.

Totem Press, 1959 list of publications (courtesy Gilbert

Sorrentino).

-is able, or should be able, to take almost any piece of matter, idea, or whatever, and convert it, if he can, into something really "beautiful" the way Bernard Berenson

beautiful. I don't

mean

means it-but into

something moving, at least.

And I don't think that there are any kind of standard ideas or sentiments or emotions or anything that have to be in a poem. A poem can be made up of anything so long as it is well made. It can be made up out of any feeling. And if I tried to cut anything out

of my life-if there was something in my life that I couldn't

talk about

...

it seems monstrous that you can tell almost anything

about your life except those things that are most intimate or mean the most to you. That seems a severe paradox. You've mentioned your influences as including Lorca, and Olson. What from Lorca-a surrealist approach?

Creeley,

Yes, that, but at the time I got hold of Lorca, I was very much influenced by Eliot, and reading Lorca helped to bring me out of my "Eliot period" and break that shell-not so much Poet in New York, which is the more surreal verse, but the early Gypsy Ballads

-that kind of feeling and exoticism. What about the Black Mountain people, and Williams? From Williams, mostly how to write in my own language-how to write the way I speak rather than the way I think a poem ought

to be written-to write just the way it comes to me, in my own

speech, utilizing the rhythms of speech rather than any kind of metrical concept. To talk verse. Spoken verse. From Pound, the same concepts that went into the Imagists' poetry-the idea of the image and what an image ought to be. I learned, probably, about verse from Pound-how a poem should be made, what a poem ought to look like-some little inkling. And from Williams, I guess, how to get it out in my own language. Is there

middle

ground between natural speech and formal

metrics?

Oh, yes. I don't mean that I write poems completely the way I'm talking now, although I'm certain that a great deal of my natural voice rhythm dominates the line. For instance, my breathing when I have to stop to inhale or exhale-dictates where I have out to break the line in most cases. Sometimes I can bring the line 322

longer for effect-you learn certain tricks, departures from a set method. But mostly it's the rhythms of speech that I utilize, trying to get closer to the way I sound peculiarly, as opposed to somebody else.

influence the speech patterns--or any thing else, for that matter, in your writing?

Does your being a Negro

It could hardly help it. There are certain influences on me,

as a

Negro person, that certainly wouldn't apply to a poet like Allen

Ginsberg. I couldn't have written that poem "Kaddish," for in stance. And I'm sure he couldn't write certain things that have to deal with, say, Southern Baptist church rhythms. Everything applies-everything in your life. Sociologically, there are different influences, different things that I've seen, that I know, that Allen or no one knows.

I asked that because I don't find in your work the sense of "being a

Negro" that occurs, say, in the poetry of Langston Hughes

....

That may be part of, like they say, his "stance." You have to set up a certain area in which you're going to stand and write your poems, whether you do it consciously or not. There has to be that stance. He is a Negro. It doesn't lessen my feeling of being

Negro-it's just that that's not the way I write poetry. I'm fully conscious all the time that I am an American Negro, because it's a

part of my life. But I know also that if I want to say, "I see a bus full of people," I don't have to say, "I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people." I would deal with it when it has to do directly with

the poem, and not as a kind of broad generalization that doesn't have much to do with

Negroes.

a lot of young writers today who are I don't know that many.) It's always been (Although

separate section of writing that wasn't quite up to the level of the other writing. There were certain definite sociological rea a

sons for it before the Civil War or in the

early part of the twentieth

in the 30s, but it's a new generation now, and century, are beset by other kinds of ideas that don't have much people or even

to do with sociology, per se.

I'm always aware, in anything I say, of the "sociological con

figuration"-what it means sociologically. But it doesn't have anything to do with what I'm writing at the time. 323

A BACKWARD GLANCE O'ER BEATNIK ROADS Krim

Jack Kerouac (the Bettmann Archive).

In 1941, at the age of nineteen (Seymour) Krim worked as a re

porter for The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" column. That

magazine became his chief model for excellence-though not necessarily for subject matter-when, twenty years later, he edited Swank (specifically a "Beat Writing" section within that girlie magazine) and Nugget. Mr. Krim's career as a reporter, critic, essayist, short story writer, poet, anthologist, editor, and teacher has been varied. Perhaps best known for his personal essays col lected in three volumes-Views of

Nearsighted

Cannoneer

(1961), Shake It for the World, Smartass (1970), and You & Me (1974)-he has also edited two collections-The Beats (1960), one of the most comprehensive anthologies of Beat writings ever produced, and Manhattan: Stories of a Great City (1954). His essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including, among others, Cosmopolitan, The Evergreen Review (for which he has served as a consulting editor), Playboy, The Smith, Vogue, The Village Voice, Newsday, and the Washington Post. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1976. He lives in New York City.

Looking back at the Beat Gen. as I puff and snort forward-for I'm deep into a present-tense chronicle about the country called Chaos [sic!] which, for sure, gets some of its impetus from Beat style-I'm amused by our open-fly radical innocence in those late fifties days but heartened by our courage. More was promised than was accomplished, I guess, but the accomplishments them selves (still open to debate) generated much energy, passion, tum on, camaraderie, faith-essential human things that are good in themselves even if your cause ends up dead on the Mexican border as Neil Cassady did. But let me explain my relationship to all this before editorializing.

I had been a New York Jewish satellite of the Partisan Review

gang up to 1955, when I had a crashing breakdown, brought on

by trying to parse Finnegans Wake and Marx's Das Kapital and make some kind of amalgam as by having a lousy emotional! sex life. As a "middle-aged young writer"-actually thirty-three-I was kept in a constant state of anxiety and de pendence by the terrifying amount of scholarship that the T. S. as

much

325

Eliot/Lionel Trilling combine demanded: always reading like a

desperate man instead of writing like one, which is really more interesting. My position and condition were not unique, unfor tunately. One was afraid of using one's own voice at that time. More to the point, it was despairingly hard to get a hearing for that voice unless it

was

studded with

kind of modern formalism

backed to the hilt by the most knowledgeable of the

university

sponsored "little" mags, like the Sewanee Review, the Kenyon, the

independent but Princeton-incubated Hudson Review, and of course the hiply hybrid Partisan Review, where my early Green wich Village friends and gurus like Isaac Rosenfeld, Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, William Barrett, Weldon Kees, Manny Farber, Anatole Broyard, Willie Poster, etc., etc., published and held sway in downtown N.Y. literary society. Young men and women my own age who had simply wanted to be lyric, realistic U.S. novelists, as I did, were tied into knots by the inhibitions and inferiorities brought about in the mind by our uncomfortableness with Kafka, Karl Jaspers, Rex Wamer name your own nemesis!-that whole slew of tantalizing foreign intellects who were suddenly dumped on us as the Standard. I actually have come to love the pure, martyred Franz, and I'm oversimplifying the complexities of all the issues involved to get to the crucial point: that we had the bad luck to come of age in a rabidly intellectual, criticism-dominated period when our native wanted to out rather than stew. I, and no doubt others, juices pour stewed so long and so unfruitfully that we finally exploded one way or the other: I into creative paralysis, psychoanalysis, a couple of sanitariums, and the slow climb back-but up another road

and Allen Ginsberg into Howl, Kerouac into On the Road, Corso into Fried Shoes, and Burroughs into Naked Lunch.

choking repression, explosion was inevitable. You would never think of tremblingly gentle, humane men like Eliot and his disciples (Trilling, Tate, Blackmur, John Crowe After

much

Ransom, et al) as dictators in any sense, but that's the way they

operated in the tight little world of upper American letters until bull by young writers more confident than myself took their own the horns-even call it bullshit, in

some

cases, and it was still

exciting!-and just threw it where it landed. Such recklessness was needed; a better word or words might be abandonment, range, expressionism, risk, all the neo-romantic qualities that had been 326

sanitized for the preceding ten years and now broke loose like fire hydrants on a sweltering Harlem street. Well, as you can

imagine, the howls at the university English departments and their surrogates, the big little mags, were loud and contemptuous, but the effect on those of us who had been held captive by these invisible mental chains of inferiority and self-denigration was immediate. We started rushing out our own work on the wave of free energy that the Four Big Beats-Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, and Burroughs, hottest group in town-kicked off, and we started improvising the original counterculture apparati to carry and promote that work. It was a Civil War atmosphere, and we were the outnumbered but bloodcurdling rebs. In my own case, I could no longer go back to the kind of Thomas Wolfe an fictional innocence I had once loved-after such

knowledge, what forgiveness? But I did bat out a series of per sonal gut pieces and published them in a true home-made under ground press rather than hawk them uptown. We called the book Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer and actually made enough money to pay ourselves back, because the literary counterculture had by now, in 1961, created its own audience. Jack Gelber wrote The Connection, and the youthful, Beat-oriented, not-then-so political Living Theater put it on at 14th Street and 6th Avenue, with great Establishment-uptight success. That Bronx bull Jack Micheline wrote River of Red Wine, published it privately, and came out a winner. The same with many gung-ho writers of the time who found friends or instant publishers to put their work into pamphlets or broadsides, including Dan Propper, Erje Ayden, Jack Green, Tuli Kupferberg, Ted Joans, Ray Bremser, Joel Oppenheimer, Fielding Dawson, Diane di Prima, Gil Sorrentino, LeRoi Jones (his pre-black-militant handle), Hubert Selby, etc. It's also important to keep in mind that when this burst of anti authority energy began to surface in waves between, say, 1957 and 1963, strong writers who had already made a name for them selves independent of the Beats-people like Mailer, poets Frank O'Hara and Robert Creeley, even the young newspaperman Tom Wolfe-joined in the fun as honorary members, with some of the beatnik style rubbing off on them at the time. As a matter of fact, I see the New Journalism (especially the Hunter Thompson Tom Wolfe wing) coming out of the Beat explosion, although not on a direct route. Practically every under-forty American 327

writer

was

slightly infected by the spirit and lingo, even if it

didn't stick. And not only writers; the Beat assault released a new gang of amateur publishers and impresarios in a hurry. My Cannoneer was published by Marty Geisler, a brash young guy who ran a chain of paperback bookshops-a handy opera tion when you're publishing-but he gave up after a couple of years when the Beat energy began to flag. Julian Beck's and Judith Malina's Living Theater did Gelber's play and later Ken Brown's The

Brig, but then they went deeper and deeper into

the anarchistic-political

bag that's become their trademark. The dedicated Ted Wilentz, friend of literally hundreds of Beats and then co-owner of the 8th St. Bookshop, founded the Croyden Press, which is now mostly a backlist. Out on the Coast, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a prototypical artist-publisher force of the time; one of the best of the Beat poets, he also published Allen G.'s Howl and then Mailer's The White Negro, plus a lot of other first-rate stuff, with his City Lights Books. Of course, Kerouac and Ginsberg were active all over the place as influences and lobbyists for Beat writing, with the highly imaginative Kerouac christening the dissident U. of Chicago's literary mag, The Big Table. It served up some exotic goodies under the editorship of Irving (Sheeper) Rosenthal before the university disowned it. Some of the other magazines that came and went with great fanfare were Neon, Beatitude, LeRoi Jones's Yugen, Ferlinghetti's City Lights Journal, The Black Mountain Review, my own ragtag Provincetown Review (Bill Ward was the editor, I his evil genius), and a slew of others that have momentarily gone down the drain

of memory. All of them were touched by the Beat rhythm, al though a number hated the name; don't forget, it was the time of "Beatnik for Hire" ads and other caricatures. I want to go into this in a moment, but first I'll point to one publication that stuck and prospered: The Village Voice, founded in 1955, a year before Gins's breakthrough reading of Howl in S. F. There would have

been no Voice, in my opinion, without the Beat energy, just as there would have been no New Journalism. We didn't know that

time, but as I look back they all seem to tie together at one of those pregnant points in history where a lot of forces are at the

blindly converging to say, "Enough already! This is the direction we

have to tum to for our souls' sake!"

Now that we have some perspective that we didn't have between 328

1957 and 1965, when the Beat thing had finally spent itself or at least metamorphosed into hippiedom, it's best to see the label as a

looser one than we originally took it to be;

make

distinction between the Beat freaks

at least to

the street and

joint with the first in a pinch but that's about all. Writers like Oppenheimer, Sorrentino, Dawson, the powerful Selby, Jones (lmamu Baraka today) refused the Beat label with indignation and thought the childishness of the primitive "like, man" beatniks was an insult to their seriousness. Yet even if they resisted the tag, they too were caught up in the special manic doing which was generated by the unclassifiable presence of Kerouac and the inexhaustible activities of Ginsberg, who was more strategically conscious about what he was up to than J. K. (my belief) and had the model of those behind the typewriter, who would share

Ezra Pound in mind. Nevertheless, between the two of them, along with ballsy mascot Corso and guru Bill Burroughs, the time was erase

one

of almost fierce

activity with a heroic attempt to

the line between play and achievement.

Coming back to your reporter here, I was exactly Kerouac's age-born in 1922-and older than most of the turned-on writers and editors in the movement; that is, I was more interested

taking this new style and vision into the larger world and making converts. While it's true that Ginsberg and Corso were highly media-conscious, picketing Brentano's in Paris in the late fifties for not stocking their work and making such a row that they got on TV, Kerouac was really a more brooding and with drawn guy underneath the Gary Grayson looks (Gary Grayson Goes to Yale, etc.), and Burroughs was "a wheel that rolled up hill" in Bing Crosby's great autobiographical line-that is, he just got there on his own mysterious forces without pressing. And by the way, Ginsberg's smarts in handling the media were to affect young hipsters of a more political generation, like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Hippie media manipulation, with Abbie burning ten-dollar bills in the N. Y. Stock Exchange to the true horror of the brokers, got its virginal start with Allen and Corso; Kerouac played a tortured part-after all, he was the all-American-looking star-but my bottom feeling was that he was always ambivalent about the camera and the microphone, especially in his bitter last days; while Burroughs, the great cool freak, just did his appearances

he brushed his teeth, with

emotion and

329

Above: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and Proprietor of City Lights Books, San Francisco. Opposite, top: poets Gary Snyder (left) and Allen Ginsberg;

bottom: poet Peter Orlovsky (standing) with brother Julius at the Ginsberg/

Orlovsky farm, Cherry Valley, N. Y. Photographs by Gerard Malanga.

Above: William Burroughs in front of Burroughs Corporation Headquarters, N. Y. C. Opposite, top: author Brion Gysin (left) and William Burroughs;

bottom: Charles Bukowski (foreground), with his publisher, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press. Photographs by Gerard Malanga.

aggressive desire for attention-which Allen and Gregory defi nitely had. Anyway, being older, coming from a hell of a different back ground, I saw my job, after Cannoneer came out, as one of am bassadorial negotiation from the downtown world to the uptown one. There were a couple of others who felt the same. Barney Rosset, another Taurus born within a couple days of me-however criticized in later years for making bucks out of porn when it was just that he was fascinated by sex in every conceivable shape and form-joined hands with the sharp editor Don Allen and turned Evergreen Review into a great forum for Beat writing. Grove Press, the parent outfit, also joined to some extent, although its commitment was not as total as the magazine's. Out in Venice, California, Lawrence Lipton, older than Rosset and myself by at least twenty years, also took up the torch and produced The Holy Barbarians and a lot of journalism for Art Kunkin's Los Angeles Free Press as pro-Beat propaganda. In my opinion his effectiveness was cut down by his personal power play with the whole thing-he's now dead-but there's no denying that he was a remarkably crisp and formidable partisan, a holy terror, right to the end. I don't think we've heard the last of Lipton. Finally there was James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions who had already published the great money-losing modems when nobody else would touch them, and he too was still young enough in heart to publish Corso, Bob Kaufmann (a rare half-Jew, half black famous in my world for the Abombunist Manifesto), Kerouac and even Cassady, the legendary coast-to-coast driver

whose nonstop rap was word-music to two generations, Kerouac's and then Ken Kesey's. So. To get the word out to the masses, and also to make a buck but not much more, I did the anthology The Beats, brought out by the hard-boiled adventure line of Gold Medal Books

(half

my contributors greeted the project with suspicion and I don't blame them), and we went into two editions with the writers sharing the bread. Years later I would meet members of the

hippie generation who said that this gaudily packaged parcel of what I believe was the real thing had stung their Texas or Ohio eyes like a can of Mace. I want to believe them. Then-for the Cause and for 334

living,

and

they get more confused and

along!-I edited a "Beat Section" for the girlie mag Swank and then moved my operation to the more classily tits-and-assed Nugget from 1961 to 1965. Along the way, right between the legs of the photos you might say, we published Kerouac, Ginsberg, Mailer, di Prima, O'Hara, Selby, Terry Southern, John Clellon Holmes, Al Aronowitz (The New York Post reporter most trusted by the increasingly wary, even paranoid Beat figures), Chandler Brossard-just about everybody now in their late forties or fifties who was closely or even tangen tially connected with the Beat impact. By the time 1965 rolled around, the Beat nucleus had splintered. Ginsberg bought a farm in Cherry Valley, N. Y., and tried to pump some physical and moral health back into poets like Corso and Ray Bremser who were strung out on drugs. Burroughs was living in London. Kerouac was hiding out from a new Beat/hippie

harder to separate as you go

world he said he'd never made, and Nugget went under. Casualties on every

side!

That was the end of my explicit involvement with Beat publish

ing and editing; but the fact that the next thing I did was join the New York Herald Trib on a dare as a general assignment reporter (at the age of forty-three and did a pretty good job, too, until the paper folded in April 1966) has a lot to do with the entire Beat phenom, and I'd like to talk about that before winding down this very informal Remembrance of Flings Past, and cer tainly the Beat era was one long terrific spree that nonetheless was damn serious at the pit of it all. The Beats, wittingly or not, did a lot to break down the iron lines separating poetry from prose, and fiction from nonfiction, and the big go-for-broke book I'm finally getting around to now upholds all these experiments twenty years later. So it couldn't have been all foam and noise, unless I am a prime sucker who is just rehashing a novelty from

the past. Dan Wolf, who started The Village Voice in 1955 and in his own way added to the new beat of the Beats, used to say with a certain amount of embattled sourness that he wasn't

running a damn "little magazine" when some of the late fifties writers for the Voice, including myself, would take high-flying liberties with an ordinary fact piece. True, he was running a weekly newspaper with a very crackling political slant, but after the Beat radiations got into his more polemical climate you 335

couldn't tell the difference. Journalism as well as standard literary prose was shaken with new, even previously undreamed-of, possi bilities. 1 don't want to exaggerate, but there was a line of descent that the Beats tapped which had been squeezed out of the ordinary

decent writer's

thinking before then.

As Dan Wakefield

said in a review of Kerouac's Desolation

once

Angels, it was all re

pressed primary American stuff, with roots in the rebelliousness of Whitman and Huck Finn and Henry Miller, to just touch on one

of the main Beat streams; the other, not as significant to me,

brought in by Burroughs and Ginsberg from people as diverse as Celine, Gide, Rimbaud, Mallarme, and God knows who else, but it was all pegged on very down-home American experience. The fact that 1 could go into daily newspaper work from my original elitist ass-licking with the Partisan Review crowd is a testimony (to me) of the really big democratizing influence of the Beats. When Tom Wolfe in what is probably his best book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was

surrealist and French contraband

mixes poetry and prose and information and sound waves and light waves, all reduced to little ole words themselves, he is paying tender respects to the Beats. And when Karl Shapiro turned his

back on his own Pulitzer Prize (I believe it was), given for the traditional rhymes of V-Letter & Other Poems, and paid his deeper

respects to the old uncrowned king of crotch, Henry Miller, and the young swanker Tom Wolfe--catching fire for it too--he was

doffing a nice, real, character-crushed fedora to the Beats and the changes they had brought about in his head. Well, I have to turn mine back to what's right here in front of us now-more crazy experience than we can utter, I'll bet, which is fittin' for game American writers to tackle!-and let the

past take care of itself. Much was done back then, I admit it, that has faded away: mags and instant publishers and half-sincere

promoters and poetry-and-jazz ephemera-which owed much to the previous generation's neglected Kenneth Patchen, by the way -and even writers (among the honored dead are Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, and Paul Blackburn so far). But a lot has survived in all the underground papers in this country and abroad; in the exper iments of the New Journalism, especially Hunter Thompson and Tom W.; in the New York School of poetry, some of it; in Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith and a good slice of white 336

rock and even the storytelling bluegrass sound; in the best of the so-called counterculture, from The Greening of America (the Beats really wanted to make it bloom) to the Carlos Castenada books, which Kerouac would have loved and which actually have

precedent in Burroughs' Yage Letters to Allen G. from some dope-infested little mystery country in Central America where Explorer Bill went to get high and have visions-went to learn guarded knowledge, to put it simply. All these things are still alive and kicking today, what more can you ask? As for myself, in my own lengthening years I've reached the point of being on the road in quest of honest fulfillment where I'm no longer quite the same kind of God-will-provide literary ro mantic as in the old days. I've paid my dues, at least for myself. I'd like to make a decent living from my work for a change and tell post-Beat truths in the likes of such commercial formats as a

The New Yorker and Esquire and Time

(what could be more

that every regular, literate, equally questing

av American?), erage/unaverage Joe and Jill can be exposed to what I was taught right off. I guess I've been popularized all the way from my un derground beginnings in the trenches, but I'm not ashamed. My type is known as a survivor, I think, and we can't afford it. Hell, I look forward to what might be the Beat Gen.'s last grand illusion (we were always optimists when you get down to it) without any so

sense

of betrayal to those who gave their best in the last twenty

years to make the likes of me now.

Krim. Photograph by Sy Johnson.

337

Peter Michelson (courtesy University of Colorado).

ON THE puRPLE SAGE,

cHIcAGO REVIEW, AND BIG TABLE Peter Michelson When Peter Michelson began working as an assistant editor for The Chicago Review in 1961, he says he was "in a state of inno I knew a bit of the two embarrassing to describe contending poetry anthologies: Hall, Pack, and Simpson's New Poets of England and America and Donald Allen's New American Poetry. The latter, more self-consciously shouldering its way into the poetry world, was especially significant, introducing me both to new poetry and to new critical approaches. Grove Press and The Evergreen Review mattered a lot. Also, for reasons now obscure to me, I recall liking Contact, The Outsider, and The cence too

....

Tulane Drama Review." Mr. Michelson writes that as a young editor he was "naively eclectic," and that he learned most from a

study of the history of The Chicago Review, whose editorial range included the experimental (William Burroughs), the academic (Hazel Barnes), and "pop" (Walt Kelly). By the time he accepted a position at the University of Wyoming in 1969 to edit The Purple Sage, he had assimilated a variety of ideas and approaches. His decision to produce an intermedia pub lication was based on his interest in such diverse art forms as concretism and sound poetry, as well as in such magazines as Henri Chopin's French Revue ou, and Dick Higgins' Something Else Press. "We were trying," Mr. Michelson notes, "by beating the bushes worldwide, and by providing a regular, albeit irregular, forum, to keep the energy and ideas flowing on all fronts. It was in a fair way toward working, too, until the sky fell." On literary experiment, he observes that as an editor he was quite consciously interested in being experimental, but that as a writer he has no particular commitment to experiment. "As an editor, experiment 341

might well be an end in itself (though whether to publish is a more complicated matter), but as a writer I never think of experiment as an end. The thing to be written is the end, and any experiment (just as any theft from tradition) is a means of getting the job done right." Mr. Michelson's published work includes a critical volume, The Aesthetics of Pornography (1971), and two collections of poems, The Eater (1973) and Pacific Plainsong I-XIII (1978). His poems and essays have appeared in a variety of magazines, including TriQuarterly, The Chicago Review, The Nation, The New Re public, Oink, and Mojo Navigator ( e ) He received a poetry grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976. .

They may prefer one magazine to another, or mimeo mags to printed university slicks, but when it comes to the little magazine in general, writers great and obscure will talk it up like Little League infielders. Going into an aggressive crouch, they smack their mitts and chatter shameless tropes of praise-"the very heart of contemporary literature," "the cutting edge," "the avant-garde," "the pulse," etc. But my favorite is attributed to George Hitchcock of Kayak. Little magazines, says Hitchcock, are "the furnace where American literature is being forged." I like his industrial metaphor; it emphasizes the real center of things and implies a connection between little magazines and the workaday world. Also, there is a sense in which the flood of literary magazines "does make up a kind of industry. Or perhaps counter-industry, since for many edi tors and writers little magazines and presses are an alternative to the conventional business of life. The clinker, as everyone knows, is that, though small magazines

have heroic production records, they can't market to save their souls. As Coda, the Women's Wear Daily of the trade, notes, there

producers of poetry, the little magazine's heaviest staple, for every buyer of little magazines. Moreover, the poets themselves apparently aren't buying. That they may not read either, as some commentators on the subject claim, is a prospect too dismal to contemplate. However that may be, in most industries this problem would correct itself in the obvious ways. Not so here. Wages being few and far between and profit nonexistent, deficit spending is the very nature of things, and the notion of an expandare three to ten

342

ing market is an industry-wide joke. Not only that, but the worse the market gets, the more little magazines there seem to be. So how in the name of double-entry bookkeeping do these things survive? That they are labors of love is obvious enough. But what does that mean in

culture where love is to labor what fish

are

bicycles? What, besides making application for nonprofit status and

pastime, do little By way of proposing an answer I take the liberty of shamelessly invoking not only autobiography but racial memory as well. And I begin with

government grants something of

national

magazines provide that we should cultivate them so?

my father's father, whom neither I nor my father ever met except in print. My grandfather, a poet, was a friend and associate of Harriet

Monroe, the archetype of little magazine editors, founder and for twenty-four years editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. In her

autobiography this is what she said about him: Now and then

...

ambition was too insistent, delight in the art too absorbing,

leading to bitter disappointments or some more tragic denial. Max Michelson, for example, was a little back-street Chicago furrier whose exquisite sensi bility transcended the demands of his business. Our office, and the encourage ment we gave his slow-working delicate talent, became gradually a necessity of life to him, and we found his quiet presence helpful in the routine of our work, and his judgment of new poets suggestive. His fur business was neglected more and more, orders were delayed beyond his customers' endur ance, his patient lovable wife became profoundly discouraged, and all his friends were extremely anxious as it gradually seemed evident that his mind was weakening under the strain. At last his wife took their little child to her parents' home in Seattle, secured work there, and sent for him. He was as gentle as ever when I took him to the station and confided him to a sym pathetic porter, but soon after his arrival in Seattle a mental hospital had to be his refuge. Max lived in that hospital-an incurable paranoid schizophrenic

"haunted by voices," his records say-until he died, about 1953. For the last thirty-eight years of his life he lived quietly, it seems,

tending the hospital farm, violent only when recalling the outside world. His last contribution to Poetry was in 1921, from the hospital. A 1925 note from Sara, his wife (who died when I was small child), to Harriet Monroe remarks a collection of now lost manuscripts. After that there is no indication he wrote anything a

whatsoever. I can't say which half of his life was better, though I've

always felt Lear was on the mark when he said, "I would not be mad." But then how clear

are

one's real-life choices? Did Max

343

know, for example, that his "exquisite sensibility" was irreconcil able with the "demands of his business"? One story has it that, just before Max's madness came on, Ezra Pound had offered him

"job" with The Egoist, the magazine with which Pound and Eliot were

connected in London; and that, it seems, was the straw that

broke the back of sanity. If this is so-Max did review Pound's

early work appreciatively in Poetry, and The Egoist did publish poems by Max-doesn't it confirm what Harriet Monroe says, that poetry became a "necessity of life to him"? And isn't Pound's own much-disputed madness a sign of the inevitable tension between aesthetic and economic necessity? On two levels, then, we may say Poetry gave Max a lease on life. For a time, at least, it allowed him his "exquisite sensibility," which is obviously where his real life

And it also makes my own history---or racial memory accessible. In this very personal sense, then, I think little magazines

was.

give life to both the individual and the collective psyche. If that opaque, return with me to the 1950s, the heroic age of contemporary poetry, to 1958 and the unlikeliest of places: Lara seems

mie, Wyoming. Laramie is located roughly halfway between Seattle and Chicago -that is, between the

place where Max began his life (which

Lithuania, a fact irrelevant to the symmetry of my actually story) and where he ended it. And since the University of Wyoming was

is located in Laramie, and it was there I first saw Max's name in

Poetry and thus had my first tangible sense of his being, I think it was something more than accident that directed me to Laramie. This man-whose son knew only vaguely that he had written some poetry and had died in an "asylum" (I believe that he was, in fact, still alive and not

information was passed

than

fifty miles away at the time this

me) -turned out to be, however

minor, a historical figure. Was his historicity-my myth, if you will-a document in the life of poetry, or was poetry a document of his life? Certainly his only life for me is in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. And, moreover, before then I had not even seen a little

magazine. But willy-nilly my karma was upon me, at the propitious age of twenty-one. And, as if to give an imprimatur, the University of Wyoming's now long-defunct student literary magazine pub lished a story of mine. That story was about my brother, in reality my half-brother and no kin to Max at all. So from the beginning little magazines have 344

been for me a romance, in which I both found and tried to shape the iconography of a complex past and present that simultaneously were

and were not mine. Of course I didn't understand myself to

be doing anything of the sort. Nevertheless the powers in charge sent me to North Dakota for seasoning, to teach, coach the debate

team, and be the line coach for the Jamestown College football team. Even in North Dakota the contemplative life had its dis tractions. But a good angel, in the form of John R. Milton

(now

editor of the South Dakota Review), awaited me, a copy of Big Table 1 in his left hand, his own mimeographed magazine, Plain song, in his right. He had a hypothesis that American writing done west of the Mississippi, the sort he preferred, tended to be Jungian,

while that done east of the Mississippi inclined to be Freudian.

"Here," he said with a resigned shrug, "maybe you can make sense of this," and handed me his copy of Big Table. This was 1959, and in fact I could not make much

sense

of Kerouac's "Old

Angel

Midnight" Burroughs' "Naked Lunch," and only a little of Dahlberg's "Further Sorrows of Priapus" and perhaps a bit more of or

by Corso. Remember, I still thought that little magazines spontaneously generated themselves in somber black bindings on library shelves. I didn't know that living people made and wrote them. Big Table was news to me. So I just gazed east ward across those infinite Dakota plains and wondered what the hell was going on at the far side of the horizon. True, I had heard of Kerouac, if only to have his grammar denounced at great length by a professor of mine. Even I, however, knew that something more than grammatical finesse was at stake. I had nothing like a world view, so it suffered no rudeness at the hands of Burroughs and company, but they certainly helped me eventually to recognize that if, as F. R. Leavis (who was then very big in the academy) contended, Jane Austen was alpha and omega some

poems

of "the great tradition," then the great tradition was not my dish of

figs. And that, though it may not seem like much, meant there was an alternative; it was, when I finally caught on, as if Galileo had just invented the telescope. Bemused, I kept my own counsel and gazed eastward across the infinite Dakota plains. My naked lunch was on a back burner, simmering. Meanwhile I began experiment ing with some poems, and Milton published them, crude as they were, in his magazine, Plainsong. I don't know how Big Table made its way to the middle of North

345

Dakota. But its coincidence there with me had to be also more than

accidental. For one thing, as if to jog my karmic recollection, the

magazine was published in Chicago. Moreover, it was born out of the suppression of the Chicago Review, which four years later I would edit. So, while I watched the deer and antelope play on the great high plains, it was more than mere idle curiosity that made me wonder what was going on at horizon's edge. Heavy karma was coming down in Chicago. It was a staging area for the Beat revolt from the great tradition. The Beat wars against the academy (though in fact they were against the middle-class taste for which the academy had become apologist and preserver) were fought in two ways. They began in the oblique guerrilla-like spiritual life described in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. But as the Beats got more artillery-the notori ety of Kerouac's and Ginsberg's work, for example-they raised the ante and began to engage the academy head-on in the urban univer sity areas (San Francisco, Chicago, and New York), where they had grass-roots sympathy and support. From the start the academics were at a disadvantage because they either did not know or would not admit their role, which was to help conserve social order and contentment under the guise of maintaining immutable aesthetic standards. All right, said the Great Bald Eagle, maybe in the fickle, illusory world of reality we have to allow women to vote, property taxes, social security, labor unions, habeas corpus to Bolsheviks and malcontents, blacks to live wherever they like, and so on. Unpleasant, to be sure, and our hands are tied when the people get so feisty. But Beauty, there we draw the line! Things were further confounded when in the courts they were reduced to "obscenity." So the academics found themselves inextricably identi fied with either Victorian mores or authoritarian censorship or both. The Beats consequently caricatured them as either fools or Nazis. In any event, the Beats were successful and, like good revolutionaries, even turned apparent tactical defeats into strategic * victory. The Chicago Review-cum-Big Table war is a classical instance. *So successful were they, in fact, that by 1972-a dozen years after their official entry into American literature via Donald Allen's anthology, The New American Poetry-they were building their own institution, the "Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics," in Boulder, Colorado; and, like any academy, it is now being hounded by its own harpies of orthodoxy and conservatism.

346

Chicago Review, Vol. 12, No.3, Autumn 1598. The Irving Rosenthal-edited number contained the controversial chapter from Naked Lunch (courtesy Peter Michelson).

While I sat in North Dakota wondering what went on east of the horizon, a copy of Big Table 1 dangling in my hand, this is what was going on. Irving Rosenthal, editor, and Paul Carroll,

poetry editor, of Chicago Review had got wind of what has since come

to be called the San Francisco renaissance.

They excitedly

set about gathering manuscripts from writers who were getting to

be known as Beat. The Spring 1958 issue of Chicago Review was

special San Francisco number. It included work by Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Duncan, Wieners, McClure, Doyle, Laman tia, and Whalen and the first chapter of Burroughs' Naked Lunch. The Autumn 1958 issue featured Burroughs' second chapter, as well as prose by Whalen, poetry by Antoninus and Oppenheimer, and two brief but significantly articulate letters about the Beat movement by Allen Ginsberg. (Five years later, when I became a

editor of Chicago Review, Richard Stern, novelist and member of

the University of Chicago

faculty, was still distressed about the publication of those letters.) It also presented work by Chicago writers and artists, including Paul Carroll and John Logan, and the issue included essays by David Riesman and Hugh Kenner. Those were intelligent, lively, balanced issues. Moreover, in presenting Naked Lunch, the magazine was making history. But a Chicago columnist, Jack Mabley, got hold of the issue and promptly wrote an attack of the most nitwitted sort, challenging the trustees of the University of Chicago to put their house in order. (Albert Podell's detailed account of this episode in San Francisco Review 2, Spring 1959, does an especially nice job of dissecting the stupidity of Mabley's article.) The article was run on the front page of the Chicago Daily News under a banner headline, "Filthy Writing on the Midway." Keep in mind that this was 1958, in the wake of McCarthyism among other things, and the University of Chicago had not long before been on the public carpet for harbor ing communists. The administration was in no mood to take a smut rap. Moreover, the university fund-raisers complained that the Chicago Review publicity was making their jobs more difficult. Meanwhile Rosenthal and Carroll were going ahead with plans for their winter issue, presenting work by Kerouac, Dahlberg, Bur roughs, and Corso. The image of the university was on the line, but its principles apparently were not. Administration and faculty both took a decisive stand against common sense and freedom of the press. The winter issue of the Chicago Review was suppressed. 348

BIG T.ABLE

EDWARD

THE

DAHLBERG

GARMENT OF RA

FURTHER SORROvVS OF PRIAPUS

Big Table, Vol. 1, No.1, Spring 1959. Edited by Irving Rosenthal, it contained the contents of the suppressed Winter 1959 Chicago Review (courtesy Peter Michelson).

The Great Bald Eagle smiled. His boys were on the job. And

they kept things admirably confused, so that nobody need have an embarrassingly clear perception of what had happened. The administration, headed by Lawrence Kimpton, simply asserted its power as publisher and got off the PR hook by putting its own house in order. It left explanations to its faculty. The faculty, not wanting to be impaled on smut censorship, invoked a variety of transparent evasions. The editors, they said, were narrow-minded, fiscally irresponsible, inflexible, too limited in taste, etc. But cut it as fine as you might, the simple fact was that the Chicago Review had been censored, and the faculty had facilitated censorship as agents of the administration. Though I didn't know it, dreamily innocent back there in Dakota, this was a karmic paradigm that was to hang over my head like Pigpen's dust cloud on several occasions in later years. For their part, Rosenthal and Carroll were annoyed and baffled.

They had done their job as they supposed, rightly, that it should be done. They had tracked down lively new writers and were giving them a hearing, and at the same time were responsive to tradition though not, it's true, the formalist traditions then dominant in academic circles. They were confident they had found writing that was, whatever else, vivaciously real, a literature energized by its own time and place. Here was something new that mattered, and as editors they were adding it to the spectrum of possibilities. To do that, they supposed naively, was why the university subsidized the magazine. Wrong. As Rosenthal put it, "Mr. Kimpton does not want free expression at the University of Chicago; he wants money." So Rosenthal, Carroll, and four of the five remaining editors resigned from the Chicago Review, and on Christmas day 1958 they decided to make their own magazine, without subsidy or censorship, using the suppressed Chicago Review material for their first issue. The title came from Kerouac, who wired apoc

alyptically, "CALL IT BIG TABLE." If the suppression of the Chicago Review was a defeat in the Beat wars with academe, the inception of Big Table was a stunning counterattack. And the Beats regained a solid beachhead in the Second City, giving them serious artillery installations coast to Evergreen Review, Grove Press, and New Directions in New York; Big Table in Chicago; Contact and City Lights Books coast:

350

in San Francisco. There was also the "sleeper," Black Mountain

Review, and there were other outlets-Yugen, Kulchur, Beatitude, J argon Books, San Francisco Review, etc.-but the former were the big guns, partly because they were consistently in the glare of

obscenity litigation. "Thank God it was banned," Carroll later said of the Post Office impoundment of Big Table 1; "it made the magazine known to writers, and gave it some celebrity." Conceived in the censorship of the private sector, Big Table was swaddled in the censorship of public institutions. But such is the energy of contradiction that the greater the crunch from the top, the greater the possibility of the sides bursting all around. How else could I have gotten in North Dakota a copy of a magazine that was banned even as it was mailed in Chicago? The Post Office, however,

impounded only four hundred copies, so some slipped by them into the hinterlands where innocents like myself were waiting. The Great Bald Eagle was not happy at that tum of events, so his Post Office minions placated him in timeless bureaucratic fashion, by neglecting to tell Rosenthal (who edited Big Table 1; Carroll edited subsequent issues) that the magazine had been impounded. When Carroll, who was going ahead with Big Table 2, found out, he went to the Post Office and then the ACLU. The Post Office demanded that copy for Big Table 2 and subsequent issues be sent for

prepublication inspection. The ACLU challenged the Post Office's authority to either impound or preview editorial matter, and requested a public hearing. It took a year to get the hearing, which had no legal authority but was necessary-such is the de facto clout of the Great Bald Eagle-in order for the ACLU to get the case to court. At the hearing, the Post Office offered August Derleth, book editor of a Sauk City, Wisconsin, newspaper, as its sole witness against the literary merit of Big Table 1. The ACLU presented a host of literary eminences, including Jacques Barzun, John Ciardi, Norman Mailer, and Lional Trilling, who testified to the contrary. Nevertheless the Post Office found Big Table 1 obscene and unfit for the mails. Getting into court took another year.

Meanwhile Big Tables 2 through 5 were being sent through the mail. The Post Office's passion to either preview or impound the

magazine was held off by the ACLU while the trial was pending. The trial judge, ironically, was Julius S. Hoffman, who years later 351

presided so infamously at the Chicago Seven conspiracy debacle. In this case, however, he consulted precedent judiciously and followed Judge John Woolsey's famous decision on Joyce's Ulysses. Of Kerouac's "Old Angel Midnight," which had baffled me, he commented that it was "a wild prose picnic which seems to be some sort of dialogue, broadly, between God and Man." Of the episodes from Burroughs' Naked Lunch he said that they were "intended to shock contemporary society, in order perhaps to better point out its weaknesses and flaws." He concluded by citing Judge Woolsey: "Art certainly cannot advance under compulsion to traditional forms, and nothing in such a field is more stifling to progress than limitation of the right to experiment with a new technique." The Great Bald Eagle was miffed, to say the least, and spent the next nine years clouding Judge Hoffman's mind in preparation for his rendezvous with conspiracy. But history does not forget a moment of lucidity, when a judgment is free of the talons that make "e pluribus unum." Even though it is chronologically out of order (for I am still in Dakota, remember, contemplating the horizon), I will comment on this matter of obscenity and law. It's not out of line with my subject in any case, because during the period of the late fifties and early sixties the little magazines and small presses carried most of the burden of resisting censorship, both institutional (e.g., Chicago Review, Prairie Schooner, Northwest Review, etc.) and civil (e.g., City Lights Books and Grove Press/Evergreen Review). As reason able as were the decisions of such judges as Woolsey and Hoffman, they were nevertheless essentially wrongheaded. Like the professors who were conscripted to rationalize for the Great Bald Eagle's supersubtle machinations, these judges were manipulated into doing business not properly theirs. And in consequence they helped distract social energy and resources from the real issue. It is quite reasonable to distinguish literary from prurient obscenity, which is ...

the basis of these decisions. But such deliberations sanction state

authority where it ought not to be. As Justice William O. Douglas put it, the First Amendment "says in words that are unambiguous, abridging the freedom of speech, 'Congress shall make no law or of the press .' The legal issue is therefore simple: no law a means no law, and some abridgment is abridgment. Obscenity is social problem, then, not a legal one. Citing Jefferson, Douglas hits the mark directly: .

...

352

The way to prevent these [errors] of the people is to give them full informa tion of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right.

In short, full information being imperative, the primary business of a democratic society should be to contrive that full information

penetrate the whole mass of the people-through the media, government information agencies, social services, education and continuing education, etc. But this is precisely what the Great Bald Eagle contrives against, what with his Watergate caperings, his secret CIA/FBI budgets, files, and carryings-on, his multinational

legerdemain, etc. Why spend our time splitting hairs: is this obscen ity prurient? or this other socially redeeming? We must find ways to provide ourselves with the information necessary to withstand the obscenities, vulgarities, stupidities, and immoralities with which the big birds contrive our befuddlement. Meanwhile (just as I am preparing to leave off contemplating the horizon and resume pursuit of my myth to Chicago, quite to the satisfaction of my now restless karma), after two years of hassle and litigation Big Table 1 was free to walk the streets. Also in that

period, Carroll had produced four more issues, presenting a spec tacular roll call of "new" American writers-Kerouac, Burroughs, Mailer, Corso, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Bowles, Bro. Antoninus, Blackburn, Logan, O'Hara, Ashbery, Creeley, Koch, Duncan, Rechy, Wright, Dorn, etc. But more even than publication of specific individuals-it is no small credit, for example, that Chicago Review and Big Table were midwives to the birth of William Burroughs-Big Table had helped give shape to the Beat and Black Mountain "revolution" in poetics. It had, in short, done a damn good job-legally, socially, and aesthetically. And there it stopped, at Big Table 5. The reasons were, as one might expect, money and energy. But there was also something else, something perhaps unique to little magazines, especially those that burn hard and bright and briefly: a sense of organic completion. These decisions, as Carroll says, "are more complex, more human. I might have simply reached the limit of what I was about; I went .

on with it until it seemed to reach its termination.

And then, when it was time to stop, it was simply time to stop." The announcement, in Big Table 5, of Carroll's next projected issue-a symposium on

"Post-Christian Man"-suggests that this indeed

was

so.

After

353

what had been going on in Big Table, Allen Tate, Russell Kirk, Paul Goodman, and William

Phillips writing on "Post-Christian

Man" would have had to seem too much like academic filler. And so it must have seemed to Carroll

himself, for the symposium never

appeared and Big Table was laid to rest with its integrity intact. In a recent article in the Nation, Gene Lyons admonishes little

magazines that they must "grow or die." His position has a logic, but it is not sufficiently understanding of the kamikaze character of at least one sort of little magazine, the sort of which Big Table is a classical example. It exists for a particular purpose; and when that is realized, part of its function is to die rather than go mori bund. The history of little magazines is larded with The Egoist, Blast, Others, The Anvil,

examples

Yugen, Big Table, The

Outsider, to name but a few that come to mind and not even touch on the hundreds of mimeo or

single-shot magazines that have come

and gone. Little magazines cannot support themselves any more than little grocery stores can. Their vitality in part depends upon short life span. Even for relatively long-lived magazines sup ported by institutions there is often a regular rate of editorial a

turnover.

However, the different purposes of institutional and

private magazines are more or less complementary. The expansion of taste effected by kamikaze magazines like Big Table is usually reflected subsequently by the more stable magazines, or even, as was the case with the Beat revolution, in commercial publishing. Aesthetic impact makes waves beyond the point of collision only if it hits hard enough, so it should be expected that many little magazines will have resources only for the one big shot. Every magazine of high impact, like Big Table, draws energy directly and indirectly from dozens of transient and obscure mimeo maga zines. At the time Chicago Review and Big Table were "discover ing" the San Francisco Beat, for example, North Beach was buzzing with obscure, now forgotten journals being hawked in bars and coffeehouses. They helped create the environment that encouraged the writing which was more widely broadcast by ambitious little magazines, until at last commercial publishers took it on and stamped it officially into American literature. In short, as in many ecological structures, the dying, the dead, and even the stillborn are essential to the life of the system. So there's no point in our lecturing little magazine people. With a few exceptions, they don't 354

want to grow. In

Boulder, Colorado, population about 70,000,

there are between six and nine little magazines, depending on how the money tree grows. I once asked the editors of three of them, who were all friends of one another, why they didn't merge and, in effect, grow. They weren't even vaguely interested. About all "

What they could say was, "Well, ah, er, you don't understand I didn't understand was that they'd rather do it themselves because the doing was hip by haunch with being. So far as death goes, they know they're going to die. Meanwhile, however, they're living. And working, so to speak, for themselves. Many little magazine people are as afflicted with "careersma" as anybody else, but mostly they're in business to be out of business. So of course they violate the logic of business. That's why they're in business. Anyway, just after Big Table received extreme unction, I came across the plains to Chicago in a wheezy old Ford that had just enough cylinders working to deposit me on the doorstep of my birthplace, Hyde Park. I had gone from North Dakota to Mexico and then to California, but the big finger bone of fate pointed to Chicago. The University of Chicago held the archives of Poetry and thus more of the precious little information available about Max ....

and my racial memory. And of course there was the Chicago Review. In my own head I supposed that I was after a Ph.D. in

literature. Since high school, the life of a teacher had seemed to

good life, and I was simply following that through logical being a professor. I did not presume to think of myself as a writer. Even though an editorial in

me synonymous with the

to its

conclusion:

Big Table 1 had laid out its connection with the Chicago Review and I presumably had read the editorial-the information didn't

stick. So when I discovered that the magazine was housed on the

University of Chicago campus, I came to it as unprejudiced as I had come "to the university itself. Hyung Woong Pak three years earlier had been the only editorial staff member who did not resign in protest at the university's censorship of the magazine, and he had taken over as editor. In consequence, he was profoundly distrusted not only by the literary community but also, ironically, even by the faculty of the university. Pak, a North Korean expatriate, was accustomed to that atmosphere and seemed almost to cultivate it. He was the very image of the inscrutable Oriental. His political mode was feudal, and he supposed that his survival 355

depended on systematically playing both ends against the middle. If, for example, the faculty and the literary community distrusted not only him but one another, their double alienation neutralized both factions, which was the way he wanted it. That seems natural

enough for someone who had fled to the south from North Korea during the communist coup and then, seeing General Park at work, kept on truckin' to the United States-where, of course, he was not only an alien but a yellow one to boot. Pak had no doubt earned his paranoia, but it nonetheless lent his life the quality of a con tinuing melodrama. As far as the Chicago Review was concerned, his machinations

pretty unreal. He had little to fear from the faculty, who had been burned so badly in the censorship controversy that they were more than happy to keep hands off. Moreover, Pak was a Euro were

phile, and his primary interests were the configurations of European intellectual history-a subject perfectly congenial to academics and sufficiently abstract to be safe from smut hunters. And if the literary community had more or less turned its back on him and the Chicago Review in retaliation for the censorship, that was no great matter because he was not all that interested in poesy anyway.

Nonetheless, paranoia prevailed and served to widen the breach between the Chicago Review and the literati. Despite all this, Pak edited a good magazine. If creative writers were down on it, aca demic and critical writers were well served. He did impressive issues on

existentialism and phenomenology, for example, and he gave

space and encouragement to two young critics who have subse quently attained some prominence, Ralph Mills, Jr., and Geoffrey Hartman. Mills has since become a poet, but Hartman has hewed the academic mainline. He had been, as I recall, dismissed at the University of Chicago and had gone on to the

rigorously

University of Iowa. He seemed somewhat nervous and obviously ambitious. He and Pak would rendezvous on occasion at Chicago's Midway Airport, with a kind of conspiratorial air. Pondering what new moves with which to dazzle the academy? I soon realized that my editorial interests led another way. But I did my chores and tried to learn the trade. Pak's academic interests had given the magazine that stamp; my character and its rapport with the interest was to restore its

literary community. Inconveniently for me, I knew literary nothing about how to do it. Nor, in 1962, was there anything so and artistic

356

dramatically coherent as the Beats or the Black Mountaineers to "discover." So there I was, still more or less fresh from the wilder of the Louisiana Purchase, with a magazine to fill with something more substantial than my innocent goodwill for the arts.

ness

A year or two before I became editor, the Associated Literary Magazines of America (ALMA) had organized itself to deal with

distribution, the perennial problem of little magazines. The Chi cago Review was a charter member, and I decided to go to the second ALMA meeting in New York, partly to learn about distri bution but mainly to introduce myself to New York and the whirl of the literary world. ALMA-which originated, I think, out of the energies of Reed Whittemore of the Carleton Miscellany and Robert Bly of The Sixties-was at that point a cozy group of fifteen or so members. But the idea had

caught on, and people were there

from all over the country to apply for membership. The rift between the established magazines-Partisan,

Quarterly Review, Hudson,

Sewanee, etc.-and the newer, smaller, less well-heeled ones began

there, a rift which has seemed to widen in COSMEP and CCLM, the offspring of ALMA. With wide-eyed interest I watched not only the harangues but also the celebrities of the little magazine world, keeping what I hoped would seem a sophisticated silence. It was the only mask I had, and I was found out pronto in the latrine. others have afore malice Though ungenerously suggested thought, I think it was mere unhappy chance that brought Gordon Lish to the neighboring urinal. He had just delivered a ringing call for support of Karl Shapiro (not present at the meeting), whose magazine, the Prairie Schooner, had recently been censored by its publisher, the University of Nebraska. Lish, subsequently fiction editor for Esquire but then editing Genesis West in San Francisco, was bristling with eloquence, outrage, and indignation. His oration had been enthusiastically received, and he was still trailing clouds of glory. I'm sure he had business to attend at the urinal, but before he began he said, "You from Chicago Review?" His tone let me know I had something to fear. Maybe I should stonewall it, I thought, or has he got the goods on me, and in my defensive agitation I nearly turned toward him in full arc. I should have. Only the most reptilian quisling, he told me, would consent to edit a censored magazine, had I no pride, no morals, all the editors in the country ought to protest, to strike, blahblahblah Standing there with my now thoroughly wilted privy part adangle, I was ...

....

357

defenseless. My sophisticated silence became a squawk in my throat as Lish

flayed me both back and side. Luckily, at that point Roger

Aplon and John Logan, who then edited Choice, were moved by the Grand Design to relieve themselves-if design, as the poet says,

govern in a thing so small. Logan ranked Lish on the matter, since he had contributed to both Chicago Review and Big Table. He dismissed Lish and his splenetic tirade, commending the direction of my editing. Lish, Logan said, would probably end up editing

fiction for some goddam magazine like Esquire. Then Logan and

Aplon introduced me to the social whirl of little magazines. Here's how that went. George Plimpton threw a party for the assembled editors and writers. In those days Plimpton's parties were famous. A few weeks previously, Time had carried a story of Jackie Kennedy cavorting at one of them. High art and high society, and me all atwitter in anticipation. Aplon and Logan invited me to accompany them, Robert Bly, Carolyn Kizer, and Donald Keene. I in turn invited myoid friend Ron Tavel, whose work I was trying to promote in the Chicago Review. We were received with Plimpton's urbane but boyish charm. His apartment overlooked the East River and was hip deep in literati. There was a lot of liquor. Wit, wisdom, and literary gossip crackled like endless strings of ladyfingers. I wandered about like a rube, gaping and eavesdropping. The convivial stream didn't look too deep. I stuck my toe in and asked Plimpton about all the pictures of him with baseball players. He was amused. He put me on for two or three sentences. What was he saying? Had he been a baseball player? He was still more amused. He gestured vaguely with his hand. Baseball, he said, was Marianne Moore's favorite sport, and sidled off to less gullible guests. Someone introduced me to Andrew

Lytle, longtime editor of Sewanee Review. Lytle, from the old school of southern gentlemen, had precise but crafty manners. He was willing to talk to new talent. I didn't know if I qualified. I introduced him to Tavel. Tavel told him he was writing an avant garde novel. A what, Lytle asked in mock ignorance. I groaned. Tavel didn't give a shit. An avant-garde novel, he repeated. There is no such thing, Lytle said; there are only good novels and bad novels. Greenwich Village girded for battle with Yoknapatawpha County. I kept drinking and wandering through the party like the camera 358

eye of Last Year in Marienbad. On every circuit I ran into Jules Chametsky of the Massachusetts Review, and each time we met I

would say, "Remember to say hello to Joe Langland." Soon his eyes began to roll in his head when he saw me coming and we would chorus the line together. Meanwhile the party had run out

of food. Logan and Kizer and Bly were getting hungry, and they

maybe a bit miffed about something. By this point I was stone high on New York literary life and could have danced all night. But they were gathering our party together to leave for dinner. Plimpton was concerned. He scurried about in his kitchen and came up with several large cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. He might as well have offered dog food; Logan, Bly, and Kizer had not come to New York to eat Dinty Moore beef stew. I dragged Tavel away from his umpteenth rebuttal with Lytle. We all left in something of a huff-with me, however, trying to smile over my shoulder to Plimpton, indicating that personally I was not at all insulted by Dinty Moore. Though I confess that until then I had never seen a can of the stuff and thought, given Plimpton's style, that it might be some New York gourmet item. Plimpton shrugged and spooned himself a bowl of stew. Sandra Hochman joined our exodus. She was being squired by a young executive type, obviously a man of means. After our dinner he said he knew a Turkish bar complete with belly dancers. The elders declined, but the rest of us piled into his Lincoln Continental.

were

We drank and caroused, and after a while Sandra Hochman and

her swain rose to leave. He tossed a fistful of bills on the table,

inviting us to stay on as his guests. We drank him a toast and then one to poetry and to Sandra Hochman, to New York, to Turkey, and finally to such largesse as was induced by our host's passion. I was pretty pleased with the style of life in New York. Finally, in the small hours, as Tavel and I were stumbling toward the street, we found ourselves behind one of the

dark, exotic Turkish dancers

into whose cleavage we had been stuffing our host's dollars. "We

gotta hustle ta catch a cab," we overheard her say to her boyfriend in a flat, incongruous Brooklyn accent. Tavel, who was from

Brooklyn, smiled. I thought of an old actor friend of mine who used to say, and perhaps still does, that theater people are all fake. Sometimes shortly after Kennedy was inaugurated-and we thought the good guys were in office and Nixon had disappeared359

the Bay of Pigs invasion happened. This was just before we were, you may recall, eyeball to eyeball with the Russians over some missiles in Cuba, until they blinked. That being the level of our as

foreign policy, I thought it right to put together a symposium on "Morality and Power Politics." I wrote to a dozen or more political theorists and theologians-Adlai Stevenson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur Larson, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, etc.-asking them to contribute. All but

one

declined. Stevenson wished

luck. Larson, then director of the Foreign Affairs Institute, won

dered, ahem, what fee might be involved. Well, I replied, we might, ahem, be able to come up with fifty dollars. Alas, he was unfor

tunately too busy. A month or two later he had an article in Harper's or the Atlantic on a subject very like morality and power politics. But Reinhold Niebuhr, partially paralyzed and on what I believe turned out to be his deathbed, sent

incisive, humane

article entitled "The Nuclear Dilemma," along with a very moving note in which he

apologized for the condition of his manuscript,

but he could only type with one hand and did not have a secretary.

symposium never materialized as such, though the nuclear dilemma, needless to say, did. But the effort was worth it, if only to be able to encounter Niebuhr's profound humility and grace. As an editor, one has more than his share of humbling occasions. At that time, having been a student most of my life, the energizing thing about editing was that you were always on the line. Each decision mattered because it was a public statement. Even what you didn't print was in some way public. The most humbling "mistake" during my time at the Chicago Review was our failure to publish Kenneth H. Brown's play The Brig. It is a highly theatrical piece but not especially literary, and we were all literary folk, none of us with a director's vision. The irony is that we were making special efforts to locate and publish plays as a way of helping to stimulate theater in this country, but we failed to recog nize the single most arresting piece of theater we encountered. Luckily there are more magazines than one, and the Tulane Drama Review (now The Drama Review) published the play. Within a in year of our rejection The Brig was a nationally celebrated item the Living Theater's repertory, so we had our comeuppance even if nobody but ourselves and Kenneth Brown were the wiser. Sometimes, on the other hand, we were right on the money.

Our

360

Though we were no more Zen monks than we were directors, we had sufficient wit to publish Lucien Stryk's and Takashi Ikemoto's Zen anthology. And we had the pleasure of having helped it become a successful book, giving Stryk's careers as poet and as translator

much deserved boost. And it mattered more to

than all the Plimpton parties or Brooklynese belly dancers in New

York when Robert Bly called me from Paul Carroll's apartment to say how important he thought it was that we had published those translations. Helping to secure an audience for new or little known writers is

obviously the biggest satisfaction in little magazine publishing. There is also, however, the equally important job of providing space for experimental work by prominent writers. When we published his "The Boys' Magazine," for instance, William Burroughs had an international reputation. But his reputation exceeded his prerogatives. While Esquire or Playboy might contract with him for a journalistic piece, they could not publish his real work, the experimentation which had won him his reputation. But we could and did. In the same issue we published a piece of Tavel's "avant-garde" novel, Street of Stairs (subsequently published in an unhappily aborted form by Olympia Press), and when he found his name back to back with Burroughs' in the table of contents it was, he wrote, like a swig of pure oxygen. We had our downs, but we

also had our ups.

Editing the Chicago Review was a profound turning point in my life, though I didn't get hold of its significance until three or four years later. While editing I had also been teaching at North western University, playing father to two babies, and increasingly attending to my own poetry, so there wasn't much time to think about a dissertation and Ph.D. I had supposed I would get back to that. But by this time it was 1965 and Johnson had just been elected to keep Goldwater from defoliating Vietnam. The citizens of the United States were about to have

radical confrontation

with both their private and their public mythologies. Mine had

begun with the Chicago Review, where Max's legacy became my tar baby. Was I actually going to be a writer? Nearly thirty years old and obviously not precocious, I was hard to convince. And why not? Where I grew up, one could conceive of being a bricklayer or a fireman but not a poet. It wasn't in the vocabulary. And when it did enter my consciousness it came like Max, like a ghost. But the 361

big finger bone nudged me once again, through the agency of a little magazine, TriQuarterly-which, so far as I am concerned, could have been invented precisely for that purpose. Some writers, perhaps the best, are born to the pen. Keats and Corso, for example, didn't need to be persuaded they were poets; they just knew. I don't know if that was true of Stevens, but I take heart in the fact that he didn't publish a book until he was forty-four. At any rate, 1 needed to be convinced. So here's how a little magazine added twelve inches to my chest

expansion and gave me biceps to be proud of. Do scholars kick sand in your face at the beach? Are you chagrined before your best girl as critics mock your puny thighs? Little mags can help you too! In fact, the first issue of TriQuarterly in 1964 featured a parody of the Famous Writers School ads. It was one of Charles Newman's first ideas for the

magazine. Happily, however, it also featured

the calligraphic poems of Kenneth Patchen and other items that announced it was up to serious business. Actually Newman con ceived TriQuarterly on a grand scale (i.e. in little-magazine terms) and it has behaved itself grandly ever since. All the better for me. Newman published an early version of one of my plainsongs.

complete volume of these, I am pleased to announce, was published

by the Brillig Works in the spring of 1978. Demand a copy of Pacific Plainsong from your local bookstore, and if this entire parenthesis does not appear here you will know TriQuarterly has betrayed its heritage!) Also a couple of essays--one of them a piece on Ronald Tavel's Theater of the Ridiculous and Andy Warhol's film factory, which I wrote only at Newman's insistence. It was spotted in TriQuarterly by Gilbert Harrison, then the publisher and editor of the New Republic, who promptly wrote me what he called a fan letter, asking if I had anything in mind that I might do for his magazine. Two years earlier, I had tried unsuc cessfully to get approval for a dissertation on a critical study of pornography at the University of Chicago, and now I wrote an essay on the subject for the New Republic. A month or so after it appeared, the editor of Herder and Herder (now the Seabury Press) called to offer me a contract for a book on the subject. I was in business, and more or less on my own terms. From one point of view, 1968 had seemed like a very good was year. Radical energy was mobilized and full of purpose. It

362

fantasia most especially for white radlibs. Having, ridden the coattails of the black movement,

interlopers,

seemed to have

found our own raison d'etre in the Vietnam war. Not only had we

appeared we were heard. Johnson had Bobby Kennedy were laying out at

found our voice, but it

withdrawn.

McCarthy

and

least the most urgent part of our case. And if we didn't have enough power to elect a president, we still had enough to defeat

and discredit Humphrey liberalism. We had to be reckoned with. Or so we thought. I thought so, and it was a cocky feeling, like one's

twenty-first birthday. As if one's imagination were no longer a quixotic aberration but had at last taken on social viability. At any rate, it was in that spirit that I accepted an offer from the University of Wyoming to edit an "experimental" arts journal. I spent time at Northwestern and Notre Dame, and was pleased to reply, when the Wyoming administration asked me what I thought the focus of such a journal would be: "What is important is that we do not need another journal for its own sake. We do, however, need one that is cap able-L e. set up for the purpose of exploring the dynamics of contemporary art and culture. I think the increasingly intermedial character of the arts, for example, is changing our sense of artistic form and aesthetics. A magazine sensitized to this evolution and willing to pay for its practice and criticism would be a valuable addition In short, I proposed an "international journal of experiment in the arts." I also pointed out the obvious, that such a venture could not be subject to censorship of any sort. I was feeling pretty nifty, my myth well in hand, poet with portfolio. Somewhat to my surprise, and greatly to my pleasure, they agreed "enthusiastically," as the dean of academic affairs informed me. So, my head brimming with visions of sugar plums, I once again packed myself off to Laramie, home of the Wyoming Cowboys. But one man's meat The year 1969-70 was not a good year for the administration of the University of Wyoming. Reality came crashing in on its mountain hideaway without so much as a by-your-Ieave. Its nervousness began with the October moratorium -marches, demonstrations, and vigils in Laramie as elsewhere. Nervousness blossomed into full hysteria when the administration felt obliged to support the football coach's firing of fourteen black football players from the Wyoming team, which brought national "

....

363

notoriety and a million-dollar NAACP lawsuit. And that spring, in response to a passive, orderly demonstration protesting the Kent and Jackson State shootings, the administration became altogether unhinged. The university president, before hiding out in the Ag School's milking machine, called in the state troopers, the National Guard, and, yes, the fire department. The university administration, like the national one, had lurched from bungle to botch in these "crises." And having had all they could take, they brought the same calm perspicacity to the suppression of The Purple Sage, as I decided it should be called-Purple as in "purple patches" and Sage as in wisdom and the well-known brush. Besides, who could resist a table of contents called "The Writers of the Purple Sage"? Specifically they suppressed The Lover's Horoscope, our first publication. It was an erotic poem, "kinetic" in form, printed on

eight discs which are riveted at the center so as to be able to spin. Twelve verses, corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac, are printed on each disc. The zodiac signs are printed at the edge of the discs. The reader spins each of the eight discs separately, and the verses that randomly align with his sign provide him with an erotic poem by way of instruction for the day. A reader might come up with this: "Touch ritually / prick / to nipple kiss / her lips, or butterfleyelash / enter after soixanteneuf / meet her gaze, or moan one obscene word / come unexpectedly talk of the zodiac, crossed signs, the mysterious marriage." The wheel is in color, ranging progressively from violet, at the smallest center disc, to a bright yellow. A handsome, prickly piece of stuff. A pleasure. A good piece of art. And, alas, erotic-more than the burghers running the university could abide. Though, as it turned out, there was more to their reaction than the horoscope. As I suggested above, the horoscope came at the end of a bad year. The penny wits running the university were frazzled. Scared and confused, they had here, at last, something they could get hold of: the horoscope was "smut" and The Purple Sage was "radical." One perhaps has to have had some experience in Wyoming to quite appreciate what that meant. I have been asked, especially by editors of university-based magazines, why I began with what was most likely to terrify a university administration. First, I thought the agreements under which I took the job had settled that problem. The university had 364

agreed to the experimental character of The Purple Sage and had said there would be no censorship. Second, when the issue did come up, I offered to postpone distribution of the horoscope until other issues had articulated more clearly the aesthetic range of The Purple Sage. But even this was a compromise I had to force myself to offer. Because the real issue was freedom, the freedom to make an aesthetic and moral statement as you think it

ought to be made.

And that was compounded by the need-as I supposed, and still

do-that a journal claiming,

The Purple Sage did, to be "an

international journal of experiment," and

coming as it did out

of an obscure, small state university, had to make its initial state ment as precisely as possible.

The Lover's Horoscope was perfect.

It was written by a British poet. Its form was

experimental. To make its format an entire issue was saying beyond any rhetoric that we were not going to be bound by the conventions of magazine publication. Its tone and subject were their own statement, and augmenting the aesthetic of The Purple Sage-at once graceful and obscene, lyrical and pornographic-it said something about the condition of beauty. And, goddamit, it was happy; it celebrated life. If an experimental journal can't risk celebrating vitality and energy, then it damn well better close up shop. The X factor in editing an institutionally supported magazine is what motives the institution has. One has only to think of Encounter's association with the CIA to know what I mean. Where you get your money, and why, matters. Even when there are no

visible strings attached, there is always that moment waiting when

things will come to push and shove, and at that point motives count. Every subsidized magazine has seen it, or will. (For TriQuarterly it came with the publication of William Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife.) Which is why many editors prefer their own shoestring budget, even if it means mimeo rather than print, just because in the crunch who pays the piper always calls the tune. Moreover, in a university one is always dealing with a compounded bureaucracy. If you're doing anything at all adventurous, you're not likely to get coherent faculty support, partly because faculties have their egos, tastes, and special interests to protect and too many of them are threatened by contemporary literature or con descending to what has not yet been certified. And even if you do get faculty support it won't matter much because administrators 365

Above: cover of The Lover's Horoscope (Purple Sage), designed by Lawrence Levy. Opposite: poster advertising the Purple Sage (courtesy Peter Michelson).

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are so

contemptuous of the faculty that they either ignore them

as was

the case at Wyoming-or manipulate them into line-as

at the

University of Chicago in the Chicago Review affair. At Wyoming they basically wanted a magazine for window dressing. Even though we negotiated for a year and a half before I took the job, and in that time I distinctly emphasized how serious I was about the magazine's experimental character and had a "no cen sorship" clause written into my contract, they just didn't believe what I said. Or, more accurately, they didn't think it mattered what I said. For

rule administrators also have

contempt for

language. Like any bureaucrats, all they really believe in is the power of systems. What they wanted, it turned out, was to balance their heavy investments in science and technology with a flashy humanistic venture, and a magazine seemed a relatively cheap way of doing it. The particular character of The Purple Sage didn't matter to them. In their heads it was a magazine and therefore interchange able with the many other literary magazines that they also didn't know or care anything about. Being basically simple and cynical, they thought they could control it, which is to say castrate it and make it fit company for a proper college of arts and sciences. The political lesson here is that motives determine how much admin istrators will actively subvert the workings of a magazine. It's axiomatic that they won't help, so the question is how much they'll hurt. If they think you're causing them more trouble than you're worth, they'll do you in. When, as is usually the case, they have no aesthetic commitment, then you're really worth nothing to them, and so any trouble at all is more than you're worth. The "trouble" I was is worth checking into briefly. Wyoming suppressed The Lover's Horoscope on the grounds that it might antagonize the state legislature and thereby perhaps endanger budget allocations for the university. And there was probably some reality there. However, the university made no effort either to understand how the Horoscope fit into the aesthetic pattern of The Purple Sage or to check out the legislature itself. This latter is not

farfetched

as it may seem. I had been told before I took the job that one of the

trustees of the university knew my own

writing and my proposal

for the journal and supported both it and me. So it was not out of line to suppose there might also have been legislators similarly inclined. Clearly the Horoscope offended their own sense of 368

propriety, and they were not about to confront the legislature with what they themselves found objectionable. Moreover, the Wyoming legislature met biennially, so it was highly problematical whether it would even be aware of the Horoscope. The point is that there was no trouble nor was any very likely; but the more chimerical the university's bureaucratic reasons for having the journal in the first place, the more their paranoid suppositions had the force of fact. However, as I said, the year had brought them heavy weather, and they were nervous. Consequently they were afraid of the "radical" possibilities of an uncensorable magazine, and they used the eroticism of The Lover's Horoscope as an occasion to either put the journal under their bureaucratic thumb or cashier it altogether. The only amusing moment of the whole episode came on the day it all "broke," when Chicken Little-in the guise of Swallow Press, our distributor-called to tell me the sky was falling. During some

bureaucratic business with the dean-who is the villain of

this-here tale-I had casually and naively shown him a proof copy of the Horoscope. With equal casualness he asked if he might keep

it over the weekend and return it on Monday, when we were to meet again. By

Monday afternoon all the shit had hit the fan. I was

walking to his office when my assistant called out the window that Swallow was on the phone and it sounded urgent. The crew-cut villain dean had been busy. He had got the university's legal adviser to contact the distributor and manufacturer of the Horoscope, both

of whom were in Chicago, and with impeccably officious arrogance

informed them that I was no longer empowered to contract for the

university and that the Horoscope itself was to be shipped directly to the university president's office. I had in effect been fired without knowing it. Insane with rage and inspired by guerrilla theater, I went roaring off to what had been set up as an ambush in the dean's office, where a delegation of administrative types were waiting to browbeat me for smut mongering and general nastiness. They obviously did not expect me to be forewarned, and were astonished when I entered raving and threatened to bust the legal adviser, who had made the secret calls, in the eyes, ears, nose, and throat, crack his skull, and feed his flitweight brain to the coyotes. I ranted, cussed, pounded desks, and carried on in general like a red-blooded

American maniac. Their eyelids clicked open like Barbie dolls. Great consternation, much

hemming and hawing as I stomped 369

around the office. Then

apologies for furtive behind-my-back goings-on, fidgeting and squirming; and from that point on, through four weeks of negotiation, the legal adviser, an unbelievable twirp, was carefully kept out of my sight. He would wait in adjoining offices while we negotiated, and the bureaucrats would shuttle back and forth to consult with him. It was a small but distinct victory over the good manners with which such folk ask you to please lift your chin as they prepare to cut your throat. Meanwhile I asked the manufacturer to hold on to the Horo scopes until he heard from me, to which he

agreed. He was in Chicago and not much impressed with the university's officiousness. The point of this was that I would at least have that card to use in trying to persuade the administrators to permit publication at a later time. Perhaps after a year or so the range of Purple Sage projects would show them that we were not in the smut business. We had a book of children's art and writing in nearly complete manuscript, likewise an anthology of contemporary British poetry (which subsequently became an issue of TriQuarterly and a book published by Swallow Press), etc. Negotiations went their mindless way. No, the administrators said, under no circumstances could the Horoscope be published. Then the villain dean proposed an editorial board. Fine, I said. But what he really wanted was a censoring board. No, 1 said, under no circumstances. Besides they already obviously had censoring power, so it was a moot point. All through these meetings they were hangdog and nondirective. Except for the censoring of the Horo scope they just kept throwing the ball back to me. Yes, they wanted The Purple Sage to continue (at one pathetic moment the president, referring to the children's book, said, "I don't suppose you'd be content just to do that sort of thing "). No, they didn't want to censor the journal. But also, no, the Horoscope could not be published any time. At one point faculty quislings were paraded in to tell me that my colleagues would most certainly not like it (and presumably therefore not support me) if their research monies, etc., were cut because the legislature got peeved. 1 replied that I did not choose to edit a journal according to the tastes of the Wyoming state legislature. So it went. In the course of these meetings I called the legal director of the ACLU in New York. I explained the situation, the no-censorship clause in my contract, the general decorousness of the Horoscope's ...

370

eroticism, etc. I asked if there was any reasonable hope of success

fully fighting the censorship in court. "Where did you say you were?" he asked. "Laramie, Wyoming," I said. A long pause at his end of the line. "That's the Wyoming District Court," he said, "and Judge X is a local Wyoming judge. Unless you're prepared to go to the Supreme Court you'll never win. Forget it," he said. Forget it, I thought; the flame's not worth the candle. I resigned. Back in Chicago, Max, so to speak, was waiting. I went there and finished my books, The Eater, and The Aesthetics of Pornography. Some few thousand words ago I suggested that little magazines make up a kind of counter-industry, since for many people they are

alternative to the conventional business of life. And the

conventional business of life is a bit like stupidity; it mayor may not kill you, but it'll certainly make you sweat a lot. Even if you

adapt to it like a healthy organism, your very health is often a mode of death. Or if you don't, you're locked up in a hospital or prison, or you destroy yourself and save them the trouble, or you find an alternative, some sort of compromise with which you can live. My grandfather had been locked up. My mother had destroyed herself. I have, at least so far, found an alternative, in and through the life of little magazines. Lenin called the Russian intellectuals of his day "shit." If, as seems to be the case, that attitude still prevails in Russia, small wonder that the Russian samisdat press is so active. In its relative way, the little

magazine in the United States is

analogous to the Russian samisdat. They are both an SOS by way of resistance to prevailing dogma-"mind the State" for Russians and "mind your Business" for Americans. Business-witness my grandfather Max-can be as lethal as the state. And the little

magazine world is largely powered by the will, at least, to resist the deadening aspects of the business ethos. Jack Collom, editor and publisher of the, a mimeographed little magazine, is an example. Now in his middle forties, he has for the past fifteen or so years-while publishing his magazine, writing his own poetry, and earning an M.A. at night-supported himself and his family by working in a factory. When writer friends, sup porting themselves at academic jobs, complained about their work, he would wonder if it was, after all, worth the effort. But he kept at it and finally finished the requirements for his degree, sustained by his editing and writing. Having marked time for many years, he quit his job as soon as he got the degree. He 371

managed to pay the rent for a while by working in the Colorado PITS program, at the same time continuing to edit and write. Then he landed a year's gig in Grand Island, Nebraska, as a poet-in-the-community. In short, after many years he extricated

drudgery and had the satisfaction of less recognized and working as a poet, of doing a job that more or honored his spiritual energy. And he was happy at it. Whereupon, Now why, curiously, he decided to stop publishing his magazine. at this point in his having borne it for so many years, did he stop himself from industrial

life? The reasons are, of course, complex-questions of money, of the money and energy before; why energy, etc. But he had found relation to his not now? A large part of the answer lies in his he needed large doses of "other-level work. While in the

factory

dissociations of

experience" just to keep alive, i.e. to survive the industrial drudgery. With his work as a poet, more spiritually cohesive and satisfying, he no longer needed the symbolic activity of the magazine. His work and his being were integrated, so the

magazine became in a sense superfluous. Not that little magazines exist solely as some form of negative their editors. Not at

compensation for the otherwise drab lives of need. all. They exist to satisfy what their editors see as a literary Of course,

than

few editors of littles

earn

quite livable

salaries, though they are a minority in the industry. Nonetheless, for careerists the prevailing little magazine energy connects with the spiritual need to do in life, with or without pay, something with it that makes one feel human. And often enough that carries is what a sense of cultural alternative. Alternative opportunity that extent pride is little magazines pride themselves on. To some even

myth, but it's a healthy myth. Certainly, aiming think most little challenge your audience's expectations (as I to magazine editors intend) is healthier than simply aiming please. of characteristic so We need not subscribe to the salvific hyperbole little magazine rhetoric to recognize that they make a significant cultural contribution to the life of the culture, even though the

based

mainstream is largely unriffled by them. If literature matters,

magazines matter-and not simply because of

little

the honor roll of great

that great writers who may have gotten a start there. My guess is the at goal line, "not writers, or even good ones, are like fullbacks teams who feed to be denied." Valuing little magazines as farm it's however much that may happen (though the

major leagues,

372

probably a good deal less than is supposed), is just another way of plugging them into the GNP. And calling them the "furnace where contemporary literature is being forged" is dramatic but mislead ing. They're more like retail outlets. Whether bargain basements with plain pipe racks or some fancy import shop, all of them are marginal ventures (to whom the CCLM is the equivalent of the Small Business Administration). The furnace is the culture itself.

Significant writing is forged by life, not magazines. What little magazines do is affirm that the written imagination matters. Their puny, inexhaustible voices encourage the collective imagination to articulate itself, and in that way they are part of the life that forges contemporary literature. Literature, they say, is part of life, however much commerce may discourage any but the most popu lar. Their importance, then, lies not in the success of their writers but in the quality of the life activity they exist to represent. Obviously some are better and some worse in terms of aesthetic quality. But that distinction is after the fact. A culture must be the healthier when it may choose from among the widest possible range of self-expression, i.e. when the existence of that range is itself regarded as a value. Little magazines matter not only for what they publish but also, perhaps more so, for the kind of generative activity they are. When we insist that little magazines grow or die we are really demanding that they measure up to some mythically immutable standard. No one, not the most ingrown toenail of a mimeo graph-magazine editor, will ever argue against good writing. On the other hand, Charles Bukowski, who ten or fifteen years ago was regarded as an illiterate drunk, is now practically a national

hero. Modern literature is shot through with such anomalies. So there's no point in trying to bully people about "quality." "Quality" smacks of "success," and they both take care of themselves. Take, as

examples of success, the dapper Edwardian image of the New

Yorker logo and its evolution in caricature from Esquire's white

mustachioed old gentleman to Playboy's snappy young would-be

gentleman. Or the complementary transition of Cosmopolitan from purveyor of sturdy domesticity to chanteuse of sexy career girls. The New Yorker, as aesthetically serious and energetic as even the most austere of literary magazines, thrives to this day by huck stering urbanity in the forms of fancy food, drink, clothes, and

hostelry. The others-with lesser but still prominent literary claims 373

-have flourished by adding the commodity of sex to the formula. This is not to say that they are all the same. But there is a sense in which they all succeed by catering the simple hedonism their

readers associate with the good life:

fancy food, drink, clothes,

hostelry, and sex. Now, take the following observation, that

...

labour is external i.e. it does not belong to [man's] essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. [Man] therefore only feels it is the himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself loss of his self man [the worker] no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions-s-eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc ...

...

....

I cite this aspect of Marx's theory of alienation because I think it

helps explain something important about the phenomenon of little magazines in our culture. Marx is describing here what J ung would call the transference of energy. Not being "freely active" in his work, where mind and soul are dissociated from body, we transfer frustrated spiritual energy to "animal functions--eating, drink dressing-up." This is precisely ing, procreating dwelling .

what these successful magazines have understood, that their success

depends upon playing fast and loose with the prevailing sociological rhythms that keep freedom of action domesticated within the bounds of simple hedonism. The more we keep focused on food, drink, clothes, hostelry, and virile or voluptuous Kewpie dolls, the more we keep the placid beat. Playboy has grown fat on pictures of decorously naked ladies. Is it an accident that Ralph Ginzburg went to j ail for publishing in Eros more or less equally decorous pictures of a naked white woman and a naked black man embrac ing? Well, this is a bit facile and perhaps more than a bit evasive of the complexities of these magazines, especially The New Yorker. Still, one pretty certain road to success is a sophisticated use of soma. But it is to their credit that little magazines have by and large declined the gambit, even if a number of them do put us to sleep. Serious writing has always been between a rock and a hard is place. One of its duties, after all, is to sing out that the emperor naked. Since social order depends on cultivating delusion, such an singing has only occasional rewards. Unless, of course, being 374

enfant terrible is it own satisfaction. And with regard to little magazines the emphasis has always been on "enfant." Even the big-money folks have their troubles in that respect. Newness, always a selling point, is really an analogue of infancy. Norman Mailer has been trying for twenty years to persuade people he's a grownup, but what made him the cultural object he is was his early promotion

enfant terrible. To be taken seriously as an artist in the GNP ethos, it must first be demonstrable that one is a child and as an

therefore need not be taken seriously. But a good part of the raison d'etre for little magazines is the

outsider role itself, in which the moral kudos of fighting the good

fight remains untainted by the corruptions of power (though the power structure of the little magazine world, too, grows apace). While many are acutely conscious of the irony of their situation denouncing the power structure even as they apply to it for funding -what are they to do? What are any of us to do? Strum the blue guitar and sing of possibilities other than things as they are. In that there is at least the human dignity that goes with singing and dreaming. Moreover, it's fun, a pleasure beyond the slick placebos with which we're customarily anesthetized. Meanwhile, Jack Collom's year as an official poet in Grand Island, Nebraska, is over, and he's back at the factory, happy to get the work. And my grandfather Max's poetry is still there to be read, if you look hard enough through old poetry magazines. And people like Len Fulton in Paradise, California, continue on their extraordinary way, carrying the torch for little magazines. As for me, when I finish this paragraph I'm going to write a review of J erzy Kosinski's new book. In spite of the fact that I don't like

it much-it's several cuts below The Painted Bird-it will doubtless sell many thousands of copies. After that I'm

going to get the manuscript of my own new book ready for the printer. If I have extraordinary luck, it may sell a thousand copies. Then, if my luck holds, the publisher may run another thousand copies. Be that as it may, all you magazine editors, large and small, beware. Every body knows about the little-man syndrome; we're feisty and persistent, like Snopeses. We'd as soon grind a shoeful of Horse shit on your new white carpet as anywhere else. One of these days you'll get my dog-eared manuscript in the mail. You'U know it by the name-the one you don't recognize. 375

ON TRAcE James Boyer May Although James Boyer May lost more than $40,000 as editor of Trace, his interest in little magazines has never wavered. His mono graph Twigs as Varied Bent (published by Felix Stejanile's Sparrow Press in 1954) provides an overview of the state of little magazines on an international scale, though focusing primarily on English and American publications. Mr. May offers perspectives on the moral attitudes of little magazine editors after World War 11, on the economics of small-press printing and distribution, as well as on the state of the art of the little magazine itself. He stresses the corrective potential of little magazines, their ability to lend cultural renewal to an essentially mechanized, artistically defeated age. Mr. May's ideology came to fruition in 1950 when he met John Sankey, the founder of the Villiers Press in England, and it was Villiers that published Mr. May's magazine, Trace. In keeping with his belief in the importance of communication between the editors and contributors to little magazines, James Boyer May kept watch on American and English journals for eighteen years in his continuous "evolving directory" of little magazines-which alone made Trace one of the great formative journals of the fifties and sixties.

unnamed and nonexistent, its embryo, Towards Print, this editor's regular feature in Matrix in 1950 and

Back when Trace

was

1951, was intended to aid new writers to find markets as well as to

provide information for librarians and teachers. More so than today, there was a dividing line between old-line literary magazines (chiefly those sponsored by schools) and independent littles. Virtually nowhere, except in the latter, could unknowns find print unless they adopted somewhat commercial patterns or imitated prominent writers in accepted modes. At that time, largely because of this, what was to become an ever-augmenting increase in little Revised and expanded by the author from editorials in Trace 68 and 72/73.

376

TOWARDS PRl:o.il (an expa"'�,..J , ..... U""""' .. of tbe lea""" in MATRIX MAGAZ 1:-; E. L' SA. by Ib_ Editor of TRACE). Ak

rcc:ord pGIlwat � lA ON lilcn.tun what A.ulnliani pn.1« to Q)I �1'�'S' (viz all

com� .... ,oar

•

joIuDaIiJu. oicniJi<anl Iholllh • """"""" 01 Ibm

� .W::�ilbI�� -';:'�i'::a:n� fhct::£ is'SettlinC bRr

tbis once more

cut actO$ thoc � Claai.flCdlioll�.

Into categoricaa "t.r;1

AI 6rst, the

altempt at

�':;;'Y�-ot��{� �aJ�� :::��=�� =��.�!: �t=P::::ar� �r= ==!.��lt

�::,e:�i.=d ;;��j:!�Uil��tai�: wmptom of the variant pionc:uing vitalil)' nKIII marked to mar\'

off·tr .. il endeavors. And �I� thil attempt

inescaJ>.lbly hag to do With trmdJ\

tbrouabout l� conJ.emparary ChVlCOfUDoot-oat simpI}' among

"1"0.111

rn.a.,;uina nor soIC!ly in the literary domain-we oddl)' ""rnluB COIJUJ'IImC2 v.ith me IOf "'r.oo vnallc'§t �ouI�. Fewer maga.Dnt:s than twemy yean. ago espoend �UI refonm" iuld tbo6e which do c:bidIy preach in anarchistic or nihilistic lmns. Ln;.. tban a third &trNo Marxian NJOCePls. Some 0C1 thr �m,(Art' At least to tbe toxtent their exbcna liGl� obviou<Jy do encourage rul1ural-potitkal m<ldlficaliorl!l tht' reverse 01 those which wert' until lbe- bu.t ('_ouple u[ yean Hi::�1 doo ." pro(fe.\'f'. Exrept for party-line It-him lik!!! MASSES, 6: MAJ!,\STREAM or SEW FOP!'JOATIONS Of <;Oml' dv.'1PJdliJl� ,,!d lull' lIO('ialislU' publication like LAST CALL, providinc 1i1t14'

appear llrtually reactionary.

�,!i�t tarar��I:=l'r;gI='t��d�tdt't��C�;� :'mU,lS, ::��trSou�ro not

tong 3IP. the tditoZ'1al OOIes of rnoc:t lhf'

others _ill WJUndIflJ reform

�and not a fe'A have ��", ,om

par"h\'Hv nru.tral as re politks. hlce PARTtsA?'\ RF.\ IE") <V1Wllly might ha\'t been pronounced Ultra·cou!.(·n',dl\'(- B,tt

Anollll'f larger group

dcliocl';),tely cam� lUfv.dCd ot�MI;- -ent ..

lradll,on-. -1101 I,Utpri-»flKly wuh ,turdwr !ollPJl(lri (bv rt-4.'oOjl of F",YJllg t-uLJ'o(flbc� who prefer fannha, !>t>fltlRirnt to dis

mUle

turtlillg onJ:'Hlahl) Ihllon any of ttw ftlftboom.:. Maybe a few 0( lhl"!!tt, shouh.lu'\ l'\'('11 be POirt of thIs Sun'L'Y-<'X(Cpt th�y re

links Wllh pa... t cnltllrl' alld don't belong wllh 1TJa._elltf'l1a.in ment lIIagoll:lHe-> (-Ither, Surely, '>Ome do not lwe In f1nylhlOl rt:�lUbling the ..elise of Par,u·ch.us, om.ervlng on., ,roo ye.&rs. ago Learmng "our \'{'ry hft'. from youth to old 3gt', mdeed, up to th(' llTltlk of death; no 011(' /i:'t:l (or ten bows \IIltbout lcaming.. By thh. �lIe of IhC!!e aren't "'nlply cxpinng or hut poor stUfJl-d replicoas of .... orthm mwcum ..

��.;:-thcy·re

And fn:.lny lll(.Jrc of the dOO\'C mdurc thOln of publications SCif<OlISC'IOU.Jy foo..1erJnl: definable expefirnenta.li5otns. This is the fifth group. the other smallC!>t

Ofl�.

Y(..1 thes.e {C!'t\'

mar be

T��O 1�:n��:: �J nr::"��JCtar::u�ni:�urT;r;�� two

Ilrc

and

C"\'en

('omplemrnt:llrv, tholl�h !ilrktly-litcru.ty editor'$ diWke chsd:ulI 'mi�.:,aK('l'. and though socially-coocl"rned

tdUOf5 call

th(' others IV�' 111\\'('.( p""'-"UflO. Both Rt feast do more. Ifl th{'lf UhlqUC (a.lld {)('I .l"jnnally downright ('mnky) wa),!" and thus. <l1{, tltl' \.It,,1 "pints of 11''''UfJt't"lIon alr,U[IM any attcpted 'attitude \\ru('h ollll.'fwiwo might liCt up l'xclU»lve ....'01'. lil�rary 0{ slllp spc!(tally-('\'otvoo oollfonnitics. adhered to by IiQ1IIb; a.d\,"[l(',··guartll� �lrvl\'lIIg lh�' TIurh('S

TIlouRh the}' may lIot fairly br arrayed t�er, 4!IIeb n�,:!llz.i",' Iw\-tnfi!: .1 d"hllt'tive cd,ltori�1 IlIIe a.nd ('OJlt('T\I .. th\' (ollowing hold !lutOrldlt to rommon tCl- be IS havUlg exhibited novel (and also defUlable) t£ll ; ,

distinrufibi

r.oNTACT (Can.da). THE GOLDEN GOOSE. IMAGI. INT 0 �IAGAZINE MANDt<AKE (1I,lv). NINE (I'""lnnd). ORIGIN. and WAKE: ThtJKI l'VUKIrl8 iIoci.1 a\¥Ilr�lCU (and. ill fair

=suTH� 1l��F:f:WI7r(- ('°R�\Vf �i:.:,:,�r:n�),ti'O"A'D,l ��

GRlINDTVIf. REVIEW. IN�ERNO. LAST CALL. PlIOTEUS QITARTERl.V I'IWTOCOL (N,·wfouncnand). RESISTANct MAGAZINE. RETORT. SUCIO:G<; MULE. IUId IlPSUIIGI. Two ne\\' unAl, firsl illSU5 at which at thia VII'Ithur baWO'l apo l""mI. nTY (.\u"rnha) and t'OUR WINDS (U.S.A.) (rom 11m cditun' �tat('P1eln, to belool here \go,

lIM! ",,1>' ,t'OIC'ti\'(' h.ll' hi Ih"t kt-rl�1 \I�' t("Oo."''''I:I"C tc the

prov�

:.!i��1�;l� �1I�1r,:,�14��t�.��,"W11�;;:It�;�I:V:�t:fcft�.l�.:e':

ham)' bnle: comp",n) t holllll"UllJJlg mdi\'ldlialil} auuinl"t the wufurmiue" al M.tol aPl'If" , .. tI:u \\lU ensue (hO'.WWf 'Ide-a lly 'J 0.11)' nj;0rou). (X'Otn&hu'C.i path-Ill fur ccmrut. They battle aU fur lhill

ncNI'- -ee.

In.ud

maucr

mere ma!ii�

lalter ain)Oi;l ha",(' fOlcl 01 11HU1.lTIt'utS,

llgg'-""-lianl. The

amoI� (>olmJa,liOlls con-

:'7�t'b�h::�:�t,:'�t a��:; l l�:;�thc;hl�h'a�,ioO}111�>lt�)(�i;: ��::':('� rmoril.ll crc.,fh\'lly nul 1114"1"'1\: ill the art .. hut nlnUll!; lo .. t haudi ,

crait..

Ecbces (If tiw l'wlt ....... Krow, ami uot ... rnply from lack quality ill mac lunc rnxl�rt" itlu-r r�\t'r{"s o;UIt.';;t',tiQll of r('\atiausbip to aglt.lh.,,,!, a,G'.II",.t J'--'(·lUhl�·-lmc mdllllfotrtun", of ,

�

such itemeo as bread

II\'Cktw., ,1110 Ix:d!>u.k t,lhl(".·

fnM) humani_

�=-:"-=\'�'it/t:::i��?�!i:I:�o:�I��r' :!)=I�t��itt:;�:�� purposive Ida'imt�hlp" dmt

mon.k'

lll"th'(

n..,,101"e

within

!iorid.Y'-Gfld not m>(�Jily to be coupled \.\Ith advocacy 0( rommunnv (Y.vut'tf!.''IIPS, But. 'rt"\'t�rtil'« 10 litt'r.1ry C'OO!Udcrations. a large and ItS demarcated groo,» than the above cont4.ins nearly aU true noactiullafi!iol'l1. (.nnlrndic:orily. thC'>e edncrs conldd,'r that tbey (and

partl(,lIwrly.

their

own

mag.tzinrs_:--for ('(\t'n there'

...

warped. Ihoufi:h u"dt'r..(;m(\able. perspcctiveless 1oIIl't1gal1t(') <.:00l:!tilulr- the gemune '",tI",m(,I::' yrl S('hot(lrly re--:trainll> UINln eon tribulon;. rontinue t'nforc-ill.l: reveeeeees for nllp. tradition or an· other. nl(,Y Icl ..lip throuvb "JI'IIf("f'I� .wy material \�hir-h haSll't <;OfJIe !lUp�uon (I( prco-dent. Tbe n1<lg,I1.ill(". usuatlv ant peopared \\'Ifh au ('�'(' h� C13'il'4t1Of11 u-e. n mAjo�ity, rOCt't\.-ing partial (';\111N{t' or 1lt!IYC'nltv. support. And the �lt�nd.1 IIf.md! ma\' tx- bt... vy wllh naln�, plus l(Jn� I.III� of ('(11100,11 .1l1\'1�

Slight WO'ltfN. what \\1th nUl1k'rnu... (,1'Ob, Ihat tht' l-ditoria): broth ;II 1110("", f.lik of ilny U,stv d('fiuitiM. thOit conlcull! � ::1$ edt't'hc .1" til the! fiNt-llll.rllOlt ol(ell Ia,'k 1:1.10_

,roup--yet.

fl.\wr (If "lllluml polk)' to condone thi_

n\i9te11llnic�-I�-�ldulfl llw,n ('(;I(lCtirs-,-cuntain �ifk-an(',e,

Ff'w

suc� "1.m�I�'

among the S('ml-Intdlbonal And Whl'8 tIO. with dubioDf

�;:��n:�ks�tlll�(1�:' �I�� \illt:.kXO\�r·'\fi��. just autho""

are imilatot'lI tlf the erne.

;:t �:t�"I��I��:��i��:C: =1I�k"�';":!� f��

iug btst: retuItMdl,:ration .,uggcsts (besides the fact that art is not l"Ompdiu\'t.') that future J..'\.'lIer.thons likely will diacover more pI't"Ct:dc!nl'!. dlUong lLc less fimcky �zines. in the above two Oltcgories, And n!!'CMch not d!\tomAAingly confin1l.1 that nearly ,

�!�T:,I�:g"�t�!trJX;'��:� 'i��i�,:;:e�a�: � &: wordEi,

whosL>- editors toed aCalll"CltlC m.uks,

In other

these pro

jects in at least 0[1(' important Sl!fL<;e better jtwtify the t,outed

PUfPOlit'S of such (":l(ic-.H'or .... d(.'Spite ('(Ince<..h-d excellenctes of '-,('vcraJ mdl\;dual IIMg-.IZIll� til olhrr calegonc-.. for Uus is not to cWprocatc auy merllOI'IOUS pubhcallOlls--nor amone thOIl8 devoted to 'tlaid('f' poetr:r. for mslatl«, drspitc most of these finaDy rna...,. not g.lIn crC(lIl ['''''I'cpt for ha\'mg preserved minor

work oth<,"''l.....:' lost. in magnDrlcs of

Simpl\' tholt real bla%lflg dOl!S mark trail

�·mrtutic..J.l{y Ul:�'er timber (miln)' \\ith rnnk

wild J!'fO\�1hj; indC(-d!). From Toronto, as CON! ACT already ha!o

examl)it".

the

new

and

venturesome

\x.<en. condemned by '!tany

Yet: by

6Z/-:h:n:�: :�1��' ��IUa;p��:�T�t e:g�;td ��M�ti\:i Sp<'ClflC CW�

v.ith imrnetliate

t:n\'Uoamcntal prohlems, wlthoUI

iog howeY<_tr alnu)Sl-a�ract contemplallV(!

and

phtlosophical

treatments II) passages WOV('O \\;th qUlckcniag sensory Imagery, N'ot only do these editors thereby define a trt'nd direct from

Sartre. but

mav

be said

pwc(.acd along their O\\n special self-

��(.'(�::Uhis ��=� 1�� em�d o��

obscure: Canadian poets, but affirlD'> they'll publish ally good work of purposes in the least relevant to the fore

ex.perimental

gowg. no �lt!'f the divergenl doctrine or ongin. c?Untry So. within Imuts on thts phase, a bro.ld,'r U'lVltatlOil I';' offend with sharply SUted '\OCtal VlNS; than &moor: typIcal

th."

periodi�ts

and in fact, m.1�<l2inl-S �tressmg Illerdry ,ing('nuity USII,21ly drsplay broader latitudes than tbose of emphatic !I.OCial convictions,

Perhaps exceptional

amonfl:

the

othcn

PROTEUS

Eclitor Frederick C. Hf'Ckel's ideas do alto litera..y bias-if such it can be named--an If not markedly aware of qua mten...e adroiration for G-oeI.hc, tiCXlS of tecltntque nor a standard-bearer among knights 01

QUARTERLY

take! form from

Above and overleaf: a manifesto from Trace, Vol. 1, No.1, by Editor James

Boyer May (courtesy Northwestern University Library).

hremry llIrol)', Mr. Heckel's belid 111 rOhU�III('M I1l\d round flcsllt� M!nhn�I�1l1 Ln. gC'ncrnl bnpans a bellctr;!OIIc onuy mre

:'�I�)� havr'1�:�f.�1�:\.�r:�;��r �C\':��IIOII�:nht�� .cpRO;1f,e�� I\C�'()l\t,ullll"d !>Igll� 01 liGhl(,lIlUf: editorial awtlrt'u

Whu:h. (01m

'110111(

wl�h

(OIl\I1)\IL'(1

ulI'luem:hublu search alter

kindred \0 those of the cducr ill re the

�r��l�(')l Lln()nts

cnignul,s

WAKE and MANDRAKE HEVIl-:W "1'0 the only two In these .other than (which rlu'rj<'lt

,grQUPA" ORIG�N non-Anglo Amc�t�n wnllllg',. but I� 01 �lical (:\l31I1aliol1'1). extensively

�:'�l��::� :��:�nlt;: [�t��I��J)�I�\i'l �frRn�\�l\�I�� tl,�� ;i1t\I'�r space in futu.ro tor \,rill'fli of tllil4.'.r COijl1triClii

announces

both

rrauslutlous. This WAKE (No. 11) r.ootaln� or:iJ;illal� new, ttllt\&S ,by Conrad Alken. t�cthllr with essays about him and

by tntcmauonat fi8urcs. with Aikril bibllusraphy and pOOI,1). graphs. .The same number contains Italian. French. and Ger man secuons-c-besldes the editor's choices of !olgllJlicaut contcm porary U,S. writing. Oul);landing specimens (current) of tfu- fiNt and largest

�:uP'��':dia�rint�8R�J;� bo�E�ll�� 9��>OO�la��

lh.,n tI" ply rono,crvath." \\ith I'KI rlc.",-I\' I'ft�'ld .. d PI'llJfl�rntll!", 11th mdl'l'd ,\I.d .\,1 .j- Itllld,1..d '1111"· 1I111)\lt 1I11,t\",L!r.hl,' track' mUIll\7Ir1f� �tll1 '::1\1 L1I11h.• IIII()U� II,. I. hI r .",. r,tll-.( mal('il.lllho.ulh, f''''tlll� " ... J \\1,,,1, t' .... "I'II(.oI� hvlh

publls.h no more gt'tlllIn(' "1"'111�11' 11\ (-'<iltON. would

'oI"C1n

qucnnal wn\�. 1IlII\Irally).

TIl(' he'" of IIHlI n'nlOl l,Ih!lll[\, "d,ll .. 1 .,,;lllt·mil" ['1'I'llp which. in tILl' pn,ft'..;IJ(ll'Jal ('\'1'''', ,III tIll \Itt!tl.h�t ", ,tlllh , 1';0 TIlE i\lJl I 1'111 (l::nJ:I.Ul.dJ. puhlicnll0n:-;. p�rh.\po; nn ACCENT. I�P()(II. TIlE (.I�()I{(.I \ UE\'IEW 11l·J):.:.r)S HEVIEW, KI�N"()N 1<1-·;\111:\\. "EA:\II� (.\I1,>!r;.Jliu). Till: ...

PACIFIC SPECTATOH. PUMHIE SCIIOO:\Jr;r<. OPI�r�s'S I �r\ FR· IIW QtlAHTERIS (Cfttllui:l\. �I·.\':"!\I II. HI':\ �JT" OJ' k':"N':;�� lTV I�J·.\·IE\\,.1·1IF. \'IJU,I�I:\ QlTAR. IH£\'IEW. and YAI.F. Othtn nF.VIE\ Wl'$TEI<N TERLY .

fo.tnn� IH Ihi .. enveorv, but dudh f'4)("lr: fllill 1>00: ltV r-riltf .....n.

I'I( .... I� ( .1nrHla). ('\!'o:.\f)IAN il\rllldc' CONTE�I(>ORAl{Y POETRY MAGAZIKE "OIITRY (ChkaJ.;o). and Qt'AK� mRLY REVIEW OF LlTEI<HlIf<E.

To name a Iew 1('<t·;.!!)- h�tl, ... pi old tb\ avarn "rdi.1!'o) of tbt nf'ar-outri,l!'htly tradltlcuat-. FOliO. POETJ<Y ell:\I' W>OI\,

t(o�t�,�nf:"V�i \��t�Ei!;�Nr?ri��"AbJ��fi �C��:l��; undeserving

WE OFFER (F.n�IQnd) and \\'IS(;. POF.Tny Ql'ARTERLY (London) has p:lb!io:.hl'd :l ",id, -r �t. .. 1Ir)·1 than il� C�. cocnterpert •• ud n"t"Clllh' n'3V be d«lau-rl to hlWt bener typUird lht anginal purposes of that k.lll\g·rn'�minl?llt tndt',w,,..

CA�ADIAN POETRY MAGAZINE. EPOS.

Falling !IOJl1ewhat between -wolf are uniqllC' eruk<l\'"{}O; lib flURtOSO. which .... <hilt net eoc�·ti(", hU\;!1't adhrn'd to Ol «II'

ARENA, THE WINDOW.

and THE WIND & THE RAIN

of inclusion here. for some of Ihe recent fiction. I'roruinent eclectics among those restricted to poetry nnd artidt':iI about pot'try h3\'C bern THE BELOIT POETRY JOUIt..'lAL.

�� ;:t: J:n��,��:ta,��OI�t�� 3��'1.�� ·rr;;�:�t��r��i �lert�tnC1ou.s pOSIll� only of

illustrations of evanescent-spot Itg�tcd lOCI of UIC uuceasmg struggle between tradition and ex pt:nmclll. Tht"SC aren't the ��a('t words of (lny editor. but lh�y matter

swnmari"c a

position 01 some mainly gui(h'Ct b�, pcnonal tastes

and not ronS<:lOusly undertaking to dow toward definite !\o('1('('ti'\'('

synthesis •. absorbed

And

�hcre'� justice

tbeir

charge that t..'dh�,

exclu�.J\Ie theory of ont' sort or another_ indl\idual

��e�:�af s��a�� (�:;t�:�j:� :��:::) �n

sUtenth -dcfmnblr IOf:k ill 5Cll'ctions other. And tW"fl. thr � A. D. MAGAZIN�, r'-"wung I() br: Ul! a I<.k-d avam gdflffl, .. hilt announdn� 8(h'0(''''''\' f)f a da\··IJ('ton·.� �I'("d:t\" .. oMHfn Il� 'hI: theo.ad\'Goccd-()(fr,u3!!\'Cly rl'(·(.ltl'lit.abl1! dt'n-j(otil')l1� tj( ch vious ,r-<tlitj� a(f \'!I. the oo:<>u- IU1·for·:m'�-"ak" Id(::l Ih;1l wr«m

� =c�:,�-erd:��;:II�� 1��:;�W:�lh:

known, THE CALIFORNIA Ql;�RTF.RIX C�ROLIlIA QUARTERLY. THE HOI'KU<' RF.VIF.W NF.ASCRE. and PHYWN-all lrmding toward acadefflJ� rat.Mr than open. mcnt.

mags began. Already, there were more than in any earlier period, with the maximum activity in the U.S. A key paragraph of a Towards Print (Matrix number 32) nevertheless points to a pre

dominance of conservatism: Current literary magazines,

especially those in some degree under the aegis

of a school, betray a tendency to give more weight to technical finesse than to individuality of the ,sort to be expected from the advance guard. This may them from printing an occasional callow mistake, but prevents printing much neoteric work

save

...

However, I was in no sense campaigning, nor did I dream of

founding Trace. This came about accidentally. I was simply serv ing a view expressed in my brief comments on periodicals. The first "tracings," the small magazine listings appended to Towards Print, though not comprehensive, were geographically unlimited. I had established contacts with editors and writers in

several countries, and it was

comparatively easy to expand the

listings into the international directories. Initially, the main purpose was to provide a forum for informa tion and discussion among little-mag people everywhere-to ac quaint them with one another. Then, almost at once, it was seen 378

that this "bridge," as some called Trace, enabled writers to find outlets in magazines far from their own national boundaries. The

increasingly internationalized; writers from different lands, reading one another, were mutually influenced insofar as they were using English, the idioms of which varied from Canada

littles grew

to Australia, from South Africa to Scotland. Soon, too, there were

many translations which otherwise never would have occurred. Naturally, from the start, Trace appealed to teachers of liberal

bent; and teachers were to comprise the biggest portion of indi vidual subscribers. The standard now, were

quarterlies, much more than

devoted to writers already in the texts, and Trace sup

plied a guide to those who had not yet built reputations. The story of the birth of Trace can be stated in a few sentences. I had

cooperated with Whipple McClay in obtaining data for Galley, a bibliographical project in this field. He died in March 1952, rendering continuation improbable. (As it turned out, then expired-but I had no Galley did reappear in 1953 advance knowledge of this.) My number 1 came into being in ...

June of that year in response to many letters. For Matrix-which

had endured since 1938-also

Moray and S. E.

was

terminating. Editors Joseph

Mackey had been unsuccessful in a search for

college or other institution to take over their project. My correspondents proposed that Towards Print be combined with a more adequate running survey similar to that maintained by Galley, with other contents limited to brief articles and letters. I wrote to John Sankey, whose Villiers Publications had been founded in 1951. He had been editing The Window, one of the best British littles. He offered British printing at cost of labor and materials; and this is how it came about that Trace was published in London under Villiers sponsorship. I assumed responsibility for the financing of American circulation (about 90 percent of the total) Trace was fortunate in gaining press notices. That summer, a couple of paragraphs by David Dempsey, in the "In and Out of Books" feature of the New York Times Book Review, brought 187 queries, accompanied by 347 dimes (the mag sold for 20 cents); and nearly a hundred joined Matrix supporters as subscribers. A few hundred other subscriptions were garnered by the end of the year. Number 1 sold out in weeks. There had been 300 copies some

379

produced on first estimates. The one typographical error corrected, an

additional 300 were press run; and all of these also were sold. Even with this propitious beginning, losses were sustained, as

Trace grew in size (number 1 had just sixteen pages, but it finally

averaged about 200). This growth always preceded, and never kept proportionate pace with, the increasing subscribership, which has been very gradual. Net increase was held to small figures by losses each year of approximately one-third of the roll (nonrenew ing subscribers). Press runs have not been long enough to reduce per-copy cost sufficiently below the price obtained. It took eight years to approach a circulation of 2,000, and this turned out to be an average maximum. The magazine would have broken even much of the time, how ever, had contributors not been paid. The deficit figures have just

about matched the amounts

paid them (losses eventually ap But I've insisted that authors be paid, year).

proached $3,000 as a matter of principle and to safeguard their rights without their having to apply individually for copyrights. And I think, too, that a higher caliber of material has been obtained. Concerning contributors-from anywhere and, from early in the history, about everywhere-it should be noted that they came a

to Trace. Mss almost never have been solicited. The onrush

(not "unrush," for we gave fast reports) has been read to the best of our abilities without regard to the authors' reputations or lack of reputations. Submissions from "name" writers frequently have been rejected because they broke no new ground or because they

against their authors' best. No editorially preconceived ideas relating to comparative values of differing writing theories have been applied, and no "school" has were

found inferior as measured

been favored. I have tried to select on a basis of what I considered the degree to which writers accomplished what they were under

taking, in their own fashions. Informed by Trace, scores of people have been led to found magazines. That they otherwise would not have considered this is attested by the letters we received. And scores of others, already determined to launch ventures (including small presses), have written for advice. I don't maintain that this proliferation has been

unmixed

good; yet, conceding that numerous publications have been 380

dubious worth, the opportunities afforded thousands who otherwise could not have found print, have-in the overall picture--infiu

enced significant developments. The stream has been broadened and enlivened; not a few magazines have proven important in their

right. Critics who downgrade the little-mag movement cite mags which have merely been media to feed the vanities of their editors, those with eccentric or limited aims or devoted to cliques, those innocuously endeavoring to revive old traditions, and those in offensively bad taste. Such critics fail to see that the good out weighs the bad, that even cursory examination of the experiences of the writers forming today's quality vanguard verifies that little mags have been essential to an upsurge of creativity. Evidence that unknown writers of probable significance have

own

become known writers is part of the Trace story. In 1961, associate Gil Orlovitz suggested that we not only talk about new literature

but publish examples of it. The "Creative Window" section was

inaugurated; and now over half the content consists of poetry, fiction, literary experimentation of all types, plus graphic art. In eight years, more new writers have been introduced than in any other magazine. And a few older writers of rather fading reputation have been aided. These had, for one reason or another (reasons having little to do with their works), fallen into disfavor, appearing scarcely anywhere until revived by print here. Related to this has been a policy of publishing articles, when available, about writers of the past who, I felt, deserved more attention than they were receiving. Preference has been given those whose influences were contem porary. One way in which Trace has been different from

nearly all use of reviews and/or mentions of some books published by their authors, including some from vanity presses. This has not been to encourage people to pay for their own books (a most unsatisfactory nonsolution), and emphatically not to give comfort to unethical publishers, but because such books occasionally do have merit and the writers deserve recognition. I don't feel that talent should be penalized; and history reveals that many eminent authors have had to finance their early offerings. (It is this fact, by the way, which provides the potent lure to self-publication-the aspirants giving no thought other mags of its kind has been in its

381

to the added fact

that only one in tens of thousands makes it in

this way.)

The Trace editorial line mainly has been fixed by the editor for most of the years solely by him. For about three years, there editorial board. If anyone member was overwhelmingly impressed by a manuscript, it was accepted even though all the was an

others did not much approve. The idea was to avoid falling into the pattern which results from majority rule:

leveling down to a common denominator, with nothing really inferior winning but it offbeat either. How print, winning nothing outstandingly ever, Trace began to lose direction, becoming more eclectic than eclectic. I again reserved all final decisions to myself. Just the same, there has been no arbitrary one-man rule. Hun dreds of subscribers have influenced me, as well as the many people who have come to my aid at various periods. Those who have helped Trace have been Marvin Bell, Mary Carol Bird, Guy Dan a

iels, G. E. Evancheck, A. Fredric Franklin, Alexandra Garrett, Duncan S. Harris, Robin Johnson, Helen Luster, Carl Linder, Stuart Montgomery, Warren Netz, Gil Orlovitz, John V. Sankey, Geraldo Sobral, Lawrence P. Spingarn, Wai-lim Yip, and Curtis Zahn.

During 1960 and 1961, the directories were divorced from Trace. A separate project, The International Guide, was indepen dently financed under direction of Miss Bird. I was merely an adviser, though I continued to maintain my own card files on the magazines, etc. With the collapse of the Guide, a complete directory again was carried in Trace (number 47). During those two years, The Chronicle had been limited to little-press books and pamphlets. Since number 47, each year's directories have been indexed so that the four (or three, now) comprised a work able inclusive reference for everything noted in the twelve months. These have been complete only so far as new or changing projects were concerned (together with a hundred or so of the more active regulars). With 72/73, there have been 939 contributors, from most parts of the English-speaking world and from numerous other-language areas. As the years passed, the influx of submissions became larger and larger. A survey in 1965 showed that about 3 percent of these were accepted. This dropped below 1 percent in the inter382

vening period. Manuscripts almost never have been solicited, and then only for a specific need. Yet this has not by any means been a major factor accounting for the comparative absence of well known writers from these pages. "Name" authors have from time to time sent in

work; but the policy has been to favor talented

unknowns or those less recognized. When print has been given to

established writers, this has been because the material was such

that, for one or another irrelevant (from the literary view) reason, it might not be published anywhere else. The editorial position has been to remain open to all types of writings and to judge these on the writers' degree of success in

achieving their particular intentions-not to read with pre

conceived and set notions as to method. The result has been that, as

mentioned in number 68-for better

for

worse

far

the state of literature is concerned-Trace has introduced more writers

(especially in the sixties) than any other periodical. A policy of publicizing author-financed publications along with those from royalty houses also appears to have aided many beginners. During the fifties, before the magazine was opened to original creative works, main emphasis was upon the littles and products new

of the small presses, and this coverage has continued to the very

finish. And if less detailed

descriptions

and fewer and fewer

reviews have since appeared, this has been due to the unbelievable

proliferation of publications. Their numbers have made it im practical to much more than note their existence. The first direc tory (1952), limited to magazines, had but 152 entries; yet that was a fairly complete world coverage of littles in English. By 247 1956, mags were listed along with 165 presses; and in 1963, the combined total had reached 747. But the huge acceleration began with 1964. The incomplete "Evolving Directory" in Trace 71 had 697 entries. Indexed projects and listings in this issue totaled 999.

In the early years,

Trace-though carrying articles (some of

them perhaps definitive) and critical reviews-was more a meeting

place for other publications than a periodical in its own right. There were numerous exchanges of ideas and opinions among editors from all parts of the world. Number 4 (1953), for exam ple, had letters from editors in England, France, and Australia, 383

well as the U.S. In

1954, an attempt to get data on editorial intentions was less than successful. Only eleven editors were willing to express themselves frankly (a twelfth wrote for an ensuing issue). Still, scores of editors from time to time did reveal purposes quite honestly in the letters department. In this same early period, there was a "first" statistical survey (number 5) derived from questionnaires concerning financing and management. Over seventy editors sent information for an article by John Sankey. Trace helped in a general way to provide awareness of a continu ity of literature developments through the two decades; and it had a decided share in the poetry revival. The editor wrong-guessed, in 1965, that what was then termed an unprecedented period of innovations was about to be succeeded by one of conservatism and "digestion." The opposite has been occurring, as every reader of new writings is aware-with ever more "far-out" matter. Not a few opinions with which the editor was in dis accord, and some poetry and creative prose not personally favored, were given print due to the wish to "trace" all types of possibly significant trends. From this, it was sometimes charged that Trace had no editorial direction. However, the editorial criticisms in Trace were outrightly biased and often strongly outspoken. Among other prominent editorializings were those in which favor was expressed for more positive themes, as against a pre ponderance of negativism. It also was suggested-by example as well as comment-that a little mag, even though seeking new nesses of statement and publishing avant-garde material, mainly of interest to a limited audience, still might be entertaining to less prepared readers. Comparatively few editors have troubled them selves to try to make serious mags more enjoyable without catering to general public taste. Since Trace emphasis always has been upon the individual and distinctively personal contributions, there has been editorial resis tance to the concept of "movements." Rather than devoting sections as

or issues

to this or that so-labeled trend, there have been features

such as an autobiographical issue

(number 58, 1965), a section

of poetry derived from dreams (number 46, 1962), Chinese and Indian issues (number 54, 1964, and number 67, 1968), special numbers with emphasis on satire, humor, etc. Important in this connection was the Trace line of reaction to the dubious beginnings 384

of the "underground" in the late fifties. This so

was-an

conflictive

accidental and

development.

was

seen

as-and

quite inconsistent and internally

was

not

foreseen that the beatnik

attitude toward life and letters was to progress toward an organized

political and literary persuasion--of late, under the hippie label. But I still hold to the argument of an essay in Trace number 34

betwixt and among and between the square conservatives and the posturing outsiders, the more signifi

(1959): that there

are,

cant individuals doing their own things.

Yet another matter, which has from time to time taken up many

pages of this magazine, has been the conflict over comparative values of the creations of people connected with the "academy" and those not

connected--over the relative merits of

things

published school-supported mags and things in independent mags. Again, so far as Trace has been concerned, this may be determined

only by looking

particular works, disregarding

academic connections (or their absence). It has not infrequently been charged that Trace has been anti the academy. This is

patently ridiculous in view of the fact that far more than half the contributors to this magazine have been post-grad students and teachers, largely college professors. If more space has been given the "anti's" this has been because their contributions outnumbered the defenders. However, a large percentage of the "anti" arguments came from the colleges; and the real point of difference was not whether an author held degrees and made his living by teaching, but whether his work therefore was unoriginal and conservative. And, going back to the mags, unhappy pronouncements about independents have been as numerous as those about persons under school aegis. Not only has considerable attention been given the probability that too many magazines have been publishing a great deal of inconsequential matter, but the question has been raised whether the enormous increase in publications has not brought about a progressive thinning of force and quality. At what point might not vitalizing diversification become senseless variegation? This sort of critical conjecture was not limited to the little-mag field, but extended to an examination of the entire overcrowded literary scene. Or was it really overcrowded, so much as weakened and muddled by increasing percentages of bloated semi-literacies? Even more attention has been given to expression itself, to 385

possible language corruption (rather than healthy integral growth) and breakdown (where words often seemed no longer to be used

meaningful communication at any level). In 1962, the period was seen as one of nonconformism-some of it pertinent to possible major developments of expression, some of it superficial doodling. Earlier, there had been concern that so many serious writers were dealing with short-term specifics and disregard ing long-term fundamentals. Then, after it was realized along in 1966 that the great explosion of experimentations had set up chain reactions which would continue into the seventies, the question was raised as to which kind of literary vehicle might best carry forward. The novel was looked upon with uncertainty, and the new poe tries appeared to be communicating to increasing numbers of people. These and related factors were examined in numerous articles and interviews with prominent writers. I have mentioned the part the magazine played in bringing writers in all parts of the English-speaking world together in print in many countries-and thus bringing about exchanges of for

influences that otherwise would not have occurred. Some of

suddenly had contributors from far-scattered places. One gradual effect has been to lessen language differences. Another has been the breakdown of verbal reserve, the language of propriety. In the beginning, this was chiefly in the U.S., but today many writings in Britain, Canada, India, Australia, and the littlest littles

New Zealand are as far out as any in the United States. From the Trace view, to the extent that genuine originality (honest individual expression) has spread, this is to the good; but, to the extent that posturing abuse of expression and utilization of vulgarities for purposes of shock has spread, this is to the bad.

This must not be interpreted as criticism of the use of four-letter words per se. Explicit consideration of specified works would be

essential; and more weight should be given the achievement of an effective texture and style (newly and strikingly propounded themes) than to the inclusion or noninclusion of words which, until the last couple of decades, brought unquestioned censorship. The same holds true for what had been forbidden subject matter: not what, but how, and to what end.

This stance has been reflected in Trace, where all kinds of frankness have been permitted wherever the writings were judged 386

to be of possible literary merit. From time to time, this has resulted

in losses of subscribers who were offended. were

Precisely how many I that for I but assume cannot lost, everyone sending say;

indignant letter, there were many who silently allowed their subscriptions to lapse. From a "practical" view, Trace could have compensated for these many times over by becoming sensationally pornographic-as have certain magazines formerly in the literary category. But I should think it must have been clear long ago an

that Trace has not been edited to make money, or even to stop

losing money. Having firsthand experience of the financial problems of a little mag, as early as 1955 Trace pushed for grants for such projects. Apparently this was rather ineffective, more than ten years having passed before such aid began to flow after establish ment of the National Endowment for the Arts. In the case of this

editor, the probability of adequately substantial assistance for a

comprehensive bibliographical project came too late. Since there have been many inquiries about this, it's fitting for me to state that considerations of health were the deciding negative elements.

387

The Wormwood Review

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:'v' I

Winter 1960

Wormwood, Vol. 1, No.1, Winter 1960 (courtesy Marvin Malone).

THE GALL OF

WoRMWooD IN PRINTING OVER 66 ISSUES AND STILL CONTINUING Marvin Malone In addition to being a poet and the editor of The Wormwood Re

view, Marvin Malone is professor of pharmacology at the Univer sity of the Pacific, the author of 167 research publications, editor of the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, co-editor of the Pacific Information Service on Street-Drugs, member of the editorial boards of Lloydia: The Journal of Natural Products and Journal of Ethnopharmacology, and an authority on the isolating and testing of drugs from higher fungi and plants. Mr. Malone is also a spare-time printmaker and an avid col lector of little magazines. Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart, H. E. Briggs of Books 'n Things, and Larry Wallrich of the Phoenix Bookshop were his original tutors in this regard. The earliest influence on Mr. Malone's notions of publishing was Eugene Iolas' magazine, transition. His editorial philosophy is amply disclosed below.

Let me be direct: for a little magazine to succeed it must have (1)

memorable title and a reasonably tidy publishing format; (2) one altruistic, well-read editor or editor in chief with extraordinary a

patience and persistence; (3) a budget which matches editorial aspirations with income; and (4) some sense of the absurd to offset the aura of high purpose which can clot around such a venture. Let me be realistic: the above items

are

listed in reverse

order of importance. A good little-mag title should be unique and have some poetic

connotation (s). The "wormwood" of T he Wormwood Review was

389

not

chosen because of the biblical star Wormwood heralding the

oncoming apocalypse, not from Screw/ape, not from oil of worm wood (the active ingredient in absinthe which is reputed to make "hearts grow fonder" but which in reality produces organic brain damage), and not from the classic bitter draft of wormwood and gall. The title derives directly from Wormwood Hill in East Con necticut, where artemisia grows abundantly and near the place where the first issue was printed. Artemisia tea "repels black fleas, discourages slugs, keeps beetles and weevils out of grain, and combats aphids." The word "wormwood" carries many con notations, all of which have some validity since all are based ultimately upon the reputation of the plant. The editor is a professional pharmacologist, and as a result has been able to remain clear and independent of the politics, subpolitics, schools, subschools, factions, and subfactions of the nonliterary aspects of the literary culture and subculture of the past two decades. This has allowed him to focus available time and

energy on the contents of the mag. The editor dictates the contents of Wormwood-rather than the audience (as in commercial

magazines and the university quarterlies) or the contributors (as in the cult little magazines). Consequently Wormwood strives to educate and build an audience and to avoid cults.

Always a reader and a writer, the to-be-editor picked up on the New Directions Annuals during his first year in college. Then in rapid sequence he came across transition, View, Poetry London. Horizon (Connolly), Golden Goose, Zero-and then the world of the little magazine opened, with Inferno and The Deer and the Dachshund. The editor-to-be was hooked. The baptism was com pleted by the reading of the classic book The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. by Frederick I. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. He began collecting and reading, and the process continues undiminished. The collection is regarded

comprehensive outside a university-beginning with complete sequences of Wyndham Lewis's Blast (1914-1915) and Margaret Anderson's the little review (1914-1929) and running through to this issue of TriQuarterly. This catholic reading and collecting policy has forced the development of (1) a realistic perspective on what a little maga zine can and cannot accomplish, (2) some editorial sense of what the sustaining influences are in Amerenglish literature, and (3) as

still the most

390

some

editorial appreciation of what is merely sophomoric redis

covery, what is

regard

frankly imitative, and what is truly unique in

submitted manuscripts. All this has led to

modest

philosophy for the mag, to suit its very modest budget. The editor has never focused his energy on seeking and printing "established" names. The policy is as follows: (1) to seek new names and to sustain them,

(2) not to feature the work of the editor and his personal friends, and (3) to avoid all the subtle and not-so-subtle vanity aspects by making the mag pay its way completely. Worm wood is quite content to be a little magazine and not a big-little magazine, a little-big magazine, or a big magazine. It receives about 3,000 submissions (all unsolicited) for each issue; with this input, there is no problem in finding new names for each new number. Wormwood does "discourage slugs." In early correspondence with the editor, Cid Corman indicated that it was useful to have each issue of Origin associated in the public's mind with one poet, i.e. the Charles Olson issue, the Creeley issue, etc. This concept appealed, and Wormwood insti tuted its yellow-paper center sections (8-24 pages) devoted to either one poet or one idea. Twenty to forty copies are signed, and half are retained by Wormwood to distribute to patrons and friends of the press, while the remaining half become the poet's property. This concept has been helpful to the poets and to Wormwood. The poets featured to date are John Bennett (issue 55), Harold E. Briggs (40), Charles Bukowski (16, 24, 53, 71), William S. Burroughs (36), Judson Crews (19, 58), John Currier ( 44), Sanford Dorbin (42), Ian Hamilton Finlay (14), Hugh Fox (32), Don Gray (26), Oliver Haddo (27, 28, 39), Alfred Starr Hamilton (61), Dick Higgins (25), Gloria Kenison (23, 26), Ronald Koertge (29,35,51,63), Carl Larsen (11), Lyn Lifshin (47, 59, 65), Gerald Locklin (31, 50, 64, 67), Al Mas arik (57), Ann Menebroker (54), Jack Micheline (37), Joyce Odam (49), Christopher Perret (21, 30), Ben Pleasants (38, 52), Bern Porter (41), Ray Puechner (27, 28, 39), Steve Rich mond (43, 70), Kirk Robertson (60, 69), Walter Snow (46), Richard Snyder (56), Charles Stetler (48), Brian Swann (68), William Wantling (15, 36), Charles Webb (62), Jon Edgar Webb/The Outsider (45), and Phil Weidman (33). If you, the reader of these words, have never heard of 50 percent of these authors, then you are missing a certain section of living Amer391

english literature. Four are already deceased: Briggs, Perret, Snow, and Wantling. The ages, the personalities, the backgrounds, the writing styles of these four are disparate in the extreme-their only common denominator is that their best work appeared in Wormwood.

Possibly the most appreciated and dreaded award an author receive today is the annual Wormwood Award "for the most overlooked book of worth for a calendar year." In his search the editor does not confine himself to a diet of scientific journals and little magazines. Certain of the awardees are no longer unappreci ated and unknown, but they were at the time of the award. Here is the list. 1961: Alexander Trocchi, The Outsiders (Signet); 1962: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night (Gold Medal); 1963: James Drought, The Secret (Skylight); 1964: Russell Edson, The Very Thing That Happens (New Directions); 1965: Christopher can

Perret, Memoirs of a Parasite (Hors Commerce Press/Callahan); 1966: Stanley Crawford, Gascoyne (Putnam); 1967: Peter Wild, The Good Fox (The Goodly Co.); 1968: Ian Hamilton Finlay, 3 Blue Lemons (Wild Hawthorne Press); 1959: Charles Bukow ski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (Essex); 1970: Lorine Neidecker, My Life by Water (Fulcrum); 1971: Jonathan Williams, Blue & Roots/ Rue & Bluets (Grossman); 1972: Gerald Locklin, Poop, and Other Poems (MAG Press); 1973: Ronald Koertge, The Father Poems (Sumac); 1974: Steve Richmond, Earth Rose (Earth Press); 1975: Lyn Lifshin, Shaker House Poems (Tide line); 1976: Phil Weidman, After the Dance (Orchard Press); 1977: Joseph Nicholson, The Dam Builder (The Fault); 1978: Charles Webb, Zinjanthropus Disease (Querencia Press). One can

regard this annual award

public

service function of

Wormwood. The editor receives inquiries at a rate of about once a month from individuals writing theses

taking polls/surveys relating

to the little magazine scene. One of them asked for a list of the

books that had most influenced the editor. The list was assembled hastily-but continues to be fascinating personally. Since it prob

ably tells more about the philosophical slant of Wormwood than anything else which could be written, the list is reproduced here: Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle books; Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island; Saki's Beasts and Super Beasts and The Unbearable Bas392

sington; Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts; Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (especially the preface to the 1855 edition); Celine's Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Install ment Plan; Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and The Books in My Life; George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and 1984; William Sansom's Something Terri ble, Something Lovely; D. H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers; Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth; William Carlos Wil liams's The Autobiography of WCW and Collected Later Poems; James Joyce's Finnegans Wake; Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Mother Night; James Drought's The Secret and Gypsy Moths. The sequence is roughly in order of reading and omits many of the editor's favorite authors/poets-a favorite book may not necessarily be an influential book. Certainly the editor's known

predilection for the prose-poem should now be

less surprising.

After the first three issues, Wormwood's format has

always

reflected its income-the money necessary to put out four issues a year. The receipt of four issues annually pleases librarians, and the libraries are the stable backbone of our subscription list. The

first issue was

printed in 1959 in a barn by letterpress, on a by one of the founding editors (Alexander Taylor). Since the barn did not have adequate electrical wiring, the press was operated by having the other two editors (James Scully and Morton Felix) spin the flywheel by hand. The editors were fueled by gin, since the weather was cold and the barn drafty. The paper was obtained at cost via Sandy Taylor's father. This operation was economically sound, but the manual aspects did not appeal to the founding editors. Consequently the sub scription money was used to print the second issue commercially. This used up all available cash. The venture went eighty dollars in debt, and the magazine quietly folded, as all good little maga zines are supposed to do. In September 1960, the present editor arrived in Storrs, Connecticut-brash from mimeograph publish ing in New Mexico, where little magazines perennially thrive. The first day there, he found the second issue of Wormwood in the magazine rack of one of the two local drugstores. On the second day, he learned that the mag was defunct, and within the month it was apparent that Wormwood had been a sport, in the biological

machine

owned

393

sense

of the word. The academic and nonacademic locals did not

look favorably upon modern literature, and the little magazine was

clearly neither sound

nor

publishing of a right. With Sandy

Taylor, Wormwood was resuscitated. The librarians received the subscriptions and were pleased. The mag also had been critically accepted. Renewals came in. A policy was made to stay within the budget and adjust the format accordingly. This was not an easy choice, since many individuals consciously or subconsciously buy little magazines because of an attractive/ exciting format-a format that will enhance coffee balance of their one-year trial

table decor. With issue 5 other responsibilities took Sandy away from direct

participation, and with issue 9 the present editor assumed full responsibility. To stay within the budget, he takes no money from the operation and puts every cent earned by the magazine back into its production. Any other names appearing on the masthead are pseudonyms (A. Sypher, Ernest Stranger, etc.); the magazine is a one-man operation. The editor reads all manuscripts, selects those matching the current editorial psyche, prepares camera ready copy, designs the covers, maintains the mailing list, bills accounts, balances the books, addresses the envelopes, mails out the magazines. Currently, issues are mailed out two at a time to save effort in addressing, save the cost of envelopes, and cut the postal bill in half. The operation is tightly run: bills are paid on time and subscribers have guaranteed subscriptions. Only four bookstores in the U.S. have been found to be equally reliable in living up to their business obligations: Asphodel Bookshop (Burton, Ohio), Chatterton's Bookshop (Los Angeles, Cali fornia), Either/Or Bookstore (Hermosa Beach, California), and Serendipity Books (Berkeley, California). This very sorry state of ethics explains why Wormwood is not to be found in more bookstores in more cities.

only ones at fault. The editor believes that the main reason why private individuals do not subscribe to little magazines in greater numbers is the sloppy business practices of the average little magazine. Speaking from much experience as a collector, the editor realizes no one wants to pay in advance for a four-issue subscription and receive one The bookstores

394

are

not the

issue, knowing that two have been published (issue 1 reserved for

copies were printed), and then have (copies dis tributed only to friends of the press). No chance of a refund (there was a "closing" party and everyone left town)! After being burned this way several times in succession, only the true little-mag addict persists, and he too eventually begins to restrict subscrip tions to DeBoer-circulated magazines. To combat this, Wormwood has a guaranteed subscription policy. Wormwood prints only 700 copies. Approximately 100 are targeted as payment to contributors (two to six copies each or the cash equivalent), and 100 are designated as "exchange" copies for other little magazines (to keep communications open). If 300 copies can be sold regularly, then the magazine can survive with a decent format. The number of the remaining 200 copies sold

libraries because too few

the magazine cease publication with the third issue

determines the extra pages in the next issue and the luxuries of format that can be afforded. Wormwood retains its modest format

because the magazine must operate within the limits of available money and available time. If 2,000 copies were to be printed, they could certainly be sold to bring in more money and to produce

elegant look. However, the magazine could no longer be a one-man operation and a completely new and expensive set of operating procedures would be necessary-and the mag would probably not survive this "progress." In July 1967 Wormwood received one of the first fifteen grants awarded by the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines; the amount was $415. Two grants have been applied for and received since that time (1970: $500; 1973: $1,000). Each grant has been used to tidy up the format of the magazine and to consolidate the "gain" without departing from the modest philosophy and modest size. Wormwood continues without being dependent on a

grants for survival.

Every three years the editor rereads the magazine as he prepares the traditional three-year index and debates whether Wormwood continues to have a function; there is as an end

wish for continuation

in itself. The responses of readers and contributors, the

number of reprint requests, the relative number of new talents found, and so on, are considered. If this analysis is positive, sub395

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Marvin Malone).

scriptions are then guaranteed for the next three years. Issue 72 will carry the next announcement

whether Wormwood

continues or stops. A sense of self-importance has stifled many little magazines. one apparent way of combating this

Wormwood has at least

phenomenon. The approach is somewhat sophomoric and has frustrated the librarians and put off certain serious scholars of modem literature-nevertheless the technique seems to prevent

creeping pomposity. Since issue 32 the cover title of the magazine (supported by the cover art) has been some semantic corruption of the magazine's very high-poetry real name, e.g. The Warm Wooly Review, Worm Oil on View, Wormwood Cuts Through, The Worm Would View You, Wormwood in You, The Worm Would Bite and Chew, The Worn World Raw View, The Warm

Wood Tree View, etc. In 1975 the masthead indicated that our beloved art editor, A.

Sypher, had apparently been fired and a editor, Ernest Stranger, hired. This allowed the ever con siderate Editor-in-Chief Malone to adopt a subtitle for The Worm wood Review. The subtitle? "Incorporating Malone-Stranger Review." The knowledgeable can only sigh and reply, "Heigh-ho, new

Silver!"

397

ROBERT KELLY AN INTERVIEW ON TRoBAR David Ossman

Robert Kelly, editor 0/ Trobar. Photograph by Gerard Malanga.

of the proponents of the blend of surrealism, imagism, and plain talk that characterizes the Black Mountain School and many of the Beat poets, called some of his poetic variants "lunes": "Lunes are small poems that spend half their lives in darkness and half in light. Each lune has thirteen syllables, one for each month of the moon's year. Along about the middle, the dark of the moon comes. The full moon is the approximate splendor of the whole lune, provided the clouds do not fall too heavily on Robert Kelly,

one

that poem." Mr. Kelly was co-editor of Trobar magazine and Trobar Books

398

in the early sixties. His publications comprise twenty-eight books

of poetry-including Armed Descent (1961), Flesh, Dream, Book (1971), and The Loom (1975)-and three novels: The Scorpions (1967), Cities (1972), and A Line of Sight (1974). Mr. Kelly has taught at California Institute of Technology, SUNY-Buffalo, Tufts University, and currently teaches at Bard College.

First of all, what is the relationship of the "Image" to Trobar?

With our first issue, we wanted poetry that qualified by being alive in one sense or another. We, in our own work and in our critical attention, grew more and more involved with the poetry of images. Let me say this about the Image: if you want to divide all the ways of going into the poem, all the quanta and quotients of poetry, I think the division of powers that Ezra Pound made long

ago, into

three, is the best. His division was logos, or word word-magic, word-development, the development of meaning; melos, the musical gist, the musical development-singing, really -sound; and third, phanos, literally "brightness," phanopeia equaling, for Pound, "throwing the image onto the mind." This is the intellectual and emotional tone of the poem.

Now, if poetry deals with word, word is its ground-you might call word the mystical hypostasis of all poetry, of all literary art.

At the same time, music (melos) is the space-time of poetry-its line, extent, duration. These two approaches to poetry, or these two behaviors of poetry, have been well

analyzed and well dis

cussed for a number of years-I should say about 2,500 years at least. The third, phanos, the image, has gotten rather slighting attention. In the 30s and 40s we heard a lot about "metaphor,"

largely, I suppose, because Pound was talking about metaphor in the lOs and 20s; but we've also heard a little about image. The Image Poetry that I'm talking about is not what Pound nowadays means when he speaks of the poetry des Amy-gistes. When I speak of Image Poetry, I'm speaking both of a way of looking at all poetry, and also, in our own time, of a particular This interview is reprinted from a collection of interviews with modern poets by David Ossman called The Sullen Art, published by Corinth Books in 1963.

399

stance of the poet

regards his material; that stand generates a kind of poetry not necessarily dominated by the images, but in which it is the rhythm of images which forms the dominant move ment of the poem. I'm not trying to say that all great poetry is essentially Image Poetry. I will say that all great poetry generates its images, both the Final Emergent Image of the work of art (Pound calls the Com media a single image) and, more so, the image as prime generated material of the poem-the primal image -which can be expressed as it normally is-in the word-but can also be expressed, can cohere, in sound. Now this all seems rather remote from Trobar, but what I've been saying records part of the sharpening process that went on as

in my mind and in the minds of my friends and associates. This

sharpening of focus led us to try to make Trobar a vehicle for Image Poetry. I certainly don't say that that's the only place it can be found, or the only place it will be found, because the poetry of image is coming more and more to life in America. For confirmation, don't look to any tendentious little magazine what ever, but to the work itself or more and

poets. I think the

revival of interest in poets like Lorca and Neruda-they're be coming almost "standard" poets now-is based very largely on

the enormous dark sentiment of Lorca, that darkness that "sur rounds" us in things, and on Neruda's celebrations and love of the

things of the earth. In their work, image becomes the motive force of the poem: their voice is in the images as much as in the music. If they play, they play on some ground. Really, this revival had to come, this awakening to the fullness of poetry, after the dry wit and tricks of words that marred so much of the poetry of the 50s. This is a partisan statement, but the worst thing you can say about a poem, any poem, is that it's dull. Do you think that a poetry concerned with the Image is likely to be a surrealist kind

of poetry?

I think probably the first stage an individual poet would go through

in trying to let Image emerge in his work would be a surrealist one. I really don't believe that surrealism and the Poetry of Image

necessarily constitute more than a companionate marriage. Sur realism has its own technique at the heart-I think it is a tech nique-and I feel, rightly or wrongly, that the Poetry of Images 400

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(stress on Poetry: it's not a technique) is essentially a mode of Vision. Vision is something of enormous importance in talking about poetry-we very rarely talk about it, perhaps because it's so indefinable. (Pound, for instance, leaves it out altogether in the ABC of Reading; that book is so good because it keeps to the discrete: you can't teach the other.) The use of images constitutes a part of the poet's Vision. It has nothing to do with technique. You can simulate a surrealist poem but you cannot simulate, in a true sense, an Image Poem. This is no real criticism of surrealism

it has its own concerns. But if it can be extrapolated and a tech

nique formed on the basis of it, it's not what we're talking about. Image is a vehicle for Vision. Vision discovers. What some consider Blake's fancies are explorations of the real world, discoveries through perception. Remember what Stevens said: Surrealism invents; it cannot discover. In your recent issue, you publish poems by Creeley, Duncan, and

Snyder. How does their work in Trobar differ from their work to be found in other magazines featuring them and the "new Ameri can poetry"? I don't believe it differs at all. I want to bring up again that I don't

think that Image Poetry is the only kind of poetry. The poetry we

publish, God knows, the poetry we write, is new and it is American; the important thing is that it gets written, that it stands. I think Duncan is one of the greatest poets writing today in English. I think, as various people, notably Creeley, have said of him, that his work is enormously rich in technical solutions as well as in movement and meaning. I would think very little of a maga zine that isolated itself from a poet such as Duncan merely because Duncan operates on all levels of poetic meaning. His Venice poem, his greatest work I've encountered, is very strongly built on the flow of Image, as well as upon space and measure. With Creeley, there's a different consideration. Creeley, too, is an exceedingly fine poet, I think, if I can say so without anything at all except humble

admiration of the man and his work-a man

who's writing poetry of a beauty that I thought a few years ago

impossible in this day and age--of an excellence I still think incred ible. Again, for the magazine, similar reasons apply. Snyder is most relevant as far as the Poetry of Images is concerned. The most 402

recent book of Snyder's, Myths and Texts, is to my mind one of

the strongest books published

by an American since the Pisan

Cantos, let's say. And it is, by my definition, Image Poetry. That's a

tremendously important book, not just as an accomplishment

and a measure, but as a direction. The origin 0/ a paper you have written, called Notes on the Poetry of Images, was in seeing Eisenstein films and relating the

Image in poetry to filmic montage. Do you still see Image Poetry in these terms?*

Since then, I've thought about something that might be a differ ence, might not be a difference. The film starts out with a known

reality: the reality the camera faces-and when you're building up film montage with the sequences and the strips and the cuts and finally the frame itself, I think that you are in a different position altogether from the poet employing images. Different only because, while you don't know what the outcome is going to be, you at least know what you have to start out with. The poet doesn't. There is a Mystery in poetry, and I really mean this with a capital M, a darkness, an atmosphere in which the author com poses the Images before he really knows what those Images amount to. Now, if you take one of the famous Eisenstein frames-a long line of troops seen far in the distance across a snowy field-what ever this

Image may amount to in later development, it is something in itself. It is white and black and gray and the very thin line of soldiers and the whole horizontal motion-and the motion in

depth. You can take it out and print it in a book, look at it, and know what you're seeing. It is a thing. The poetic Image is not a thing. It is process and a discovered identity. It discovers its being in its function. *The paper referred to was privately circulated. A later version was published as Notes on the Poetry of Deep Image in Trobar 2 (1961). Before the printed version came out, the author benefited from a number of comments and criticisms gener ously and relevantly supplied by many people, especially Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov (whose critique was published in The Floating Bear No. 11), and Charles Olson, whose brief comment, "not imageS but IMAGE," was fundamental. Most of these comments took exception to the terms of the paper or their development; the names given above are in no way respon sible for the printed version, which, it should be noted, paid much less attention to the film (R. K., 1962). David Ossman's comments on Kelly's paper, which pay considerable attention to the film, were also published in The Floating Bear No. 13.

403

I think there's that difference, and this is really why I bring in

the question of rhythm. Image is the rhythm of poetry. I've said

this over and over again in my paper, and I must say now, and

give full credit, that this is a formulation that is not originally mine, though I've made use of it fully. Nicolas Calas, the surrealist writer and art critic, offers as a dictum (I really don't know in what context, since I've seen it only quoted) just this statement: "The combination of images constitutes the rhythm of the poem." Rather than talk of laws of combinations, I just want to say that the Image itself, in its development, constitutes the fundamental, basic rhythm of the poem, which all other rhythms-sound rhythms, stress rhythms, and so forth-must subserve. Now here again I think you come back to the film, with its interspersal of one shot with another and (I don't know what Eisenstein calls it) the visual similarity, if not identity, of two successive images of different subjects-their formal, structural nature being the same. The intertranslatability of all things is fundamental to all poetry; it is perhaps more obvious in Image Poetry, and perhaps there there's a tie-in with the film. If it does tie up with film montage, it does so not so much from the point of view of the individual frame, as from the rhythmic point of view of what is done with the frame. The processes may be anal ogous; the modular units are different. Is there anyone experience, more than another, that prompts you to write a poem?

It's something that I do. I don't know how to stop writing them. I don't know what the impetus is---or, I guess, we can all say in

impetus is and we all know in one real way or another what the impetus is, but can we ver balize them? Have any people succeeded in verbalizing that impetus? The conformation of necessities in the unconscious, the conformation of shapes and structures that demand expression-I think it is that, or sometimes the song-the sound of music of some one theoretical way or another what the

kind.

404

EL CoRNo EMPLuMADo, 1961-1969: SOME NOTES IN RETROSPECT, 1975 Margaret Randall

Margaret Randall, editor 0/ EI Como Emplumado (courtesy Poetry magazine).

The birth of El Corno Emplumado, and its maintenance through out the

eight years of its publication, came from a consciousness

forged out of two quite different origins: Margaret Randall's own beginnings in the Beat and Black Mountain traditions in the United States during the late 1950s, and the work of a widely dispersed group of Latin American writers who emerged rather as iconoclasts

but came to social consciousness as their life situations-and those

of their countries and peoples-demanded. Writers whose work was important to Ms. Randall in her early days with the magazine included William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Allen Gins berg, and Gertrude Stein as well as Latin Americans Ernesto Car denal (Nicaragua) and Octavio Paz (Mexico). "The development that went along with the making of the magazine changed our needs, tastes, in short our consciousness, literarily as well as socially, or literarily and socially at one and the same time." By 1969, when the magazine folded, it was possible to list the writers who had become vital to its growth. They were, with others, Cesar Vallejo (Peru), Mario Benedetti (Uruguay), Violeta Parra (Chile), Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Roque Dalton (EI Salvador), and Gabriel Garda Marquez (Colom bia), and the newer Cuban poets and writers. During the years of El Corno's publication, Ms. Randall main tained close ties with literary magazines on both continents: Cuba's Casa de las Americas, Mexico's Pajaro Cascabel, Venezuela's Techo de la Ballena, and Argentina's Eco Contemporaneo, among many more, as well as City Lights, Trobar, I.Kon, and others pub lished in the United States. Ms. Randall has published twenty-three volumes of her own work-poems, essays, and stories. Much of her writing concerns women, including the study that led to the publication of Cuban Women Now (1974); a book about Nicara guan women entitled Somos Millones (1977); a book of interviews with women living in the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam and the then-liberated zones of South Vietnam entitled Spirit of the People (1975); and a current project dealing with Chilean women in the resistance. Her short stories, poems, articles, interviews, essays, and translations have appeared in most of the major literary

journals of the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and other countries.

406

In the fall of 1961 I left New York and arrived in Mexico City with my small son; with a still to some extent individualized an

guish, a consequently off-center rage, and the determination that everything would be different. I thought of myself primarily as Margaret Randall, a poet. My spiritual baggage: middle-class and provincial America, an awakening in the Beat fifties, Ginsberg superimposed on Williams and Pound, hearing my own voice somehow out of Black Mountain and, more recently, Deep Imagery. Abstract Expressionism. Politics: progressive but unorganized; indignant but baffled. In Mexico

City the visionary Catholic poet Philip Lamantia had preceded me by some years. His apartment on Rio Hudson was a meeting place for other North Americans who, for one reason or another, had been exuded, expelled, or propelled from the metropolis: Ray Bremser, Howard Frankl, Harvey Wolin. The Peruvian Raquel Jodorowsky and the Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal=-later to become a priest-were other arrivals. Of the Mexicans who frequented the apartment, read their poetry, and established with us-and we with them-the common need to know "what was happening to the south, what was happening to the north," there were Sergio Mondragon, Juan

Martinez, Homero Aridjis, Jaime Augusto Shelley, Juan Banuelos. The intense, complex, and silent painter Carlos Coffeen Serpas was there, his mother's wild shadow always drifting behind him. The English surrealist Leonora Carrington was a sometime part of our group. The great Spanish poet exiled in Mexico, Leon Felipe, was a mentor. It would be difficult to recall a group of men and women who would later go in

diverse directions. For those of us who

remain, it might be interesting to meet again one day, to

assess

together that moment in time. The sixties. Clearly, though most of us were grappling with very individualistic needs (or needs that did not yet fall into a social perspective in our heads and hands), the unifying factor was this realization: What did we, from the North, know of Vallejo, of Neruda, much less the expression of contemporary Latin American brothers and sisters? What did these poets and writers, whose medium was Spanish, know of

our more

our

Williams, Pound, Creeley, Blackburn? 407

I remember long nights when most of us understood very little

of what was being read. Our need to share, to

experience each

other's questions and answers, was expressing itself at that time all over Latin America and throughout the United States. It was the boom in the "little magazine." El Como

Emplumada/The Plumed Horn (the jazz horn of the U. S. and the plumes of Quetzalcoatl) was simply an expatriate expression of that boom. In that sense it partook of the simple urge to speak, to be heard, to be felt-an urge characteristic of similar magazines that were born, lived, and died in many coun tries during those years. Its other dimension was the duality of language, the thrust toward breaking barriers which we knew were established by our enemy without yet understanding why or even how. Or even who the real enemy was. In the United States Black Mountain Review

was

already a

classic, to be drawn upon. We saw ourselves connected in one way another to Evergreen Review before it became slick, City Lights Journal, Trobar, George Hitchcock's hand-wrought Kayak, or

Kulchur, the outer edges of Poetry, Robert Bly's The Sixties for his concern with the great Latin voices, and many, many others. The radius included Duende in New Mexico, d. a. levy's Renegade Press in Cleveland, Elizabeth in New Rochelle, and Leavenworth's

New Era (written and run by prisoners).

South of the Rio Bravo there

was

El T echo de la Ballena

(The Roof of the Whale) in Caracas, Eco Contemporaneo and Airon in Buenos Aires, Pajaro Cascabel in Mexico, groups in Colombia, Peru, Nicaragua, Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala. And,

increasingly, Cuba. We were in touch with all these groups-the letters back and forth, the poems, the dreams and plans shook with discovery and affirmation on a continental scale. From Canada, too, the feelers came. George Bowering had started up Imago to print the long poems. We communicated with poets, groups, magazines in India, Japan, Australia, Nigeria, England, Italy, France, the Soviet Union. At one time our exchange list numbered some 320-mostly "little"-magazines. Sergio Mondragon, Harvey Wolin, and I launched El Como in the last months of 1961. The first issue appeared in January a magazine 1962. It promised in its first editorial note to be ". art from two of poetry, prose, letters, printed Hemispheres .

...

408

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El Como Emplumado, Vol. 1, No.1, January 1962 (courtesy Northwestern

University Library).

in Spanish and English.

need for a NEW MAGAZINE

published in Mexico City out of the

whose pages conform to the word instead of whose words conform to the pages now, when relations between the Americas have never been worse a ...

...

showcase BROTHERS

(outside politics)

for the

fact

that

ARE

ALL

" ..••

We understood the alienation between two

continents, but

neither its colonialist nor its imperialist nature. We removed cul tural expression from politics, falling easily into the enemy's trap of compartmentalization. The enemy-imperialism-that engages in cultural

well

economic and

military penetration. The

enemy that "brain drains," that has developed a thousand expert ways of ripping off people's culture and dangling the plastic and illusory dream called the "American Way of Life." For me, whose real history had been robbed from my life, the word politics had lost its real meaning. We were more concerned with form, perhaps,

than we should have been, and we really thought we could all be brothers. (We didn't think, then, about being sisters. We were a few women, a minority among mostly men. Our intellectual pre tensions took care of that ratio-women's consciousness was not

part of us then.) Now, holding El Como Emplumado number 1 in my hands,

rereading this editor's note after thirteen years, it's easy to see how we were then prisoners to a distorted, elitist, and even racist concept of art for art's sake. But there's a lot of solid searching, a lot of concrete discovery, a lot of brilliant, tactile, alive, and rebellious memory in the flashback. Whether we knew it or not

(we didn't), and in spite of the idealistic nature of the moment, some

of us at least

were

headed down roads that went in

one

direction only.

Looking through El Como 1, I find Laurette Sejourne's wonder ful "El culto mdgico de una virgen," She deciphers the mysteries of Monte Alban, she who is without doubt one of the most penetrating, visionary, and dialectical of our anthropologists. I remember now how Laurette encouraged us from the beginning. She knew much more than the rest of us, always, but her greatness included knowing that we had to find out for ourselves. Ernesto Cardenal goes back through the history of Nicaragua in "El estrecho dudoso," denouncing the rape of land and people. 410

Leon Felipe speaks out in Spain's voice. Elaine de Kooning has contributed a strong drawing--one of her powerful bulls. Milton Resnick and Leonora Carrington stand out. In spite of ideological error, I

reminded how much really fine work the

magazine

offered. Issue number 2: Allen Ginsberg for the first time in Spanish.

Strong Clayton Eshleman, Paul Blackburn, Robert Kelly. Bruce Conner's asphyxiated sculpture. Cesar Vallejo in English, though certainly neither well represented nor clearly appearing who or what he is. In number 3 a long poem by Mario Benedetti appears in both

English. The Latin American poet dealing with New York City. A logical progression from Lorca. Kenneth Patchen and Jose Luis Cuevas yield the strongest visual expres sions. Franz Kline's death is marked by two reproductions. Robert Kelly, Anselm Hollo, Kathleen Fraser, and others make statements worth remembering, and in that issue we began our policy (con tinued and expanded throughout the magazine's life) of present ing small anthologies of young work from different countries. Here it was Guatemala and Nicaragua. The magazine became an institution. By that time-nearing the end of our first year-getting the money together to put out each issue was a task that consumed us. In the beginning it was

Spanish

and

effort to collect the work, to convince writers and artists that

the magazine was real, that it would appear, that it wasn't just another dream. By the end of the first year there was no problem

getting material. Our correspondence grew and was richer every day. Funds were the problem-the story of all unofficial unbacked independent journals everywhere. I say "independent" with a bitter smile, for we maintained our independence with a fervor, we shouted it from the rooftops, and yet we had no consciousness of how tied we really were to our historic conditioning, to assumed attitudes and established institutions, weren't spelled with

even

if those institutions

capital letters. We had been brought up in

them. And yet we took a stand and, for where we were, it was an honest stand. In issue number 3 we could say (in our editor's

note): "Our age-Cuba, Africa, Chessman, A-bombs, civil dis

obedience,

abstract

expressionism, electronic music, a million babies born every day-compresses the history we make to a 411

madness which has fractured the light in which we move

" ....

there was confusion, there was also awareness. And who financed all this? Mexico's under secretary of state,

Jose Goroztiza (once a great poet himself), New York bookseller Ted Wilentz, our parents, poets who contributed fifty pesos, occasional friends-Norman Mailer, Elaine de Kooning, Kurt

Stavanhagan, etc.-who could give a hundred dollars. Poets got together and read to benefit the magazine. The first such reading, with poets of the stature of Ernesto Cardenal and Philip Lamantia, netted us six U.S. dollars! Later, painters offered their work, and several art shows in more than a few cities brought in considerable sums. Up to the last couple of years of the magazine's life, various agencies of the Mexican government-Bellas Artes, the Ministry of Education, the Secretary of the Presidency, etc. (this is common in Latin American countries)-provided subsidy. And our sub scription list grew steadily, leveling off at around five hundred for most of the magazine's life. Harvey Wolin, who was responsible for the magazine's name, dropped out after issue number 2. From then on it was Sergio Mondragon and me, for almost seven years. Sergio edited the Spanish side of the review and I the English. When we could (in issue 18, almost completely dedicated to Mexico, or in issue 23, totally dedicated to Cuba for that year's 26th of July), we pre sented bilingual facing-page translations. When we couldn't (which was much more often), it was Sergio's choice of work in Spanish, mine in English. During those years we also married each other, had children, created an institution of and around ourselves-an institution that both kept the project alive and

destroying us in our own lives. Sergio's steady move toward the occult, the esoteric, the mystic and my just as steady move toward a Marxist-Leninist revolu tionary consciousness began to create insoluble contradictions existing side by side between the magazine's front and back covers. There came a time when it was almost two magazines, within those covers--discernible only to the infinitely small per centage of our readership that digested both Spanish and English. Throughout the magazine's history we took frequent stands, as did other publications of that kind, regarding issues of those

came close to

times: the Vietnam war, support for the Cuban revolution, etc. 412

This never has been a problem in Mexico. The country has long

been known for its libertarian stands on issues not directly affecting internal problems. However, when the 1968 student movement

got under way, it was a different story. Our magazine, as well as many others, sided with the students in a movement for very basic and elemental human rights. Immediately, of course, official

support was withdrawn. For most of our sister magazines, this meant instant death. However, perhaps because of El Como's bi

lingual nature, we had a possibility of support from outside the country. In answer to a letter we then sent to many friends in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere, we re ceived enough money to do another issue. We weren't willing to

"go under" at the moment the enemy chose. All this was heightened by the way things developed throughout the movement. The National University had been occupied by the students at the beginning of August (1968) and the army, complete with hundreds of tanks, etc., took it back on September 18. There were many deaths and many more people in prison. The 1968 Olympic Games were scheduled for October 12, at great political and financial cost to the country. On October 2, ten days before the Olympics, a peaceful demonstration in the mid dle of the city was surrounded by army, police, special troops, etc., and although the official death count was released as 26 (!), the real death toll has been calculated at between 500 and 1,000: men, women, old people, pregnant mothers, small children. No one will ever

know for sure how many people died that afternoon

because most of the bodies were incinerated and so simply "dis

appeared." For days those who loved them waited in endless lines in front of the Red Cross stations, before giving up hope. So what was our situation in all this? What was the situation of El Como? As

individuals, we had taken part in the student

We weren't leaders; our roles were by no means important ones. We simply did what most honest people in Mexico

movement.

City did at that time-helped the students, provided them with food, collected money, distributed propaganda, etc. At the same time, we had a magazine which, while not directly related to the student movement, supported it and took a radical stand, as it did on other problems. On top of that, we had not allowed them to do us in, as had been the case with several other similar 413

magazines. After their support had been withdrawn, we came out on some

schedule, as usual. This no doubt created resentment in

circles.

And El Como kept on appearing: 1968 ended and 1969 began. I want to emphasize that our role was not particularly important,

extraordinary in any way. But in those years in Mexico paramilitary groups were operating-either with or without direct cooperation from the government-and the prisons were over flowing. People were beaten up, clubbed to death; all sorts of methods were used (as are used everywhere when a system like capitalism feels threatened). By this time we had to change printers for each issue, because each printer we used would receive threats if he continued to help us publish. In July 1969, agents visited our house and stole my personal papers (passport, etc.). The first anniversary of the events of the year before was approaching. When harassment reached the level it did in July, we were advised to go into hiding. And that led to our eventually leaving the country. It wasn't that El Como, as a magazine, was prohibited from appearing; it was simply that if the editors had to flee, who would do the magazine? Thus the pressure, which produced its quota of struggle in 1966 and 1967, built beyond itself in 1968. Issue 29, corresponding to January 1969, was edited by me alone. The last two issues, 30 and 31, I co-edited with Robert Cohen. In mid-1969 the political repression that finally sent us into hiding and eventually out of Mexico forced the magazine out of existence. An era had ended. was not

There was other work to be done. As early as our first year, we hit upon the idea of dedicating each year's fourth issue (the magazine was a quarterly: January, April, July, and October) to a book of poems by an individual

poet-one year from south of the border, the next year from north. These were bilingual facing-text enterprises which took

completely good deal of work and direction and love. The first year it was Marsias & Adila by the great Spanish poet, in exile in Mexico, Agusti Bartra. Elinor Randall (my mother) did the English translation. Our next such book, in issue 8, was Robert Kelly's a

Her Body Against Time; Sergio and I translated it into Spanish. In issue 12 was Raquel Jodorowsky's Ajy Tojen, and again the

414

translation

(this time into English) was ours. Ditto for George

Bowering's Man in the Yellow Boots, which was El Como 16. The tradition stopped there; by that time El Como Emplumado was publishing a series of books apart from the magazine itself, and so numbers 20, 24, and 28 were ordinary issues. In our editor's note in number 5 we said, among other things, "Let us continue to destroy more boundaries in the race between atomic annihilation and man's spiritual emergence as an individ ual." In 6 we proclaimed: "From a Catholic seminary in the jungles of Colombia, a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, from a carpenter in Nicaragua, a student of physics in New Mexico, a poet prophet wandering through the Himalayas, Trappist monk in Kentucky, professor of German in a college in upstate New York, bookseller in San Francisco, poets in London, Buenos Aires, Maine, Oslo, comes the new poetry. A Montevideo, Cuba, New Jersey ...

poetry man

new

because it is of a new age, made by a new man. A

finding his voice in the new era."

That issue came out in April 1963. Two years later, in

1965,

Ernesto Che Guevara would publish his Man and Socialism in

Cuba, but his-the revolution's-new man (and woman)

were

gfEi:; [fJ0ff�[i�J��ni�J�it��f� :t: '�::t.-�'�',,::"-,,::'T ,:a"r7�:L;;i��,��"'j':'I;� �� : :;:. ..

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�2;�;:�5i�·tg:;i;:'?�,f,:;�: : E+':�i� :�21�; �:n�j';�r';;:' j�(\:�:: �M"i;��I�"�;�r;L r�n�;; ;��J!�;:..\i ::,1'�;: II"fTI"·"!;" Ih,.lUfu.i"(l Ql 11>.;, ,,,,,..1. th,' � ....

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"Siall and humbll: p"rt.

Editorial note by Margaret Randall and art work by Carlos Coffeen from El Corno Emplumado, No.6, April 1963 (courtesy Northwestern University •

Library). 415

already perfectly defined: the man and woman who were com mitted to life, who were for justice, against exploitation. The ideologues of the Organization of American States (through its cultural body, the Pan-American Union) were also developing their "new man," the counter-image. Theirs, needless to say, was beyond politics. Like "art beyond politics." The two concepts were diametrically opposed. In some muddled way we accepted both, though already we intuitively-if not clearly, analytically-suspected the OAS model and were moving toward Che's truth. It helped to be living in an underdeveloped Third World country whose culture, as well as its economy, was being raped by U.S. imperialism. Speaking in a personal sense, it helped to be delivering babies in the Mexico City misery belt. It helped to begin to develop our first contacts with young revolutionaries throughout the Continent. It helped to get our first letters from Cuba. Our issue number 7, appearing in July 1963, presented a solid selection of new work from the "first free territory in America,"

headed off with fragments of Fidel Castro's "Words to the Intel lectuals." It was an important offering; the U.S.-imposed blockade

(again, cultural as well as economic) had thrown a curtain of silence around Cuba's literary production since the triumph of the revolution. Especially in the sister Latin American countries, and of course in the United States, you weren't free to read what

coming from Cuban poets. We were defiant in our offering, and proud to be making it.

was

In that Cardenal.

editor's note, "If Emesto is right in saying 'the poets are the true Panamerican

same .

issue

said in

our

Union' and Miguel Grinberg in Argentina is promoting this vision into reality with his newly founded Inter-American League of

Poets, the mirrors most publicly reflecting this common vision are Our sense of our own importance the NEW MAGAZINES was overblown, to say the least. Poets throughout the Americas had already, many of them, laid down the pen and taken up "

....

the gun. The mirrors were not the new magazines, but lives forged in struggle. The mirror was the revolution, already under way. But the fact is, we did print the Cuban anthology, and we did, because of that, lose 500 subscriptions from the Pan-American Union in Washington. A specific attempt had been made to buy

416

us off.

This taught us a lot; I guess you could also call it instinct. as they say, but in the right direction even when we didn't

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, our own were

leading

yet understand how or why. In the editorial comment in our issue number 9 (January 1964) still

we were

grappling with the same problem. I quote it with

great humility because my intention here is not to cover over false consciousness but to try, head on, to look at the road we took twisted almost out of coherence by class distortions and the com mon

mistake that intuition could

should take the

place of

talked about a new era analysis: "In eight issues we have a new man. ask still us this new man is and who peopled by Many what in new age he lives Pisces/Aquarius. A spiritual revo lution historically comparable to the industrial revolution (! ) It is a time for an art of the people which is not an 'art of the An individualism which includes everyone. A slice people.' of bread buttered with vision and divided infinitely How much was a question of semantics? How painful going back to .

....

this is! Well In 11

...

picked up on sisters and brothers, saying that "any a single brush line can (me) do more for man. than all the socially-morally conscious are ."-etc., etc. But by number 17 (January 1966), our cover showed the violence of u.s. Marines invading Santo Domingo. Our fourth anniversary was marked by an editorial note that spoke of 30,000 Vietnam war protesters marching in New York and was finally able to affirm that "El Como Emplumado will continue to be the vehicle through which the other face of this struggle can be expressed, the interior aspect of what's happening, through the eyes of our poets." It was still inner, but the con sciousness was developing that this inner manifestation was the we

change must begin within you .

reflection of the real, the outer, world.

By number 15 (July 1965), we had broken with our tradition typographical front cover (the continuous El Como Emplumado Plumed Horn El Como Emplumado Plumed Horn running back and forth along the top, and across the bottom a list of the contributors in a similar typographical style). From then on there were photographs, paintings, collages, poster art, cartoons, and covers specially designed by artists close to us. Among the of the purely

417

outstanding: Nacho Lopez's photo of a police roundup of Mexican poor-faces of exploitation and defiance-on 15; "STOP THE WAR IN VIETNAM NOW!" running along one side of a detail from Picasso's Guernica on 18; a full-color Willem de Kooning painting on 19; Felipe Ehrenberg's special covers for 23 and 24 (Felipe was a close collaborator throughout the life of the maga zine); on number 25, Larry Siegel's photo of young Harlem men hanging out; on 26, the great Cuban protest-song poster-the rose with the bloody thorn; and for 28, our own five-year-old daughter Sarah's cover drawing. El Como Emplumado was never just a magazine; it was never just a collection of words and images on paper, put together by two people (it was always only two people: editing, raising money, supervising the printing, handling the secretarial work and distribution). El Como was a network-letters going back and forth between poets, between people. It was a meeting of most

poets like spontaneous combustion (some would sell books or

"fly now-pay later" in order to make the trip) in Mexico City February 1964. It was readings and art shows and contact between movements. It was young intellectuals throughout the Third World coming to terms with their role in revolution; it was U.S. intellectuals coming to terms with their relationship to their sisters and brothers in the world exploited and oppressed by in

"their" government. Despite the broad base and the initially unclear focus--or per

haps, strangely, because of that--during the years El Como lived published some very great, very worthy work. Work that appeared for the first time in Spanish or for the first time in English. Work by unknown writers who would some day be known. Early drawings which today hold the clue to a particular artist's development. Photographs that reflect the sixties. Some extra ordinary short stories. Looking through the thirty-one issues now, I can make a list of such work, tempered by my current vision we

and concerns. The list would have been different in

1965, when

the magazine had gone only halfway through what was to be its natural life. It would have been different in 1969, when it died. For what it's worth, here are some of the things I now feel were

particularly important: The early (for outside the island) Cuban work in number 7; the primitive poetry and the drawings by Mexican Indians from 418

the Guerrero mountains

(10) and the long cry of anguish from anonymous Colombian poet in the same issue; Cesar Vallejo in English in 11; a selection of Finnish poets, Clayton Eshleman, an

Juan Rulfo, and Jerome Rothenberg in 14; in Spanish

(17)

Ginsberg's "Kaddish" Spanish (18);

and William Carlos Williams in

number 23 dedicated totally and bilingually to Cuba, with Nuez's incisive drawings; Ernesto Cardenal's "Zero Hour" in 25; Dalton and Susan Sherman in 26; Roque Dalton, Michele

Roque Clark,

and Richard Johnny John in 30; Bill Hutton's stories in 31.

There were those who were close to us, who were an

integral

part of El Como during the sixties and who died in that decade.

They met different kinds of deaths, and for that reason remain on the pages of the magazine like a special kind of monument. I want to honor them here:

Leon Felipe, who died of old age and of

Spain

Paul Blackburn, who died of cancer much too

young

Rosario Castellanos, who died of electrocution in Israel Jose Cardenas Pefia, who died of a lifelong affliction Waldo Frank, his heart

Otto-Rene Castillo, tortured to death in the jungles of Guatemala while fighting with the FAR Kenneth Patchen, dying such a long death in Palo Alto Franz Kline, of drink and of

being spent

Pablo Neruda, of cancer and of Chile

Thomas Merton, electrocuted in India while William Carlos Williams, age and life and

plugging in a fan paralysis

Christopher Perret, a sudden heart attack-too young-on the

island of Majorca

d. a. levy, who shot himself Aldan Van Buskirk, of a rare blood disease

Elise Cowen, who jumped from a tall Jose Carlos Becerra, in a car crash in

building to her death Italy

Red Lane, unknown and sudden

Roque Dalton, shot by traitors to his own revolutionary cause

which was also ours

Saul Gottlieb, of lung cancer

Javier Heraud, shot down at the age of twenty-one in the middle of the Madre de Dios River, Peru

Charles Olson, of cancer 419

Even when the distance between life and culture is wide, even

when alienation has not been dealt with and contradictions not resolved-if there is honesty in the search, the distance inevitably narrows.

As long as we at El Como continued to protest the war

in Vietnam from the relative

safety of the other side of the river, as long as we spoke of a "new man" largely divorced from real cause and effect, as long as we lived (to a large extent) off Mexican government subsidy and believed ourselves independent, the contradiction was left unexposed and the magazine's contribu tion was limited pretty much to the publication of one or another beautiful poem, excellent short story, fine piece of graphic art. But 1968 came along, and with it the social and political up heaval of the Mexican student movement. The student movement

became a popular movement. We took sides. In our own back

yard. Withdrawal of official support was immediate. Our artistic expression was forced by the circumstances of our life and struggle to define itself in a more relevant way. Our own experience helped us to understand the experience of others. The editorial note in number 29 read:

Beginning in July,

the Mexican government has countered an authentic student strike with unreasoned brute force. The strike became a popular movement. In EI Como Emplumado #28 (October), our editorial was a protest against a repression which had not even then reached its high point. Immediately following that editorial, our government subsidy (accounting for approximately half of the magazine's finances) was cut off We speak for the total revolution in mind/body/senses and social order. Weare no longer subsidized by anyone but you, and our future issues depend ....

on your response.

something that happened all of a sudden. It had been a process, and the seeds were planted from the beginning. The editor's note in 26, I think, is worth quoting in full. It wasn't

Our children will not see the world we know. The change is upon us, in our hands and in our mountains and in our cities-brute and sure. Vietnam, Korea, Guatemala, Guinea, Tierra Amarilla, Detroit. Artists and writers are

longer content to bear witness; looking to Debray, to Che, to Carmichael and Cesar Montes they are making their action a new kind of witness. In Cuba the real mirror in which we care to see ourselves reflected, 600 intel from 70 countries met in January and talked about THIs-in Its details and faces. The "official" press everywhere is already engaged In will Our offensive strategy of silence; but we are no longer on the defensive. and be known-through our action, our eyes, the objects and lives we cr�ate this goes which reality and little magazine, by small the news no

lectu�ls

�ll =

media,

out to you.

420

press

In Havana, Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti said: "The artist who resigns himself to be considered an ignominious article of luxury proves, in the last analysis, that the accusation is partly true in his particular case. On the contrary, the one who refuses to be considered a luxury of the revolution, the artist who defends his right to dream, to create beauty, to create fantasy with the same fury and conviction with which he defends his right to eat, to have a home, to safeguard his health, will be the only one capable of proving that his work is not a luxury, but a necessity not o1zly for himself but also for his fellow man." EI Corno Emplumado continues this witness which is action, this action which is poetry, this art which is life.

As I've already said, number 31 was our last issue. Repression meant

survival, reassessment, keeping on the move. The end of

the magazine. The end of an era shared by many.

What would the

magazine have become had

been able

to continue it? It's pretty clear from the last two issues especially.

The contents

are

the poem, short

less limited to the more formal literary forms:

fiction,

etc.

There is

emphasis now on

letters, diaries, essays and articles, the interview. More direct

testimony. And the poems and stories change, too, and grow. A U.S. movement leader goes to Vietnam and reports back. A (necessarily) anonymous Mexican political prisoner draws what the cell feels like. An American woman shares her Cuban journal. An Iroquois Indian brother sings. A great Salvadorian

poet makes poetry from the way the most marginal, the poorest of his country

finally settled accounts with the dictator responsible for thirty thousand working-class and peasant deaths. A young U.S. student participates in the Chinese cultural revolution. There is men

discussion of the Senoi dream community. Edmundo Desnois

analyzes mass media. Karl Marx appears in comic strip format. Form as well as content that more accurately reflects the struggle. Had we been able to continue, we would have hoped to move into

some of the necessary Latin and North American terrain.

political debates-on both

The importance of Latin America for the United States cannot be

overemphasized, either from the enemy's viewpoint or our It's only a matter of time before Che's "two, three, many Vietnams" explode on the southern continent; events of subse quent years (in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, etc.) bear this out. Imperialism wields incalculable resources (the multina tionals, military aid, media control, "education" and population own.

421

control

projects, etc. etc.) to keep the continent from bursting open. We too must coordinate our struggle-on the cultural as well as all other fronts. And the Latin American experience, inversely, is vital for the U.S. struggle; we must confront the real culture that emerges from beneath centuries of colonization. There

deep lessons there for us-and the roots themselves for vast sectors of our peoples: chicanos, Puerto Ricans, etc. That exchange which is part of the struggle for a new society is what we didn't have time to extend and deepen. But others are doing it. Others are carrying it forward from where we left off. are

Opposite: advertisement in Dust, No. 17, for Len Fulton's Directory of Little Magazines, Small Presses and Underground Newspapers (courtesy Len Fulton). 422

DuST: A TRIBAL SEED Len Fulton

Direetory 01 Little Magazines, Small Presses, a Underground Newspapers

Seventh Edition, 1911-72 dUst&(>ob�

I ..... n .uhon f,d,to,.& P"J,I, her ..

:;218 ..... uu.oOod nuad.I',lrildlll". (A. CJ';9f.IJ

The influences on Len Fulton's editorial methods extend back to

704 A.D.-the date, according to Mr. Fulton, of the oldest known

printed work, a Korean religious scroll on woodblocks. In his Small Press Review, he prints a monthly column, "The Small Press Chronology," which traces the evolution of the written and pub lished word through the ages. Len Fulton, a onetime biostatistician and free-lance statistical consultant, founded and edited the magazine Dust from 1964 to 1971. The journal gave rise to his publishing house, Dustbooks, best known for its yearly International Directory of Little Maga zines and Small Presses. Mr. Fulton also founded the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP), and has served on the Litera ture Panel

of the National Endowment for the Arts and on the Grants Committee of CCLM. He is the author of two books of fiction, The Grassman (1974) and Dark Other Adam Dreaming (1975), and of an autobiography, American Odyssey (1975).

I started Dust magazine in 1963 because I had the urge to do it and because I had lain fallow long enough, thank you, under the

largely self-inflicted notions that there were higher arbiters of taste. The quiet world of the fifties (actually more comatose than quiet) was falling in, and in Berkeley, California, where I lived and worked, the collapse was as big as they get. Mario Savio was making speeches about "putting your bodies on the wheels and the gears to stop the odious machine," and the machine to which he referred, the University of California in Berkeley, was on

one

with which I possessed intimate familiarity.

I had learned publishing early, and had learned it under the

hard, bedeviled fist of Maine's icebound Yankee soul. A friend, Bob Fay, and I, new idylled from the University of Maine at Portland, started, with no more than some innocence and charm,

weekly newspaper at Kennebunkport in 1957. From that we embedded ourselves deeper yet into the Yankee soul up country at Freeport, where we purchased a letterpress print shop and two more local weekly papers. If it had worked (I was twenty-one), I might still be there, but it happened that the winter of 1957-58, riding in on sea winds that only a Melville could love, slapped us a

424

breathless. I strung south, working for a weekly in Massachusetts, and spent my last year east of the Mississippi (1958-59) on a daily

just outside New York City. From there I returned to college at the University of Wyoming at Laramie, and moved to Berkeley in 1961 to work on a doctorate in psychology. Well before Savio and the Free Speech Movement (FSM) I had come to know and feel the insular and indurate heart of academe. Psychology was on the make everywhere for grants, crying out for a scientific name-and pulverizing those who resisted. I resisted. I resisted because I had paid my price in austerity before the northern New England snows, and "experimental rigor" in the study of the human mind often reduced to absurdity the merest creative impulse. (We used to say of this experimental rigor that it had rigor mortis.) I had studied literature and done some writing, so I resisted because I sensed a more than chance connection between human behavior, language, and mind. Those Berkeley psychologists skirted that issue by using rats, monkeys, frogs, and other animals that did not confuse the issue with words. I proposed to study the literary roots of Freud for my dissertation; they handed me a faculty adviser named French, from Maine, with no r's in the soul of his language, and a herd of laboratory monkeys with their brains ablated. I proposed novels and poetry as the matter of my study; they proposed the English department-though my talent for statistics frustrated the clarity of this advice. "Symbols," I muttered to French one day. "It's all symbols." He looked up from my paper, written in the first person, active voice-a criminal thing in the academy. "You write that Freud felt a certain way about language. I doubt that many of us care how Freud felt," he said, leaning forward on that word as though he'd trapped the fingers of a heretic defiling a sacred fount. "Stated, postulated, yes-felt, no!" Five years of academic psych plus a dime got you a cup of coffee in those days, and very little more. However, as an under graduate at Wyoming I had been forced through a course in re search statistics, something used to terrorize students in the social sciences. I found it in fact a quite sensible pursuit, took further studies in it, and when I went looking for work again in Berkeley I discovered I'd unknowingly gotten myself an ace in the hole. No one needed a psychologist, but every project in even the 425

borderline sciences screamed out for a statistician,

person who could arrange raw and often carelessly acquired data into sophis a

ticated tabular form, charts, graphs; one who understood "con fidence" and "testing" and the use of computers. I was not long in landing good and steady employment with the California State

Department of Public Health, a position I held until retiring in 1968, and without which there would've been no Dust and cer

tainly no Dustbooks. Dust magazine was founded in a breech. It was personal for me, and also spiritual, ideological in the social sense, a response to Zeitgeist. I found a number of others, too, with modest writing or publishing experience: Andrew Curry, black, brilliant, a product of Cleveland's Hough District, a psychiatric social worker, painter, poet, musician, dancer; George Kauffman, a staffer for the Berkeley Barb, a man from the thirties who'd never lost his angst or his consciousness of the world's dismal; Emil Strom, a composer-witty, good with language in a piecemeal fashion, an unruly conservative, like Kauffman a product of the thirties, who would argue that he'd "seen it all before"; Frank Lapo, a geneticist who couldn't find work precisely in his line and so took blue a new

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whom I understood least of all, given to an absolute distaste for

conventional expression (Lapo was our "treasurer" and showed a

transcending compulsion for the job);

and Bob

Fay, myoid

friend and partner from Maine newspapers, at that point an adman for a paper in Richmond, California. Just before starting Dust in

1962, Kauffman and I had both

been directors of a newspaper in Berkeley, a co-op weekly modeled

By early 1963, with nothing published, the paper was already foundering in the wash of Berkeley's upper-middle-class liberality, reminding me more than anything else of academic rigor mortis. What wiped out The Citizen, however, was not the unending harassment by its reader owners or by the California Corporations commissioner, or even the hostility of Berkeley's merchant class. What wiped out The Citizen was the Berkeley Barb, a hip, flip, and grainy harbinger of the underground press movement. The Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press, and New York's East Village Other all started circa 1963, and by the time they had organized the Underground Press Syndicate in 1965 there were some one hundred such papers in the country. It was a primal year for change. Dust faced two struggles, fiscal and editorial, and both hit crisis proportions by the third issue (Fall 1964). At that time the "editorial board" had shrunk to four-Curry, Fay, Strom, and me. By the fourth issue Strom quit, and by the eighth, Fay. Curry, bless his magnificent soul, stuck with it through the thirteenth issue (Summer 1969), mainly as poetry editor, having given up all financial involvement in the magazine with Fay's departure in 1966. To this day I don't know whether the fiscal or the aes thetic/editorial problems were more to blame. Anyone who's tried it probably knows that a publishing operation with six editor-part ners is a unique form of madness, and it is, in retrospect, marvelous that anything got out at all. Yet those first seven issues were reg ularly 64 to 88 pages, costing $600 apiece. This was prorated at $100 per partner-minus subscription receipts, which were boosted by having six people whose private circles of friends were as disparate as their artistic biases. By number 4 there were 518 paid subscribers, virtually all individuals, no institutions. Sub scription fees covered roughly two of the first four issues; the on

the food co-ops and titled The Citizen.

other two cost those of us left about $250 each-a considerable 427

Dust, Vol. 5, No.1 (17),1971, the last issue (courtesy Len Fulton).

product that was destined never to satisfy all investors. At our first renewal (with issue number 5) the real thunder of periodical publishing clapped me awake. Subscriptions plunged to 300. And with each succeeding issue more atrophy occurred, with huge gouges at numbers 8 and 12, which began new volumes. When Dust suspended publication in 1972, it had 290 paid subscribers. The personal and editorial conflicts were simply inevitable numerous and rending. Lapo, always unpredictable, dropped the records and bankbook on my doorstep one day and drove off forever into the sunrise. Kauffman, who thought we should publish only our own work and refused even to read unsolicited manu scripts (which, with number 2, were pouring in), quit when we voted not to print one of his short stories. Strom objected to a lesbian poem titled "A Pretty Story" by someone named Lake Purnell from Kansas. We voted to print it anyway-and Strom withdrew the day number 3 was published. By number 7 Fay had amassed personal problems-and an obvious weariness for the repetitive process of periodical publishing, struggling through one issue only to get to the next. We agonized over this for a for neither of us took the other's day, plight lightly, but it was sum

for

final

clear that he must leave. And by then it was clear to me that though the founding deal

had been a six-way split, the operant deal consisted of me and five others who had tentatively agreed to the thing as long as it pleased them. Everyone but me always thought of the magazine

ultimately mine, and as a result felt a certain freedom to walk away from it. At Fay's departure, Curry said he would edit the magazine as long as I would publish it. Faith, I must say, drove me after that. It was a faith in literature as an enduring human as

pursuit, a faith in the times-the sixties-as a sort of renaissance that neither I nor anyone then could precisely name, but being in those times was proof enough. It was a faith that measured the medicinal power of independence by the natterings of its many detractors, and a sense, somehow, of the intrinsic value and do minion of the freedom of print. It was a faith in the essentially tribal spirit under which the small press functions-a spirit dwell ing, on the one hand, outside the corporate octopus but, on the other, inside the cultural stream of real possibilities. And it was 429

faith, above all, in myself-as my father had known it in him self to survive the cold, blowing blizzards of the eastern north country. a

I decided to be

publisher again.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1963 we had held many meetings, looking toward the first issue, planned for Spring 1964. We spent one of those meetings finding a name, which we came to after casting out the "journal of" stigma (stronger then than now, believe me), "quarterly of" (which was too entrapping in the periodical sense and also possessed some stigma), and Thales's four elements. I suggested Dust as something that existed in liter ature and life without regard to style, age, or place; and as a name under which we could maintain a sufficiently open (read "loose") editorial posture to accommodate all our aesthetic pro clivities. We quickly began to use its literary references in ad copy, from "dust into dust" to "fear in a handful" of it. Issue number 1 carried

Shakespearean subscription pitch: Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

We defined

"shovelful"

($3.50)

"four handfuls" (a dollar

each), and when the mag died in 1972 one long-time subscriber wrote, "It is hard to believe that never again will another dust bite the day." Several scientific organizations subscribed, clearly

planning to advance their laboratory knowledge of dust as a ubiquitous substance-but no one ever wrote back admitting an error, hanging on instead through four issues. We received, start ing early, many poems and stories either titled "Dust" or about dust (I don't recall ever publishing one of these), and one day I found a copy of Yael Dayan's novel Dust lying on my desk with never an explanation as to how it got there. I became known in the post office as "Dusty," and once had a printer who would address my mail to: Dirt Books Len Fulton, Chief Pornographer

which did little, as you might guess, to alleviate suspicions of me in this cow county of Butte, where I came in 1969. Occasionally 430

even now bank

clerks will look at me in that odd way, as though

in fear of the information, and ask "What are dust books anyway?" I start by asking them to define "anyway."

sixties, poetry was still struggling to escape the aesthetic regulations of the "formalists" (Eliot, Ransom, etc.). Language in general was still struggling for a full measure of freedom against suppressive social forces as well as academic ones. The Beats had made gains in both these matters in the fifties, but it truly remained for the little magazines and un derground newspapers of the sixties to take up the cause with their sheer number and diversity. While they had been limited in number and located in either New York or San Francisco, these early efforts were easily isolated and harassed-as with, for example, "Howl" or Lenore Kandel's Love Book, or Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which was prosecuted in Marin County, Cali fornia, in 1962. Once magazines, presses, and newspapers began to appear everywhere in the country it became a futile business to track them down-to say nothing of a demand for literacy that outran most county prosecutors. Furthermore, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1963, which drew masses of street-bodies to its cause, and the burnings in Watts and Detroit, soon created a perspective against which a free and open press In the early

looked least mean of all. These small magazines, which began to proliferate in 1963-64, took up such causes

"concrete"

poetry:

mix of visual and

grammatical material in experimental form imported from Brazil, Switzerland, England, and Canada. This led to the whole testing of "intermedium art," wherein old structural genres were reworked in new, fluid, and functional ways. The "Meat" poets, who began as followers of Charles Bukowski, stretched the subject matter of poetry via their mimeo mags: "Every inch of the planet earth, every curse word, every thimble, every spot of dirt, every slam,

bang, jing, every chug in the harbor is poetry" (Douglas Blazek in Ole, number 1). And dope, war, prison, race, ecology, and sexism all eventually worked their way into poetry as content which affected form, mostly by loosening it. Rhyme and meter in the old sense fell into final disuse as the "projective line" (that 431

of the natural breath) became dominant through oral presentation. When we started Dust there were two readings a week in the San Francisco

Bay Area. Now, in the seventies, there are literally

dozens. In a way, Dust was

mini-cosm of the small magazine of its

day. We published a little of everything and remained true to our founding goal of openness. We published Bukowski and Blazek, prison and dope poetry by William Wantling, socially satirical poems by L. C. Phillips, the street poems of Doug Palmer, translations from the Italian by Dora Pettinella, from the Japanese by Curry, and from the German by Gene Fowler. We published several hundred poets in the course of seventeen issues. For reasons unknown to my memory now, way of concrete poetry until

did not publish much in the

Wally Depew took over as editor

with issue 14 in 1970.

early to publish interviews, and they, with some of the fiction, may be the most historically important features of the magazine. They covered modern poetry, black organizing, peace Berkeley-style, street poetry, small presses, Zen philosophy, and novel writing. Here are the people interviewed and the issues in which those interviews appeared: Alan Watts, Zen philosopher (numbers 2, 3; later published as a separate chapbook titled The Deep in View); Louis Simpson, Pulitzer poet (numbers 3, 4); Booker T. Anderson, black organizer (2); Doug Palmer, street poet (5); Gene Fowler, poet (6); Stephen Smale, anti-war activist (7); John Williams, novelist (7); d. a. levy, Cleveland editor-poet ( 12). We published thirty-five pieces of fiction in the first twelve issues, most of it experimental, including work by Ed Bullins, Gary Elder, Ed Franklin, Sinzer James, and Nigerian Babatunde LawaI. I worked with a writer named Gene Gracer (whom 1 have not heard from since) through five rewrites of his grimly colorful story, "Shadows of Dawn," before publishing it in number 7. We set out

A year ago I met James D. Houston (Native Son of the Golden

West), and as we shook hands I said, "I remember reading manu

scripts of yours for a mag I once edited." I wondered how good his memory was.

"Dust," he said quickly with a smile. "You even published me!" "No shit?" The trick was on me.

432

"Yeh-a play, I think." "No shit! Really?" Later he remembered the title: "Time to Kill." We published work by two dozen

artists, fifty letters ranging

from hate to love, and several dozen reviews. We published

article by Strom on atonalism in music and Shakespeare's "Sonnet

50," which he'd set to piano music. This latter brought in a light hearted complaint from a trumpet player who didn't "appreciate

having to transpose his music from base to treble clef." Bob Fay wrote an article on Congressman Wright Patman's attack on the

U. S. banking system, and Curry wrote several brilliant essays on Wallace Stevens, Issa, Hopkins, and James Baldwin. It was Fay who interviewed Booker T. Anderson one afternoon in Richmond,

California, and Anderson had some unfavorable opinions about Richmond's black mayor. When the issue came out, the Richmond

city manager called me and asked if he could photocopy the interview and reproduce it with the mayor's comments attached. I checked with Anderson, who was incensed. I offered the city of Richmond as many copies as they wanted at a buck each, but informed them that to copy the interview would violate copyright laws. They checked with counsel, then bought whole copies of Dust.

With the fifth issue (1965), we picked up a British editor named Cavan McCarthy, who published a little magazine out of Leeds titled Tlaloc.

report

McCarthy contributed only one essay to Dust, a the obscenity-bust of British poet Dave Cunliffe over

publication of a book called The Golden Convolvulus, but he figured critically in other Dustbooks publications later. In fact, McCarthy mined the entire European continent and Russia for listings for the second annual Directory of Little Magazines ( 1966) and set up for us a momentum to collect European infor mation that is still going, though he quit in 1968 to disappear into Brazil and Nigeria. He was one of the best and brightest people I have ever worked with.

(In March 1976, I was at the Gotham Book Mart in New York, promoting my new novel Dark Other Adam Dreaming. As the afternoon faded toward evening, a young man

materialized in the gallery, grinning because we were about 433

to meet and he didn't want the moment lost too

quickly. It was

McCarthy, eleven years later.) I would venture to guess that most

small-press editors active

today have scarcely heard of Dust and certainly have never seen copy. Yet they know of Dustbooks, and contribute monthly and annual data, advertising, goodwill, and ideas to its several infor a

mation titles, most specifically the International Directory of Little

Magazines and Small Presses and the Small Press Review. It is the case of the tree bearing no seeming resemblance to its original seed.

Early in the course of publishing Dust-perhaps before its second issue was out-we began getting exchange copies of other mags from everywhere in the country. As early as number 2 we printed reviews of Duane Locke's Poetry Review (Tampa) and Harry Smith's The Smith (NYC)-both of which, by the way, are still going. In 3 (1964) we listed thirty-six mags as having been received, and eight books, and we devoted five pages to reviewing them. In 4, this list of magazines received had grown to 67, and I began to be fascinated by the fact that with each one

also came a story, a human drama not unlike the one behind

the founding and publishing of Dust itself. The more I knew about

it, the more taken I became with what was obviously a larger movement

somehow related to ours by its literary and publishing

spirit. It was the first time in all my days that I'd found myself quite naturally and organically a part of something beyond the reach of my own hand, something that had not preceded me so much as it had simultaneously awakened with me, or I with it. I was drawn to it. At that point Dust receded in my interest and in the

energy I would willingly give it. I devised the first of a multitude of forms for collecting information in 1965, and soon produced the first edition of the Directory of Little Magazines--40 pages, 250 listings, 500 copies, a buck each. A year later, in an effort to

track the movement's accelerating action in a more dynamic and immediate way, I started the Small Press Review

quarterly.

subscribers and

earns monthly with 3,000 paid $5,000 a year in advertising. The Directory now lists 2,500 smaIl

(It is

434

now

presses and mags, is 500+ pages, prints 10,000 copies, and sells for $10.95.) In 1967

(Goliards) came to my drunk and talked some more, home, and after we had talked and an

editor named Jerry Burns

he said: "Let's join forces, man, a partnership!" "I've done that one," I said-but he was wired.

"Then how about a meeting of little mag editors?" A year later, almost to the day, we brought it off, Burns and I, in Berkeley on the U. of C. campus, which five years before had

prodded its last rat through the maze of my academic life. We held the meeting, titled the Conference of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP), and attracted eighty editors like ourselves from everywhere in the country. I chaired a panel on distribution, which included Harry Smith (The Smith), Douglas Blazek (Ole), D. R. Wagner (Runcible Spoon), and Hugh Fox (Ghost Dance). It was out of that

panel, the first of a thousand like it, in an effort to get funds for a catalogue of small press publications, that the Committee of Small Magazine/Press Editors and Publish ers was born. By November 1968 it had 110 paying members and a self-appointed board of directors. (Burns and I fought furiously over whether those directors should be elected. By 1970 I had worn him down, and the first election was held at the Buffalo conference

that year.) It was Burns who, after the conference in Ann Arbor in 1969, concocted the COSMEP Newsletter. We "hired" Richard Morris in late 1968 to help get out that first Catalogue of Small Press Publications, typeset (Grande Ronde Review)

by Burns and printed by Ben Hiatt

In mid-1968 I retired from my work as a public health biosta

tistician under pressure from a nerve disease of still unknown origin

destiny. I broke with the urban madness and moved back to the mountains to spend time in the sun and the mud, and give the publishing and writing a chance to work its medicine. Dust had begun to be sporadic anyway in the flow of my other interests, and the move gave it a new setback. Number 11, published from the Bay Area, was dated Fall 1967; 12, published from Paradise,

435

dated Spring 1969; 13, all fiction, was dated Summer 1969. At that point Andrew Curry, who'd been nothing if not a stolid

was

co-editor and fast friend, quit-and I didn't blame him a whisker.

Finally, having quit gainful employment, I was running out of money and out of energy for a magazine which had cost me $7,000 in seven years, and some editor friends. It couldn't hold its sub

scribers

(at number 4 there were 518; after 8 there were 129),

and it worked in some devilish way against the rest of my opera

tion, because it was forever unable to be as open spiritually as it needed to be to co-exist with the Directory and the Small Press Review-and with my chairmanship of COSMEP. In late 1970, with subscriptions at 190, I hired Wally Depew to see what he could make of it. Depew was, along with Richard Kostelanetz and

others,

of the earliest and

brightest experimenters in the U.S. in concrete art, games, probabilities and chance, series equations, permutations, and the like. He had started a magazine called Poetry Newsletter in New York in 1964, and I had published his chapbook Once, as the fourth in a series of "longpoems." Depew described his chapbook as "a contrapuntal, serially developed New Poetry longpoem using re petitive/progressive wood block series set against an expanding letter design." (The book remains in print today.) Depew edited four issues of Dust in 1970-71, one of which carried work by some

one

Folsom Prison poets and Canadians and one, the seventeenth, having four contributors, all experimental, including Kostelanetz, Alastair MacLennan, and Depew himself. I liked the "new look" of the magazine, the fresh and intricate designs by Linda Bandt,

and the tight,

editing by Wally Depew. I liked not having to decide on manuscripts and layout and wrestle with com plaints from contributors and subscribers. Though Depew would confer with me on the general size and shape of each issue, those issues were always an enjoyable surprise. For the first time ever no-nonsense

I was able to concentrate on what had become my first interest: small press information. I applied for a $1,500 grant for Dust from the Coordinating Council of Literary

Magazines in New York,

which had turned me down several times before. But a magazine like Dust,

436

any editor can tell you, becomes

the child of a life style, and you can partition it off no more easily than you can your personality or your face. I began to feel a vague,

nagging sense that the all-fiction issue (13), Curry's last, had been somehow an organic end, that I had started a whole new contraption with Depew and it was a contraption which was not a

part of me. I had become a financier, and was otherwise excluded

from the

continuity.

On New Year's Eve 1971 I walked with Depew,

Gary Elder,

and others along a pathway through the brush, watching the stars and hearing the wind across the live oak. Depew talked about the

baseball (a nonliterary interest we shared), and I knew in my heart it would never be. When, a few days later, the next issue, on

notice came from New York that Dust had gotten its first grant,

enough money to see it through four more issues--enough, per haps, under Depew's editorship, to reestablish the magazine as an important vehicle of experiment in the country, I replied to CCLM: $] ,500 is too little, and it is too late. I must turn it down. But CCLM, unable to

stop its wheels in time,

anyway, and I put it in the bank. Dust had bitten its last day.

sent

the money

They stopped payment.

437

ON KAYAK George Hitchcock

George Hitchcock, editor of Kayak. Photograph by Gerard Malanga.

The magazines that have influenced George Hitchcock include transition, Hound and Hom, Circle (edited by George Leite in

Berkeley), and Robert Bly's The Fifties. Mr. Hitchcock was brought up in the provinces (Oregon during the twenties and thirties) where, as he says, "the distant drums of surrealism, com munism, and French decadence could be heard." His artistic mas

Georg Trakl, Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Wallace Stevens. He spent one semester (1937) in the Berkeley graduate school, then dropped out and joined the work ing classes. For most of his adult life he has lived in San Francisco, working in shipyards and factories and writing during the winter seasons. According to Mr. Hitchcock, many San Franciscans of his generation thought of themselves as Europeans. This artistic alienation from America was reinforced by Red-baiting and po litical blacklisting. He has never supported himself by literary or magazine activity. Of late, lecturing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has replaced shipbuilding and landscaping as his main source of income. George Hitchcock is the author of a novel, two plays, a book of stories, and seven books of poetry. He has edited The San Fran cisco Review and Kayak. ters were

If there is any discernible trend in the publication of little maga zines over the last decade, it is certainly only numerical: there are more

and more of them. Because of the widespread

availability

of low-cost offset printing equipment and a newfound generosity on the part of the National

Endowment for the Arts, small maga

zines have proliferated at

growth

unprecedented rate. Is this boom

good thing? I am of two minds about that. Certainly from

the political or social point of view it is preferable to have several

thousand localized and generally anti-establishment voices, and any shift in that direction and away from the control of publishing

by our great monopolies is desirable. Little magazines have come to be an integral part of the counterculture and, by their indepen dence and intransigence, offer a really hopeful alternative to the increasing stranglehold the corporate marketing mind has over our traditional cultural outlets.

Yet at the same time I'm afraid the new wave of little magazines,

by their very number and fundamental sameness,

has created

439

confusion

and

possibly read more than a thousandth part of them? And isn't it probable that a sort of literary Gresham's Law has come into effect-bad writing driving out good, or at the very least inundating it in a surf of paper? I have no real answers to these questions. Analyzing the state of the Zeitgeist has never much appealed to me. Artists are usually better off leaving such questions to the sociologists and historians of letters. In what follows I shall merely offer a few opinions based on twenty years of independent publishing, both of bocks and magazines, appending some caveats for those who may be con sidering a similar plunge into the unknown. In the late fifties, encouraged by sparks from the bonfires of what was then called (in retrospect, a bit optimistically) the "San Francisco renaissance," I shared editorial responsibility in the newly launched San Francisco Review. The magazine was the creation of Roy Miller, a San Francisco lawyer whose impulses were, I suspect, as much sociological as literary. At any rate, he had gotten an article by Bertrand Russell and poems from the ever-generous William Carlos Williams and e. e. cummings with

apathy.

Who

can

which to launch his first issue. There was also, I think, a prose poem by Bill Saroyan and a two-act play of mine that had been

recently premiered by Jules Irving at the Actors' Workshop. It was because he admired this play that I was invited to sign on as associate editor (no salary, of course). That was more than twenty years ago, and, once hooked, I've never properly been able to get away. The San Francisco Review was rather ambitiously conceived and, I'm afraid, never quite lived up to its initial promise. For one thing,

letterpress printed in England and shipped to its editors via book post; consequently, there were vast and irksome editorial and publication delays. Even more important, there was a very substantial deficit for each issue. The deficit was made up by the editors but, I hasten to add, not by the associate editor. And in any it was

red ink as case, it didn't run to such astronomical projections of

by the other San Francisco literary magazine of that the period, Contact, whose editors, Bill Ryan and Evan Connell, five the in grapevine tells me, contrived to drop around $70,000 or six years of the magazine'S existence. But I soon learned the number-one law of little magazine pubwere incurred

440

lishing: no literary magazine in America can hope to break even without either financial subvention from a patron or the discovery of some way to beat the printer's bills. Another lesson I also learned was that collective editorship, even with the greatest initial enthusiasm, has dreadful drawbacks. In fact, I should be inclined

initially promising publications have been ruined by the multiplicity of ladles in the literary broth than by any other single cause. The three of us at San Francisco Review (very shortly a third editor who was prepared to assist in the financing was added) regularly disagreed. Of course, that in itself is not a bad thing, and I look back upon many of our fiercer arguments with a certain retrospective relish. But what invariably happens with an editorial board of equals is that either-to borrow Orwell's phrase-one becomes more equal than the others, or the accep to

think that

tance basket tends to become filled with submissions which have as

their least common denominator the fact that no one objects

to them very strongly. And I am afraid any magazine edited along

these lines is

ultimately doomed to a tepid eclecticism. In any event, soon enough the money ran out. Roy Miller, the founding editor, went back to the law; he is at present compiling a parlia mentary guide for, I believe, the Library of Congress. June Degnan, on whose shoulders the lion's share of the financial responsibility had fallen, went on to greener pastures as financial consultant for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign. We had published twelve issues, some good authors, and a fair amount of rubbish, and had summed up the magazine by issuing, in collaboration with Jay Laughlin of New Directions, one paper back collection of which I am still quite proud. But I had merely gotten my feet wet. I was convinced that the only effective way of publishing a little magazine was through an absolute dictatorship. This method of government, while cer tainly not to my taste in the commonwealth, seemed to me then, and still does, the only one that works in the world of art. An editor who is not prepared to be an autocrat in matters of literary taste, who is not ready to face with a smile the raucous cries of "Elitism!" would be better off somewhere else. Far too many editors or quasi editors lack the courage of their convictions. Many go into

little-magazine editing with the psychology of corre spondents of a Pen Pal Club or a society of clock collectors: they 441

want to get letters; they want to be liked. A mistake. I have met

others whose activities are ruled by the conviction that their chief function is a philanthropic one toward young writers. Of course, certain amount of vaguely diffused benevolence may be a by product of the publication of a good little magazine. But it should a

always be viewed suspiciously as a by-product and nothing else. publisher, and thus undertakes complete all for responsibility aspects of his magazine, should, I think, have first of all a responsibility to himself-that is, to please him self and to meet his own highest artistic standards. His second responsibility, I should like to argue, is to his readership, not to an amorphous, anonymous "public" but to a readership made up of individuals, with each of whom the editor can envisage an enjoyable conversation. If such a readership does not exist, then An editor who is also

it's up to the editor to invent it, and in time nature may come to

imitate art and provide him with it. Somewhere very far down the scale of responsibilities comes the welfare of novice authors. And even there, let us remember that patronizing other human beings, and particularly bad writers, is a crime which should be punished by immersion in boiling

well, perhaps a boiling puree of old rejection slips. In 1964, alone and armed by my experiences with the troika at San Francisco

Review, I launched Kayak. The title was not

accidental; in the initial issue I defined a kayak as not a galleon. ark. coracle or speedboat. It is a small watertight vessel

operated

by a single oarsman. It is submersible. has sharply pointed ends. and is con structed from light poles and the skins of furry animals. It has never yet been successfully employed as a means of mass transport. It was my intention to publish chiefly poetry showing certain tendencies which I admired and felt to be gravely underrepresented by the then existing poetry journals. These tendencies can, I suppose, be roughly defined as the various branches of contem porary romanticism. Romanticism is, of course, a very loose term,

perhaps exclusively associated with Coleridge, Keats, Swinburne, Rossetti, and their epigoni. However, specifically modern roman ticism seemed to me to be work in the imagistic and surrealist modes. In fact, I don't think it an overstatement to say that sur

realism, in one or another of its forms, is the quintessentially 442

Above: Kayak, Vol. 1, No.1, Autumn 1964 (courtesy Northwestern

University Library). Overleaf: a Kayak rejection slip (courtesy George Hitchcock).

editors of kayak feel that what we need .. ion i. not

Sorry. but the your .ubmi

thH se •• on.

quite

Thanka anyway.

modem guise of the romantic movement. At the same time that I was prepared to flaunt my own predilections for imaginative and

subjective poetry of this sort, I didn't want to shut any editorial doors on romantic poetry in the English tradition where it was still alive. I thought when I started Kayak, for example, that I should prove a very poor and imperceptive editor if I were to tum down the work, let us say, of a younger Dylan Thomas or David Jones simply because it didn't measure up to some pre established canons of surrealist taste.

Anyway, in practice no editor worth anything creates his magazine on the basis of a-priori considerations. Theories are interesting, but in artistic discrimination the viscera play an equally important part. So to the catalogue of preferences I've listed above I should add a list of my often irrational hates, par

ticularly since by character and ancestry I have always been a rebel and tend to be provoked into action more by what I don't like than by positive affinities. Thus in 1964, listed in no par ticular order, I actively disliked neoclassicism, the nee-Hemingway "tough guy" posture, most of the New Criticism, the Vietnam war (already in its initial stages), the banal eclecticism of Poetry (Chicago), excessive academic analysis at the expense of feeling, our national administration, the pseudo poetics of Charles Olson and his Black Mountain disciples, the cliquish pretentiousness of many of the Beats, poets preoccupied with the trivia of suburban existence-in short, 90 percent of what was being written or done in my own time. Enough fuel to keep my critical fires burning for quite a while. In the early sixties I was certainly influenced as well by Robert Bly and his rediscovery of what was then popularly referred to as "the deep image" of European and Latin American surrealist poetry. However, it was more than forty years ago that I first began to read Breton, Soupault, and Garcia Lorca, to mention but three, so what may have been a discovery to Robert Bly was not exactly a novelty to me. I think Bly performed a great service, with the though, early issues of his magazine The Fifties-to become in later decades The Sixties and The Seventies-and for a number of years it was certainly a model to me of what could be accomplished by energy and cantankerous individual taste.

Since Robert has apparently lapsed into unforeseeable depths of 445

Foal'

THE++ SIXTIES

MAGAZINE

POETRY

AND OPINION

Above: The Sixties, No.4, 1960, edited by William Duffy and Robert Bly (courtesy Anania Community Trust). Opposite: Robert Bly, reading.

Photographs by Gerard Malanga.

inwardness and Oriental mysticism, my own extrovert's empathies with him have diminished a bit over the years.

Still, if all this means anything it is that an editor or poet is

capable of creating a magazine worth reading only if he feels passionately, if he brings to his work deeply held convictions and a taste founded upon something more committed than the desire for personal celebrity. And particularly in America, where getting ahead has been the major ideology for a century or more, this attitude is not found every day. People sometimes ask me what they should do to make their forthcoming magazines successful. I think the only sensible answer I can give them is to start by forgetting about success. In our literary climate the only real successes are the honorable failures. Then, of course, they should read widely, learn about printing, and cultivate their own passionate prejudices. With these maxims in mind, they may find some joy in their work, and who knows?-sooner or later they may earn the esteem of a few ardent readers. There are far too many magazines being published in America today that bring such stern joys to no one at all and fulfill no particular purpose unless it be to feed the editor's vanity or advance him up the ladder of academic promotion. This of course brings me to the literary magazine spawned by a university English department or one or two ambitious creative writers within it. When editorial responsibility for such a magazine is turned over to students, it probably fulfills a sufficiently honor able pedagogical function and can be justified on those grounds. But when, as is more often the case, it is edited by a faculty committee with one eye fixed on the promotion and tenure com mittee and the other following the rise and fall of New York publishing reputations, then I for one can do without it. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with university patronage of a literary magazine, but the university would be well advised to make sure that it is spending its money on the genuine living article rather than a mere ecJectic grab bag and vehicle for faculty ambitions. I can think offhand of only two or three university-financed reviews in which the impact of a strong edi torial personality has created a vital magazine. The examples that come to my mind are those of David Ray and the strong sociaI radical consciousness he has brought to the editing of New Letters 448

for the University of Missouri at Kansas City; of the elegant and rather standards James Boatwright has given to Shen

patrician

andoah at Washington and Lee; and of Robin Skelton, who has brought such a distinctively international flavor to the Malahat Review at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. In all

magazines appear to be run on the autocratic principle, and their achievements are counterbalanced by the dead, doughy weight of several score of other magazines-which shall here be nameless-edited by faculty committees. Of course, if one is going to edit without patronage-and that has always been my personal choice-then the prerequisites must be sufficient mechanical and printing skill and a great deal of free these

cases

the

time. I have no advice as to how to secure the latter, but offset

printing equipment is today so readily available at a reasonable expenditure that I am inclined to think the chief prerequisite for any editor is to learn to print. Of course one doesn't have to approach printing with the zeal of a William Morris at Kelmscott, although it is certainly a nice thing to be able to do beautiful print ing; but some knowledge of offset processes, or at least of typesetting and paste-up, seems to me to be absolutely fundamental. Besides which, I am with Morris and Blake in prizing the written word that you have designed and made with your own hands over and above the product of alienated labor. In a factory-ridden world, the little magazine can be one of the rare creations in which thought and labor meet without the intercession of the impersonal processes usual in our society. And as for Kayak, which is now publishing its forty-eighth issue, it is in its design and production always with the freely given help of a sodality or brotherhood of poets-that the joy of the thing lies.

449

DOING CATERPILLAR Clayton Eshleman

October 1967 Paul Blackburn: NAME CAST INTO THE TREE-ALPHABET FOR MATTHEW CRAIG ESHLEMAN born at

Lima, Peru, FEBRUARY 22 (?), 1966

Robert Duncan: RITES OF PARTICIPATION PASSAGES 30 •

Gilbert Sorrentino: S POEMS. .

•

•.

•

...•.••..•.•.•...•.

.•...•••••••.••••.••••

•

Gary Snyder: OCTOBER.

A Test of Translation 1:

Montale..

.......•..

Nancy Spero: 6 GOUCHES:

Helicopter "K.I. L. L." 196724 x 36 Helicopter "K. I. L. L." 196724 x 36

1. 2.

...............

3. "The Bomb'

196627 x 34

4. "The Bomb"

1966 27 x 34

1966 24

196627 x 34

"Helicopter"

6. "The Bomb"

Leon Golub:

BOMBS AI'<'D HELICOPTERS ---THE ART OFNANCY SPERO.

...•..

Margaret Randall: THE ANSWER.

Norman O. Brown: FROM POLITICS TO META POLITICS.

•

David Henderson:

PSYCHEDELIC FmEMEN. A Test of Translation n.

•

Vallejo.............................

Cld Corman: THE ANGEL OF NECESSITY

..•....•.•.••.•...•.••...••••••

103

Diane Wakoskl: IN GRATUITUDE TO BEETHOVEN.

131

Frank Samperi: 6 POEMS.

cover:

.................•...........

135

Nancy Spero: "The Bomb" 1966

27 x 34

Caterpillar, Vol. 1, No.1, October 1967, back cover showing (courtesy Northwestern University Library).

contents

Clayton Eshleman's aesthetic bent was early influenced by the jazz improvisation of Bud Powell, but when he was twenty-three Mr. Eshleman began to read and write seriously. The following year he began to edit the magazine Folio, funded by the English department at Indiana University. After three issues in 1959-1960, Folio was discontinued because of adverse reaction to accepted work by Allen Ginsberg and Louis Zukofsky, which he was unable to publish. In 1965 Mr. Eshleman went to Lima, Peru, to do re search on Cesar Vallejo. There he was asked to edit a bilingual magazine funded by a Peruvian cultural institute, which turned out to

be a front organization for the U.S. Information Services. The

magazine was discontinued when he refused to withdraw some pastoral poetry by Javier Heraud, who was a member of the Com munist Party. In 1967 Mr. Eshleman started Caterpillar. Clayton Eshleman has published thirty-six books, including his translations of Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, and Aime Cesaire, as well as his own original verse. His co-translation (with Jose Rubia Barcia) of the complete poems of Vallejo will be pub lished in 1979 by the University of California Press. Mr. Eshleman teaches in a black ghetto high school in Los Angeles and gives private poetry tutorials. He will be traveling in France this year on a Guggenheim fellowship to do research on painted paleolithic caves.

I spent, on the average, around three hours a day on Caterpillar

magazine during the six years that I published and edited it. Once Caterpillar was under way, there were generally four or five un solicited manuscripts in the mail each day. I was never inundated, probably because the magazine had an exclusive look about it (although 168 different writers and artists appeared in its 4,000 pages) and also because it printed "difficult" poetry. Manuscripts that I was not interested in I sent back the day I received them and always wrote a personal note or letter, which at least showed that someone had actually read the submission. I always appre ciate that personal note when another editor rejects my own writ ing, and I took it for granted, well into Caterpillar's run, that others did too. But it wasn't true. Many people became irritated when I wrote them that I did not like their writing well enough to print it and occasionally told them why. Gerard Malanga 451

took one of my rejection notes,

printed it at the top of a page, wrote his reaction under it, and mailed it out to people he thought would be sympathetic. An aggressive "gay" activist from Boston, Charley Shively, sent me a group of poems with a letter which he signed "gayly yours." I resent causes being used to push near-art, so when I sent back Shively's poems, at the end of my explanation as to why I was not printing them I wrote something to the effect of why did love have to be qualified by "gay"-what was wrong with simply love? A bit caustic, true-but that was the way his poems and letter made me feel. A couple of weeks later I received from Shively a ten-page attack on my own poetry, which I answered by saying that under the circumstances I would not deal with it. Both my letters became part of a mimeographed "Shively Eshleman correspondence" packet which Shively, without my permission, mailed out to people. Amazing how these things proliferate. He mailed a copy to Richard Grossinger, who was writing an essay on androgyny at the time. Grossinger had pre viously written me about how much he admired a book of mine called Altars, in which my acknowledgment of Wilhelm Reich's work played a small but crucial role. The next thing I knew, Grossinger had lifted sentences out of Shively's attack and incor porated them in his essay in such a way that Reich and I were made to look like heterosexual chauvinist pigs-as if that is what both of us are about. So doing Caterpillar was always lively, and there was meaningful conflict as well as the kind of flak I have described above. Such is

inevitable if you do a magazine that gets under people's skins and makes a dent in the existing scene. Someone told Cid Corman, when he was preparing to start his magazine Origin in the early

1950s, that he should be willing to stick with it for at least five years or the magazine would have no real effect. Corman did, and I think that is true. When I began I committed myself to three to years and/or twelve issues (having no idea how I was going hold to that promise), and in this regard a bizarre thing occurred in the spring of 1970, after the eleventh issue came out. I was mailed a copy of a magazine called The Smith, edited by a Harry Smith, in which Smith had encircled a statement for me to note. I was advised that if I tried to publish Caterpillar after the twelfth issue, a group of (unnamed, of course) magazine editors would 452

seek an injunction to prohibit me from doing so. On the one hand this was pretty funny, but on the other it reeked of self-hate and the yellow journalism by which Smith has tried to get his magazine known. When Caterpillar did not stop publication, there soon began to appear in The Smith vicious attacks on a number of people

associated with it. The main reason I began Caterpillar was that I did not feel

poets like Robert Duncan, Diane Wakoski, Jerome Rothenberg, Frank Samperi, Cid Corman, Louis Zukofsky, and Paul Blackburn had a dependable and generous outlet for their writing. I hoped that these poets, along with perhaps a dozen more, would become

regular contributors to the magazine and that around this core I could bring in eight to sixteen pages of art reproductions per issue as well as writing by younger and lesser known poets. I saw a poetry magazine as a granary of sorts, where writing could be stored until it was to be consumed or consummated in a book,

midpoint between its inception and its ultimate form. Caterpillar was useful to me in this way when I was working on Altars. On several occasions I put a fresh section or two into an issue of the

magazine to test it in a context and see how it looked at that distance. I also hoped that if I got the magazine out regularly readers would be able to follow the development in regular con tributors' writing. Looking back, I think that it was possible to do this in the case of Robert Kelly, Thomas Meyer, Kenneth Irby, and Gary Snyder. Another thing that was on my mind when I started the maga zine was poetry in translation. It seemed important not to push it to the exclusion of American poetry (as Robert Bly had done in The Fifties and The Sixties) because I was convinced that it was

important for us to read ourselves in 1967 than to give priority to translated poetry. On the other hand, the quality of translating was much on my mind, so I adapted Zukofsky's "test of poetry" and made it a "test of translation" and did the first two tests myself, on Cesar Vallejo and Eugenio Montale. My idea was to set differing translations of a poem side by side and, with more

minimum of comment, encourage the reader to measure them

as articulations of the we needed new

original poem. Behind this was a sense that translations less than we needed to know exactly

what had been done in the past. 453

Caterpillar, No. 20, the last issue, June 1973 (courtesy University Library).

Northwestern

I didn't print any of my own poetry in the first issue, but as I was

putting the second one together I decided that something of mine should be in each issue. I felt that this would give the reader a kind of yardstick by which to understand and measure the editing, would put me on the line and involve me much more rawly with what I was printing than if I just edited. Since I was not trying to do an eclectic magazine, but was doing one with a definite point of view, I wanted this point of view to be immediately visible. I also wanted to bring things that were not poetry per se to bear on poetry. I experimented with macrobiotic cooking for a year and in number 3/4 edited Georges Ohsawa's The Book of Judgment down to four pages and set it before a long poem by Theodore Enslin. In number 5 there was a scientology lecture, in 7 and 10 passages from the writings of Reich, and in 13 a statement by Billy McCune, a convicted rapist. The McMaster lecture on scien tology looked suspicious almost as soon as number 5 was out. Putting it in Caterpillar, in a context with thoughtful writing, made its slovenliness evident to me, even though it had not been evident when I was sitting in the scientology offices on 32nd Street. For the entire year before I started the magazine, I had been very much involved in protesting the American destruction of Vietnam. The first issue carried an edge of that protest and anger, but by the second issue I had realized that Caterpillar was not the place to take the matter up. Curiously, the first issue, with its exploding man on the cover, its bombs and helicopters, its N. O. Brown lecture and Margaret Randall essay on Cuba, got me a job a couple of years later at the California Institute of the Arts. On the basis of that issue, Maurice Stein, who was forming the Department of Critical Studies, decided that I was a poet-revolu tionary, and, I guess, since he liked the idea of having at least one of those around he hired me. When my wife Caryl and I made the move to the West Coast in 1970-after the appearance of the twelfth issue, devoted mainly to Jack Spicer's early writing-and

Stein and I got to know each other, he realized that the first issue was the least

typical of all the issues that followed. It was never a

matter of deciding that the anger was merely my own and should not be directed toward American genocide, but rather a realization

that I did not want to use Caterpillar to "demonstrate" in. After 455

printed those horrifying photos of twelve-year-old napalmed Vietnamese girls in 3/4 (photos which Ramparts refused to run when they did an article on war victims), I really didn't know what more could be said. I had them set right after the translation of a strong poem by Aime Cesaire, which opened: The heavy hit of machete red pleasure full into the forehead there was blood & that tree called

flamboyant

...

to test those words of violence right up against the visualization of

what violence in our time has become. I had invited Robert Kelly to co-edit the magazine with me.

Kelly wrote back accepting my gesture, but saying that he felt the magazine would be weakened by dual editorship. He did, however, offer to become a contributing editor and to send me his own writing regularly as well as collect pieces from others. We worked out an agreement whereby whatever he sent of his own, plus up to twenty pages of other writing, would go into Caterpillar without any editorial tampering on my part. This arrangement turned out very well. Besides bringing in material that I would not have other wise solicited--or sometimes have been very sympathetic to--it made me stretch, to the point of allowing more to happen in the magazine than I probably would have allowed had I done it completely alone. At times I picked up Kelly's enthusiasms and invited someone who had previously been a Kelly contributor to send work directly to me, thus releasing space for Robert to fill in with new people. I had printed that long poem of Theodore Enslin's in 3/4 but did not feel any deep engagement with his work. Kelly sent me some short Enslin poems for the next several issues and

urged me to think more about what he was doing. When Ted read 1969, Caryl and I went, and both of us, Caryl especially, were moved by a section from a long work-in-progress called "Synthesis." The following week I reread everything by Enslin that I owned, and decided that Robert and Caryl were right. Beginning with the eleventh issue, I serialized sections of "Synthesis" to the end, printing around two hundred his poems at Max's Kansas City in

pages of it. Having been in Reichian therapy, I should say something about in my doing Caterpillar. The therapy in itself was the role it

played

not a distraction from Caterpillar, for I only saw Dr. Handelman,

456

my therapist, an hour a week-but it flushed me out into the world, looking for people I could have real contact with, to such an extent

that at times that was the focus. It was often difficult for me to

acknowledge poems that were not involved with self-confrontation and contact in the way that I thought they should be. Of course, one has one's own set of priorities, and one must stick by them. And to the degree that therapy taught me how to free my intellec tual energies I became a more discerning and severe reader. Kelly's poetry at this time was, in a number of ways, almost contrary to mine, especially in the way the two of us handled the self. Yet, although this may not be apparent for a while, our poems are

deeply compatible. Glancing back over the twenty issues in order to write this essay, I have found that a hundred pages or so of material now seems irrelevant to Caterpillar and does not support my own concerns at

the time. Rather, it is material that I let get in when I allowed my attentions to go slack, or when I allowed myself to be influenced

by friendship. This latter consideration; as everyone clearly knows, is a big determinant as to what gets in the little magazines and what does not. Michael McClure gave me some interesting visual poetry and a cover for number 6, then offered me a photograph of himself on his motorcycle to run in number 7. I remember being at the McClures' when this happened. We were sitting around the table having a good time, and Michael was saying that I should print

photographs of all my contributors, for if some of the poets saw what they looked like they would write differently. That remark seemed funny at the time, but I wasn't convinced that it meant

anything other than being Michael's way of slipping his photograph into Caterpillar. I humored him because I liked him and his writing, but in doing that I was wrong. Printing the photograph led to the

following situation: Michael sent me some publicity on plays of his which had been produced in California and at the same time asked me to give his New York agent a free one-page ad. I wrote

him back and said that if I agreed to do that I should also give free one-page ads to all the other contributors' publishers. I would,

however, compromise: if he sent me a new unpublished play to print I would give the agent a free half-page ad. He never an swered my letter and I have not heard from him since.

Another variation

the

friendship problem came

up with

457

Bernard Forrest. Bernard was a retired Lockheed accountant who had discovered art late in life and spent his days writing literally thousands of short poems and painting thousands of paintings in a beautiful

redwood house in the Beverly Hills hills. Bernard was

opened his house to hundreds of artists. There was one guest room, which was nearly always occupied by someone who needed a place to stay for a while or someone just passing through. I stayed with Bernard for a month in the summer of 1968, and since he read Caterpillar and was always showing me his poems, I knew that he wished I would print something of his in the magazine. Even though I did not think what he wrote was very interesting, I would always read what he showed me, hoping to find something that I could justify printing. One day I found four poems that almost made it as they were and that looked as if they could become acceptable with some cutting and revising. So a

very sweet guy who

I cut and revised them, and told Bernard that if he would agree to my changes I would run them in number 6. After the issue came out, I saw that the poems were odd hybrids and as such did not

anything. I still think it is okay to rewrite someone's poems way of telling him what you see in what he has done-that seems more useful than mere descriptive criticism. But unless the original author can take the results and incorporate them in some thing that is ultimately his own, they really don't belong to anyone. In spite of my moving around and being involved in other things besides Caterpillar, it was important to me to get the magazine out on time and to offer both authors and readers a sense of continuity. In fact, I think that continuity or the lack of it makes the difference between a magazine's being useful or not-especially to the authors. Yet I learned from Corman's Origin that not only should a magazine last for several years and appear at least quarterly, but it should be of real use to its contributors. Poetry (Chicago), during Henry Rago's editorship, seems to me to be a good example of a serious eclectic magazine in which you might very well have found a poem by James Wright facing a poem by Charles Olson. Yet even though Rago was generous to me-he printed my work once a year for four years-I never felt any connection with the maga zine. I sent Poetry work because it had a good circulation and paid well. In contrast to this situation, when I was living in Kyoto and mean as a

458

seeing Cid Corman a couple of times a week (in 1962-64 when he was editing his "second series" of Origin), I found that he was deeply involved with everything he published. He maintained a taut correspondence with some of his authors, and in turn some of his regular contributors could count on being featured at some point or other, when perhaps half of an issue would be given over not only to their poetry but to some of their correspondence. How ever, it also seemed to

that Origin had a central and severe

limitation-the unvarying 64-page format-and that this limita tion not

only affected how much Cid could print of anyone person's work, but also tended to prescribe a certain kind of poetry to be written. He backed the short poem to the exclusion of the

longer, or "serial," poem which in the past couple of decades has become a direction in American poetry in a way that it had not been before the Second World War. While Corman began with

Olson and printed sections from the beginning of the long "Maxi mus" sequence, and at the beginning of the "second series" printed a

little of Zukofsky's "A," Origin was primarily a magazine for

the short poem (which Corman himself has always written) in which the "self" has been omitted or resolved and is not seen as a

part of the struggle unfolding in the poem itself. Corman made his attitude clear to me in San Francisco in the summer of

1959 when he was planning whose work he wanted to

print in the "second series." He told me that he wanted to present alternative to "sick" poetry in Origin, and that he did not intend to publish such writers as Ginsberg, Burroughs, and an

McClure. What Corman seemed

anything that smacked of confession, subject matter which included drugs, and any detailed descriptions or thoughts about homosexuality or heterosexuality. While these concerns do not necessarily make a poem strong or weak, they have turned out to be elements in a gradual enlarging and deepening of materials to be dealt with in the poem. In seeking to "exercise [our J faculties at large," as Robert Duncan once put it in regard to the writing in his The Opening of the Field, many of us have attempted to eliminate the censorious mind in us which considers certain things not "proper" to poetry. By 1969 it was clear that Corman also included personal and historical mythology, when used as part of a poem's visible enerto oppose was

459

gies, in his evolving concept of "sick" poetry (see his review of Maximus IV, V, VI in Caterpillar 8/9). William Bronk and Corman-as-translator became the central figures of the "third series" of Origin. Olson, who at first represented the opposite pole of Corman's editorial tension, disappeared. It seems to me that 1945 was the point when, to update two lines of Vallejo, "the winds change atmospheric needles / and the tombs change key in our chests." As soon as the concentration camps were opened in 1945, something in the air was felt by Charlie Parker and Jackson Pollock

well

Charles Olson.

Whatever it was, it was connected with a much more complex and

complicated sense of self, and the poetry that has been touched by this phenomenon is processual, longer, and more difficult than most pre-Second World War American poetry. In Hart Crane's The Bridge a mustang is haunted by a dream in which it is really a sonnet but, like Chuang-tze's butterfly, it does not know whether it is a sonnet dreaming that it is a mustang. Crane's dilemma could also be stated as that of a poet with a plan for a long poem, where certain procedures are to take place which don't seem to work once the poem is under way; and thus the plans, as they did to a certain degree in Williams's Paterson, became at odds with the veer the poem itself was taking. In Caterpillar I wanted a magazine that was open-ended. in which the contributions, expected or unexpected, determined the nature and length of a given issue. Nothing was to be held over except work that was being printed serially. I always tried to keep an issue open right up to the time that I had to start typing the paper plates to get them to the printer at deadline time. I think that numbers 3/4 through 12 were most faithful to this intention; and they ran between 160 and 276 pages. After I moved to Cali fornia I became less willing to do big issues-for one reason be cause I was so much in debt.

In 1970. when I was writing the introduction for A Caterpillar

Anthology (published by Doubleday-Anchor in 1971 and pulped. without my knowledge. three years later). the phrase "a magazine organic to the ongoing needs" came to mind, and as I thought about the flexible issue size. I recalled the reasons for naming the magazine Caterpillar. That special word was given me by Will 460

Petersen on a Kyoto street corner in 1963, when he quoted Blake's couplet "The Caterpillar on the Leaf / Repeats to thee thy Mother's

grief." When I was reading Reich in 1966, I came across a draw ing he had made stressing

the peristaltic movement basic to all living creatures. In looking at photos of Vietnamese war victims, I would

occasionally see a burned baby who looked like a black caterpillar, and in 1966-67, when I edited a series of books before starting the magazine, I used one of these black caterpillars on the colophon pages. I was also aware of the Caterpillar tractor used in earth moving as well as in tearing down old houses, so by the time I was ready to do the magazine, "caterpillar" seemed sufficiently complex to use as a name.

In the late summer of 1967 I wrote to about twenty people, telling them my plans and inviting them to send whatever they

wanted. Most of them

responded, although there were several disappointments. I telephoned Louis Zukofsky, since I was in New York City and had visited him several times in the past year. "How is the magazine to be printed?" he asked. "Photo-offset," I an swered, and I heard him sigh. "Well," he said, "send me a list of who is going to be in the first issue and then I will make up my mind." If it had been anyone but Zukofsky I would probably have dropped the matter right there, but I did send him a tentative list. A few days later I received a postcard from Celia Zukofsky saying that Louis had decided not to send anything. Then. when I told Robert Creeley my plans, he seemed only irritated. He told me I did not have a group of poets and therefore it made no sense to start a magazine. That was it. as far as he was concerned. I borrowed from Margaret Randall an old El Como Emplumado mailing list that had seven hundred names and addresses on it, wrote up a two-page statement on Caterpillar, mailed it out, and received around 150 one-year subscriptions. I had $1,000 in the bank and a teaching job at NYU that paid $6,000 a year. For the first issue I went to a printing broker and 461

put the entire production in his hands. He told me that 1,000 copies of a 140-page issue could be

typed, printed, and bound, including for around stock, $700. After the first issue, I the old IBM

bought typewriter that I still have and typed each issue myself. When it was time for the produced issue to be delivered, odd delays started It soon became clear that the broker was not to be taking place. trusted at all, so one morning I appeared at his office and followed him around all day long. I knew that sooner or later he would have to visit

the binder, who had the issue, and then I would find out

what was up. The issue, carelessly produced, appeared a couple of months late and with it I received a bill for $1,400. When I refused to pay more than the original estimate, the broker took me to court. I went in alone and told the judge what had happened. The broker had a

lawyer who kept repeating that the magazine had been perfectly produced and that, since unforeseen costs had come about, I should have to pay the difference. The judge picked up the specimen copy and saw for himself what it looked like. He then picked up a copy of the Bible and literally tossed it into the lawyer's lap, saying, "This is a perfectly produced book." I thought that I had won and in a way I had. The judge ruled in the broker's favor but allowed him only $200 over his original estimate. Two days before issue number 2 was to be delivered, I only had a

few hundred dollars to my name and no idea as to how I was

going to pay for it. That evening I was invited to Adrienne Rich's apartment to read some poems to her creative writing class. I got a

lift back downtown from one of her women students and told

her my plight as we rode

along. She immediately offered to lend money for the printing bill and wrote out a check. Once the first issue was out, I asked Andy Brown, owner of the Gotham Book Mart, if he knew anyone who might be interested in buying Caterpillar manuscripts and correspondence. He suggested I talk with Ted Grieder, the special collections librarian at NYU. I did-and lucked out. Grieder offered me $1,700 for the first year's material and a little more for the second and third years'. This helped a lot. If I had only kept the magazine small, and limited the press run to 1,000 copies per issue, then-what with subscription checks plus the dribble of income from bookstores the magazine would have broken even, issue by issue. But in the me the

462

seventh issue the number of pages jumped from 160 to 256 and I

upped the press run to 3,500 copies, which was a real mistake. After number 6 was published, Michael Hoffman of the Book Organization, which was then very new and based in NYC, decided his salesmen could sell Caterpillar along with the magazine and book titles from Aperture, Jargon, Something Else, etc. Mostly on the basis of Aperture sales, which seemed to have a very large circulation for a serious photography magazine, I ran off 3,500 copies of number 7 and spent around five hundred dollars on return subscription envelopes and ads in the Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. All of a sudden Caterpillar had entered that no-man's land between the little magazine and the slick weekly or monthly. If I had had a large subscription base (as do little magazines like Poetry, which have been around for years and thus have many library subscriptions), or if I had had money to invest in real publicity, I might have been able to make it. But

I didn't have either. I must have had around 400 subscribers at

the time, and sold 200 copies of each issue in bookstores. After several

months, the Book Organization salesmen, who probably

didn't make enough commission off Caterpillar to push it, had sold less than a hundred copies! Instead of

dropping the idea of a larger distribution, I ap Eastern News Distributors, a national magazine distribu proached tor, and on the basis of being able to sell the Paris Review they

agreed to take on Caterpillar, beginning with number 8/9-which meant I was stuck with about 2,700 copies of number 7 and was several thousand dollars in debt. What Eastern News did was to

send a copy or two of Caterpillar to every newsstand

they did

business with, so the majority of the copies went to places that did not generally stock

literary magazines (a friend once wrote me quite surprised to find a copy of Caterpillar in a Birmingham bus station!). The issue sold fairly well. Of the 2,500 copies Eastern News sent out, I think only about 700 were returned. (I should say the covers were returned; they were torn off the unsold copies of the magazine to prove they had not been that he

was

sold, and mailed back, at my expense, to the distributor.) But each subsequent issue did a little worse, and with number 151 16-a 304-page issue priced at $3.50 (not so much today, but overpriced at the time)-the bottom fell out. Only some 700 copies were sold, 463

and most of the other 2,300 were destroyed before I could get them

back. At that point I was nearly $10,000 in debt and if my parents had not died I think 15/16 would have been the last issue. But my

parents left me a little money, some of which paid most of the printing bill, and on a modest scale I did four more issues, spaced out over two years, cutting the press run down to 1,250 and using

Serendipity Bookstore in Berkeley as the distributor. This worked out fine; in fact, the last four issues made a slight profit and I paid all contributors either $15 or $25, depending on the issue. When I think back to the period covering issues 7 through 13 I don't know how I managed to keep myself going and turn out all those copies. In fact, after issue number 5 I quit my job at NYU. From then on, until checks from the California Institute of the Arts started coming in after the publication of number 13, I had no salary. I lived off the tiny royalties from my own books and

readings (which brought in very little), and sold a lot of my personal correspondence and work sheets to Grieder. If it had not been for him (and my Greene Street landlady, Anna Donovan, who kept my rent to $85 a month), it is doubtful if Caterpillar would have gotten beyond issue 5 or 6. Ted Grieder really went out on a limb for both me and the magazine, and I will always be grateful to him for doing so. During this period Caterpillar was some

awarded two small grants of $300 and $400 from the National Translation Center for the high quality of its translations, and two

grants from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines

totaling $2,500. So at this time a new thing that I got involved in was raising money. In New York City this meant following up every lead and wasting a lot of time at cocktail parties. Occasionally I got as much as a hundred

dollars, and once Harold Wit gave me nine hundred,

which was very generous of him. He was just starting his Croton on-Hudson Press with Michael Perkins, so he also took out a few ads. When I told him I was going to see if I might have better luck in the summer of 1968, he suggested I look up an old friend of his whom I will refer to here simply as BK. Once I

on the West Coast

was settled at Bernard

Forrest's, I called BK at his Wilshire Boule

vard office-he was an investment broker-and made an appoint ment to talk with him the next morning at nine. I appeared, but

464

no one else was there.

I waited half an hour and when still no one

showed up I asked a janitor if he knew BK. He did, and told me BK might be having breakfast at Nibblers, on the corner. With my little stack of Caterpillars I went in. There were lots of men

eating breakfast, so I picked out one and asked him if he was BK. He was. He had forgotten, he said, that I was coming over; wouldn't I sit down and have some breakfast with him? In five

minutes I knew that he had no interest in little magazines and that I was wasting my time. Out of the blue he asked me what I thought about LSD. I thought he was trying to find out something about

and was probably, like most people of his profession,

against drugs. I told him I had taken LSD twice and while I had had interesting experiences, I did not think it had anything to do with the creative process as I understood it. (Note: I made that attitude up at the time for BK's benefit, but it is what I actually believe today.) He said that he disagreed, and it came out that he had been turned on to acid by a hooker a few months before, and now was experimenting with all sorts of things in all sorts of combina tions. Somehow, in talking about LSD, I mentioned that I was in Reichian therapy, and that interested him too. He said, "Let's go

back to my office and talk there." We did. He canceled all his

morning appointments and we sat in his office talking, undisturbed, until noon. At a certain point he interrupted what I was saying to ask me how much money I needed. Like the LSD question, it came out of the blue. I thought, if I ask for too much he won't give me anything and if I ask for a pittance and get it I will be a fool for not asking for more. So I shot for something in between: "Ten thousand dollars," I said. He said, "OK; I'll give you half of that, but you must first raise the other five thousand from someone else."

he said, "And be sure I get

a tax

Then

writeoff." "Oh, sure," I said,

stunned. Was this guy for real? The next thing I knew he was

inviting me over to his house, so I followed his car in the one I had rented. He showed me around, and I saw that he had a small, uninteresting painting by about every twentieth-century master.

After a brief tour of the house, we sat down at a coffee table in an alcove off the

living room, and he offered me a joint out of an elegant wooden box in the same way, I imagine, that you would offer someone a Cuban cigar. We smoked that and I got high immediately. He then pushed what looked like a fat, ornate sugar 465

bowl toward me, took off the lid, and asked me if I had ever tried "that." There must have been a pound of cocaine in it,

drug

I knew nothing about. We sniffed some and his daughter walked

in, reminding him that he was supposed to go shopping and buy some new

clothes for a trip to Europe the family was

taking the

following week. At this point he decided we should take off, get lunch, and then go shopping. I waited out front while he appeared in what looked to me like a Stutz Bearcat, but that may have been a some

went out back to get another car to drive. He

hallucination. We drove around the peaceful, leaf-mottled streets of

Beverly Hills for half an hour,

stoned out of

our

minds.

Somehow he found Santa Monica Boulevard and the pizza restau rant he

liked. I only remember eating an enormous amount of a

house special at a rickety white metal table next to the parking lot. Then we drove off to Fred Segal's so BK could buy clothes. I was

standing in a daze inside the door when he came over and said, "Go ahead, buy yourself some pants." I wandered toward the $12 corduroy rack, but BK came rushing over, exclaiming, "Hey, get yourself something nice!" So I found the leather rack and picked out a pair of gorgeous dark blue pants that cost $85. BK paid for our things from a fat roll of $100 bills. He had not found everything he wanted, so we went to a second Fred Segal's, and my head started getting funny. Without quite knowing what I was doing I walked in, picked out a $115 dark blue leather coat, and told the clerk that BK would pay for it. As soon as I did this I about fainted. Had I blown everything? Was

anything at all going to come of this?

Was it all a setup for him to put the make on me? BK found what

paid for everything without batting an eyelash, and to his house. He said that he had enjoyed our day together and that as soon as I raised the first $5,000 I should

he wanted,

drove

back

let him know.

When I got back to NYC several things became clear fast. I was not to be able to raise that first $5,000. My day with BK

going

had been an utter fluke, and I could not count on it ever happening needed the $5,000 he had promised. So And I

again.

desperately

I wrote him and said that I had raised the money, and would he send I told him that he could give it to me what he had

promised.

Caterpillar via the CCLM, and that way he would get his writeoff. Two weeks later a check for $2,000 arrived. When I tried to call 466

him he was always out and never returned my call,

I had to

start dealing with him through his secretary. She finally informed me that I would not

get the other $3,000 until BK had been shown

proof that I had actually raised the first $5,000. Then I had an idea. I called up a wealthy friend, told him my predicament, and borrowed $5,000 from him. He sent it to the CCLM as a Cater pillar donation, and as soon as it was in I asked the CCLM to write a letter to BK stating that the amount had been raised. They did, and weeks passed without the $3,000. So I then called up a friend who lived in Berkeley and told her that I would pay her way down to Los Angeles and arrange for her to stay at Bernard's if she would try to pry that $3,000 out of BK. She made the trip and was

successful: the $3,000 came and I paid back the borrowed

$5,000. The upshot of all of this was more complicated than getting the money in the first place. Since the leather suit was the only terrific looking thing I owned, I wore it everywhere, especially to Gotham Book Mart's four P.M. literary parties. Unknown to me at the time, rumors began to circulate that I was getting rich off Caterpillar (with the implication, of course, that the starving contributors were not even being paid). At the same time, some people who had been turned down for CCLM grants began to investigate the inner workings of the Council and were shown the financial report for the year. In an attempt to find any possible dirt, they disregarded the fact that the $10,000 which Caterpillar had received (of which I had only kept half, remember) had come from outside sources. In an article published in the Nation they stated that Caterpillar had received something like $12,500 from CCLM. This made me and Caterpillar appear very suspect, not just because only $2,500 been reported previously as the amount the magazine had been given by the Council, but because it appeared that I, a consultant, had been using that position to tap funds that should have been spread out among other magazines. I should have made a statement clarifying all this at the time it happened and printed it in Caterpillar, but I was never fully aware of how malicious people could be, and to what extent poets in NYC were jealous of me and my magazine. If I had been down and out, a junkie, or horribly unhappy, I imagine people would have let matters pass. But I was relatively healthy; I had bounced into 467

the city in 1966 and in a year had an impressive magazine going. It is hard to imagine the rancor that is shoveled from person to person in NYC unless you have lived there and had some of it

dumped on you. Rather than getting rich off Caterpillar, I was as broke as ever and got in deeper with each issue, because less and less money was coming back via Eastern News. Through a friend of Kelly's, I got in touch with a graduate student at Wagner College on Staten Island, a young man who had a private income and contributed his monthly graduate-assistant stipend to "worthy causes." He and I talked on the phone and he said that if Caterpillar was what he had been told it was, he would give me several hundred dollars. Before we got together, however, he made a trip to Boston and, while visiting the Temple Bar Bookstore in Cambridge, mentioned that he was planning to give some money to Caterpillar. When he returned to NYC he called

and said it was all off. When I

inquired why, he said that a bookdealer by the name of Nunnalee was

there, and when he mentioned the magazine, Nunnalee had

told him that I was selling manuscripts to NYU for thousands of dollars a year, that I ate my meals at the Ritz, took taxis every

where, and wore a fur hat! It happened that one of the charges was

true: I did wear a fur hat-but so what? I pleaded with the

student to come over to the loft and see for himself how I lived. He did, and went so far as to ask to see my checkbook. I had to

show it to him, of course. I don't remember whether the rat was out that night or not, but after inspecting the place and listening to

my refutation of all the charges-except the fur hat-he solemnly wrote me out a check for $200. Some of the charges were so

incredible-I only remember four of what must have been eight or nine-that I asked him if he was sure Nunnalee had said all that. He was, he said, and had written them down in his notebook at

the time. "Would you send me a copy of that?" I asked, and he

agreed to. Since it never came, and since I called him several times and repeated my request, I am pretty sure he was at least exaggerat ing. What makes this story even stranger is that Nunnalee himself had called me long distance a year or so before and asked me if he could buy copies of issue number 2. I had told him that it was sold out, and we had discussed the possibility of his reprinting it. He

finally decided that he could not make enough profit by doing that, and the matter was dropped. Of course, all along I assumed that 468

he was interested in the magazine, and thus would have liked to see it continue, or he would not have called me in the first place. Nunnalee later wrote me and denied that he had bad-mouthed me

magazine at all. So the whole thing remains a mystery. The NYC printer whom I have referred to several times was David Miller, who probably still manages a large photo-offset

or the

business on West 19th Street. David was another of the generous

people who made Caterpillar possible; he carried me for several years when I was unable to pay more than 30 or 40 percent of a bill when an issue was delivered.

A word about Caterpillar's subtitle, "A Gathering of the Tribes," which was dropped with number 11. It was never really true, and it took a personal incident for me to see just how untrue it was.

My impulse to gather the poetic tribes under one cover came out of my desire to do a magazine that had a single point of view and was also eclectic. Some part of me wanted to believe that by print ing poets as different, say, as Cid Corman, Diane Wakoski, Gerrit Lansing, and Jack Hirschman, and including writing and music by musicians Philip Corner and James Tenney as well as essays by the film-maker Stan Brakhage, etc., a symbolic "gathering of the tribes" could take place (and in 1967 that phrase still had a little zest left in it). And maybe it did, in away. The falsity in the phrase lies in the fact that I did not print the Ashbery tribe, the Lowell tribe, or the Bly tribe, etc., which I would have had to do to make the phrase really stick. I had formulated it while reading an essay by Robert Duncan, "The Rites of Participation," which appeared in issues 1

and 2. When Duncan sent

the second

half of his essay he asked me to send the typescript back after I had typed it for the issue. When I took the first batch of Caterpillar material over to Grieder, I told him that Duncan wanted the type

script. Ted said, "Why don't you xerox it and send him a copy?" I knew that Grieder wanted it as part of the Caterpillar archive, and since I was beholden to him I made a mistake and did what

he suggested. Because Duncan did not say anything about it, I figured that it was okay with him. Afterward, I saw him several

times. We were quite friendly, and he gave me material for issues

6, 7, and 8/9. Then in the fall of 1969 a couple of friends asked me, "Why did you do that to Robert Duncan?" Each person told me

the same story: Duncan had told them that I had stolen

manuscript from him, that because of thk, he could not work on 469

the book it was a part of, and that he wanted nothing more to do with me or my magazine. I knew the second charge could not be true if for no other reason than I had sent him a xerox of the type

script, but it also seemed bizarre that he would not have kept a copy of something he had mailed out (and, for that matter, had available in his copies of Caterpillar 1 and 2). But Duncan did have a point in his first charge. I had, against his wishes, turned his typescript into capital gain for the magazine, and this was a kind of theft. So I went over to NYU, told Grieder what had hap pened, and said I wanted to make another xerox of the typescript and to send the original back to Duncan. I did this, but I heard nothing from Duncan. The grapevine, for the little it is worth, continued to bristle with his ill will toward what Caterpillar and I represented. The incident upset me because, while I had made a

mistake, I considered Duncan to be a friend. If he had really been my friend, he would have spoken up as soon as the xerox arrived, but the way he had handled the matter meant that he had never been a friend in the first place. Suddenly the phrase "a gathering of the tribes" looked ridiculous. Not only could poetic tribes not

be gathered, but not even one tribe could be held together-and could Caterpillar even be thought of as a tribe? After issue 10 I decided it couldn't. If I ever do another magazine (and I would like to, were some one to back it

at least

financially), I would insist on paying all contributors

$50 per issue. Not only would they deserve that, but by

doing so I could eliminate some of the complicated psychological dark that accumulates in hardly discernible ways between a little

magazine editor and his contributors. Without a contributor's fee, the contributor is made to feel that he is supporting the magazine more

(in most cases) than the magazine is supporting him. True,

the neophyte is overjoyed if a well-known magazine prints a poem is a surprise. But if one reverses the and to him financial

payment

implied age differences between a neophyte contributor and an older editor, a different picture results. The neophyte editor, while possibly doing a lot of hard work for others as well as for himself, is still building his reputation with the names of the older con tributors whom he prints. If this so-called older contributor is and someone like Robert Duncan, who has remained independent has taken menial jobs to be able to do so, how must he feel when he is not only not paid for his writing but realizes that his unpaid470

for writing is being converted into cash for something or someone else? Someone told me that Gilbert Sorrentino was furious when he heard that NYU was buying Caterpillar materials. My response to him was, "What a shame that Sorrentino did not make that

kind of connection when he was doing Neon. He might have been able to do more issues, and at least the Neon archive would be all

together in one place [for little-magazine editors do not send man uscripts back to contributors unless they are specifically requested to do so; they throw them out!] along with much of the corre spondence as well." Who knows what triggered Sorrentino's an ger? Had he just been fired from Grove Press and seen me in my leather suit? Perhaps the underlying pain is that all American poets share a cookie of a dividend that in the business world might sustain a few executives for a year. And given the sense of self worth that a poet must daily raise in order to remain a poet in any meaningful way, one can see the enormous gap between sensed achievement and actual reward. And of course this is taking place in the wealthiest country the world has probably ever known, where most artists think nothing can be too good for them. My greatest pleasure in doing Caterpillar was in the preparation of the manuscript for the printer. I held off typing up an issue until the last minute and then did it non-stop for two or three days, so that the material would coalesce in my mind as a typist-reader. That typing was engaging as well as grueling, for I would often see things in typed poems that I had missed when I read them in in the case of regular contributors, when Sometimes, manuscript. I was sure that I was going to print what had been sent, I held off reading the material until I typed the manuscript, allowing myself that special pleasure of reading it while it was becoming part of the issue. Once everything was typed, I paper-clipped the longer (more than one-page) pieces together and spread them out in a kind of fan shape around me on the loft floor, along with the artwork. Then I would start assembling two or three contributions at a time, to see how they would "set" next to

each other. What

piece would be best to open the issue? To close it? There was a potential rhythm in each issue, which assumed the kind of reader who would read it from beginning to end-though with a 256-page

issue, such

reading was unlikely. Still, it was a stimulating challenge get all of that work together in such a way that it cohered and made a whole image out of all its separate parts. a

471

----�----------------------�------------!-

•

Blue Suede Shoes, Vol.?, No.?, Date? (courtesy Northwestern University

Library).

BLuE SUEDE SHoES, ISSUE 379 (THE BABE RUTH ESSAY) Keith Abbott

Any discussion of the editorial and literary history of Blue Suede Shoes must include mention of David Sandberg's OR magazine, which, although it existed for only two issues, was in some ways a model for BSS. According to Keith Abbott, the business of editing is a matter of saying yes and no. He cannot recall ever receiving any helpful comment from an editor about his work. Nor can he recall editing any individual poems, although when he has pub lished a large selection of poems by a single poet he has explained the reasons for his choices. In addition to being an editor, Mr. Abbott is a poet and fiction writer. His work includes five books and pamphlets of poems, among them Putty, Erase Words, and 12 Shot; and two novels, Gush and Rhino Ritz. His education as a writer has consisted pri marily in learning how to live in the world as a writer, and he is indebted to Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, and Richard Brautigan for providing interesting examples.

Steve Carey and I thought up the idea of Blue Suede Shoes while we were

both living in San Francisco in 1968. What we wanted

to do was a one-shot mimeo magazine and write all

ourselves under various

the material

normal

names. famous, ridiculous, Although we saw each other frequently, we began to write each other letters, submitting material for the as yet unnamed magazine. This soon became part of the charade of naming the magazine: Dear Cleat Habit, editor of Pantsed, or

...

However, I think we arrived at the name Blue Suede Shoes just by chance or drugs or something. Anyway, we submitted cutups and parodies and regular poems and imitations to each other, and 473

we soon

had a completely crazed issue. Unfortunately Steve then

moved away and took half the magazine with him. He also stopped

writing letters. Two years later I was walking into the Humanities building with the chairman of the English

Department when I saw a janitor abandoning ten cartons of mimeo paper in the hallway. "Excuse

me," I said to the chairman, and went over to the stack and put one carton on my shoulder.

No one saw me leave.

Some friends of mine were running the student government and

gave me access to a great new A. B. Dick mimeo machine. I took half of the original manuscripts that I had, and added a few more

things, and published the first issue of Blue Suede Shoes. But the impulse behind the magazine was different. I was now in

the backwaters of literary endeavor,

Washington State, and I

wanted to use the magazine to establish contact with the rest of

the literary world. Blue Suede Shoes was also a great way to avoid the boredom of graduate school.

By stealing paper from the various departments and buying only my stencils, I managed to put out four issues of BSS and four mimeo books of poetry in the first year.

Certain

things were retained from the first. Publishing poems

under famous, ridiculous, and/or normal names became very amusing, as were the specials and editorials. Other poets soon were sending me work under fake monikers. In Michael-Sean Lazarchuk's case, I was

sure

that he was

pseudonym of a

friend that, after I accepted three of his poems, I tried to get him to admit that he was really someone else.

These little amusements led to more serious incidents, one

when

Midwest editor, who seemed to take his position in literature wrote and said that the latest issue was "shit"

quite seriously,

except for Alvin Greenberg'S "Modem Oven."

managed to restrain myself from writing him and Koch letting him know that the poem was a parody of Kenneth and/ or Allen Ginsberg by Steve and me, and that we had named the writer Alvin Greenberg because that was the name Kerouac had given Ginsberg in The Subterraneans. Somehow I

474

About two years after that, I found out there poet called Alvin Greenberg.

was

Another thing I did was to play with the idea of

Midwest

magazine.

Fake contributors' notes, or notes that were a mishmash of fanciful and real information.

Deranged pleas for funds, "Life in These

Ignited States" specials, and "Statements of Ownership" that read like this: Sweat spurted /

struggled. / Blast and damn

/ marijuana anyhow.

My favorite notes to the contributors ran like this: Dear Contributor, I wish I had time to comment personally on each manuscript submitted to Poetry Northwest, but the large volume of submissions makes that impossible. The fact that you are receiving a form rejection slip is in no way a comment on the quality of your work. It simply means a knife in the white belly, for one of a large variety of possible reasons, including a shortage of space. We are only able to publish about 180 poems a year, and we receive approximately 40,000 poems a year in the mail. This rejection is not intended to discourage you from submitting further work at any time; we are dependent on your continuing interest and goodwill. I hate you as much as anyone else does, but they are indispensable; they have enabled Poetry Northwest to return your poem to you much faster than would have otherwise been possible.

Sincerely, David Wagoner Editor

Sorry to be saying no again. We're very crowded. The contributor who receives the best note may wish to submit it to Blue Suede Shoes. This month's winner of the BSS Notes to the Contributor wishes to remain anonymous;

however, other work by Mr. Snyder appears in the

pages of this issue.

Translations were also big news then and so I took any cutups and/ or collaborations that sounded like Char, Reverdy, Tzara, etc., and published them as being by them. So it came to pass

that a hearty schizoid megalomania became the editorial for BSS. And all the editors agreed with it. As for money, CCLM gave, and a few library

policy

subscriptions made

their way through the maze of forwarding addresses. Very few unsolicited manuscripts too. Even though CCLM mailed the

money to me, they always managed to have the wrong address on their grants list, and so I was spared writing too many

rejection slips. 475

Board

JOON

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OUR GAL FLO

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CODRESCU

ROBERT CREEJE{

Bl l' TH1/-; IS A.L/� }"OU

from Blue Suede Shoes, the Board of Directors (courtesy University Library).

Northwestern

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My most enthusiastic response was at first from people in New York. Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Larry Fagin, and others were most supportive and encouraging. My writer friends from 1968 San Francisco had all zeroed out, with a few exceptions, and were into post-acid backpedaling. Many were not writing any more. So I didn't get too much positive feedback from there, even after I moved back to Monterey, with the exceptions of Clifford Burke, Richard Brautigan, and Pat Nolan. Philip Whalen, There was no schedule for BSS. Basically I put everything I found or received

in a folder and waited until I was going bananas from

inactivity or too much activity (such as at the end of a prose writing spree) and then I would type up the stencils and run off two to four issues at a time. I learned

a lot about editing. How you could get the most out certain type of poem by following it with something that complemented it or contrasted with it. Sometimes the best thing

to do for a group of poems was to put them between two neutral

pieces, like a BSS "Special" and an editorial. Some poets' work was so different from the normal BSS fare, it was a pleasure to include them just to create new textures. Bruce Andrews was one

such poet.

One of the things that bothered me about other magazines was that sense of stylistic claustrophobia. A Deep Dark & Delicious Surrealistic poem followed by another Deep Dark & Delicious Surrealistic poem. The virtues of any author's style tend to get blurred if he is surrounded by other authors too similar to him. I think that from the experience of editing a magazine I learned

identify poems by their effects and/ or style, and to put them together in pleasing combinations. I have since edited a couple of friends' books, and all of us were pleased with the results. to

Another result of

editing a magazine was an impatience with

certain types of contemporary verse. From about 1970 on, the creative writing programs were turning out poets who were writing

imagist poems which were, for all their brevity and opaqueness, also very sentimental and romantic. The poets would take an object, compare it to another object, and then short and flat

478

look out the window

and

see

something mysterious,

white horse. Me arcane Magi poems, Drinkin' in the Alley poems, and what Clifford Burke has called the

Lonely Cry in the Night poems.

Eventually I became less and less amused by the various models, and I wrote a "Pre-digested Young American Poets Anthology." Here I claimed to publish the poems without their authors' names,

but with only their generic code names: "Just Tough Muscular Verse

(Midwest Edition)," "Polite Buttoned-Down Surrealism,"

"The East & West Coast Sea Shore Agony Poem," "Every Day I Have the Blues

parodies

(or Reds) Poem," etc. In BSS I published the

straight poems

sometimes

with innocuous

names

attached and sometimes outrageous names like Al Chemical. Later I published the rest of the anthology in Steve Vincent's magazine,

Shocks.

One genre interested me: the prose poem. My idea of a prose poem was one whose lines were so fast that you didn't want to slow the reader down with line breaks. Lots of

velocity. Not

lush description and none of that "of'-"of" prose where there's lobsters of knives, napkins of oysters, etc.

Sometimes

tiny story had the quality I thought of as being prose poem. Where nothing could be replaced or changed but yet it was prose. The most interesting model for these was Max Jacob. His prose poems seemed to be almost language objects. a

Several other poets shared my interest in the prose poem, and so I came to publish Michael Lally, Richard Snyder, Bill

Berkson,

Jack Anderson, Michael Sowl, Bob Heman, and Pat Nolan.

Blue Suede Shoes would also publish collections of work as one

issue. Books by Michael-Sean Lazarchuk, Steve Carey, Michael

Sowl, Mary Carey, and Pat Nolan were originally submissions that seemed to me to be worthy of taking up an entire issue. This practice led to the debacle of issues 16-20. Because I had received a huge grant for BSS from CCLM, I planned to produce two novels as BSS: Gush by myself and The California Papers by

Steve Carey. But what to do while I waited for them to be done?

Easy. I began the Decimal Series, taking BSS backward in time. The few libraries I had as subscribers became upset. 479

But then BSS had a history of library problems. Opal L. Nations

and I switched issues once. He did number 11 of BSS and I did number 9 of his magazine, Strange Faeces. This created a wonderful amount of confusion among our library subscribers. But the Decimal Series was the last straw for some of my libraries.

It was reported to me that at one library they refused to recognize my Decimal Series and were hand lettering each issue as it came in: No. 16, No. 17, etc.

I lost another library because

they became hysterical when the .3141596265 issue came out; the number was too big to put on their index cards. (Alert readers will notice that this is the number for pi, only the decimal point has been placed incorrectly. This did not deter me, though, from calling it the Pi issue.) The New York Public Library sent me an anguished letter, and I tried to convince them that this was a chance for true creativity and that

they might arrange the issues any way they wanted, be missed in the librarian's profession.

a chance not to

They canceled their subscription. BSS never did receive too much money from libraries anyhow, and basically the magazine was not sold but given away. The Decimal Series, besides providing a way out of the Gush problem, was an attempt to revive what I felt to be a flagging focus. I knew the maxim about no little mag going beyond twenty issues without going stale. So I had a satori and began to write my manifestos of Syllogism. I explained that I had finally understood what sort of poems I

should have been publishing all along, and so, instead of starting

magazine, I went backward. I sent out letters to my friends, asking them for poems that they would have written in 1968 had they known about BSS. a

new

possible in order

to smooth over the transition to the Decimal

Series, so I tried

I knew that I had to to use

use

famous decimals, such

much

reason

Ted Williams' batting average,

.406, the last time anyone hit over .400 in the major leagues, and Rogers Hornsby's equally celebrated .424, the highest batting average ever recorded. As the Decimal Series continued, the plans for publishing Gush

480

and The California Papers receded. The lean

Republican years

wiped that out. However, since then Gush has been picked up by Blue Wind Press and published, and I'm sure The California Papers will be eventually published too. The one piece of praise which pleases me the most and which I have had most often is when people tell me that they read BSS

from cover to cover. I

always feel very good about that. Blue always attempted to be a totally engrossing cheerful and odd and surprising. magazine,

Suede Shoes has

Selected Bibliography

Blue Suede Shoes, issues 1-15, edited by Keith Abbott and others. Blue Suede Shoes, Decimal Series (9 issues), edited by Keith Abbott.

Abbott, Keith, Putty (Cranium Press, 1971). Abbott, Keith, Gush (Blue Wind Press, 1975). Abbott, Keith, 12-Shot (Z Press, 1975). Andrews, Bruce, Corona (Burning Deck Press, 1973). Berkson, Bill, Enigma Variations (Big Sky, 1975). Burke, Clifford, Griffin Creek (Cranium Press, 1973).

Carey, Steve, Gentle Subsidy (Big Sky, 1975). Carey, Steve, Smith Going Backward (Cranium Press, 1968). Lally, Michael, Rocky Dies Yellow (Blue Wind Press, 1975). Nolan, Pat, The Chinese Quartet (Cranium Press, 1973). Magazines of related interest: Strange Faeces, edited by Opal Nations; The End (& Variations Thereof), edited by Pat Nolan; The Titmouse Review (Canada), edited by Avron Hoffman. Blue Suede Shoes is available in complete sets from Keith Abbott, 1020 Cornell, Albany, California 94706.

481

A HISTORY OF 10, 1964-1976 Richard Grossinger

Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough, co-editors of 10. Photographed by Gerard Malanga.

of book-length anthologies combining literature, anthropology, natural and physical science, and mythology in specific thematic issues that include, among others, "Alchemy," "Enthnoastronomy," "A Phenomenological Geography of Ver mont," and "Baseball." Unlike most magazines, big or little, 10 is, in Richard Grossinger's words, "a long accumulating poem, or myth, created by those who read it." Rather than collect and edit a number of manuscripts notable for their literary quality, Mr. Grossinger has concentrated instead on assembling a variety of texts to compose each issue, so that "the integrity of the individual pieces is less important than the coherence of the whole, either the issue or the set." "Set" here refers to the magazine's twelve-year run. In addition to 10, Mr. Grossinger also publishes North Atlantic Books. His own published work includes a volume of prose, Solar Journal; three collections of essays-Mars: A Science Fiction Version, Early Field Notes from the All-American Revival Church, and Martian Homecoming at the All-American Revival Church; 10 is

series

and The Cranberry Island Sequence, in six volumes.

10 was born

by accident and then grew out of itself, changing subject matter, authors, and readership over the years. Although it has been most commonly regarded as a kind of poetic research project, 10 is neither an intellectual poetry journal nor a collection of conventional scholarship. The actual text of the publication is very rough, with the appearance of a workbook more than a finished product. The individual pieces are often drafts or working notes, and the overall appearance is dense and continuous, like a long footnote broken by different type styles and illustrations from old texts. I know of no publication that preceded 10 in the format of a handbook

catalogue interspersed with glyphs and land scapes from hermetic and scientific sources. The work in a journal like 10 can afford to be daffy, extravagant, brilliant, sloppy, in some melange or combination, because it has no authorities to serve, no elders except its own magic. Throughout its history, 10 has published major new works of poetry and prose-in the early issues, poems of Robert Kelly, or

Edited and abridged by TriQuarterly with the author's permission.

483

Paul Blackburn, Diane Wakoski, Theodore Enslin, Kenneth Irby, and others; later on, such lengthy prose texts as Robert Creeley's

"Presences," Gary Snyder's "Letters to Will Petersen," Michael McClure's "Wolf Net," and my own designations for the tarot deck. From the eighth issue on, in particular, 10 has been respon sive to new work from

unpublished writers, much more so than have comparable magazines like Kulchur or Caterpillar, and it has

introduced such authors

David Wilk, Charlie Walsh, John Moritz, Russell Gregory, John Thorpe, Anne Oswald, Paul Kahn, Irene McKinney, Don

Byrd, Shepherd Ogden, and Jayne Anne

Phillips. Generally, however, 10 has not been a source for individual gems; it is more nearly a long accumulating poem, or myth, created by those who read it. The integrity of the individual pieces is less important than the coherence of the whole, either the issue or the set. For twelve years now, the whole set has been kept in print, with old issues often enlarged in such a way that the response appears literally side by side with the original documents. What ever weakness the journal has is a result of its commitment to text over literary value. Better writings are often not published when specifically relevant pieces fit into a given collection. Likewise, works are often used in a different way than was anticipated by the authors. Such attention to context is also, of course, la's

strength. I would date the beginning of 10 from the merging of two events, one

in the fall of 1964 and the other in the spring of 1965. In

October of my second year at Amherst College, I gathered a group of people from Phi Psi-a fraternity that nourished artists, musi

cians, political radicals, nascent hippies, druggies, and bikies, as well as an odd assortment of people refused admission to other Amherst fraternities-and together we arranged a Halloween of ceremony. For me it was a kind of inspirational celebration occult and Jungian readings, and I wrote a very high-energy dedication speech. Charles Stein brought with him Josie Rosenfeld found its way to Robert Kelly, who and The

Harvey Bialy.

speech

invited me to visit him and to begin studying with him. Later it appeared as the first piece in the first issue of 10, which was financed for fifty dollars as a "rushing publication."

Initially, then, 10 was a fraternity magazine. When the fraternity 484

•

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••

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....

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.25 10, Vol. 1 No.1, 1965 (courtesy Northwestern University Library). ,

involvement was broken off, it was resurrected as

four-college magazine (Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts), in order to get a wide editorial base and funds from all four colleges. Robert Bagge, a Phi Psi alumnus, was chosen as the University of Massachusetts editor; Lindy Hough, a poet friend, the Smith editor; and Susan Mohl, a painter, the Mount Holyoke editor. That particular constellation fell apart and was re-formed as a three-way editorship that held for the first two issues: myself, Lindy Hough, and Nelson Richardson, an Amherst student and poet. As the three of us talked over the project, we recognized our strong opposition to conventional school literary magazines and their coteries. The Amherst Literary Magazine was dominated by those who had taught writing at Amherst in recent years: Robert Frost, Rolfe Humphries, and Archibald MacLeish; it was, at the very least, literarily exclusive, but it was also so cially elitist and commercially oriented. a

10 was able to find very few local writers interested in an alterna

tive publication, but we printed our own work and solicited work from friends. My affiliations brought in people like Charles Stein and Harvey Bialy, who have remained dominant. Nelson Richard son directed the graphics, and he and his friends in New York

(Leandro Velasco and Philip Terry Borden) did the covers for the first four issues. By the time of the second issue in 1966, however, Lindy Hough and I had a falling out with Nelson over Robert Kelly, who had become our primary artistic and intellectual guide. Nelson had presented a chunk of work for the second issue,

including that of Eduardo Zalamea, Aram Saroyan, and Edwin Denby, along with a letter from Saroyan advising us that there were "better and thinner poets than Robert Kelly." We were so offended by the letter that we argued with Nelson; eventually only the Zalamea was included, and Nelson resigned as editor, though he continued to send work to the journal. The 10 that appeared in two issues at Amherst was generally mocked by the literary establishment. It had 11 parapsychology

science-fiction bent, influenced by my Halloween speech, Nelson's surrealism, a few found documents, and a rather weak letter from

Ray Bradbury. 10 was named in a moment I have trouble remem bering, except that we decided the title should be a heavenly body, name. preferably a moon, and probably the one with the shortest 486

Because of its astronomical ongms, I stick to "eye-o" as pro nunciation rather than the Greek "ee-o." We thought of the maga

zine

one-shot deal, and I

certainly never dreamed I'd be

hassled for the next "x" years with letters and uncashable checks to Lo, Ten, IQ, Id, Ion, 1.0

just (blank) Magazine.

What kept 10 going past one issue was, first, the fact that we didn't use up all our funds while selling the magazine for a quarter;

second, our interest in the work of the Aspen Writers' Workshop (summer 1965); and, third, a negative response from Amherst that was strong enough to arouse curiosity and interest. In fact, because I had become a sort of bete noire. I was able to command some

administration attention.

I visited the

president,

Calvin

Plimpton, and received funds not only for the journal but also for a film

and poetry series run by Phi Psi. We had visits from Stan

Brakhage, Robert Kelly, Paul Blackburn, and Diane Wakoski, and we showed the films of Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Harry Smith, and Bruce Conner. All this represented radical artistic innovations for the locale. People came from all four colleges, and we had something of a salon at Phi Psi. Amherst nurtured 10, though 10 never represented Amherst. Amherst's contribution was subtle-a kind of intellectual tough ness and spirit of inquiry-and in its disdainful criticism (on both student and faculty level) of our work there was some grudging admiration. The second issue cost a dollar, and we sold several hundred on the long dinner lines. If copies were abandoned on the

dining room chairs, Phi Psi members collected them, and they were sold again. In 1966 we moved to the University of Michigan, but Ann Arbor, on the surface much more worldly and artistically open, ignored 10. We tried setting up tables to sell copies, but we were in competition with SDS and other popular organizations. No one knew 10 was there. Interestingly enough, however, after we moved to Maine in

1969, Ann Arbor became one of our better

markets, and for several years we sold hundreds of every issue there.

During the years 1966-1969, 10 had no niche in Ann Arbor. The English department dominated the literary scene so thoroughly that when Robert Kelly came to town, there was no place for him to read except in our living room. Of the visiting poets acceptable to the establishment, only Gary Snyder supported us and attempted

487

to gain us a hearing. The 10 of this period was a continuation of

Charles Stein's proposed magazine of Traditionary Science (Aion), which published

only one issue, in 1964. Stein helped to guide our magazine away from literature toward hermeticism. During this time, 10 published one issue (a thousand copies) a year for six years, and sold very few of them. Io's 2 and 3 were younger cousins to Yugen, Matter, Something,

Floating Bear, Kulchur, etc. Lita Hornick was lo's first subscriber. 10 3 was an American Indian issue that preceded the American Indian issue of the San Francisco Oracle and Rothenberg's anthol ogies. In fact, it was this issue that brought Rothenberg and David MacAllister together for the first time, initially in print, later in person. It led directly to the Indian material in later Io's, which is one of the continuities: Cherokee in 4, Omaha in 5, Pawnee in 6, Eskimo in 7, Iroquois in 8, Hopi in 9, Tewa in 10, Osage in 14, Crow in 16, and Abenaki in 21. In a certain sense, this direction seems inevitable, since I was a graduate student in anthropology, but in another sense it was a continuation of my science-fiction and occult interests, and very different from Rothenberg's later (which I have criticized so strongly in

invention of other Indians

print). The Indian of 10 3 became the alchemist of 10 4. (The Amherst affiliation was continued by the submission of a poem the captain of the football team wrote on his helmet after the last game.) 10 4

(1967), the first of the fat, bound issues, was born out of

Robert Kelly's "Alchemical Journal." He submitted it, knowing it was

long and hoping we might print some of it. But the piece

moved me so much that it dominated my own work for a full year

around 1966 and 1967. I began Solar Journal at that time (its "Alchemical Sections"); I made two hours of eight-millimeter alchemical films, the Michigan seasons as flux and alembic; and I used the surprisingly available alchemical section of the University of Michigan Library to find other texts to print beside the Kelly.

(1968), called "Doctrine of Signatures," was a direct continuation of the "Alchemy" issue, moving from the field of minerals and salts to the domain of living things. I did most of the editing during a year of studying botany, ethnobotany, and ecology at Michigan, during which time I treated a text like Bold's Morphology of Plants as if it were Kelly's "Alchemical Journal." 10 5

488

I continued Solar Journal with "The Plant Book," and I entitled

the issue "Doctrine of Signatures" after a passage in Foucault. At this point I was committed to subject-matter issues and had taken full control of the journal, mostly because of Kelly's physical dis

Lindy's lack of interest. "Doctrine of Signatures," "Ethnoastronomy," and "Oecology" (with the baseball issue in seed form) were all prepared together but came out in successive years because of the slow collecting of both work and funds. Thus 10 7, the "Oecology" issue, was a direct continuation of "Doctrine of Signatures," in a direction opposite to that in which it emerged tance

and

out of "Alchemy."

The "Ethnoastronomy" issue, 10 6 the science-fiction threads of 10

(1969), was woven out of and the hermetic-scientific

threads in 10 4, but it also included two events very important in the germination of 10. The first was Charles Olson's direct collabo ration with 10, an influence equal to, and related to, Kelly's. Charles Stein had told me that Olson considered 10 the most interesting

magazine being published. Since I was editing a proposed ethnoas tronomy collection, using part of his poem "The Praises," I wrote him and told him where I was. I got back not only a couple of essays but also letters of advice and the work of other people: a very useful poem discarded by Ed Dorn, and poems and transla tions by Mike Aldrich, Lewis MacAdams, and Charles Doria. For reasons not entirely clear to me, Olson's literary executors have tried to minimize his contribution to this issue and blame me for

hustling out of him what he didn't want to say. This is foreign to my sense of the correspondence, and Don Byrd says it is because Olson's contribution stands in the way of a more purely Jungian interpretation of his intentions. The second event explains the pure astronomy in the "Ethnoas tronomy" issue. Originally, as part of the process (not usually successful) of interesting scientists in 10, we tried to get both astronomers and ethnoastronomers to contribute. There was topol ogy in the "Alchemy" issue and much natural science in the

"Oecology" issue. The ethnoastronomers we got in touch with paranoid about their scientific stature that they refused poetry. At the same time they tried desperately to get me to commit myself to a strictly scientific journal in their field. Thus the calendrics and star mythol-

were so

to publish in 10 unless we eliminated the

489

ogies, promised in the prospectus, never appeared. The astronomer whose participation I sought was Kip Thorne, who had written an article in Scientific American on the gravitational collapse of stars. He rejected an offer to publish in 10 or to be interviewed, but at that time I met Fred Haddock, a NASA-associated radio astron

through his secretary, who was a graduate student in anthropology. Haddock was cynical about appearing in the journal and was about to dismiss the possibility when he was struck with the significance of our name. "10," it happened, was the moon of Jupiter he was studying at the time, and he could not pass up the opportunity to have the newest unpublished material on 10 appear in a journal named after it. Eventually we did an interview with him and Haddock paid to have a hundred extras run off, and sent

omer,

them to astronomers around the world. Later, when 10 became

popular (after we left town), Haddock became something of a cult hero in Ann Arbor, and his whole life was changed. When I returned five years later, I found him a bearded astronomer-mage.

To fulfill Olson's crystal-flower-star ratio, I got together with another anthropology student and called up the local crystal

lographer to request an interview. He was incredulous---even more recorder, asked the relevant questions, and left. A rereading of that spontaneous inter so when we showed up at his office with a tape

view shows it to be just as hot and lucid today as it was then.

Through the early years, 10 was my own work. I did the editing if it were writing-collecting in order to gain insight, always under the guidance of Kelly, Olson, Theodore Enslin, and others. When Clayton Eshleman returned from Japan and began Cater pillar, he took up the editorial mission of publishing new poetry in the tradition of Origin and Kulchur, and Kelly became his con tributing editor. Meanwhile I was becoming more and more prone as

to pay attention to whatever in the local

scene

interested me. In

Ann Arbor, it was the library and the scientists and anthropologists; Mount Desert Island in Maine (where the "Oecology" issue was finished and published), it was the lobstermen. on

A series of events, occurring from late 1970 through mid-1971, hastened the process of Io's transformation and gave it an entirely

Sparrow published my Solar Journal: Oecolog leal Sections with an enthusiastic preface by Robert Duncan. This led to its listing in both the American and Canadian Whole Earth new direction. Black

490

Catalog (Almanac) and to an invitation from Robert Bertholf to read at Kent State with Duncan and Ginsberg on the anniversary

of the Kent campus shootings. At the same time Book

People,

born with the Whole Earth Catalog, offered to distribute 10. In 1971 Solar Journal sold a large number of copies and aroused a

curiosity about, and a demand for, 10. West Coast stores had never carried many copies, but Book People placed it there in such abundance that the first seven issues went out of print immediately (except for number 5, which lasted another year or two) ; they were reprinted with the money from the sales. Submissions increased; Lindy Hough and I were invited to do readings in many places. In the first seven issues we printed only one piece of unsolicited work (the poems of F. Paul Salstrom). After that, we received regular surprises. By the thirteenth issue, one-third of our subscribers had appeared in 10, having sent work with their subscriptions. For the first time the people who were buying the magazine and reading it were also writing it. At the time the boom was happening, it was already ending. The forces that brought it about, almost from the start, were opposed to what it was. 10 had its own obscure history, but by a coincidence it began to resemble the new ecological and spiritual publications from the West Coast. It was distributed with them and was seized upon with the same enthusiasm. Of course, this was not a coincidence; it was

general synchronous revival. When I

complained to Robert Kelly about the misuse of Jungian interpre tation in so many courses at Goddard College (Plainfield, Vermont) after I arrived there to teach, he said, "You have no one to blame

but yourself." I thought at the time that this was too lofty a role for me and 10. Now I see that it was lo-in the sense that 10 was very early and part of the tide that reached people in derivative forms. For instance, although 10 was painstakingly accurate in its reconstruction of alchemy, it participated in a general fad of rein

terpreting the occult sciences, and thus was indirectly responsible for some of the modernistic blurring and misuse of the subject. By making alchemical sources available for people to use meta phorically, loosely, psychedically, etc., 10 helped to make alchemy unavailable again, in a new way. 10 has as little currency in Plain field today as it did in Ann Arbor or Amherst; I take that obscurity to be the rule and 10's brief flourishing the exception. 491

10 8, the "Dreams" issue, marks the transition between the magazine's two periods. Contributors sent in dream material, which did not have to be verified or diligently argued. The later "Regions

and Locales" issue permitted the same sort of personal response. 10 9 is the series' first book, a collection of rough, mainly discarded

writing rather than finished work. I was working to evade the original integrity of the pieces and subject them instead to an editorial reordering. That I was the only author of the work in the issue seems incidental. I had felt the need of a science-fiction issue somewhere in the series, and since the unsolicited science fiction sent to 10 was of low quality, I published 10 own involvement with the

The "Baseball" issue

9 as a history of my

planet Mars. was

based

primarily on an apocryphal

Indian games of strategy and English field games. It fell very hollowly at first because 10 was mainly reaching a Whole Earth and spiritualist audience, neither connection between American

of which had any use for baseball. In time, it developed a specialized readership having nothing to do with the rest of the one

series. I

now

planning,

with five other editors,

revived,

enlarged baseball book, divided into sections: baseball, pastor alism, growing up, first love, totem ism landscape, strategy, numer ,

ology, autobiography, oral history, etc. For the next publishing venture, a thousand pages of accepted material

were

divided

batches titled, respectively, and Celestial Influence; Regions and

into

three

Economics, Technology, Locales; and Imago Mundi. These appeared as the three Earth Geography Booklets. Then a much misunderstood project closed

period of publishing: 10 #15, Frank Zero's book Love Minus Zero. We had already confused our readers, but this out the Maine

book on the Lama Foundation in San Cristobal, New Mexico, presented without explanation, brought outraged letters from sub scribers who expected us to continue either with our Kelly-Black Mountain literary concerns and commitments or with our Whole

Earth, geography, or hermetic-scientific emphases. The sixteenth issue was the fourth Earth Geography Booklet, Anima Mundi, but it was really a collection of smaller issues. and Locales" and "Baseball" material, received after the

"Regions publication of those issues, was included with a section on James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Oak Openings and a section based 492

Charles Olson's relatively obscure visit to Goddard in 1962 (from which tapes remained). The nineteenth issue, "Mind

Memory Psyche," edited by Lindy Hough, with Robert Bertholf at Kent State as a contributing editor, was also a generally literary collection. She decided to push aspects of 10 which had been dormant since the second issue, with sections on sculpture and photography indicating a clear, overriding sense of the artistic and aesthetic. There were plans to issue one literary issue of 10 per year, with Bertholf, Victor Coleman, Pierre loris, and Robert Adamson as contributing editors (the latter three representing

Canada, England, and Australia). However, Bertholf began his own magazine, Credences, and loris and Coleman had other edi torial projects. At the same time, David Wilk, who had participated in 10 as a writer and interviewer, remodeled his college mimeo magazine, Truck, after 10, and we turned over much of our unpub lished work to him, since we planned no new issues for some time. Charles Stein did number 17, a collection of his work called Poems and Glyphs, with a long cosmological preface constructed from tapes I made with him. Bialy did number 20, titled "Bio poesis," which proposed an exact correspondence between the genetic language (of the cells), which expresses us, and the poetic language (of the intelligence), by which we express our cellular and cosmic reality. The issue takes into account many synchronous systems: the I Ching, astrology, mathematics, memory, and em bryology. In this issue Bialy, by now trained as a biochemist, was able to present his own arguments on matter and art and to com

bine the work of such familiar 10 writers as Gerrit Lansing, Kelly, and Enslin with the four of us and Michael McClure. The issue

tight and read almost like a conference. Stein and Quasha wrote an exchange on dream science for the enlarged "Dream" issue, and I collected much of Stein's unpub was

lished Aion material and added it to a new alchemical essay of my own

in doing a third edition of the "Alchemy" issue. I also col

lected, as number 18, many of my early writings on tarot, qabbala, Indians, angels, and general occult topics. All these simultaneous projects made for a very thorough reexamination and redefinition of earlier territory, and placed 10 on firmer ground. Much of this work was done in connection with an Earth Mythology seminar at Goddard during the summer of 1974, in which I arranged to 493

teach a course (with Stein, Bialy, and Quasha) on the emergence of biological and poetic form. After that we went our own ways:

Bialy to Africa to work on native medicine, Stein and Quasha continuing to work together (see America: A Prophecy, co-edited by Quasha and Rothenberg, and the Vort issue on Robert Kelly). lo's "Vermont" issue number 21 was assembled very gradually over the same three-year period as a collaborative writing and re search project. It involved collecting current work done in Ver mont as well as culling the historical records for precise and dis tinctive descriptions of the Vermont landscape and culture. These were then "sewn" together in a large, continuous diary (360 over size pages, with photographs), to serve as a single Vermont image. The geographical-ecological remains one of the primary axes of 10, but much of that work has been taken up by Bob Callahan in the Turtle Island Foundation publications and New World Journal. So 10, first series, is complete, having circled in on its own concerns and participated in numerous rebirths and the spawning and splintering of other publications and anthologies. The second series now takes the first into account, but sings in a different key. The scrambling, collecting, patchwork quality is no longer neces sary. The first series stands as a twenty-one step initiation into a world view that might seem fragmented and discontinuous from

without, but is entirely consistent in its germination and generation through the stages. It is now time to consider where that initiation has taken us. Past the nervous energy and the encyclopedia, there is an actual world to propose.

Postscript This essay was written especially for the collection in which it appears. Since two years have passed between the writing and the publication, I will update it briefly. 10/22 and 10/23, entitled "Olson-Melville Sourcebooks," actually closed out the first full

phase of 10 in 1976. 10/22, "The New Found Land," dealt primarily with Moby-Dick in the context of North America with a very detailed summary and analysis of Olson's uses of Melville. 10/23, "The Mediterranean," with an emphasis on the Pleistocene and ancient civilization, gave a historical and an thropological perspective to Olson's Maximus Poems. Together

they were a restatement of the literary basis of 10 itself. 494

Since then, we have moved to Oakland, California, and have included 10 more actively in a cooperative network with other

journals and editors (Bob Callahan, Ishmael Reed, Geoff Young, etc.). At the same time, we have continued the process of having the journal unfold from within, feeding off itself. Four of the themes are being repeated in new issues: baseball (already as a four-hundred-page anthology entitled Baseball I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life), ecology (Ecology and Consciousness, at press), alchemy (The Alchemical Tradition), and dreams. Meanwhile issues on homeopathy and astrology are being prepared by different editors. Rereading this essay now, I am startled by my own sense then (two years ago) of lo's continuous martyrdom and "outsider" status. The facts are accurate, certainly, but it is no longer how I remember it. The arguments have come to seem less important than the continuation of a process which is grounded in some real thing, and continues to emerge and shape our own world and the world of our readers. I would call the essay,

stands,

it now

"social and anecdotal" history of lo-lacking, perhaps,

the intimation of largeness and of something there, at the beginning of time and space and history, that sustains the interest and the work past any contemporary entanglements.

495

DISCUSSION OF LITTLE MAGAZINES AND RELATED TOPICS Anne Waldman & Larry Fagin editor-poets took place on September 7, 1976, at the Boulder (Colorado) Recreation Center. Larry Fagin had been participating in the summer program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Insti tute in Boulder. Anne Waldman is the co-director of the School, with Allen Ginsberg. For the past seven years, Mr. Fagin and Ms. Waldman have worked together at the Poetry Project of St. Mark's Church in the Bowery in New York City. The project holds poetry readings and writing workshops, and owns the mimeograph machine on which Anne Waldman's and Lewis Warsh's magazine Angel Hair was printed from 1966 to 1969 and which now prints Ms. Waldman's magazine The World (founded 1966) and Larry Fagin's Adventures in Poetry. St. Mark's may be one of the only Christian institutions to spawn a literary movement since T. S. Eliot became an Episcopalian. This conversation between the two

496

Larry Fagin: The question was, "How do you edit a little magazine, run the Poetry Project and the Kerouac School, teach, and still find time to write?" And the answer is, "You do, that's all."

Actually there never is

Anne Waldman: I have to make time.

enough time. But the jobs get done. Little miracles. If I didn't have all these projects I'd probably write too much. L. F.: How do you find time to do what you're doing this minute?

(sunbathing) A. W.: I've found I can write almost anywhere and at any time, not

just a particular time slot-in notebooks, or using a tape

recorder on an airplane, or in a car, or during some other project

activity. Frank O'Hara used to write in the middle of cocktail parties; Allen Ginsberg, too. or

L. F.: I've seen Allen writing at someone else's poetry readings.

Turned on.

A. W.: I think prose is another matter. You need a large block of time for prose. For long poems, too, and for open-ended writing where the idea is to collect material from all kinds of life situa tions and episodes

Spontaneous performance and chant, too, where you're composing on the spot. So there's more time than you'd imagine for your own work, despite everything else ....

you have to do. L. F.: Jack

Spicer believed that a poet who had to write and simultaneously edit a magazine couldn't do both or either very well. A. W.: There are no hard-and-fast rules.

contemporaries inspires be distracted by that.

Reading work by my in my own writing. But others may

L. F.: I think editing Adventures in Poetry helped my writing. Seeing manuscripts I admire goads me to get busy. There was a

time conflict with the Poetry Project, but even there I got feed

back from the readings. It's all parallel, but maybe during a given

period one aspect (writing, editing, administrating, or teaching) may suffer and another prosper.

Opposite: left to right: Gregory Corso. A nne Waldman, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg. Photograph by Gerard Malanga. 497

Adventures in Poetry, Vol. 1, No.1, March 1968 (courtesy

University Library).

Northwestern

A. W.: Sure, and it's range of activities. .

always interesting if you accept a whole I've always found the best editors to be

decent writers themselves. L. F.: Right, I can't think of good editors whose work I haven't

admired.

Fagin and Waldman compile a list of favorite postwar magazines: Black Mountain Review (Creeley, Ginsberg) Measure (Wieners),

Yugen (Jones) Floating Bear (Jones, di Prima) Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (Ian Hamilton Finlay) Ioglars (Clark Coolidge) Lines (Aram Saroyan) Locus Solus (Schuyler, Koch, Ashbery, Mathews) Art and Literature (Ashbery and others) Kulchur (O'Hara, Berkson, Jones, Sorrentino, et al. ) Origin (Corman) Once (Tom Clark's series) Mother (Lewis MacAdams, Peter Schjeldahl) "C" (Berrigan, Padgett)

Chicago (Alice Notley) Angel Hair (Warsh, Waldman) Big Sky (Berkson) Juillard (Trevor Winkfield) Fuck You (Sanders) J (Spicer) Open Space (Stan Persky) 0-9 (Acconci, Mayer) Paris Review (Tom Clark only)

499

Wint('r 1961

s 1.00

I�()CUS S()LUS J

KE��ETH Kocu, On the Go. Two Poems. lhnnARA Gl'E�T, Seven Poems

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JA)IES SCIlt'YLE£t, Current EI'e11IS

A�:\E Ponran, The First of .If(JY

ERRE BOltIlWAA.IJ), Three Poems

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115

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152

H. BUIlCKIIAIIDT, LO('e ill Three Acts

1.56

FAlltnF.LJ) Ponrsn, Four Poems.

163

Above: Locus Solus, Vol. 1, No.1, Winter 1964 (courtesy Northwestern

University Library). Opposite: Kenneth Koch (below) and James Schuyler, editors (with John Ashbery and Harry Mathews) of Locus Solus.

Photographs by Gerard Malanga.

Top: John Ashbery (left) and Ted Berrigan. Photograph by Gerard Malanga. Bottom:

Chicago, Vol. 1, No.1, February 1972, edited by Alice Notley (courtesy the Dauphine Foundation). Opposite: C, a journal of poetry, Vol. I,No.I, May 1963, edited by Ted Berrigan (courtesy Northwestern University Library).

A of

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Above: Big Sky, Vol. 1, No.1, 1971 (courtesy Northwestern University

Library). Opposite: Bill Berkson, editor of Big Sky. Photograph by Gerard Malanga.

FUCK

YOU/

A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS

PEACE-fyt;,

NUMBER j Above: Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, Vol. 1, No.1 (no date) (courtesy Northwestern University Library). Opposite: Ed Sanders, editor and publisher

of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts and Peace Eye Books, and proprietor of Peace Eye Bookstore, N. Y. C. Photograph by Gerard Malanga.

The

, Vol 3

The World, Vol. 3, May 1967, edited by Joel Oppenheimer,

.50�

Lewis Warsh,

and Anne Waldman (courtesy Northwestern University Library).

A. W.: The weaker magazines, from my point of view, have been

without a specific vision; those that have solicited anything from almost any well-known poet to get a little prestige. L. F.: I don't mind the big quarterlies, though I hardly ever read

them; once in a great while something interesting shows up. They kind of prehistoric, like mastodons. And there's

seem

par ticular point of view except what's current or "important." Con

temporary Literature and that enormous Boundary both have

articles

so-so

[Boundary 2]

Frank O'Hara in recent issues. It's

interesting to see a consideration of his work in a respectable, academic setting. A. W.: Not that The World could ever be academic or respect

able, but two anthologies were culled from issues over the years (both published by Bobbs-Merrill) and I'm working on a third collection

now

contents alone scene

...

more than twenty pages for the table of lot of variety. One misconception about this

is that we're working out of one aesthetic only. Labels like

"anti-academic"

hardly apply now; Ginsberg's in the academy!

I've published all kinds of exciting material-you, too. And when

right down to it, it's the particular piece of writing (and writer) that's primary. Forget about the scene and gossip! Interesting sometimes but, finally, irrelevant.

you

come

not the

L. F.: Yes. Save the auteur theory for later. Meantime pay atten

tion to what's on the piece of paper. A. W.: Put John Wieners, Joe Brainard, William Burroughs, and

Kathy Acker, say, together under one cover and you've got quite a mixture. Or Ron Padgett, Fielding Dawson, and Phil Whalen. The combinations, when editing, can be incredibly dynamic, though here I'm doing what I most dislike-describing authors' works by their names. Dumb. What I want to say is something about the variety of writing emanating from, or passing through, the Poetry Project and, recently, through the Kerouac School. There a journal of poetics is being put together based on a series of lectures by visiting poets, such as Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Ted Berrigan, Philip Whalen, and others. 509

L. F.:

Maybe you should briefly run through a history of the

Project and The World. A. W.: Paul Blackburn had the idea of moving the readings from Le Metro,

a coffee house, to St. Mark's Church. In the fall of 1966 there was money from the Office of Economic Opportunity

Poetry Project; to hold regularly scheduled open readings paid readings by invited poets, and free writing workshops; and to print publications: The Genre of Silence, a to structure a

and

one-shot affair, and The World. At first we sent out stencils to poets in the community on which they could type their own work, whatever they chose. Joel Sloman edited that first issue of The

World, but nobody knew how to handle the stencils very well, and mailing them in tubes was troublesome. It was almost like a

sheet, carrying people's latest work (some of it still in progress), silly collaborations from the night before, and so on. news

Then

magazine and the workshops developed, energized by the readings and by certain poets and artists in the Lower East Side community. The Poetry Project is in its eleventh year and The World has evolved and changed along with all other activities during that period. New energy kept coming in. Out of the workshops came other magazines and pamphlets, edited by Sam Abrams, Tom Veitch, Bernadette Mayer, Tom Weatherly, Charles North an

interaction between the

....

L. F.: Most of whom cut their teaching teeth in those workshops. A. W.: Then I did an all-prose issue, and later Ron Padgett guest

special issue of translations, and Lewis Warsh did an issue of autobiographical writing. In a sense the magazine became more thematic, more specialized. The last two numbers, 29 and edited

30, are collections of reviews, commentary, and prose miscellany. were graced with marvelous cover designs by artists Philip Guston, Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, Yvonne Jacquette, Joe Brainard, Mike Goldberg, Britt Wilkie, George Schneeman, and others-all gratis. There's always been terrific support from writers and artists, considering that contributors are not paid and the print run is never more than a thousand. We've survived All issues

mostly through CCLM grants and community team support collating, for example. 510

L. F.:

Aspiring writers are still starting little magazines for no particular reason. There are oodles of them and they're getting to seem

A. W.: Redundant. Like the one you got last month. Suddenly another arrives with basically the same stuff, same people, and a couple of poems by each, so you don't get anything or anyone in depth no substance. ...

L. F.: I started Adventures in

Poetry in order to meet people.

A. W.: Good idea. Start corresponding, let them know there and interested. When I went to the

you're Berkeley Poetry Con

ference in 1965 I met Lewis Warsh, and we decided to do Hair. So we began by can, and others.

L. F.: You build

Angel

contacting Denise Levertov, Robert Dun

mailing list, a very particular readership, people who'll actually be reading what you've put together and who'll maybe notice how the combinations, you've done it your style-rather than just going out and trying to sell it, or getting Robert Lowell to read it and maybe give you a crumb up

from his table. Or Robert Crumb. A. W.: Angel Hair asked for

specific work from specific people to just anything arriving

from the beginning. We weren't open in the mail. L. F.: A

magazine might reflect a community of writers but I wouldn't want to keep it confined to that bunch. It doesn't matter who or where they are. The common denominator has got to be

quality, not any particular style. A. W.: The World does

consistently publish the work, including reviews, of a group of writers whom I've followed for ten years, such as Michael Brownstein, Bernadette Mayer, and Ron Padgett.

But also there have been

many interesting newcomers.

L. F.: Sure. But if Mike Brownstein submitted

you wouldn't use it. A. W.: Of course not. But I've it in general.

seen

crappy poem

enough of their work to trust

511

L. F.: But editors still go out and ask a famous poet for manu scripts, and he may send in kaka. The editors know this, but

they're trapped and they almost always lack the gumption (part of the vision) to refuse the said kaka. Of course, sometimes a famous poet's shopping lists are often more lively and more of a turn-on than most unsolicited manuscripts. A. W.: I've

encouraged young writers who ask me about pub lishing to start their own magazine, to publish their own work and that of their poet friends-say, three or four people who can be featured, presented in a big way. This instead of sending their poems out to all the big-time publications.

Magazines like Poetry are just as homogenized, antiseptic, democratic, and dreary as ever, but many of the little mags started by young writers are half-assed because they don't have a motive other than to make the writing scene. Maybe that's a good enough reason to get started, but some where along the way inspiration has to figure in it-passion, even a bit of coo-coo mania, to give the old rag that extra whatsis. Also,

L. F.: Where the poems get buried.

it's not such a great idea to have co-editors. Too often visions con

flict, and you wind up hating each other. L. F.: It's time for poets to start publishing books and pamphlets

magazines that can only give you snippets, little tastes and it's the magazine that becomes the main thing, not individual works. But a month after it comes out the magazine winds up in a pile of magazines gathering dust under the sink, or the whole stack goes into cardboard boxes, gone and forgotten, thrown out entirely. Whereas if everyone who wants to publish or be published put together one book a year (say, anything from a $150 mimeo job to a $1,500 perfect-bound edition of 1,000), the publishing problem for poets would be solved. SO GET ON What a pipe dream. WITH IT, everybody!

rather than ...

Helping a poet like Steve Malmude get going is really encouraging the likes of Mary Ferrari or John gratifying Godfrey, wonderful poets already in their thirties and forties who need a little pushing. No big publisher is going to snap them up, no bright editor at Knopf or Random or Holt or Viking (who

L. F.:

...

are

512

those editors?) will "discover" them. So the small press is

there to start them. That's the reward if you have a small press:

you're the intermediary. L. F.: Jack Kimball's new magazine, Shell, looks promising. He to have something in mind,

interesting semi-abstraction (Wieners, Ann Kim, Eigner, Donald Elmslie, Quatrale), rather than just collecting copy. It seems

shared by some of the contributors seems

edited, anyway.

A. W.: Which is refreshing. I agree with

you that the thrust should be toward books. That was the inspiration for our Full Court Press-to publish collections that wouldn't otherwise in

appear

quality format, and really get them out there. For instance, Edwin Denby's work, long ignored, was the book we had most a

in our hearts. A. W.: As for the question of the

printed page versus poets' read ings and performances, let a hundred flowers bloom, as they say. I see no problem, no contradiction. It's all working with the language.

513

u»

�'�ICPICTIOl{

New WI'M1g by JOHN ASHBERY .JEROME CHARYN

MARVIN COI-EN

STANLEY ElKIN PETER HANDKE GOLDSCHMIDT

t.s. SlMCKES

THOMAS BERNHARD

JANE DELYNN

JOHN HAWKES

ROSALYN DREXLER MAX FRISCH

JAMES KEMPTON ANTHONY KERRIGAN

JEAN

MARK MIRSKY

Fiction, Vol. 1, No.1. 1972 (courtesy Northwestern University

Library).

ON FIcTIoN Mark Jay Mirsky Mark Jay Mirsky began his professional career teaching in a public school in Boston. He became a staff writer for American Heritage

magazine in 1964, and then lectured at the City College of New York from 1965 to 1966. Mr. Mirsky taught at Stanford University for a year before returning to City College in 1967 as an associate professor of English. Educated at Harvard (B.A. 1961) and Stanford (M.A. 1962), Mark Jay Mirsky has been the recipient of a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference at Middlebury College, Vermont, and has served on the advisory board of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM). His published novels include Thou Worm Jacob (1967), Pro ceedings of the Rabble (1971), Blue Hill Avenue (1972), as well as an edition of novellas, The Secret Table (1975). He has contributed short stories to Partisan Review, TriQuarterly, New Directions Annual, Fiction, and Mosaic. His articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and The Village Voice.

I started Fiction out of desperation. One is supposed to be ashamed to admit such

things. A friend, wife of a prominent New York publisher, recently accused me of being generous and ruthless by turns. But I've never seen myself as the latter-just desperate, a state which comfortable, lucky people often misunderstand. Fiction was begun at a time when fewer and fewer magazines were taking stories for their pages, to say nothing of excerpting novels. I could accept my own dilemma and rage, all the while

saying to myself, You're no good. In 1970 and 1971, however, Stanley Elkin and John Hawkes couldn't get their best fiction printed in periodicals, my selfish indignation passed into righteous fury. I railed against a whole kingdom of

when friends like

515

periodicals-Esquire, American Review, the Atlantic, bewailed the realm of dead issue, Harper's Bazaar's discontinued fiction section, the defunct Saturday Evening Post. I cried out under a banner, and that banner was Fiction. Several incidents provoked this flag waving. Stanley Elkin came to New York to read at City College. He recited a section of The Dick Gibson Show so funny that students were falling down in the hall, banging hands on the floor, against the walls, to try to stop laughing. I asked Stanley's friend, Gordon Lish, why Esquire didn't run the pages-a tall tale about a lady with an oversized private part, shopping under the eye of a lunatic pharmacist. Lish told Elkin to change the erotic key to the chapter and maybe he would consider it. No doubt Lish was under the yoke of Esquire's puritan hangover, but it was an editorial attitude that put the book of Hosea beyond the pale of decency. Esquire, how ever, was a lamp unto my feet compared with Playboy or Pent house, where one could be sure of reading a famous writer's worst fiction. The literary journals were not especially concerned with the short story or novel. Caroline Herron had brought some vital spirit to Partisan Review's pages in this regard, but the critical essay still reigned supreme there and in the other serious reviews. Paris Review's poetry kept abreast of what was happening, but its readers of fiction, who have since awakened, had fallen asleep for a moment in

the nap time of the late fifties. I remember that once

an editor there called me to

ask the date of publication for a novel

by Ronald Sukenick. They had a section they wanted to publish. (since they had told they didn't print excerpts in rejecting a manuscript of

With regret and a certain amount of malice me

that

mine), I had to inform them that the book had been published two years before. Worst of all was reading the regional reviews from around the country. One was appalled by the difference between the discrimination they showed in selecting poetry and

experimental short story. It was a bleak moment in which we were born, which probably explains some of our noisemaking: the fact that for an instant the hack stuff they represented

we were able to get

the

national attention-the back page of the New

York Times Book Review, New York

Magazine's "Best Bets,"

around the country. For a brief space it looked like a miracle. Let us pause at that second, enjoy its a lot of newspaper coverage

516

glow. I slyly hope that the attention we got did change, at least in the quarterlies and reviews, the attitude toward contemporary American fiction. Certainly at TriQuarterly, Paris, Partisan, and a host of smaller magazines, the situation is today much healthier. Now I am forced to take the lamp from under my feet and shed the limelight on the features of one who habitually professes to detest it. Fiction owed its existence to Donald Barthelme. He

kept ragging me when I came over to talk with him. "When are you bringing out that magazine? I'll do the layout for you." I had been trekking over to Donald's to listen to his talk about books and show him my own work. At one moment I had angrily threatened to bring out a magazine in pure spite at the vast con spiracy of indifference. He took me up on this vaunt during a late afternoon hour when I was well pickled in a friendly glass of Scotch. "When are you bringing it out?" he asked afterward, whenever I saw him, again adding the fateful words, "I will do the layout." I used to meet Anne Waldman

street corners as I

walked

past Saint Mark's Church in the Bouerie, where we had both once worked in the theater. She and I would discuss Angel Hair, her

mimeograph magazine The World, and the costs of printing, cheap and expensive. In the back of my mind was a conversation I had had years before with Rudy Wurlitzer over coffee in a dingy East Side luncheonette on Avenue B about the possibility of bringing novels out in newspaper format. Offset printing had briefly revolutionized publishing by cutting the costs of typesetting drastically. If one embraced the newspaper format, which was cheap to print, perhaps one could reach an enormous readership by distributing literature for pennies. Dreams of an underground audience of good readers began to haunt me. 0 vain illusion. o but now the moment of the glow is fading and I promised .

to hold you in it for a while.

At this very instant, into my office at the City College English

department walked a fireball named Jane DeLynn. Jane was looking for a teaching job. There was nothing, but as her legs and her tongue flashed I was moved by inspiration: "Why don't you become my managing editor?" I was outlining the hypothetical magazine as she snapped, "Absolutely." And we were off and running. 517

While Jane DeLynn hunted out the cheapest of printers, Donald Barthelme produced for us a handsome dummy page which was the basis for the first issue's design and layout. In the next few

months, before we saw that issue, whenever my energy lagged I would look at the three elegant walls of type on the page, the collage which floated within them. I knew that if we never went

beyond a single number of Fiction, it would be worth it, whatever the contents, just to hold the work of Donald's eye in my hands. I had to hug the dummy many times. City College kept blowing hot and cold on the project. I felt that the financial support of the college was critical if we were to be able to open an office, send and get mail, answer telephones. I was blissfully ignorant of how much time Fiction would be stealing from my writing and teaching. In an English department committee meeting I had received a pledge from the powers-that-be to underwrite the maga zine. But when I had the dummy in hand-stories in manuscript from Stanley Elkin, Donald Barthelme, John Hawkes, Max Frisch, Jerome Charyn, etc.-I was suddenly told that the funds were not there. I knew I couldn't wait. I swore silently. I collected pledges of financial support from friends. And when the issue went out to the

typesetter, I went to the bank and withdrew

the money from my

savings account. Page after page appeared mysteriously before us-before me, a neophyte, as Donald bent expertly over the shoulder of the young man at the layout table. I trembled, holding the check from the bank in hand. Alas, we celebrated boisterously the paste-up of the final page-prema turely, it turned out, as someone spilled a glass of Scotch over them and it was a number of hours or a day or so (a happy alcoholic haze here obscures the details) until they were done. Now, before the pandemonium starts, I have to mention a few more people. Donald Barthelme pulled me aside as we were assembling the issue at his apartment and said, "There's a woman downstairs who is willing to help you with the copy editing." It was Faith Sale, who quickly became a valuable member of the editorial board, joined by my close friend Jerome Charyn. Finally, the presence at this precise moment in New York of Max Frisch, the Swiss dramatist and novelist, and his wife Marianne (who was translating American writers into German), their enthusiasm for Fiction, their willingness to share their contacts with us, made 518

large difference. The Frisches created something unique in that city for a few months-a European salon at which writers met each other, talked, quarreled, were introduced, scolded. One came in from the cold, lonely plain of America to a warm literary parlor. It was impossible in such an atmosphere not to talk about a second and third issue of Fiction, if only to bring the new names one was hearing about, discussing, together under the magazine's roof. a

The efforts of all the editors, named above, and those of a publicist, Kathy Hartmann, who gave us her time and effort gratis,

produced a sudden thunderclap of publicity. At one point, not only did we get attention from the newspapers already mentioned, and others-the Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, etc., but the Today Show called. If we could produce one of our famous writers, they would be interested in having us on television. In

"Guest Word" editorial in the New York Times Book

Review, Fiction had asserted: We simply cannot believe that people have tired of stories, that the

ear

America has atrophied permanently and is now deaf to myth, fable,

puzzle,

Literature is a mirror image of our own complexity-a necessity paradox not a luxury. That is why we have spent a not inconsiderable amount of time and labor, plus a little money, in an effort to find new audiences. The 5,000 copies of our first printing melted away. Ten thousand more are just off the press and frankly we were amazed at the demand, stores like the Gotham Book Mart going through 250 copies in a few weeks. As we gather material for our second issue, we dream of reaching higher and lower, to the street corner, to the benches of power, as Charles Dickens did with his cheap pamphlets. Illiterate workmen used to hire readers to recite Dickens to them as the chapters appeared. Can we live without fable? What a dreadful impov ....

erishment. Writers must take matters into their own hands and search out the audience they believe is there. Gather the singular, the quixotic, the recondite, try even with the clamor of the bazaar around them to tell a curious tale. By going outside the marketplace (none of us at Fiction, writers, artists or editors, have been paid) without grants or foundations, we have begun. As the Chairman says, seize the day. .

Brave words. Aye. For a moment the novelty of what we were

doing, the newspaper format, the illusion that adult fable was easy to read as a child's fairy tale, the newspaper, media attention, and some intangible historical freak did make those

copies melt away. Most of them were never paid for, but that's another story-the wars of the newsstand deliverers, the piracy of distributors, the Mafia, etc. In a moment I will come to our sad long march through the vacuity of the American wasteland. 519

Was the intellectual

premise of Fiction correct? Half a year later, Tom Wolfe attacked us in Esquire. The idea that the novel has a spiritual function of providing a mythic con sciousness for the people is as popular within the literary community today as the same idea was with regard to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England

Mark J. Mirsky writes a manifesto for a new periodical called Fiction devoted to reviving the art in the 1970's and he says quoting Thoreau, "In the mythos a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious ....

...

thoughts of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn." Nothing could be further from the minds of the realists who established the novel as the

reigning genre over a hundred years ago. As a matter of fact,

they were turning their backs, with a kind of mucker's euphoria, on the idea of myth and fable, which had been the revered tradition of classical verse and French and Italian style court literature. It is hard to realize today just how drenched in realism the novel was at the outset-realism pour le realisme! -all this is true of life! Defoe presents Robinson Crusoe as the actual memoir

of a shipwrecked sailor

....

Esquire refused to give me space to reply. What nonsense! Wasn't Tom Jones a parody of Oedipus Rex, the old myth of the hero who sleeps with his mother? And in a clumsier fashion, this is the plot of Moll FLanders too. As for Robinson Crusoe, what

really sold the book, then and now, was its magic, the fable of returning to Eden. Defoe's far more realistic Journal of the Plague Year remains a deadly bore. Wolfe neatly had amnesia man

about the fantastic voyages in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, about Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. the bizarre, the morbid, the grotesque, the fabulous and intricate fairy tale of his plots. But in most of the nineteenth-century masters there is room for realists

What I treasure in Dickens

and surrealists to plead their case.

Wolfe's distortions are a house of cards which any sophisticated

English graduate student could huff down in a few minutes. What fascinates me about his article now is not the truth or falsity of his assertions but that his crowing about the New Journalism's having supplanted myth, fable, magic was in essence correct, as far as a serious audience was concerned. Cheap magic-The Exorcist, Valley of the Dolls, etc.---continued to be successful, but more intelligent readers were giving their attention to politics, sociology, psychology, journalism, in general to nonfiction. Fiction did not garner more and more readers

it became better and

better. Its contents seemed too difficult and arcane to friends who were

520

unprepared for contemporary fiction. The magazine aroused

enthusiasm among the few who already read, but that number, as the publishers had discovered, was woefully small and shrinking. All American artists are victims of the lemming effect. a

rare

A certain panic, hysteria, begins, and everyone rushes out to buy

something. Without that panic, one is dealing with the natural timidity of the crouching rodent. Pragmatic America wishes to take the mythos, the "unconscious," apart, much like a Model T, and so the how-to-do-it books about sex, personality, witchcraft are all more popular than the dream log in which you surrender to the hierogyphics rather than receiving a diagram on how to do it just as well. Woe when a serious artist like Norman Mailer is caught among the lemmings. Popularity again and again has proved a disaster, a siren that calls you to drown yourself in the great sea of American dribble. For a moment I almost tried to embark on it with Fiction. A distributor offered to spread 100,000

copies around the country. I looked at our treasury-nothing. The City College of New York was not about to foot big printing bills. My own small bank account would be depleted in one or two issues. I looked at the contents of our magazine. Thirty, forty thousand copies, perhaps, if we were very lucky; but that was too small for the distributor. And to the disappointment of some on my editorial board, I said no. So in a sense the second premise, the commercial premise of

Fiction-that one could bring the "quixotic, the recondite," to a

large new audience-was never quite tried. Perhaps if I had closed my eyes and jumped, I would have swum to a great and successful future. At that moment, however, I trembled with light. I was a writer, not a publisher; without a paid staff, financial

backing, professional promotion on a full-time basis, it would be suicidal to take the leap. Still, short of taking on a commitment I knew would kill me, I tried. We printed a lot of copies of the first three issues: 25,000 of the first, 20,000 of the second, 15,000 of the third. Short of storage space, at one point we were storing them in a bedroom at

Barthelme's, lugging them carton by carton up the stairs. I went from bookstore to bookstore opening accounts, trying to service them. Everyone on the editorial board was licking labels and stuf fing envelopes. It was madness. Slowly we began to understand the problems that plague the literary magazine in this country: indif521

ferent

bookstores, surfeited subscribers, inefficient sible distribution systems. We slid down to the

impos original number that we began with-5,OOO. Without reviews, media hype, heavy promotion, it was about average. I couldn't get from City College the kind of backing that Partisan or TriQuarterly receives: a man aging editor, salary for a secretary. As the financial crisis bit into the college, they had to cut back my few privileges and increase load. I received a my teaching scholarship for a graduate student, office space, and some periodic help. Knowing the horrors that the whole city of New York was going through, I was grateful or

for this.

Where should the help have come from? The National Endow ment, the New York State Council on the Arts, private patrons? All of these contributed meagerly. And so we

limped along. (It

never

occurred to anyone in the grant establishment that writers

and editors deserve to be paid at the minimum standard that an

apprentice dancer or actor would receive for a week's work.) I continued to publish Fiction out of the same desperation with which I began it. Why? Because Fiction was more than a maga zine for me. The banner we raised has been lowered, strung between poles, a shelter at half mast. Fiction kept me-and a few

others, I hope-s-out of the cold. It

brought me into fellowship with South American and European writers. Publishing the frightening, obscure, unknown -stories by Alexander Kluge, Thomas Bernhard, a chapter of Manuel Puig's neglected masterpiece The Buenos Aires Affair, Bioy Casares, Benedetti, the River Platte school-I felt like Crusoe on his island. There is a taste of Eden in a book, a landscape whose shores you dream, with no one but a few faithful Fridays. As for Americans, we bend tearfully to our unsolicited pile hoping, taking risks, proudest when we have rescued SOL. �thing valuable from that dunghill. But America, my country, fills me with desperation. A terrible selfishness animates the establishment.

merely of my own generation; it is typical of the United States, like the slough into which Melville was consigned as his work grew more difficult. I don't see a literary community, even a quarrelsome school. I see only individuals who give easy lip service to fashion, are ready to appear, wherever there are flashbulbs, to protest a war, political prisoners, etc., but are unwillI don't speak

522

ing to criticize, to encourage, to support, to join with younger and older writers. Instead, as always, they retreat into private rituals of self-destruction. Instead of the myth of what they have written, the myth of the writer becomes their testament. No wonder criminals like John Ehrlichman, in the wake of the New Journal

ists, step into the limelight to pander to the tangerine highs of America. The fantasist sits at his desk and walks in his dreams in order to see our future, understand the present, draw or set down a rhythm from the confusions of sight and sound around us.

We are afraid of a moral literature because we

quick,

are

bent on

easy sensations and we fear that the thrill will be taken

away from us. But it is precisely in reaching through the confusion for some idea of mastering it, if only in a dream for a second, that the thrill which is beyond the drab cake of the lotus eater lies. The self-excoriation of Heinrich Boll in Katharina Blum, of Marquez in A Hundred Years of Solitude is no different from the hair shirt of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov or of Dante in the Comedy-comparisons of mastery aside. But we are a poor

country and the past few years have been a time of feeble chronicle and flash in the pan, crepe-paper genius. Fiction has published its share of this dreck; since it has passed through a generation pub

licly, it is impossible to be free of its sins. In the absence of a group of American writers who would sponsor magazines like Fiction, we have gone begging, threatening to shoot the periodical unless so and so contributed a piece. And this is the best I guess most of us can do: the stubborn begging to keep a house alive, hoping, knowing a few moments, perhaps, when the presence of something uncanny, unreal, holy(?) will alight before us.

523

ENTERPRISE IN THE SERVICE OF ART George Plimpton

George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review (courtesy

Paris Review).

Ernest Hemingway staged a bullfight in 1954 with George Plimp ton as matador.

Plimpton

Light heavyweight Archie Moore fought George

three rounds in 1959. Pancho Gonzales beat him at

tennis 6-0. Mr. Plimpton has challenged championship swimmers,

golfers, bridge players, major league hitters, and trapeze artists to compete with him, but has found "almost no pleasure in the actual moments of participation, because I invariably fail." He has tested his endurance and wit by joining professional football teams (from which came his book Paper Lion, 1966), a hockey team (the Boston Bruins), and the New York Philharmonic-and in so doing has raised the role of amateur to the pitch of art. Both as a writer for Sports Illustrated and the author of books on sports, George Plimpton has been praised for the literary excellence of his por trayals of the emotions of the athlete. Hemingway said of Out of My League (1961), "It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty." In 1953, George Plimpton founded Paris Review, which has not only discovered and published the work of Terry Southern and Philip Roth and maintained a consistent standard of somewhat unpredictable, angular, but undeniable artistic merit, but has also remained a magazine irrevocably, and properly, associated with the manner and personality and energy of its editor. It may also be one of the few little magazines to have a racehorse named after it, and one of the few to appear in advertisements for Peck & Peck and in New Yorker cartoons. Because of Mr. Plimpton's ingenuity, the Annual Spring Revel for the Benefit of Paris Review has be come a news item; the galas have been held everywhere from a barge at the South Street port to Roosevelt Island, and, as we hear in the following essay, there have been Paris Review booths at World's Fairs. Mr. Plimpton has also tried to promote his maga zine and his authors by a co-publishing venture with Doubleday (the Paris Review Editions), and by a remarkable series of Paris Review Posters with commissioned art by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Jack Youngerman, Ben Shahn, Saul Stein berg, and Robert Rauschenberg. The short-lived American Literary Anthology series of the mid sixties was an attempt to bring before a wider public the best work from little magazines. George Plimpton secured a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to publish the anthology and to 525

recompense the authors and the little magazine editors whose work it contained. Unfortunately, when the fourth annual ALA was be

ing prepared, a congressman from Iowa denounced the project by reading (or spelling) an Aram Saroyan poem on the floor of Con gress. The National Endowment money was withdrawn.

Mr.

Plimpton is currently at work on books about old-time

tennis players, his reminiscences of Paris, and his experience as a

goalie for the Boston Bruins. He continues his quest for rare birds. Although his most recent search for the Congo peacock closed without a sighting, Mr. Plimpton did meet a man who had eaten one the day before. I-

The Paris Review booth at the New York World's Fair, Summer

(courtesy Paris Review). 526

1964-5

I wonder if I could get you to describe The Paris Review booth at

the 1964-1965 World's Fair in New York. It sold little magazines, and thus has a certain distinction in little magazine history. I wish I could get you to say "literary" magazines rather than "little." I have never liked that appellative "little magazines" or, even worse,

the collective "the littles." Dreadful. Midgets are said

to prefer being called the "little people," which I can understand.

But "little"

referring to a magazine would by the same token, wouldn't it, refer to its physical dimensions-which suggests that a "little magazine" editor is responsible for those little fat numbers, two inches by two inches, that you ripple fast with your thumb, and you can see Carl Hubbell throwing a screwball (that dates me, doesn't it?) or, in the sleazier neighborhoods, Popeye doing some thing to Olive. No, no. "Literary magazines." In deference to your feelings I'll try to do better. I was asking you

about such commercial enterprises as The Paris Review booth.

Malcolm Cowley once described a direction The Paris Review took which was perhaps different from most little

...

literary magazines

-that while the magazine hoped to present material that was new and uncommercial, it

willing to try commercial devices in order to get the contents read by people and talked about. He produced a motto which was appropriate enough: "Enterprise in the service of art." Some of the earliest decisions regarding the magazine were based on that-the design of the magazine, the use of artwork inside and on the cover. Even the instituting of the Art of Fiction series-interviews with distinguished writers on their was

craft-was done in part so as to be able to put a famous name on the cover to entice readers to buy the magazine and by indirection,

having read the interview, to wander on and read the work of someone just starting off and with no reputation at all. In Paris, in the early days, we did all sorts of crazy things to promote the magazine-printing posters and pasting them up around the city on

the pissoirs, even on the defense d' afficher walls, very late at

night, in flying squads, and we never got into much trouble. I put one on the ceiling of the lavatory of the Cafe du Dome in 1955 and it was there for a couple of years. This sort of enterprise has been kept up-in varying degrees, depending on the energies of the group running things-since the start. 527

A number of the writers living in Paris in late 1954 and early 1955 who contributed either to the Paris Review or the short-lived publication, Merlin. Front row, left to right: Vilma Howard, poet; Jane Logue, the publisher of

Merlin; MufJy Wainhouse, the wife of A ustryn Wainhouse; Jean Garrigue, and Merlin poet. Second row: Christopher Logue (with the cigarette), poet editor; Richard Seaver, then associated with Merlin, and subsequently an editor of Evergreen Review; Evan S. Connell (with the moustache), novelist; Niccolo Tucci, essayist and novelist; the woman with the smile is unidentified; Peter Huyn, poet, translator, editor; Alfred Chester, novelist and story Wainhouse, novelist and translator. Third row: Eugene writer;

Austryn Paris Review Walter, Paris Review editor and story-writer; George Plimpton, author editor, author (in the hat); William Pene du Bois, Paris Review editor, and illustrator of childrens' books; James Broughton, poet and film maker; Paris William Gardner Smith, novelist; and Harold Witt, poet (courtesy

Review).

The Paris Review, Vol. 1, No.1,

Spring 1953 (courtesy Paris Review).

And one 0/ enterprises was The Paris Review booth. 1 believe it was

known

"the smallest pavilion at the New York World's

Fair."

Quite right. It was at once the most ambitious and dismaying of

projects. It seemed such a good idea at the time. We got the franchise through a friend of mine whose firm was representing the corporation that owned the Pavilion of Paris. De Gaulle didn't want to have anything to do with the fair, and the Pavilion of Paris was a sort of ersatz substitution for a bona fide French pavilion. Through the terms arranged, we were permitted to put down (I think that's the proper designation) a structure outside the Pavilion of Paris on an avenue called the Harry S Truman, directly opposite Philip Johnson's New York State Building and down the road our

from the Astral Fountain and the "Vatican" where the Pieta was

display. The booth was designed by William Pene du Bois, our art editor-a charming, mushroom-like structure with a movable roof that raised up along a center flagpole, cranked up with a system of ropes and pulleys that one got at by crawling through a panel in the side of the booth and twisting a winch. It was built for us in Katonah, New York, at no great expense, by a firm of swimming pool specialists. It was made of wood, only ten by ten. But the booth had great style. There was a metal flagpole at each point of the roof, which was octagonal. It was decorated with blowups from pages of The Paris Review-both artwork and text

-a chunk

of Celine, Hemingway, Frost, and a line or two, I re

member, from the interview with Evelyn Waugh: Interviewer: What about Ronald Firbank? Waugh: I enjoyed him very much when I was young. I can't read him now.

Interviewer: Why? Waugh: I think there would be something wrong with an elderly man who could enjoy Firbank.

Sometimes the salespeople inside would spot a man slowly circling the booth, and they would appreciate that he was, as they put it,

"reading the booth." Who were the salespeople in the booth?

They were as decorative as the booth itself-a series of very young, whom were in love with pretty girls, a few of them French, all of the managing editor of the magazine at the time, Peter Ardery. 530

They would arrive early in the morning, crawl on hands and knees into the booth from the little side-panel, crank up the roof and set up the counters for the day's work, and then at closing time the roof would be cranked down and the girls would emerge like hedgehogs from a burrow onto the A venue Harry S Truman. They were awfully pretty. On rainy days they would crank the roof down to protect the "goods," the edge of the roof just inches off the counter, and you could see the girls' eyes inside peering out from the darkness. On these days, when it was almost closed, or we gave up and it was closed completely, the booth looked like the turret on the Monitor, the "cheese box" of the "cheese box on a raft." When it was open, it looked too much like an information booth. In fact, on a fine day there'd be a thick ring of people around it, the ones in the back rising up on their toes and shouting over

the heads of the others to get directions to the "Vatican."

And what was for sale? What were the "goods"?

By God, literary magazines. We wrote a form letter to every literary magazine in the country, with the heady news that what they had slaved over could be displayed on that busy boulevard and offered for sale. Everyone was intrigued. Cartons of maga zines, back issues, broadsheets began to arrive, and I borrowed a station wagon and we took this tonnage out there and set it up on the counters of the booth. It was a brave display-not unlike what you see in the window of the Gotham Book Mart on 47th Street, except not as dusty. We kept a feather-mop duster in the booth, and sometimes

brisk wind swept down the Avenue and rattled the pages. a

Harry S Truman

Well, how did it do, the booth? I have the figures here. The booth was open for the last five weeks of the fair's 1964 season-36 days precisely, or 413 working hours

-by the end of which time the total gross sales had mounted to $379.70. That works out to a dollar of sales an hour. As I recall, best day

brought in thirty dollars, and the worst-a rainy Tuesday-a few cents more than a dollar. That was not very good. We came nowhere near that magic phrase in literary magazine financing, namely "breaking even." It was a melancholy time. The other day I was looking over the Common Book that we kept our

531

during the booth's operation. Two entries suggest how things were going. One of them: "The booth seems to attract more attention when closed than when open-is there anything we can do about this?" Another suggestion was that we try publicizing the booth by trying to get it referred to as "the smallest pavilion at the World's Fair"-as if somehow people would flock to see such a thing, as they might pay to get in to see a midget elephant. Which of the little-I

mean

literary-magazines were the big

sellers? I was hoping you'd think of something else to ask. "Big seller" is

really an applicable term. Toward the end of that first year things. We brought in some books. The public an of three and one-fourth books a day. Usually bought average at least one of these was the Tropic of Capricorn, or The Tropic of Cancer, or Frank Harris' My Life and Loves, or Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (with a photograph of a naked woman on the cover), or Lady Chatterley's Lover. The Paris Review, which took up one whole pie-section of the counter for those first five weeks, sold twenty-three copies. The Realist was the best seller among the other literary magazines. The cover was a car toon of Senator Goldwater as a woman in a topless bathing suit. Four copies of Yale French Studies and four of The Quarterly not

we had to sell other

Review of Literature were stolen. Our financial accountant was very accurate about such things, and

kept excellent, if woeful,

books. But you didn't close down the operation when the fair went into its

second season. Good God, no! While

a more

prudent organization might have

forgone that second year, we decided that an intensification of effort might bring better results. We expanded the booth into a complex by adding three bookstalls modeled after the bookstalls along the Seine. Enrique Castro-Cid, the Chilean sculptor, was persuaded to build and program a four-foot-tall weatherproof robot to stand in front of the booth, doing something to attract attention. No one ever saw what it looked like or what it was indeed pro

grammed to do. Castro-Cid built it, but he was reluctant to part with what he had done. Somehow I recall that he once told me 532

it looked like a giant erect grasshopper. It had a voice box within,

which would alarm

passersby-at which point the grasshopper

would wave an antenna-like arm at the booth. One of the minor

despairs of the booth project was that the Castro-Cid sculpture never graced the A venue Harry S Truman. How did the booth do in its second year of operation?

Well, things went much more briskly. In a desperate attempt to recoup, we took over the operation of the French Book Center, which had failed for lack of profits in the great disaster of the Paris Pavilion next door. We took over its supply of French maga zines

(the fashion magazine Elle eclipsed The Realist as our big seller), records, books, little French flags on black wooden stands, French cigarettes, posters, Charles de Gaulle masks-God, what else?-tinny Eiffel Towers and Statues of Liberty, some fitted out with red light bulbs, just a tremendous glut of doodads and gim mickry. And in there somewhere, just a pie-slice of them now on the counter, were the literary magazines-Hudson, Sewanee, Partisan, the less known, the affairs of the heart, and The Paris Review, along with Paris Review T-shirts and sweat shirts that we thought might catch the fancy of at least a small segment of the people coming by, so that there might be some justification for what we were doing. Do you know what the big sellers were? Shopping bags! Truly. There was a big run on those damn shopping

bags. It was an unexpected boon for us that one of the salespeople -one of the lovely girls doubtless-thought of selling those things. After we realized that we had a hot item, we draped them around the circumference of the counter. We bought them wholesale and

stamped them "The Paris Review" with big rubber stamps (I re member doing that in the evening-bang, bang, bang) so that the people who purchased them could carry their souvenirs back from the fair brandishing this literary magazine's name around the New York City subway system. On the great days, on the weekends, we made $300, almost ten times as much as we had made on our best days the year before-the big sales being in shopping bags and French cigarettes. But somehow the evangelical fervor had gone. I didn't go out there much that second year. I couldn't bear the sight of all those Eiffel Towers with the red bulbs. I think we

all felt that way

....

I'll tell you something which epitomized that

533

second year. One of the booth girls

thought that the de Gaulle face masks might catch on, the way the shopping bags had. So she wore one. Besides, she was French. You can imagine what a sight it was to approach along the A venue Harry S Truman and see a Charles de Gaulle (sometimes a pair of them if she had a friend working with her) peering out from the shadows of the booth. One day she saw someone coming down the avenue whom she recognized as a relative-I'd like to say it was her mother, but it wasn't actually; an aunt, or maybe a cousin-and the girl in the booth had the option of calling out through the mouth of the de Gaulle mask, "Hi, Genevieve," or whoever. But she didn't, you know. She just let that person cruise on by-past that strange little

complex with all those crazy things for sale, which had started with such hopes-and she didn't utter a sound.

534

There is a certain kind of woman who reads Peanuts and the Paris Review. For this woman, there is a certain kind of store: Peck & Peck. ,�

Enterprise in the service of art.

STRIDENCY AND THE SWORD: LITERARY AND CULTURAL EMPHASIS IN AFRO-AMERICAN MAGAZINES Eugene Redmond While this essay concentrates on developments since 1950, black little magazines have actually been in existence for more than 140 Their continual rise and fall-even though they rarely merited being called "literary" in any exclusive sense-record the

years.

of Afro-American arts and letters. Beginning in 1838, David Ruggles' Mirror of Liberty, a particular brand of cultural magazine that carried on antislavery warfare, formed the aesthetic and ideological spine of black thought and expression. During the antislavery era (1834-1861), the task was taken up by tumultuous life

Slavery in America, The National Anti Slavery Standard, AME Church Magazine, Mystery, The North Star (superseded by Frederick Douglass' Paper and Douglass' Monthly), and Anglo-African Magazine. The works of early race leaders, theoreticians, fiction writers, essayists, novelists, and poets, including Phillis Wheatley, Prince Hall, Olaudah Equiano (Gus tavas Vassa), George Moses Horton, Maria W. Stewart, Jarena Lee, and Douglass, can be found in these journals; they published some of the best protest writing of the nineteenth century-litera ture in which the act of creation was synonymous with the act of the African Observer,

liberation.

Afro-American magazines, and their editors and writers, ma tured during the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. Among the new journals were The Southern Workman, National Baptist Magazine, Howard's Negro Magazine, Colored American Maga with zine, McGirt's Magazine, and Alexander's Magazine. Faced 538

the task of having to create a black community out of the newly

emancipated slaves, the new intellectuals and leaders founded black schools and colleges, and stressed skill development, especi ally reading and writing. Thus the new magazines not only had an immediate function to serve, but were assured of newer and larger reading audiences as these were produced by the schools. After the Civil War, writings by Afro-Americans became more consciously "literary." Led by authors like Paul Laurence Dunbar, Albert Whitman, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and James Weldon Johnson, both the older and the younger be

ginning writers made ample use of their new outlets. Without some notion of the longevity of the black little magazine in America, the particular tenor of the black magazines of the past three decades would, as Mr. Redmond indicates, be difficult to grasp. Eugene Redmond has been a newspaper editor, publicist, and social worker in St. Louis and a theater director, poet-in-residence, and Afro-American scholar at Southern Illinois University, Web ster College, Oberlin College, Southern University (Baton Rouge), and California State University at Sacramento, where he now teaches. He is the author of eight plays, eight volumes of poetry, and scores of articles Oil black writers. His critical history, Drum voices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, was published by Doubleday in 1976, his edition of Afro-American poetry in 1977. His arrangement of a novel by Henry Dumas, Jonoah and the Green Stone, appeared from Random House in 1976. Origins and evolutions For the purpose of developing a contemporary peak from which to survey beginnings of the Afro-American literary magazine, we

could select any year, but let us settle for the year 1968. That was

when Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited

by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, made its provocative appearance. In April of the same year, the world mourned the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., apostle of peace and one of the most influential Afro-American leaders in history. Less than two months later, Henry Dumas and Conrad Kent Rivers, premier poetic voices of the "second renaissance," were silenced-Dumas by the bullets of a New York transit cop and Rivers by an "impulsive" act. Earlier 539

in the decade, that missile-of-a-man named Malcolm X (a.k.a. Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, "Black

Shining Prince"), had been rammed by assassins' bullets at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Black prophets and poets, activists and writers cried out, "If you talk too long and too loud about the hurt that's being put on you, you'll be long-gone." Hence Afro American magazines such as Liberator, Freedomways, Negro Digest, Dasein, Umbra, Soulbook, Black Dialogue, The Journal of Black Poetry, The Black Scholar, and Black Ascensions became the cultural-literary offspring of the terrors and contradictions inherent in a society unable to practice what it preaches. Black Fire, in turn, was born of a disparate and far-flung, yet commu nalized, cultural spirit that completely remade the world of Afro American arts and letters. Similarly, during the "renaissance" of the 1920s, Alain Locke's provocative The New Negro (1925), backdropped by Jim Crow laws, World War I, and lynchings, shored up the strength and perseverance of a kaleidoscopic battle line of black periodicals: The Crisis, The Journal of Negro History, Southern Workman, The Messenger, Opportunity, and others. This pattern was also seen in 1941, with the publication of The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes, edited by Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee. Caravan performed what had become by then an important function of Afro-American editors and anthologists: to collect, at intervals, the best and most representative works from smaller black publications (journals, newsletters, pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers) and put them into a substantial volume for posterity. Available to Caravan's editors was a rich new range of magazines and various periodicals, including Challenge, New Challenge, Brown American, Journal of Negro Education, Negro History Bulletin, and Race. One sees in these and other new magazines of the thirties and forties-reflective as they were of the historical demands of the black struggle-an often part-time literary posture, since their of primary function in each issue was to do battle with the forces to data racism, oppression, and violence and to present basic usable Afro-American communities. The Journal of Negro Education, Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes, Negro History Bulletin, Negro Digest, and Phylon: Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture dealt with all areas of black develop540

SOULBOOK

Soulbook, Vol. 2, No.1, Summer 1966 (courtesy Northwestern University Library).

ment. On

the other hand, a steady tradition of literary journal publishing had been established, as witnessed by magazines like the Negro Quarterly, Challenge and New Challenge (dedicated to the revitalization of black literature and art), Negro Story, and Harlem Quarterly. Often the editors and creative writers were one and the same. One found, for example, the following

names on

the editorial boards and in the tables of contents of these period

icals: W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thur man, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen,

Claude McKay, Arna Bontemps, Ann Spencer, Angelina Grimke, Owen Dodson, Carter G. Woodson, Marcus Garvey, Margaret Walker, Horace Cayton, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwen dolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Melvin B. Tolson, E. Franklin Frazier, Chester Himes, and others.

Bearings and focuses: 1950-1960

Despite decades of vigorous effort to develop independent black literary and cultural magazines, these did not appear until the 1950s. Among the black literary journals to emerge at midcentury, Free Lance and CLA Journal have been the most influential, albeit

for different reasons.

Literarily speaking, the decade began aus

piciously with several notable events: the reception of the works of Richard

Wright (whose Native Son had been the first black

authored Book-of-the-Month Club selection); the establishment of several cultural and literary groups, such as the Harlem Writers' Club and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts; the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (Annie Allen, 1950) to Gwendolyn

Brooks; and the publication of the anthology The Poetry of the Negro (1949), edited by Langston Hughes and Bontemps

publishers' growing interest in black literature. But it was an already-established journal, Phylon, that carried the literary and cultural weight of the black experience during most of the 1950s. Phylon's 1940s format, designed by W. E. B. DuBois (and colleagues), continued into the next decade: a good balance between sociological-historical analyses and cultural-artistic cura torship. The most advanced indigenous Afro-American social theories and concepts were reflected in its literary content. For to example, the fourth quarter 1950 issue of Phy/on was devoted

further indication of large

542

Afro-American literature and writers: "The Negro Writer Looks at His World" (William Gardner Smith, Ezra Bell Thompson,

Langston Hughes, and Phylon editors); "Fiction and Folklore" (Thomas D. Jarrett and Sterling Brown); "Criticism and Literary Scholarship" (Ulysses Lee and Blyden Jackson); and "Poetry" (Margaret Walker and Arna Bontemps). In subsequent issues Phylon published "Contemporary French Negro Poets," "The Cuban Poetry of Nicholas Guillen" (Angel Augier, translated by Joseph Bernstein), an article by novelist Rene Maran (translated by Mercer Cook), and several pieces by the Dutch literary historian-anthologist Rosey E. Pool, including one on the "African Renaissance" (African writing in English). The poetry of Robert Hayden, Nanina Champney Alba, Hughes, Walker, Calvin C. Hernton, Ray Durem, Alvin Aubert, Raymond Patterson, Lance Jeffers, and James Emanuel also appeared in the journal along with short fiction by Hughes and Katherine Dunham ("Audrey"). In reviews and articles, writers waged critical wars, each adding to the wider portrait of the Afro-American literary legacy. Among books given extensive reviews in Phylon were all of Hughes's works, the autobiographies of Lena Horne and Ethel Waters, J. Saunders Redding's On Being Black in America, Wright's The Outsider, and Claude McKay's Selected Poems, Carl Rowan's South of Freedom, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son,

Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha,

Ann Petry's The Narrows, and George Lamming's In the Castle

of My Skin (1953) and The Emigrants (1955). Phylon's book review pattern was reflected in almost all the black magazines of

the fifties, including Sepia and Ebony, which irregularly published

literary history and criticism. Sepia sustained a fine record for reviewing black literature, and both magazines carried in-depth stories on music and culture. In 1953, Free Lance arrived as the first Afro-American literary

journal destined to survive the handicaps and adversities usually visited on such efforts. Subtitled "A Publication of Free-Lance

Poets and Prose

Workshops, Inc.," this

Cleveland-based little

development of a multi-ethnic American literary underground, specifically the "Beat" movement in poetry, which prevailed between 1955 and 1965. Free Lance was directed by Casper Leroy Jordan, book reviewer

magazine played

as-yet-unsung role in the

543

and librarian at Wilberforce University, Ohio, and Russell Atkins, eccentric poet-composer and psycho-visualist. Early assistance also came from Helen J. Collins, Beatrice

Augustus, and Helen Dobbins

Dobbs. The first issues of Free Lance were hand done, so to speak,

but it later took on a more professional look. Since it was devoted

solely to the printing of short creative writings and occasional book reviews, the journal did not need the size or space of a Phylon. It became, by all definitions, a "little" magazine. The first issue of Free Lance included work by Atkins, Augustus, Collins, Rose Green, Jordan, Budd Martin, Vera Steckles, Mott Wilson, and Jerry Davis. But the introduction-and the theme were supplied by the literary father of all modern black writers, Langston Hughes: Words are the paper and string to package experience,

wrap up from the

inside out the poet's concentric waves of contact with the living world. Each

poet makes of words his own highly individualized wrapping for life segments he wishes to present. Sometimes the paper and strings are more arresting than the contents of the package. Sometimes the poet creates a transparent wrap ping revealing with great clarity and from all angles what is inside. Sometimes the word wrapping is clumsy and inept, and neither the inside nor the outside of the package is interesting. Sometimes the word wrapping contains nothing. But, regardless of quality or content, a poem reveals always the poet as a person. Skilled or unskilled, wise or foolish, nobody can write a poem without

revealing something of himself. Here are people. Here are poems. Here is revolution.

Hughes was talking, it seemed, almost directly to Atkins. The introduction was stripped of racial intensity, since the older writer

knew that Atkins, like William Stanley Braithwaite, Countee Cullen, and Hayden, had protested against being judged purely on the basis of race. Precocious and brilliant, he had studied music and begun to develop provocative ideas and concepts connecting sound, dance, mathematics, drama, psychology, and language. In a

January 1973 Black World article on "Black Art and Artists in

Cleveland," Leatrice W. Emeruwa referred to Free Lance as the "oldest Black literary magazine extant" and said that Atkins was "to dramatic and musical innovation and leadership what

poetic,

Coltrane has been to jazz and avant-gardism." In addition to printing the works of black poets (such as Hughes, and LeRoi Jones), Free Lance also opened its

Dudley Randall,

pages to white bards: Robert Sward, the Canadian Irving Layton, Don Silberger, and Robert Creeley (also critic and editor of Black 544

Mountain Review). Stylistically, the poetry was traditional, experi mental modern-formal, and offbeat; and much of it was iconoclas

tic, irreverent, pedantic, and didactic. Other writings ranged from a review of Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line

Philip Butcher's essay on Paul Laurence Dunbar and George Washington Cable, to Creeley's reflections on Hart Crane (includ ing some letters of Crane). Free Lance also featured the fiction of Cleota Augustus, Adelaide Simon, Silberger, and Robert J. Shea. During the 1960s Free Lance would increase its review space, introduce some exciting new black poets to the public, and play an important role in the midwestern black arts scene. CLA Journal appeared in 1957 as the brainchild of the College Language Association, formed in 1939 to protest the Modern Language Association's policy of excluding blacks. Its editor was Therman B. O'Daniel (Morgan State College); its associate editor, Blyden Jackson (Southern University); and its managing editor, Charles A. Ray (North Carolina College, Durham). Among its regional advisory editors were Hugh Gloster, Nathaniel P. Tillman, and Melvin B. Tolson. Contributing editors included Margaret Walker Alexander, Richard Barksdale, M. Carl Holman (of Clark College and editor of the A tlanta Inquirer), Redding, and Bertram L. Woodruff. Scholarly, erudite, and giving deference to linguistics and composition, the magazine's aims and objectives were stated by O'Daniel in the first issue: it would accept articles on "most These turned out to be languages." languages, however, "Greek and Latin, Old and Middle English, Modem English, and the Modern Foreign Languages." CLA Journal, as a black-based professional publication, was thus begun in something of a cultural limbo: it had no philosophical direction, no theoretical or concep to

tual framework with which to chart its direction, and hence no thrust

that reflected, even from the magazine's high plane, the turbulence or

beauty of the black sensibility that produced most of its staffers

and contributors.

The cultural ambivalence of CLA Journal, born out of ideologi cal tensions and conflicts that have

historically mesmerized the

black intelligentsia, was clearly seen in its allowance of twice as much space to writings on European and Euro-American culture to African or Afro-American culture. Such a contradiction, hard to imagine when one recalls the social and racial factors that as

545

prompted the founding of the journal, would become even more glaring in the sixties and seventies when many new black-con sciousness journals were being born. Whereas Phylon unashamedly grounded itself in black and Third World cultures (relegating its European concerns to notes and excerpts), CLA Journal repeatedly printed articles on Congreve, Shakespeare, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Poe, Baudelaire, Swift, Hawthorne, Tennessee Williams, and hun dreds of other European and Euro-American subjects and writers. In all fairness, however, the foregoing comments must be balanced by a consideration of CLA's contribution to black literature. Its first issue, for example, did contain a review of Hughes's Simple Stakes a Claim. Later numbers of the quarterly carried articles on black authors and their work. During the sixties and seventies CLA would not be able to continue its immunity to the broad and intense cultural self-examination occurring in black communities. Like all other Afro-American publications, it would be substan tially influenced by the social holocausts of the post-civil rights era. Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, LeRoi Jones, and Atkins come prominently to mind when one considers the "underground" move ment.

Kaufman, after an itinerant life, settled in San Francisco,

where the West Coast pole of the Beat activity (Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore) was centered. He published in Beatitude and numerous

other little magazines, his work finally reaching France,

where he became

literary sensation-occasionally being com

pared to Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Jazz poet Joans, trained as a painter, was among the first black artists to arrive in Greenwich Village, the East Coast center of the Beat school. Very early influenced by Hughes, he also published in many little magazines. The capricious LeRoi Jones was a central figure in the Greenwich Village movement (the New York literary underground), founding Yugen (1958-1961) with his Jewish wife, Hettie Cohen. Though Jones has always been irreverent and experimental in his posture and writing, the fact that he was black in 1958 was more or less incidental, since Yugen published mostly white authors. Occasion of poets ally, however, black writers were featured, as in the case to contributing to Allan Polite and Clarence Major. In addition the avant-garde American poetry scene, these pioneers provided into the new experimental models for younger black poets tuned little magazine circuit. 546

Ascendancy's sharp mirror light: rear view to a future (1960-1978) By 1960 Afro-American periodicals, and their faithful editorial

staffs, were well seasoned from several decades of training and

experience. During this exciting history, countless publications had been founded by sororities, fraternities, college literary workshops, community organizations, unions, social clubs, reading guilds, and private individuals. Many of these older organs also wound their way into the 1960s and 1970s: Crisis, Negro History Bulletin, Journal of Negro History, Phylon, Negro Educational Review, Free

Lance, and CLA Journal. Phylon maintained its previous leader

ship, though some fatigue was beginning to show in the later sixties or dispersion of many of its original founders and contributors. Fresh talent, which would have naturally gravitated toward it, was attracted to the new black publications and the white periodicals opening their pages to black writers. Nevertheless, Phylon continued to present a solid offering of essays, reviews, poetry, and some fiction. Among writers contributing articles to the journal during the sixties were Charles Hamilton (Black Power, with Stokely Carmichael) Eugene D. Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll), Eugenia Collier, John

-the journal having witnessed the death

Henrik Clarke, Theodore L. Gross, Nathan Hare, Donald Hender son, B. I. Chukwukere

(on African novelists), O. R. Dathorne

(on Africa in West Indian literature), Charles Larsen, Addison Gayle, Jr., and Keneth Kinnamon. Older and newly discovered poets peppered the magazine's pages: Mary Graham Lund, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Dan Georgakas, Mari Evans, James Worley, N anina Alba, George Douglass Johnson, James Emanuel, James Kilgore, and Julius

Thompson. Of all the journals, Phylon in particular

established an excellent record of good in-depth reviews. On a smaller scale, but in steady pursuit of literary experimen tation and freedom, Free Lance was realizing its goal of becoming a

viable, if modest, alternative to the deaf ears and closed doors

met by so many new young writers. Free Lance also upgraded its

book review program and added a news column, "Occurrences."

Among the black and white poets it published in the sixties were Major (editor, The New Black Poetry), Judson Crews, Charles Bukowski, Glen Grobos, Conrad Kent Rivers ("discovered" by Free Lance), Irene Dayton, Peter Jones (editor of New Helios, London), Hughes ("perhaps the only active link from the fabled 547

period of the New York renaissance of the '20s"), David Rafael Wang (teacher at the University of Hawaii), Lewis Turco, L. S. Torgoff, Douglas Blazek, and Etheridge Knight (writing at this time from prison). CLA Journal remained culturally adrift as the sixties unfolded. More than half of its space was still being devoted to the examina tion of European-American aesthetics. Granted the professional nature of the journal, with its emphases on composition and modern languages, one wonders why not even an experimental unit on Afro-American literary methodology was developed. The white dominated MLA had established a Commission of Minority Litera tures before the mid-seventies, but not until 1976 did CLA Journal

begin its "Annual Bibliography of Afro-American Literature." Though hanging in a frustrating cultural limbo, it nevertheless published important articles on black culture, such as Jackson's "The Negro's Image of the Universe as Reflected in His Fiction," Barksdale's views on the teaching of poetry, Naomi Garrett's "French Poets of African Descent," Darwin Turner's "The Negro Dramatist's Image of the Universe, 1920-1960," Robert A. Smith on the folktales of Chesnutt, A. Russell Brooks's "The Comic Spirit in the Negro's New Look," and Arthur P. Davis' "The Black-and Tan Motif in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks" and "Gwendolyn Brooks: Poet of the Unheroic." That a plethora of little magazines emerged during these years

obviously of more than mere incidental importance-even though so many were destined to a state of transiency or premature death. It is not always easy to record, or even locate, these publi cations. The most extensive listing of them, however, appears in various news and notes sections of Negro Digest/Black World (1961-1976), itself a product of the black cultural revival that swept the globe in the 1950s and 1960s. Other important maga is

Community, Dasein, Freedomways, Axiom, Approach, Adept, Negro Heritage, Floating Bear, Umbra, Harvard Journal of Afro-American Affairs, Soulbook, Vibration, Black Dialogue, Insurgent, Black America, Journal of Black zines

the sixties

were

Poetry, The Black Student, Echo, Negro American Literature Forum, Cricket, Shrewd, Issue: A Quarterly Journal of Africanist Opinion, Nommo, Pan-African Journal, Ex-Umbra, Newark Afro American Magazine, The Feet ("The Monthly Black Dance Maga548

THE JOUItHAL OF THE oue WRfTERS' WORKSHOP

NOMMO

Nommo, Vol. 1, No.1, Winter 1969 (courtesy Northwestern University Library).

zine"), Black Theater, Echoes from the Gumbo, The Black Scholar, Pound, Confrontation: A Journal of Third World Litera ture, and Nkombo.

Literally before our very eyes, these journals did cultural somer saults and demographic cartwheels: being born, often

experiencing

immediate death, then being reborn in another place with a refurbished staff and a new name. Most of them, however, re

sponded to, and some grew in the shadow of, the glitter of Negro Digest-resurrected in 1961 after a publishing hiatus of ten years. Its helm was manned by Hoyt W. Fuller, an Atlanta-born journal ist who had worked for several newspapers and had formerly been associate editor of Ebony. Since Digest was a Johnson publication, it offered little opportunity for free and open experimentation and exploration. Moreover, like CLA Journal, it initially could not take an official editorial stand based on cultural theories or ideo

logical concepts. But Fuller sought to compensate for these built-in restraints by cautiously indicating his evolving aesthetic in book reviews, various notes, articles, and news items. that took that

He charted

rights through black arts/black power and into its new pan-Africanist posture as Black World (1970-1976). During the first five years of its new life, Digest followed some what in the path of its forties predecessor, publishing general arti cles about black life, with an emphasis on stars. It also ran reprints from various other (mostly white) magazines as well as poems and articles by whites. From its very beginning, however, it had more of a literary thrust than the earlier Digest. Articles on black history and culture were contributed by C. Eric Lincoln, Bontemps, John Hope Franklin, Benjamin Quarles, Frank London Brown ("Chi cago's Great Lady of Poetry," about Brooks), Babs Fafunwa ("An African Student Looks at America"), participants in a symposium on "The Negro's Role in American Culture" (Baldwin, Nat Hen toff, Lorraine Hansberry, Hughes, Emile Capouya, Alfred Kazin), Nathan Hare ("The Black Anglo-Saxons"), Agnes Behling ("Father of Negro History," on Woodson), Casper Leroy Jordan (on Elizabeth Keckley, the black woman confidante to the wife of President Lincoln), Redding (interviewed by AMSAC on "An American Writer in Africa"), Kwame Nkrumah ("The Recovery of African History"), Louise Meriwether (on Baldwin), Horace course

550

journal

from civil

Mann Bond, Arthur Schomburg, Lomax, Hernton ("White Liberals and Black Muslims"), Elijah Muhammad, Rivers (on Hughes), J. Noel Heermance ("The Modern Negro Novel"), Thomas Echewa

("Africa vs. Afro-Americans," part of a series of debates involv ing John A. Williams and John Oliver Killens), and Hamilton Bims ("The Plight of the Negro Writer in a Segregated Society"). Bontemps opened the decade appropriately enough with his November 1961 article, "The New Black Renaissance." Since he had participated in the "first" renaissance, he was aptly qualified

comparisons between the two. He noted that "the new crop of Negro writers in the United States show more traits in to make

common

with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance than with

the famous WP A group who

were

their

literary parents so to

speak." Wright, Yerby, Motley, Walker, and Brooks, Bontemps felt, did not have progeny in the newest group of authors (Paule Marshall, F. L. Brown, Jones, Gloria Oden, Killens, Herbert Simons, and William Melvin Kelley). A possible exception was Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun, inspired by Hughes's "A Dream Deferred"), who may have been related "in some fundamental literary ways" to Wright. Her work reflected the "increase of technical skills" expected of "a second or third generation of writers." Bontemps warned that there was, after Wright's heroic efforts to master form and language, no excuse for poor writing by black authors. Such an admonishment was to become a source of great irritation to the still newer writers waiting in the wings some of whom assumed that it represented a broadside against the new

Black Esthetic.

In June 1964 Fuller's article on "The Role of the Negro Writer in an Era of

Struggle" explored Baldwin's frustration at being

acclaimed as an essayist while the same attention had not been

given his fiction. Fuller noted that in a time of social crisis, readers and critics perhaps find more meaning in social essays than in novels. Ralph Ellison, he observed, emphasized craft, while Hughes remained very committed to civil rights. Many other articles dealt with the problems of black authors. Bims examined "The Plight of the Negro Writer in a Segregated Society" in a January 1965 issue, and lamented, "The current Negro Writer who does not have an unshakable faith in himself is frustrated in looking about him for justification of himself, of his chosen profession." In April of 551

the same year, a symposium undertook a look at "The Task of the

Negro Writer as Artist" with contributions from Lerone Bennett, Jr. (author of Before the Mayflower and Ebony senior editor), Brooks, actor Ossie Davis, novelist William Demby, jazz critic Nat Hentoff, Hughes, Jones, Kelley, Killens, Redding, Harvey Swados, John A. Williams, Yerby, Hare, John Henrik Clarke, Rivers, Randall, Kristin Hunter, Bill Gunn, Lincoln, Ernest Gaines, Alex Haley (originator of Playboy magazine's famous "Interview" series, author of Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X), Lennox Raphael, Lomax, Hernton, playwright Wil liam B. Branch, Margaret Danner, Ronald Fair, and Emanuel. The committed Hughes remained basically true to his lifelong self, drawing away from the temporary artiste's stance of his Free Lance introduction: "Contemporary white writers can perhaps afford to be utterly irresponsible in their moral and social view points. The Negro writer cannot. Ours is a social as well as a literary responsibility." Discussions and debates concerning the black writer's role had, in the mid-sixties, become an important arm of the black cultural enterprise, evidenced by the numerous conferences: AMSAC Stu dent Editors Conference of Africans and Afro-Americans at Hamp ton Institute; a white literary luncheon in Chicago at which editors of Digest engaged in a touchy exchange with Roy Newquist over why his new book Counterpoint (featuring interviews with sixty three writers) included no black authors; the Harlem Writers Guild-New School for Social Research symposium (Baldwin, Richard Gilman, Jones, Alice Childress, Sarah Wright, Marshall,

Brown, Myrna Baines, Douglas Turner Ward, Killens, Gloria Oden, Allen, Walter Lowenfels, Loften Mitchell [Black Drama], Albert Murray, and others); and the Alabama A. and M. College Writers' Conference, where Rosey E. Pool, Hayden, Dodson, Evans, and Killens made presentations. Hayden, destined to figure

prominently in the aesthetics controversy, talked about drama at the Alabama conference and labeled Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie and Jones's Dutchman as "just bad plays." Notices of conferences and symposia were announced regularly in the columns of Digest-which developed into the best source of cultural news in black magazine history.

Jones and Major had been 552

publishing in Free Lance and in

myriad white-dominated little magazines (Beatitude, Blue River, Beat Coast East, Statements). With Spellman, Jones also wrote exciting jazz criticism in more widely circulated magazines such as Nation, Jazz, and Downbeat. In the meantime, Ted Joans (the itinerant jazz poet), Kaufman (the irreverent and brilliant Beat poet), and Atkins (the genius-experimentalist) had begun sepa rate but-hindsight shows us-related assaults on the language traditionally employed in the service of poetry. Their efforts and those of others, however, were not confined exclusively to the often black-influenced but white-controlled cultural and literary undergrounds. Writing and theater arts workshops began springing up all over black America. Following or preceding them were important social corollaries: political ideologies, religious sectarian theories, race pride philosophies, hero- and myth-makers, and an unprecedented consolidation of black activism (symbolized by freedom rides, sit-ins, and, most important, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom). It was not surprising, then, to find clusters of poets, writers, and activists developing their own journals: the Howard Poets and Dasein; "Liberation Committee for Africa" and Liberator; the New York activist-theoreticians and their

Freedomways; the "Society of Umbra" and Umbra; the workshops and their mirror-journal, Soulbook ("the Quarterly of Revolutionary Afro-America"); the Negro Student Association at San Francisco State College and Black Dialogue; the young poet-mystics who proudly announced their Journal of Black Poetry ("published for black people every where"); the Organization of Black American Culture's frank embrace of its Africanity in the name Nommo (Chicago); and the numerous others (most of them bearing names associated with the new mood and group spirit). It also goes without saying that because they took many and divergent ideological and cultural stances, they deserve more treatment than this essay can give them. Dasein, one of the most consciously literary of the new journals, activist-writers

immediately established a link between the Harlem Renaissance and its progenitor of the sixties and seventies

by organizing the

following advisory board: Sterling Brown, Arthur P. Davis, Owen Dodson, and Eugene C. Holmes. Brought out by the Dasein Literary Society, the periodical was subtitled A Quarterly of the Arts, with Percy Johnston serving as publisher and Walter De553

LegaU as editor. Al Fraser, Oswald Govan, Lance Jeffers, Leroy O. Stone, and Joseph White were contributing editors. Original and experimental in content, design, and layout, Dasein remains one of the truly beautiful cultural art survivals of the much discussed sixties. Bebop, Zen Buddhism, black language and folk lore, the Beat poetry of coffee shops, nuclear armaments. racism, and the threat of World War III all influenced the writings of Dasein's contributors. Like Free Lance, the journal did not restrict itself to printing works by blacks. Among the poets were Clyde Taylor, Delores Kendrick, Jeffers ("My Blackness Is the Beauty of This Land"), William Jackson, Vernon A. Butler, Laura Wat

kins, Govan, Dodson, Fraser, Karl Darmstadter, R. Orlando J ack son, DeLegall, Johnston ("On Her Senility," "To Paul Robeson, Opus no. 3"), Stone ("Calypso"), Richard Eberhart, and Carl Smith ("The Little Red-Bellied Woman"). The usually strong essays of the early sixties included Kermit Keith's "Approaching Architecture as an Art"; and among the writers of fiction were Theophis Shine, Jeffers, White, Barbarossa ( "The Avengers"), Helmar Cooper ("Elizabeth"), E. L. Robertson, and Mel Cebulash ("The Price of Fame"). The early sixties continued to witness an outpouring of cultural and literary magazines, but they also saw their share of new political journals, most of them avowedly nationalistic and devoted primarily to the struggle. Such was Freedomways, established in 1961 by Shirley Graham (editor), W. Alphaeus Hunton (associate editor), Margaret Burroughs (art editor), and Esther Jackson (managing editor). Initiated as a "Quarterly Review of the Negro Freedom Movement," the magazine later dropped the word

"Negro" and broadened its scope to deal with Africa and the Third World. However, its service to poets and writers was more than incidental, since it regularly featured creative literature and commentaries on the arts. Moreover, it received a boost from two veteran activists and magazine developers, John Henrik Clarke and Ernest Kaiser, who wrote on "The New Afro-American National ism" in a 1961 issue. The title of the article set the political and cultural tone for Freedomways. Other articles looked at freedom, W. E. B. DuBois, challenges to black artists, blacks in films,

jazz,

black poetry, Paul Robeson, social justice, new civil rights heroes, the significance of Lorraine Hansberry, "The Negro Woman in 554

American Literature," and "The Free Southern Theatre." Hand

but rarely deviating from its basic design and layout, Free domways soberly analyzed social and cultural developments, its some

pages reinforced by the fine art of Tom Feelings, Charles White, Elton Fax, and Lee Jack Morton. In 1963 the written and visual arts were combined in a special issue on "Harlem: A Community

in Transition." Taken together, the healthy group of black journals launched in the early sixties represented the Afro-American consciousness in

all its many colors. It is to them that one must go to trace the

weaving of black art and thought. They fashioned the new literary tapestry and published the new writers: Nathan Hare, Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones, James Emanuel, John A. Williams, Clarence Major, John Oliver Killens, Paule Marshall, Ernest Gaines, Jay Wright, Henry Dumas, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Larry Neal, Frank London Brown, Herbert Simmons, others.

Conrad Kent Rivers,

and

Clarke, a regular Freedomways contributor, was also a founder of Liberator, along with L. P. Beveridge, Jr., and Evelyn Battle. Liberator brought the whole of black life into focus through its creative literature, social essays, reviews (books, plays, movies), cultural articles, photo-essays, and interviews. The first issue was

dedicated to Patrice Lumumba: "a symbol of unity and freedom; the people know why he died and what he stood for. Lumumba has

taken his place among millions of martyrs to 600 years of struggle

against slavery and colonial exploitation in Africa." Because Liber ator, like Freedomways, was born of struggle, it was hampered by none of the initial constraints imposed on Negro Digest. Very few

subjects or styles were off limits-a fact that was much more obvious after 1963, when the magazine became financially stable enough to use color and to experiment with different designs and formats. Each month Liberator expressed its message in cover photo

graphs of the new and old black heroes: Baldwin, Dick Gregory, Marcus Garvey, Cassius Clay, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jones, Hughes, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, Omette Coleman, and Julian Bond. Following the example of Crisis, Opportunity, and CLA Journal, in 1965 the magazine sought to encourage writers by instituting a $100 short story contest. However, it had already 555

begun publishing the fiction of Bims, Clayton Riley, Carlos Rus sell, Joseph White ("O'Grady Says"), Len Holt ("The Bug Feeder"), and Alfred Gray ("Any Other Reason"). Riley, the main critic of drama and film, wrote reviews of Nothing but a Man, The Pawnbroker, China, and numerous other works. Chief

essayists were Larry Neal and Chester Fuller. The perceptive Neal reviewed Jones's The Slave and The Toilet in February 1965 and made this synthesizing comment: "Jones' plays are the verbal companions to the expressions that have reached their greatest intensity in the music of Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and more lately Archie Shepp." One function of a journal like Liberator, Neal said in September of the same year, "is a passionate and sincere examination of the role of Afro-American culture, e.g. the arts, in shaping the spiritual foundation for revolutionary

change." Indeed Liberator seemed to wear Neal's suggested role, attempting to bring all black art forms into an arena of reenergized fluidity. The first literary magazines of the 1960s published exclusively for black writers and readers were Soulbook, Black Dialogue, and Journal of Black Poetry. Umbra ("shadow region"), which chrono and shared the excitement they them,

logically preceded

presaged

workshop of musi was not, cians, poets, fiction writers, and visual artists, the journal

caused. Founded by the Society of Umbra,

like the other three mentioned, a black nationalist literary organ. as evi Aesthetically, however, it was born of the black struggle, this statement in its first issue: "UMBRA is not another denced

by haphazard

definite

literary' publication. UMBRA has a in orientation: (1) the experience of being Negro, especially termed America; and (2) that quality of human awareness often issues 'social consciousness.''' Though concerned primarily with 'little

creative literature

facing Afro-Americans as these were reflected in Umbra warned, "We will ("poetry, short stories, articles, essays"), with race, social not print trash, no matter how relevantly it deals a "self issues, or anything else." Neither was the publication to truth the deemed radical," but "as radical as society demands be." Its "unequivocal commitment," the editor-founders noted, excellence." This stand, to "material of literary integrity and artistic have been an with its implied preference for art over politics, may both overreaction to the attitudes of Liberator and Freedomways, was

556

Umbra, Vol. 1, No.1, Winter 1963 (courtesy Northwestern University

Library).

published "uptown." Once one read Umbra, however, there was no question of the journal's involvement in the struggle-or of the need for a purely literary black magazine to serve as a forum and laboratory for new aesthetic experiments and analyses. Finally, like Free Lance and Dasein, Umbra had a particular interest in linking the post-Beat movement with the (often ill-termed) avant-garde. Considering the magazine's financial and spatial limitations, its achievements were quite substantial. One important by-product of the founding of Umbra and its cousins

(Liberator, Negro Digest, Soulbook, Black Dialogue, Journal of Black Poetry) was an effort to reformulate a vision of black artistic reality. The family of black artists and theoreticians who participated in this effort served

as a

nucleus out of which

evolved the scope and design of most of the later magazines. In

the persistent search for a synthesis of the artistic and the political

consciousness, Umbra assembled a wide range of opinions, per sonalities, and attitudes: editor Tom Dent (freedom fighter and son of the president of Dillard University in New Orleans), assis tant editors Hernton (sociologist-novelist-poet, a product of black

colleges) and David Henderson (a poet and former student of writing at the New School for Social Research), and editorial assistants William E. Day, Rolland Snellings, Pritchard, and Nora Hicks. The first issue was divided into four parts: "Figurine of the Dream Sometimes Nightmare," "Blues and Bitterness," "Time and Atavism," and "Umbra Through Ethos." These titles, with their Dasein-like evocation of sensuality, mystery, psychology, and social consciousness, pretty much established the breadth of interest of Umbra's first contributors. Interestingly, one of the poets was Julian Bond.

magazines was developed in isolated, self contained cultural centers, but each bore some evidence of region None of the

new

alism. That the editors and contributors were aware of national

literary activities is chronicled in the notes, titles of poems (and dedicatory inscriptions), reviews, and news. More important to this sense of black nationality, however, was the appearance of the same names in most of the publications. These writer-editors Neal, Jones, Cruse, Clarke, Snellings, William Keorepetse Kgo sitsile, Henderson, Hernton, Dent, Major, Joans, Hughes, Ishmael Reed, Joe Goncalves, Atkins, Bob Hamilton, Lorenzo Thomas, 558

Ed Bullins, Jeffers, Donald Stone, Randall, and others-helped form the backbone of the new black periodicals. One finds this to be the case with Soulbook, Black Dialogue, and Journal of Black

Poetry, all of which ironically, in view of their nationalistic orienta tion, sprang up in California, not in the compressed neo-African worlds of Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, New York, or Washington, D.C. The on-again-off-again publication schedule of the journals

attested to the

problems they faced as the first black literary magazines in history to try sustaining themselves purely on black resources. The forerunner of these, Soulbook, "the revolutionary journal of Afro-America," came from the Afro-American Research Institution in Berkeley. Its focus was on black music, economics, black poetry, and anti-imperialism. With Hamilton as editor, the journal received editorial support from Wananchi Donald Free man, Isaac Moore, Ernie Allen, Alvin Morrell, Ken M.

Freeman,

Carroll Holmes, and Leo R. Huey. Its major associates and con

tributors, however, reflected an East Coast influence: Kgositsile, Jones, Major, Doug Allen, Cornwell, Bullins, and Alfredo Pefia.

Among subjects treated in articles were Frantz Fanon and the Third World, racism and the socialist society, Egypt in history, "Blackness, That's Where It's At!" "Racism in France," and the whole of the African past. Africa began to figure prominently in Soulbook and other journals. Soulbook, for example, employed numerous African phrases ("Kitabu Cha Weusi"), ideas, concepts,

drawings, maps, and names. Black Dialogue and Journal of Black Poetry were low-keyed in that they, like Soulbook but unlike Digest, avoided taking on the

whole of the black cultural experience. Dialogue, born in 1965 at San Francisco State College, featured some articles and essays,

reviews, poetry, and fiction. Its founding editor was Arthur A. Sheridan, a San Francisco State student who had published his writings in Canadian Sun, San Francisco Sun Reporter, and Liberal Democrat. The East Coast editor was Edward Spriggs, brilliant poet and artist, while the editorial board consisted of Abdul

Kaliem, Joe Howard, Aubrey Labrie, and Sidney Schiffer. Brought out by Ari Publications, Dialogue was expected to appear every two months as "a meeting place for voices of the Black community wherever that community may exist." It symbolized the youthful vigor of black America, publishing articles on "Revolutionary 559

Theatre," "Negritude Americaine," "The Future of 'Soul' in America," Santo Domingo, jazz, more on African negritude, revo lutionary nationalism and the black artist, and Vietnam (by an eyewitness from Hanoi). Here the works of new young poets and occasionally those of older ones were printed: Al Young, Jon Lovett, Spriggs, Welton Smith, Neal, Conyus Calhoun, Alphonse Ngoma, Patricia Bullins, Goncalves, Senegalese David Diop, and Bisharo Al-Ausig, Here too were the fiction and drama of Marvin Jackmon ("Flowers for the Trashman"), Bullins ("How Do You Do"), Jane Clay (prize-winning author who had appeared in New South and Negro Digest), C. H. Fuller, and Melba Kgositsile. The

talented, unpredictable LeRoi Jones led the roster of essay-article writers that included Saadat Ahmad, Romare Bearden, Neal, James T. Stewart, Bullins, and Eldridge Cleaver. The book review

section, though sparse, was spiced with social undertones and ideological conflicts, as in reviews of Glorious Age in Africa, Worth Fighting For, The Wretched of the Earth, and Manchild in the Promised Land. There were also reviews of movies (for example, of Uptight by Nikki Giovanni) and the Afro-American Folkloric Troupe. The middle years of the sixties were given a particular twist and impetus by Jones, who wrote in a 1965 issue of Dialogue: "Revolutionary Theatre must Accuse and Attack anything that can be accused and attacked. It must Accuse and Attack because it is a theatre of Victims. It looks at the sky with the victims' eyes, and moves the victims to look at the strength in their minds and their bodies." In that year of Watts, a major jolt would be given the American social consciousness, and certainly the least affected would be black cultural institutions, espe cially the literary magazines. not

people everywhere," the quarterly founded by Goncalves and had a great impact on black arts groups during the late sixties and early seventies. No other periodical before or since has rivaled its lead ership in publishing the best of the newest poetry from the black "Published for all black

Journal of Black Poetry

was

poems and poets, the journal included incisive book reviews and excellent art and illustrations. world. Yet while it focused

(such as Negro Digest, Free domways, and CLA Journal), it energetically sought to establish Unlike some of its contemporaries an unbroken

560

relationship between typography, content, and ideol-

Black Dialogue, Vol. 1, No.2, July-August 1965 (courtesy Northwestern

University Library).

ogy. Following in the paths of Soulbook and Dialogue, it strove to achieve this synthesis by dismissing the Euro-American aesthetic and embracing neo-African criteria. An important component of this

developing sensibility was the "new" music, which became increasingly important in the thinking of cultural philosophers, many of whom saw parallels between the ideas of Malcolm X and the "revolutionary" sounds. Goncalves' contribution to this vital breakthrough in black aesthetics was to provide a forum for the new poets and theoreticians. For over a decade this journal has remained the showplace for the best black poetry. Part of the Journal of Black Poetry's appeal was in its cultural miscellany-a gumbo of criticism, reviews, news, and visual art. Articles, for example, covered such diverse subjects as Coltrane's music, black poetry from the Americas, "The Death of Yakub," "Toward a Purer Black Poetry Esthetic" (Crouch), "Letter to a Young Poet," "Black Magic" (on the new black poetry), "The Fire Must Be Permitted to Burn Full Up" (literary criticism), and "Black Arts Mexico" (Marvin X). Battles over the new aesthetics continued to dominate the pages of Journal and other black cultural organs. One of the books con

tributing the most to this controversy was Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual-a biting, searing indictment of black intellectuals and artists. It was simultaneously praised and attacked in all quarters. Two examples of staunch positions, pro and con, taken by contemporaries were poet-artist Edward Spriggs's endorse ment of the work as the "most significant book of the decade" (Journal of Black Poetry, 1967-1968) and Black Scholar editor Robert Chrisman's condemnation of it as "The Crisis of Harold Cruse" in a later issue of his own journal. A kind of "blackening" process-which, in Digest, for example, took the form of ceasing to publish or endorse white writers and

changing its name to Black World-occurred in most of these new journals. The pattern was quite apparent in their names or subtitles, as witness this very incomplete list: Afro-America, Black America, Negro American Literature Forum, Black Expression, Black Theatre, Nommo, The Black Scholar, Confrontation (Troupe: Ohio University, Athens), Echoes from the Gumbo, Proud (St. Louis), Revolt! (Nat Turner Theatre, New Orleans), Cosmic Colors, Nkombo, Cricket ("New Ark"), Deep Down in My Soul 562

(Miami, Florida), Spark (Chicago), Amistad (John A. Williams and Charles Harris), Black Academy Review (A. Okechukwu, State University of New York, Buffalo), Black Creation (New York), Black Review, Harvard Journal of Afro-American Affairs, The Mask (Los Angeles), Ex-Umbra, Chicory (Baltimore), Phat Mama (New York, subtitled "Her Black Mind"), Uptight (El Paso), Spirit (London), The Conch ("Journal of Literary and Cultural Analysis"), Rhythm (Atlanta, African Expression, Inc.), Black Lines (Larry Coleman and Clarence Turner: Black Studies, University of Pittsburgh), The Non-Aligned Third World Journal (St. Louis), Kushusu Vitabu (Washington, D.C.), Phase II (Sarah Webster Fabio: Berkeley, "Journal of Black Art Renais sance"), Onyx, Talking Drums (London, monthly music maga zine), Yalode: Journal of Black Sister Poets (Miami, Theatre of Afro-Arts), Imani (New York University, "Concepts of Educa tion for Black People"), Black History Museum Newsletter (Phila delphia), Roots (Houston, Texas Southern University), Hoo-Doo: A Journal of Black Arts (later Hoo-Doo Black Literature Series; Up South-D.C. and Down South-DeRidder, Louisiana), Transi tion (later Synergy; D.C., Howard University Department of Afro American Studies), Pamoja Tutashinda (Williamstown, Massa chusetts), Maongezi (Detroit), Renaissance 2: A Journal of Afro American Studies (Yale, Afro-American Cultural Center), Watu (Cornell University; "Journal of Black Literature and Art"), Mwendo (Coe College, Iowa), The African Voice (Camden, New Jersey, Black Cooperative Association), Proud Black Images (Ohio State University, Columbus; New World Arts Workshop), Together Forever (Chicago, Hirsch High School), Poems by Blacks (Lane; Baton Rouge and Fort Smith, Arkansas), Shades ("cultural, historical and literary magazine"), Black Books Bulle tin (Chicago, Institute for Positive Education), The Pan African ist ("quarterly of the international Black movement"; Claremont,

California), Black Music in Perspective (Eileen Southern), Black stage (Adesanya Alokoya, "a monthly magazine reflecting the

development of Black art and culture"), Living Blues: A Journal of the Black American Blues Tradition

(Chicago), Identity (Detroit, Rapa of the Black Experience (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Hambone (Stanford, Committee for Black Performing Arts), ObsidHouse Writers Association), Drum: Journal

563

ian: Black Literature in Review

(Alvin Aubert; SUNY, Fredo nia), Studies in Black Literature, Movin' On in Space and Time (Nora Bailey, Chicago: "Journal for the Fine Arts and Foreign Languages"), Dues: An Annual of New Earth Writing (Ron Welburn, New York), Maii: A Journal of the Black Arts (Phila delphia, The MAJI Collective), Dark Waters (Collen McElroy; Seattle, Washington), Black Writers' News, Black Works (New York), Impressions, Spirit (Jamaica, New York; Center for New

Images, "A Black Arts and Communications Organization"), Con tinuities: Words from the Communities of Pan-Africa (Wilfred Cartey: New York), BGI-18 (Black Graphics International, "Journal of Revolutionary Literature and Art"; Detroit), Strive (Montclair, New Jersey), Gumbo: A Literary Magazine (Yusef Komunyakaa), Umoja: A Scholarly Journal of Black Studies (Edward C. Okwu; University of Colorado, Boulder), Blackprint (Austin, Texas), and Yardbird (later Y'bird) (Reed and Young: Berkeley). Many of these publications were patterned after their early and mid-sixties forebears. Some had radically new formats, reflecting the most advanced developments in print media technology; still others, like CLA

Phylon, were more formal and academic in appearance. However, most were influenced by regional brands of black consciousness. This was particularly true of the Chicago-based Negro Digest, which, as the only national black literary magazine with a paid staff and a reliable publishing history, naturally assumed a position of leadership in the black arts movement. Until well into the seventies, Gayle, one of the most influential black aestheticians, dramatically aided Fuller in charting the journal's vision. He, along with Don Lee (Madhubuti) and Baraka (who later renounced Black World's position), devel Journal and

oped into a kind of axis force that monitored the evolution of the movement.

Of the other journals begun in the sixties, some, like Dasein and Umbra, changed paces and places. Others, such as Liberator and

Afro-America, folded in the late sixties. Still others, among them Freedomways and The Black Scholar, remained strong and signifi cant. Often the same editors simultaneously manned the staffs of

several short-lived magazines. Dasein, which, like Free Lance and had not been an exclusively black journal, reappeared in

Umbra, 1965

564

publication of the Dasein-Jupiter Hammom Press of

New York. With this shift had come a change in mood and format. It remained beautifully laid out with attractive color covers and

fine-textured paper, but the obvious black context was gone, though all the black writers were not. The racially mixed contribu tors of poetry included Barbara Brown, Bruce Andrews,

William

Packard, Sue Abbot Boyd (white publisher of Poems by Blacks), Jeffers (who with J. William Meyers and Michael Winston had been added to the advisory board), Jack Crawford, and the tal ented young Jodi Braxton (Sometimes I Think of Maryland).

Essays tended to be inspired by European-American academic ideas rerouted through an avant-garde consciousness. Very little fiction was published after the first two issues of Dasein, and there were few reviews. A current feature of the magazine is "The Young Writers' Salon," in which the work of new poets is introduced. As nonliterary journals, Freedomways and Liberator neverthe less incorporated the essential black cultural spirit into their pri mary function. Freedomways opened its pages to dozens of poets. South African Bessie Head contributed short fiction ("Tao"),

along with R. J. Meadough, Alice Walker, Loyle Hairston, Ann Shockley, and Mignon Holland Anderson. Liberator, with its larger size, made strategic use of visual arts and artists, featuring photo essays on various black communities. Short fiction and plays were still its strong features in the late sixties, and its star-poet lineup was interspersed with occasional new names. However, publisher Daniel Watts and company were not able to keep Liberator in existence after 1970. As for Umbra, the dispersion of its staff actually had a positive

effect on the black literary world. Reed and Henderson went to

Berkeley. Dent returned to New Orleans and, with the aid of Val Ferdinand (Kalamu Ya Salaam), organized two short-lived maga zines: Echoes from the Gumbo and Nkombo. (Salaam, in turn,

became a founding editor of Black Collegian.) In 1975 Dent

joined Charles H. Rowell and Jerry Ward in establishing Callaloo, "born out of a specific desire to give expression to the new writers in the Deep South area." In the meantime, Henderson had revived Umbra. first in New York in the form of an anthology and later in California as a tabloid that has exerted considerable influence on Third World cultural

programming. One of its most significant contributions was to bring together those writers and artists rarely published by the establishment with those from the black world. 565

three-issue Confrontation and Reed's five-issue Yardbird seemed similarly interested in tapping this broader base

Only Troupe's

of creative expression. Most new journals, while not completely

ignoring other colored artists, rarely attempted to show relation ships between cultural expression and political events occurring in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. A proto

type format for dealing with wider issues of color had been de veloped by Phylon in the 1940s, but apparently the editors of the new journals were not aware of it. The "survival of the fittest" axiom finally overcame both Soul book and Black Dialogue, after the latter had been briefly revived in 1969 with a new editorial board. Afro-American, with its New York orientation, proudly advertised itself in

September 1966

issue of Liberator as a "new magazine dedicated to you of African

ancestry

....

We feature the new young Black poets and writers; we

feature your history and heritage; we feature

review of current

books about Africans and Afro-Americans." The Afro-American

Woman,

Ebony-type publication brought out by the Negro

Club, issued its first number in 1967. At Terre Haute, Indiana, Englishman John F. Bayliss of Indiana State University founded the scholarly Negro American Literature Forum "for Book

school and university teachers." As

quarterly, which changed

its name to Black American Literature Forum in the mid-seventies under the editorship of Hannah Hedrick, it has been

valuable

of reviews, criticism,. and poetry. Its contributors have included Upward Bound and prison poets, members of the Watts source

Workshop, John Lovell, Benjamin McKeever, Lloyd Brown, Daryl Dance, Abraham Chapman, Turner, and Tolson. In 1972 Redmond (Drumvoices) edited a special poetry number that presented the work of twenty-three black poets. The black music magazine Cricket, an outgrowth of Liberator and other journals, carried the works of Sun Ra, Askia Toure, Caldwell, Neal, Baraka, Reed, Crouch, Kgositsile, Spellman, and Norman Jordan. Spellman later helped found Rhythm in Atlanta. Around the time Cricket appeared, Nommo arrived as the publi cations arm of Chicago's well-known OBAC, founded in 1966 by Rivers, Fuller, and Gerald McWorter. It came out irregularly and usually published works by members of the OBAC Writers' Work shop. Angela Jackson (Voodoo/Love Magic) became editor of Writers

566

YARDBIRD READER UoLtUPIB onB •

Yardbird Reader, Vol. 1, No.1, 1972 (courtesy Northwestern

Library).

University

the journal in the mid-seventies. The indefatigable Fuller oversaw these Windy City activities from his several-pronged position of

editor, organizer, and father figure. His feminine counterpart, Gwendolyn Brooks, openly and unselfishly shared her resources with the new black writers in Chicago and elsewhere. With Randall of Broadside Press (publisher of Black Position), Fuller and Brooks, under the ever-hovering spirit of Baraka, formed a tri umvirate that literally set the course of black creative expression during the late sixties and early seventies. This was achieved by rocketing to stardom their young poet-protege, Lee (later Haki R. Madhubuti). In the meantime, Gwendolyn Brooks made a unique contribution to little magazine history by editing Black Position, wherein she promised to "present the music and the muscle of contemporary black pride as an excitement, a privilege, a respon sibility." Mostly done in black and white, the magazine carried the writings of Randall, Fuller, Bennett, Lee, Curtis Ellis (Chicago bookstore entrepreneur), Neal, Francis and Val Gray Ward (of Kuumba Workshop), Carolyn Rodgers, Gayle, George Kent, and Kgositsile. One of the most impressive literary periodicals to emerge from the Chicago and national scene, however, was Madhubuti's Black Books Bulletin. Though typographically imposing, with brilliant cover art and design, the journal's articles and commentaries were

quality. Part of Bulletin's problem was that its editor was simultaneously experiencing growing pains and occupy ing a vital leadership position in the Afro-American cultural sphere. Overpraised too early in his career, Madhubuti drastically simplified the most complex racial and social issues, then went on to quickdrawn conclusions. Nevertheless, the journal's service to black creativity remained invaluable, since it offered poetry con tests as well as artic1es and essays by leading thinkers, and it became a leader in monitoring books by and about Africans. Still of going strong in 1978, the Bulletin reflects, to use the words poet Julius Thompson, "hopes tied up in promises." The Black Scholar, founded in 1969 and now edited by Robert often of lesser

Chrisman, was established as a forum for social and political issues. However, its occasional literary criticism, book reviews,

poetry, and short fiction have helped provide new

platform for the

black literature. Most monthly issues have been devoted Pan concerns of black or Third World communities:

the special 568

Africanism, black psychology, the black soldier, black women,

fund-raising for the Afro-American community. There are essay and short story contests along with irregularly appearing reviews. One important service rendered by Scholar is its annual Black Books Roundup, and it has also devoted several issues exclusively to black literature and the arts. While Black Scholar was establishing its base of operations in Sausalito, Yardbird was launched in the early seventies by Reed, Young, and associates in Berkeley. The journal resembled Amistad and Mel Watkins's Black Review (neither of which lasted very long). Yardbird's inability to tangle successfully with the various conflicts among its editorial ranks led to its death after only five issues. However, in its brief life the journal was more concerned like its predecessors Free Lance, Dasein, and Umbra-with pub lishing literature than with discussing or reviewing it. Brought out by the Yardbird Publishing Cooperative, Yardbird reflected some of the best writing being done by Afro-American and Third World authors (and occasionally carried the work of non-colored writ ers). This practice of including some white writers was carried over into the new Y'bird (Reed and Young, 1977). Nate Mackey, Sandi Richards, Charleen Rubin, and Gloria Watkins organized the magazine Hambone (in the mid-seventies), which is published by the Committee for Black Performing Arts at Stanford University. It featured poetry by Barra, Watkins, Henderson, Johnnie Scott, Halifu, David Jackson, Michael Harper, Fabio, and Reed. Drawings and photographs, interviews (Anthony and

Braxton), articles (Eckels and John Cochran), and fiction (Wan dera Ogana, Fred Johnson) helped round out one issue of the attractive publication. Historically the major centers of black little-magazine activity have been D.C., Atlanta, Cleveland, Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and Berkeley. Oddly enough, New York City has not been able to give continuous life to a single black literary periodi cal, though it has seen many come and go. Recently, however, encouraging signs have been appearing on the cultural horizon, and writers hope the phoenix cycle will produce an important New York-based black journal. In other parts of the state, as well as in adjacent states, various writing and arts workshops, studios, and social organizations have often joined Afro-American studies or English departments in repeated attempts to publish little maga569

zines. When Liberator, the most literary of magazines in New York during its day, was on its deathbed, Black Theatre was

ascending. As the official periodical of the black theater movement, it was based at the New Lafayette Theatre, founded in Harlem in 1966. It had hoped to publish six times a year but soon met all the familiar adversities. During its brief existence, however, it became a valuable source of cultural news, original short plays, interviews, reviews, and poetry. Bullins and Marvin X headed the staff of editors and correspondents that represented a national range and scope: Dent, Theodore Ward, Vantile Whitfield, Adam David Miller, Goncalves, Larry Miller (Katibu), Caldwell, Jones, Woody King, O'Neal, and Barbara Ann Teer (founder of the National Black Theatre of Harlem). Black Creation, the brilliant prototype of a black cultural journal, appeared in the early 1970s. As a "Quarterly Review of Black Arts and Letters," it had much of the spirit and flavor of Liberator, except that its editors unashamedly announced that literature and the arts would be their main focus. Veteran and

beginning artists and writers were given exposure in Creation which-like Liberator, Black Theatre, and other New York maga zines-had regional editors in San Francisco (Cleveland Bellows), Detroit

(Melba Boyd), New Orleans (Dent), and Paris (Lillian Barlow). Editor Fred Beauford was handily assisted by James Walker, John Flateau, and playwright Buriel Clay. The following claim by Creation was well documented in each issue of the color ful magazine: "We are one of the few magazines around where the heart beat of Black Americans can be felt with force; where young and

old, male and female,

come

together in a community of

creative expression." The entire spectrum of black expression was

repeatedly seen in the journal: film and theater criticism, creative (fiction, poetry, essays), art, book reviews, in-depth

literature

interviews with authors and artists. One-time poetry editor was the gifted Elouise Loftin, who published her own poems as well as those of others. Editor Beauford

published his own fiction along

with that of Melvin Mitchell, Wesley Brown, Joe Johnson, Shelby Steele, King, Mignon Holland ("Gone After Jake"), and Ronnie Redd.

Bopp (earlier BOP, for "Blacks on paper") and Black Works were only two of several new magazines that showed promise in the mid-seventies. Bopp, originally conceived by students at Brown 570

University, is currently edited by Kambon Obayani, who is in the graduate writing program at the University of Iowa. Associate edi tors are Gayl Jones, Troupe, and Cannon; contributing editors include Charles Davis, Everett Hoagland, Rhett Jones, Major, and Mustapha (included in Jumbalaya). The future of Bopp is uncer tain, but its present is bright. Black Works, which made its first impact as a literary magazine published once annually, announced in 1977 that it would come out twice a year. Based at Long Island University, the journal has been reminiscent of Liberator in its practice of printing photo graphs of everyday blacks in natural surroundings. Poetry, stories, drama, and literary criticism accompany the visuals. Editors include Cecil Lee, Patricia Nichols, Wayne Dawkins, Gibson, Patricia Lee, and Grace Corbet. Gibson is also a member of Troupe's New York poetry workshop at the Frederick Douglass

Creative Arts Center. The struggle to bridge the gap between the academy and the streets was most

notably seen in journals like Phylon, Negro

Digest/Black World, Liberator, and Black Scholar. Within this frame of reference, one other New York State literary magazine deserves brief consideration. Although its future was not guaran teed

(and it remained in need of subscribers in early 1978) Obsidian: Black Literature in Review appeared at mid-decade. Its attempt to avoid the tension between the streets and the academy,

and to embrace the international black literary family, was seen in

its list of

contributing

and

advisory

editors:

Awooner, Lloyd

Brown, Clarke, Arthur P. Davis, Nick Aaron Ford, Gaines, Gayle,

Harper, Blyden Jackson, Kent, Arthenia Bates, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Redding, Rowell, and Douglas Turner Ward. Obsidian was de scribed as being "devoted to the study and cultivation of Black Literature, featuring critical articles, book reviews, short fiction, poetry, interviews, very short plays." It is desperately needed as a review of literature--especially in view of the abdication of this position by CLA Journal. At the same time, fine new journals like Bopp and Hoo-Doo are vital and important because they specialize in creative expression. The latter's peripatetic editor (Ahmos Zu-Bolton), who has been active on the little-magazine circuit (including the white network) for some time, made impressive strides in the mid-seventies, pub

lishing a wide range of contemporary Afro-American poets and 571

devoting an entire issue to women writers. A southern flavor has pervaded Hoo-Doo, just as it has and does in such sister journals as Echoes

from the Gumbo, Roots, Nkombo, Pound, Deep Down in My Soul, and The Saracen. The excitement caused by black and other non-white interac tions and struggles has spurred the development of Third World

journal publishing. Early examples were Tropiques, Presence Ajri caine, and Black Orpheus, but these were followed by many others: Abbia (The Cameroon Cultural Review), African Forum (New York), African Arts (UCLA), African Literature Today (Sierra Leone), Journal of New African Literature and the Arts (Joseph Okpaku, New York), Journal of Ethnic Studies, Lotus: Afro Asian Writings (Cairo), African Studies Review (New York), Black Images (Ontario), Cavite (Barbados), African Language Studies

from the Cave, African Theatre (Kenya), Jamaica Journal, African Review (Dar es Salaam), Gumbo: A Literary Magazine (Yusef Komunyakaa), Mazun gumzo (Michigan State University), Calaban, Savacou (Jamaica), Insight and Opinion (Ghana), BIM (Barbados), Kairi (Trinidad and Tobago), Ujahumu, Busara, Caribbean Quarterly, lonala, Harambee, Neworld (Los Angeles), Gigibori (Papua, New Guinea), Copesthetic (Harryette Mullen), Minority Voices, Afri can Authors, and African Literature Association (Pennsylvania). This list only samples the rich productivity occurring in worldwide (London),

Voices

circles of "color." Afro-American writers have become more in volved in the Pan-African and Third World little magazine move

ment, and a healthy reciprocity has obviously emerged. The "black world," as many now refer to the global existence of Africans, is the stage on which the drama of the black future

will be played out. Black World, as name and new identity, was in fact born of this urgency. First World-a black-derived term to

negative residuals in the phrase "Third World," and to suggest black leadership instead of followership in interna tional life-adorned the masthead of a new magazine founded by counter possible

Fuller, Parks, and associates in Atlanta. "An International Journal

Thought," First World has changed its location and format. However, despite its august editorial board (Samuel Allen, Maja Angelou, Houston Baker, Brooks, Clark, Cruse, Davis, Gayle, Madhubuti, and others), not much has been done to keep the journal alive. One of the best-looking of the new magazines. it of Black

572

offers criticism, poetry, reviews, and political analyses, and its shoestring existence is not unlike that of other black journals. At the same time, the journal's history has been fraught with contro versy. During the mid- to late sixties and into the seventies, several writers and editors felt Fuller had allowed himself to be pushed into a myopic corner by proponents of the black aesthetic and

black nationalism. This predicament,

they maintained, aided in

the circumvention of certain writers and their materials. So, when Black World folded in 1976, a number of supporters were less than eager to help Fuller develop another journal with the same edi torial policies he had pursued in the last stages of Negro Digest/ Black World. One wonders, too, why Fuller, with both a knowledge of the journal's impending death and an international network of

contacts, did not act sooner to conceive and implement the First World project. The black little magazine has received indirect support from the

big slicks (Ebony, Essence, Encore, The Black Collegian, Players, Unique) which, especially in the case of Essence and Collegian, feature creative expression and literary history. In publishing the works of little-magazine contributors, these bigger ones are helping to publicize the efforts of their less stable cousins. For the black "littles," it has indeed been a long trek from instability to an uneasy stability, aided in part by wider reading audiences and various public or private grants. The same magazine (Umbra- Yardbird- Y -bird, Gumbo-Nkombo-Callaloo, Shrewd Confrontation-Bopp, Free Lance- Vibrations-Black Ascensions Juju, or Liberator-Cricket-Black Theatre-Black Creation) keeps being born within the spirit and letter of the African continuum. A healthy reflection is cast by the current state of the black cultural arts: strong, flexible, multidimensional! directional, proud, contro versial, and life-giving. From this robust conflict is produced the stuff of future creative expression. The individual black journals have come and gone, but the idea that they are necessitated by life (art) will never disappear. Callaloo, one of the newest of these magazines, is, as its editors suggested in the inaugural issue, already in "a wretched financial state"-a desperate situation, to say the least. But hope abounds in the lead-off article, in which Lelia H. Taylor, preparing to examine the survival-food recipe that became the journal's title, flings a challenge and a lifeline: "Callaloo, anyone?" 573

Concern Is Tom Montag

Tom Montag's Concern/s, Pentagram Press, Milwaukee, 1977. Photograph

by Michael Tarachow (courtesy Tom Montag).

THE LITTLE MAGAZINE SMALL PRESS

CONNECTION: SOME CONJECTURES Tom Montag "If any single characteristic of many contemporary writers bothers me," says Tom Montag, "it is the pretension-the smug assump tion that innovative writing is a more distinguished and honorable profession than farming or selling lumber." Thus he explains his decision in 1976 to leave Milwaukee, where he edited the Monday

Morning Press and the review magazine Margins, and become a country journalist in a central Wisconsin farm village. Mr. Montag's aversion to pretense is also manifest in his decision to use newsprint for twenty-four of the thirty large issues of Mar

gins. What Margins did in its four-year run from 1972 to 1976 was designed to be peripheral, "at the edge of serious literature." Tom Montag has published nine volumes of poetry (all with small presses), and two books of essays about small press books,

poets, novelists, publishing, and literary journalism.

In the past, the study of American literary publishing has tended

history, significance, and influence of the little magazine and to neglect the role of the small literary press. Works such as Frederick J. Hoffman's The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography have been widely acknowledged and used as resources in the study of the dynamics of literature; other studies, such as the annotated bibliography included as part of The Little Magazine in America, a Modern Documentary History, serve to update and expand Hoffman's classic work and sometimes to em phasize the little magazine at the expense of the small press. Only recently, with the publication of Hugh Ford's Published in Paris, has any full account of particular literary presses (those in Paris earlier in this century) been readily accessible. Numerous studies to center on the

575

of "fine presses" are available, but such books have been concerned

primarily with the art of bookmaking rather than with the dyna mics of literary publishing. Because Ford's Published in Paris presents considerable factual material about the operation of small presses (despite the boundaries of its concerns), the book will enable those interested in the processes of literary production to consider and assess the historical importance of the small literary press. Ford's book, we might hope, will spur similar research about past and present American literary presses. To date, however, the intense interest in the little magazine has meant, largely, the neglect of the small press. In part, this may stem from the fact that the little magazine is more readily researched and studied than the press. A little magazine can be indexed; its editorial vision can be analyzed; its sphere of concern over a period of years can be assessed. By contrast, the and editorial vision of the good small publisher nature, concerns, may often be difficult to ascertain because, first, the small press editor does not have the convenience of "editorial notes" in which to set down his literary tenets; second, the publisher may present diverse kinds of writing, dissimilar in all respects except for that

intangible called quality, something not easily described; and, third, students of literature generally seem more interested in the development of particular writers (and hence the bibliographies of particular writers) than in the larger dynamics of literature (to which the bibliographies or "lists" of publishers are relevant). The editor of the little magazine can and often does explain his editorial position in the pages of his magazine; the small press editor can do so at the risk of irritating his readers, who buy a particular book in order to read the writer, not the writer's editor. In addition, an editor's concerns are more quickly apparent in a little magazine by virtue of the number of selections presented during a year's publishing; the book publisher usually presents considerably fewer writers, and therefore fewer examples of his editorial interests, in the same span of time. Further, the "lag time" between a decision to change editorial direction and the imple mentation of that decisiori is far shorter for the magazine than for the small press. The critical vocabulary necessary for discussing the common quality of several kinds of writing is available, but when a long-lived small publisher's list becomes extensive, such discussion may be highly intricate and complicated. Recurrent 576

readily discernible for the magazine than for the press-again because the magazine presents a greater number of selections in a given period of time than does the press. Although the needed critical vocabulary may be available, we have only a limited understanding of the dynamics of literary interrelationships and influence; Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era presents the first comprehensive model for grappling with complex interactions of writers, writings, and emerging literary currents. editorial patterns

are more

Literature is studied

often in terms of writers alone, and

seldom in terms of processes, that we are not yet accustomed to

considering the significance of the multifarious literary interrela tionships that book publishing entails. We can, moreover, speak about the editor of the little magazine in terms similar to those we use for writers.

We may discuss his vision, for instance,

would talk about the vision of

novelist

as we

poet. The editor

of a good little magazine seems to be more visible

(though not obtrusive, in the best cases) than the small press editor, although each may be exercising the same tight editorial control. Because researchers' interests have tended to focus on little magazines, the study of small presses has been neglected; hence the detailed factual information and the analysis needed for an understanding of the broader literary processes of which small presses are a part have not been gathered and made. The relationship between the small literary press and literature is only beginning to be examined. When factual material about literary publishing in America since 1950 is finally collected and analyzed, the significance of the small press might well prove greater than the current neglect by students of literary publishing would indicate. That the editor of a little magazine is frequently also the editor of a small literary press should not surprise us. The concerns of the two enterprises, literature and readership, are similar and interrelated, however different the magazine and the press may be in practice. An editor may launch a little magazine only to discover that magazine format is confining and does not permit all the kinds of publishing he would like; in such cases the press is an outgrowth of the magazine. An editor may feel, for example, that one or more of the contributors to his magazine needs more substantial exposure than magazine publication would permit i.e. that a particular writer would be better served by the presenta tion of a large collection of work in one place than by the publica577

tion of the same work in a number of issues of the magazine or in several different magazines. Such circumstances may serve as the

impetus for founding a press out of a magazine. Depending in part on the editor/publisher's financial resources and in part on how frequently the editor sees the need, books may be an occasional or regular supplement to the magazine operation; the magazine itself remains the center of activity while books are viewed as adjuncts. For instance, Gallimaufry (formerly of San Francisco, now of Arlington, Virginia) continues as a literary journal on newsprint, but the editors have established the Gallimau fry Chapbook Series and are publishing 40-to-48-page collections of work by writers who have often been contributors to the maga most common

zine.

ManRoot

(South

San

Francisco, California)

has

also

instituted a ManRoot Book series. Unlike Gallimaufry, however,

changing its editorial policies and scope of concern, to become less an eclectic gathering of work and more a tightly focused thematic publication. The M anRoot Jack Spicer

ManRoot has been

issue (number 10) is evidence of this altered direction. In some cases-more frequent in the past five years-the editor

of a little magazine chooses to publish a book, the work of a single writer, and simply calls it a "special issue" of his magazine. The editor of Road Apple Review

ple, presented

(Oshkosh, Wisconsin), for exam

William Kloefkorn's Alvin Turner

Farmer in

1972 as volume IV, number 2, despite the fact that Road Apple Review and Road Runner Press are related enterprises. Windflower Press (Lincoln, Nebraska) reissued Alvin Turner as a book two years later. Painted Bride Quarterly (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) recently published a title by John Giorno as an issue of that

magazine. December Magazine (Chicago, Illinois) has probably made more frequent use of this type of special issue than most other little magazines. Since 1967 five novels and two books of stories (with another collection of stories forthcoming) have

appeared as Decembers. The reason for such a decision could be financial-i.e. money is available for the magazine but not for the press. Or the editor could be attempting to conserve his flow of energies by producing a book without interrupting the his magazine-centered activities; he may fear, for example, that time and energy devoted to the production of a book will disrupt his magazine's publishing schedule. Or the editor may conclude that a book appearing as an issue of his magazine will have 578

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CLOWN WAR 13

FREE!

TED BERRIGAN

JACK COLLOM RAY DIPALMA DAVID GITtN BOB HEMAN MARNE MARCUS JIM MOSER

JEFF WRIGHT

Above: Clown Wars, Nos. 13,14,15,16,1977, edited by Bob Heman John Jacob). Opposite: The Painted Bride Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. I,

(courtesy Fall 197 3, edited by Louise Simons and R. Daniel Evans (courtesy J &FAnania).

�E B4INTED BRIDE vol.1/nol r\I I fallt73/1DO I L �� AnTERly i

WHITE

RABBIT

PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO

Above: Book, a Jack Spicer spoof of Poetry magazine, featuring the Poetry

format and logo (courtesy J&F Anania). Opposite: Mojo Navigator(e), No.4, 1973, edited by John Jacob (courtesy John Jacob).

better distribution than otherwise. Subscribers to the magazine, at least, will receive a copy of the book immediately, while remain

ing copies can be promoted and marketed in the same way book publishers handle their titles. A variation of the "special issue" book by one writer is the magazine appearance of what are essentially chapbooks by two, three, or more writers. Writers are sometimes allotted as many as 20 to 30 pages; depending upon the editor's selection skills and

intent, the work presented may have the wholeness and integrity associated with

good chapbook or small book. Salthouse: A Magazine of Field Notes (Ann Arbor, Michigan) will soon be publishing an issue given over entirely to the work of two poets. Stations (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) devoted each of its first two issues to fairly lengthy selections from the works-in-progress of six writers, with extensive statements by each contributor about the work he is doing. Each issue of Stations is, in effect, a tightly edited and carefully orchestrated anthology. Other magazines, which may regularly have eclectic or grab-bag policies, have also been known to publish anthology-like issues containing large swatches of work by relatively few contributors. Thematic special issues, which present work by many writers around a single topic, also have the appearance of anthologies. The ManRoot Jack Spicer issue, mentioned previously, is one example: poetry, appre ciations, and critical essays by a range of writers center on Spicer, with many contributors acknowledging literary debts to Spicer a

the poet. Both Dacotah Territory

(Moorhead, Minnesota) and

Scree (Fallon, Nevada) have published "Native American special

issue" anthologies. Dacotah Territory also recently produced (as its number 11) a Minnesota Poets in the Schools Anthology.

special issue devoted to the work of a single writer, together with the anthology numbers of little magazines, indicates a strong impulse among magazine editors to produce titles which are characteristically booklike in terms of editorial stance and literary intent. The Ironwood (Tucson, Arizona) special issue devoted to George Oppen is a book, and is edited as such, regardless of its appearance in a serial sequence. The several issues of Vort (Bloomington, Indiana), each presenting essays and commentary on one or (more frequently) two contemporary writers, are also booklike collections of criticism. Although The occasional

584

subscriptions to Vorl are encouraged, I suspect that the magazine's single-issue sales do better than individual subscriptions, simply because one might be particularly interested in some of the poets whose work is discussed but not in all of them. Two issues of Truck magazine (St. Paul, Minnesota)-number 13, Land scape, and number 14, Explorations-are also books centered on

particular thematic considerations. A book, we might say, can stand alone with its own particular literary identity and a clear, self-sufficient reason for being, independent of any larger design on the part of the editor. With the eclectic magazines that seldom if ever publish special issues, the reader must become aware of the editor's (or editors') peculiar stamp-the special nature of the editor's vision which marks his magazine over the course of its existence. For unless a magazine that purports to publish "the best contemporary literature available" has a clear editorial intelligence behind it, it can easily end as a hopeless, unfocused

hodgepodge of contradictions, a citadel of dullness. The grab-bag magazines are significant in one crucial respect: many of them are the first places where new, unknown writers can publish. But these magazines need a vitality, a unity, a vision that are too often lack ing, to the detriment of the better pieces of work they present. Some magazines steer clear of the hodgepodge effect by devoting themselves to particular kinds of writing. Interstate (Austin, Texas) is decidedly experimental in its emphasis; Kayak (Santa Cruz, California) is devoted to surrealistic poetry; Alcheringa (Boston) concerns itself with ethnopoetics; Salthouse presents historico-geopoetic work; Assembling (New York City) publishes "the otherwise unpublishable." The strength or weakness of mag azines with clearly defined boundaries of concern lies in the skill of the editor, in the excellence of his eye. A magazine that publishes bad examples of experimental writing, for example, or one that presents the worst surrealistic poetry being written, does no service to the particular kind of writing it purports to be inter ested in, and no service to literature generally. By contrast, a well-edited magazine with special concerns benefits not just its particular kind of writing, but all writing. Further, such maga zines frequently function as "continuing anthologies" or "active

anthologies," and can anthologies are used.

be used

the

same

way that

book

585

The number of special

single-author, thematic,

anthology

issues of little magazines and of special-interest literary journals seems to have

grown considerably in recent years. Where formerly editor might have been content with a series of eclectic issues,

frequently now he seems to feel the need to produce singular issues with distinctive and clear-cut concerns. The editor more

magazine

is beginning to view his role

similar to that of the writer, in

terms of

vision, balance, rhythm, and style in the work he is producing as editor. Any issue of a little magazine is becoming, more and more, a personal artistic statement on the part of the editor. Thus the magazine itself becomes a clearly stated aesthetic proposition, just as a well-written and well-assembled book of poems or stories or a novel is. The present tendency is to infuse each issue of a magazine with the wholeness, the unity or integrity we are accustomed to find in good works of art and good single author collections or well-edited anthologies. Historically, the impulse to edit and publish a little magazine frequently arose from the perception that an identifiable literary community needed a vehicle of expression. Little magazines were a means of communication and exchange among the members of of writers. "identifiable particular groups By literary community," however, I do not necessarily mean a school or clique of writers. Often the writers identified with particular magazines have been doing diverse kinds of work, although they might share common concerns.

Such

influential promoter of new literature as Ezra

Pound was interested in T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, James Joyce's

Ulysses, and imagist poetry-and much more; others of Pound's time had similarly broad-ranging tastes. The fact that magazines in the past tended to arise from, or to

form around even

themselves, a community of writers served to give

the most grab-bag of them some measure of wholeness and

unity. Invisible City (Fairfax, California), Kayak, Wormwood Review (Stockton, California), and Vagabond (Ellensburg, Wash ington) continue this tradition, serving identifiable communities. Other contemporary magazines, such as Blue Cloud Quarterly (Marvin, South Dakota), Center (La Honda, California), Mojo Navigator(e) (Oak Park, Illinois), and Montana Gothic (Mis soula, Montana), are distinguishable and identifiable on the basis of each editor's interests and taste. Still other magazines, such as Aspect (Somerville, Massachusetts), Caim (Baltimore, Mary586

land), Lake Superior Review (Ironwood, Michigan), and New Collage (Sarasota, Florida), have no strong editorial presence and appear to serve no community in particular; magazines of this

frequently a would-be contributor makes no attempt to ascertain a magazine's intent, if indeed there is an identifiable purpose, and all too frequently the lack of any community of writers means that a magazine drifts aimlessly, selecting material almost at random and getting virtually no notice and readership. The trend toward issues of magazines that have the integrity of books is of course an encouraging sign. If a magazine is not useful to one particular community of writers, sort are often anonymous entities. All too

least it can be of service to certain sets of ideas

kinds of

writing (which implies, perhaps, a community of concerns). Possibly one key distinction between a devoted magazine editor and a small press editor is this: the best little magazine editor situates himself within a literary community and uses his magazine to capture,

reflect, and shape the energies of that community and

to facilitate communication with those

beyond the circle of writers. The small press editor, in contrast, is primarily interested, with each title he produces, in presenting a substantial, integral work by an individual writer (or, in the case of anthologies, a carefully edited selection of writings). Certainly the small press can serve a literary community, and many of them do. As with some maga there is the zines, however, danger that small presses may publish only the clique of writers around them; other presses, especially those that are outgrowths of healthy magazine endeavors, serve a vibrant, already existing community. Perhaps the small press editor who brings out a highly influential and significant work intends, however slightly or secretly, to hitch his wagon to a star, to immortalize his name (or at least the name of his press) by being associated with a particular artist who comes to be regarded as a major writer. That the small press editor's impulse is neces sarily any more aristocratic or elitist than the magazine editor's is doubtful; many magazine editors feel they are publishing the most select, excellent writers of a particular generation and are part of an aristocratic literary tradition. Indeed, the editors of some little magazines (Partisan Review, Paris Review, Hudson

Review, Iowa Review, and many university quarterlies, with the notable exception of New Letters and Cut Bank, come to mind) are notoriously snobbish in their editorial selections, though not 587

for any discernible literary reasons. Even magazines which are established to serve a particular literary community may be gov erned

by aristocratic principles, if the group of writers being published is viewed as a special elite. Certainly the editors of some small presses, such

Black Sparrow Press (if we stretch def

initions to count Black Sparrow a small press), the Fiction Collec

tive, the Elizabeth Press, and others in varying degrees, seem inter ested in publishing that acknowledged first rank of poets and fictioneers-and intend the books they produce to endure as remarkable contributions to the literature of the world. This is not to say that the editors of less aristocratic small presses--e. g., New Rivers Press, Gallimaufry, Pentagram Press, Alice James

Books, and others, believe they are publishing inferior writing. Rather, they may feel there is more exciting serious writing appear

ing today than we have been led to believe. We do not have many Walt Whitmans and Ezra Pounds among us these days, but then we are not living in an age of giants. Or at least there are many excellent small press editors, I'll wager, who will argue that the

giants are extremely rare and that the task of the contemporary editor is simply to discover the best works of his generation, be they major or minor. A distinction between the little magazine and the small press might be drawn in terms of the immediacy and topical character istics of the magazine in contrast to the artifactual nature of the published book. Magazines can have an impact and topicality which bind them to a literary era, but if art is art it transcends those boundaries and endures. The best of the poems and stories in a little magazine will stand the weathering of time,

although

for a full sense of a particular poet or storyteller's range and vision we will

need to see other work in other magazines or in full-length

collections. Little magazines, by publishing single poems or stories, are perhaps issuing interim reports on the state of a writer's

development or the progress of a particular extended piece of work. Yet more and more editors are turning to the small chap book as a particularly useful way to present a writer's ongoing work, thus dissipating the immediacy of the magazine's "report." Some editors have gone so far as to issue boxed numbers of their

magazines, the boxes containing various pamphlets and chapbooks by individual writers. Kirby Congdon's Magazine 5 (New York City, 1972) and issue number 7/8 of Some (New York City, 588

Alcheringa, No.5, Spring-Summer 1973, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock (courtesy Anania Community Trust).

A LAST MEETING WITH EZRA POUND by Miauel Semno AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID IGNATOW

MUSIC ]:0 WHISTLE

Above: Some, No.3, Winter 1973, edited by Larry Zirlin, Alan Ziegler,

Harry Greenberg. Opposite, left to right: The Small Press Review, Vol.l, No.4, December 1968, edited by Len Fulton; The Sensuous President, manufactured as a free supplement to Fragments, The Little Magazine (Vol. 6), and The Minnesota Review (New Rivers Press 3, Fall 1972); December, Vol. 10, No.1, 1968, edited by Curt Johnson; Field, No. 12, Spring 1975, edited by Stuart Friebert and David Young (courtesy 1&FAnania).

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lISfINO!)

1976) are excellent examples of the melding of small press/little

magazine concerns. We have the sense that these two boxed issues are balancing the magazine tradition and the press tradition, to initiate a new style of publishing. We have also seen, sometimes, that small presses offer subscriptions to broadside or chapbook series; the publisher may desire the extended contact with readers which magazine subscriptions provide. Some editors who have both a magazine and a press, such as John Judson of Northeast/ Juniper Books (La Crosse, Wisconsin), offer one subscription to the magazine alone and another subscription to the magazine plus the chapbook series. Others, such as the Alternative Press (Grind stone City, Michigan), provide copies of all work produced in the course of a year for a flat subscription fee. Some libraries have begun to deal with small presses the way they deal with little magazines, by providing standing orders for all of a press's work. This arrangement helps insure that the libraries will receive titles they wish to have without the risk that a book will be published and go out of print unnoticed. In such cases, each small-press book or chapbook retains its "artifactual" nature, yet the sub scriber/reader perceives the series of which it is a part as an ongoing enterprise, similar to the little magazine. The combination of the chapbook and the subscription to a press's work lends small book publishers' lists some of the immediacy more often associated with little magazines. The pamphlet or small chapbook can also, of course, be used to present topical material. Literary history provides innumerable examples of this use of pamphlets, though the survival rate of such works, as art, is relatively low. Whatever distinctions are drawn between the magazine and the press begin to break down as magazine editors strive to create a sense of wholeness within each issue of a magazine and small press editors begin using little publications to provide ongoing reports on the state of literature.

accompanying small press; the editors of such a magazine may not be responsible for the pub lication financially. University literary quarterlies, for instance, very seldom if ever set up small presses, although they may publish special issues devoted to individual authors. The vision behind such institutionally sponsored magazines may very well be that of a particular editor, and the publication may be clearly stamped with his concerns, but the economics of literary publishing do not Some magazines never develop an

592

permit that editor to extend his goals beyond prescribed limits. Those magazines from which we see small presses emerging are more frequently the work of an editor or group of editors who find themselves responsible for all aspects of the magazine's existence. Often the magazine and the newly founded press are serving a clearly defined literary community, the press being viewed as an added service to the member-writers. There are, certainly, maga zines which are clearly intended to remain magazines, never evolv ing into a small press. Other magazines are at the service of what editors see as their most urgent needs; if a different kind of publish ing seems appropriate to changing circumstances, the magazine operation can be adapted accordingly. Some small presses are clearly small presses only, designed to serve either a specific literary group or the more intangible interests of "literature." Theoretically at least, the editor of an existing small press can establish a magazine to facilitate communication with a larger literary community or to deal with certain situations he may face, but in my experience such an occurrence is rare. After some research, I remain unable to name a significant magazine which emerged from an established small press. A great deal more research needs to be done in this area, but as a general rule it appears that a little magazine and a literary press are founded simultaneously, or else the press emerges from the magazine operation. Partly because factual material about the operation of small literary presses remains ungathered, a full examination of the role of small publishers cannot be made. We do not yet know enough to understand how publishing influences literature and how literary circumstances require the evolution of different kinds of publishing. Partly because researchers interested in literary publishing have studied the little magazine isolated from its small press counterpart,

have very little data on the interrelations

between the two enterprises. The preliminary conjectures offered here are made in order to identify, and at least argue about, some of the correspondences binding the magazine and the press together as

related and interdependent endeavors. Students of publishing

now need to

verify or disprove these tentative conclusions by col

lecting and analyzing sufficient information to allow the full exam ination which will provide insights into the dynamics of literature in America today. 593

THE SCHIPTIIHF: OF rnr

GOLDEN ETEH1\ITY

Second Avenue by Frank O'Hara

lack Kerouac

1------

S1.50

CAHY

::l'\YDEH

PREFACE TO A TWENTY VOLUME

SUICIDE NOTE by Le Roi Jones

...

•

Four Corinth titles: Frank O'Hara's Second Avenue (1960); Jack Kerouac's The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1960); LeRoi Jones' Preface to a Twenty

Volume Suicide Note (1961); and Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts (1960)

(courtesy Ted Wilentz).

BEHIND THE WRITER, AHEAD OF THE READER: A SHORT HISTORY OF CORINTH BOOKS Ted Wilentz & Bill Zavatsky Ted Wilent: has owned two bookstores. As a young man he and some

friends started the first one in the Bronx after he discovered

he could not get along with his father in the fur business. The second, the Eighth Street Book Shop, he opened with his brother Eli shortly after World War II ended. "The

changed every thing," Mr. Wilentz writes. "I spent almost five years in the army, entering as a private and leaving as a captain. The army is a hard master, but I willingly served in the fight against a modern bar barism. In those years, the shock of realizing, emotionally as well as intellectually, that progress is not inevitable, that the Day of the Beast is always imminent, led me to a reexamination of my thoughts and beliefs, and affected my social, moral, and literary war

attitudes." Soon after its opening, the Eighth Street Book Shop became a

literary center, a gathering place for a variety of writers and poets. "Dylan Thomas was visiting America, his sonorous tones adding to his romantic image. Allen Ginsberg's voice began to be heard in the land. The New York School, the Black Mountain group, the Beats were emerging. Little mags and small presses came alive with

vitality and with new visions sometimes startling and shocking." By the time Corinth Books was founded in 1959, Mr. Wilentz had become involved "personally, emotionally, and, to a degree, a

ideologically" with what Donald Allen would later call the New American Poetry and the New American Writing, which included "a great range of social thought, mostly implicit, ranging from the

philosophical anarchism of the Beats to what seems Art for Art's sake

....

The wide variety of the books Corinth did indicates that 595

our

editorial policies did not stem from a statement of principles.

I like to think that the overall list-the

poetry-ref/ects

our

personal

tastes

fiction, nonfiction, and

and beliefs, and that Corinth

may be counted among the voices that sing 'the simple separate person, yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.'"

In addition to

being co-editor and co-publisher of Corinth

Books, Mr. Wilentz is a founding editor of the annual Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses; a member of the Literature Ad

visory Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts; an associate fellow of Silliman College, Yale University; and a member of American MENSA.

Bill Zavatsky has published a volume of poetry, Theories of Rain and Other Poems (1975), as well as two books with Ron Pad gett: The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth, a translation of the work by Valery Larbaud (1977), and The Whole Word Catalogue 2, an educational text (1977). He edits Sun, a little magazine, and pub

lishes books from a press also called Sun. Mr. Zavatsky has taught

writing courses at the University of Texas, Austin. I've been co-editor and co-publisher of Corinth Books for seven teen years. Prosaic as this

sounds, small press publishing is still

full of excitement for

The

me.

same

excitement I felt when I

read The Little Review, Hound and Horn, transition, and the writers like Hemingway, Stein, Laura Riding, and the many others who published their work in those pages. They filled my memory as I became personally involved with the writers of the fifties, sixties, and seventies whose works I published.

My brother Eli and I started Corinth Books in 1959. The press grew out of our success with the Eighth Street Book Shop in New York's Greenwich Village. The store had gradually become a center for many writers of the fifties. Both of us were interested in publishing, so we jumped in. For a while we thought we might make Corinth into a full-fledged business, but that fantasy dwin

dled

time went

on.

Our first

publication was a book about

Greenwich Village which we commissioned Hal Bowser to write

fifty-cent guidebook that included photographs, a walking Green map, and an essay by William Barrett. The New Guide to of all the done with wich Village was Villagers. sophistication -a

596

My brother was always an art and architecture enthusiast, and made a perfect editor. We knew a good many of the new writers during the fifties.

University now, where you often can't tell a professor. But at that time even the clothing of these young people was disturbingly distinctive-and their beards! One of the factors that drew them into our bookshop was that we had empathy and respect for them when they weren't being well treated. And they appreciated it. By this time I had practically stopped reading poetry. But these new poets brought an irresistible excitement with them. They were speaking for their time. They were where the action was. In their work they dealt with issues, though their poetry wasn't directly political-nothing like the proletarian poets of the thirties. But what they were saying in the fifties represented a social viewpoint altogether different from an accepted one. Theirs was a sensibility coming to grips with life as it had to

I'm around Yale student from

be faced and lived after World War II. In 1947, my brother and I bought a small Womrath's bookstore

MacDougal Street in the Village. It had the usual lending library, best-sellers, stationery, greeting cards, and so forth. We gradually threw out everything and changed the nature of the books. As I've said, both Eli and I had a feeling for the Village, a respect for writers and for the new. Once somebody tried to me down that I a was writer put manque. I knew that by saying all the time. He wasn't putting me down. So in a very real sense

my involvement with the writers came out of the fact that I've always believed writing is the highest form of art. The bookstore

kept us close to the writers, and I think it's important to remember that most of the early American booksellers were also printers and publishers. And the number of writers who have worked in bookstores, owned them, and been involved in publishing is legion. These new writers, then, began appearing sometime in the early fifties. They would come in the shop, often to leave their

books-mostly on consignment because we usually couldn't sell them. I remember one guy who kept coming around and leaving five copies of his book, ten copies of his book. Every time he'd come

in, we'd check on his last consignment-and it was always 597

sold out. He had told

that the author of the book

was

friend of his, but finally I faced him and asked, "Tell me, are you Gregory Corso?" "Well, well yes," he said, "but I felt

embarrassed to be

selling my own

book." Which could

only

have been his first one, The Vestal Lady of Brattle (1955). I think I met Ginsberg even earlier, but I can't recall exactly. Allen

figure. Aside from the importance of writings, he has always been a catalyst. I remember in later years speaking to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and talking about what had been going on in San Francisco in the early Beat days. He said, "Well, everybody was writing and things were happening-of course. But it wasn't until Allen came that it really happened." Many years afterward I heard that same thing said again when I was in Berkeley with Al Young, whose book Dancing Joan and I published in 1969. We went to a nightclub to meet Ishmael Reed, who, as it happened, had told me about AI Young in New York. Every few minutes someone was

tremendous

Howl and his other

would rush up to the table to say hello: this one was

writer,

that one did this or that. I said to AI, "Wow, what a lot of action!"

And he replied, "Well, it didn't happen till Ishmael came." Gins

berg spread a great sense of brotherhood throughout the scene. And affection.

During the anti-Vietnam war movement a peace demonstration was scheduled in Berkeley, and the Hell's Angels

going to break it up. Ginsberg went to see them and cooled them down. Allen has been a focal point for years, with a royal

were

touch that I've seen bring solace and calm to many people. There were many now-important writers whom I had the

pleasure of working with and getting to know. LeRoi Jones, for instance, who today prefers to be known as Imamu Amiri Baraka. We began publishing books together in 1960. I met Roi when my secretary for a time. He was another of the young writers on the scene. But more about our association later. there was also tremendous activity in all this

Hettie Jones, his first wife, worked

During

period

the arts. The Living Theater, first uptown on New York's intel lectual West Side and then in the Village on 14th Street, played a crucial role in our lives with its productions of plays like William Carlos Williams' Many Loves and Jack Gelber's The Connection. A number of important poetry readings were held on that stage.

598

In art, the New York School was emerging. We went to the Cedar Bar and numerous other watering places, such as the San

Remo, which had displaced Minetta's by the early sixties. Then we went down to Louie's near the Circle in the Square, and of course the White Horse Bar, which Dylan Thomas made famous. But finally it was the Cedar. I first went there around 1951

a poet and playwright who worked for married to the painter David Ruff. She was

1952 with Holly Beye, and who

was

meeting David and other members of a workshop run by Stanley William Hayter near the Cedar Bar. You could sit in the back of the bar and have

nobody would disturb you. The owners were friendly and nice enough to let the artists alone. The Cedar emerged as a place where you could always go to meet people. Not only people you knew, but the friends a

ten-cent beer and

your friends knew at other tables. Naturally, no one had any money then. In fact I still recall

the time when Ginsberg came to me and asked if I would lend him

bring Philip Whalen and Mike McClure Ginsberg guaranteed the money, me and the back, paid brought poets to my house. I haven't met Gary Snyder more than ten times, but we share feelings of friend ship-partly because Corinth published his Myths and Texts, but also because he was part of the circle. Robert Creeley was some

money to

to New York City for a reading.

in Mallorca, and of course there was Olson in Gloucester. Jonathan

Williams, at some point, used to pack books for us at the shop. His first work was printed by the same David Ruff I met at the

Cedar Bar. These circles of writers and artists

never

stopped

intersecting! Our first co-publisher was Jargon, which was Jonathan Williams. Even as a young man, Jonathan had an extraordinary

people of consequence,

I've

for

sense

to amazing foresight treasure. For me, new writing is like a foreign language that only a few people can read until finally it becomes a daily language. Jonathan was one of the decoders, and his genius for recognizing first-class writing is reflected in Jargon's list-Olson, Creeley, Oppenheimer, Sorrentino, and writers like Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, and Louis Zukofsky. We did four books with Jonathan, and published them under the Jargon/Corinth imprint. One was 1450-1950 by Bob Brown, new

come

599

who lived near me in the Village and who was then making his

living selling cookbooks. His death, shortly before the publication of the book, saddened us all. That book had originally been published in 1929 by the Crosbys' Black Sun Press. Louis Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry was another reissue we did with Jonathan. Then we co-published A Form of Women by Robert Creeley. I didn't meet Creeley until after he had left Mallorca. When I first saw him he was reading at the YM- YWHA in New York City. He was up on the platform wearing that black eyepatch, and you could feel the tension pouring out of him, the same tension that characterized his poetry of that period. We kept A Form of Women in print until Scribner's was ready to publish Bob. Then we published the first three books of The Maximus Poems, that great work of Charles Olson. Jonathan had published the first part three years before, when he was about nineteen. It was Roi Jones who introduced me to Olson in the flesh. At that time he looked like

German

burgher-mustache, round

face, a huge, solid person. Once on a visit to Gloucester we went

looking for him in a poor section of town, perhaps a Portuguese fishermen's section. When we asked for Mr. Olson, the people said, "Oh yes, the big man!" When we published him he was

living on very little, and did so knowingly, to continue his work. The irony is that later on all his papers were sold to the Uni versity of Connecticut for a large sum of money, which he never had the pleasure of enjoying during his career. We didn't publish the rest of Maximus-not quite. We had the manuscript and had it set up in galleys, all ready to go. But we kept getting strange letters from Olson. (Anyone who knew him knows he would write letters that required a magnifying glass and an understanding of script to decipher, almost a scribble; and all kinds of additions covered the envelope.) The tenor of these letters was such that finally my brother and I threw up our hands and cried, "What does he want? What is wrong? What shall we do?" Olson kept writing to us saying, "Forget the money!" We finally letter that said, "Dear Charles, we never said a word about the money! What is it?" Then after a time he went wrote him

Europe and the rumors began: this or that publishing house was going to bring out the book. Actually we could have stopped to

600

Jonathan Williams, editor and publisher of Jargon Books. Photograph by Gerard Malanga.

publication. We had a contract, we had the galleys. But the book was ultimately published in England by Jonathan Cape. What was wrong with our printing, we found out partly from Olson and partly from others, was the spacing of the words on the page. To Charles this was extremely important. Here was a giant of a man with an epic view of the nation, and he wanted us to have a bigger page, more leading between lines, etc. He thought our standard size page (which was slightly oversize but not really big) was too small. Some of the language he used in his letters to us was as tounding: "This was no way to treat this poem!" But in his insis tence on the point, Olson and many of the writers around him emphasized their sensitivity to, and their sense of, placement the person particularized in place rather than lost in the abstract in an industrialized and dehumanizing society where the individual and the meaning of the earth are all too easily forgotten. After we had published the Bob Brown and Creeley books with J argon, and before Maximus came out, Fred McDarrah brought us a marvelous collection of his photographs and a pile of the new poetry. (Fred served as unofficial photographer of the avant-garde, would make all the scenes. Bumping into him any where meant you were at the event of the day!) Eli edited the material into an anthology. Some of the poets included weren't as good as others, but taken as a whole The Beat Scene (1960) presented a spectrum of what the young Village poets were up to at that time, and the general level of the work was very high. With good reason, the anthology has been called the family album of that generation. Eli and I would work closely on the manuscripts, but he did more of the editing on the Greenwich Village guide and The Beat Scene than I did, and was mostly responsible for the layout and design. The wonderful thing was that, regardless of who did the lion's share, we were always in agreement. In that same year, 1960, Corinth took three different directions. The first was its American Experience Series, a series of reprints

primarily on first-person narratives. This was fundamen tally Eli's project, and it included classics such as Lewis Henry Morgan's League of the Iroquois and Owen Chase's Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex, which figured so importantly in the mak ing of Moby-Dick. We used Henry Bamford Parkes, the great based

602

The Beat Scene (1960), a Corinth Book edited by Elias Wilentz, with

photographs by Fred McDarrah (courtesy Ted Wilentz).

historian at New York University, as a consultant. Once he knew what we wanted to do (and he liked the idea of the series), he supplied various ideas which we either accepted or rejected. As is usual with small presses, we didn't sell many of the twenty-one

titles we republished in this series. The second direction Corinth took was in the field of social

ideas. In 1964

brought out a paperback edition of a book

written by Moses Richin and published by Harvard in 1962, The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870-1914. (It's now a Harper paperback.) And we did a book that Dan Wakefield had written on

the Puerto Ricans, originally published by Houghton Mifflin.

We obtained the paperback rights and sold more copies than the

hardcover edition. Island in the City is, I think, one of the best books on Puerto Ricans coming to New York, though it is unfor

tunately out of print. We also did a book that I'm still proud of-in 1962, before the civil rights movement had really gotten off the ground. We felt that writing about blacks was being done by white people, and that we should publish a book in which the young blacks would speak out. With the help of Dan Wakefield and others we found several writers, among them two young men Glenford E. Mitchell and William H. Peace III-who had been involved in acts of civil disobedience. They commissioned articles on

different phases of the movement from various young blacks.

Unfortunately some of them weren't professional writers and never came through with the articles. Some of the pieces we did receive had to be rewritten. By the time we finally got the book together and published it, there was already a flurry of books of this type. Ours was called The Angry Black South: Southern Negroes Tell Their Own Story. But the direction that most appealed to me, meant most to me, and I think we did the most with-in an original sense-was that

of literature. We obviously hadn't caused the changes that were going on in writing, but as a bookseller I always wanted to be behind the writer and ahead of the reader. The publisher isn't the artist, but I've felt exhilarated by the fact that our publishing has

extremely important. A lot of the work we not published we knew was a first book and that the writer might out develop as a talent. And if much of what we published turned that to become "Postwar American Poetry," part of the reason for turned out to be

604

co-publication ventures with Jonathan Williams

and

with LeRoi Jones, both of whom, in their different ways, great editors.

were

our

day Ginsberg came to me and said, "Y'know, you're publishing now, and here's Roi with his Totem Books. He hasn't got any money." (It cost a hundred dollars then to put out a book, but Roi had to pass the hat to pay the bill.) "Why don't you get together with Roi? Maybe you could publish together," Allen said. So I spoke to Roi, and he thought it was a good idea. I liked him very much and we got along very well. He had already published four books or so as Totem, including Olson's Projective Verse. We got rolling in 1960 with four Totem/Corinth titles: The Scripture of the Golden Eternity by Jack Kerouac, Myths and Texts by Gary Snyder, Second Avenue by Frank O'Hara, and Like I Say by Philip Whalen. It cost us about $300 to produce each of these chapbooks. There was a royalty schedule. Our agreement with Roi was that he would submit manuscripts to us, and we were to say yes or no. If we said yes, we'd publish them. The heart of our editorial contribution was this judgment. Selection was up to Roi and he worked directly with the poets. We took the first ten One

selections he gave us. At the same time, Eli and I were also originating projects. We had a strong feeling that Diane di Prima could write fine prose as well as poetry.

(In my opinion Diane is probably the only woman writer who could be called Beat; her attitudes, her language, her whole approach was Beat.) She found writing prose very tough going, but finally came through with Dinners and Nightmares (1961 ), a book that catches the period with a hard, concise brilliance unlike any other writing from that time that I have seen. In 1973 we reissued the book with material that had been left out of the original edition.

In 1960, besides beginning our association with Totem and LeRoi Jones, we bought the rights to a delightful collection, Irish

Street Ballads. One of our regular customers at the Eighth Street,

Frank O'Connor, that "lovely"

man and fine writer, wrote an introduction to it for a modest fee, being more interested in the

material than in the money. Our venture was filled with overlappings and intertwinings. For

example, Jonathan Williams had published Joel Oppenheimer's 605

first book; then LeRoi Jones later brought us The Love Bit (1962). Jonathan had also published Maxim us, and Roi himself very affected by Olson's poetics. When I first met Olson he was coming to New York and staying at Roi's. In fact, they came was

to me looking for a bed for Olson, and I had none big enough to

fit him! We made do, though. Another Corinth Book that happened by serendipitous chance was

Successful Love (1961), the last collection of stories that

Delmore Schwartz would publish in his lifetime. Delmore and I would often meet over breakfast, and at some point he mentioned to me that Doubleday had turned down his second volume of short

stories.

(The first was the remarkable The World Is a Wedding, published by New Directions in 1948.) I suggested to Delmore that we publish it-and we did.

In retrospect, David Ossman's The Sullen Art,

collection of

short interviews which we published in 1963, seems to represent a summation of the period. David was doing radio interviews with

poets, and at that period there were few places where one could find an expression of the ideas behind the poems of the time. To

day, when Ginsberg is a kind of culture hero, it's hard to believe were heaped upon the new writers. Truman Capote, for example, stated that Kerouac wasn't a writer but a typist. Even though there are many different styles of poetry discussed in The Sullen Art, Allen's feeling of brotherhood, especially among these "alienated" writers, permeated the book. the scorn and ridicule that

We said no to the eleventh book that Roi gave us. It wasn't that the book was bad (nothing that Roi picked could have been bad);

just weren't excited by it. This came after we had published Totem/Corinth books, including collections by Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones himself, Four Young Lady Poets (which featured Carol Berge, Barbara Moraff, Rochelle Owens, and Diane Wa we

ten

koski), Ed Dorn, and Gilbert Sorrentino. We also published a collection of short stories that Roi edited, The Moderns (1963), which was strictly a Corinth Book. After 1964 Roi began to drift the away from the scene and grew more and more involved with black movement. I feel very strongly that one of his great contri

really bring black writing onto a competitive level with writing done by whites. We all felt a great loss as he moved away. The better I knew Roi, the more I had butions in that period was to

606

The Moderns edited with

inlfO(/uction by URal J_.

William Eastlake Robert Creeley

Jack Kerouac Paul Metcalf

John Rechy

William Burroughs

LeRoi Jones

Fielding Dawson

Douglas Woolf Hubert Selby, Jr. Michael Rumaker Edward Dorn Diane Di Prima

Russell Edson

The Moderns EMPTY MIRROR EARlY POEhlS 6 ¥

FOUR YOUNG LADY POETS CAROL BERGE

ALLEN GINSBERG INTRODUCTiON BY W'llIAM CARtOS WlU.tAMS

BARBARA MORAFF

ROCHELLE OWENS DIANE WAKOSKI

lOTEM,CORINTH $1.25

Four Corinth titles: David Ossman's The Moderns

(1963); The Sullen Art (1963); LeRoi Jones' anthology Four Young Lady Poets, Carol Berge, Barbara Moraff, Rochelle Owens, Diane Wakoski (1962) and Allen Ginsberg's Empty Mirror (1961); (courtesy Ted Wilentz),

respected him and liked him personally. His new politics and racism shocked and saddened me.

My brother and I split up around 1968, and I took the press with me. We had never actually lost money (we must have sold 25,000 to 30,000 copies of LeRoi Jones's Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note), but we never paid ourselves for our time

and energy. My wife Joan and I directed the press after that. We were co-editors

and co-publishers. Anything we published we must

both agree on, and she has designed most of our subsequent titles. After Joan and I took over the press, we were solely involved in the editing of the books. Often we found that there was material we

didn't want to include in

volume, and our guide was always

quality, (I you that there's content in many of the books that I don't approve of!) We worked very hard with never

content.

assure

the authors-figuring out the order of the poems, challenging this poem or that, making suggestions. Naturally, as an editor/pub lisher, I feel more pride in the books that Joan and I edited

ourselves, and part of the enjoyment in doing them has been in

working with the younger writers we've published. As everyone knows, Donald Allen has busied himself for many years since the appearance of his seminal anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, with the definition of the "canon" of the Beat period,

Donald M. Allen, editor and publisher of Grey Fox Press and Four Seasons

Foundation. Photograph by Gerard Malanga.

608

and I assume he will work on it until he's done all he can. The truth of the matter is that most editors get involved with a particu lar period, and it's very hard for them to get out of it. I once asked Don Allen why he didn't do a new anthology of the younger poets,

and he said, "I can't keep up and I don't have the same feeling for them."

The first book Joan and I published was Barbara Guest's The Blue Stairs, in 1968. Barbara had also appeared in The Beat Scene.

She's still one of our great friends, and an important part of doing the books is the friendships that develop. Not every writer is

likable man or woman, but certainly most of the people we've dealt with I would say awfully nice things about. Helen Frankenthaler, a friend

of Barbara's, did a stunning cover for the book-one of

our loveliest.

But by 1968 times had changed around the

Village. A new

group, referred to as the "second generation" of New York poets, had arrived: Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, Lewis

Warsh, Peter Schjeldahl, and others. They had moved into the East Village. We published Peter Schjeldahl first, then Ted Berri gan, who doesn't like to be thought of as a second generation New York School poet. He actually spans the first generation, which

includes such poets as Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, the late Frank O'Hara, and Barbara Guest, and the younger poets, and was born the same year (1934) as LeRoi· Jones. In 1970 we were able to reprint John Ashbery's Some

Trees, which had won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1957. At a couple of parties John mentioned to me that Yale was about to let the book go out of print. He didn't know what to do

about it, and I assured him that Corinth would be happy to publish it. Eventually he called and we

put out the book, minus the preface W. H. by Auden, which didn't seem to Joan and me to have much to do with

We asked Kenneth Koch to do a new but his schedule and ours didn't mesh. introduction, We also published two books of translation. One I did with

anything.

Eli-Modern Poetry from Spain and Latin America, edited and translated by Nan Braymer and Lillian Lowenfels a

(1964). It was

slim book, and included poets who were still unknown in the

United States, even though Robert Bly was beating the drum of

Spanish surrealism.

But the book that

really taught me about 609

translation was I Am Listening to Istanbul by Orhan Veli Kanik

(1971). Of course, few of us knew anything about Turkish poetry, and I published the book after my good friend Erje Ayden-that mad Turk and author of The Crazy Green of Second Avenue

brought it to us in a translation by Talat Sait Halman. We looked at it and liked it immensely. Halman is a tremendously cultured man, but since he wasn't born here, his brilliant translation had a

few rough spots. I learned what it meant to go to bed thinking about one word and how that word could be changed to catch the

spirit of the original language. One day we received a manuscript in the mail from a young woman named Brenda Herold, accompanied by the typical insuffer able young person's letter. We wrote her back saying, "You're too good a poet to write a letter like that!" Although we weren't ready to publish her, we kept in touch. Our correspondence with her would fill a volume, for in it we worked on the development of a young writer. And we worked hard! Her book, The St. Charles Gig, came out in 1971. We had a similar experience with an earlier

volume, Julian the Magician, a novel by Gwendolyn MacEwen that Eli and I published in 1963. The novel came to us "over the

transom," and the book flopped, but I'm still pleased we published it. Gwendolyn is still writing, I believe, and at thirty-five is one of the better known writers in Canadian literary circles. (We never met her.) Some years later, Robert Duncan told me he had read the book and liked it very much. It may have seemed to many of our readers that around 1969 we

began publishing poets because they were black. We never did that. We published poets who were good, and in the late sixties the black poets were emerging. The trend began, naturally, with LeRoi Jones, and led to Tom Weatherly, Clarence Major, Al Young, and Jay Wright-four very different writers. Joan and I became friendly with Clarence Major and his wife, and eventually he submitted a manuscript which we published as Symptoms and Madness in 1971. Strangely enough, when Ron Padgett started the White Dove Review in Tulsa at the age of fifteen or sixteen, one of the writers he published was Clarence Major. So in a roundabout way Clarence came to us as part of the second generation New York School. I read some of Tom Weatherly's poems in a magazine, and learned that he was working as a cook at the Lion's Head, a Village 610

literary hangout. Tom has a tremendous mind, and the vocabulary of his poems ranges from strictly black language to arcane nature words derived from plant names. I asked him for a manuscript, and we brought out Maumau American Cantos in 1970. I asked Jay Wright for a manuscript, too. Tom Weatherly was

working with me on an anthology of young black poets for Hill and Wang. In the course of editing Natural Process, Jay Wright's work turned up. Jay has been everything from a seminarian to a baseball player, and is very much involved in philosophy and anthropology. He's got a depth to him that is rare even for a writer. For a time I was working at the Sierra Club, and one day Ishmael Reed came up to see me. Naturally we talked about writers. When I asked him who was new and good out west, he said, "There's this cat named Al Young." That's how Dancing ( 1969) came to us. What unified

efforts at

Corinth, in the midst of diverse schools whose poetry differed greatly, was the sense that all the our

writers whose work we became involved with were trying to write in a new language, with a new view and a new sense of America

and of society. These writers learned from each other.

joined together in sympathy and

Life is hard for anyone, and for an artist it is

particularly hard.

Simply to remain an artist creates so many problems-financial ones, especially. My dear friend, the late Cecil Hemley, summed it up in conversation this way: "Here you are at forty, a poet. If you're famous you wonder if it's temporary, and whether your poetry is really any good or not. If you're not famous, you wonder what you've been devoting your life to. If you're good, you'll never know it." It makes for a difficult life, a life that by its very really nature must be an extended act of faith. Someone once asked me to ask Delmore Schwartz he wrote. I into him at a

why

bumped

party and blurted it out: "Delmore, someone asked me to ask you why you write!" "Ted," he answered, "I write because I have to write." And to me that was a perfect answer. Corinth Books: A bibliography, 1959-1973 1959

The New Guide to Greenwich Village, Hal Bowser. 1450-1950, Bob Brown. (Jargon/Corinth) A Form of Women, Robert Creeley. (Jargon/Corinth)

611

1960 The Beat Scene, edited by Elias Wilentz. photographs by Fred McDarrah.

The Maximus Poems, Charles Olson. (Jargon/Corinth) Irish Street Ballads, collected and annotated by Colm 0 Lochlainn, introduction by Frank O'Connor. The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Jack Kerouac. (Totem/Corinth) Second Avenue, Frank O'Hara. (Totem/Corinth) Myths and Texts, Gary Snyder. (Totem/Corinth) Like I Say, Philip Whalen. (Totem/Corinth) 1961

Empty Mirror, Allen Ginsberg. (Totem/Corinth) Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, LeRoi Jones [Imamu Amiri Baraka]. (Totem/Corinth) Dinners and Nightmares, Diane di Prima. Successful Love and Other Stories, Delmore Schwartz. The Hipsters, Ted Joans. Island in the City: Puerto Ricans in New York, Dan Wakefield. (Paperback reprint of original Houghton Mifflin edition.) The American Experience Series:

The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen The Journal of John Woolman The Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, James E. Seaver Brook Farm, Lindsay Swift Four Voyages to the New World, Christopher Columbus Journals of Major Robert Rogers Harriet Tubman, the Moses of Her People, Sarah Bradford Recollections of the Jersey Prison Ship, A. Greene A New England Girlhood, Lucy Larcom American Communities, William Alfred Hinds 1962 The Angry Black South: Southern Negroes Tell Their Own Story, edited by Glenford E. Mitchell and William H. Peace III. The Love Bit, Joel Oppenheimer. (Totem/Corinth) Four Young Lady Poets: Carol Berge, Barbara Morafj, Rochelle Owens, Diane Wakoski, edited by LeRoi Jones. (Totem/Corinth) The American Experience Series: Intellectional Origins of American National

Thought, edited by Wilson

Ober Clough

League of the Iroquois, Lewis Henry Morgan My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians, Fanny Kelly Joutel's Journal of La Salle's Last Voyage The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, John Filson The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter Excursions, Henry David Thoreau Father Henson's Story of His Own Life 1963

The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, edited with an introduction by LeRoi Jones. Julian the Magician, Gwendolyn MacEwen.

612

After Appomattox: The Image of the South in Its Fiction, 1865-1900, edited with an introduction by Gene Baro. The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets, David Ossman. Greenwich Village, text and photographs by Fred McDarrah, introduction

by David Boroff. The American Experience Series: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (Mourt's Relation), edited by D. B. Heath Mutiny on Board the Whaleship Globe, William Lay and Cyrus M. Hussey

Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex, Owen Chase, with Melville's Notes, edited by B. R. McElderry, Jr. 1964 Hands Up! Edward Dorn. (Totem/Corinth) Black and White, Gilbert Sorrentino. (Totem/Corinth) A Test of Poetry, Louis Zukofsky. (Jargon/Corinth) New York, N.Y., Fred McDarrah. The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870-1914, Moses Richin.

(Paper

back reprint of original Harvard University Press edition.) Modern Poetry from Spain and Latin America, edited and translated by Nan Braymer and Lillian Lowenfels. Mer: and More Merz, cartoons by Bob Merz. 1968

The Blue Stairs, Barbara Guest. White Country, Peter Schjeldahi. 1969

Dancing, Al Young. Many Happy Returns, Ted Berrigan. 1970 Giant Night, Anne Waldman.

Dreaming as One, Lewis Warsh. Some Trees, John Ashbery. (Reprint, minus the Auden introduction, of the 1957 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize book) Emily Dickinson: Letters from the World, edited by Marguerite Harris. Maumau American Cantos, Tom Weatherly. 1971 I Am Listening to Istanbul, Orhan Veli Kanik, translated from the Turkish

by Talat Sa it Halman. The St. Charles Gig, Brenda Herold. Symptoms and Madness, Clarence Major. The Homecoming Singer, Jay Wright. 1973 Dinners and Nightmares, Diane di Prima, with a foreword by Robert Creeley. (Reprint, with added material, of the 1961 Corinth edition.)

613

ON PUSHCART PRESS Bill Henderson Bill Henderson is editor of the Pushcart Press and has recently pub

lished the 1978-1979 edition of The Pushcart Prize III: Best of the Small Presses. Before establishing the Pushcart Press, Hender son

worked at Doubleday (1972-1973) and Coward, McCann &

Geohegan (1973-1975). Mr. Henderson's interest in self-publishing grew from a desire to encourage

the small presses, and writers whose work might be

discouraged by commercial publishing houses. In fact, three of the contributors to the first two editions of The Pushcart Prize Mary Gordon, Tim O'Brien, and John Irving-have all recently published successful novels. The author of The Galapagos Kid (which he published in 1971 through his own Nautilus Press under the pseudonym of Luke Walton), Bill Henderson has guest-lectured on publishing at Har vard University, Sarah Lawrence University, and the University of Rochester. His work has appeared in The Chicago Review, The New York Times Book Review, Publisher's Weekly, and Book views.

A publication party at the Gotham Book Mart, N. Y. C., September 28,1976, for the first Pushcart Prize Anthology. Left to right: Barbara Damrosch, editor

of Little Magazine; John Ashbery; Bill Henderson (courtesy Bill Henderson).

614

My first small press collapsed with the publication of my first novel-a funny book called The Galapagos Kid. I had spent the better part of a decade in stoic devotion to hard work had every word of The Galapagos Kid. I thought such

payoff with fame, fortune, immortality, and a New York publisher's cocktail party where I would get heroically drunk and be propositioned by many women. That's how it went for Dylan Thomas, and he was very big in my youth. That's the way it was supposed to go in the very order of the universe-decent, diligent work paid off. to

Not so.

At the end of a decade of writing, I entered my novel in the

Harper and Row Prize Novel Contest for 1968. I waited months for a reply and steeled myself for disappointment by letting my hair grow long. If I was rejected, at least I'd look like a writer. One day, very hairy, I phoned the editor and was told that the manuscript had made it through all the first readers and was on his desk. He promised he would read it over the weekend. I celebrated by getting a haircut. I was indeed a writer, and I didn't need my hair to prove it. That was the last time I celebrated an editor's opinion of the novel. The rejection slip arrived in a few days. "We all feel that the novel is better than the average unsolicited manuscript." I wrote the editor back and asked where I should send it next. He replied: "The question you raise in your letter is that ancient and sad question of who publishes serious fiction these days. I would suggest that you try

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Viking;

Little Brown; Houghton Mifflin; and Knopf, more or less in that order and good luck with the book." "Serious fiction"! Such recognition, coming from a house nota ble for literary publishing, encouraged me through the next two years of rejections.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux neglected to confirm receipt of the manuscript. When I telephoned them they mistook my query and mailed the manuscript back the next day, special delivery. Viking sent a rejection slip. Little Brown did the same, and when I called them to ask just why, the managing editor fished a card out of his files. "Your characters are too fantastic," he said. "What did they mean-that fantasy was unpublishable! Don't they realize that we live in a fantastic world!" I raged at my wife ,

615

before

heading for the local bar and the next rejection-slip bender. Houghton Mifflin sent a slip and Knopf's editor said, "I think you will have to find someone who responds to your very special kind of humor." And so it went. Somewhere during that time I acquired an agent, who encouraged me at first (champagne lunches at his home) and tried all the usual channels without a whimper of success, and returned the novel to me.

At that time, 1970, I knew of only one other possibility-the vanity publisher. But desperate as I was, I resolved to do anything

before that final humiliation. A bighearted, adventurous uncle saved my mind and my novel. He agreed to publish a few other books if I paid for all the expenses

of my novel, donated the income to the company-which named Nautilus-and ran the entire operation.

"Self-publishing" at the time was thought to be for losers only. I didn't want to prejudice the chances of Nautilus-or of my Galapagos Kid-by admitting that the company's editor in chief was publishing his own book. Besides, I reasoned it would be easier to raise a lot of hoopla for the novel as its editor than as its author. So I tagged the author as "Luke Walton," after a Horatio Alger character, and used my own name as editor. In the role of Henderson trumpeting for Walton I managed to get quite a few advance quotes. The late Max Wylie's is my fav orite: "Jonathan Swift might wish he'd said it all." Being compared with a literary immortal was a heady trip for a twenty-eight-year-old rejectee. I upped my pre-publication printing to 2,000 clothbound copies and borrowed $4,000 from my mother and brother for advertising in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and Publishers Weekly. I did a lot of legwork to wholesalers and bookstore chains,

teaching myself how to publish as I went along. I discovered that publishing was easy-at least getting the book into stores, stocking wholesalers, making an advertising racket, and putting reviewers on notice that an important literary event was afoot. What was tough was getting people to buy such literature. The responses to my ads brought only a mimeographed appeal for free books from a Maine charity, plus two letters from buyers of publishers' overstocks. In all, I sold about 500 copies and figured my losses at $10,000 for a decade of unpaid labor. 616

the money wasn't important, and even the poor sales were respectable enough for the serious, underground sort

course

of author Luke Walton now imagined he was. What really mat

tered was that my Great American Novel was finally published. It had even been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review

("an existential fantasy that does not have a frame of reference"). My mind was saved. I was purged of booze, dejection, and rejectjon. There was indeed a possible third way between com mercial publishing and vanity house hopelessness. I thought I should tell other writers about that some day. Nobody should have to suffer what I had suffered at the dictates of commerce. But first, since I was deeply in debt-and Nautilus had folded-I turned to commerce. Doubleday, thinking I was the sort of hustling young fellow they needed, hired me as an associate editor. I spent most of my time there hunting for fine literature. I discovered that the company, with Park A venue rents to pay,

wasn't particularly interested in unsalable

literary stuff,

and also that there really wasn't that much fine material around. I turned instead to founding and coaching the corporate softball team-a job almost as satisfying as poking through the slush piles.

It occurred to me that perhaps the reason so little good work

arriving at houses like Doubleday was not only that most commercial firms didn't want to publish it, but also that so much junk was being issued with big-bucks sound and fury that authors had stopped writing good books. Perhaps many of them had suc cumbed to the despair I felt after years of rejection. Writers had to be wised up, I thought. They should know that they didn't need commercial publishers of any sort. And they was

needed a book to tell them that. In my flirtation with vanity people, I had noticed their ads mentioned that various famous people had "paid to have their

books published"

(implying by inference that they had gone to vanity presses)-people like Thomas Paine, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Upton Sinclair, James Joyce, Anais Nin, and others. Noontimes I visited the Fifth Avenue Public Library and investigated the biographies of these writers who allegedly paid vanity houses. Not one had used a vanity house. All of them had issued their books themselves. A whole literary tradition lay buried in the phony claims of vanity houses. Gradually a title evolved: The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: 617

Literary Tradition and How-to. I had the title but I didn't have the book. I started by writing a chapter about Luke Walton's bittersweet

experiences and then a chapter on all the do-it-yourself literary history I had discovered during my lunch hours, plus a how-to section on my own learn-as-you-go publishing education. I had the beginning, middle, and end of the book, but I wasn't confident that anybody else would get excited about the idea of The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook. I tried it out on New York

publishing firms, but received only dull stares. The editors didn't understand what writers would need such a book; weren't all the

publishers listed in Literary Market Place? Every good book would find a home, they remarked. I realized if this title ever got off the ground it would have to be without a com mercial publisher. At best it would be boring to such a publisher; at worst it would be insulting. I asked a few other do-it-yourself publishers to join me with contributions to the Handbook and said if nobody else would publish the book, I'd damn well do it myself. One of the first people I wrote to was Anais Nin, who had done all her own work during the 1940s when she was a commercial outcast. She wrote back, "I'm too busy, but this summer I may not be and I will let you know." I took that for a no and shelved the project to concentrate on the slush pile and coaching the softball team. commercial

I don't think there would have been

Publish-It-Yourself

Handbook without Anais Nin. One day in summer, completely unannounced and unexpected, without a request for payment of any kind, and without any knowledge of who I was or if I knew a thing about publishing a book, her chapter arrived with a letter

saying, "Your book is certainly needed." easy. I wrote to thank her and she wrote back suggesting several other people who might be interested in con The rest

was

tributing a chapter about their own publishing. It seemed that everybody I contacted had a friend (who in turn had a friend) who had self-published or published somebody else's book. The editor at Knopf who had rejected my novel suggested a sailor, Patrick Royce, who had published his own how-to sailing books, and a tailor-poet, Clarence Poulin, in New Hampshire, who issued his own poetry and also instruction books on tailoring. Stewart 618

Brand gave me permission to reprint his afterword in his Whole Earth

Barbara Garson, author of MacBird, consented to an interview about her play

Catalog (a catalog how-to)

publisher publishing-but only after I argued with her agent, who thought the whole project sounded anticommercial and might be bad for Garson's career with commercial publishers. I picked up a chapter from Leonard Woolfs autobiography about the start of Hogarth Press-first publishers of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and others and one by Alan Swallow on the history of Swallow Press. Irena Kirshman wrote about making a fortune through publishing her own cookbooks. And the small-press movement-then just catch ing on in an important and visible way-was represented by Len Fulton, Dick Higgins, Richard Morris, Daisy Aldan, Rochelle Holt, Adele Aldridge, Ricardo Sanchez, Richard Kostelanetz, Larry Rottman, Jay Bail, Frank Earl Andrews, Al Dickens, and others. There was even a fellow pseudonymous author, "Oliver

Lange," who then had a novel on the Times best-seller list and admitted that his favorite was one of which he had published twenty-five copies at his kitchen table. The commercial people were more enthusiastic than I had first expected. A literary agent, Alex Jackinson, contributed a chapter. Martin Baron, an ex-vanity editor, slammed vanity publishing. And Esquire's Gordon Lish knocked out a humorous piece about why the whole idea of the book was ridiculous-something about having lunch with Gordon Lish at fine New York restaurants and how, if you self-published, you didn't get to do that. A veteran of several memorial lunches with Lish, I admit that missing a lunch with him is a real drawback to do-it-yourselfing.

When I knew what I had to

do-publish the book with my studio help apartment in Yonkers, New York (more famous for horse racing and runner-up only to Philadelphia

wife's

from

our

in city jokes)-I told Doubleday what I was up to, and prepared

goodbye to the corporation, to our mutual satisfaction. supported the book with suggestions, and two gentlemen. Sam Vaughan and Ken McCormick, were particu larly helpful. Publishers Weekly gave the book a four-page send off with an excerpt from my history of do-it-yourself publishing. PW later reviewed the book so well that I went reeling off to the Italian Pavilion restaurant, half in irony, half-seriously, because to say

Several editors there

619

CITY LIGHTS BOOKSElLERS Elf PUBLISHERS AVENUE

261

COLUMBUS

SAN

FRANCISCO, CALIF. 94133 l:8y 16 1977

Dear Hend crson: been reading PUSHCART for 1976, and I think it's the best collection of small press publishing I've ever seen. Particularly liked the ':IHUam Eastlake Sun, Jack Spicer's Footnote to the Renaiss4noe, and the Joyce Carol Oat. Have

Berke� � considered

I am wondering if you always just �ity Lights press to be too big to be in the little press category? If there is eny�ng on the enClosed list you'1 like to see for next y�ar':3 book, p1'8ge let me

know.

And could you

your

review list?

Above: a letter from Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Bill Henderson. Opposite: the first Pushcart Prize Anthology, 1976-77 (courtesy Bill Henderson).

that was where

publishers often dined and I suddenly knew I was a publisher. (PW had said my Pushcart Press was "delightfully named," but for that I give credit to George Plimpton and others. Their Project Pushcart down Fifth A venue, to protest publishers' ineptitude in getting books around, inspired the naming of Pushcart Press six months later, in 1973.) Having been stung once (I still had about 1,250 copies of The Galapagos Kid stored in closets and under the bed), I was

determined to be cautious

matter

what the

prepublication

fireworks might be. The first printing of the Handbook was a mere

1,000 copies-100 in cloth and 900 in paperback. I spent almost our

entire

savings on printing, but saved some for advertising.

It turned out we didn't need to advertise. More than a hundred newspapers and magazines serenaded the book. (Many reviewers are frustrated writers, as are lots of editors-rejected by New York and bound to be sympathetic.) Orders piled up faster than we

could reprint. One mention in the New York Times Book

Review by Victor Navasky,

paragraph buried in a longer ar

ticle, brought in 400 prepublication orders. To date the Publish It-Yourself Handbook has sold 22,000 copies and continues to sell strongly. Pushcart Press is now on something approximating a

financial footing, and I

able to publish full time from

studio apartment-grantless, typing my own letters, and hauling my own mailbags. The bad news is that I suspect many authors, while quite ready to buy a book about how to

publish their own stuff, are far too

reluctant to buy the works of other authors. In order to give some sort of recognition to the more outstanding authors encouraged by the Handbook and by today's small press movement, in 1975 I asked several distinguished editors to help me start an annual prize anthology: the Pushcart Prize series.

Again Anais Nin was one of the first to respond to Pushcart's appeal. So were Buckminster Fuller, Charles Newman, Daniel Halpern, Gordon Lish, H. L. Van Brunt, Harry Smith, Hugh Fox, Ishmael Reed, Joyce Carol Oates, Len Fulton, Leonard Randolph, Leslie Fiedler, Nona Balakian, Paul Bowles, Paul Engle, Ralph Ellison, Reynolds Price, Rhoda Schwartz, Richard Morris, Tom Montag, and William Phillips. In the first Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses (1976622

1977) and in Pushcart Prize II (1977-1978) we have promoted the short stories, poems, essays, and literary whatnots of more than 140 small press authors

they appeared in 100 presses.

Pushcart Prize III is now on sale, and Pushcart Prize IV will be

receiving nominations around the time this issue of TriQuarterly appears. The Pushcart Prize series is, first of all, publication and recog nition for small presses and their authors who have done out standing work in the previous calendar year. In the introduction to the various volumes

make

point of selecting "a" best.

Obviously some "best" is not found in each book. The Prize series is only an attempt-but an attempt that receives more than 3,500 nominations every year from small press editors. Even with the help of some sixty contributing editors, and a constant influx of new

editors each year, the Prize can be thought of

inclusive

only if it is seen as a continuity of many volumes. The Pushcart Prize is also a cooperation between a small press and a commercial publisher, Avon Books. Pushcart alone couldn't

hope to make good each year in getting wide market recognition for other small presses and authors. So we do the elegant cloth bound volume, and Avon sends the paperback around-with particular thanks to Avon's Walter Meade and to Peter Mayer. Mayer, now head of Pocket Books, is a weekend small-press person from his Overlook Press in Woodstock, New York. Finally, the Pushcart Prize is a promotional event, a celebration

by hundreds of small presses that says we seek meaning and excel lence and are willing to take chances with the new and with young authors-kids like Luke Walton, and others with a lot more talent. In the five years of Pushcart, I have published only four books, including the paperback edition of The Galapagos Kid

(created by stripping the cloth binding off my remainders and rebinding them in paper). I doubt if I would have done more if money was available. For Pushcart, and for other small presses, there is only one secret, and that secret has nothing to even

do with money: publish what you care about.

623

A NOVEL

C, ....

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RONALD SUKENICK

ftC1L.:. EC- ·f

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Four Fiction Collective titles.

WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE? A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE FICTION COLLECTIVE Jonathan Baumbach It was Jonathan Baumbach's combative urge that led him, in the

early 1970s, to make two of the most important gestures allowed American citizens: he defended himself in court and he became an

entrepreneur. Mr. Baumbach acted as his own lawyer in small

claims court over his demolished Mercedes, and he co-founded the Fiction Collective in order to

right the wrongs created by the

New York publishing "monopoly." In his essay, he explains some

of the reasons why he and other writers thought an alternative press was needed, and how they went about getting support for distribu tion and publicity. George Braziller and the Fiction Collective have

published twenty-four volumes of fiction and two Statements: anthologies of shorter fiction. Jonathan Baumbach has published one novel, A Man to Conjure With (1965), with Random House; one with Harper and Row, What Comes Next (1968); and two novels with the Fiction Col lective/George Braziller, Reruns and Babble. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. now

Reruns, my third and-at the time of its completion-best novel,

rejected thirty-two times over a period of three and a half years. It was circulated by Candida Donadio, a literary agent of the highest reputation, and so had every chance to find acceptance. (Only one other novel she had handled, she told me, had had more rejections than my book, and that was Catch-22.) During the years that Reruns was almost, if not quite, making connection-no small frustration in my life-I had difficulty getting into another novel. It is not an uncommon phenomenon, though by no means uniwas

625

versal. My first two novels had been taken by

major publishing

houses on first and third tries, and had had their share of favor

able attention. I had been spoiled in a modest way. The failure of Reruns to find a publisher was (and remains) a mystification to me. I grudgingly began another novel. I began to talk with writers

whose work I

respected about alternative means of publishing fiction. We all knew that most publishing houses and their representatives were incapable of making real distinctions, but in the past we had been too self-interested

addition to the old horror stories of how

properly marketed, were no books in

say it out loud. In books were not

our

how when the reviews

came

out

there

were new ones about editors

bookstores, admiring manuscripts, keeping them on ice for five or six months, and then turning them back because the writer had a "poor track record" or because the book had limited sales potential. Sometimes books were accepted only to have that acceptance revoked at a higher level. The publication of fiction in America, with fewer and fewer exceptions (said the evidence), is a desperate transaction with the devils of greed. Something ought to be done, everyone said. On that point alone there was unanimity. Here's where the story starts. A group of us, some eight or ten fiction writers mostly based in New York, began to meet regularly at my place or someone else's to explore the idea of a novelists' publishing cooperative. We were agreed on the necessity of taking the authority of publication into our own hands, although objections kept turning up. It was more expensive to publish books than we imagined, said one. It was difficult and time-consuming work, said another. Our business, after all, was writing books, and there was barely enough time to do that. We need capitalization to start, said K. A former theologian, K spoke eloquently on the accessibility of angels. Without a distribution arrangement, said L through the smoke of his cigar, we are dead before we begin. We meditated

the death before life that

present circumstance, persuaded ourselves against hope. Urgency kept us going, a sense of irony. It was hard to believe, having done nothing yet, that we had gotten as far as we had. on

was

our

meetings, between exhilaration and despair, Peter Spielberg and I sought advice and information, went around together-each too diffident to go alone-talking to printers and distributors, representatives of foundations, anyone who knew Between

626

anything about the publication of books. We met with explicit encouragement for our idea and unspoken skepticism about its ever coming to pass. In the evenings, the two of us spent hours talking with each other on the phone (to the despair of our wives), sorting and analyzing information, reviewing alternatives, trading off anxieties, holding on as if the only thing that sustained our ephemeral project was each other's voice. One afternoon I looked out the window to discover that someone had smashed into my parked car, a silver gray 1962 Mercedes for

which I had a somewhat excessive affection. The car that had

owner

of the

damaged mine (an owner of a bus company) was a

slick operator, a fast-talking deadbeat, and led me a chase before I realized that he had no intention of making restitution. A new

obsession governed me. I went to small claims court to present my case, studied law, interviewed witnesses.

My dreams confused the damaged Mercedes with my unpublished manuscript. In real life, I presumed to make distinctions. With each repair on the car, something new went wrong. The night after the day I won my hard-fought claim, the Mercedes was smashed into again, and this time the damage was irremediable. If it was an omen, I chose to overlook its implications. At some point, Spielberg and I, both creative-writing faculty members at Brooklyn College, went with our ally, the dean of humanities, to see the provost and suggested the Fiction Collective -the name our group had selected from among other homely and unmemorable choices-as a forerunner of a Brooklyn College press. The provost was sympathetic to our idea, though vague about what he could do for us. Funds were out of the question. Space, he said, might be provided, some mailing privileges, and official connection with the MFA Program in Creative Writing (of which I was co-director). It would take time, eight months or more, to codify arrangements. The talk at our meetings, now that we had a name to validate our existence, took a new turn. There had been a feeling in the room, inchoate and embarrassing to admit, that our collective authority lacked symbolic weight. The ritual of a publisher's acceptance satisfied us as our' own improvised ritual-majority vote of writer-members-somehow didn't. (How important sym bols were in our lives, we discovered.) It didn't matter that most ed

itors couldn't distinguish original work from fashionable imitations 627

that most publishers could

longer afford to do any novel

that was not "soon to be made into

major motion picture." A

publisher's acceptance represented official sanction. For a sense of our

worth, we were dependent, some of us, on an editor's approval.

The more we denied the sway of establishment culture, the more we

confessed it. The enemy, if there could have been said to be

one,

was

much within

without, whispering what was to

become a familiar reproof: Who do they think they are?

R, one of our members in spirit only, wrote from California to say that he felt left out: "No one tells me what's going on." He and

I had been exchanging letters almost daily. The time lag between the

sending of a letter and its receipt (sometimes it took two days, sometimes a week) seemed to frustrate him. My four-year-old son, N, said he was sorry, but he hated the Fiction Collective.

Meanwhile H, who was in a subversive mood, suggested doing novels in throwaway editions. Isn't the transience of commercial

publishing the very thing

we're resisting? said P. Let's do something, said I, sometimes to myself, sometimes out

loud, chronically impatient.

Finally, we decided unanimously-objections spoken under our breath-to do an anthology of new short fiction to be called Statements, and on the strength of that to apply for grants to do individual novels. The anthology, by dint of its breadth, would announce us as a

collective.

A few weeks later, during one of our daily phone conversations,

Spielberg said he was worried that by the time we got the anthology together-six months at least to do it right-the impetus we had to go ahead would have dissipated. We had already, in his opinion, been talking too long. After each of our meetings there seemed to be less enthusiasm for going ahead than before. (I had been thinking the same thing.) After consulting with the others, we decided to postpone the anthology, which was after all an advertisement for the project and not the main event, and instead do the first series of novels for our opening publication. It seemed the only thing to do-the manuscripts had been ready to go into production for some time -if we were

ever

going to do anything.

The first series, the first three manuscripts that were accepted

628

and ready to go, were Twiddledum Twaddledum, Museum, and Reruns. We broke the editing chores down in an informal way.

Spielberg would edit Reruns; B. H. Friedman would do Twiddle dum; I would do Museum. The only clear principle was to avoid reciprocity-that is, to avoid the potential conflict of interest in editing a book by the man who was editing yours. At some time-so much was happening at once-Friedman asked a young designer friend to devise a uniform format for the series, something that would suggest a collaborative effort. One of his ideas, the one we decided on by majority vote, was to have the cover made up of a montage of faces, all in photo graphic negative except for the author of the particular book, who would be highlighted in positive. This format was used only for the first series (for the next three, each writer designed his own cover) though it has been picked up in diminution and used as an identifying symbol on the back cover of later books. While editing Museum, while making last-minute revisions on Reruns, while getting together my case against the man whose car had smashed mine, while running the writing program at Brooklyn College, while teaching, while paying occasional attention to my family, I went around with Spielberg (and sometimes also with Mark Mirsky and Jerome Charyn) inter viewing potential distributors. The head of one distinguished publishing house, initially interested in the possibility of distributing our books, woke up one morning (so it was reported to us) furious at the idea. "Who do they think they are?" he said, or was reported to have said. "We publish all the good fiction that comes our way. There isn't any good fiction not getting published." It was an attitude we would encounter, directly and through oblique report, again and again. To inspire such anger gave us a sense of weight and importance. We were-despite our expressed intentions not to (how mild and reasonable we thought ourselves)-challenging the way things were done. It made a lot of people uneasy with us. More than knew, we were to discover; more than we meant. An idealistic venture, we had been forever telling ourselves, ought to proceed idealistically. So we accepted the first publishing

house to offer us distribution services. Two others were hanging \

fire at the time, procrastinating in their fashion. But we accepted 629

George Braziller's forthright offer without waiting to see what else was forthcoming. It occurred to us that the offer might be used as leverage to induce action elsewhere, but we were, for that moment at least, inured to temptation. George Braziller, Inc., announced our books in the centerfold of their catalogue. The arrangement with Braziller, which continues to be mutually satisfying, was a turning point in our fortunes, a crucial piece of luck.

At the same time, before and after-the Collective obsessing us

like a difficult love affair-Spielberg and I were checking out

printers, comparing costs for various sizes of press run, evaluating reliability and convenience factors. A large printer in Michigan (with a sales office in New York City) gave us the lowest overall production bids, and we decided (a last-minute decision) to have the whole job done by them: typesetting, pages, binding, etc. We would use ten-point type for the first series, allowing forty-two lines (thirty-five is average) to a page-an austere choice. Austerity was one of the few vices we allowed ourselves. An attendant irony: the reviewer in The New York Times Book Review would reprove us for having an excess of blank space. We moved from crisis to crisis, barely resolving one before the next was on us. X would call to say that I ought to know that V was bad-mouthing us. V, confronted (though sometimes avoided), would insist that he had been

confrontations

were

misunderstood.

Misunderstanding is the lot of most novelists. the guise of

We write to perpetuate misunderstanding under making ourselves understood.

Despite the differences in the length of our novels, we agreed (Spielberg, Friedman, and I) to split costs and reimbursements three ways. All for one and one for all. There may have been private misgivings, jealousies (reviewers tended to make irrel among us), feelings of rivalry, but the sense of common bond-I still marvel at it-was transcendent.

evant

comparisons

out, I've discovered (a discovery engendered by doing a book with the Collective), a of primitive feelings that have little to do with the When

writer has

novel

come

variety

book itself rise to the surface. A novel is sometimes (perhaps, at some level, always) an act of aggression toward the world at

large. Unacceptable feelings toward parents, lovers, friends,

630

adversaries are revealed in, as it seems to the writer, transparent code. Such engenders guilt. The childish association

aggression

the fore. On top of that (or on bottom) there's the murderous ambition of the writer to succeed, no small hostility in itself. A novel, in the melodrama

between wishes and deeds

of the heart, is like

comes

assassination or

a mass

murder. I exist

and am potent, says the book. Once I invade your life, you'll never be free of me. (When my first novel came out and I saw it in a bookstore with my picture on the back flap of the dust

jacket, I had the sense that everyone in the city would recognize me, that my privacy would never again be my own.) A publishing house mediates between the novelist and the rest of the world, serves (among other services, of course) as a symbolic protector. A publisher (or editor-I use the words interchangeably here) shares a writer's potency, takes it on himself by doing the writer's book, and at the same time shares responsibility for the murderous implication of that potency. A needful relationship on both sides, though traditionally rife with real and symbolic betrayals. We were offering the writer-and I doubt that we understood it ourselves at the time-a new and less sanctifying relationship with his publisher. We were asking him to stand in for himself; to become, in the metaphoric sense I've been using all along, his own father. 2

Making ourselves known, getting press, was easier than we anticipated. We were news, a first (so said our publicity) of its kind in America. We believed what

read. The stories

read about ourselves were our own story returned to us through a

variety of distorting mirrors. We had books almost five months before

publication date, (we published in both cloth and paper simultaneously) in lieu of galleys as advance copies. It and so we sent out paperbacks

turned out

the

that

mysteries

almost our

everyone

who

experience-asked

reviewed

us-one

for books to be sent

them again. The first

piece to appear about the Fiction Collective was in "Scenes" in The Village Voice (July 4, 1974). The representa631

tion was not notably inaccurate, was in fact sympathetic and fair;

yet its publication embarrassed

me.

was

fantasies had been broadcast. How hard to

our

private

one's words, not always used as one meant them, stare back foolishly from the page. We would in time become inured to small and large see

inaccuracies in print, and to our own inability to

answer

inter

viewers' questions with sufficient public wit.

Next the reviews

in-the

prepublication reviews-from Publishers' Weekly and Kirkus Services, sent to us in photocopy from Braziller. On the whole, we were treated respectfully, and in the Kirkus reviews with more than passing perception. It was just like, I remember thinking (another small irony), bringing out a book with a publisher. On September 15, Ronald Sukenick published in the "Guest Word" of The New York Times Book Review something of a Fiction Collective manifesto, the closest thing to one. He had written it, given the kind of things we had been saying to each other about the publishing establishment in private, under the constraint of sweet reasonableness-though for reasons I had not foreseen the piece angered a number of people. Sukenick had presumed to say that the Collective was publishing (or would publish) quality innovative fiction-first-rate serious work-that was being "starved out" by the publishing industry. According came

to the

establishment, such fiction was either not being written or was already being published in abundance. The word was that a good novel, no matter its specialty or difficulty, would ultimately find a publisher. It was impolitic, at the very least, to call conventional wisdom

liar.

The worst overall reviews the first series got were in The New York Times; for

long time they were the only bad reviews

though such is the influence of The Times that for many the book review's notice was all the news. The review itself represented an interesting phenomenon. The reviewer, a young novelist, had been messed over at one time by commercial publishing and had

written a moving account of that unpleasantness in

magazine

called Intro. His odd review of the Collective was informed by seemingly irrelevant outrage. The message of the review, behind the pretense of failed sympathy, was another version of Who do

they think they are? No president of a publishing house could have been more patronizing in defense of the establishment. The

632

former victim

not uncommon

circumstance, had taken on

the role of his victimizer. Reviews of the Collective's books-and the obvious thing was to review them together-tended to set up invidious comparisons among them, playing them off against one another for rhetorical convenience. We had to remind ourselves that we were not in

competition, as no writer really (outside the contrived arena of media) is competing with any other. Most of the attention we received was generous. The Quality Paperback Club, just starting out, presented our first series as a Special Selection. The New Republic ran a long and highly favorable review of all three novels in the Fall Book Issue.

Intelligent, affirmative pieces appeared in Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the Chicago Tribune Book World, the American Poetry Review, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, among others. Something like forty-five periodicals throughout the country either covered the Fiction Collective as a news story or reviewed the books or both.

as one

The Washington Post listed Reruns

of the notable books of the year. The first printing of all

three novels

sold out before

publication date. (Something of an illusion, since about 25 percent of the books placed in was

bookstores were later returned.)

Shortly

after the first series of novels

was

published,

received a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts to hire a coordinator

H.) and

(a desperate need filled by the remarkable

publicize what we were doing.

The

following

year, the NYSCA grant was renewed and the National Endowment

for the Arts gave us funds to subsidize, in large part, works of fiction.

eight new

There is material in the Collective experience for other fictions. I recently learned-it had been kept secret from me for reasons

I've

never

had been

understood-that

slashing copies

someone

(some unknown enemy)

of Reruns in

Greenwich

Village

bookstore. I wondered less who it was (though that too) than what it was I had written that had provoked the assault. The rest is more of the same, or different, or less. By the time this appears we'll have twenty-four books in print (plus State ments, brought out by Braziller): a small shelf of the fiction of the seventies. When the Fiction Collective started, I

thought

it would be

633

way of pressuring commercial publishers into doing more innovative fiction, but I can see now that that's not going to happen. Publishers maintain they can't afford to publish fiction a

that sells fewer than

eight thousand copies. (We need to sell

about two thousand to break even.) Really good books will have large audiences, they tell us, pointing to Dickens and the latest

middlebrow

best-seller, and besides

one

buying

serious fiction. The delusions necessary to keep a clear conscience make

ideology out of an unadmitted cynicism.

The Fiction

Collective survives because it has to.

Despite not-for-profit cooperative, despite continuing rumors of our demise, despite predictable problems with typesetters and printers and patrons and writers, we continue to bring out good-quality fiction in a reasonably presentable edition -a success (selling between 2,500 and 3,500 of each book) in terms that the publishing establishment is unable to appreciate and refuses to comprehend. the unwieldiness of running

634

REPORT ON THE FICTION COLLECTIVE Gene Lyons "1 write for fun and money," says Gene Lyons, who has supported

himself entirely by literary and magazine writing since he left academe in 1976. He has been a columnist and fiction reviewer for The Nation for the past two years, where he first discussed some of the Fiction Collective novels mentioned in his essay. He enjoys, he says, "giving the world a passing kick whenever 1 can." Mr. Lyons has taught at the universities of Massachusetts, Ar kansas, and Texas, and has written for the following magazines: Shenandoah, Critique, The Progressive, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Texas Monthly, Harper's, Moment, The Southwest Review, The New York Times Magazine, Intro, Bookletter, and Weekend (Canada). He was a Ford Foundation fellow at the University of Virginia, and won a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fel lowship in 1976.

The appetite for recognition, like the hunger for love and approval, is never satisfied. There isn't enough recognition in the world to satisfy even one culti vated appetite. -George Garrett on writers and fame

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. -Anonymous On the surface of things it is at least curious. Here we are devoting

substantial chunks of the national treasure

something called professors

literature

higher education. Probably there proudly brandishing their "terminal" degrees than there were students of the subject forty or fifty years ago. Although the per centage of English majors is down somewhat from what it was when I was in college in the early 1960s, probably only Chicken are

635

Little would make much of the fact. Back then,

nobody worried much about making a living. Guns, butter, fellowships, and draft exemptions were all a part of the wartime economy. Teaching and other jobs were plentiful for college graduates, even in the liberal arts; within the American culture the prestige of imaginative litera ture was probably at an all-time high. To hear some people talk more recently, though, you might think it is now at an all-time low. Part of the problem, we are told, is the publishing industry itself. Big business and the multinationals are taking over and flooding the bookstores with commercial sludge. Unless a novel has a Nazi assassination plot, a group grope, and two flying saucers somewhere in the first chapter, it doesn't stand a chance. Even so, according to Ronald Sukenick, a founding member of an organization called the Fiction Collective, "at the same time that publishing has been starving out serious fiction, the genre has experienced a resurgence of vitality and inventiveness." The

group's answer has been to establish "not a publishing house, but a 'not-for-profit' cooperative conduit for quality fiction, the first of its kind in this country, in which writers make all business

decisions and do all editorial and copy work." Since its

founding in 1974,

the Fiction Collective has

pub

lished more than twenty titles, for each of which the author has

put up $3,000 or more of his or her own money to cover produc

accepted or rejected by a vote of the membership, consisting of previously published writers. Copy editing chores are shared. Exactly what Sukenick meant by "not-for-profit" was unclear in tion expenses. Books

are

the 1974 "Guest Word" column in the New York Times Book Review announcing the formation of the enterprise. The article

stipulated that each author "splits profits evenly with the Collective and gets 60 percent of its share of other rights." During its existence, the Fiction Collective has been variously supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal also

agency; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; Brooklyn College, a public institution; and an organization called the Teachers and Writers Collaborative.

Brooklyn College also

helps out with office space, postage, and other small favors. That most may be the key to the "not-for-profit" designation, since 636

public universities have regulations forbidding their faculty (which most members of the Collective are) from using their facilities for private gain. But that may be a quibble. More important to notice is what the group's members do not mean when they complain of being neglected and all but censored by something they call "The Establishment." They do not mean the governmental or educa tional establishments.

Almost everybody who knows and cares anything about serious fiction knows a few horror stories about agents, editors, and pub lishers. Having a book published, it seems,

cruciating

ordeal. Without

promotion

can

often be

and distribution

an ex

book

attracting an audience in the short run; then corporate computers dictate remaindering or shredding long before can

succeed in

demand for work that may have There are also the tales about fine novels escaped early notoriety.

word of mouth

can

create a

and short story collections which

are

never

accepted at all by

commercial houses. I confess to being of two minds about those. On the one hand, I have served

reader in several literary

the National Endowment for the Arts

competitions, including Creative Writing Fellowships, and have never read-nor have I spoken to another judge who has read-unpublished fiction that we thought should be printed. I have read a great deal of "serious" fiction that I thought a waste of ink, and I have more than once directed friendly challenges to writers' groups to produce examples of such injustice, so I could promote them in a column on little magazines and small presses that I used to do for the Nation. I got any takers. On the other hand, everyone knows that Catch-22, From Here to Eternity, and any number of other

never

artistically respectable and commercially successful books were initially rejected by scores of publishers before finally being accepted, so perhaps it is best to temper one's skepticism. In any case, most literary people are predisposed to accept arguments against both free enterprise culture and the vulgar herd -perhaps too easily. Almost everybody reading this magazine shares a common disdain for the average novel on the best-seller list. So when the Fiction Collective announces that it is selecting,

printing, and distributing the "books of its peers on the basis of literary merit, free of the implicit commercial standards of the 637

book business," and hopes by so doing "to open a path toward the

maturity of the American novel," we ought to be interested. We ought also to be suspicious. For the Fiction Collective has done no such thing. Nor, from the evidence at hand, does it appear likely ever to be anything but what it is: a well-publicized, tax-supported vanity press. How and why the enterprise has failed, moreover, can tell us a good deal more about what is happening to the idea of serious fiction in our time than success could ever have done. The fact that almost all of the Fiction Collective's

organizers

and authors are academics who teach creative writing is symptom

atic. The institutionalization of creative writing

degree-granting part of the

permanent,

academy has brought with it

per

faculty. Since the M.F.A. degree is now considered suf ficiently respectable so that one possessing it may gain tenure, many of that faculty are hothouse flowers like much of the rest of the faculty, i.e. persons who entered school in September of their fifth year and have never left it. Creative writing has become a specialty and, as such, is in a fair way to developing a kind of world view to protect itself from hostile scrutiny by outsiders. The components of that world view are not, thankfully, so widely shared by author-teachers as the following list may seem to imply, but I think it worthwhile, for the sake of clarity, to have them all in one place: The need to "publish." Academic employment confers substan tial benefits upon the young or would-be author, primary among them a decent salary and lots of free time. To keep getting them, he must compile a bibliography like any other assistant professor's.

manent

The result of the consequent frenzy is the same in literary maga zines as it has been in scholarly journals for some time: an explo sion of unread mediocrity. An article by Stephen Minot in the

Spring 1977 issue of North American Review offers some exemplary statistics. In 1975 a magazine called Field: Contem to it by porary Poetry and Poetics had 10,500 poems submitted 1,875 authors. Field has 520 subscribers. Nor is that a freak. I have myself been present at a "writer's conference" and seen George Garrett wring a mass confession from a couple of hundred "poets" that nobody in the room had purchased a single hardback volume of poems by one author for anything other than classroom 638

use

in a calendar year. Minot

reports, moreover, that in a con

siderable academic career he has never met a student or colleague who has either subscribed to a small magazine publishing poetry and fiction,

or ever

received

one

comment

work of his

own

published in such a magazine-not even when his college's library subscribed to and displayed the magazines printing his work. When it comes to fiction, there is no way that the centralized American literary marketplace can merchandise more than a fraction of what all those teachers and their students are writing, even if the

work were of high quality generally, which most of it

is not. An author can have

without being

list of credits several pages long certain that anybody but editors has read his or a

her work. While the large number of outlets can in part be seen

literary culture, for all their value accommodating their energies, hopes too often they contribute to the every-man-an-artist-but-no-man needs-to-read syndrome encouraged by large and promiscuous enrollment in creative writing courses. Status frenzy. As a hierarchical bureaucracy, the American university rivals the Kremlin. Even if poets and fiction writers are employed everywhere in academe, they are only tenuously accepted there by the resident scholar-critics and are often regarded as presumptuous hacks. For some reason, the writing of unread criticism is considered an honorable pastime, while writing poems and stories is like mocking the gods of Parnassus. Literature professors themselves rarely trifle with contemporary work unless that happens to be their specialty. In many years of hanging around English departments I never heard the honorific adjective "bril liant" applied to a writer of fiction, although it is used quite freely as an index of the health of our

sustaining writers'

and

otherwise. Mention to the average scholar that you have spent the weekend curled up reading Tom McGuane, Don DeLillo, or Lisa Alther and your reward will be a numb stare, as if you had con

fessed a passion for Charlie's Angels or professional wrestling, and a "From

the reviews I shouldn't have thought

" ...

If, that is, he

has even read the reviews. Most Ph.D.s know and care less about

contemporary fiction and poetry than your old

man,

and

are

fearful of being caught going ape over something posterity judges to be second-rate. Of course, most work is bound to be second-rate

639

by the standard the ages have set-as, at best, is most criticism. A writer who may begin with ambition, humility, and what Heming way called a "good shit detector" often learns to suppress or conceal the two latter qualities in order to survive. Self-depreca tion and modesty are the worst possible traits one can have in a generally humorless world where everybody has got the knives out. Hence organizations like the Fiction Collective and the Associated Writing Programs may be seen as essentially self protective, like the Modern Language Association or the American Historical Association: job and prestige markets, the buddy system writ large, would-be determiners of professional tone, style, and prerogatives. You hire my protege and I"ll publish your poems. I will read at your school's arts festival; you will serve on the staff

of my place's summer writer's conference. The way of the world. Of course such groups are partly altruistic, and certainly necessary

for

maintaining the individual writer's dignity in an otherwise inimical climate, but that should not blind anybody to their primary function. Academic values. Professors are interested in books that teach

well, and that justify by their complexity the professorial mission. Not for nothing do Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year in campus bookstores, while the more accessible of his works are

rarely required. That the average undergraduate at most American colleges and universities can scarcely grasp even the surface mean ing of Joyce's works is precisely the reason so many of them are asked to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in their According to the English depart

freshman composition classes.

ment, a novel is above all an encoded narrative, the understanding of which depends largely upon a system of hidden symbols requir

ing explication by a professional. Since the discovery of The Novel, there have been two main purposes for reading fiction in the academy: moral improvement and the demonstration of intel lectual refinement. Such motives as pleasure and curiosity are rated quite low. Thus the most highly regarded sort of fiction is self-referential or "experimental" in nature. Anything traditional or too easily understood makes an academic fiction writer vulner able to charges that he is a literal-minded simpleton or a shameless 640

panderer to mass tastes. Once upon a time, part of fiction's appeal was in its bringing to a broad middle-class audience parts of the world-geographical, sociological, or what have you-remote from that audience's ordinary experience. But it is little recognized in the English department any more that a legitimate reason for reading a novel may very well be that one would like the vicarious experience of being a British policeman in Burma, sailing up the Congo in a fiat-bottomed steamer, taking part in an abortive revolution in Shanghai, or smuggling cocaine from Colombia. For a writer to do actual "research" on a book, the way Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace do, is seen as a concession to the vulgarity of subject matter, which sophisticated novels no longer

have. Isolation. All these tendencies taken

together only serve

fact of academic life

one

familiar that

who

magnify brings it up is showing bad taste and can be accused of anti intellectualism. One reason why classroom-oriented authors write the sort of claustrophobic, subjective, and willfully incomprehensi ble books they write is that they don't know enough about what goes on in the outside world to do anything else. I wish that readers who think the foregoing a bit strong could have overheard a luncheon conversation I had a couple of years ago with several former colleagues just before departing on a magazine assignment to write about the Texas Prison Rodeo-an annual function put on in Huntsville by the Corrections Depart a

even

ment, with volunteer inmates, in order to raise money for the system's recreation and education fund. None of those present had ever done more than drive across Texas, and none had ever been inside a prison or so much as seen a live rodeo. Nevertheless, neither had they, to a (wo)man, very much difficulty in converting

the nouns Texas, prison, and Rodeo into abstract symbols, joining the symbols

together and presenting me with the "meaning" of the experience I had not yet had in quite a neat package. Over the discussion hung the question that none knew me well enough at the time to ask: why would I give up tenure to do such tiresome, and tiring, things? As it was, the story took me almost two months and several drafts to write, and was perhaps not one of my best. Suffice it to say that the symbolic meanings offered by my well641

intentioned academic friends

mainly in providing straw men to attack in the first draft, delaying for a time my getting anywhere near the real story. I should recommend as therapy to anybody suffering from hardening of the categories, or a sense of wonder atrophied by communing too long with adoles cents and their mentors, a week or ten days interviewing inmates, guards, and wardens at their friendly neighborhood state pen. If that fails to cure the malady, it is probably terminal. Now then. After all the above I must confess to never having been able to read any novel published by the Fiction Collective from beginning to end, although I have not tried all of them. As an example of why not I offer the following passage from Althea, by J. M. Alonso, who is also an editor of the New Boston Review. Generically speaking, the book is academic-sexual, the tale of "a wretched and paralyzed graduate student who never finished his were

useful

thesis." The man's name is Muldoon, and as he is an Irish Catholic

by birth and upbringing, naturally he despises and fears women, although like the man in the joke he can't seem to get along with out them either. We come upon him in front of Harvard's Widener

library, where he has been left by a fellow student who has gone inside to use the men's room. Ordinarily he avoids the place because he is afraid of meeting his faculty adviser. So there I was,

in a most humiliating position unknowingly positioned before the Widener God, with my back turned, my face averted, practically cowering and reduced to cursing Ben (who, incidentally, was a pervert) for leaving me there. Though not daring to look at the living Temple directly, I could feel the Widener God's life behind me with all its massive silent vibrations of obscene mental electricity. Sparking from books to minds and back again. All con tained in the shadows of the stacks within the infinite creases, in the dark ness deep beyond the cyclopic, glassed mouth behind me, with that low, dark, ...

square mouth.

So, to protect myself, to undeify the living Temple, I tried thinking of the Widener God as just one more Harvard Corporation-owned factory, meshing stacks and stacks of minds with rows and rows of books. After all, professors author books which themselves author professors, and the Widener Factory God was in the business of producing both, which were sometimes barely dis

tinguishable entities. Come to think of it, I knew many books that were far more perceptibly human, both in their affects and contents, than many a pro fessor who had turned himself through his life's work into a walking thesis with hat and shoes.

642

"cyclopic" mouth, whatever that is, which in the same sentence is also "square"? With the barbarism Where to begin? With

of "author" used

transitive verb not

once

but

twice, the

second time with "books" as an implied subject? With "undeify"? With "affects" used for "effects"? Or for something; the clause makes little sense either way. Alonso is equally apt at the coinage of adverbs. In other passages, Althea is a novel in which characters are

"uncommentingly patient," and stand "homosapiently erect"

while "looking Biblically up at the sky." Almost any selection of similar length from anywhere in the novel will yield such howlers. And this man is an editor! The daily newspaper, not to mention Harold and Irving, is better written. Even

characteristic of the Fiction Collective's

(pardon

me) collective practices are the many paeans and asides Alonso's

first-person narrator delivers to what he calls the "Unseen Mysteri ous

Forces"-the UMFs for short. Essential to what the group a sort of juvenile self-consciousness

calls "The New Fiction" is

which demands that the author prate constantly about what he is

doing, has done, or is about to do with his story-like a child learning to ride his bicycle with no hands. In Alonso's case the UMFs stand alternately for the wonders of the unconscious, for chance, and for coincidence. Every turn in Althea's turgid plot must be explained as one or the other, or perhaps some mixture of all three. A large part of the Fiction Collective's case against commercial

publishers in fact rests upon its alleged hostility to, or incompre hension of, what is "new," or "innovative," or "experimental." In the organization's lexicon all of those words are good ones, as "traditional" and "commercial" are bad. Now, in America no one

"new," as in the "new, improved lemon-scented Chev rolet Malibu," unless he is trying to sell us something. The word ever uses

has virtually

inescapable intimations of cant, never more than when it is being applied to ideas or attitudes, as in "new morality," "New South," or here in "The New Fiction." Were the Collectivists group not obsessed with irony about everything on earth except their own "voices" (another cant term), they might have as

spared us some of their claims to originality. In fact there is nothing 643

remotely novel in the fictive practices of the group, and a good deal that is so tiresomely conventional in the contemporary fashion as to verge at times on self-parody. The best single place to verify the charge is in Statements 2, the Fiction Collective's most recent anthology. At the risk of seeming reductive, I should like to list, with representative examples from that book and a couple of others published by the group, the three main discov even

eries about prose fiction that the Collective and many of its academic allies seem to regard as daring: 1. Stories

calling themselves "fiction" are not true. They are

made up.

From Russell Banks's "By Way of an Introduction to the Novel, This or Any": You know, it occurs to me that I really needn't bother with all this. Certainly

this point. Perhaps later in the narrative such descriptions will be of significance, but here, now, I'm merely attempting to explain how I, Russell not at

Banks, came to write a novel with a hero whose "real life" prototype is my I had reached a point in my friend, my own "hero," as a matter of fact ....

relation to him where almost anything could happen and where whatever did In other words, the man had become happen would be believable to me sufficiently real to me that I could, and therefore should, write a novel about him-even if that "reality" were nothing more than a projection extruded by my unconscious life, even if it were no more than imaginary. ....

More UMFs! One would think that Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, among forty or fifty others, had done this kind of thing to death. 2. Since stories are made up, it follows that the traditional

beginnings, middles, and ends of retrograde, old-fashioned fiction are somewhat arbitrary and not to be confused with genuine neces sity. Any story could have been told differently. The narrator, by entering his story as a "voice," demonstrates his advanced sensi bility by pointing this out as often as possible. The following passage is from Raymond Federman's Fiction Collective novel, Take It or Leave It, described on the back cover as a book in which "the narrator involves his listeners

in digressive

arguments about politics, sex, America, literature, laughter, death, of the story itself. Consequently as the story progresses it also deviates from its course and eventually cancels and the

telling

itself [whatever that means] ...

the voices in the fiction multiply

[and] makes a shamble of traditional fiction and conventional

modes of writing, and does so with effrontery and laughter."

644

Why, when, where, how, why me, why then, who, and then, in which direc Dammit! If you guys keep talking all the time/and at the same time/we'll never get it straight! We'll never get there! Do you think it's easy to tell a story? Any story? HEY! Particularly when it's not YOUR story-a second hand story! Anywhere? To retell a story which tion? How the hell do I know!

was

...

already told from the start in a rather dubious manner. Do you think it's

easy to set it up so that it looks coherent? Or even readable? Not to mention

credible? I tell you it's not easy.

Fearless innovator Federman also refuses to number the pages of his bulky text, and speaks of a "battle against the linearity of

syntax," which he wages with the dazzling new weapon of creative typography. 3. Words and languages themselves are also made up, and may have a purely noumenal existence. It is this supposition that makes it impossible for any "real" writer to use the word "real," or any other that might imply metaphysical earnestness without the ironi cal quotation marks. Hence the flatulence of a writer like Feder man indicates neither incompetence nor self-indulgent, lazy think ing and writing but extreme sophistication. At its furthest reaches, this skepticism about language compels the writer to demonstrate constantly that language is a kind of trapdoor through which all must fall. He does this through a kind of linguistic play (see Huizinga and other authorities on the seriousness of play) known as a "pun" or "play on words." From B. H. Friedman's "P : A Case History," a tale in which a horny middle-aged man has a case of priapism, or per manent

erection, which turns out to be a symptom of terminal

leukemia: "As he finishes dressing he wonders if he should call the office and tell them-what?-that something has come up. He smiles. That is just the sort of vague

explanation his secretary case it's precise, too precise." And later, "but the gives. won't stand up (another joke, another smile)," and again analogy In his

"he tells the nurse that this is an emergency. She says she will fit

him in. P

smiles. The world is filled with cruel jokes."

Not to mention juvenile ones. In Peter Spielberg's "The Her metic Whore," about a government project to cheer up the elderly

by encouraging masturbation that ends up so popularizing the practice that intercourse goes out of fashion and the birthrate plummets, there are more. Spielberg tells the one about

645

the crazy scientist who killed and cremated all the cats he could get hold of.

Yes, cats. You know: kittens. Meow, meow! He sifted their ashes into empty

coffee cans, or maybe it was baby-food jars, and tried to sell them to the hard-up dudes on 42nd street. "Psstl Want a piece of the best stuff in town?" he would buttonhole a likely customer.

"Sure. Where is she? How much?"

"Right here in the jar. Five dollars a spoonful. Just add some hot water. My invention-instant pussy "

....

And so a one-liner copied from 2S-cent vending machines in half the gas station men's rooms in America becomes a whole routine. In Take It or Leave It Federman explains why his narrator has

decided to travel across America by car (a daring new plot): To penetrate you (all the way to the WEST COAST) because (up to now) I must admit I hadn't gone very far-very

deep. Mostly stayed on the margin. Yes, dealing mostly in the CUNTFRONTATION. But now it was really going to be an enormous PENISTRATION. I couldn't wait to get going. AMERICA here I come!

When he is not altering the shape of literary perception Raymond

Federman is a professor of comparative literature. Not all of Statements 2 or of the Collective's novels are so bald as the passages

quoted. But I chose each of the writers above not

only because his work was illustrative of what seems to me to be the Fiction Collective's

guiding principles and general tone but

also because he has a book in print with the organization and is

therefore a member of its editorial board. The sexual obsessiveness of the last three is equally characteristic, as if a group of academ

ically employed solipsists has no other subject matter available to it. Spielberg's "The Hermetic Whore" contains a carefully enumer ated list of ways for men to masturbate, which seems just about right. Any of the three could easily make a living writing to the Penthouse Forum if they could forgo the puns for a while. But that would be commercial. It would not be art. I find it puzzling that writers of genuine talent like Jonathan

Baumbach, Russell Banks, and Ronald Sukenick seem content with the self-imitation of easy effects that their work in Statements

Reading too much of it is like watching a basketball game in which the players have gotten so cool that they have agreed true devotion to the sport requires that all shots be missed and the ball double-dribbled on purpose. I find it depressing to

2 shows.

646

imagine the Fiction Collective version of contemporary literary "reality" becoming the currency of seminar tables all over the country-a gloom that is partially lifted by my knowledge of how little attention the most promising young writers will pay in the long run to any teachers. I emerge from my reading tempted to paraphrase Flannery O'Connor's remark on the effect of the American university on the national literature: if the publishing industry is stifling writers, it isn't yet stifling enough of them. We have more mediocre fiction writers, poets, and critics than we need.

What we lack is readers. Most of the Fiction Collective's

members would do themselves and the rest of us a favor by knock

ing off the boasting and the bitching for a while and getting back to the classroom to train some.

647

The

1SPARROW Magazine,

soc

The Sparrow, Vol. 1, No.1, June 1954 (courtesy Felix Stefanile).

THE LITTLE MAGAZINE

TODAY Felix Stefanile Felix Stefanile says that Cid Corman's Origin taught him to value an

editor's literary allegiances; that Robert Creeley's quirkiness in

editing The Black Mountain Review taught him to respect his own eccentricities; that W. Price Turner's The Poet in England gave him a new view of eclecticism; and that Canadian poet Irving Layton (Civ/n) taught him arguing could be fun. The fifties were, says Mr. Stefanile, a marvelous time to be a young poet in. "There was a real and

powerful establishment to fight. Because it deprived vision of the Enemy that the new pluralism has taken away from young poets starting out now." Stejanile has taught creative writing and modern literature at Purdue University since 1961. Standard Oil of Indiana gave him an award in 1973 for being the best teacher in his school. He is the author of four books of poetry and has contributed to scores of little magazines. Mr. Stefanile is the editor at Sparrow Press (founded 1954), whose activities include the little magazine Sparrow, now devoted to one poetper issue; Vagrom Chap Books; and the series of polemical pamphlets called Black Rooster. us, it gave us a

Now every week the mail brings in

another braggart bulletin or newsletter straight from the heart

of the National Endowment for the Arts, from Leonard Randolph, or Nancy Hanks, or some such

pol, that offers thanks-

in IBM Selectric Type-

for the latest grant, the latest hype. -from "The Sorrows of Pontifico"

For my own foray into the present discussion of the little maga zine I shall not have much to say about my own poetry journal,

Sparrow (now known, after twenty-four years, as Sparrow Poverty Pamphlets). The reader will find my modesty forward and articu late enough, however. At the not inconsiderable risk of expunging forever from the ranks of scholarly footnotes a fair history of the 649

efforts of my wife and me to publish poetry in our country, I begin

by stating I have always thought of Sparrow as a publication in the second rank of independent literary publishers. Except in the lives of a few stalwarts, like Cid Corman or Frederick Eckman, whose first books, in poetry and criticism respectively, we were lucky enough to publish, our activities over the years have been stolid, almost dogged, hardly ever "crucial." We have broken no new ground. We have had to earn our taste. Our poetic vision has always been more often of the hindsighted, not the farsighted, kind. History will reveal, for the past generation, that the real comers in the land have been picked up first by Origin, or the Hudson Review, or maybe City Lights or Jargon Books, or some publisher of similar excellence. Because of our merely reliable performance, the fact that Sparrow has always been around, we have sometimes been the beneficiaries of spillage from these sources-resulting, say, in the special Eigner issue we published in 1956 or, for that matter, the charming Douglas Worth feature we were able to put out in 1975. Occasionally we have scored a minor critical coup, like publishing early Vassar Miller (even without credit from the Untermeyer or Meridian anthologies) or like having the reviewer at the A merican Scholar describe one of our small ventures in publishing literary criticism as the most knowledgeable

thing of its kind. Given the context I have been attempting to establish for my magazine, it should be obvious that in calling us second rank I do not mean shopworn or secondhand. I suspect that the most amusing, and at the same time perhaps the most honorable, thing that can be said of Selma and me is that as poetry publishers we have lasted 10 these many years. In this respect, and taking into account the often very proudly announced high casualty rate for little magazines, are we not then, in our own way, genuinely inimitable (apologies to John Martin of BLACK Sparrow)? We delight in observing, when the results of the latest Washington surveyor librarian's questionnaire have been pub lished, that we are always placed-even though anonymously, always as a cipher-among the "oldest" magazines. Forgive our little finger timidly raised, and pointing, not only at our modesty, with pride. Things change. I quote from a note in the Small Press Review for October-November 1977 on Maurice M. Custodio, president 650

of Peace and Pieces Foundation:

" ...

[the] Foundation was

recently rejected by the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program and the California Arts Council for 1977-1978 funding, and therefore cannot accept any manuscripts for books or its magazine until at least 1979." We see here, on the part of a fairly well-established organization with clear-cut social service and literary goals (Peace and Pieces serves prisoners, minorities, and other communities in a broad West Coast area), a wide-open implication that publication plans are being suspended until 1979, when, theoretically, the organization can once again apply for grants. The literary tie-in of an "alternative" publisher with gov ernment funding is, if not complete, at the very least tragically strategic. This writer could cite, at random and at a minimum, a score of similar examples of the connection, chilling to contem plate, between Big Uncle and a so-called alternative press. Yet the distinguished Library Journal, in its annual "Small Press Roundup" issue (December 15, 1977), has stories on little-maga zine fortunes, one by Bill Katz and one by Michael Haldeman, that nowhere make mention of this ominous relationship. Though we are given facts and figures, lists, names and addresses, and all sorts of utopian prognostications of a bright future for inde pendent publishing, there is not a single allusion to the National Endowment for the Arts. But the fact remains that for too many journals, like Yardbird Reader or Gallimaufry, a dependence on government funding seems to be the actual operative condition of their independence. I repeat-I have written of it elsewhere, and at length, and time and again-the most important thing to happen to the little magazine in the generation since the early days of City Lights and The Fifties is not the introduction of cheap offset technology, not the arrival of surrealism, not the education explosion of the sixties, which has resulted in a minor poetry audience, but government intrusion into the arts. It is Sparrow's contention that we have yet to wrestle competently with that particular angel. Not the least grim or the least dangerous result of this intrusion has been the rise of the poet as activist. Poets now run for office, on

grant committees. Poets now proclaim their minority status,

and organize. Where we once, in the more classical days, had an

avant-garde, a group, an atelier, we now have the collective, the 651

community arts council, the neighborhood poetry cafeteria; what we now have is the poetry constituency. It is in the nature of all government arts budgeting and "service" in our country to have the burgeoning of conflicting "democracies" of the kind we are talking about here. As usual, the screamers run away with most of the loot. A high point in the democratization and politicization of poetry is the recent putsch brought off by the Fall 1977 Grants Committee of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. The ladies and gentlemen involved, very much like a congressional ways and means committee, and by a majority vote of 3 to 1 (one timid and, I suspect, vapid soul abstaining), ruled that, with the exception of eighteen magazines excluded by some vague criterion, all 130 applicant magazines should share the money equally. It has never been clear to me what voting has to do with literature, but we must all admit this is democracy with big teeth. Note the ringing, manifesto tone of the majority statement: ...

Therefore, some editors and writers have long advocated a pop ulist approach, and the majority of this CCLM grants committee

responsively votes to recommend an equal share of the public monies for every applicant which [sic] we have found to be quali fied. We believe this position to be a practical alternative to the conventional system. We believe it accomplishes the greatest good for the greatest number. Sparrow wonders what Plato would have had to say about that!

Irony of ironies, of course, and I hasten to make the statement, that the majority of little magazines do not, for one reason or another, apply for these grants. I do not mean to give the impres sion that we have all been caught in the director of the literature program's net. For the Fall 1977 Grants Committee's Jacobin pronunciamento to have made any egalitarian sense, the Charlotte Cordays and Robespierres of the group ought to have been speak ing for all of us, and not just some of us. This, of course, is impossible: thereby proving, in today's Orwellian grants atmo sphere (something that hardly troubles Washington), that al though we are all created equal, some of us are more equal than others. But grants are an ineluctable fact of the current literary scene, to be paying more attention to this fact. The director, and we

ought

who functions like a warring pope among the factions and con-

652

stituencies-an Alexander VI, not a Paul VI-wields inordinate power in this "parlement" of benefit seekers. It is against this backdrop of factionalism that we must read his reckless statements, such as the one about seven hundred books having been published in 1976, with government help-the implication being, I assure you, that they all ought to have been published and were in truth

dramatically rescued from oblivion. I am particularly struck by his proclamation, given to the editor of the "Book Ends" page of the New York Times for June 5, 1977, that government assistance to little

magazines contributes to the lifting of "censorship by omission," by bringing before the public books heretofore threat ened with extinction because of mere financial exigency. I wish he had also spoken, as others have, of "censorship by submission." There is indeed that negative censorship of what we must not do, and here, we see, Washington plays its cagey game, substituting for raw, negative censorship its own guideline: affirmative censor ship of what, in order to obtain support, we must do, what we must publish. To cite but one example, this includes the numberless anthologies of the writings of children. It seems clear, in today's advocacy enthusiasms, that the sonnet and other traditional poetry have effectively been eliminated from democratic privilege. (The director is notorious for his scornful public remarks about something he calls academic poetry.) Then there exists, for his own guidance, the statement of the National Council on the Arts-as quoted in Publishers Weekly for July 25, 1977, page 48-that the Endowment is "basically committed to the support of future creativity rather than to the provision of ...

cash awards for past work." With such official confidence in the

future, who needs Shakespeare? What we seem to get, wherever we

turn, is promises, promises, and the numbers racket.

The going little magazines (I mean journals like Sparrow)

are

effectively and in principle-especially when one considers that the past includes last year and yesterday-eo-opted. The best indication of this bumping process, this co-optation in support possibilities, is the absence of any serious government program for the distribution of little magazines. There are the minuscule distribution projects that are funded, through a Ford Foundation grant, by the CCLM. Sparrow has had some decent luck here, often as much as a 50 percent return on consignments, but there 653

ought to be many more such projects, and they ought to be more heftily funded. Unfortunately, distribution implies fulfillment, fulfillment implies performance, and performance-experience demands some kind of "past," which may all be a little too damn businesslike to serve the thinly masked social service strategies of the social engineers at the NEA. It is instructive to observe that the new executive director of the CCLM rushes to announce, in of his correspondence, that he is

political scientist; and, fact, from what I have read of a letter of his, he sounds like a welfare director, not a literary arbiter. He seems awfully worried about unsilencing "the silenced" (his phrase), and some as a

matter of

by the same token I am awfully worried that he and his ilk in Washington are perhaps also intrigued with the possibility of silencing the unsilenced, all sorts of people like me, with lack of interest or encouragement. Am I being paranoid? To get back to the pope, the latest thing I hear is that he has been admitted to the Poetry Society of America-his biographical notes identify him as an "assistant to a congressman"-and I shudder to think what designs he has on the club women of America. We cannot leave this matter of censorship without also con sidering the self-censorship engendered by the total environment. I am grateful to Lingeman for quoting me, as well as Randolph, in his "Book Ends" story already alluded to, and there I specifically mention it. Felix Pollak writes me that self-censorship is a charge impossible to prove, and he is right. I can only depend on my own credibility-quotient among some trusting souls, and pray for a modest conversion here and there. With only that (admittedly tenuous) goal in view, I quote an unnamed "source," who recently wrote me in response to one of my more wearisome fulminations

against the NEA in Black Rooster Newsletter. His words are a paradigm of one kind of correspondence I receive on the issue, even sometimes from the high and the mighty: one of your anonymous informants at this point-mute testimony to your assertion that there' is fear and censorship. It is not that I'm afraid of sticking my neck out, but I'm very much identified with --, does receive a publication grant from the NEA, and I would hate and to see penalized for my foolhardiness.

I may have to be

As the old saying goes, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Some of the omens are good. We have Robert Brustein's long

piece in the December 18, 1977, issue of the "Arts and Leisure" 654

section of the New York Times. His article includes a report on conversations with Senator Pell, Livingston Biddle, our new NEA

chairman, and Mrs. Joan Mondale, as well as other dignitaries, about the future of NEA activities. I enjoyed his identification of the pivot of the crisis under discussion here as a struggle between people interested in art and people interested in adult educa tion. I would also add (Brustein does not refer to this forcefully enough) people interested in neither art nor adult education but in social engineering. His essay is too meaty to review here, but it is a healthy note that a person of his stature has decided to enter the fray, no matter how "impartially," and that his views have been presented on a national forum and not in some crazy little magazine. As nearly as I can tell, his is the first higher echelon voice to utter a demurrer on the whole arts binge. He has, of course, in subsequent letters to the editor, been called a "patri cian" and a "snob" for his pains, but it is high time our more prominent writers and editors stood up to be counted on this all-important intellectual question; I for one hope Brustein's per formance is not only symptomatic but prophetic. As things are falling right now, the Philistines are winning by default. We must not omit our humor for the day. There is always the perennially trivial leadership of COSMEP (Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers) to fall back upon for a good laugh. For a couple of years now, these unsturdy commis sars of literature have been burning up the mails with their pro posed van project: to bring in mobile form, much like our old peddlers, the little magazine to the boondocks of America, where a lot of good folks are. COSMEP is today-in essential, financial and of the of course, under the litera NEA, ways-an appendage ture program director's benign tutelage, has had no real trouble in obtaining a $30,000 grant for this purpose. There was an im mediate falling-out between West Coast and East Coast partisans as to where the single van should operate. When the area of the Southeast was finally chosen as the base for the pilot project, charges of "sellout," and resignations, immediately followed. Do not think for a moment that President Carter-that wily southron -was

exempt from accusation. One man wrote a book of poems

explaining his secession from the mother organization. Then, af ter weary months of looking for the right vehicle to buy, drivers to hire, coordinators to appoint, the leadership sadly announced 655

that the van had broken down, that the repair bill

$7,000, resigned (I do not believe he wrote poems about his resignation), that the board of directors had voted itself $2,500 of the van money for a meeting, and that the directors must vote on the problem of the inclusion of anti-fem inist material in the van. (There is a poem about it in a recent issue of the organization's newsletter.) As nearly as I can make out, Ken Kesey had nothing to do with any of this. Naturally, and to be expected, all this idealistic inexpertise bodes well for future creativity. Since the past does not count-the concept of "past work" having been abolished-COSMEP has been award ed, for the present fiscal year, not $30,000 but $40,000! Now was

that the coordinator had

that is what I call a real incentive system.

Sparrow's principle in all this is clear: we stay out of the game. We lack the financial buttressing of the university review, insecure and uncertain as that may be. (The fat university review is a

small-press myth.) We have not developed the readership of solid institutionals, like Partisan Review or Poetry. We are not inde pendently wealthy, as are the backers of some of our reviews. We earnestly feel that the better part of discretion, if not valor, is to keep lean, and depend only on ourselves. We're not exactly starving. We manage to get into the libraries. We have a sure, if not great, list of subscribers we can honestly call "hard core." We know where we're going. We too can-as can most serious little magazine editors-truly point with pride to a bibliography here, a footnote there, a prizewinner now and then out of our ranks, poems in most of the major anthologies. We sense keenly and personally our by-now aging tradition: a tradition, for instance, that accommodates the inclusion of Sparrow poets in both path finder anthologies of a past exciting epoch-the Allen New Ameri can Poetry 1945-1960 and the Hall, Pack, and Simpson New Poets of England and America. If that tradition, little as it is, doesn't have scope, I don't know what has.

Laboring as we do on the middle terraces of Olympus, neither among the establishment-view journals that feature essays by the Welleks and the Barfields of the acknowledged literary peaks, nor among the foothills of topicality and "movements" where the small press revolution lurks and ideologies and guidelines gather, we

nurture

our

strong sense of portent, and endeavor to stand

fast amid the buffetings and storms unleashed by the NEA pres-

656

sure

system. Once in a rare while, some name-poet sends us his

castoffs, and the latest female vincitrix makes her browbeating

inquiry about our attitude toward neglected literature. Our corre spondence on such matters is always vigorously courteous and strategically brief. Wanting to stay lean and to give government the slip, we are right now doing our best to retreat from the movement aspects of the little magazine. This is the main reason for our changeover from a traditional poetry miscellany to our pamphlet series fea turing the work of a single poet. As we wrote elsewhere-our words were quoted in Time, of all places-it is impossible, this side of idiocy, not to get published these days. Thanks to the movement, we have magazines for all seasons, all gradations of talent and non-talent, and to get out of that game is not the elitist or antisocial act it might have been twenty years ago, before the era of poetry gamesmanship. Fortunately, the word is getting

around, however slowly. In 1976-the first year of our change in

policy-our manuscript mail was reduced by about 25 percent, a

real work economy for us that made us feel very rescued. The

for this reduction is

simple: as our poet-in-the-school is quick to inform his or her charges, anybody can write a poem but not everybody can compile a genuine chapbook manuscript. Sparrow has changed the rules of the game, and a certain type of un-poet, or part-time poet, or one-shot workshop-poet is auto matically cut out. The reader will note-with admiration, we hope -that a current requirement of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a five-dollar submission fee. We wonder how many unspicy meatballs have been deflected in their course, in the mails, by such a simple fiat. To such lengths are conscientious editors brought in the continuing struggle to reduce the slush pile. A letter we wrote recently to a writer-in-residence of the South Carolina reason

Arts Commission, in response to his request for donations, focuses

sharply on this blight of poetry palaver, of poetry hordes that has overtaken today's little magazine, all in the name of future cre ativity. We rephrase in spots, to keep other people out of the discussion: In all friendliness, and in all frankness as well, we feel we cannot oblige you in your request for copies of Sparrow publications for your teaching projects, and in doing so we touch

on a

real social and intellectual problem that has

already been discussed in the past by some well-known authors and publishers. 657

I don't know how to put it, without sounding like a cannibal or some other

kind of soulless literary golem, but Sparrow is the kind of magazine that can never be seriously interested in novice work. I am sensitive .

especially because, with one or two exceptions, what has crossed our desk bespeaks a truly tragic issue of identity and education problems, and we are quite simply a literary magazine, not a clinic, not a when it comes to prisoners ...

remedial institution. In other words, I don't see what purpose is served in telling these individuals that Sparrow is a market for them, when in utter and it seems to me, for the same reason, that it is a fact Sparrow is not waste of effort to expose us to senior citizens, other novices, and kids ...

....

Judging from the material we are now beginning to receive, we have lowered the boom still further. We give preference, and say so, to poets whose manuscripts are made up of mostly unpublished

poems. This, we hope, will get the creative writing majors off our backs. There is one large school in the Midwest, just about all of

whose MFA candidates, we sometimes feel, have sent us a type

script, with the duly cluttered acknowledgments page. Far be it from me to knock my own profession of teaching creative writing, but schools of this kind invariably harbor their own little maga zines, stuffed with the work of their students, and token decora tions from eminences like William

Ginsberg or Allen Stafford. Aside from a general lack of adventurousness, what we detect in much of the work is the march of the syllabus-the poem addressed to Another Person, the poem that objectifies a person or personifies an object, the poem with the word "stone" in it, the backpack poem, and so on. While I am not prepared to argue that poems in these modalities cannot be good, I do come away from the manuscripts with the distinct feeling that to have read one

such collection is to have read them all.

ought not to overlook that in today's failing educational times creative writing is one of the disciplines bucking the declining enrollments trend, that composition and the new mass media pro grams are in our pedagogical future, and that these schools man ufacture a product, just like other schools, and not poetry. All this is related once again, though at a different level, to the blight of poetry palaver. Accomplished literary competence may earn degrees and-I hope-get jobs, but its relationship to the classical tradition of the little magazine is nonexistent. A good little maga zine is never after the merely correct, or publishable, or fashion able verse-the verse that is being "done" now. In this latter group there is a sameness of tone, a pedestrian exercise-developWe

658

ment and gallop to the work that we do not intend to encourage.

A good little magazine is very often after work that is not the "done" or going that is not fashionable, not "in," and in

thing,

fact some of these smart and talented degree candidates ought to be told to stop doing what comes to them so easily. We seem to be arguing against the previously published poem, but this is not entirely true, and often enough we break our own rules. We are arguing against the Published Poem mind-set that freezes the

insufficiently developed poem on the printed page. The magazines are full of these abortions. Granted the inevi tability of eventual publication these days, we submit that Spar row's newfound prejudice in favor of the virgin manuscript places the responsibilities of art where they belong--on the artist, at the artist's own pace-and not on the interstices, drafty with the winds of fame, of an arts system riddled with sham, campy topi cality, and "connection." We are, in other words, against the style of the times, and paradoxically our rigidity has elicited (as it was meant to), from out of the blue, work that is genuinely new. This comes especially from middle poets of sustained achievement, workmen who cannot claim to be

innovative

new

young

current

underprivileged or needy or unemployed, and against whom the style of liberational novelty, with and without NEA and graduate school encouragement, militates to effectively shut them off from public attention. Again, our strategy is to refuse to fight the enemy on his terms, but to fight him on ours. Sparrow has, in effect, most unmilitantly abolished both the movement or

and the NEA.

In the single-poet idea-as anyone who has come across an issue of Vort, say the Guy Davenport number, will note-there is a phi

losophical challenge impossible to confront in most little-magazine publishing. The writer is truly up front where he belongs, in all his vulnerability and, in the case of a previously unpublished work, all his nakedness. Taste is at work, and vigorous choice-not en thusiasm, not educationist display, not cheap thrills. Audiences are being formed, no matter how small. Aim is being taken. This is the true job of little magazines. Of course nothing new has been said here, except, perhaps, that it is against the style of the times, the thematic anthologies, the discovered geniuses, the age-group choruses, the collections based upon issues and events, etc. We 659

observe

trend that

gives us pause to think: that more and more editors are devoting their efforts to the single-poet issue. One young fellow actually acknowledged in the International Di rectory that he got the idea from Sparrow and magazines like it. I'm sure the idea is around, and it is one way of combating the blitz. Also, more and more editors are publishing magazines that feature only work that has been solicited; as the saying goes, "Don't call us, we'll call you." Such self-protective gestures ought to rescue a certain type of little magazine from the general malaise of enthusiasm and future creativity that threatens to engulf us all like a flood. Once again, as in the single-poet issue, exclusivity places the burden of art where it belongs, on the individual, the editor as much as the poet, not on operation, gamesmanship, pol icy, production, guideline-fulfillment, publish-or-perish MFA de gree requirements. Let us reflect soberly that it was precisely such editorial exclusivity that brought to us the superb poetry of people like J. V. Cunningham, William Bronk, Paul Metcalf-all nur tured through the years by their adoptive publishers. It may not be democracy, but it sure as hell is art! When such ideas and others like them catch on, as they very well may, I am sure that somebody on the literature panel of the NEA will come forth with the denunciation that these editors are being "elitist," or perhaps "unpopulist," and ought to be excluded from government grants. In each of the categories cited-the movement, the schools, the a

government programs (I shall close with at least one well-aimed

fling at PITS)-the mounting evidence of NEA influence is clear. By now literally millions of dollars have been given to the maga zines. There exists

monolithic and automatic filtration system

connecting the schools with CET A, PITS, and the Creative Writ ing Fellowships, still more and more millions of dollars. I have pointing out components on a grid as to one vast chaos of poetry palaver, misnamed renaissance: a veritable not so much been

space program for the arts that involves children, state arts cils, neighborhood betterment projects, new education plans (a new star on the horizon is "arts education"), and so forth. Even coun

have congressmen, usually suspicious of and hostile to art, a sink to decision been bought off by the Washington hefty and regularized percentage of arts funds directly into the states, thus our

bringing the politics of the placement of an air force base or navy 660

yard to a new level of finesse as state arts funds, or poetry as pork barrel. Next to the future creativity stress of the NEA with its built-in exemption from critical scrutiny as the Now yields to the new Now annually, and the devil take the hindmost past this is the most brilliant coup pulled off by our perilous benefac tors, the social engineers. After all, with fifty states, how much more democratic can art get? What we really have is not poetry, but politics-the arts lobby, the arts caucus, committees and coun cils of poets and poetasters, constituencies including camouflaged quota systems; just check the sociological makeup of, especially, the smaller higher-echelon boards and panels-and Organization. The cult of plurality reigns, and the shit rains down on us all. My favorite theory, for the present (one can never be sure when we are going to be hit over the head with another miracle from the NEA) is that Gradgrind is really in charge, and Grad grind is bent on fostering and advancing, not literature, but hatred of literature. Hatred of literature has to be part of the present action because Gradgrind really wants literature as policy image, literature as social revolution, literature as statistics proving results.

Something more important than literature, as most of us under stand literature, is always going on. Such strategy of preconception and goals can only result, eventually, in suspicion of and mis treatment of the age-old, often aesthetic elements of the paradigm we have always accepted as art. I find here a frightening resem blance both to socialist realism and, with the committees, to the Soviet Writers Councils. As for the mystique of goals, of "700

books," it reminds me of Stakhanovism.

Surely a hatred of literature motivates any teaching that can result in the obvious victimization of individuals who send letters like the following to Sparrow: Dear sir or madam: I have enough pages for a book of poems of poetry, that will be for all ages. I think it is a two way street from the author and the publisher. I would like to know what I will receive. what type of paper they must be typed on and what type of typewritter ribbon. I am not a free lance writer. these poems is

from observeation. I would like to have two books for copywrite purpose, also can I order additional books direct from you. I have a poem I would like to be in the book. It has been acepted in the poetry press contest unpublished poetry, that ends in Dec. Do you want a sample or all at once. Will ga rentee [sic] postage back, I have a few more than necessary, will send for you to sort over.

661

At first my wife and I, on receipt of such letters, would sus

pect a joke. Today, we receive too many of them to doubt their sincerity. Note the mangle of teaching units, sticking out like bone splinters from the general mess; the reference to copyright; the implication of SASE in the return postage remark; the query tone of "sample." This is what is going on in the NEA world-grant funded teaching, which can impel, out of dreadful innocence and stalwart misinformation, another letter to the poetry editor that

begins, "Dear manager, I am 18 years old and have written 1200 We get poems. My teacher told me to send them to you this kind of query-there is also a category for the seventy-four year-old who has written a "first" poem-about every third week. Being the sort of magazine we are, neither too high nor too low, we have a reputation for accessibility, and get all sorts of mail. Is Sparrow being cruel and insensitive to see-beyond the hope and innocence, the sweet temerity of inexperience, but equally as evident-the despair and loneliness of ignorance, the unready, absolutely vulnerable spirit unprepared for disappointment? Do I exaggerate? We too, like Gradgrind, keep statistics. Out of our first two hundred manuscripts for 1978 we noted that fully 12 percent came without a self-addressed, stamped return envelope. From 1965, the year the NEA was conscripted, this is a rise of about 1,000 percent for such manuscripts. Is the rise part of the renaissance? Let me momentarily lift the discussion out of its "

...

Sparrow context, and refer to a recent (November 1977) issue of Indiana Writes, where a poet-in-the-school attempts to answer William Jay Smith's charge that, by and large, people in the PITS program are not teaching the great lyric tradition to the kids, are not teaching them our classics, and above all are teaching

nothing about rhyme, language, and structure. He offers from his own experience the teaching (of all things) of a Neruda lesson poem in a free verse translation; the main point of the seemed to be to get the pupils to relate, out of their own lives, them

to the "theme"! What kind of answer to Smith was this? In terms

of poetry, our general findings point to the existence of a burgeon of educationally battered and abused children who

ing generation can't spell, don't type, have never been taught the simple rudi ments of manuscript preparation or the primitive ethics of paying for their return postage. These children--except (in the words 662

of another editor) for a pleasant bout with "recreational experi mentalism"-have

never

been

taught

what

writing

being

published, in the larger environment of literature, really means or imports. This is not teaching, dear poet-in-the-school; this is child molestation. I choose to close on this gloomy note in order to emphasize how

rampant the plague of government policy in "supporting" poetry really is, affecting not only our magazines but, as the social

engineers seem to want it to, our whole society. The condition is one that our writers, our critics, even our parents ought to be paying more attention to. It is truly a Big Deal, and I do not think it is going to readily go away. Gradgrind will not leave unless strongly invited to do so. In the meantime, funding gets bigger and better year after year. I used to think NEA-shenanigans were the greatest national joke since the popular self-help, fulfillment" "personal optimism, in the twenties and thirties, of Dr. Coue and his chortling band of enthusiast-imitators, like Harry Overstreet and Dale Carnegie. The equivalent slogan or meditation-words for NEA adherents would go something like "Every day in every way, my poems are getting better and better," or "How to win friends and influence poetry editors." I am no longer so offhandedly amused by the whole thing. What we have on our hands is a national hoax, perpetrated by govern ment-funded brainwashing and boondoggle. The situation is a danger to us all. As the fellow said when the fight started on the train, "This is where I get off." This is where Sparrow

gets off.

Felix Stefanile (courtesy Poetry magazine).

663

AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SELECTED LITTLE MAGAZINES Peter Martin Peter A. Martin has published articles in The Arizona Quarterly,

Studies in Short Fiction, and The Wisconsin Academy Review. He has been working for some time on a comprehensive survey

and

bibliography of British magazines from 1919 to 1939, to be published by G. K. Hall. Mr. Martin teaches in the University of Wisconsin system.

Note on the magazines

Although no one today doubts the importance of little magazines, there remains a frequently intemperate controversy regarding the boundaries of the little-magazine category. The broadest definition, and the one that creates the least controversy, suggests that a little

magazine publishes creative work which for one or another reason is unacceptable to commercial magazines. Certainly few, if any, little magazines can be accused of commercial expediency. A narrower definition suggests that little magazines are limited in circulation and independent of outside funding, and that they not only avoid crass commercialism but focus principally upon new names and new literary techniques. This bibliography ignores the narrower definition and bases its selections on merit. To have excluded the more stable, better funded magazines would have

passing over major works by many first-rank writers. At the same time it would be ingenuous to think that the really new and untried could be as consistently represented in The American Poetry Review or The Hudson Review or TriQuarterly as in Wormwood or in a little-little magazine with a dedicated but limited special readership. Therefore, the following list ranges meant

666

from The (New) American Review, which tried to bring quality literature to a mass market through paperback anthologies, through

university- and government-subsidized magazines, to little-little magazines such as Vagabond and Blue Cloud Quarterly. This bibliography deals with the history of American little magazines since 1950. It includes a number of magazines that began well before 1950 (for example, The Sewanee Review, Poetry, The Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review) but have been an important part of magazine publishing since then. As with more recent university-sponsored magazines, omission of these periodicals would have eliminated much important writing by major literary figures. Also included for annotation are a few magazines that were not edited in the United States. These are either displaced American magazines (Paris Review, Origin in its Kyoto issues, Locus Solus, Antaeus), or magazines reflecting new international emphases that have been significant in American literary history (El Corno Emplumado), or magazines that have printed large amounts of significant English-language literature (Botteghe Oscure). a selection of

Selection of titles for this survey was made after consultation with a number of experts on American little magazines. Michael

Anania, John Jacob, Marvin Malone, James Boyer May, Tom Montag, Felix Pollak, Marjorie Smelstor, S. C., Felix Stefanile, and Robert Wilson of the Phoenix Book Shop, among others, gave valuable advice on the choice of titles for annotations.

Special thanks go to John Jacob, Marvin Malone, and Marjorie Smelstor, S. c., who provided information which greatly facilitated the writing of a number of annotations; also to Gloria Prochaska, Darlene Safransky, and Ella Toigo for first-rate secretarial help; and to the highly efficient, knowledgeable, and invariably good natured staff in the Special Collections room at the Northwestern University Library. I would also like to thank Bonnie Jo Sedlak for providing the information regarding magazine bindings. A very brief checklist of sources for the study of American little

magazines

Despite some occasionally erratic guesswork, the inevitable factual errors, and

smattering

unaccountable decision to include

English magazines,

hit-or-miss

Frederick J. Hoffman's

The

667

Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography is a comprehensive survey of American little magazines from 1891 to 1946. In addition to the 230-page discursive history and the 174-page annotated

chronological checklist, this study also includes a list of references that forms a good starting place for an investigation of American little magazines up to the end of World War II. A number of scholars and publishers have discussed updating the Hoffman book, but thus far no substantive study has appeared. The major inhibiting factor is the roughly 1,000 percent increase in the number of little

magazines published over the past three decades. An immense post-World War II increase in the number of college-educated persons, combined with the accessibility of cheap mimeograph machines and inexpensive offset printing, has effected a phenomenal increase in the creation of small literary periodicals. Yet we are not without aids to the ordering of the welter of materials. For the fifties and sixties, a chronicle history of English-language little magazine activity is provided by the revolving directory of magazines in James Boyer May's Trace (see annotation below). The scope of the 1950s/1960s "mimeo revolution" is reflected in May's observation that his first directory (1952) contained 152 entries, "a fairly complete world coverage of littles in English," and the final directory (1970) included 999 entries. After the demise of Trace, May worked for some time on Len Fulton's International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, an annual publication, now close to 500 pages, which lists several thousand magazines and small press ventures. The international directories, along with the ongoing accumulation of information in Len Fulton's monthly Small Press Review (a cumulative ten-year index is scheduled for 1978 release), helps provide for the 1970s an even fuller listing of little magazines than Trace offers for the 1950s and 1960s.

Among the other magazines which list or review current little magazines is Tom Montag's Margins (see annotation below), which offered intelligent, often comprehensive, reviews and com mentary upon many small press books and magazines of the 1970s. Some persons find Margins too inclusive, too open to the new and the small, but it is an invaluable tool for the student of recent

little magazine history. Harry Smith's The Smith (see annotation below) expresses a highly opinionated, often impolite, but in668

teresting attitude toward both establishment and small press magazines; Smith also issues the Newsletter on the State of Culture. Noel Peattie's Sipapu is a good source of information on alternative and underground publishing, as is Peattie's The Living Z: A Guide to the Literature of the Counter-Culture, the Alternative Press, and Little Magazines, published in 1975 by Tom Montag as a Margins Book (an earlier version had appeared in Margins 10, February/March 1974). The bibliographic check lists in The Living Z are a logical starting place for anyone in terested in recent little

magazine history (especially regarding

alternative press ventures). A good deal of information regarding details of publishing little magazines

(funding, printers, formats,

magazine exchanges, conferences, and the like) is found in the COSMEP Newsletter, edited by Richard Morris for the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers. Fulton, Montag, and Peattie, like James Boyer May,

are

essentially concerned with the little-little magazines rather than, say, the substantial university-sponsored literary magazines and

journals. Persons interested in the latter sort of periodical should consult the Directory of Periodicals, published by Swallow Press, a list of magazines printing articles on English and American literature and language. Designed for academics seeking to publish their articles, this guide naturally leans heavily toward establish ment periodicals, but does list little magazines which carry critical articles. The Fourth Directory (1974), for example, includes The Smith, Small Press Review, and December. A number of period icals regularly review other magazines and journals. Noteworthy is Bill Katz's "Magazines" column that has regularly appeared in Library Journal since January 1967. Although his primary purpose is to alert librarians to possible acquisitions, he maintains a strong and encouraging interest in little magazines, and his highly topical column is often of real interest.

Many of the magazines in the present checklist have been comprehensive little magazine indexes. Of primary importance is Swallow Press's Index to Little Magazines, begun included in

in 1948 and later extended

by increments through the 1960s.

Excluding any title found in the Readers Guide, the International Index, or the Social Sciences and Humanities Index, the Index to Little Magazines offers a comprehensive guide to a selection 669

important little magazines (the Index for 1966-1967, for example, covers 49 periodicals, 20 of which are found in the present checklist). While a variety of compilers worked forward from 1948, Stephen A. Goode compiled a four-volume index of important little magazines covering the years 1900-1947. In 1976 the Kraus-Thomson Organization published Marion Sader's Comprehensive Index to English-Language Little Magazines, 1890-1970, Series One-an author index to one hundred selected little magazines. It has been estimated that only 15 to 20 percent of the titles here overlap the Swallow indexes. Comprehensive Index to English-Language Little Magazines, 1890-1970, Series One. Compo Marion Sader. Millwood, New York: Kraus-Thomsen Organization, 1976. COSMEP Newsletter [Committee of Small Press Editors and Publishers]. Buffalo, New York [then: San Francisco]. Vol. I, no. 1, Aug 1969+. Ed. Richard Morris.

Directory of Periodicals: Publishing Articles on English and American Literature and Language. [Second Directory, etc.]. Ed. Donna Gersten berger and George Hendrick. Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1959, etc. Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton

University Press, 1946. Index to Little Magazines, 1948, etc. Denver, Colorado: Alan Swallow [then:

Chicago], 1949, etc. [The years 1900-1947 are covered in 4 vol., comp, Stephen H. Goode, as Index to American Little Magazines.] International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses [early editions: Directory of ]. Ed Len Fulton. El Cerrito, California: A Dustbook [then: Paradise, California], 1965, etc. Katz, Bill, "Magazines," Library Journal, Vol. XCII, no. 1, 1 Jan 1967+. ...

Margins. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. No.1, Aug 1972+. Ed. Tom Montag. Peattie, Noel. The Living Z: A Guide to the Literature of the CounterCulture, the Alternative Press, and Little Magazines. Milwaukee,Wisconsin:

Margins Book, 1975. Sipapu. Winters, California. Vol. I, no. 1, Jan 1970+. Ed. Noel Peattie. Small Press Review. El Cerrito, California [then: Paradise, California]. Vol. I, no. 1, Spring 1967 +. Ed. Len Fulton. The Smith. New York. 15 Feb 1964+. Ed. Harry Smith. Trace. Hollywood, California. No. 1-72/73, Jun 1952-Autumn 1970. Ed. James Boyer May. A

Guide to the Annotations

Wherever possible, the headnote information is taken directly from the magazine; first attention has been paid to the title page masthead, then to the cover, and then to the rest of the

670

magazine. Any information derived from sources other than the magazine itself is placed in brackets. A question mark (?) accompanies any item that is at all in doubt. Circulation and funding information, where not presented in the magazines them selves, was obtained from the editors and from CCLM, but is

by no means complete. Title. Place of pUblication

Changes of title or place of publication are given in chronological order. Subtitles are listed when consistently used on cover and title page or masthead, or when they clearly explain the magazine's purpose. Place of publication means the editorial office. The place of printing is not considered.

University or school affiliations are noted under place of publication when sponsorship is clearly indicated in the magazine. A number of magazines not so identified have received some support from such institutions. Other

sponsoring or supporting agencies or publishing houses are not listed here (though often discussed in the annotation). Volume numbers and dates. Frequency.

Wherever

possible the use of volume, number, series,

month

season,

etc., follows usage in the specific magazine. Where any of these elements are not taken directly from the magazine itself, the matter appears in brackets. Dates of first and last issues

are listed. A plus sign (+) indicates that the magazine is still being published. A few magazines have not appeared recently but are considered to be in suspension rather than defunct (The Seventies, Margins). For these magazines no terminal issue is cited. Simple changes in frequency are noted; multiple changes are listed as "Freq. varies"; publication at irregular intervals (including regular publication interspersed with frequent or extended periods of nonpublication) is listed as "Irreg."

Editors. Editors are listed in chronological order according to when they first edited the magazine. The current editor is not always the last named (see Poetry, The Massachusetts Review). Where

dates accompany

editor's name, that person is

presumed to

have edited every issue. Where conflict exists, dates for changes of editor are based on internal evidence rather than upon outside testimony of editors and others. Where editorship changes very frequently, the editors of issue number one are

listed and the fact of frequent change noted. Later editors are listed

only if especially important (see Shenandoah). Contributing and guest editors, listed only when they strongly affect the magazine, appear in brackets. 671

Textual data.

Dimensions and pagination refer to normal issues and generally to recent issues. Many little magazines vary a great deal; therefore these figures should be taken as estimates. "Illus." is cited only when illustrations are a regular and significant feature.

"Mimeo" is cited when most issues are reproduced by mimeograph machine.

"Stapled" indicates side-stapling; "stapled (folded)" indicates center-stapling in saddle-stitch position. "Perfect" indicates a spine to which cut signatures are glued; "sewn" indicates a spine to which sewn signatures are glued. Indexes.

Indexes are noted where encountered in research. This is not an exhaustive list.

672

Magazines annotated The Agni Review Alcheringa The A merican Poetry Review Angel Hair Antaeus The Antioch Review

Aphra Assembling Audit

Bastard Angel The Beloit Poetry Journal Big Table The Black Mountain Review Blue Cloud Quarterly Botteghe Oscure Boundary 2 The Carleton Miscellany Carolina Quarterly

Caterpillar Center Chelsea Review The Chicago Review Choice Clown War December El Corno Emplumado

Lillabulero LocusSolus ManRoot

Margins The Massachusetts Review Mulch The Naked Ear Neurotica New: American and Canadian Poetr New American Review The North American Review

Origin The Outsider Panache The Paris Review Parnassus

Partisan Review Pembroke Magazine

Poetry Poetry Northwest The Prairie Schooner Prose

Quarterly Review of Literature Salmagundi

Epoch Evergreen Review

The Sewanee Review Shenandoah The Smith The Southern Review

Fiction Field

Spectrum Story

The Fifties

Trace

The Floating Bear Fuck You The Greenfield Review

Truck

TriQuarterly Unmuzzled Ox

Hanging Loose

Vagabond

Hearse The Hudson Review Invisible City

West Coast Poetry Review

Kayak The Kenyon Review Kulchur

Wild Dog The World The Wormwood Review Yardbird Reader

Yugen Zero

673

The Agni Review. Antioch College, Antioch, Ohio (no. 1-2, 1972-1973); Cranford, N.J. (no. 3-5/6, 1973-1976); Cambridge, Mass. (no. 7,

1977+).

No.1, 1972+. Irreg. Ed. Askold Melnyczuk; David Ghitelman (no. 4-5/6,

1975-1976); Sharon

Dunn (no. 7, 1977+). 5th" x 8th"

perfect (no. 1-2: folded and stapled)

60-144 pp.

Askold Melnyczuk (with assistance from Eric Hoffman and Kim Connell

for No. 1 and Hoffman and Thomas Bahr for No.2) began The Agni Review at Antioch College, where he produced the opening issue at the

college print shop. Then he moved the editorial offices to Cranford, N.J., as co-editor, and later to Cambridge,

where David Ghitelman served

Mass., where Sharon Dunn became the co-editor. With Agni No. 10, Dunn is scheduled to assume full responsibility for editing the magazine.

Agni has become a sophisticated forum for both known and unknown contributors. Beginning with Robert Bly (a one-line poem) and Greg Kuzma in No.1, Agni has printed a number of well-known poets, in cluding Russell Edson, Ira Sadoff, George Hitchcock, Anselm Hollo, Paul Eluard, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Douglas Blazek, David Ignatow, Joseph Bruchac, Colette Inez, George Starbuck, and Carolyn Stoloff. Agni has published fiction by Hale Chatfield and Clarence Major and prose poems by Brian Swann, Russell Edson, and Carolyn Stoloff. At the same time it has also provided substantial space to less well-known writers. Beginning with No.4 (1975), each issue has featured ten to twelve pages of work by a poet who has not yet published a full-length collection; these poets include Herbert Morris, John McKernan, Barbara Eve, Mekeel McBride, and Stuart Dischell.

According to Melnyczuk, the one abiding character

istic of Agni over the years has been its "openness to anything of quality," from a photo-essay on spatial poetry by Timothy Cohrs, to a novella by David Bosworth, to poems by George Starbuck.

Starting with No. 5/6 (1976), Agni has received CCLM support. The current press run is

1,000 copies.

A1cheringa [no. 1-5: Ethnopoetics; new series no. 1+: A First Magazine of the World's Tribal Poetries]. New York, N.Y. [in association with Stony Brook Poetics Foundation] (no. 1-5, Autumn 1 970-Spring/Summer 1973); Boston University, Boston, Mass. (New series, Vol. I, no. 1, 1975+). No.1, Autumn 1970+. 2/yr. Ed. Dennis Tedlock; Jerome Rothenberg (Autumn 1970-1976). 8'/.l" x 9" (recently)

perfect

132-152 pp. (recently).

Alcheringa (from the Arunta word for "dream time" or the act of

dream

manifesto ing) offers a format for tribal poetry in English translation. The the free assist "to intention that appeared in the first issue asserted the editors' so others & of ethnic self-awareness among young Indians

development 674

concerned, by encouraging a knowledgeable, loving respect among them & all people for the world's tribal past & present." Alcheringa has printed translations (and transcriptions) from oral traditions, explanations of new

devices for rendering a strictly oral work into written English, and original work in English that attempts to reflect oral traditions.

To overcome the problems inherent in translating and then transcribing these oral-tradition works into English, Alcheringa contributors have ex

perimented with punctuation, typography, and page layouts,

well

with patterns borrowed from concrete poetry and from emblem poetry. Collaborators on the transcriptions include Simon Ortiz, Robert Kelly, Nathaniel Tarn, Anselm Hollo, Kofi Awoonor, Clayton Eshleman, Diane

di Prima, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Charles Doria, and W. S. Merwin. issues include disc recordings by Jackson MacLow, Schwerner, Jaime de Angulo, and Anne Waldman.

Some

Armand

The editors of Alcheringa are not interested in literal translations. Some number of oral poems; others are the work of an who English-speaking poet develops a poem from a prose crib; occasionally

versions synthesize

poet collaborates with an anthropologist, linguist, or classicist (e.g., the poet Milton Kessler and Egyptologist Gerald E. Kadish, who worked a

together on "Love Songs and Tomb Songs of Ancient Egypt"). New movements in art and literature may sometimes produce better manifestos than art; the opposite is true of Alcheringa, where the poetry is as a rule interesting and moving and the theoretical discussions muddled and jargon-ridden. Thus the special issue reporting on an ethnopoetics symposium at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (edited by Michel Benamou and Jerome Rothenberg) addresses interesting topics in a way that makes the magazine dull when one compares it with earlier numbers that presented Indian poetry, black dialect, South Pacific oral poetry, and South American Indian poetry.

Alcheringa receives support from Boston University and CCLM. Circula tion is 2,000 (600 SUbscriptions). The American Poetry Review. Philadelphia, Pa. Vol. I, no. 1, Nov./Dec. 1972+. 6/yr. Ed.

Stephen Berg; Stephen Parker (Nov./Dec. 1972-Nov./Dec. 1973);

Rhoda Schwartz (Jan.j/Feb. 1973+); David Bonanno (Sep./Oct. 1973+); Arthur Vogelsang (1974+); Eleanor Wilner (1975-1977). 11'4" x IS"

folded

40-72pp.

Illus.

With its circulation of 24,000 (15,000 subscribers), The American Poetry Review reaches a far wider audience than does the usual poetry magazine.

beginning, in 1972, APR had two principal editors, a managing editor, three associates, and twenty-four contributing editors. By 1977 there were five principal editors, two editors-at-large, an assistant editor, and twenty-eight contributing editors. Although Stephen Berg and David At the

675

Ignatow have been associated with the magazine from the beginning (Ignatow resigned in 1977 after the magazine was cited for including too few women and blacks), APR does not bear anyone individual's stamp. A major feature of APR has been the center supplement devoted to the work of a single poet (Czeslaw Milosz, Muriel Rukeyser, Pablo Neruda, John Berryman, Thomas McGrath, Cesar Vallejo, Richard Hugo, Anne Sexton) or ethnic group (center pages of Eskimo, Hungarian, black poetry) or short anthologies of the work of younger poets selected by one other, better known, poet. APR has also featured

regular columns by Marvin Bell, Marge Piercy, Sonja Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, and Stanley Plumly. Other frequent contributors include Donald Hall, Clarence Major, June Jordan, Robert Bly, Charles M. Fair, Adrienne Rich, Ralph J. Mills, Jr., and Joyce Carol Oates. APR appears in tabloid format on newsprint, which, especially for

large magazines (the early Fiction, for example), substantially re duces production costs. APR has received funding from the National circulation

Endowment for the Arts. American Review: see New American Review

Angel Hair. New York, N.Y. No. 1-6, Spring 1966-Spring 1969. Irreg. Ed. Anne Waldman; Lewis Warsh. 9�" x 12�"

stapled (folded)

24-64 pp.

Angel Hair was a well-designed serial poetry anthology. Its issues con centrated strictly on poetry and prose-poems to the exclusion of criticism, reviews, letters, manifestos, and the like. Angel Hair developed its identity by focusing on late-sixties work by the poets often grouped under the term "the New York School." Of the twenty-seven poets anthologized in the Anthology of New York Poets (1970), edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro, all but Harry Mathews, David Shapiro, and Ed Sanders appeared at least once in the six issues of Angel Hair. Although there are great differences between the poets in this school (compare John Ashbery with Aram Saroyan), and although many of them are not native New Yorkers, a strong link of acquaintanceship ties them together, and they often appear together in other anthologies and periodicals. Other frequent Angel Hair contributors were Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Dick Gallup, Peter Schjeldahl, Michael Brownstein, Lewis Warsh, John Perrault, Jonathan Cott, Tom Clark, and Clark Coolidge. Circulation of Angel Hair was between 350 and 500 copies. See also the annotation for The World (below). Antaeus. Tangier, Morocco (no. 1-4, Summer 1970-Winter

London, New York (no. 5, Spring 1972+). No. I, Summer 1970+. Qy.

676

1971); Tangier,

Ed. Daniel Halpern. 6�" x 9" (varies) Index

no.

sewn

96-272 pp. (double numbers to 416 pp.)

1-20, 1970--1975 in

no.

21/22, Spring/Summer 1976;

no.

21-28 in no. 29.

Among magazines that began in the 1970s, Antaeus is one of the finest repositories for the work of the literary mainstream. Like John Lehmann's New Writing anthologies in the mid and late 1930s, the Penguin New Writing published in the 1940s, and the magazine ZERO of the 1950s, Antaeus is cosmopolitan and maintains an interest in international arts and letters. Where Penguin New Writing was uniformly anti-Nazi, how ever, and where Lehman concentrated on special interests like the Spanish Civil War and working-class writing, Antaeus reflects the political eclec ticism of the 1970s-some Vietnam contributions,

work by political radicals,

but generally

some

translations of

fixed intellectual or political

position.

published a number of special issues: a fifty-poet British anthology in Winter 1973; a double fiction issue in Spring/Summer 1974; two translation issues, Autumn 1974 and Winter 1975; a special essay issue, double number Spring/Summer 1976; and a popular fiction issue, double number Spring/Summer 1977. Antaeus is much more concerned with established figures than with new writers. Featured interviews, for example (a favorite device), have been conducted with Gore Vidal, Edouard Roditi, Cyril Connolly, W. H. Auden, Andrei Voznesensky, and Stanley Kunitz, Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, John Berryman, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alfred Hitchcock, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. But such a list also typifies the geographic and

Antaeus has

artistic breadth of Antaeus.

Antaeus, published by Ecco Press, has a circulation of 5,000. It has re ceived grants from CCLM. The Antioch Review. Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Vol. I, no. 1, Mar. 1941+. Qy. no. 1: J. Donald Kingsley, W. B. Alexander, Paul Bixler, Freeman Champney, George R. Geiger, Lincoln R. Gibbs, Herman Schnurer [edited by committee until Vol. XXVII, no. 2, Fall 1967]; then Ed. Victor Ayoub (Vol. XXVIII, no. 4, Winter 1968/1969); Lawrence Grauman, Jr. (Vol. XXIX, no. I-Vol. XXXII, no. 4, Spring 1969-Nov. 1973): Paul Bixler (Vol. XXXIII, no. t-Vol, XXXV no. 2/3, Spring 1975-Spring/Summer 1977); Robert S. Fogarty (Vol. XXXV, no. 4, Fall

Editorial Board for

1977+). 51h" x 8�"

perfect

128 pp. (varies widely).

Indexed by volume.

From its inception in 1941, The Antioch Review has been a liberal in tellectual magazine. On the eve of the Second World War, the magazine

published pleas by liberals for greater involvement of Americans in 677

sociopolitical activities. The lead article in the first issue called for a new application of scholarship to the solution of social problems, and added that "this is our purpose in founding a magazine." During the war years, Antioch Review was run by an editorial board dominated by social scientists; most of the articles printed were concerned with social issues and written by economists, political scientists, and political activists. The magazine published some literary criticism but no poetry and practically no fiction. After the war, the editorial board was made up of more humanists and fewer social scientists.

Finally, in 1967,

the system of editing by committee came to an end, and Antioch Review entered

period during which it was influenced by individual editors.

These included Victor Ayoub, Lawrence Grauman, Jr., and Paul Bixler. Bixler has been with the magazine from the beginning, when he was librar ian at Antioch College. His own remarks on the magazine in its twenty fifth anniversary issue give a useful survey of its publishing history. In recent years, special issues have become an important feature. The long

history of Antioch Review's interest in social and literary issues is reflected in the Fall 1967 discussion of the Watts Writers Workshop. Other special issues have included "The Politics of Scholarship" (Fall 1969), "The Role and Rule(s) of Law in Contemporary America" (Summer 1970), "The Rediscovery of Cultural Pluralism" (Fall 1971), and an Ohio bicentennial issue (Summer 1976). Many fiction writers and poets have also appeared, including Alvin Greenberg, Annie Dillard, Jane Kenyon, Heather McHugh, Daniel Halpern, and Ira Sadoff. Current circulation is about 3,200 (2,500 subscriptions). Support has come from Antioch College and the Ohio Board of Regents.

Aphra. Springtown, 1971+).

Pa.

(Fall

1969-Winter

1970);

New York

(Autumn

Vol. I, no. I-Vol. VI, no. 3/4, Fall 1969-Spring/Summer 1976. Qy. Ed. Elizabeth Fisher [Co-editors have included Gerry Sachs, Vivien Leone, Ellen Harold, Ravelle Brickman, Dorothy Hage, Yvonne, Margaret Lamb, Sandy MacDonald, Terry Hinte, Leah Zahler, Dana Biberman, Jane

Augustine, Daphne Patai, Edith Konecky, Claire Sawitzky Reed]. 6%" x 8th" stapled (folded) 72 pp. (named for Aphra Behn, "the first woman professional writer") stated that in a patriarchal society the maga zine would be "free of ulterior motives, interested only in giving women a In its first issue, the editor of Aphra

chance to express themselves and to see themselves." Editor Elizabeth Fisher vowed to emphasize "art, not ideology." Aphra has frequently printed work about women that had been rejected by male-dominated magazines. Fisher discusses this policy in Margins, No.7 (August/September 1973). Aphra are women-some who write poetry,

Almost all contributors to

fiction, and essays, and some who come from conventional magazines, 678

journalism, New York publishing, and so on. Among the prominent con tributors have been Ellen Glasgow, Kate Millett, Muriel Rukeyser, Chris tina Stead, Marge Piercy, Colette Inez, Carolyn Kizer, Kathe Kollwitz, Erica Jong, Jean Garrigue, Adrienne Rich, Lyn Lifshin, Carol Berge, and Sheila Delaney. Aphra published a "Whore Issue" in Spring 1971, and another special issue in Winter 1970 to try to answer the question, "Can women and men live and work together in fairness?" The framework for the issue is a study of the lives of three "Couples from History"-Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill. Aphra has received grant money from CCLM. Circulation was 4,500 in 1974.

Assembling: A Collection of Otherwise Unpublishable Manuscripts. Brook lyn,N.Y. ?1970+. Annual. Ed. Henry Korn; Richard Kostelanetz.

81;2

11"

stapled

varies up to 300 pp.

Illus.

Assembling comes close to being a periodical that is more interesting to read about than to read. Its aim is to "help stave off the coming end of imaginative writing by putting into print what would otherwise remain unpublished." Arguing that no established literary magazine and no agency (not CCLM, nor the National Endowment for the Arts, nor any private foundations) has any real interest in the avant-garde (especially visual poetry), Richard Kostelanetz asserts that "our ultimate aim is nothing less than the creation of a literary situation open enough to allow good inno vative writing to be published and yet discriminating enough to insure that it gets recognized." The Assembling procedure calls for approved con tributors to submit 1,000 copies of up to four pages (later three pages) of any subject matter, printed in any manner on 81;2" by 11" paper of any sort. Assembling binds the submissions in alphabetical order and sends three copies to each contributor, the remainder going to a limited number of subscribers and to single-copy purchasers. After examining Assembling, one can easily agree with Kostelanetz that nearly everything printed in the collection "would be rejected by every art literary magazine in America." Whether the work is as fertile and con sequential as Kostelanetz might hope is an open question. Assembling does show, however, that in much recent verbal art there is a strong trend toward the use of print for nonlinear, nonverbal messages. The editors' call for "poetry, fiction, graphic art, designs, architectural proposals, or any other ideas adaptable to print" has resulted in a publication full of mixed media, visual and concrete poems, collages, and typographic experiments of all sorts. Assembling has received grants from CCLM. There are 1,000 copies of each issue.

679

Audit [Some individual issues are titled Audit/Poetry or Audit/Fiction; Vol.

V, no. 3, May 1969, has cover title Audit 3]. Buffalo, N.Y. Vol. I, no. 1,22 Feb. 1960+. Irreg. Ed. Ralph Maud (Vol. I, no. I-Vol. II, no. 8, 22 Feb. 1960-Winter 1963).

[Special fiction issues Vol. I, no. 8, 12; Vol. II, no. 4, 8, ed. David D. Galloway, Richard M. Komer]; David D. Galloway (Vol. III, no. 1-2/3, Spring 1963-Summer/Fall 1963); Michael Anania (Vol. IV, no. 1-3, 1964-1967); Charles Doria (Vol. IV, no. 1-3, 1964-1967); Edward Kissam (Vol. V, no. 1-3, Spring 1968-May 1969); Mac Hammond (Vol. VI, no. 1-2, 1972-1973; Vol. VIII, no. 1, 1975+); Wayne Andrew Howitt (Vol. VI, no. 1-2, 1972-1973); Charles Baxter (Vol. VII, no. 1-2, 19731974). Format varies widely; recent issues 6" x 9" stapled 32-56 pp. Audit has undergone radical policy changes since its inception in 1960.

Founding editor Ralph Maud, drawing on his twenty-two "staff writers," intended to hold an "audit a significant reckoning of the pros and cons of the twentieth century." The result was, for a time, a small magazine that published some poems, reviews, and literary essays, along with many more essays on morality, civil defense, modern technology, and similar issues. Special fiction numbers did, however, become a regular alternating feature; these were edited by David Galloway and Richard M. Koffler. Major changes began in 1964 with Vol. III, No.1, when Ralph Maud stepped down and A udit became more consistently a literary magazine emphasizing fiction. With Vol. 4 Michael Anania and Charles Doria became the editors and began publishing poetry, which has been the central focus of the magazine since then. From 1964 to 1969 five issues appeared at irregu lar intervals. Anania and Doria edited special issues of work by Frank ...

O'Hara and Robert Duncan. Edward Kissam edited a John Koethe issue

and, in 1969, an anthology of fifteen poets including Anne Waldman, Theodore Enslin, Peter Schjeldahl, and Anselm Hollo. A udit did not appear again until 1972, when editors Mac Hammond (who had appeared in the first issue of the magazine) and Wayne Howitt established the cur rent policy of featuring two poets in every issue (poets Alan Feldman and

Mike Finn were the first pair). Only chapbook-length manuscripts by poets who have not yet published a book

are

considered. Other poets in this

Gary Margolis, William B. Hunt, John Howell, Richard Pearse, Gail Fischer, Thomas Frosch, Paul Genega, Margaret Savides, series include

Anne Pitrone, Tom Centolella, and Ron McFarland. Audit has received support from SUNY-Buffalo, the New York State Council on the Arts, and CCLM. Recent circulation has been listed at 600.

Frequency of publication and magazine format have varied widely. Bastard Angel. San Francisco Cal.

No.1, 1972+. Irreg. ("when funds allow"). Ed. Harold Norse.

8lh" x II"

680

stapled (folded)

52-65 pp.

Illus.

Bastard Angel No. 1

announces

that it will

"present new and established

writers, with emphasis on the experimental and non-conformist in poetry, stories, excerpts from diaries and novels." Editor Harold Norse has re cently described the noncomformist contents of Bastard A ngel as "Beat. Surrealist. Cut-up, Raw Meat." The magazine, though it appears at irregu lar intervals, is a good source for anyone interested in the 1970s work of

by autobiographical notes, and recent experimental work by Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Nanos Valaoritis (a contributing editor), and others. Issue

the Beat writers. Besides

number of previously unpublished poems

Jack Kerouac, Bastard Angel also carries poems,

No.3, Fall 1974, featured "Beat Generation Poets: The Prints of Peter LeBlanc." This issue was used as the catalogue by the DeYoung Museum, where the prints were exhibited. Two of the three issues have been supported by matching grants from the

National Endowment for the Arts (one of which came from the DeYoung

Museum through the NEA). Circulation is about 1,200 copies, with many single-copy sales. The Beloit Poetry Journal. Beloit College, Beloit, Wis.

[With Vol. VIII, no. 4,

Summer 1958 connection with Beloit College ended].

Vol. I, no. 1, Fall 1950+. Qy. Ed. Chad Walsh (Fall 1950-Summer 1964); Robert Glauber; David M. Stocking (Fall 1952+); David Ignatow (Fall 1952-Fall/Winter 1958); Marion Kingston Stocking (Winter 1956+); John Bennett (Spring 1961Fall/Winter 1971/1972); David Palmer (Spring 1966-Winter 1966/1967); Brian Dibble (Spring 1970-Winter 1972/1973). 5lh" x 8lh" stapled (folded) about 40 pp. Twenty-Five Year Index (Vol. I-XXV, 1950-1975) available separately. The Beloit Poetry Journal's editors indicate that the

magazine's editorial

policy has not changed since 1950: "independent publishing the best poems it receives, without preconceptions as to form, content, length, or allegiance. It also tries to keep its readers abreast of new directions in today's poetry." They substantiate their claim of ongoing concern for "new poets, the growing tip of contemporary poetry," by pointing out that Beloit Poetry Journal has been "the first or among the first to publish Galway Kinnell, James Dickey, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, David Ignatow, David Shapiro, Erica Jong, etc." In 1958, Beloit Poetry Journal's independence and freedom from alle giances led to a significant development. Beloit College, which had spon sored the magazine since its inception, ceased to support it because of a special issue devoted to the British "movement" and the United States "underground" (Winter 1957/1958). Since then the editorial board has been solely responsible for the magazine's finances. Over the years Beloit Poetry Journal has published a number of less con troversial special issues and chapbooks (issued as regular numbers of the ...

681

magazine). Chapbook anthologies have been dedicated to Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams; others are collections of folk songs, contemporary Asian poetry, concrete poetry, longer poems, and

Western Australian poetry. Chapbooks in translation have presented work

by Garda Lorca and Kaoru Maruyama; chapbook American poets have included Galway Kinnell, Anthony Ostroff, Winfield Townley Scott, and Suzanne Gross. A Discoveries chapbook, published under a matching grant from the Wisconsin Arts Foundation and

Council, presented new poets

recommended by established figures (among the new writers were Dennis

Saleh, David Steingass, and Peter Wild). In general, the Wisconsin influ ence on Beloit Poetry Journal is slight. The magazine consistently prints a wide range of poetry by contributors, some new and some well known, from a broad geographical area. In more than twenty-five years of publication, the format of Beloit Poetry Journal has changed very little. The usual size is about 40 pages. Twelve hundred copies is an average printing, with about 150 copies usually left over -a pattern which, the editors indicate, has remained remarkably stable over twenty-seven years, except for a steadily growing list of subscribing libraries. From 1950 to 1958 the magazine got "a few hundred dollars a year" from Beloit College; since then the only outside sources of support have been three grants from CCLM and Council for a special issue.

one

from the Wisconsin Arts

Big Table. Chicago, III. [Vol. I], no. I-Vol. II, no. 5, Spring 1959-1960. Qy. Ed. Irving Rosenthal (no. 1, Spring 1959); Paul Carroll (no. 2, Summer

1959+). 5'h" x 8"

sewn

120-158 pp.

The first number of Big Table, edited by Irving Rosenthal, advertised the

fact that it contained "the complete contents of the suppressed Winter 1959

Chicago Review." Rosenthal, who resigned at Chicago Review, said that the trouble there began with a Chicago Daily News article by Jack Mabley in the fall of 1958 called "Filthy Writing on the Midway." When the Uni versity of Chicago administrators saw the contents of the proposed winter issue (contributions by Jack Kerouac and Edward Dahlberg and excerpts from William Burroughs's Naked Lunch), pressure was exerted on Rosen thal to scrap the issue. Six of the seven editors, Rosenthal included,

contents of the

signed. Big Table's first number, with the suppressed Chicago Review number plus three poems by Gregory Corso, was itself banned in March 1959, and more than four hundred copies were im pounded by the Post Office. In a lawsuit in which the American Civil Liberties Union defended Big Table, the magazine won. Judge Julius J. Hoffman quoted part of the Judge Woolsey Ulysses decision of 1933 in presenting his favorable judgment on July 5, 1960. Paul Carroll became editor with Big Table No.2. The second issue pub682

lished a long section from Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh (fur ther excerpts from the Dahlberg autobiography appeared in each subse

quent issue of Big Table); an excerpt from Burroughs's In Quest of Yage; Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish"; poems by Gael Turnbull, Brother Antoninus, Paul Blackburn, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Andre Breton; and essays on

Burroughs by Alan Ansen and Paul Bowles. Two facts distinguish Big Table from magazines like Chicago Review. First, it was a professional-looking magazine; because of the quality of its physi cal appearance and the huge quantity of advertising it carried, Big Table had more in common with commercial magazines than with most shoe string literary journals. Second, it began as a controversial magazine, pub lishing suppressed material, but did not shift its emphasis or settle into a less incendiary editorial policy. In issues subsequent to the two numbers mentioned, Big Table published the work of Kerouac, Burroughs, Black burn, Bowles, Artaud, Dahlberg, Corso, and Ginsberg as well as work by Denise Levertov, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Peter Orlovsky, Jean Genet, Frank O'Hara, Norman Mailer, Michael McClure, James Wright, John Rechy, Kenneth Koch, Diane di Prima, Philip Lamantia,

Gary Snyder, LeRoi Jones, Charles Olson, Paul Carroll, Bill Berkson, Pablo Neruda, John Updike, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. From Spring 1959 to the middle of 1960, Big Table presented a concentrated package of non establishment literature. The Black Mountain Review. Black Mountain

College, Black Mountain,

N.C. Vol. I, no. 1-7, Spring 1954-Autumn 1957. No. 1-4: qy; no. 5-7: irreg. Ed. Robert Creeley. No. 1-4: 6%"x8Vz"

No. 5-7: 4%

x 6%

IlIus.

sewn

64pp.

sewn

224-240 pp.

IlIus.

Because he believed that the poetry magazines of the early fifties were either "dominated by the New Critics or else so general in char ...

acter

that

active center of coherence

...

was

possible,"

Editor Robert

Creeley-with help from Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, Irving Layton, and Paul Blackburn-founded The Black Mountain Review. It

was

extension of magazines like Cid Corman's Origin, and in some respects (especially because of the "chunky" size of the last three issues) a proto

type of magazines like Caterpillar. Creeley's magazine was built in part around the faculty and students of Black Mountain College. Charles Olson was then college rector; Robert Creeley, Richard Hillman, and Robert Duncan had all taught there; Jonathan Williams, Joel Oppenheimer, Fielding Dawson, Ed Dorn, Michael

Rumaker, and Tom Field either had been or still were students. But Black Mountain Review did not draw

exclusively on the college. The seven published work by C. G. Jung, Jorge Luis Williams, William Lee, Jack Kerouac, Allen

issues of the magazine also

Borges,

William Carlos

683

Ginsberg, Herbert Read, Paul Goodman, Lorine Niedecker, James Purdy, Louis Zukofsky, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Judson Crews. Robert

Creeley has also indicated the extent to which Black Mountain

Review was founded to supplement the poetry published in magazines like

Origin. "One possibility did seem to me lacking in Origin, despite occa sional notes and reviews, and that was the ground that an active, ranging critical section might effect." Despite some interesting essays, however (Jung's "The Mass and the Individual Process," Zukofsky's "Bottom on Shakespeare," frequent aggressive reviews by Martin Seymour-Smith-one of which, an attack on Theodore Roethke, caused Kenneth Rexroth's resignation as a contributing editor), Black Mountain Review was primar ily a poetry magazine whose attempts at critical "grounding" were always a sidelight. Black Mountain College provided funding. The print run was from 500 to 750 copies.

Blue Cloud Quarterly. Marvin, S.D.

Vol. I, no. 1 [11954]+. Qy. Ed. Brother Benet Tvedten, O.S.B.

[Editorship of pre-literary magazine

issues undetermined-see below]. 5*" x 8*"

stapled

12-24 pp.

Illus.

Blue Cloud Quarterly specializes in American Indian literature. Begun as a

parochial

newsletter intended for members and benefactors

of the

Benedictine community at Blue Cloud Abbey, it gradually shifted emphasis under the editorship of Brother Benet Tvedten and by 1971 had evolved

into an exclusively literary publication offering "prose and mostly poetry on

Indian themes." It is from the time of this transition that Blue Cloud

Quarterly is of interest to students of small literary magazines. Blue Cloud Quarterly is a clean, spare, elegantly produced magazine; some issues are mini-anthologies, but many issues focus upon the work of a single writer. Within the boundaries of American Indian literature Blue Cloud Quarterly is open and eclectic. It offers translations of anonymous tribal songs (Vol. XX, No.1, n.d., versions by David Cloutier of North west coast songs; Vol, XXII, No.3, 1976, translations by Jim Heynen of Sioux songs), writings by American Indians who have appeared in general literary magazines (Norman H. Russell, Wendy Rose, Buffy Sainte Marie), and a good deal of poetry and commentary by young writers of varied Indian ancestry (one issue, Vol. XV, No.3, n.d., printed poems by Pueblo, Ute, Seneca Seminole, Navajo, and Nez Perce poets). If there is any particular emphasis in Blue Cloud Quarterly it is perhaps a focus upon the Sioux, a tribe with whom the Blue Cloud Abbey has immediate con nections. Volume XIX, No.1 (n.d.), for example, presents "Two Legends of the Sioux," narrated by Wamdi Wicasa and sponsored by the American Indian Cultural Research Center of Blue Cloud Abbey. Current circulation is about 3,250. The chief source of funding is the Benedictine Missionaries.

684

Botteghe Oseure, Rome, Italy. Vol. I-XXV, Spring 1948-Autumn 1960. 2/yr. Ed. Marguerite Caetani [with various assistants]. 5�" x 9" perfect (may have been sewn) 240-622 pp. (usually over 450 pp.). Index Vol. I-X issued separately in 1953; complete index by Wesleyan University Press, with introduction by Archibald MacLeish. After she had

run

the French quarterly Commerce for almost

decade

decided to found

a 1924-1932}, Marguerite Chapin (Princess Caetani) her not to; multilingual magazine. A relative of hers, T. S. Eliot, advised he didn't believe a multilingual publication could be successful. But Botteghe Oscure, founded in 1948, did succeed despite the fact that it did not originate in one culture, nor were its contents restricted to the work of anyone literary movement. Botteghe Oscure published a diverse group of poets in half a dozen languages; during twelve years of publication, 650 writers of thirty nationalities appeared in its pages. Caetani took particular care with the magazine's format, so that the poems in different languages had a distinctive appearance. She also preserved the multilingual interest of her enterprise by printing foreign-language versions of English poems. Robert Lowell's "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" and John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," for example, were translated into

Italian.

Among the poets who published their work in Botteghe Oscure, one finds Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Wil liams, Randall Jarrell, Leonie Adams, James Merrill, Theodore Roethke, Stanley Kunitz, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Penn Warren, Dylan Thomas (the first draft of Under Milk Wood, "Do Not Go Gentle "), W. H. Auden, Walter de la Mare, Kathleen Edith Raine, Sitwell, Roy Fuller, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, Thorn Robert Gunn, Graves, Charles Tomlinson, Paul Valery, Albert Camus, Andre Malraux, Antonin Artaud, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Boll, Uwe Johnson, Eugenio Montale, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlos Fuentes, Octa vio Paz, and Jorge Guillen. Botteghe Oscure was funded by Marguerite Caetani. Circulation has been estimated at about 5,000 copies. ...

Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature. SUNY-Binghamton, Bing hamton, N.Y. Vol. I, no. 1, Fall 1972+. 3/yr. Ed. William V. Spanos; Robert Kroetsch. 5�

x 8�

sewn

230-350 pp.

Illus.

Indexed by volume. While Boundary 2, subtitled "A Journal of Postmodern Literature," has been a significant outlet for experimental fiction and for recent poetry,

"especially that in the Pound-WiIIiams-Olson-Creeley line," this magazine is most closely associated with postmodern literary criticism and theory: 685

"criticism, theoretical and practical, with an awareness of post-New Criti cal, post-Structuralist phenomenology and hermeneutics." Special issues have been devoted to Charles Olson, Martin Heidegger, Jack Spicer, Ca nadian literature, Greek writing, and "The Oral Impulse in Contemporary American

Poetry." Supplements have been devoted to David Ignatow, Bly, and "Contemporary American Fiction" on Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon, Nabokov, and Sukenick). The 330-page Winter 1977 issue includes papers from a sym posium on postmodern literary theory held at SUNY -Binghamton on Nathaniel Tarn, Robert (with discussion centered

March 25-27, 1976.

According to the editors of Boundary 2, its "central critical focus is derived from the temporally oriented philosophy of Heidegger and existential phenomenology. A key point of attack therefore becomes the spatial, object oriented perspective of, for example, New Criticism and Structuralism." In "Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry" in the first issue (Fall 1972), David Antin discusses modernist literature in terms of collage (with pieces selected and arranged by the artist) and contrasts postmodernist creativity, which is based upon perceptions of a phenomenological reality that "is 'discovered' and 'constructed' by poets" and which is "part of a great Romantic metaphysic and epistemology." In "From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Post-Mod ern American Poetics" in the Spring 1973 issue, Charles Altieri explains that modernist, symbolist writers stress the creative faculties of the poet as observer (Coleridgean view), while postmodern writers stress the imma nent power of perceived objects (Wordsworthian view). The development of Boundary 2 has involved an "issue-to-issue attempt to help define post modem literature and criticism, as well as to 're-read' key Modernist texts."

Contributors to Boundary 2 have included essayists and critics Edward W.

Said, Ihab Hassan, Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Nathan A. Scott, Jr., Jerome Rothenberg, and Dennis Tedlock; creative writers Arlene Zekowski, David Ignatow, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Greg Kuzma, Eli Mandel, Clayton

Eshleman, John Tagliabue, Theodore Enslin, and Yannis Ritsos.

Boundary 2 has been aided by SUNY-Binghamton as well as by CCLM and the New York State Council on the Arts. Subscriptions, a major source of funds, are at about 500 and slowly rising. The Carleton Miscellany. Carleton College, Northfield, Minn. Vol. I, no. 1, Winter 1960+. Freq. varies.

1964); Erling Larsen (Fall 1964--Summer 1970); Wayne Carver (Summer 1971-Fall/Winter 19761 1977); Keith Harrison (Winter 1977/1978+). 6" x 8th" perfect 96-176 pp. Indexed by volume. Ed. Reed Whittemore (Winter 1960-Summer

686

The Carleton Miscellany is a continuation of Reed Whittemore's Furloso

(1939-1952), a magazine of verse, fiction, and cultural comment. The characteristic "Department of Culture and Civilization" column in Furi oso, for example, had criticized the Book-of-the-Month Club,

discussed the

dangers of the hydrogen bomb, and satirized academic rhetoric. In Carle Miscellany Whittemore continued this social critique in featuring Wayne Booth's satiric column, "Department of American," and more pointedly in the symposiums, which treated topics like "The City and Its Planners" (Summer 1962); "Foundations and Magazines," with essays by Allen Tate, Dwight Macdonald, Henry Rago, Robie Macauley, and Paul Carroll (Spring 1963); "What to Do About the New York Times Book Review" (Winter 1963); what's wrong with graduate training in the hu manities (Winter 1964); a retrospect on the 1930s, with poems, essays, and reminiscences by Jack Conroy, David Ignatow, Nelson Algren, and Mal colm Cowley (Winter 1965); a symposium on little magazines (Spring 1966); a "Challenges to Reason" issue in which Wayne Booth discussed the rhetoric of the public media (Fall 1967); and a symposium on the state of the liberal arts in universities (Winter 1970). The symposiums indicate Carleton Miscellany'S interest in the role played by politics in communica ton

tion and art. Carleton Miscellany has also published the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers like A. R. Ammons, William Stafford, Diane Wakoski, Stephen

Spender, Joyce Carol Oates, and Howard Nemerov. Major funding for the magazine has come from Carleton College. Circulation is about 1,000 copies. Carolina Quarterly. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C. Vol. I, no. 1, Fall 1948+. 3/yr. Ed. no. 1: William Sessions [changes frequently]. 6" x 9"

perfect

120 pp.

Illus.

Index with Kraus reprint edition. Carolina Quarterly is proud of the fact that it is part of a great tradition and frequently advertises itself as the fourth manifestation of a University of North Carolina journal which has previously appeared as North Carolina

University Magazine (1844), North Carolina Magazine (1861), and New Carolina Magazine (1920). As the opening issue's editorial indicates, Carolina Quarterly commenced in 1948 with a strictly regional goal: to be "a quarterly which would ultimately represent the intellectual and artistic endeavors of students here, of people of thought and feeling throughout the state and region." Ten years

later, however, the tenth birthday issue (Fall

1957) announced that in addition to creative writing and literary criticism it would begin to publish book reviews as well. A concomitant policy shift with the inclusion of more and more works from experimental and non-southern writers, so that Carolina Quarterly has developed into a cosmopolitan little magazine with a general readership. A thirtieth annivercame

687

sary issue (Winter 1978) includes John Tagliabue, George Hitchcock, and Albert Goldbarth. Among the many other 1970s contributors have been

poets Doug Blazek, Peter Wild, Greg Kuzma, Arthur Vogelsang, Howard McCord, John Hollander, Kate Jennings, Lyn Lifshin, Andrei Voznesen

sky, William Stafford, Annie Dillard, Philip Dacey, Ira Sadoff, Danny L. Rendleman, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Stanley Cooperman, Joyce Carol Oates, and Raymond Carver. Fiction has been contributed by Anthony Burgess, Joy Williams, Michael Jennings, Jerry Bumpus, Joyce Carol Oates, Donald Barthelme, Barry Hannah, Annie Dillard, Rosellen Brown, Don DeLillo, and Ursule Molinaro. The financial status of the magazine has been helped by a patronage pro gram in which funds from donors

are

matched

by grants from CCLM

and the North Carolina Arts Council. Circulation is approximately 1,500.

Caterpillar [no. 1: a magazine of the leaf, a gathering of the tribes; no. 2-12: a gathering of the tribes]. New York, N.Y. (Oct. 1967-Jul. 1970); Sher man Oaks, Cal. (Oct. 1970+). No. 1-20, Oct. 1967-Jun. 1973. Qy. Ed. Clayton Eshleman. 5'h" x 7" perfect (4 issues sewn) 128-256 pp. (double numbers over 300 pp.) Illus. The original Caterpillar, edited by Clayton Eshleman, was a series of chap books by Louis Zukofsky, Paul Blackburn, David Antin,

Eshleman, and others, published from 1966 to 1967 by Jim Lowell of Asphodel Books. Eshleman began the magazine Caterpillar in the same format (the distinc tive, squat 5" x 6" trim size) as the last few issues of Black Mountain Review. As Robert Bertholf suggests in Caterpillar 20 (June 1973), Eshle man

owed

than trim size to Robert

Creeley's journal; it was "an

extension of Origin and Black Mountain Review, in the sense that it pro

vided a place for the writers of that generation to publish."

Caterpillar was, however, more than an extension of Cid Corman's and Creeley's magazines. As Eshleman has indicated, it published writers as different in craft and attitude as Diane Wakoski, Frank Samperi, Norman O. Brown, Jackson MacLow, Jerome Rothenberg, Cid Corman, Kenneth Irby, Carolee Schneemann, and Stan Brakhage. As some of the names indi cate, Eshleman was for some time interested in translations, and published a series many of his own translations of Cesar Vallejo. Early issues carried called "A Test of Translation," featuring two or more translations of a work in a foreign language with several commentaries assembled by the "collector" of each exercise. Some of the works tested were by Vallejo, Airne Cesaire, Akutagowa Ryunosuke, Antonin Artaud, and Paul Celan. After the first four issues, Robert Kelly joined Caterpillar as a contributing editor and was responsible for a section in each issue. Because it contained three to four times as many pages as most privately

printed literary magazines, Caterpillar was able to devote thirty to forty to work by pages to single poets. July 1970 was a special issue devoted 688

Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer. Number 15/16 (1971) contained 75 poems

by Stephen Jonas. Number 19 (October 1972) contained ninety-nine pages by Gary Snyder as well as work by Robert Kelly, Theodore Enslin, Cesar Vallejo, Thomas Meyer, and Eshleman. Caterpillar also published regular reviews by Frank Samperi and Stan Brakhage, artwork, movie stills, and works in progress.

Caterpillar received three CCLM grants. Print runs varied from 1,000 copies for Nos. 1 and 2 and 17-20, to 3,500 for Nos. 3-16. Library sub

scriptions never numbered more than 60. Doubleday-Anchor published A Caterpillar Anthology in 1971, drawn from issues 1 through 12. Center. Woodstock, N.Y. [place varies].

1970+. Irreg. Ed. Carol Berge.

81h" x 11"

stapled (folded)

80-100 pp. (recent issues) reproduced from

typewriting. "Center wants to see short non-form prose from known writers-exciting work unacceptable in the usual media. Many resemble previous forms, but we

are

formal-concept writing. See contents for clues." irregularly issued periodical do indeed validate the

not involved in

The contents of this

statement that introduces issue No. 1. Almost all the contributions are lim

ited to

one or

two typed pages. The

writing is relatively unanchored and

but

strictly in prose format-no collages/visual prose patterns. The contributors include Jonathan Baumbach,

"experimental," poems/concrete Raymond Federman,

Ronald

Sukenick, Fielding Dawson,

Sanders,

Theodore Enslin, David Antin, Jackson MacLow, Arlene Zekowski, Stan

ley Berne, Joseph Bruchac, John Jacob, Carol Berge, Clarence Major, Gayl Jones, Richard Kostelanetz, Joe David Bellamy, Alta, and Jack Micheline. Editor Carol

Berge

refuses almost all

first-person contributions. "My

stance is that I deplore confessional writing as not being 'art,' and I believe

diaries and journals are miles behind the competent writer; very few writers are interesting enough to create/sustain first person." Poetry is never

published in Center. Summarizing the magazine's special interests,

the editor says that she publishes "sections from letters, from novels in progress, 'articles' about innovative or experimental lifestyle material

(astrology, biorhythms, new educational techniques, psychic phenomena, etc.)." Center is at present undergoing a change in emphasis from one- or two-page selections to longer chapbook-size contributions. Center's print run is 450 to 500. There are no subscriptions

advance

sales and no bookstore sales. CCLM has provided partial funding (allow

ing nominal payments to authors). Chelsea Review [no. 6, Winter 1960+: Chelsea]. New York, N.Y.

No.1, Summer 1958+. Irreg. Ed. Robert Kelly (no. 1-5, Summer 1958-Summer 1959); Ursule Molinaro

(no. 1-17, Summer 1958-Aug. 1965); Venable Herndon (no. 2-17, Au689

1958-Aug. 1965); George Economou (no. 2-5, Autumn 19581959); Sonia Raiziss (no. 6, Winter 1960+); Alfredo de Palchi (no. 6-24/25, Winter 1960-0ct. 1968); David Ignatow (no. 24/25-29, Oct. 1968-July 1971). tumn

Summer

5lh" x 81/2"

Chelsea

sewn

70-245 pp.

Illus.

("Review" was dropped from the title after five issues) began

under the editorship of Robert Kelly and Ursule Molinaro, with George Economou as European editor. In five regularly issued quarterly numbers, the editors presented

cosmopolitan selection of literature that included

fiction by Martin Buber, Raja Rao, Nathalie Sarraute, and Cecil Hemley

(A Folly to the Greeks, serialized as the Chelsea Novel of 1958) and poetry by Daniel Berrigan, Paris Leary, Armand Schwerner, Jerome Rothenberg, David Antin, Blaise Cendrars, and Boris Pasternak. Number 4 (Spring 1959) contained a selection of contemporary African poetry. After No.5

(Summer 1959), Robert Kelly and George Economou left Raiziss,

with Joan Kelly to form Trobar, while Ursule Molinaro, Sonia

Venable Herndon, and Alfredo de Palchi formed

new

editorial board

which continued the international flavor of the magazine (perhaps even increasing the number of translations). Special issues have been devoted

(No. 13, June 1963) and to Italian (No. 18/19, June 1966) (March 1961) contained an interesting special unit on workshop poetry; No. 12 (September 1962) carried several pieces by and about Laura Riding, a fairly regular contributor. Chelsea also has been one of the few little magazines that regularly prints plays. Since its change in editorship, Chelsea has appeared irregularly (about two issues a year including double numbers). It has kept up with develop to French

literature; No. 9

poetry and the prose poem. Some issues have had guest poetry editors (e.g., A. R. Ammons, Michael Benedikt), and through ments such as pattern

the 1960s Chelsea published dozens of the most active and best known

practicing poets. Editorial control has changed periodically, with Sonia Raiziss

remaining

the constant factor. A typical print run of 900 to 1,400 copies is widely circulated. Size has varied from 94 pages to 245-page double numbers. Some aid has been accepted from the National Endowment for the Arts, and from CCLM and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Chicago Choice: see Choice. The Chicago Review. Chicago, Ill.

Vol. I, no. 1, Winter 1946+. Qy. Ed. no. 1 Carol Dillard, Radcliffe Squires [changes frequently].

5%" x 8%"

perfect (early issues stapled-folded)

160-230 pp.

Indexed by volume.

The Chicago Review is edited by graduate students at the University of Chicago, and has thus been that sort of university magazine which changes

690

editors very frequently, often with each school year. The editors try to mix student and local writers with better known literary figures. Beginning as

small, indifferently produced paper, containing student work but

by an occasional professional piece by a Chicago writer such as James T. Farrell or by University of Chicago faculty members, Chicago tressed

Review grew steadily in size and scope until by Vol. IX (1955) it had become a genuine literary and cultural magazine of national scope. Aside

from some overzealous defense of Chicago humanists and the occasional of R. S.

puffery

Crane and Elder Olson,

the

early Chicago

Review

established an attitude of youthful exuberance and positive faith in

new

directions that has characterized the magazine throughout its history. The

Spring 1958 issue was particularly influential (see the annotation on Big Table, above). In recent years Chicago Review has been a supporter of experiments in poetry, such as

concrete poetry and Poesia Visiva (the next step after concretism), which is the special subject of Vol, XXVI, No. 3 (1974), edited by Thomas Joyce. In fiction, too, much space has been given to such "new writers" as John Mella, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Zane Mairowitz, Blaise Cendrars, and John Jacob. Though the 1940s tendency to puff the Chicago humanists is recapitulated by a 1970s willingness to permit (to cite one example) rather uncritical backslapping of (and at times by) Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Baumbach, Jerome Klinkowitz, and the Fiction Collective, Chicago Review remains a vital source for new thrusts in fiction and poetry, both American and foreign. Recent issues have printed translations of Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes, and others, while special issues have been devoted to modern Japanese poetry and Latin American writing (a bilingual issue). Total paid circulation of Chicago Review is about 2,000, with mail sub scriptions accounting for 1,470 copies. Funding is largely from sales revenues, a University of Chicago subsidy, and grants from CCLM and

the

Illinois

Arts

Council.

The

German

government

has

contributed

toward a special bilingual issue of postwar German language writing.

Choice [no. 1: Chicago Choice]. Chicago, Ill. Vol. I, no. 1, Spring 1961 +. Irreg. ("occasionally"). Ed. John

Logan; Aaron Siskind (no. 2-6, 1962-1970); Milton Kessler

(no. 9, 1974+). 8':4"

pp.).

sewn

(no. 7+: perfect)

112-243 pp.

(double number 326

IIlus.

Index no. 1-6 in no. 6, 1970.

Choice is an attractively produced, representative blend of new and well known poets. Numbers 1 through 6 included close to three hundred poets. Editor John Logan claims first publication of Shirley Kaufman, Stan Rice,

Marvin Bell, William Hunt, Dennis Schmitz, Bill Knott, Naomi Lazard, Jessie Kachmar, and others. Choice No. 1 alone contained an impressive

691

roster of seventy-three poets, among them A. R. Ammons, Robert Bly, Hayden Carruth, John Ciardi, e. e. cummings, James Dickey, Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, Howard Nemerov, Jerome Rothenberg, Dennis Schmitz, and James Wright. In No. 2 Aaron Siskind became co-editor, with special responsibility for photography and graphics. From that issue on, Choice has played a major role among little magazines in combining poetry, photography, and graphics. With No.9 the editors announced a change in strategy: unsolicited manu scripts would no longer be accepted, and the magazine would concentrate solely on chapbooks of solicited material. For a magazine that has often published as many as a hundred poets in one issue, this decision has been a major policy shift. Despite its concentration on the poem itself, Choice has managed to include an occasional controversy. In the opening issue, Marvin Bell attacked Donald M. Allen for including all those "pseudo-hipsters" in the anthology The New American Poetry. Controversy escalated with No.2 when John Logan printed a Robert Bly article that had been "originally commissioned when they refused to by the Hudson Review, and later withdrawn certain sections." When the editor of Hudson print Review, Frederick denounced John took the matter to a Morgan, publicly Choice, Logan CCLM meeting. ...

Choice has had grants from CCLM, and both SUNY-Buffalo and SUNY

Binghamton have contributed funds. Current circulation is about 1,000 (down from a peak of 3,000 copies for numbers 2 through 6). Clown War. Brooklyn, N. Y.

No.1, Feb. 1972 +. Irreg. Ed. Bob Herman

[Co-founder Stephen Fairhurst is co-editor of some

issues]. 5" x 7"

stapled

Clown War offers

the

new

32-40 pp. an

experimental poems, especially in for experimental graphics. Despite the

outlet for short

surrealist mode, and

magazine's small size, the index to Nos. 1-12 includes 110 contributors, among whom are Keith Abbott, Douglas Blazek, Ray Di Palma, Russell Edson, Albert Goldbarth, Richard Kostelanetz, Michael Lally, Lyn Lif shin, Opal L. Nations, Marge Piercy, Rochelle Ratner, Ron Silliman, and Keith Waldrop.

(1977) Heman decided to distribute the magazine free of charge. The first free issue included the work of John Jacob, Paul Colinet (tr. Rochelle Ratner), Richard Kostelanetz, Francis Picabia (tr. Rochelle Ratner), and others. Editor Heman has also issued Clown War Extras, usually odd-size artworks that would not fit the magazine. (A. F. Caldiero, With No. 13

Rochelle Ratner, and B. Solomon,

well

Bob Heman, have been

featured in Extras.) Special issues have been devoted to prose poems by

692

the Belgian surrealist Paul Colinet and to the rubber-stamp art of Leaven worth Jackson.

Clown War is an open, unpredictable magazine in which poets can experi

freely. Heman currently distributes 1,500 copies (mainly through selected bookstores and art galleries) within Manhattan, and intends soon ment

to expand to 2,500

copies. CCLM has provided grants.

December: A

Magazine of the Arts and the Opinions. ?Iowa City, Iowa (Vol. I-II, 1958-1959); Chicago, Ill. (Vol. III, 1960+; local address

occasionally changes). Vol. I, 11958+. Irreg. Ed. Richard Schechner, Deborah Trissel, and Louis Vaczek (Vol. I, 11958); Jeff Marks (Vol. II-IV, 1959-1963) [with various co-editors]; Curt Johnson (Vol. V, 1963+) [with various co-editors]. 5'12" x 8'12" no. 1-10: sewn; no. 11 +: perfect 100-388 pp. II1us. Although December began in 1958 with three editors, who were soon succeeded by two new editors, the magazine is now largely identified with editor Curt Johnson and with his predilection for short fiction and novellas. Johnson has attacked cronyism in government-supported art (in articles in the San Francisco Review of Books and The Smith), and his publishing policy indicates that he has no particular regard for names or reputations. In Vol. XIV, No. 1 (1972), he summarizes the contents of fifteen years of December: (1) one novel (Anaconda by Jerry Bumpus), (2) one chap book (The Fake Revolt by George Legman), (3) 125 short stories, (4) 41 articles about film, (5) 728 poems, (6) 94 book reviews, (7) 59 general articles, (8) two plays, (9) six interviews, (10) 173 pages of photos, and (11) 182 pages of graphic art. He concludes by saying that the editors have read 200,000,006 manuscripts. Most of the recent issues have been devoted to a single long work-for example, Curt Johnson's Nobody's Perfect and Jay Robert Nash's On All Fronts in 1974; Matthew Hochberg's Sweet Gogarty and Robert Wilson's Young in Illinois in 1975; and John Bennett's The Night of the Great Butcher in 1976. In 1972 Curt Johnson reported 238 subscribers

(170 of them libraries).

Contributing editor Robert Wilson estimates that cash gifts to December during the first nine years of publication amounted to $4,066 ($3,050 from CCLM), and the overall cash loss was $10,000. EI Como Emplumado. Mexico City, Mexico. No. 1-31, Jan. 1962-Jul. 1969. Qy.

Ed. Margaret Randall; Sergio Mondragon (Jan. 1962-0ct. 1968); Harvey 1962-Apr. 1962); Robert Cohn (Apr. 1969+).

Wolin (Jan.

5'12" x 8" (some 7'12") 100-256 pp.

no.

1-19,24: sewn; no. 20, 26-27, 31: perfect

II1us.

EI Como Emplumado began in 1962 as a magazine of international and

interracial unity, publishing many translations of poems from English to

693

Spanish and vice versa, often with the original en face. As the sixties progressed and the magazine's liberal aesthetic attitude became increasingly politicized by the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, its con tent became more radically anti-war and anti-establishment. This shift was reflected in an editorial in No. 17 (January 1966): "We will be sharper, harder in our choice of publishable material, try to get further to the roots of what's happening. We plan to devote more space to the long, significant poem [and] also plan a series of translations of important major works from both languages. Allen Ginsberg's 'Kaddish' in this issue being the first." (The Ginsberg poem appeared in a Spanish translation by Ernesto de la Pefia.) Early issues of El Corno Emplumado had special sections for translations into English and Spanish of poetry from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Argen tina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Cuba, Colombia, Canada, the Netherlands, Finland, and Russia. The Mexican anthology (No. 18, 1966) was the first extended bilingual edition. The large Cuban anthology in No. 23 (July 1967) was also bilingual. El Corno published Spanish translations of the work of T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. For the first four years, the last issue of each year was devoted to the work of a single poet: Agusti Bartra in October 1962, Robert Kelly in October 1963, Raquel Jodorowsky in October 1964, and George Bowering in October 1965. In the issue for January 1969 the editors revealed that the Mexican gov ernment had cut off the

magazine's subsidy; they were able to continue publishing only until the July issue. Margaret Randall writes that El Corno Emplumado "was mainly funded by Mexican government grants, individuals, benefits, art sales." Average circulation was 3,000 copies per issue. Epoch. Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. Vol. I, no. 1, Fall 1947+. Qy. (now 3jyr.). Editor-in-chief Baxter Hathaway (Fall 1947-June 1976) [a shifting list of co-editors served with Hathaway]; Walter Slatoff, Alison Lurie, Robert Morgan, William J. Harris, and Thomas Johnson (Fall 1976); James McConkey, Walter Slatoff, Alison Lurie, Ken McClane, William Harris, and Thomas Johnson (Winter 1976); Walter Slatoff and James McConkey (Spring 1977 +). 5" x 9" perfect (early issues stapled) 96 pp. (recently)

Complete index 1947-1964 in Winter 1964; also, regular biennial indexes. Editor Baxter Hathaway announced in the first issue of Epoch that the magazine would "print a lot of fiction and poetry" and not much criticism; in the early postwar years many felt that literary criticism had forced original work out of magazines entirely. For thirty years Epoch has fol lowed its original plan and, despite the accusation that it is too "establish ment," has maintained a reputation for publishing good work, especially 694

short stories. The

Spring

1959 issue, for

example, included the first

published stories of Thomas Pynchon ("Mortality and Mercy in Vienna") and Ronald Sukenick Other fiction writers who

("The Sleeping Gypsy"). are Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Matthews, Cyrus Colter, Ray Bradbury, and William Carlos Williams. Also pub lished has been poetry by William Dickey, A. R. Ammons, Chad Walsh, e. e. cummings, Daniel Berrigan, and John Haines. In the winter of 1971 Epoch began to appoint an editor for prose and one for poetry for each issue, so as to expedite the handling of manuscripts

have often appeared in Epoch

and to economize on editorial responsibility.

Epoch currently prints 1,200 copies per issue (600 to libraries, individual subscribers). It has received grants from CCLM.

150 to

Evergreen Review. New York, N.Y. Vol. I, no. I-Vol, XVII, no. 97, Jan./Feb./Mar. 1957-Summer 1973.

Freq. varies. Ed. Barney Rosset; Donald Allen (Jan'/Feb./Mar. 1957-Spring 1959). No. 1-31: 51.!.J" x 8" (varies) 158-260 pp. No. 32+: 814" x 11" about 96 pp.

Binding varies: sewn/perfect/stapled Illus. No. 97 is tabloid on newsprint. Index to Evergreen Review (1957-1970), by David A. Bower and Carol Campbell Strempek, Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1972. In its

early issues (during the time when Donald Allen was Barney

Rosset's co-editor), Evergreen Review was a literary magazine hospitable to the New York

poets, the San Francisco writers, and international

writers of a sort likely to appeal to Grove Press, Inc. With sponsorship by a publishing house and with a much larger operating budget than most

literary magazines, Evergreen was able to print in issue No. 1 such established writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett, along with Michael Hamburger, Henri Michaux, Harold Feinstein, James Purdy, and Mark Schorer. Other contributors to early issues included Albert Camus, William Carlos Williams, Eugene Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Karl Jaspers, Federico Garcia Lorca, St. John Perse, Boris Pasternak, e. e. cummings, and Robert Lowell. From the beginning, though, Evergreen had little interest in first publications. Many of the contributions from the writers named above had originally appeared elsewhere, often in Europe, and were subsequently printed in Evergreen. Issue No. 2 (April/June 1957) was in effect a special San Francisco number and contained the work of Kenneth Rexroth, Brother Antoninus, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others, as well as a Ralph J. Gleason article on the San Francisco jazz scene, some Harry Redl photos of San Francisco poets, and Dore Ashton on the "San Fran cisco School" of art.

695

As time went on, Evergreen, widening and popularizing its contents, added culture while jazz columns and then articles on various aspects of popular later or second on publication of much more and more

concentrating

material, until by the early 1960s it had become

kind of Reader's

Digest of literary magazines. welcomed In another shift of emphasis, Evergreen, which had always contained an 1 controversial writers and questioned the censors (No. the business into article by Mark Schorer on Lady Chatterley's Lover), got sexual con of nude photo-essays, and articles and stories of graphically its modulation from literary magazine to Reader's Thus it

completed

tent.

continue to

Digest to the Playboy of literary magazines. It did, however, make new writings available print well-known and respected writers and to to a wider

audience; for example, Evergreen printed the text of

Michael

and Guilden McClure's The Beard and of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz in Ever Guildenstern and appeared Rosencrantz stern Are Dead. When

already been discovered at the Edinburgh Festival, brought in New York to to London where it became a success, and then staged it was making but wasn't making any discovery, further acclaim. Evergreen new play an new important play by available to a magazine audience a and 1960s the wright. This process was typical of Evergreen throughout was it important until its demise as a tabloid in 1973. Therefore, though or ten issues, it retained a as a genuine literary magazine only for eight of ninety-seven certain significance to literary history throughout its run green, it had

issues. Fiction. New York, N. Y. Vol. I, no. 1, Nov./Dec. 1972+. Freq. varies.

Ed. Mark Mirsky. VoLl-II: ll'h" x 16" (varies)

folded

Vol. III-V, no. 1: 10" x 14" (varies) Vol. V, no. 2/3: 6" x 9"

perfect

24-32 pp.

folded

Illus.

32-36pp.

Illus.

256 pp.

and layouts, the short story Partly because of the cost of paper, print, the sixties has lagged behind poetry in little-magazine publication during reduce the odds somewhat and seventies. Mark Mirsky's Fiction tries to or poetry and no corres fiction-no reviews, criticism, by printing only in 1974), and then Vol. No.1, tabloid III, a (until pondence. Originally Fiction has been able to an outsize format with uncomplicated layouts,

print fiction by a dozen or more Fiction has also been

contributors in each issue.

readers and important in keeping both serious

new work by serious novelists. to excerpts from novels. The devoted issue is A significant part of each from Stanley Elkin, Donald first fourteen issues contained contributions Samuel Beckett, Anthony Bur John Barth, Barthelme, John Hawkes, Mark Mirsky's affiliaEditor James and Purdy. gess, Joyce Carol Oates,

major New York publishers apprised of

696

tion with the City College of New York is reflected in the table of contents. He also publishes work by members of the Fiction Collective and by John Ashbery (prose poems), Kenneth Koch, Howard Moss, and

Michael Benedikt. Mirsky's eclectic taste also allows him to offer work by a range of writers, from Flann O'Brien to Ishmael Reed, Gayl Jones, and Clarence Major, and by newer writers like Robert Stone and Thomas McGuane. Another special feature of Fiction has been the translation of works

by Handke, Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass, Nathalie Sarraute, Roland Barthes, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Alfred Jarry, Yuri Olesha, Ilya Ehren burg, Kobo Abe, Isaac Peretz, Halldor Laxness, and Julio Cortazar. In Vol. V, No.1 (1976) there is a special tribute to Marcha, the Uruguayan weekly, with work by "H. Bustos Domecq," Felisberto Hernandez, Carlos Martinez Moreno, Mario Benedetti, and Juan Carlos Onetti. Fiction has received support from CCNY, the Longview Foundation, Herbert Lehmann College, CCLM, and the New York State Council on Peter

the Arts. Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.

No.1, Fall 1969+ 2/yr. .

Ed. David P

Young; Stuart Friebert (no. 11, Fall 1974 +}, perfect 74-112 pp. Indexno. 1-10 in no. 10, Spring 1974. .

5Y<1" x 8�"

Field, sponsored by Oberlin College and edited by David P. Young (with Stuart Friebert as co-editor commencing with No. 11, Fall 1974), is

especially interested in contemporary American poetry, translations (generally of contemporary poets), and poets' prose statements about poetry. Short poems have been well represented in Field, with a good deal of space devoted to "deep image" poets such as Robert Bly and surrealist and neo-surrealist poets such as Benjamin Peret or Charles Simic. Other well-known contributors have included Margaret Atwood, Marvin Bell, Michael Benedikt, Philip Booth, Hayden Carruth, Robert Creeley, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Haines, Donald Hall, Louis Ham mer, Richard Hugo, David Ignatow, X. J. Kennedy, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Al Lee, Denise Levertov, John Logan, W. S. Merwin, Cynthia Ozick, Kenneth Rexroth, Adrienne Rich, Dennis Schmitz, Louis Simpson, Robin Skelton, Gary Snyder, William Stafford, James Wright, as well as (in translation) Rafael Alberti, Gunter Eich, Osip Mandelstam, Eugenio Montale, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, and Cesar Vallejo. Many issues have included one or two essays by poets on the craft of poetry. A recurring theme in these essays involves personality in poetry, especially with respect to the self and the need to universalize individual experiences and perceptions. Editor David Young sees a crucial con-

697

trast between two kinds of recent poem: one kind is "selfish, receding into a childish and fearful ignorance. The other is selfless, moving toward maturity, acceptance, understanding" ("The Bite of the Muskrat: Judg ing Contemporary Poetry," No.7, Fall 1972). Elsewhere Young ad vises that the creative discipline of the translator be primarily directed not to external form but "to the feelings themselves, to the experience on which he draws" ("Second Honeymoon: Some Thoughts on Translation," No. 11, Fall 1974). In general he seems to speak against formal con siderations and in favor of re-creation of emotion and experience, against the personal case history and in favor of universalized particulars. If there is a central purpose in collecting the hundreds of poems that have ap peared in Field, it seems to develop out of these ideas constructed by Young and discussed from different angles by other contributors. See especially the article by Galway Kinnell, No.4, Spring 1973, on recent poets' attempts to break out of "the closed ego" and transcend isolated experiences. Adrienne Rich, replying to Kinnell, offers her own sugges

tions toward a new poetry that escapes the mere "I" in favor of common

experience (No.7, Fall 1974). Circulation of Field is approximately 2,700 copies. Subscriptions are evenly distributed geographically, with more individual than institutional subscribers. The editors have received support from Oberlin College, CCLM, the Ohio Arts Council, and "occasional private individuals." The

Fifties:

Magazine of Poetry

and

Sixties; The Seventies]. Pine Island, Minn.

General

(no.

Opinion [then

The

1-3, 1958-1959); Madi

son, Minn. (no. 4, Fall 1960+).

No.1, 1958+. Irreg. Ed. Robert Bly; William Duffy (no. 1-5, 1958-FallI961).

5Y4 "x 81h"

sewn

(The Seventies: perfect)

52-104 pp.

The Fifties

(later The Sixties and The Seventies) is a little magazine closely identified with its editor, Robert Bly (although William Duffy served for a time as co-editor). Bly has never been afraid to take sides and, in an advertisement for The Sixties No.7, promises never to publish anything that sounds as if it were written by Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, LeRoi Jones, Allen Tate, Bennett Cerf, or William Burroughs. In No. 10, Bly announced that he was canceling the subscriptions of thirty-one universities known to have accepted money from the CIA or the armed forces for research

chemical germ warfare. The criticism

published by Bly is frequently a blending of undergraduate humor (often parodies) with more precise critical arguments. Typical are regular fea tures like "Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum," in which are placed, for their lack of poetic images, writers like Yvor Winters and Allen Ginsberg, and the "Order of the Blue Toad," awarded to Gilbert Highet, Norman Cousins, Jacques Barzun, Cleanth Brooks and Austin Warren, and Arthur Mizener.

698

Committed to "deep image" poetry, The Fifties features many poems in translation (with some bilingual presentations); often the editor pro pounds the curious thesis that the mainstream of English-language poetry

proceeds from Spanish and French poetry. Louis Simpson and Gary

Snyder are esteemed for their poetic practice, with some praise going also to Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, W. S. Merwin, John Logan, James Dickey, James Wright, Denise Levertov, W. D. Snodgrass, and Jerome Rothenberg, most of whom have also published their poems in The Fifties. Typical of Bly's magazine is its attitude toward Robert Creeley and Black Mountain Review: the magazine is too un-international, and Creeley too often fails to use images, is not truly avant-garde in linking up with French and Spanish poets. (Elsewhere Charles Olson's Maximus Poems are rated the worst of the year.) The Fifties and its successors have published some special translation issues: French poetry in No. 5 (Fall 1961), German poetry in No. 8 (Spring 1966), and Norwegian poetry in No. 10 (Summer 1968). Circu lation has varied between 2,000 and 4,000 copies. The Floating Bear: A Newsletter. New

York, N.Y. [no. 25, Nov. 1962/

Mar. 1963: Topanga, Cal.]. No. 1-37, 1961-1969.lrreg. Ed. Diane di Prima; LeRoi Jones

(no. 1-25, 1961-1962/1963) [guest

editors include Billy Linich (Oct. 1963); Alan Marlowe (June 1965); Kirby

Doyle (Feb. 1966); John Wieners (Feb. 1967); Bill Berkson (Jan./July

1969)]. 8�" x 11"

stapled 8-36 pp. Reprint edition with complete

mimeo. index and notes: Laurence

McGilvery,

La Jolla, Cal., 1973.

The subtitle "A Newsletter" is the

key

The

Floating

Bear's chief

contribution to literature of the 1960s; it was a newsletter, a speedy line of communication between experimental poets. Diane di Prima, in the

introduction to the reprint edition of Floating Bear, recalls Charles Ol son's tribute to the

magazine: "The last time I saw Charles Olson in things he talked about was how valuable the Bear had been to him in its early years because of the fact that he could get new work out that fast. He was very involved in speed, in com munication. We got manuscripts from him pretty regularly in the early days of the Bear, and we'd usually get them into the very next issue. That meant that his work, his thoughts, would be in the hands of a few hun dred writers within two or three weeks. It was like writing a letter to a Gloucester,

one

of the

bunch of friends."

One is apt to think of a literary newsletter as a device for talking about

poetry but not as a means for transmitting the poem itself; in Floating Bear most of the space was given over to primary work. The first twenty five issues (up to the point when LeRoi Jones resigned as co-editor) were

699

published over a two-year period and comprised 284 pages of poetry, creative prose, and comment. Among the more frequent contributors to Floating Bear during those first two years were Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara, Joel Oppenheimer, William Burroughs, Ed Dorn, A. B. Spellman, and George Stanley, as well as editors Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones.

After

1963, Floating Bear's function as a swift communicator among have diminished (Nos. 29 to 37 appeared over a period of poets five years). Size and frequency varied widely: No. 27 had 36 pages and included a 19-page section of poems by Philip Whalen; the following number had 16 pages and included work by eight authors. The range of contributors widened somewhat during this time, perhaps because a number of guest editors assumed partial responsibility for the magazine's contents. Billy Linich, Alan Marlowe, Kirby Doyle, John Wieners, and Bill seems to

Berkson each appeared

the masthead

guest editor for one of the

magazine's last dozen issues. One last issue (No. 38) appeared in 1971 as a joint issue with Intrepid (its No. 20), and was edited entirely by Diane di Prima.

Floating Bear was supported solely by contributors; it was never offered for sale. Circulation ranged from 117 to 1,250 copies over its eight-year span.

Fuck You: A Sanders at

Magazine of the Arts. "Edited, Published & Printed by Ed Secret location in the Lower East Side, New York City,

USA."

[1962]-June/July 1965. Irreg. Indexed in Serif, Vol. VIII, no. 3, pp. 23-28.

81;2" xII"

stapled

12-83 pp.

mimeo (one side only).

print anything" is Ed Sanders's boast in this 1960s protest maga zine. Fuck You was a prototypical journal of the new era of freer sexual expression, more vehement antiwar and anti-bomb sentiment, and the offensive urge (and freedom) to print shocking material of a kind highly "I'll

to the middle-class establishment. An editorial statement in No. 1 announced

that Fuck You was "dedicated to pacifist, unilateral disarmament, national defense through nonviolent resistance, multilateral indiscriminate apertural conjugation, anarchism, world federalism, civil disobedience, obstructers and submarine boarders, and all those groped by J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of Congress."

Fuck You is a record of several kinds of anti-establishment thought and expression. Its anarchistic policies so offended Dorothy Day that she fired four writers from the Catholic Worker because their work had appeared in Sanders's magazine. The pacifism wavered from the standard sort of diatribe to the

lampoon; Sanders threatened to publish a Quaker

version to be called Fuck Thee. He also initiated the era of mimeograph

publishing. Fuck You was batted out in an incredibly sloppy way; 700

one

often saw footprints on the paper. The numbering system was impossible

published five numbers, but in No.5 alone one finds nine volumes-exactly contrary to ordinary procedures. The preva lence of sexual and scatological expressions became a sublanguage that to follow: the magazine

many considered a "new realism." As it pursued its erratic course, Fuck You managed to publish a number of well-known writers, among them Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer, Paul Blackburn, Peter Orlovsky, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Diane

Wakoski, Julian Beck, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Norman Mailer, Antonin Artaud, Philip Lamantia, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ted Berrigan, W. H. Auden, and

William

Gilbert Sorrentino. The Greenfield Review. Greenfield Center, N.Y.

Vol. I, no. 1, Spring 1970+. Irreg. (recently two double numbers/yr.). Ed. Joseph Bruchac III.

5'12" x 8'12

(varies)

stapled/perfect

48-206 pp. (varies widely).

Although The Greenfield Review has printed a wide variety of poets, including a number of new names, the magazine's chief interest has been in native American poets, prison poets, and Third World writers. Volume I, No.4, 1971; Vol. II, No.3, Fall 1972; Vol. III, No.4, 1974; and Vol. V, No. 3/4, Winter 1976/1977, have all been special African

poetry issues. Volume III, No.2, was a special "NCAE Writers Work shop Issue," based on a workshop for ethnic writers conducted by Ed Burrows at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point for the National Center for Audio

Experimentation. Volume VI, No. 1/2, Spring 1977, "Special Asian American Writers Issue," edited by Garrett Kaoru Hongo. Volume I, No.2, Fall 1970, featured "Some Poets Who Happen to Be Women," a presentation of nine poets. Much of the special issue work supports Editor Joseph Bruchac's efforts to provide exposure and outlets for international writing, particularly Third World poetry. Bru chac is coordinator of the COSMEP Prison Project, which makes literary magazines available to prison inmates. Current circulation ranges from 750 to 1,000; many issues are exchanged or distributed free to Third World writers and readers and to prisons. Greenfield Review has been supported by CCLM.

was a

Hanging Loose. New York, N.Y. (no. 1-5/6, Fall 1966-1968); Brooklyn, N.Y. (no. 7, Summer 1969+). No.1, Fall 1966+. Irreg. Ed. Dick Lourie; Emmett Jarrett; Ron Schreiber; Bob Hershon (no. 4, Winter 1967+); Miguel Ortiz (no. 9-22, Winter 1970-Winter 1974). 7" x 8'12" (varies) Summer 1975+: stapled (folded) 72-80 pp. (re cent issues).

Separate indexes for no. 1-12 (Fall 1966-Fall 1970) and no. 13-24 (Win ter 1971-Winter 1974/1975). 701

Hanging Loose, a magazine of "poetry, songs, fiction," edited by Dick Lourie, Emmett Jarrett, and Ron Schreiber-joined in No.4 by Bob Hershon and later by Miguel Ortiz-takes its title from the fact that its first twenty-four issues, covering a ten-year period from 1966 to 1975, consisted of loose sheets of paper delivered in an envelope bearing a

design. This format was meant to imply a "stance" toward litera someday carefully studied but living expressions that aid and exalt us as we try to live our lives now. If you liked a poem among our loose pages, you could always tack it to the wall or carry it in your pocket; if you hated a poem you could always throw it away and still retain most of the magazine" (No. 25). Like most other small literary magazines, Hanging Loose has claimed an interest in printing some known writers, while also providing space for new talent. In this instance the editors have genuinely demonstrated their "continuing interest in work by new writers" (the first twenty issues contained the work of almost two hundred different authors). One regular feature has been a special section devoted to work by high school stu dents. Some of the young poets appear once only, while others, such as Katy Akin (Ma Prem Madhuri), have become regular contributors and developed with the magazine. For No. 21 (Winter 1973) Denise Lever tov, a contributing editor, put together a special supplement featuring ten young poets. As a way of promoting exchange of ideas, criticism, and encouragement, especially for the young contributors, Hanging Loose

cover

ture: "Poems are not artifacts to be bound and

includes with the table of contents the addresses of all contributors.

Among the more established poets appearing in Hanging Loose have been Earle Birney, Douglas Blazek, Robert Bly, George Bowering, Victor Contoski, Clayton Eshleman, Dan Georgakas, John Gill, Denise Lever tov, Lyn Lifshin, Ron Loewinsohn, Marge Piercy, Margaret Randall, Ron Schreiber, John Tagliabue, Joseph Bruchac, Rochelle Ratner, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Lynn Sukenick, and Al Young. Beginning with No. 25, Hanging Loose has been bound and now is hanging together. Since the editors have found themselves printing more long poems, they have shifted to a format that "seems friendlier" to extended pieces. Hanging Loose maintains a fairly steady circulation of about 1,200 copies distributed nationally, with peaks in New York, California, and Massa chusetts. More individuals than libraries are subscribers. Essentially an independent magazine, it has received aid from CCLM and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hearse: A Vehicle Used to Convey the Dead. Eureka, Cal.

[Sept. 1957]-1972; [suspended publication between 1961 and 1969]. Irreg.

No. 1-17,

Ed. E. V. Griffith.

5�" x 8�

702

stapled (folded)

16-88 pp.

Illus.

V. Griffith's editorial policy is expressed in the continuing sub title, "An irreverent quarterly, carrying poetry, prose, artwork, and in E.

cidental cadaver to the Great Cemetery of the American Intellect." He sets the tone for each issue with a pair of quotations on hearses or coffins

printed inside the front cover. Hearse No.1 quoted Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood-"Cash Parnum's dead," Haze said. "He got cholera from pig"-and John Faulkner's Men Working-"Well, paw. What are we

going to do now?" said maw. "I just hadn't thought about it," said paw. "Seems like we maybe ought to get some kind of a coffin together fer him." Hearse proves to be one exception to the general rule that little magazines become more moderate and sedate with time. Hearse No. 1 presented poetry by Joel Oppenheimer, Raymond Souster, Louis Dudek, Robert Creeley, Judson Crews, Barriss Mills, Jonathan Williams, Larry Eigner, Gil Orlovitz, Langston Hughes, David Cornel Dejong, and James Boyer May, among others, and featured a painting by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a college poem (one of the continuing specialties of the magazine) by Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin. Early issues contained such diverse

(sections

names

Charles Bukowski, Kenneth Rexroth Dragon and

deleted from the New Directions edition of The

the Unicorn), Richard Brautigan, Paul Blackburn, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi

Jones, Clarence Major, and Robert Sward. After Hearse No. 9

(1961), publication was suspended until

1969. In

1965, midway through the hiatus, there appeared one issue of Coffin, a similarly uninhibited satellite magazine consisting of forty-one broad sides and booklets loosely inserted into a printed folder (in a print run of 150 copies). This collection is frequently pirated for two booklets now considered to be collector's items:

Fielding Dawson's The Canoe (dated 1119/59) and Charles Bukowski's The Paper on the Floor. In 1969 Hearse resumed publication. In eight issues between 1969 and 1972 it printed an impressive number of poets, among them Winfield Townley Scott, Charles Bukowski, Lyn Lifshin, Theodore Enslin, Harold Witt, Marge Piercy, Felix Stefanile, Victor Contoski, Gene Fowler, Diane Wakoski, Douglas Blazek, Robert Mezey, H. L. VanBrunt, Charles Wright, Rochelle Owens, Charles Simic, Michael Benedikt, David Antin, Greg Kuzma, David Ignatow, Robert Hershon, John Haines, James SchevilI, Felix Pollak, John Gill, Stuart Friebert, John Judson, Larry Eigner, Raymond Di Palma, Peter Schjeldahl, James Tate, Carolyn Stoloff, Marvin Bell, Adrien Stoutenberg, Peter Wild, Philip Booth, David Wagoner, Sonya Dorman, Joseph Bruchac, John Unterecker, Wil liam Witherup, Hale Chatfield, Rochelle Ratner, Dan Georgakas, Harold Norse, X. J. Kennedy, Russell Edson, Philip Dacey, Colette Inez, Ron Padgett, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko (tr. Irina Zheleznova). In these issues of Hearse the aim seemed simply to be the setting forth of as many poems from a wide range of poets as limitations of space would allow.

703

In 1973 Griffith (at one time editor of The Minnesota Quarterly) launched

magazine in tabloid format. This venture, Poetry Now, was much less irreverent than Hearse and Coffin and soon won a much larger a new

audience. In the birth process, Hearse died.

Circulation for issues 1

through

through 9 was 100 to 275 copies, for issues 10 copies.

17, from 1,500 to 2,500

The Hudson Review. New York, N.Y. Vol. I, no. 1, Spring 1948+. Qy. Ed. Frederick Morgan; William Arrowsmith (Spring 1948-Summer 1948; 1951-Winter 1959/1960); Joseph D. Bennett (Spring 1948-

Autumn

Winter

1965/1966); Mary Emma

Elliott

(Spring

1960-Winter

1965/

1966); Paula Dietz (Summer 1975+). 6Y.z" x 9lh"

perfect

about 150 pp.

Indexed by volume. "The editors are committed to recommend those strategies and disciplines

which hold experience within an objective frame and which prevent the dissolution of aesthetic constructs into anarchic sensation. It is the func

tion of a responsible quarterly not simply to provide outlet, but to chan nel the manifestations of the contemporary creative imagination into the Neces mainstream of traditional insights and universal perceptions. .

sarily, the Review must be critical, eschewing political or philosophical commitment. It must be on guard against the vagaries attendant upon a constant quest for novelty and timeliness." With these opening com ments The Hudson Review began in 1948 its tenure as a leading literary and intellectual review. Contributors to the opening issue were R. P. Blackmur, Wallace Stevens, Joseph D. Bennett, Alex Comfort, W. S. Mer win, Herbert Read, Josephine Miles, Mark Scharer, D. S. Savage, e. e. cummings, and Frederick Morgan. In the Spring 1968 twentieth anniversary issue, the editorial referred to the socially disruptive Vietnam conflict and added: "Of what use are literature and the arts at such a time? They will serve best if they per form their traditional function-which is, putting it only in part and much too simply, to keep our minds and sensibilities alert and honest, and our imaginations free." Among the contributors to this anniversary issue were E. M. Cioran, Anthony Burgess, Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Merrill, Anne Sexton, and A. R. Ammons, with Herbert Read, Josephine .

Miles, and

S. Merwin

returning from the first

statements and lists of contributors

one

which the Hudson Review actually has

clearly represented

can

issue. see

From these

the extent to

and reflected the

intellectual and creative mainstream. Now, in the mid-seventies, the Hudson

Oates, Samuel Hazo, Anthony Hecht, William Stafford, Hayden Carruth, Charles Tomlinson, Michael Benedikt, John Hollander, and Colette Inez. Review

704

printing

John Gardner, Joyce

Carol

Without slighting the importance of all the significant writers who have contributed to the Hudson Review, one can argue that the liveliest aspect of the magazine, as well as a central means of both being in and helping

direct the mainstream, is the review section, led in recent years by Roger

Sale, William H. Pritchard, and especially Marvin Mudrick. In addition, John Simon conducts a spirited "Theatre Chronicle," while Robert S. Clark does the same for music. Vernon Young is a contributing editor for film, but ranges widely in seeking subjects for his acerb, highly

opinionated reviews. Charles W. Millard is the regular art critic. quite well at receiving grants, the Hudson Review prides itself on its independence from affiliation with any univer sity or publishing house. The magazine has received grants from CCLM. Circulation in 1976 was 3,200 copies.

While it seems to have done

Invisible City. Fairfax, Cal.

No.1, 1971+. Irreg. Ed. Paul Vangelisti; John McBride. 11 V2" x 17" folded together

16 pp.

(double and triple issues to 56 pp.).

According to its editors, "Invisible City is a collection of poetry, state ments and reviews, published by the Red Hill Press whenever enough material is available." Translation from many languages and countries has been a major feature of every issue, with a great deal of the work being done by Jack Hirschman and Paul Vangelisti. Hirschman has been responsible for translations from several languages, his most sizable and notable contribution being the whole Issue 0/ Work by Antonin Artaud (No.6, July 1972). Vangelisti has produced translations from recent Italian poets for almost every issue of Invisible City, a practice which has contributed greatly to the particular tone of the magazine. A special char acteristic of Invisible City translations is that, while they have included French surrealists, Spanish Civil War poetry, and such current favorites of American translators as Cesar Vallejo, Rafael Alberti, and Julio Cortazar, they also have included many interesting poets whose poems are not often seen in English translation, such as Adriano Spatola, Cor rado Costa, and Giulia Niccolai.

Invisible City appears in an 11"

by 17" tabloid format on heavy stock.

A typical sixteen-page issue, featuring one to three columns of as many as ninety lines on each page, contains more than seventy-five poems, some very short and others quite long. A poet is frequently represented by ten or more poems. A leftist socialist viewpoint, asserted by Editor Paul

Vangelisti in the opening issue, is apparent in many of the selections, especially in translations of poets like Rene Depestre, but it never be comes overbearing; the magazine remains primarily a literary anthology. Circulation is 1,500 copies; grants have been received from CCLM. 705

10. Amherst, Mass. (no. 1-2, ?1964-Feb. 1966); Ann Arbor, Mich. (no. 3-6, Winter 1966/1967-Summer 1969); Somesville, Me. (no. 7, Winter 1970);

Cape Elizabeth,

Me.

(no. 8-15, 1971-1972); Plainfield,

Vt.

(no. 16,

Winter 1972/1973+).

No.1, ?l964+. Irreg. Ed. no. 1: Phi

Alpha Psi Society, with "special thanks for help to Rich Nels Grossinger, Richardson, Marty Bickman, Randy Gingiss, and Lindy Hough"; then Ed. Richard Grossinger (Feb. 1966+); Linda Hough [Grossinger] (Feb. 1966+); Harvey Bialy (1974). Format varies (mostly 6" x 9" or 8'h" x 11") perfect (no. 1-3: stapled folded) 94-385 pp. (varies widely). Illus. 10 No. 1 was "put together by the members and friends of the Phi Alpha

Psi Society" at Amherst. The first three issues, small stapled affairs, estab lished the early format. Themes for the issues were drawn from "science

fiction, parapsychology, magic, comets, psi" or from "the works of photon and electron; cosmological essays." Editor Richard Grossinger has also been interested in ethnic poetry.

Beginning with No.4, the magazine has been square-backed and sub stantial in size, often running to more than 200 pages. Each issue carries a special area title, such as Alchemy, Doctrine of Signatures, Ethnoastron omy, Oecology, Oneirology, Mars, SciFi, Baseball, Earth Geography (Nos. 12, 13, 14, 16), Mind/Memory/Psyche, Biopoesis. According to promotional material, "the entire series is a growing and evolutionary cosmology; the individual numbers are not disposable or dated, as maga zines; they are more prophetic than topical." 10 abandons traditional literary magazine criticism and investigation in favor of a search into sources of poetic sensibility and the springs of poetic expression. By the seventh issue, Grossinger was able to state that "10 has served as our own education in the source material of New American Poetry." 10 is made increasingly interesting by the fact that, as it ostensibly searches out the wellsprings of creative action, it draws contributions from many widely published recent writers. Among them are Jorge Luis Borges, Theodore Enslin, Michel Foucault, Gerrit Lansing, Clayton Eshleman, Kenneth Irby, Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Paul Mariah, Thomas Merton, Anselm Hollo, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, David Wilk, Robert Creeley, Dennis Tedlock, Gilbert Sorrentino, George Bowering, Jack Spicer, Stan Persky, Fielding Dawson, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Anger, R. Buckminster Fuller, George Quasha, Nathaniel Tarn, Osip Mandelstam, John Wieners, Joe Brainard, Lenore Kandel, and Charles Doria. Recent concentration seems to be upon Grossinger's and

Lindy Hough's

North Atlantic Books venture. One large book is Baseball 1 Gave You All the Best Years of My Life, edited by Kevin Kerrane and Richard Gros

singer, which also serves as 10 No. 24. Among the contributors are Jack 706

Kerouac, Donald Hall, Lewis Warsh, Roger Angell, Gilbert Sorrentino, Philip Roth, Richard Hugo, Ron Loewinsohn, Tom Wicker, Charles Stein, Joel Oppenheimer, Paul Blackburn, John Updike, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Tom Clark, Fielding Dawson, Rolfe Humphries, and Jack Spicer. 10 funding is estimated as 75 percent from sales and 25 percent from grants, including grants from CCLM. Circulation varies widely but aver ages about 1,000 per issue. In keeping with the conviction that 10 is a growing, organic publication, the editors make all back issues available for purchase. Kayak. San Francisco, Cal. (no. 1-20, Fall 1964-1969); Santa Cruz, Cal.

(no. 21, 1970+). No.1, Fall 1964+ Irreg. ("more or less quarterly"). .

Ed. George Hitchcock.

6Yz" x 8Yz"

stapled (folded)

56-72 pp.

Illus.

Like most other good little magazines, Kayak strongly and uniquely reflects the tastes of its editor. George Hitchcock's Kayak, "operated by a

single oarsman," begins with a set of unabashed preferences: Kayak will print what its editor considers the best poets now working in the United States.

Kayak is particularly hospitable to surrealist, imagist, and political poems. Kayak welcomes vehement or ribald articles on the subject of modern poetry.

Starting with the Autumn 1964 issue, Hitchcock has published Kayak "more or less" quarterly. Most issues run to sixty-four pages and include found poems and collages as well as space for scores of poets, many new and many quite well known. Hitchcock has published the work of Louis Simpson, A. R. Ammons, George P. Elliott, Paul Blackburn, Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin, Hayden Carruth, David Ignatow, Margaret Randall, Carol Berge, John Logan, James Merrill, X. J. Kennedy, Robin Skelton, Robert Mezey, Charles Simic, Donald Justice, David Wagoner, Josephine Miles, Gary Snyder, Donald Hall, Anselm Hollo, Anne Sexton, Diane Wakoski, Evan S. Connell, Jr., Karl Shapiro, Carolyn Kizer, John Unterecker, and Kenneth Rexroth. From the beginning, Hitchcock has decorated the

magazine with draw ings from Victorian illustrated texts of all sorts. The verse in Kayak referred to somewhat dubiously as surrealistic, perhaps because it is fre quently inward and sometimes employs dislocated images-covers all areas of human experience, perception, and emotion but has a tendency toward personal communion with nature as manifest in harvests, woods, and animals. Kayak No.2 was "dedicated to America's Underground Channels and Seams," but the underground seems to be psychological rather than political, emotional rather than geographic. By 1966, though, 707

the war in Vietnam had induced a

type of poetry that was more overtly political regarding both the war and society in general. At one point in 1968, Hitchcock used some money from an award to run and specifically

poetry contest on the "Life or Death of Che Guevara." While poetry provides the bulk of each issue, Kayak also publishes views and prose essays, which range from a Louis Hammer article a

recent American

poetry (No.2) to John Haines's reviews and essays on

the work of well-known poets. In No.6, Haines calls Olson's "Projective Verse" essay "Mainly

hogwash, with its pseudo-scientific terminology (a 'high-energy-construct,' etc.)." Since this opinion, and the manner of its assertion, agrees with Hitchcock's own stated viewpoint, it stands as a good example of the sort of criticism often found in Kayak. Robert Bly, Robert L. Peters, and Robin Skelton are among the other contributors of testy, outspoken essays and reviews. Victor Contoski (No. 17) caused some controversy by attacking the "curiously negative" James Dickey; John Haines (No. 20) aroused letter writers with his poem is

argument that American poetry is in decline; and John Herschel raised hackles by his attack on Diane di Prima and her fellow social protesters for their

paranoia. Kayak

also

publishes

critical reviews of work by

contributors.

Other than one award from CCLM to pay authors, Hitchcock reports that

Kayak, with a circulation of 1,400, is "entirely self-supporting through subscriptions and sales." The Kenyon Review. Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. Vol. I, no. I-Vol. XXXII, no. 1, Winter 1939-Issue 1, 1970.

Qy. (Jan.

1966+: 5/yr.). Ed. John Crowe Ransom (Winter 1939-Summer 1958); Robie Macau ley (Autumn 1958-Mar. 1967); George Lanning (June 1967+); Elling ton White (Nov.

5'h" x 8'h" Annual index;

1967+).

about 196 pp. (1966+: 5/yr. of 144 pp. each). 25-year index (1939-1963) by AMS (compiled by Eliza

sewn

beth Browne).

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, founding editor John Crowe Ransom developed The Kenyon Review into a leading organ for the "new critics."

twenty-five-year index to Kenyon lists more than 300 non fiction prose contributors, many of whom appeared a number of times.

An AMS

Among these contributors were many of the best known new critics Ransom and Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, Austin Warren, and William Empson-as well as a mixed bag

English professors and their students. Paul Good man, Kenneth Burke, Benedetto Croce, Leslie Fiedler, Northrop Frye, of critics familiar to

Frederick J. Hoffman, Marshall McLuhan, Herbert Read, Lionel Trilling, Levin, and Stephen Spender indicate the range and quality of

Harry 708

Kenyon Review criticism. Selecting out some poets whose work has fre quently been discussed in the magazine, one finds the names of many writers whose poetry is especially suited to new critical readings; John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, and W. B. Yeats are all subjects of multiple essays. Under Ransom, Kenyon featured literary criticism but also printed fic tion, poetry, and essays on art and film (Parker Tyler contributed a regular "Movie Letter" for some time). When Robie Macauley took over the editorship in 1959, the emphasis shifted from criticism to poetry and especially to fiction. The new direction is immediately seen in Vol. XXII (1960), which features fiction by John Barth, William Eastlake, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, and others. In 1966 George Lanning took over the editorship and guided the maga zine until its demise in 1970 (Ellington White joined him as co-editor). In its last issues the magazine ran a four-part series, "The Short Story Today." Circulation of Kenyon Review peaked at about 6,000 in 1965-1966, with single-copy sales reaching 400. Besides the support of Kenyon College, in the 1950s the magazine also received aid from the Rockefeller Foun dation. Kulchur. New York, N.Y.

No. 1-20, Spring 1960-Winter 1965/1966. Qy.

Ed.

Marc

Schleifer

(Spring 1960-Summer 1962); Lita Hornick ("Managing Editor," Summer 1962-Winter 1963; Editor, Spring 1964+) [guest and contributing editors: Gilbert Sorrentino (Poetry/Guest/Book Editor, 1961-Summer 1963); Joel Oppenheimer (Guest Ed. Spring 1962); LeRoi Jones (Music Editor, Spring 1962-Spring 1964); Frank O'Hara (Art Editor, Summer 1962-Spring 1964); Joseph Le Seuer (Theatre Edi tor, Fall 1962-Spring 1964); Bill Berkson (Film Editor, Fall 1962Fall 1963)]. 5'h" x 8'h" sewn (no. 1 stapled, 52 pp.) 96-104 pp. IIlus. The first issue of Kulchur

(edited by Marc D. Schleifer) was a good example of the range of essays and critiques published throughout the magazine's twenty-issue history. For this issue Charles Olson wrote a four-page meditation on perception; John Fles praised the poetry of Robert Creeley; William Burroughs published an excerpt from the manu script version of Naked Lunch (not in the published version and not available elsewhere). Allen Ginsberg's short poem "Paterson" also ap peared here, along with articles by Erick Hawkins on dance; by Donald Phelps on Lenny Bruce, Don Martin, Ernie Kovacs, and the "Muck School" of comedy; and by Martin Williams on television. Films were reviewed and discussed by Louis Zukofsky (Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times), Parker Tyler, Pauline Kael, and Richard Kraft. 709

With the support of both Martin Williams and LeRoi Jones (who jazz editor for a time), Kulchur made coverage of jazz one of its

was

strong

est

points.

Another

Chronicle"

strength

was

its focus

written

modern art. The "Art

regularly by by Bill Berkson, with less regular contributions by Gilbert Sorrentino and Carl Belz. Kulchur also published articles on many aspects of popular culture: pornography, drugs, William Reich, the Kama Sutra, Freud, civil rights, L. Frank Baum and the Oz books, blues singers, Hollywood's ten best social protest movies, and the dangers of hipness. Poetry and fiction were published, but not in great quantities. The typical Kulchur contributor already had outlets for creative work in Floating Bear, Yugen, and allied publications. Kulchur adhered fairly closely to its goal to become "the only vanguard magazine devoted principally to Criticism and Commentary-essays on literature, art, jazz, politics and pop culture by leading poets." Kulchur's contributions to literary criticism in the 1960s included Charles Olson on projective verse, Robert Duncan on the meaning of form, Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Creeley on "deep images," and Louis Zukofsky's "5 Statements for Poetry." The temper of many reviews was vitriolic; LeRoi Jones, in reviewing Robert Bly's and William Duffy's magazine The Sixties, wrote, "I suspect Mr. Bly and Mr. Duffy are ignorant fools." Among other fre quent reviewers were Fielding Dawson, Jonathan Williams, Walter Low enfels, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov. Kulchur would occasionally print the odd, unexpected piece by writers like Paul Goodman. Kulchur, entirely funded by Lita Hornick, reached a peak circulation of was

Frank O'Hara and then

about 1,400. Lillabulero:

Being a Periodical of Literature and the Arts. Published and

edited at Chapel Hill, N.C. by Lillabulero of the Whigh Court [no. 6, Fall/Winter 1968+: Lillabulero: A Journal of Contemporary Writing, Northwood Narrows, New

Hampshire].

Vol. I, no. l=-no. 14, Winter 1967-Spring 1974. Irreg. Ed. Russell Banks; William Matthews (no. 4, Fall 1967+); Newton Smith (no. 4-5, Fall 1967-Winter 1968). No. 1-2: 9" x 14'12" No. 3-5: 8'12" x 13" No. 6-14: 6" x 9"

stapled (folded) 30,56 pp. + portfolios. stapled (folded) 54,66,80 pp. + portfolios. perfect 90-188 pp.

Lillabulero's interests included "contemporary American poetry and fic tion, including interviews, reviews, occasional criticism." The first series, Nos. 1-5 in folio format, contained the work of William

Stafford, O. B. Hardison, Jr., Evan S. Connell, Jr., Nelson Algren, David Madden, Dabney Stuart, John Hollander, Malcolm Cowley, Stanley Cooperman, Greg Kuzma, Douglas Blazek, Margaret Randall, Peter Wild, Howard McCord, and others. A special feature of Nos. 1-4 was loose-leaf portfolios (tucked into a pocket in cover iii) of artwork by 710

I), Daniel Patterson (No.2), Arturo Esquerra (No. 3), and Chris Parsons (No.4). Peter Schlaifer (No.

The second series added many new contributors, among the best known being A. R. Ammons, Andrei Codrescu, Vern Rutsala, Charles Simic,

Berry, Anselm Hollo, Diane Wakoski. No. 12, Winter 1973, special Paul Metcalf issue, edited by Russell Banks and containing

Wendell was a

contributions from Howard McCord, Theodore Enslin, Ronald Sukenick,

Lindy Hough, Richard Grossinger, Jonathan Williams, and others. Upon occasion, single poets were the recipients of "Appreciations" in which sev eral poems by the honored poet were followed by a prose critique: W. S. Merwin (No.6), Gary Snyder (No.7), Robert Creeley (No.8), A. R. Ammons (No. 10/11). The editors, by prearrangement, terminated Lillabulero after No. 14. Once established, the magazine had maintained a constant circulation of about 1,000 copies. Aid had been received from CCLM, the New York State Council on the Arts, and "three generous, anonymous patrons." Locus Solus. Lans-en-Vercors (Isere), France.

No. 1-5, Winter 1961-1962. Ed. John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, James Schuyler.

4%" x 7v.." (varies slightly)

sewn

168-204 pp.

(296 pp. double issue).

Locus Solus

appeared in five numbers over a one-year period and was Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and James with individual editors alternating special responsibilities, at Schuyler, least for some issues. This magazine offered no apologies, no explana tions; it simply tried to provide an attractive format for poets whom it respected and honored. Locus Solus No.2, Summer 1961, edited by Kenneth Koch, was titled a "Special Collaborations Issue." Asserting that "the act of collaborating on a literary work is inspiring, I think, because it gives objective form to a usually concealed subjective phenomenon and therefore it jars the mind into strange new positions," Koch then gave a cursory history of verse collaborations by ancient Chinese and Japanese poets, Provencal troubadours, Renaissance English dramatists, seventeenth-century French surrealists, and contemporary writers like Burroughs and Corso. The text of this volume consisted of close to 200 pages of collaborations by poets from each era mentioned in his history. Locus Solus No. 3/4, 1961, edited by John Ashbery, was a "Double Issue of New Poetry," consisting of some 250 pages of poems by more than forty poets. The general focus of this volume is indicated by a partial listing of contributors: Michael Benedikt, LeRoi Jones, Bill Berkson, Larry Rivers, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Jean Boudin, Frank O'Hara, George Stanley, Paul Carroll, Daisy Aldan, Kenward Elmslie, James Schuyler, Gerard Malanga, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Anselm Hollo, Kenneth Koch, and Harry Mathews. edited by John

711

Koch, Schuyler, Ashbery, and Mathews, along with Barbara Guest and Frank O'Hara, also appeared in Locus Solus No.1, Winter 1961, and in No.5, 1962-a pair of poetry anthologies edited by James Schuyler, who also called upon such other New York poets as Ebbe

Borregaard,

Edwin Denby, and Ted Berrigan. Locus Solus, with its unusual size (150-250-page issues), its concentra tion upon the poem itself, and its concern with appearance, was a

peri

odical that resembled a book and anthologized the work of an impressive number of contemporary poets.

ManRoot. South San Francisco, Cal. No. I, Aug. 1969+. Irreg. Ed. Paul Mariah; Richard Tagett.

Format varies (recently 5%" x 8%")

perfect

96-200 pp.

no.

1-4: stapled (folded); no. 5+:

Illus.

ManRoot, edited from its beginnings by Paul Mariah and Richard Tagett, is a poetry magazine open to a wide range of writers, but with a specific emphasis upon homoerotic poetry. Editor Paul Mariah states that only one-third of the contributors have been homosexuals, though

they are responsible for 58 percent of the total pages. The magazine developed from a workshop devised by Paul Mariah and Robert Duncan and sponsored by the Society for Individual Rights (SIR). ManRoot is a large magazine (over the last five years of irregular pub lication, individual numbers have averaged more than 150 pages) which takes advantage of its size by allowing generous amounts of space to individual poets and to particular themes or types of poetry. Each issue has devoted at least 30 pages to a featured poet, in some cases a writer

ignored by other publications. Featured poets thus far have been Gerald Fabian, Lynn Strongin, Paul Mariah, Richard Tagett, Richard Grossinger, Paul Eluard and Nanos Valaoritis, Allie Light and Lynn Lonidier, Victor Borsa, Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, Stephen Kessler, and Michael Finley. ManRoot has also produced special issues devoted to such topics as womanhood, Greek poetry, and the poetry of Jack Spicer (a 200-page commemorative issue). A 192-page "Surreal Issue," No. 617 (April 1972), contained 25 pages by Paul Eluard and 30 pages by Nanos Valaoritis, with other contributions (all in English) by Andre Breton, Robert Desnos, Rene Char, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Arthur Rim baud, and Jack Spicer. No. 11 (Spring/Summer 1977) is a "New Voices" the editors feel has been

special issue. large, offset-printed magazine with a print run of 1,000 (120 subscriptions). CCLM is the only significant outside funding source. though small donations have helped compensate for the editors' personal financial losses. ManRoot has only 17 library or university subscriptions. The editors plan to suspend publication after No. 12 and concentrate ManRoot is

upon their line of ManRoot Books.

712

Margins. Milwaukee, Wisc. No.1, Aug. 1972+. Freq. varies. Ed. Tom Montag; David Buege (Aug. 1972-Dec. 1972). 8�" x 10�" (no. 1-3: 8�" x 13") stapled (folded) widely).

72 pp.

(varies

response to the pro its purpose was to "put magazines; audience." Margins was to be buying

Margins was begun as a bimonthly newsletter in liferation of small-press books and

small press materials before a distributed free to "some 400 libraries and bookstores who have

pressed

interest in such small press materials."

With No.4 (1973), Margins shifted to a magazine format, principally to allow "more space for essays and reviews, a broader coverage of little magazines, small press books, and projects and activities of interest." As Margins grew in scope and size, Editor Tom

Montag eschewed com

prehensive bibliographic listings of small-press publications in favor of more detailed critical and descriptive essays on a large but selective number of small-press books and magazines. Besides articles and special features on all aspects of editing, producing, and marketing small-press publications, Margins reviews a large number of books and magazines (sometimes offering two or three reviews of a given piece). Especially interesting are the "Focus" sections, featuring collections of essays on women's writing (No.7, 1973), native American writing (No.8, 1973), the role of the review journal and the small-press reviewer (No.9, 1973/1974), prison writing (No. 12, 1974), gay male writing and publishing (No. 20, 1975), lesbian feminist writing and publishing (No. 23, 1975); and special symposiums on Michael McClure (No. 18, 1975), Rochelle Owens (Nos. 24/25/26, 1975), William WantJing (No. 27, 1975), and Diane Wakoski (Nos. 28/29/30, 1976). These special features are remarkably comprehensive, running in some cases to well over fifty double-column pages and including contributions from important figures in small-press publishing. The nature of some of these topics has made Margins at times contro versial. as has the inclusion of essays by writers such as Victor Contoski and Richard Kostelanetz (whose End to Intelligent Writing appeared in excerpts in several issues of Margins). The major criticism of Margins seems to have been the charge, especially regarding early issues, that it has favored midwestern presses and writers, even though this interest seems legitimate. More to the point, the reviews don't indicate how to distinguish the good books from the bad. Margins has received funding from CCLM. The Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass. Vol. I, no. 1, Oct. 1959+. Qy.

Ed. F.

(Oct. 1959-Summer 1963); Sidney Kaplan (Spring 1963); Jules Chametzky (Autumn 1963-Autumn 1969,

Ellert

1961-Summer

713

Autumn

1971-Winter/Spring 1974); John Hicks (Autumn 1963-Summer 1972, Summer 1973+); Francis Murphy (Autumn 1965-Spring 1967); Robert G. Tucker (Summer 1971, Autumn 1972+); Lee Edwards (Summer 1974+); Mary Heath (Summer 1974, Winter 1975+). 5%

x 8%

sewn

about 200 pp.

Illus.

Indexed by volume.

While interested in literature and the arts, The Massachusetts Review has always managed to present a very current picture of public affairs remarkable feat for

quarterly periodical. The first issue featured an article on U.S. military policy; the second (February 1960) published a controversial assessment of Fidel Castro and other Latin American leaders. Special issues and supplements in a

Edward

Katzenbach

Massachusetts Review tend to involve

areas

where literature and social

criticism merge. The Winter/Spring 1972 number, an issue on women, published essays, creative work, and documents by many writers, artists,

Abzug, Anais Nin, Angela Davis, Maxine Owens, Crystal Field, and Rosalyn Lorde, Drexler. Other special numbers or supplements have featured the Paris Commune of 1871 (Summer 1971), Latin America and the Caribbean (Winter/Spring 1974), the problem of New York City (Summer 1973), William Carlos Williams (Winter 1973), Afro-American literature "Bicentennial and a (Autumn 1977), Gathering" beginning in four-part and

even

Kumin,

politicians:

Bella

Audre

Rochelle

the Summer 1977 issue.

lines, essays in recent issues have discussed Indian women in America, twentieth-century European social thought, develop mental psychology and the arts, the IRA, the 1950s, Frantz Fanon, and Claude Levi-Strauss. The literary essays, however, tend to be eclectic

Along

the

same

and nonpolitical.

Among the dominant characteristics of the early issues of Massachusetts Review were the special, separately paged sections on the visual arts, introduced in the third issue with work by Ernst Barlach. Printed on fine colored papers at the Gehenna Press or the Meriden Gravure Company, these

sections

frequently

contained

the

wood

engravings

of Leonard

Baskin, printed directly from the block.

Funding of Massachusetts Review comes primarily from the Five Col leges, Inc. (Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts). Circulation is 2,500, with 1,000

single-copy sales. (Vol. I, no. I-Vol. II, no. 1, Apr. 1971-Spring 1972); Amherst, Mass. (Vol. II, no.2-Vol. III, no. 2, Winter 1973/1974Winter /Spring 197 5); Northampton, Mass (Vol. III, no. 3- Vol. III, no. 4jVoi. IV, no. 1, Fall 1975-SpringjSummer 1976). Vol. I, no. I-Vol. III, no. 4jVoi. IV, no. 1, Apr. 1971-SpringjSummer

Mulch. New York, N.Y.

1976. Irreg.

714

Ed. David Glotzer; Basil King; Harry Lewis. 5" x 8"

perfect (no. 1: sewn)

Just as the proper mixture of

70-226 pp.

Illus.

organic matter will replenish the soil, so

this collection of aesthetic and intellectual "mulch before the hard freeze" is intended to fertilize the sensibilities of its readers. The diversity of Mulch is suggested by the names of the writers whose quoted statements

introduce each issue-Albert Camus, Colette, William Carlos Williams, and Basil King-and by the editor's statements on subjects like raising

pigeons and eating Spam, and on more serious subjects like the politics of survival. Some of the most interesting experimental materials in the magazine are by Allen Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn, Joel Oppenheimer, and Paul Metcalf (guest editor for No.7, Fall/Winter 1975). Provocative materials of a more traditional nature included an anonymous letter (No. 5, Fall 1974) written in 1741 about a Negro plot in New York which resulted in multiple executions of both blacks and whites, and an article in the Spring 1972 issue entitled "A Conspiracy Theory of Poverty." Among the other contributors to Mulch are Nicolas Guillen (tr. Paul Blackburn), Theodore Enslin, Toby Olson, Vladimir Mayakovsky (tr. H. Lewis, L. Hellegers), Russell Banks, John Wieners, Diane di Prima, Jaime de Angulo, and George Economou. Mulch has been supported by CCLM. Peak circulation was 1,000 copies. The Naked Ear. Ranches of Taos, N.M. No. 1-11 [Winter 1956-Jan. 1959]. Irreg. Ed. Judson Crews. 4Y4" x 51;2"

stapled (folded)

12-20 pp.

Illus.

The Naked Ear, edited by Judson Crews, fits the popular conception of prototypical little little magazine as a periodical with one editor /

the

publisher / distributor, operating on a shoestring budget and publishing only highly original and/or controversial talents. The magazine-short poems and photographs-was directed to an audience of practicing poets and to other little-magazine editors, who, in turn, mailed their copies on to other poets and little-magazine editors. Because of their scarcity copies invariably got worn out or lost-and because they contain early work by a number of now-established poets, all issues have become collector's items. An inveterate little-magazine editor, Crews built this magazine on its predecessors (Suck-Egg Mule: A Recalcitrant Beast, 1-5, November 1950-March 1952; The Deer and Dachshund, 1952-1954); and even earlier versions (Vers Libre, Motive, One can consider them one continuing magazine with differing Taos). names and formats, corresponding to the passage of years and the state

Nos.

Nos. 1-6,

of Crews's personal finances.

The initial number of Naked Ear featured four poems by Robert Creeley and were

cover

Wolcott

reproduction of a Henry Miller watercolor. Other poets Ely, Crews, Max Fenstein, Hyacinthe Hill, and Cerise 715

Farallon.

Subsequent issues included such diverse names as Mason (Jason Gordon, a continuing contributor to Crews-edited magazines), Wendell B. Anderson, Stuart Z. Perkoff, Larry Eigner, Norman Jordan Mason

Macleod, Robert Sward, Alfred Dorn, Charles Bukowski, Michael McClure, LeRoi Jones ("Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note"), and Diane di Prima.

Crews-edited magazines

are

remarkably free of editorial statements or

manifestos-the implication being that the published work can speak for itself and needs no interpretation. Crews evidently was convinced of the value of the Bill Heaton statement which gave the magazine its title: "The naked ear will hear the sound of the waves we make." The circulation of Naked Ear was from 100 to 200 copies.

Neurotica. St. Louis, Mo. (no. 1-4, Spring 1948-Spring 1949); Stamford, Conn. (no. 5, Autumn 1949); New York (no. 6-9, Spring 1950-Winter

1952). Irreg. Ed. Jay Irving Landesman (no.

1-8, Spring 1948-Spring 1951); Gershon Legman (no. 9, Winter 1952 [?1951]). 614 x 9'h stapled (folded) 48-80 pp. IlIus. Index no. 1-8 (1948-1951) in no. 8. "

In its first issue the editors described Neurotica as "a literary exposition,

defense, and correlation of the problems and personalities that in our culture are defined as 'neurotic.' It is said that if you tie a piece of red cloth to a gull's leg its fellow-gulls will peck it to pieces: and Neurotica

wishes to draw an analogy between this observation and the plight of today's creative 'anxious man.' We are interested in exploring the crea tiveness of this man who has been forced to live underground, and yet

lights an utter darkness with his music, poetry, painting, and writing." Further, in issue No.5: "We define neurosis as the defensive activities of normal individuals

against abnormal environments.

human beings are born non-neurotic, and not agree that it is

the

measure

are

of social

assume

that

neuroticized later. We do

intelligence

health to adapt to, and rationalize for, every evil.

...

and

psychiatric

Neurotica is the

first lay-psychiatric magazine. It is our purpose to implement the realiza tion on the part of people that they live in

neurotic culture and that

making neurotics out of them. The practitioners have their own journals. Neurotica is for the patients-present and future." Among the persons lacking their own journals, according to Neurotica, are free spirited, non-clique poets whose serial outlets have been co-opted. "As we see it, the little literary magazine is dead. The 'little mags that died to make verse free' have been replaced by subsidized vehicles for clique poetry, critical back-scratching, and professorial piddle, served up with a certain transparent overlay of regional or radical futilitarianism. Having embraced the preciosity and academicism that the little mag was raised up to fight, the current types find themselves wholly without purpose and practically without audience." it is

716

Neurotica tries to serve the true literary community by publishing such writers

Kenneth

Patchen, Leonard Bernstein, Chandler Brossard,

Broyard, Lawrence Durrell, Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, Viereck, Larry Rivers, Mason Jordan Mason, David Cornel

Anatole Peter

Dejong, Harry Roskolenko, Judith Malina, Charles L. Newman, and Ernest Jones. But the reputation of Neurotica really rests upon the pro vocative essays which set the tone for every issue: Rudolph Friedman, "The End of Feeling," No.1, Spring 1948; William Krasner, "The Psychopath in Our Society," No.2, 1948; Gershon Legman, "The Psy

chopathology of the Comics," No.3, Autumn 1948; Legman, "Institu tionalized Lynch-The Anatomy of the Murder Mystery," No.4, Spring

1949; Legman, "Rationale of the Dirty Joke-The Castration Complex," No.9, 1952; Marshall McLuhan, "The Psychopathology of Time and Life," No.5, Autumn 1949; McLuhan, "The Folklore of Industrial Man," No.8, Spring 1951; Alfred Towne, "The Myth of the Western Hero," No.7, Autumn 1950; Towne, "Sexual Gentleman's Agreement,"

No.6, Spring 1950. One

noteworthy Neurotica by-product was the publication in 1949 of Gershon Legman's Love & Death: A Study in Censorship. Two of its four essays had appeared in Neurotica, while the remaining two ("Avatars of the Bitch" and "Open Season on Women") were prepared for the magazine but never appeared there. Fervently praised (Leslie Fiedler in New Leader) and equally fervently damned (Robert Warshaw in Partisan Review), this 104-page book appears to have been one of the most influential "underground" books of the past three decades in its impact on

the national consciousness. Demand for back issues of Neurotica and

Love & Death was sufficient for Hacker Art Books to issue

reprints in

1963. Before that time, reprinting of little/literary magazines was thought to be financially unfeasible.

Neurotica attained a circulation of 5,000 copies.

New: American and Canadian Poetry 1974+: New]. Trumansburg, N. Y. No.

[no. 22/23, Fall/Winter 1973/

1-27/28, Sep. 1966-Fall 1975. Sep. 1966--Spring/Summer 3/yr.; Fall/Winter 1973/1974+ :2/yr.

1973:

Ed. John Gill.

No. 1-20: 6'h" x 8�" (varies) No. 21 +: 6" x 9" (varies)

stapled 30-100 pp. perfect 80-144 pp. (double no. 224 pp.).

Beginning with a special interest in the midwestern and Canadian poets (Earl Birney, Al Purdy, Alden Nowlan, Raymond Fraser, John Newlove, and Irving Layton, all of whom appeared in early issues), Editor John Gill soon increased the scope of New so that it included a wide range of poetry from a great many poets. Special issues have been important. Gilles Cormier edited a

"Special Bilingual French/Canadian Issue" (No.

14, December 1970), with translations by Gilles and Linda Cormier. Elaine Gill edited the "Special Review Issue: What's New in American 717

and Canadian

Poetry" (No. 15, April/May 1971), featuring twenty-two

essays by poets and editors in the United States and Canada Robert Bly, George Hitchcock,

(including Douglas Blazek, Daryl Hine, Richard Morris, Ron Schreiber, Victor Contoski, and Dick Lourie). Michael Lally edited "None of the Above: New Poets of the U.S.A." (No. 27/28, Fall 1975, the final issue of New), featuring thirty-one poets, with a photo of each. Especially in later issues, New made room for longer pieces (such as Marge Piercy's "The Tarot Poems" in No. 19, Fall 1972) and for sub stantial sections by individual poets (Robert Sward and Keith Abbott in No. 20, January 1973; Howard McCord and Mike Finley in No. 21, Spring/Summer 1973; Michael Lally and Tom Wayman in No. 24, 1974; Joel Deutsch in No. 25/26, 1975). After ten years of publication, New was suspended in order to allow John Gill more time for operation of his Crossing Press. New received support from CCLM, and its circulation rose from an initial 300 to peak of 1,000 copies.

New American Review

[no. 16, Feb. 1973+: American Review: The Magazine of New Writing]. New York, N. Y. No. 1-26, Sep. 1967-Nov. 1977. Freq. varies. Ed. Theodore Solotaroff [Poetry Ed. Stanley Moss (Sep. 1967-Aug. 1970); Richard Howard (1971-Nov. 1977)]. 4% x 7" perfect 224-290 pp. Index no. 9-24 in no. 24 (Apr. 1976); index no. 1-26 in no. 26 (Nov. 1977). "

New American Review (later American Review) was a large-circulation magazine featuring established as well as lesser known writers. It was

produced in paperback format in print runs of from 25,000 to 100,000 copies, and published fiction, poetry, and essays. Theodore Solotaroff's head notes to early numbers set forth the goals of New American Review. Regenerating the spirit of New American Li brary-an earlier paperback literary periodical which, in Solotaroff's opinion, had avoided cult and coterie literary publishing and had ex tended hospitality to all good creative writing-New American Review broadened this focus so as to generate "more explicit and topical con nections between contemporary literature and the culture-at-large." Observing that "there is a great deal of creative expression in America today that does not flow in strictly literary channels," Solotaroff included in New American Review numerous topical essays that frequently belong within the definition of New Journalism. In the "Editor's Note" to No.

(the

issue with which Simon and

Library as publisher), Solotaroff large-circulation literary periodical stands or falls pointed to the degree to which it fulfills its "particular purpose and according Schuster

replaced

out that

718

New

American

value-that of bringing an abundance of significant writers, often rela tively unknown ones, to the attention of a wide audience." For the editor and publisher, the

problem

involves

getting

paperback little

maga

zine to compete in volume sales with other mass-market and trade paperbacks. Despite staggering economic pressures, New American Review brought a considerable number of talented writers and poets to a new, much wider audience.

According to Solotaroff, in its first seven years

the

magazine printed

"almost 500 different contributors, at least 90 percent of whom have been American." One finds fiction by John Barth, John Hawkes, Robert

Coover, Ralph Ellison, Richard Brautigan, Doris Lessing, and Malcolm

Lowry; poetry by every major American poet from John Ashbery to Robert Penn Warren; and essays by Norman Mailer, Theodore Roszak, Benjamin DeMott, and Frank Kermode. Issues 1-10 of New American Review were financed by New American Library/Signet Books; issues 11-15 by Simon and Schuster; issues 16-26 by Bantam Books. The North American Review. Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa

(Mar.

1964-Nov./Dec. 1968); University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa

(Spring 1969+). New Series, Vol. I, no. 1 (Old Series, Vol. CCXLIX), Mar. 1964+. Qy. Ed. Robert P. Dana

(Mar. 1964-Nov./Dec. 1968); Robley Wilson, Jr.

(Spring 1969+). 8lh x 11" stapled (folded) "

64-96 pp.

IIlus.

Annual index. The North American Review

began in Boston in 1815 and developed opinion on current issues. In 1940, the magazine's one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth year of publication, it came to an abrupt conclusion when its editor, Joseph Hilton Smyth, who had written some impassioned isolationist editorials, admitted to being a paid agent of the Japanese government. In 1964, Robert P. Dana revived the magazine with a vow to return to an impartial discussion of current issues. Robley Wilson, Jr., took over in 1969, emphasizing environmental into a leading American journal of

matters in addition to

poetry, fiction, and reviews.

In Dana's first issue, the presence of essayists like Julian Huxley and Paul Goodman forecast the wide range and lively nature of things to come.

everything from the 1964 elections, pornog and moon shots to highway deaths and the war in Vietnam.

Later issues covered

raphy laws,

A good deal of space was given to civil rights issues. At the same time, North American Review

printed poetry by John Logan, James Dickey,

Ignatow, William Stafford, Louis Simpson, Dennis Saleh, and But fiction was probably the center of the magazine, with others. many David

twenty-five

stories

appearing

each

year,

many

new

writers.

719

Under Wilson, North American Review has printed poetry by Rochelle Ratner, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, John Taggart, Stephen Dobyns, Samuel Hazo, Colette Inez, Douglas Blazek, Felix Pollak, Greg Kuzma, Rosellen Brown, and Philip Dacey. The long list of fiction contributors includes Paul Theroux, Gail Godwin, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond

Carver, and Annie Dillard. North American Review's catholicity of taste is indicated by the fact that Jerome Klinkowitz and

George V. Higgins

have both been frequent contributors in recent years. The Summer 1977 issue contained

interesting feature, "Inside the Iowa Writers' Work

shop," with Steve Wilbers interviewing Donald Justice, Marvin Bell, and Vance Bourjaily. Aside from the support first of Cornell College and later of the Univer

sity of Northern Iowa, NAR has received some grant money from CCLM and, since 1969, from the Iowa Arts Council. Circulation has grown from about 650 in 1968 to about 2,700 (1,600 mail and 900 newsstand copies). The current press run is 3,700. Libraries account for about 1,000

SUbscriptions. Origin [Series I: A Quarterly for the Creative; Series II: Response; Series III: Center]. Dorchester, Mass. (Ser. I, no.1-II, Spring 1951-Autumn 1953); Ashland, Mass. (Ser. I, no. 12-20, Spring 1954-Winter 1957); San Francisco (Ser. II, no. 1-4, Apr. 1961-Jan. 1962); Kyoto, Japan (Ser. II, no. 5, Apr. 1962+). Ser. I,

no.

l=Ser. III,

no.

20, Spring 1951-Jan. 1971 [a fourth series is

planned]. Qy. [guest editors include Paul Blackburn (Spring 1953), (Summer 1954), Irving Layton (Winter/Spring 1955)]. 6" x 8%" (varies) stapled (folded) 54-68 pp.

Ed. Cid Corman

Denise Levertov

a note to the Kraus reprint of Origin, Editor Cid Corman tells how Evelyn Schoolman suggested the magazine and paid for the early issues of Series One, which ran from Spring 1951 to Winter 1957 (twenty issues). Corman at that time was conducting a weekly poetry reading on a Boston radio station. In the first series he printed occasional essays, reviews and letters, and some fiction, but the real emphasis was on poetry.

Corman introduced

some

new

poets, got

new

work from

some

estab

lished poets, and printed translations of Artaud, Gottfried Benn, Rene Char, Lorca, and Ungaretti. Of the many poets appearing in the twenty issues of Series One, the most frequent contributors were Paul Blackburn, William Bronk, Paul Carroll, Cid Corman, Robert Cree]ey, Wade Dona

hoe, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Theodore Enslin, David Galler, Irving Layton, Denise Levertov, Samuel French Morse, Charles Olson, Gael Turnbull, and William Carlos Williams. Number 8 was Charles Olson's book, In Cold Hell, in Thicket, printed by Robert Creeley's Divers Press on Majorca. A fourteen-issue second series,

720

running from April 1961 to July 1964,

and

a twenty-issue third series, running from April 1966 to January 1971, carried many of the poets who had figured prominently in the

first series. In each issue of Series Two and Three of space was devoted to a featured

generous amount

poet (occasionally a group).

particular

The best way to describe Origin is simply to list the featured writers issue by issue. In Series Two, there were special concentrations of work from Louis Zukofsky, Gary Snyder, Zeami Motokiyo, Margaret Avison, Robert Kelly, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Gael Turnbull, Cid Corman, Robert Duncan, Francis Ponge, Perse, Dadelsen, Frank Samperi, Roberto Sanesi, and Basho. In Series Three, Corman featured work by himself, Lorine Niedecker, Andre du Bouchet, Kusano Shimpei, William Bronk, Douglas Woolf, Seymour Faust, Josef Albers, Francis Ponge, Rene Daumal, Chuang-tzu, Denis Goacher, Jean Daive, John Taggart, Paul Celan, Daphne Marlatt, Philippe Jaccottet, Jonathan Greene, Frank Samperi, and Hitomaro.

One thousand run was

copies of Origin No.

were

printed; thereafter the print

much smaller. For the second series, 300 copies per issue were

printed, and 200 per issue for the third. Financial help seems to have come mainly from individual patrons. An anthology, The Gist of Origin, 1951-1971, was published by Grossman/Viking in 1975 with an intro duction by Cid Corman. Corman plans to inaugurate a fourth series. The Outsider. New Orleans, La. (no.

1-3, Fall 1961-Spring 1963); Tucson,

Ariz. (no. 4/5, Winter 1968/1969). Vol. I, no. I-Vol. II,

no.

4/5, Fall 1961-Winter 1968/1969 (Mar. 1969).

Irreg. Ed. Jon Edgar Webb.

6" x 9"

no.

1-3 stapled; no. 4/5 perfect

While Jon Edgar Webb

was

102-196 pp.

incarcerated in

Illus.

midwestern

reformatory,

he was

discovered, championed, and published by Whit Burnett, editor of Story (see the February 1936 issue). Webb's gratitude for this recog nition was a major factor in his launching of The Outsider many years later. His perspective as a social "outsider" in turn shaped his editorial policy, as he made clear in No.3, Spring 1963. There he spoke of work ing toward a "representation that would not be just what serious writing was happening cross-country today but what, specifically, talented out siders were doing. And most of the clique-minded writers, no matter how good they are, or validly vital by academic standards, are not especially our kind of writers. Which doesn't make us a clique at all outsiders are totally outside of cliques." A catholic approach characterized the first issue, which featured such diverse authors as Russell Edson, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Langston Hughes, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Kay Boyle, Charles Bukowski, Robert Sward, Colin Wilson, William Burroughs, Judson Crews, G. C. Oden, Jonathan Williams, Gregory Corso, Gael Turnbull, 721

Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gilbert Sorrentino, Walter Lowenfels, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ray Bremser, Mike McClure, Henry Miller, LeRoi Jones, Marvin Bell, Paul Carroll, James Boyer May, Paul Blackburn, Clayton Eshleman, Tuli Kupferberg, and Barbara Moraff. The

Henry Miller/Walter Lowenfels letters were serialized in Nos. 1-3. A sur vey on jazz by Richard B. Allen, Sam B. Charters, E. L. Borenstein, and others appeared in Nos. 2-3. Charles Bukowski's "outsider of the year"

special section highlighted No.3, Spring 1963, and the very moving Ken neth Patchen homage (with contributions by Norman Thomas, Brother Antoninus, Allen Ginsberg, James Boyer May, Harold Norse, Hugh Mac Diarmid, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Meltzer, and Henry Miller) appeared in No. 4/5. Although the later issues featured established authors (Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Merton, Law rence Durrell, and others), a generous number of pages was set aside for then relatively unknown authors (William Wantling, Ian Hamilton Fin lay, Clarence Major, Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, Kay Johnson, Mar cus Grapes, Richard Morris, and others). The Webbs, working as a husband-and-wife team, laboriously set and printed the copy by hand on a Chandler & Price 8" by 12" press. After successfully completing three yearly numbers, they ventured into the production of fine printed books. In 1967 they were given the Type Directors of New York Award for Typography, Type Direction, and Design for a Henry Miller work titled Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel -an endeavor which seriously depleted their limited energies and finances. Five years off schedule, the final double issue was released in 1969. Avail able in hard cover, it was made possible by donations from friends and two small

grants from CCLM and the Fidelis Foundation. The death of

Jon Webb in June 1971 terminated all activities of the press.

(No. 45) commemorates The Out sider and contains an informative essay by Charles Bukowski which details the Webbs's editorial devotion and the difficulties under which they An issue of The Wormwood Review

labored. The Outsider reached a peak circulation of about 3,000. Panache. New York, N.Y. (no. 1/3, 1965-1969); Princeton, N.J. (no. 4-13,

1970-1974); Sunderland, ass. (No. 14, 1975+). No.1, 1965+. Irreg. Ed. Rosalie B. Frank (no. 1-13, 1965-1974); David R. Lemon (no. 14,

1975+). Format varies

(recently 5�" x 8�")

stapled (folded)

64 pp.

(some

longer). No.6, Ed. Richard Kostelanetz, is 8�" X 11" and 176 pp.

founding editor, Rosalie B. Frank, her successor David R. Lenson pointed out that "she invested-and lost-thousands of dollars of her own in order to pay contributors, print generous quantities of In a tribute to the late

722

each issue. and still keep the price of the magazine down," while publishing the work of George Chambers, Raymond Federman, Gayl Jones, Richard

Kostelanetz, Charles Aukema, Gary Goss, and Maura Stanton. David Lenson's current plan to produce one issue each year devoted to poetry and one devoted to fiction is a continuation of Frank's policy. Numbers 4-8

(Summer 1970-1972) all dealt exclusively with new fiction,

(1971) was an oversize number (8th" featuring a by

most of it experimental. Number 6

11" and 176

edited

Richard Kostelanetz and

pages), sampling of visual and nonlinear fiction. Panache No. 10 (Summer 1972), co-published with December magazine, was a perfect bound edition of George Chambers's novel The Bonnyclabber. During David R. Lenson's tenure as poetry editor, the poetry issues of Panache included contributions from Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, Richard Kostelanetz, Edwin Brock, John Koethe, Philip Dacey, Edwin Honig, Gayl Jones, Lyn Lifshin, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence P. Spingarn, and others. One interesting characteristic of the poetry issues is the presence of contributions from authors primarily associated with fiction and experi x

mental fiction. Panache has received aid from CCLM and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. Recent circulation is 700

(down from a peak

of 1,000). The Paris Review. Paris, France (no. 1-46, Spring

1953-Spring 1973); New

York, N. Y. (no. 57, Spring 1974+). Vol. I, no. 1, Spring 1953+. Irreg. (now qy.). Ed. George Plimpton; Peter Matthiessen

(Summer 1953+); Donald Hall

(Summer 1953-Autumn 1953); 1954); Robert B. Silvers Maxine Blair Fuller Groffsky (Winter (Spring 1956+); (Spring 1958+); 1971 +}; Lawrence M. Bensky (Spring 1966-Summer 1968); Peter Ardery (Fall 1968-Spring 1973) [the continuing editors do not all appear in every issue] 120-224 pp. 5l;4" x 8lh" no.1-56: sewn; no. 57+: perfect Index 1953-1963 in Winter/Spring 1964 (10th Anniversary Number). (Summer 1953+);

Harold

L. Humes

William Pene du Bois (Summer 1953-Summer

premise that creative per magazine primacy has printed poetry and fiction as well as "portfolio" reproductions and photos of artwork by Picasso, Zev, Kokoschka, Giacometti, ChagalI, and

Paris Review

was

founded in

formance has

over

1953

the

criticism. From the beginning, the

Pierre Soulages, among others. Even the nonfiction prose has tended more and reminiscences or interviews or biography than

toward notebooks

toward critical essays.

The poetry editorship of Paris Review has undergone interesting changes. Donald Hall held the post from 1953 to 1961, with X. J. Kennedy replac

ing him and filling the position until No. 31 (Winter/Spring 1964). Kennedy's last issue, the tenth anniversary number, contains a "Portfolio 723

of New Poetry" by some poets who are

"among those writers whom this

magazine has helped make known"-John Hollander, Christopher Middle ton, Donald Justice, X. J. Kennedy, Elizabeth Jennings, James Wright, Louis Simpson, Robert Pack, James Dickey, Charles Tomlinson, Adrienne Rich, George Mackay Brown, Robert Bly, Geoffrey Hill, W. S. Merwin

Robert Mezey, Henri Coulette, Donald Hall, Philip Booth, Donald Peter sen, and Robert Layzer. From 1964 to

1974, Tom Clark was poetry editor

and the New York poets dominated the magazine (even, at times, the fiction

section). From

1974 to 1978, Michael Benedikt was poetry editor; he continued the New York emphasis but with special focus upon the prose poem. In

1978, Jonathan Galassi, an editor for Houghton Mifflin, took

over the poetry

editorship.

The most popular features of Paris Review, and certainly the elements which most people associate with the magazine, have been the regular interviews with novelists, poets, and playwrights. Beginning with an E. M. Forster interview in No.1, discussions with novelists (less frequently with poets), have been published in every issue. These Paris Review interviews have been collected in several volumes (four by mid-1977) and published by Viking Press. Paris Review has a circulation of 8,000 to of

10,000, with single-copy sales 2,500. According to the editors, "Funding is derived from state and

national grants,

SUbscriptions, advertising in the magazine, patrons, and proceeds from the sale of a series of poster prints the magazine commis sioned in 1966." Paris Review has also received grants from CCLM. Parnassus: Poetry in Review. New York, N. Y.

Vol. I, no. 1, Fall/Winter 1972+. Semiannual. Ed. Herbert Leibowitz.

6" x 91,4"

sewn/perfect

200-550 pp.

Index Vol. I-II (Fall/Winter

1972-Spring/Summer 1974) in Vol. II, no. 2; index Vol. III-IV (FalljWinter 1974-Spring/Summer 1976) in Vol. IV, no. 2.

In the fifth anniversary issue of Parnassus, Editor Herbert Leibowitz, explaining his decision to print only criticism and commentary and no original poems, describes his view of Parnassus as "a kind of Hyde Park Corner where poets and critics of all persuasions-the solemn advocate, the debunker, the passionate idealist, the scholar, the crank, the rehabili tator of a neglected reputation-can gather and discuss with freedom, wit, partisanship, and objectivity issues, trends, and new and old books." The files of this bulky magazine (a typical issue carries more than twenty review essays, most of them substantial in length and depth) perhaps con stitute the best key we have to the range of interests of 1970s poets and critics. Emphasis is overwhelmingly on discussion of individual poets or groups of poets linked according to nationality, race, or language: Aztec,

Swedish, Greek, Russian, American Indian, Chinese, Yiddish, Latin Amer ican, African, black American, and English. 724

1976, the American bicentennial year, the Fall/Winter issue printed unlikely sources as Time of Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T. S. magazine) Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Edna Millay, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Robert Duncan, W. S. Merwin, James Merrill, Kenward Elmslie, and Weldon Kees, as well as the blues, In

reviews (some from the past and from such

black poets, and the prose-poem in America. More often, though, the central tendency of the magazine is toward reviews of new work by the

regularly practicing American poets who are generally known to readers of contemporary poetry: Diane Wakoski, John Hollander, Denise Lever tov, Howard Nemerov, and Robert Creeley, among many others. Since poets generally are committed readers of new poetry, it is not sur

prising that many of the Parnassus review essays are written by poets. These poet reviewers include Colette Inez, William Meredith, Muriel Rukeyser, Richard Howard, Hayden Carruth, Adrienne Rich, Diane Wakoski, John Ashbery, X. J. Kennedy, John Hollander, Anselm Hollo, and Howard Nemerov. Parnassus has featured occasional special

sections, notably the "Garland

for Charles Ives" (l00 pages by ten authors in Spring/Summer 1975) and the "Tribute to Virgil Thomson on His 81 st Birthday" (125 pages by fifteen

contributors, including Thomson, in Spring/Summer 1977, the fifth anni versary issue). In this same anniversary issue, Editor Herbert Leibowitz

suspended his usual policy and printed poems by authors who had con tributed review articles to Parnassus. Parnassus has received aid from CCLM, the New York State Council on

the Arts, and CUNY-College of Staten Island. Partisan Review. New York, N.Y. (Feb.jMar. 1934-Summer 1963); Rutgers

University, Rutgers, N.J. (Fall 1963-Summer 1978); Boston University, Boston, Mass (Fall 1978+). Vol. I, no. 1, Feb.!Mar. 1934+. Freq. varies (now qy.). Editorial board for no. 1: Nathan Adler, Edward Dahlberg, Joseph Free man, Sender Garlin, Alfred Hayes, Milton Howard, Joshua Kunitz, Louis

Lozowick, Leonard Mins, Wallace Phelps, Philip Rahv, and Edwin Rolfe [edited by committee until Oct. 1936, then reorganized Dec. 1937: Ed. F. W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, George L. K. Morris, William Phillips, and Philip Rahv; then continues with some shifts; Rahv was an editor until

6" x 9"

1969; Phillips remains an editor in 1978].

Feb./Mar. 1934-May 1948: sewn; Nov. 1948+: perfect

about

160 pp. Annual index; index 1934-1965

by Elizabeth Wright

in AMS

reprint

edition. Partisan Review's most

distinguishing

feature in

the

late

forties, the

fifties, and the early sixties was its essentially eclectic view of literature as well as a liberal socialism, and later a liberal academic stance, in politics. Its

original editorial board

after the first issue

(Philip Rahv, William 725

Phillips, F. W. Dupee, Mary McCarthy, George L. K. Morris, and Dwight Macdonald) was amended in 1943 when Macdonald was replaced by Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz served on the editorial board until 1946 and then was associate editor until 1955. Under Schwartz's influence Partisan Review moved

more toward literature-though still strongly eclectic. the Against background of literature and alienation emphasized by

Philip

Rahv, Partisan published poetry and prose by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Durrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Randall Jarrell, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow, and political, social, and cultural essays by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Irving Howe, Stephen Spender, Ernest Nagel, and C. Wright Mills. Contributions by Sidney Hook, F. O. Matthiessen, Nigel Dennis, Ernest Simmons, Andre Gide, George Orwell, Eric Bentley, Newton Arvin, and F. R. Leavis all indicate the range Partisan presented before 1960. Harold Rosenberg's art criticism first appeared in Partisan, which was also the first magazine in the United States to publish T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets ("East Coker" in Vol. VII, No.3, May/June 1940, and "The Dry Salvages in Vol. VIII, No.3, May/June 1941). Partisan Review was also important for its continued focus on political comment. Articles on "The Future of Socialism" by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in 1947 (Vol. XIX, No.3), "The Leninist Myth of Imperialism" by Raymond Aron in 1951 (Vol. XVIII, No.6), Hannah Arendt's "Understanding Communism" in 1953 (Vol. XX, No.5), a 1954 review by Dwight Macdonald entitled "McCarthy and His Apologists" (Vol. XXI, No.4), and a series of anti Stalinist articles titled "The Crisis in Communism," with commentary by Hungarian, Polish, and French critics (Vol. XXIV, No.1, Winter 1957) all give a clear indication of Partisan Review's close watch on the politics of the fifties.

Political awareness has remained strong in recent issues of the magazine. The extent of this concern in recent years is shown

by a

1964 critique,

"Some Comments on Senator Goldwater" (Vol. XXXIV, No.1) and the following symposiums: "The Cold War and the West" in 1962 (Vol. XXIX,

No.1); "What's Happening to America" in 1967 (Vol. XXXIV, No.1); "Black Power: A Discussion" in 1968 (Vol. XXXV, No.2); and "Art, Culture, and Conservatism" in 1972 (Vol. XXXIX, No.3). Another aspect of Partisan's significance was the fact that it served as a meeting ground, a common denominator, for a notable New York literary coterie of the fifties that included Larry Rivers, Frank O'Hara, Bill Berk son, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Several Partisan Review anthologies-The Partisan Reader (1946), The New Partisan Reader (1953), and The Partisan Review Anthology (1962) -offer an excellent survey of the magazine's blend of poets, short story writers, and essayists on literature and the social sciences. As recently as 1977, Partisan was printing fiction and poetry by both the old guard and 726

the new, many of them writers who had already been certified by other

publications: Delmore Schwartz, Donald Barthelme, Harry Mathews, Michael Brownstein, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Duncan, as well as John Hollander, William Stafford, and Richard Elman. (Guest editors are now responsible for much of the poetry published, among them Michael Anania, Paul Zweig, and, more recently, John Ashbery.) Partisan also continues to carry a wide range of provocative articles: on Freud, on films and literature, on Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, on John Berryman and booze, and on communism at Harvard-plus symposiums on popular art and culture in New York.

Circulation is about 8,500. Partisan Review has received grants from CCLM. Pembroke Magazine. Pembroke State College, Pembroke, N. C.

No.1, 1969+. Annual. Editorial director: Norman Macleod. 6" x 9"

perfect

48-372 pp.

Illus.

Cumulative index for no. 1-4, 1969-1973. Pembroke Magazine is interested in ethnic and regional literature and art

with

emphasis on American Indians,

black

Americans, and North

Carolina writers and artists. Among the American Indian poets in Pem broke have been Grey Cohoe, Duane Niatum, R. C. Gorman, Ray Young

Bear, and Norman H. Russell. No.3 printed nine poems by the Acoma poet Simon J. Ortiz; No. 5 contained a substantial "Conversation with Frank Waters

American Indian

Religion." Editor Norman Macleod

has also published poets from the British Isles-Hugh MacDiarmid, J. F.

Hendry, and W. S. Graham; biographical materials on Robert McAlmon and Norman Holmes Pearson; a special Scottish literary supplement edited from Edinburgh, Scotland; and a sizable collection of letters from William Carlos Williams to Macleod. In addition to university support from Pembroke State

University, Pem

broke has received grants from CCLM and the North Carolina Arts Coun cil. Circulation is 1,500.

Poetry. Chicago, Ill. VoI.I,no.l,Oct.1912+.My. Ed. Harriet Monroe (Oct. 1912-0ct. 1936); Morton Dauwen Zabel (Nov. 1936-0ct. 1937); George Dillon (Nov. 1937-Aug. 1942; Vol. LXVIII, Apr.-Sep. 1946-Vol. LXXIII, Oct. 1948-Mar. 1949); Peter DeVries (Sep. 1942-Vol. LXVII, Oct. 1945-Mar. 1946); Jessica Nelson North (Sep. 1942-June 1943); Marion Strobel (Apr. 1943-Vol. LXXIII, Oct. 1948-Mar. 1949); Margedant Peters (Vol. LXVIII, Apr.-Sep. 1946Vol. LXIX, Oct. 1946-Mar.

1947); John Frederick Nims (Vol. LXVIII,

Apr.-Sep. 1946-Vol. LXXI, Oct. 1947-Mar. 1948; Jan. 1978+); Hayden 727

Carruth

(Vol. LXXIV, Apr.-Sep. 1949-Jan. 1950); Karl Shapiro (Feb. 1950-Sep. 1955); Henry Rago (Oct. 1955-June 1969); Daryl Hine (July 1969-Dec. 1977). 5112." x 8" (Mar. 1971+: 51h." x 9") sewn (Aug./Sep. 1970+: perfect 70pp. Indexed by volume (semiannual); index Vol. I-LX (Oct. 1912-Sep. 1942); index Vol. I-C (1912-1962) compiled by Elizabeth Wright for AMS reprint edition. Poetry has continued its unbroken monthly publication since 1912, and has presented work by every major American poet from Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens to John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Louis Zukofsky. It has produced a number of special issues on the poetry of France, Italy, Greece, Japan, India, and Israel, on the dissident poets of the U.S.S.R., and on poetry against the war in Vietnam. The magazine has continued its policy of printing reviews as well as poetry.

Poetry is supported primarily by subscriptions and by its board of trustees. It has also received support from various foundations (Ingram Merrill,

BoIIingen, and others), as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and CCLM. Circulation is currently be tween 7,500 and 8,000 (single copy sales from 500 to 600). An index of Volumes I to LX appears in Poetry itself. AMS has also published an index of volumes I to C, 1912-1962. Houghton Mifflin recently brought

anthology of poems selected from Poetry (1912-1977) by former editor Daryl Hine. out an

Poetry Northwest. Seattle, Wash. Vol. I, no. 1, June 1959+. Qy. Editorial board for

no.

1: Errol

Pritchard, chairman; Nelson Bentley,

Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, Edith Shiffert [from no. 2 the board under went

changes; then Ed. Carolyn Kizer (Spring 1964-Summer 1966);

David Wagoner (Autumn 1966+)]. 5Yz

x 81h.

stapled (folded)

48-56 pp.

Poetry Northwest has had, in effect, only two editors: Carolyn Kizer (as part of an editorial board) and, beginning with Vol. VII, No.3 (Autumn 1966), David Wagoner. Each issue contains 48 or 56 pages of poetry by a

dozen to a dozen-and-a-half poets.

Poetry Northwest does not feature

a good essays, reviews, or fiction; it has printed verse in translation and extended of length. deal of English poetry. Very rarely does it print poems included in recent issues are Joyce Carol Oates, James Some of the

poets

B. Hall,

Ray Young Bear, John Unterecker, Harold Will, Arthur Vogel

Pack, Naomi Clark, Felix Pollak, Samuel Hazo, Constance Urdang, Philip Dacey, Albert Goldbarth, Sonya Dorman, and Philip Booth. Since 1962, the Poetry Northwest Helen Bullis Prize has been awarded to Hayden Carruth, John Logan, Donald Finkel, Mona Van Duyn, Richard Hugo, Winfield Townley Scott and Katie Louchheim, sang, Robert

728

Sandra McPherson and Gwen Head, Eugene Ruggles, Will Stubbs, Ken neth O. Hanson and Jack Tootell, Lewis Turco and Tom Wayman, Richard Hugo (again), Adrien Stoutenberg and Lisel Mueller, Dan Mas terson and Paul Zimmer, John Allman, Greg Kuzma, John Taylor, and Diana 0 Hehir. Some winners of the magazine's Theodore Roethke Prize

have been Richard Hugo, William Stafford, Carolyn Stoloff, John Woods,

Philip Booth,

Mark

McCloskey,

and

Greg Kuzma, while the Young Joseph

Poet's Prize, initiated in 1973, has been given to Greg Kuzma, di Prisco, Thomas Brush, Judith Small, and Stephen Jaech.

Circulation is approximately 2,000. Since 1966, the magazine has been partially supported by the University of Washington Graduate School. Other support has come from CCLM. The Prairie Schooner. University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Neb.

Vol. I, no. 1, Jan. 1927+. Qy. Ed. Lowry Charles Wimberly (Jan. 1927-Fall 1956); Karl Shapiro (Winter 1956-Winter 1962/1963); Bernice Slote (Spring 1963+) [for Spring 1963 Frederick L. Christensen, Virginia Faulkner, and Lee T. Lemon were members, with Bernice Slote, of a board of editors]' 6% x 9% perfect 96 pp. Indexed by volume. "

The Prairie Schooner began as "an outlet for literary work in the Univer

sity of Nebraska and a medium for the publication of the finest writing of the prairie country," but it soon found itself a national publication both in readership and in contributors. Lowry Charles Wimberly, editor from 1927 to 1956 and the man most closely identified with the maga zine, decided not to maintain strict local boundaries. The magazine has, however, tried to remain essentially national rather than international in scope. In its first thirty years, Prairie Schooner presented the first pub lished work of over 300 writers, including that of Weldon Kees, Jesse Stuart, and Jessamyn West. Later editors Karl Shapiro (1956--1963) and Bernice Slote (1963 to the present) have maintained the mixture of national, and sometimes inter national, literature with more local midwestern concerns. In recent years Prairie Schooner has done

special issues on such themes as children's

poetry, little magazines, and women and tragedy, and special numbers on Willa Cather and Wright Morris. Volume XL, No.4 (Winter 1966), the fortieth anniversary number,

presented a number of selections from

early issues of Prairie Schooner. Prairie Schooner is supported by the University of Nebraska English de

partment, the University of Nebraska Press, and private grants. Circu lation is 1,500. Prose. New York, N.Y. No. 1-9, [Fall] 1970--Fall 1974. 2/yr.

Coburn Britton, publisher.

729

5�" x 8%" sewn 159-251 pp. No. 4-9 contain cumulative indexes. Prose was

a beautiful magazine-spare and elegant in appearance, with unfailingly urbane tone which frequently made its contents seem a transcription of impossibly brilliant conversation. There were essays on fashionable topics (neuroses, the American liberal/intellectual establish ment); on artistic culture, high and low (Stephen Orgel's "Inigo Jones on Stonehenge," Donald Phelps on Dick Tracy); and on the special interests one might find among a group of educated people (writing dictionary electronic definitions, music, ancient Anglo-Saxon cures and remedies). A good deal of space in Prose was given over to memoirs, autobiography, and reminiscences of such persons as Margaret Anderson, Glenway Wes an

cott, Sanche de Gramont, Daryl Hine, Allen Tate, Paul Bowles, Elizabeth

Hardwick, Jack Sullivan, Alfred Kazin, Donald Davie, Paul Horgan, Charles Newman, Annie Dillard, Richard Howard, and Edouard Roditi. Then there were general essays by interesting prose stylists like Djuna

Barnes, Reynolds Price, and Edward Dahlberg (who appeared in eight of nine issues), essays on art and literature by Richard Howard, Kay Boyle, Howard Nemerov, Harold Rosenberg, Robin Magowan, Henri Peyre, Virgil Thomson, John Hollander, and Howard Moss. Finally, there were essays on specific artists and literary figures and their works: W. H. Auden G. K. Chesterton, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens and on Brown

ing's

"Childe

Roland," Anthony Burgess

Shakespeare's marriage,

Parker Tyler on Ronald Firbank, John Hollander on Thomas Cole, Marius

Bewley on Disraeli's writing, Robert Payne on T. E. Lawrence's prose, Phelps on Melville's Pierre, Paul Schmidt on Rimbaud, Richard Howard on Emily Dickinson, James Kraft on Henry James, Edward Foote on Ezra Pound, Stephen Koch on Andy Warhol, Donald Phelps on Edith Donald

Wharton, Wallace Fowlie on Jean Cocteau, Paul Metcalf on Charles Olson,

Hussey on Joseph Cornell, Howard Nemerov on Dante. The emphasis in most of these essays was upon biographical and societal factors impinging upon the artist, thus bringing us back to the autobiographical contributions mentioned earlier and completing a unified, organic collec tion of essays, always urbane and sophisticated and never dull. Prose was a magazine whose simple elegance in appearance suited the familiar ease Howard

and accomplishment of its contents.

Quarterly Review of Literature. Chapel Hill, N. C. (Autumn 1943-Sum mer 1944); New Haven, Conn. (Fall 1944-1947); Bard College, An nandale-on-Hudson, N. Y. (1947-1968); Princeton University, Prince ton, N. J. (1969+). Vol. I, no. 1, Autumn 1943+. Qy. Ed. Warren

Carrier

(Autumn

1943-Summer

1944); Theodore Weiss

(Winter 1944+); Renee Weiss ([ 1946] +). perfect no. of pp. varies (double nos. about 250 pp.). Index by volume for Vol. I-XV, 1943-1968. 514" x 814"

730

Quarterly Review of Literature was begun at the University of North Carolina in 1943 by Warren Carrier. After a year of publication, Car rier left for the war in Europe and Theodore and Renee Weiss took permanent control of the magazine, which published poetry. fiction, essays, and reviews. According to Theodore Weiss in the 1974 retro over

spective issue (Vol. XIX, Nos. 1-2), his interests as editor were set on "stimulation and innovation rather than on consolidation, evaluation, and

scholarly taste-making." Also eschewed were "the overtly political and the social." A significant modification of policy occurred in 1949 when, in reaction against a common opinion that this was an era for secondary and critical work rather than creative

production, Quarterly Review of

Literature turned its pages over entirely to poetry, fiction, and drama (except for whatever critical-biographical matter might be included in

special issues). Quarterly Review of Literature's expressed areas of interest are poetry, fiction, and special issues devoted to major writers like Franz Kafka, Ezra Pound, Giacomo Leopardi, Friedrich Holderlin, Paul Valery, and Eugenio Montale, who are felt to be "inadequately known or under stood." For more than thirty years, the magazine has made a point of printing novellas, plays, long stories, and large selections of an individual writer's work, thus providing an outlet for a good deal of longer work that simply could not be produced by many small magazines. For a time it managed to do this by printing two double issues each year, one for prose and one for poetry.

Persons interested in the achievements of Quarterly Review of Literature

should consult the three large retrospective issues covering poetry, fic tion, and special authors-the three special concerns of Quarterly Review

of Literature: Vol. XIX, Nos. 1-2 (1974), which is devoted to poetry and reprints 146 contributors; Vol. XIX, Nos. 3-4 (1975), which re prints prose selections from 31 contributors; Vol. XX, Nos. 1-2 (1976), which includes large chunks from the writers; and Vol XX, Nos. 3-4 (1977),

special issues devoted to major 345-page eclectic retrospective

with 32 authors. Aside from some matching-funds grants, Quarterly Review of Literature has at times received support from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Cir culation varies from 1,500 to 3,000 copies, according to the issue. The editors' present intent is to shift to "larger publication," by which is meant "whole volumes of poetry,

poetic plays, novellas, translations, etc.

in each issue."

Salmagundi: A Quarterly of the Humanities & Social Sciences. Flushing, N. Y. (Fall 1965-Spring 1969); Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N. Y. (FalllWinter 1970+). Vol. I, no. I, Fall 1965+. Qy. Editor-in-chief Robert Boyers. 51A" x 81A"

sewn

about 150 pp.

(double issues over 300 pp.).

Index no. 1-30 (Fall 1965-Summer 1975) issued separately.

731

Robert

Boyers began Salmagundi

time when

many writers

and

intellectuals were intensely interested in politics and in the politics of culture. The subject index to issues 1-30 (FaU 1965-Summer

1975), indi

cates how various that interest has

been, listing items under such head as art books in ings aesthetics, works, review, contemporary culture, cul ture criticism, film, history and sociology, literary criticism, memoirs, poems, philosophy, plays, politics, psychology and psychoanalysis, stories. Special numbers, issued about once each year, have focused upon sub

jects as diverse as "The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals," "R. D. Laing and Anti-Psychiatry," "Contemporary Poetry in America," "Dance," and "On Liars and Lying," among others. In a preface to the tenth anniversary issue (Fall 1975), Christopher Lasch stresses Salmagundi's sympathy for the political left and the spirit of scrupulous detachment in the face of calls for militant engagement. He contrasts the magazine's championing of critical thinking with the "fa miliar academic evasion," false objectivity, and modish "obscurantism" of more mandarin journals similarly catering to professor-intellectuals. In its willingness to argue issues and to demand that positions be taken, Salmagundi has invited a wide range of responses without pretending to be equally taken with every new voice and every passing ideological fancy. Despite the intermittent emphasis upon the social sciences and upon their relationship with the humanities, broadly defined, Salmagundi has been fundamentally a literary magazine. At least half the categories in the subject index can be subsumed under the heading "Literature and the arts," while many of the entries in other areas refer to topics and figures often associated with literature, literary criticism, and the arts. There are some 65 entries under "Literary Criticism" and over 200 poems by 79 poets in the "Poems" category. Since the subject index was published in 1975, Salmagundi has revealed a stronger commitment to publish younger poets along with discussions of their work. Especially interesting is the number on "Contemporary Poetry in Amer ica" (No. 22-23, Spring-Summer 1973), a 315-page anthology with essays by Howard Nemerov, John Bayley, M. L. Rosenthal, and others; long interviews with poets like Stanley Kunitz, W. D. Snodgrass, and Galway Kinnell; and new poems by Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Robert Penn Warren, A. R. Ammons, et al. The most recent (Spring 1977) of the two special issues on Robert Lowell includes close readings by Helen Vendler, Robert Hass, G. S. Fraser, and others, and a reply to his critics written by Lowell shortly before his death. The issue on Saul Bellow features a long interview with the novelist in which he discusses not only his writing but the cultural climate in general, and his attitudes to ward psychoanalysis and a variety of contemporary controversies. What ever its focus, Salmagundi regularly manages to see the literary occasion as closely related to other "modern occasions." Circulation is 2,500-3,000 for general issues and 3,000-6,000 for special 732

issues. Though it began as a private journal, since 1969 Salmagundi has been funded by Skidmore College. The Seventies: see The Fifties. The Sewanee Review. University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.

Vol. I, no. 1, Nov. 1892+. Qy. Ed. Telfair Hodgson

(Nov. 1892-Aug. 1893); William P. Trent (Nov. 1893-July 1900); Benjamin W. Wens (Jan. 1897-?1898); J. B. Henne man (Oct. 1900-Jan. 1909); B. J. Ramage (Oct. 1900; then Assoc. Ed.); John M. McBryde, Jr. (Jan. 1910-0ct. 1919); George Herbert Clarke (Jan. 1910-0ct. 1925); Seymour Long (Jan. 1926-?Apr. 1926); Wil liam S. Knickerbocker (Jan. 1926-July /Sep. 1942); Tudor S. Long (Act ing Ed.: Oct./Dec. 1942-July/Sep. 1944); Allen Tate (Oct./Dec. 1944July /Sep. 1946); J. E. Palmer (Oct./Dec. 1946-July/Sep. 1952); Monroe K. Spears Oct./Dec. 1952-July /Sep. 1961); Andrew Lytle (Oct.j/Dec, 1961-0ct.lDec. 1973); George Core (Jan.z'Mar. 1974+). 5�" x 8112" sewn 175-200 pp. (varies widely). Indexed by volume; index Vol. I-X (Nov. 1892-0ct. 1902) in Vol. X. After

eighty-five years of publication, The Sewanee Review remains a leading American critical journal. In 1974, the present editor, George Core, expressing a determination to continue Sewanee Review's "estab lished commitment to humane letters in the Western world," defined the

ongoing general subject areas of the magazine: "By and large the focus will be upon Anglo-American literature from 1500 to the present, with the emphasis on modern literature and with latitude for classical and

European letters." Although Sewanee would continue to publish fiction and poetry, "the accent will remain critical (with slightly greater stress upon literary history than in the immediate past)" (Winter 1974). The accent on criticism noted by Core had grown increasingly important during the editorship of Allen Tate, when Sewanee Review was most in fluential as a new critical journal. A clear statement of some of its fun damental attitudes is found in a seventy-fifth anniversary year article, "An Earthen Vessel" by William Ralston (Vol. LXXV, No.3, July/ September 1967): "We are doing everything we can to provide a place where the unity and the continuity of writing in English can be cele brated-in verse, in fiction, and in criticism. We intend to publish the traditional and familiar meaning which form affirms in writing any of words." Thus the close readings associated with the new critical ap proach to literature are tied to a respect for traditional forms and their continuous adaptation to new demands in new times. .

In 1977, critical essays in the Sewanee Review still discuss Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Kenneth Burke as well as southern writers (John Crowe Ransom, William Faulkner, and others).

Along with selected poetry and fiction, recent issues have carried essays and comments by distinguished literary critics such as Samuel Hynes, Denis Donoghue, Wylie Sypher, William Walsh, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. 733

Shenandoah. Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Va. Vol. I, no. 1, Spring 1950+. 3/yr (then qy.). Ed.

1: J. J.

Donovan, D. C. G. Kerr, and T. K. Wolfe, Jr.; then frequent changes until Ed. James Boatwright (Autumn 1962+). no.

6" x 9"

stapled (folded)/sewn/perfect

about 100 pp. (up to 175 pp.).

Annual index; Vol. I-IX index in Vol. XI, no. 1, Autumn 1959. In Spring 1950 Washington and Lee

University published the first issue

of Shenandoah, very much an academic literary magazine. Editors J. J. Donovan, D. C. G. Kerr, and T. K. Wolfe, Jr., divided the issue into three short stories, three poems, and utors included John Dos were

Passos,

few essays and reviews. Contrib

B. S.

Ford, and John Bowen; reviewed Fergusson's The Idea

T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party and Francis

of a Theatre, although most of the contributions were by students and advisers to the magazine. Shenandoah achieved editorial stability with the Autumn 1962 issue when, after a period that had seen a new editor for each issue, James Boatwright became permanent editor.

During his tenure, the magazine, while main taining its special interest in southern literature, has offered a cosmo politan selection of essays, poems, and fiction. Special issues have ranged from Yeats and Ireland to Greek literature and culture.

Especially inter esting are the Winter 1967 "Tribute to W. H. Auden" on his sixtieth birthday and the Winter 1976 "Symposium on Fiction," with comments by Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Grace Paley, and Walker Percy. Some indication of the magazine's quality is gained by examining the twentieth anniversary issue (Vol. XXI, No.3, Spring 1970), which in cludes fiction by Joyce Carol Oates and Guy Cardwell; poems by twenty two authors including W. H. Auden, Philip Booth, Richard Eberhart, Richard Howard, Maxine Kumin, William Meredith, James Merrill, Howard Nemerov, Robin Skelton, Stephen Spender, C. P. Cavafy, Dab ney Stuart, Julian Symons, Peter Viereck, and John Wain; essays by Roy Fuller, Hugh Kenner, Monroe K. Spears, G. S. Fraser, and Cleanth

Brooks; a notebook by Theodore Roethke; and three plays by Peter Tay lor. All these contributors had appeared previously in Shenandoah. Shenandoah has received grants from CCLM and the Virginia Commis sion of the Arts and Humanities, as well as support from Washington and

Lee University and individual benefactors. Circulation in 1967 was 1,600. The Sixties: see The Fifties. The Smith. New York, N. Y.

15 Feb. 1964+. Irreg. Ed. Harry Smith.

Format varies

(often 6"

9")

stapled/sewn/perfect

up to 250 pp.

(varies). Although The Smith has asserted certain defensible preferences-for the work of the "generalist" opposed to that of the specialist; for a populist

734

poetry both generally understandable and yet aesthetically valuable; and for an organic aesthetic leading to a constantly changing magazine rather

in-group journal-one comes away from most issues re membering chiefly the ornery attacks on, apparently, just about every one. The "generalist" stance seems to set The Smith against all the groups and schools. Robert Bly and all who are associated with him are attacked as vigorously as the Beat poets and the New York School. At times the than

static

attacks are vitriolic (as when Diane Wakoski is called "banal, mediocre")

and almost libelous (as when Bly is called "Hitlerian"). Yet there is usually a genuine critical stance behind the sensational evaluations. Given its own orientation, it is reasonable for The Smith to attack the

murky, oddly located "deep images" of Robert Bly. Also The Smith and H. L. VanBrunt are exceptionally good at isolating the most muddled and laughable lines from volumes of poetry. This talent gives many of their reviews a concrete quality that is quite convincing. The poetry in The Smith is unassuming. Issue No. 12 (1971), "The Smith Poets," is a 262-page volume featuring the work of Gene Fowler, Sam Cornish, Irene Schram, Theodore Sloan, Charles M. Wyatt, Karen Swen son, and Jonathan Morse. Issue No. 17 (February 1975) is an anthology of "Eleven New Poets"

(Charles Potts, T. E. Porter, Richard Morris,

Bill

Costley, Frank Rios, Jared Smith, Gary Livingston, James Ryan Morris, Stephen Philbrick, Reginald Berry, and Rod Townley). Probably The Smith's principal contribution to literature is the rediscovery of James T. Farrell in 1965. The magazine has carried a number of interesting attacks upon methods used in recent government funding of magazines. H. L. VanBrunt wrote

scathing attacks upon the parochialism and arrogance of the editors of the American Literary Anthologies I and II, financed by the National Endowment for the Arts, while summarizing the contents as "the sorry product of a clique of mediocrities." Curt Johnson, editor of December, contributed a twenty-five-page essay on the program of aid to magazines through the NEA and its organ, CCLM. Elsewhere Harry Smith attacks the institutionalization of magazine editing, even among the underground presses, so that common cause deteriorates into absorption by the es tablishment. Anyone interested in The Smith's stance on issues in this area should consult its subsidiary publication, The Newsletter on the State of Culture, which often features the witty observations of Sidney Bernard. Circulation of The Smith varies from 1,700 to 2,500 on regular issues; there

are

about 1,000 subscribers, half of them institutional.

Revenue

from sales and individual contributions through The Generalist Associa

tion, Inc., accounts for all funding of the magazine. The Southern Review. The Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, La. New Series, Vol. I, no. 1, Jan. 1965+. Qy.

Ed. Lewis P. Simpson; Donald E. Stanford.

6Y:z" x 9%

sewn/perfect

225 pp.

Yearly index. 735

Co-editors Lewis P. Simpson and Donald E. Stanford, with Associate Editor Rima Drell Reck, revived The Southern Review in some

1965,

twenty-three years after its predecessor had ceased publishing, Although the magazine has printed a substantial amount of new poetry and fic tion (in 1966, for example, the short-story version of John Gardner's Nickel Mountain and several sketches from N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn appeared), its central feature has been literary criticism and essays, particularly by academic critics. Among the essayists and re viewers contributing to New Series Vol. I were Graham Hough, Austin Warren, Malcolm Cowley, T. R. Henn, Milton Hindus, Glauco Cambon, Marius Bewley, Cleanth Brooks, David Daiches, Donald Davidson, James F. Feibleman, Robert B. Heilman, Frederick J. Hoffman, Hugh Kenner, Max Lerner, Harry Levin, Samuel French Morse, Kathleen Raine, Allen Tate, Leonard Unger, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty. In 1977 Southern Review still featured solid academic critical writing (by such writers as William Arrowsmith, Cleanth Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Eberhart, C. Hugh Holman, Martin Turnell, Ian Watt, and Rene Wel lek), supplemented by verse from such established poets as Elizabeth Daryush, Roy Fuller, Thorn Gunn, and Robert Penn Warren and short stories from writers such as Carolyn Gordon and David Madden. The magazine's southern heritage has revealed itself in some of the special issues and features, notably the April 1975 poetry issue, which was slanted somewhat toward southern poets; the January 1975 "Essays on Self and Society" by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, and others; and the series "Writing in the South," which has run in five separate issues. Less localized special issues or features in recent years have focused on Mark Twain, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, French literature, the sixties, the twenties and thirties, the outsider, and fiction. Southern Review has prepared cumulative indexes for the years 19651971 and for the earlier Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks-Charles W.

Pipkin incarnation of the magazine (1935-1942). Recent circulation

of Southern Review has been about 3,000. It receives support from Loui siana State University and CCLM.

Spectrum. University of California, Santa Barbara, Cal. Vol. J, no. 1, Winter 1957+. Freq. varies. Ed. no. 1: James Bell [changes frequently]. 6" x 9" perfect 42-74 pp. Index Vol. I-XV issued separately. A separately issued index to Spectrum, Vols. I-XV, announced that Vols. XIV and XV had been "awarded first place prize by Coordinating Council

Literary Magazines as best collegiate literary mag. in nation." The

selection was certainly a defensible one. For twenty years Spectrum has combined student and faculty work from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with material from well-known outside contributors. One

736

feels that Spectrum has benefited greatly from having a highly involved faculty Advisory Board which, by the third issue, included Donald Davie and Marvin Mudrick as well as founding advisers Ashley Brown and Hugh

Kenner. According to later testimony in the magazine, Hugh Kenner was

especially responsible for Spectrum's early success. During his half-dozen years with Spectrum the magazine carried several of his contributions, along with the work of such other UCSB professors as Marvin Mudrick, Donald Davie, and Edgar Bowers, as well as a number of distinguished outside contributors including Charles Tomlinson, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Jean Cocteau, and Jules Supervielle. At all times Spectrum mixed the contributions of these authors with those of UCSB students in a

way that enhanced the competent student

writing without detracting

from the professional work.

Among the many other contributors to Spectrum are David Antin, Ray mond Carver, Clark Coolidge, Thomas Cornell, Robert Creeley, Guy Davenport, David Cornel Dejong, Stephen Dobyns, Richard Eberhart, Raymond Federman, Jim Harrison, Robert Kelly, John Knoepfie, Kon stantinos Lardas, Denise Levertov, Wyndham Lewis, Leconte de Lisle, Ron Loewinsohn, Howard McCord, David Meltzer, Deena Metzger, Jose phine Miles, George Oppen, Gilbert Sorrentino, Lucien Stryk, Paul Vangelisti, Philip Whalen, Peter Wild, and Howard Warshaw. Circulation of Spectrum is about 750 copies. Story [no.1-54: (The only magazine) devoted only to the Short Story; no. 55+: The Magazine of the Short Story)]. Vienna, Austria (Apr.jMay 1931-May jJune 1932); Palma (Majorca), Spain (Aug. 1932-Feb. 1933); New York, N. Y. (Apr. 1933+). Vol. I, no. I-Vol. XXXVI, no. 142, Apr.lMay 1931-0ct. 1963 [publi cation suspended between Summer 1948 and Spring 1960], Freq. varies. Ed. Whit Burnett; Martha Foley (Apr. 1931-0ct. 1941); Hallie Burnett (Spring 1948-0ct. 1963); Eleanor Gilchrist (Spring 1948-Summer 1948); William Peden (Spring 1960-Nov. 1961); Richard Wathen (Nov. 1960-Nov. 1961). No. 1-129: 6�" x9'h"

80-148 pp.

No. 130-142: 5'h" x 8�"

no.

1: mimeo.

98-128 pp.

Indexed.

recognized as a magazine of distinction. Ed (by Kay Boyle, Whit Burnett, Oliver its first issue for The Best Short from and Martha Gossman, Foley) Stories of 1931. Then, in the preface to the 1932 anthology, O'Brien singled out Story as "now the most distinguished short story magazine in the world"-an accolade difficult to challenge in the 1930s and 1940s. Editorial intent was defined in the first number: "The only purpose of Story is to present, regularly, from one place, a number of Short Stories From the outset Story was

ward J. O'Brien selected four stories

of exceptional merit. It has no theories, and is part of no movement.

737

It is not an

anthology, but a sort of proof-book of hitherto unpublished manuscripts. Some of the stories will doubtless appear later in other, perhaps more permanent pages, and the rights remain vested in the authors. Thus the magazine is withheld by the editors from public sale in England and the United States, but may be obtained in Vienna, Paris, Nice, Budapest and Berlin." With the August 1932 number the magazine was made available in the U.S. and England. .

Contributors to the first volume included Laurence Vail, James T. Far

rell, Jose Garcia Villa, Eugene Jolas, Erskine Caldwell, Ralph Manheim, William Carlos Williams, Manuel Komroff, and Alvah C. Bessie. By the end of Vol. V, December 1934, Story had printed Carlton Brown, William March, Conrad Aiken, H. E. Bates, Nelson Algren, William Faulkner, Malcolm Cowley, Sherwood Anderson, William Saroyan, Ivan

Bunin, August Derleth, Malcolm Lowry, James Laughlin, and Jerome Weidman. The next ten volumes, January 1935-November/December 1939, were characterized by the discovery of new writers: Peter DeVries, Gloria Kenison, Jesse Stuart, Jon Edgar Webb, Ludwig Bemelmans, John Cheever, Eric Knight, Wallace E. Stegner, Carson Smith (McCullers), Mark Shorer, Howard (Melvin) Fast, Richard Wright, Budd (Wilson) Schul berg, Tennessee Williams, and Mark Harris. A history of the first five years of Story appeared in No. 45, April 1936. From 1940 through the war years and afterward, the discovery rate for major new talents sharply decreased. Nevertheless, this period saw the appearance in Story of Vivian Connell, J. D. Salinger, Mary O'Hara, Norman K. Mailer (age eighteen), Charles Bukowski, Robert Lowry, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, John D. MacDonald, William Sayres, and others. Issue No. 91, September/October 1941, was entirely devoted to homage to Sherwood

Anderson. With No. 119, May/June 1946, Story shifted to the use of pulp paper. The July/August 1947 issue was dropped, and quarterly publication was

instituted. Soon, however, publication ceased. A series of books titled Story: The Magazine of the Short Story in Book Form was started in 1951, and other book ventures were attempted-for example, Sextet: Six STORY Discoveries in the Novella Form (1951). Sponsored first by the University of Missouri and then by the University of Cincinnati, Story was reactivated as a periodical in 1960, but the spirit of the early vol umes was absent and the magazine was quietly discontinued. During this period, the editors were instrumental in setting up the Association of

Literary Magazines of America (ALMA), the first organization of lit erary magazine publishers in the United States. ALMA was succeeded by

the

Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM), which stilI

functions. The preamble and statement of principles of ALMA appeared in Story, No. 134.

[no. 1-39: A Chronicle of Living Literature; no. 40+: Living Lit erature]. Hollywood, Cal.

Trace

738

No. 1-72173, June 1952-Autumn 1970. Qy. Ed. James Boyer May. 5�"

8%"

1952-1961:

1967+: perfect

stapled (folded); 1961-1966: sewn; 1966/

12-340 pp. (varies widely).

James

Boyer May originally intended Trace as a meeting place where little-magazine editors and writers might exchange ideas. The most im portant feature of his new periodical was a revolving directory of maga zines published in English. A summation in the final issue of Trace (No. 72173, Autumn 1970, pages 417-421) details the growth of the listings from 182 magazines in the first directory (1952) to a combined listing of one thousand magazines and small presses in 1970. The directory, pat terned on the mimeo magazine Galley (1949-1953), was taken up during and after Trace's last years by Len Fulton (the annual International Di rectory of the Little Magazines and Small Presses). In 1961 Trace began to publish poetry, fiction, and graphic art. Its se lection policy was broadly eclectic. Almost no work was solicited, and established writers were evidently discouraged as often as encouraged by Editor May. The broad-based policy was both the strength and the weakness of Trace. May introduced close to eight hundred new writers and brought forward older writers who had been overlooked and under estimated. At the same time, however, Trace was open to a charge of extreme unevenness and of editorial laxity. The chief significance of Trace is the forum it provided for little-maga zine editors and contributors. Beginning in 1952, Trace anticipated the "mimeo revolution" of the later 1950s and 1960s and promoted discus sion of small magazines and presses at a time when they received little other attention. Over the years Trace grew from 16 pages to more than 200 pages per issue. Circulation in its later years averaged around

2,000.

Tri-Quarterly [new series no. 10+: TriQuarterly]. Evanston, III. Vol. I, no. l-Vol. VI, no. 3, Fall 1958-Spring 1964; [new series] no. 1, Fall 1964+. 3/yr. Ed. Edward B. Hungerford (Fall 1958-Spring 1964); [new series]: Charles Newman (Fall 1964-Winter 1975); Elliott Anderson (Spring

1975+). No. 1-12: 61;2" x 10" No. 13+: 6" 256 pp.). Index

perfect/sewn 96-288 pp. Illus. 140-640 pp. (avg. 9�" perfect (a few are sewn)

II1us.

[new series]

no.

1-3 in

no.

4; index no. 4-10 issued separately;

index no. 1-22 issued separately. After a number of years as a Northwestern University magazine

chiefly produced by and for local faculty and students, TriQuarterly was reborn in 1964, beginning again with an issue No.1, augmented in size and 739

scope, with a new editor and a truly international range of interests and contributors. (No. 1 contained work by Stephen Spender, W. B. Yeats, Koz'ma

Prutkov as well as Leslie Fiedler, Lionel Trilling, Richard Brautigan, and William Stafford.) The new TriQuarterly soon began publishing special features; early issues carried sections on "The Quest of Zen," "Humanism vs. Behaviorism," "The Case of James T. Farrell," "Creativity in the Soviet Union," "New African Writing." Then it moved to special issues; No.4, 1965, concentrated on two subjects, "The W. B. Yeats Centenary" and "New French Writing," while No.7, Fall 1966, was a special "Womanly Issue," with one hundred pages devoted to "The Art of Sylvia Plath." Number 9, Spring 1967, featured Eastern European

literature, and No. 10, Fall 1967, was an "Under 30" issue. From this

point on, TriQuarterly has frequently invited the cooperation of guest co-editors who are experts in special subjects; Jose Donoso co-edited No. 13/14, Fall/Winter 1968/1969, "Contemporary Latin American Litera ture" (a supplement to this issue appeared in No. 15, Spring 1969). Alfred Appel, Jr., guest-edited a Nabokov issue (Winter 1970) and shared with Simon Karlinsky the co-editorship of the "Russian Literature and Culture in the West" issue (Spring 1973). Jonathan Williams co-edited the Edward Dahlberg issue (Fall 1970). Lawrence Levy and John Perreault prepared the "Anti-Object Art" issue (Winter 1975). Other guest editors included John Matthias: "Contemporary British Poetry" (Spring 1971); George Gomori: "A Leszek Kolakowski Reader" (Fall 1971); George Abbott White: "Literature in Revolution" (Winter/Spring 1972); Mary Kinzie: "Prose for Borges" (Fall 1972); Lucien Stryk: "Contemporary Asian Literature" (Fall 1974); David Hayman: "In the Wake of the Wake" (Winter 1977). The Fall 1977 number culminated a six-issue survey, "Ongoing American Fiction," which anthologized scores of stories by active writers. These fiction issues, like the guest-edited special numbers, are characterized by breadth of coverage. TriQuarterly is a large magazine, usually running well over 200 pages and sometimes surpassing 500 pages. As a result, most of the special issues are remarkably comprehensive. The wide range of special topics, coupled with the broad coverage of each, makes it difficult to select names of chief contributors. An index to TriQuarterly 1-22,

roughly half the issues thus

far published, includes close to 600 contributors.

TriQuarterly receives support from Northwestern University and has been awarded grants by CCLM and the Illinois Arts Council. Circulation is 5,000 copies. Truck. Calhoun

College, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. (no.1-10,

1970-Summer 1972); Putney, Vt. (no. 11, Late Spring 1973); Enosberg Falls, Vt. (no. 12, Early Fall, 1973); Carrboro, N. C. (no. 13, Spring

1974+) [Editorial office has moved to St. Paul, Minn.]. [1970] + Irreg. .

Ed. David Wilk

740

[with various co-editors, including Steve Benson,

Kit

Robinson, Michael Waltuch, Hetty Wood, Jay Dougherty]. No. 1-10: 8Y2"x II" stapled. No. 11 +: 6" x 9"

perfect

96-225 pp. (recently).

Begun by a group of Yale undergraduates, Truck became, with issue No. 8, the sole responsibility of David Wilko Although the first ten issues of Truck carried contributions from Paul Mariah, Mike Finley, Paul Metcalf, Nathaniel Tarn, Richard Grossinger, Ken Irby, Paul Blackburn, and others, it is the second series, beginning with No. 11 (Spring 1973), that, in the words of the editor, "marks its maturation in terms of content and

production." For the new series, Truck shifted from a stapled 81h" by 11" format to a 6" x 9" perfect binding. Issues were built around special themes: a Vermont issue, a landscape issue, an exploration issue featuring Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough, Michael McClure, Daphne Marlatt, and others. Space was allocated with an eye toward overall mood and tone. Especially interesting are the 224-page Poesis issue (Spring 1975), "the last of the regular poetry issues, a gathering of voices the magazine cleaves to," among whom are Ken Irby, Michael Rumaker, Paul Metcalf, Clayton Eshleman, Robert Kelly, and George Quasha; and the 150-page Lorine Niedecker issue (Summer 1975), featuring poems and letters by Lorine Niedecker, commemorative poems by Carl Rakosi and others, and essays by Cid Corman, Jonathan Williams, Morgan Gibson, and others. Truck has been supported by CCLM grants. Circulation is about 600 copies an issue (sometimes less). Unmuzzled Ox. New York, N. Y.

No.1, 1971 +. Irreg. Ed. Michael Andre.

5" x 8"

perfect (no. 1-4,7: stapled; no. 8/9: loose sheets boxed; no. 12:

sewn).

64-148 pp.

Illus.

Andre, aided by Tom Wayman, began Unmuzzled Ox as a vehicle for the fusion of avant-garde artwork with poetry and poetry criticism in New York City. One aim, the presentation of multimedia art, is well illustrated in a special issue, No. 8/9, 1974. This consists of a boxed set of loose sheets of poetry and sketches by Gregory Corso which the reader may paste end to end to form one long pattern. Other special features that have appeared in Unmuzzled Ox include a suite of poems by Daniel Berrigan in No.4, Autumn 1972, with proceeds from a 100-copy special signed edition going to the antiwar effort; a 35-copy special signed edition featuring Gregory Corso (No. 5/6, 1973); and a 77-page issue (No. 12, 1975) devoted to Kenward Elmslie's Tropicalism. Exposition of interdisciplinary views of artistic postmodernist expression is pursued in a series of interviews conducted by Andre with Robert Creeley, Gregory Corso, W. H. Auden, James Wright, James Dickey, Allen Ginsberg, Daniel Berrigan, Nhat Hanh, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Duncan, and Andy Michael

Warhol.

741

Although Unmuzzled Ox has reproduced art by R. Crumb, Willem de Kooning, Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Hannah Wilke, and Claes Oldenburg, art criticism by Hannah Green, and fiction by Ed Sanders and Robert Creeley, the breadth and depth of coverage of its poetry best reveals this magazine's openness and interdisciplinary nature. Enhanced by well-conceived layouts and accomplished graphics, the poems in Un muzzled Ox cover a range best illustrated by a partial listing of contribu tors: Diane Wakoski, Charles Bukowski, Douglas Blazek, Daryl Hine, Richard Kostelanetz, Gary Snyder, James Wright, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Robert Bly, Marge Piercy, Lyn Lifshin, Peter Wild, Harold Norse, Ted Enslin, Gilbert Sorrentino, Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood, Clarence Major, Ron Loewinsohn, Rochelle Owens, Judson Crews, David Ignatow, Cid Corman, Jerome Rothenberg, Irving Layton, Michael Bene dikt, Isabella Gardner, Russell Edson, Carol Berge, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Barbara Guest, Anne Waldman, Adrienne Rich, Rosalyn Drexler, Joel Oppenheimer, Paul Goodman, and William Stafford. Some emphasis is given to New York poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara, and to poets whose work frequently shares the same journals with them (such as Bill Berkson, Kenward Elmslie, Ron Padgett, Bill Knott, John Giorno, Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge, Ed Sanders, and James Schuyler).

Unmuzzled Ox has been assisted by CCLM. Circulation has grown from 800 to 4,000. 1: A Literary Quarterly of Poetry; no. 2-3; A Literary Quarterly]. Munich, Germany (no. 1-5, Jan.j/Mar. 1966-Summer 1967);

Vagabond [no.

New Orleans, La. (no. 6-7, 1968-1969); San Francisco, Cal. (no. 8-11,

1970-1971); Redwood City, Cal. (no. 12-16, 1971-1973); Ellensburg, Wash. (no. 17, 1973+).

No.1, Jan./Mar. 1966+. Ed. John Bennett, Jr. 6%" x 8�"

Irreg.

stapled (folded)

size varies (72-120 pp.

recently)

some

issues mimeo.

Vagabond, a successful example of the mimeo magazine, was begun by John Bennett, Jr., in Munich, Germany, and followed him to New Orleans and Ellensburg, Washington, its current address. For some time it proudly announced itself as produced on a "1917 A. B. Dick Mimeo." By the

time Vagabond issued its twenty-fifth number (1977), it could count among its contributors Heinrich Boll, Stefan Andres, Charles Bukowski, Curt

Johnson, Douglas Blazek, William Wantling, Stephen Spender (an inter view), D. A. Levy, A. D. Winans, Hugh Fox, Lyn Lifshin, Jerry Bumpus, Ron Koertge, Nelson Algren, Alicia Ostriker, Jack Micheline, Gerda Penfold, Marvin Malone, Rich Mangelsdorff, and Felix Pollak. In No. 14 (1972), Bennett expressed his distrust of much that passes for avant-garde writing; in 1977, he said that he wanted to publish fiction that

742

would "counter

...

'experimental fiction.''' Said Bennett: "All good

fiction is and always has been that."

Vagabond is a genuine "little" magazine. Though it has received some CCLM support, it is essentially John Bennett's personal responsibility (he estimates

current annual loss of

$1,000). Circulation is about 1,000

copies. West Coast Poetry Review. Reno, Nev. Vol. I, no. 1, Summer 1971 +. Irreg. (2/yr. promised).

(no. 1-3, Summer 1971-Spring 1972); J. Glaser (no. 1, Summer 1971); William L. Fox (Vol. I, no. 4/Vol. II, no. 1,

Ed. William Ransom

Summer/Fall 1972+).

6" x 9" pp.

no.1-II, 13-15, 17: stapled; no. 12, 16, 18: perfect

44-180

No.9: 8"x8�".

Index Vol. I-IV, no. 1-16 (1971-1975). West Coast Poetry Review is currently in its third phase. William Ransom,

who edited three issues before his resources were exhausted, printed such

poets as William Childress, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Harold Witt, Mark McCloskey, Hale Chatfield, Danny L. Rendleman, Ann Stafford, and

(translations of Yevtushenko in Nos. 1-2). The shift to phase two was clearly exhibited in the double number for Summer/Fall 1972, in which Editor William L. Fox produced two separate sections: an anthology edited by William Ransom (with work by forty-two con tributors, including Gottfried Benn, Lucien Stryk, Sam Hamill, Christine Zawadiwsky, Jascha Kessler, and Patricia Goedicke) and an anthology edited by William Fox (ten contributors, including Fox himself, Morton Marcus, Greg Kuzma, Miller Williams, and J. Michael Yates). In the third phase, the magazine began to feature visual and concrete poetry. In issue No.9, Fall 1973, Fox commenced printing visual poetry by Ian Tarnman, and in No. 12, Summer 1974, he was deeply involved in visual experiments with the "Extensions of the Word" special issue-advertised as "a workbook of current experiments in poetry with concretes, post Richard Wilbur

concretes, minimals and UFO's." Among the contributors were Ian Hamil ton Finlay, Emmett Williams, Jane Augustine, Alison Sky, Peter Finch, Bob Cobbing, Peter Mayer, Aaron Marcus,

Mary Ellen Solt, Nick Zur

brugg, Richard Kostelanetz (his work was accompanied by an article on him by Hugh Fox), and others. Number 13/14, Fall 1974, exemplified Fox's attempt to strike a balance between conventional forms and visual experiments. This issue carried visual poetry by Patricia Elliott, Lawrence Lewis, Alison Sky, Venantius Fortunatus, Gerald Lange, John Kallio, Loris Essary, and Ian Hamilton Finlay (a group of photographs), and also non-concrete work by Albert Goldbarth, Ross Talarico,

Duane

Ackerson, Stuart Peterfreund, and

Harold Witt.

Fiction, a minor element in West Coast Poetry Review, is edited by Bruce

743

McAllister. The most ambitious project in fiction thus far has been Ronald Arias's The Road

Tamazunchale,

chicano novel which

was

later

nominated for a National Book Award. West Coast

Poetry Review has received aid from CCLM, the National

Endowment for the Arts, and the Nevada State Council on the Arts. "Our

regular issues generally lose money; our special ones pay for the magazine as a whole. Our greatest sales come from mass buys-like the NEA purchasing 2,000 copies of No.8, which was a special on poetry-in-the school before anyone else was talking about it." Circulation has risen from 500 to 1,000, with special issues running as high as 4,000 copies. .

Wild Dog. Pocatello, Ida. (no. 1-9, Apr. 1963-18 July 1964); Salt Lake City, Utah (no. 10-12, Sep. 1964-1 Dec. 1964); San Francisco, Cal. (no.

13-21, 12 Jan. 1965-1 Mar. 1966). Vol. I, no. I-Vol. III, no. 21, Apr. 1963-1 Mar. 1966.

Irreg. 1963); John Hoopes (May 1963-Jan. 1964); Drew Wagnon (Jan. 1964-Mar. 1966); Ed Dorn (Apr. 1964-July 1964); Gino Clays (Sep. 1964-July 1964); Joanne Kyger (June 1965-July 1965); Terry Wagnon (Dec. 1965-Mar. 1966). 8lh" x 11" stapled 26-66 pp. mimeo. Ed. Geoffrey Dunbar (Apr.

Although Wild Dog was originally conceived as a local literary magazine associated with Idaho State College, the second number indicated "inde

pendent" publication, and the third number emphasized "no affiliation" College. Quite possibly this disaffiliation stems from Robert Kelly's frank essay in No. 1 on the loyalty oath required of state college faculty members by the Idaho legislature. This first number

with Idaho State

announced that:

Wild Dog is prose, poetry, non-fiction / and other things. Wild Dog is not for Everyone / or by Someone.

Wild Dog is for people who read, / by people who write. This editorial purpose was maintained faithfully through several reloca tions and rearrangements of editors, while the magazine's scope, circula

tion, and reputation grew from local to international. In No.7, April 5, 1974, the basis for this growth was defined: "It is our one highfalutin idea

given its frequency, may be a kind of clearinghouse Contributions may be of the nature places. of calculated correspondence." Wild Dog No. 1 featured Douglas Woolf, Robert Kelly (instructor in English at Idaho State College), and Ed Dorn, among others-plus, "by direct wire," Caliph John's inside-New York City literary letter, a feature which was continued in subsequent issues. By the completion of its fifth issue, Wild Dog had published Black Mountain authors Fielding Dawson, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Louis Zukofsky along with LeRoi Jones, Judson Crews, Denise Levertov, George Bowering, and others. With the next five issues the magazine's literary horizons were that this magazine,

for notations from far

744

widened

to include Margaret Randall, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Raworth, Miguel Grinberg, Ron Loewinsohn, Diane Wakoski, and others. The di versity of still later issues is suggested by the following contributors: Christopher Perret, Stan Brakhage, Charles Bukowski, R. Buckminster Fuller, Gary Snyder, Gerard Malanga, Richard Brautigan, Robert Duncan, Robert Sward, Clark Coolidge, Bill Hutton, Victor Contoski, Stuart Friebert, Ed Bullins, and Clarence Major. Wild Dog is an excellent example of the fully edited mimeographed as from the minimally edited or nonedited mimeo periodical, distinguished of form all too common in the time of the graphed journal writings-a revolution in literature." Much of the credit for the continuing "mimeograph of Wild can be to editors Drew Wagnon and Ed high quality Dog assigned Dorn. Wagnon functioned continuously as an editor from No.5 forward; Dorn appeared in the first issue, acted as co-editor for Nos. 7-9, and was contributing editor for Nos. 10-18. Financed by donations and a limited number of subscriptions, this cheaply produced magazine consistently showed signs of care in production. The text was always legible and neat, and frequently the covers were exemplary illustrations of design triumph ing over the medium (e. g. the covers for Nos. 17-20 by Bill McNeil, Joyce Barkett, and Fielding Dawson). Wild Dog's circulation ranged from 200 to 500 copies.

The World [no. 1-11: A New York City Literary Magazine]. Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, New York, N. Y.

No.1, Fall 1966+. Irreg. Ed. Joel Sloman (Fall 1966-Mar. 1967); Anne Waldman (Mar. 1967+) [Guest editors include Lewis Warsh, Joel Oppenheimer, Sam Abrahams, Tom Clark, and Ron Padgett]. 8th" x 14"

stapled

25-112 pp.

mimeo.

Since the mid-sixties, The World, the mimeo magazine of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City,

of the work of

has constituted a kind of record

sizable number of the New York poets. Typed and 81/2" by 14" paper (except for No.7), this irregularly a

reproduced on issued magazine (30 issues from 1966 [?] to 1977) counts the following poets among its many contributors: Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Tom Clark, Michael Brownstein, Joel Oppenheimer, Michael Benedikt, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, Ron Padgett, Clark Coolidge, Phillip Lopate, Gerard Malanga, John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Edwin Denby, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O'Hara, John Wieners, Raymond Di Palma, Ed Dorn, Aram Saroyan, Ray Bremser, Ed Sanders, James Ratner, Gary Snyder, David Antin, Clayton Eshleman, Harry Mathews, Donald Hall, Anselm Hollo, Greg Kuzma, Diane di Prima, Lita Hornick, Fielding Dawson. In the mid-seventies, the emphasis shifted somewhat away from the poem

itself. See, for example, the autobiographical issue guest-edited by Lewis Warsh (No. 28, May 1973) or the 123-page issue of April 1974

(No. 29),

which featured reviews, commentary, and interviews. Anne Waldman has

745

had chief editorial responsibility, with help at times from Lewis Warsh, Joel Sloman, Ted Berrigan, and Joel Oppenheimer. Other guest-edited issues are No.6 (Sam Abrams), No. 22 (Tom Clark), and No. 27 (the translations issue, edited by Ron Padgett).

See also the annotation for Angel Hair (above). The Wormwood Review [no. 57+: Incorporating

Malone-Stranger Review]. Storrs, Conn. (no. 1-34, Fall 1959 [cover date incorrectJ-Aug. 1969); Stockton, Cal. (no. 35, Nov. 1969+). No.1, Fall 1959+. 4/yr. Ed. Morton Felix (Fall 1959-Winter 1959/1960); Jim Scully (Fall 1959); Alexander Taylor (Fall 1959-1962); Marvin Malone (June 1961 +) [Guest Ed. Allen DeLoach (May 1965); George Montgomery (Aug.

1969)]. 5%" x 8�"

stapled (folded) 28-48 pp. Index no. 1-12 in no. 12; no. 13-24 in no. 24; no. 25-36 in no. 36; no. 37-48 in no. 49-60 in no. 60; no. 61-72 in no. 72. The Wormwood Review has printed a wide range of poetry by hundreds of poets,

some of whom are fairly regular contributors. If there is a principle of selection, it is a negative one involving avoidance of cliques and groups. Wormwood is "non-beat, non-academic, non-sewing circle and non-profit. Wormwood is interested in quality poems and prose-poems (proems) of all types and schools-the form may be traditional or avant garde-up-through-and-including-dada-the tone serious to flip, the content

conservative to utter taboo. A good poem should be able to compete with

the presence of other poems. Wormwood is not afraid of either intelligence or wit-both are rare

qualities."

Wormwood's open-arms policy has led to the inclusion of many kinds and

degrees of parody and spoof, as well as concrete poems, prose poems, col lages, and number games. Poets who contribute fairly regularly include Charles Bukowski, Lyn Lifshin, Ronald Koertge, Gerald Locklin, and Phil Weidman. Each issue has a colored center section featuring a single poet or theme. Among the roughly three dozen poets featured in center sections, the following have made multiple appearances: Charles Bukow ski, Judson Crews, Oliver Haddo, Gloria Kenison, Ronald Koertge, Lyn Lifshin, Gerald Locklin, Christopher Perret, Ben Pleasants, Ray Peuchner, and William WantIing. In addition, a few issues have been devoted to a single author: No. 59 (1975), Lyn Lifshin, Paper Apples; No. 63 (1976), Ronald Koertge, Cheap Thrills; No. 67, Gerald Locklin, Pronouncing Borges. Occasionally issues have dealt with single themes: No. 45 was a memorial to Jon Edgar Webb, editor of the magazine The Outsider. Another Wormwood special feature has been an award to the "most over looked book of worth published within the calendar year." Winners during the fifteen-year period from 1961 to 1975 included Alexander Trocchi, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., James Drought, Russell Edson, Christopher Perret, 746

Stanley Crawford, Peter Wild, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Charles Bukowski, Lorine Niedecker, Jonathan Williams, Gerald Locklin, Steve Richmond, and Lyn Lifshin.

Ronald Koertge,

Except for small CCLM grants, Wormwood's funding is entirely from subscriptions. Of the 700-copy print run, 300 copies go to subscribers, approximately 100 copies each to authors and to other little magazine editors, with 100 copies for individual sales and 100 copies as reserve. One peculiarity of Wormwood is that it usually appears two issues at a time. Yardbird Reader. Berkeley, Cal. Vol. I-V, 1972-1976. Annual. Ed. Ishmael Reed

(1972); Al Young (1973); Shawn Wong and Frank

Chin (1974); William Lawson (1975); Ishmael Reed (1976).

51;2" x 81;2

(varies)

perfect

184-326 pp.

then: Y'Bird Magazine. Vol. I, no. 1, 1978+. Ed. Ishmael Reed. 51;2

x 9"

perfect

204 pp.

The first volume of Yardbird Reader begins with

preface by Chester

Himes and three separate introductions. In the first, Ishmael Reed, expos

ing the exploitation of black writers by the establishment, both black and white, explains the founding of the Yardbird Publishing Cooperative to "publish the finest work by Afro-American artists without regard to ideological or aesthetic affiliation." Al Young, in the second introduction, reaffirms the existence of "a non-white establishment." Cecil Brown, in the third, again summarizes the forms of black exploitation and brings

together all three introductions:. "Mr. Reed speaks of the need of .Indi viduality among black writers; Mr. Young of returning us to a freedom as stimulating as the old barbershop; I have spoken of inexpressiveness as metaphor for the enslavement that the Afro-American writer finds himself in. We are talking about the same thing, defining it in our own individual ways. Yardbird Reader will reveal how this critical attitude can also be exemplified in the sphere of creative imagination." Yardbird Reader's

shifting editorship helped

it maintain

its

diversity.

Volume II was edited by Al Young, Vol. III by Shawn Wong and Frank

Chin, Vol. IV by William Lawson, and Vol. V by Ishmael Reed. Volume I divided its space equally between prose and poetry. Among the prose contributions were a John A. Williams travel article on Granada (refused by the New York Times) and Claude Brown's discussion of pressures on him after publication of Manchild in the Promised Land. Poems by some

twenty contributors ranged from exercises by Sarah Fabio in the transcrip tion of black dialect to violently anti-white verse by O. O. Gabugah, and

proceeded from African poetry through Hoo-Doo to American verse in both black and "edited American English" dialects. Volume II (1973), dedicated to Arna Bontemps, contained contributions from Afro-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Colom-

747

bians, Puerto Rican-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Franco-Americans, Anglo-Americans, North Africans, Kenyans, and Caribbeans. In Vol. III (1974), guest editors Shawn Wong and Frank Chin set out to meliorate the obscurity of yellow fiction and poetry. They selected works from three generations of Asian-American writers, to produce one of the most singular and interesting anthologies in years. For Vol. IV, Editor William Lawson selected contributions from

wide range of African and American writ

including material on Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye (a Guinean novelist), and Clarence Major. Volume V (1976) featured some strong attacks against other interpreters of black culture. O. O. Gabugah, John A. Williams, Amiri Baraka, and Ishmael Reed all ripped Black World, while Ishmael Reed and Stephen Henderson lambasted a Robert Moss article published in Saturday Review. Ishmael Reed also defended the multicultural Yardbird Reader against a charge that it was merely integra ers,

tionist.

Yugen [no. 1: a new consciousness in arts and letters]. New York, N. Y. No. 1-8, 1958-1962. No. 1-5: qy.; no. 6-8 irreg. Ed. LeRoi Jones; Hettie Cohen (from no. 6, 1960, "Assistant Editor"). 5Yz" x 8Yz" stapled (folded) 24-36 pp. LeRoi Jones's Yugen published Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso as well as Robert Creeley and Charles Olson (the Black Mountain 1957), while introducing such poets as

Review had ceased publication in

Orlovsky (his first published poem appeared in Yugen No.3), Kenneth Koch, Rochelle Owens, and David Meltzer, At the same time, Peter

Yugen served as an outlet for the work of a number of writers identified with Jones's Totem Press and with Floating Bear and Kulchur, among them Diane di Prima, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ray Bremser, Robin Blaser, Frank O'Hara, Fielding Dawson, Paul Blackburn, Joel Oppenheimer, John

Wieners, Michael McClure, Barbara Guest, and Ed Dorn. Most readers prefer later issues of Yugen because they are more profes sional in appearance and less erratic in content (e. g. No.4, with McClure, Olson, O'Hara, Gary Snyder, Kerouac, Cree ley, Ginsberg, Corso, Sorren

tino, and with interesting pieces by Peter OrIovsky, Fielding Dawson, Ray Bremser, Joel Oppenheimer, and John Wieners, as well as LeRoi Jones himself). Still, there is something to be said for the rougher opening issues, which Jones co-edited with Hettie Cohen. The poetry in No. 1 was embarrassingly personal and self-indulgent (only three of about failed to use first-person pronouns), and yet it con twenty-three poems of the late fifties. the disaffection transmitted vincingly In Spring 1960, Kulchur began as a professionally printed, full-sized journal with a general interest in jazz, film, comics, and popular culture as well as in the work of poets appearing in Yugen. Then in February 1961 Floating Bear was started as a newsletter to enable new ideas, ex

periments, and achievements to be quickly communicated among a circle 748

of interested poets, most of whom were also involved with Yugen and Kulchur. Of these three interrelated publications, Kulchur was the most

substantial and professional and Floating Bear the most immediate-a real

poetry newsletter-but Yugen came first, the start of the venture. Circulation of Yugen was 1,000. It was supported by personal funds and

subscriptions. Zero: A

(Quarterly) Review of Literature and Art. Paris, France (no. 1, Spring 1949); Tangier, Morocco (no. 2-6, Summer 1949-July 1954); New York, N. Y. (no. 7-8, Spring 1956-Winter 1956). No. 1-8, Spring 1949-Winter 1956. Irreg. Ed. ThemistocJes Hoetis; Albert Benveniste (no. 1-3/4, Spring 1949Autumn/Winter 1949/1950). No. 1-4, 7: 5�" x 8"

sewn

No. 5-6: 9" x 11"

stapled

No. 8: 5�" x 8�"

sewn

76-166 pp. IIIus. 12-14 pp. IIlus.

(hardcover)

240 pp.

IIIus.

Index no. 1-6 in no 7. As an introduction to the first issue of Zero, the editors proposed that the

magazine act "as a raw and basic channel for creative assumptions, affiliat ing itself to all and to no techniques: conscious and unconscious, erudite and untutored, therapeutic and unpragmatic, right, left, with only the one major stipulation incumbent upon its use: that it be relevant to the princi ple of ZERO Izero itself, primarily honest in its use of the basic meaning of creative expression and communication; a meaning which does not allow for any forms of obscurantism in its literal sense (i.e. ideas in stasis, without volition)." The initial issue

expatriate in tone and spirit, but with subsequent magazine became truly international in every respect. In for 1955, example, the magazine was printed in Mexico and editorial offices were maintained in Tangier, Madrid, Paris, Cornwall, and Flushing, New York. Despite its internationalism, some readers tended to identify it with the exotic locale of Tangier. As interest in psyche-modifying drugs increased in the United States, pilgrimages of writers (William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Chester, among others) to Morocco were com mon, and the magazine became associated secondarily, and perhaps un fairly, with the so-called "kif cult." Zero continues to be remembered for its focus on the prose poem, mythl fables, and the short story. Appearing in the first number, along with the editors, were Wallace Fowlie ("Three Masks of Mallarme"), Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams ("All That Is Perfect in Woman"), Christopher Isherwood, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Mason Hoffenberg. Subsequent numbers featured Paul Bowles ("The Delicate Prey" in No.2, Summer 1949), Federico Garda Lorca, Dorothea Tanning, Klaus Mann, Jean Garrigue, Octavio Paz, Gore Vidal, Colin Wilson, Samuel Beckett, Ursule Molinaro, Marianne Moore, Robert Kelly, and was

numbers the

749

others. The art presented was generally surrealistic (tipped-in plates in No.

3/4, Autumn/Winter 1949/1950), the artists ranging from the well established Max Ernst to the first-appearing Bruce Conner (No.8, Winter

1956). Zero's artistic progression culminated in No.8,

240-page volume (avail hardcover) literary figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Colin Wilson, Marianne Moore, Samuel Beckett, Fed erico Garda Lorca, Samuel French Morse, Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal, Ahmed ben Driss el Yacoubi, Hart Crane, Ursule Molinaro, Constantine Cavafy, Kenneth Patchen, and Bruce Conner. Also included was "A Selection of Nine Young American Poets": Venable Herndon, Smith Oliver, Storm de Hirsch, Joseph Awad, Sanora Babb, Dachine Rainer, James Parsons, George H. Morse, and Robert Kelly. able in

which included such well-known

ANTHOLOGY OF ARMENIAN POETRY Diana Der Hovanessian

and Marzbed Margossian, Translators work, with the translations supple and freely flowing yet the sturdiness and strong hard beauty of the original." Muhae! Arlol

"A masterful true to

are lucky to have these poems moved over from Armenian to Read Koutchak of the 16th century for instance and English. suddenly notice that good poetry is instantly irresistible and indestructible

"We

ever

after." William Saroynn

$17.50 cloth, $7.95 paper To order send check or money order to Dept. ,N. Individuals must enclose payment Institutions may request billing.

L�

COlumBIA UniVERSITY PRESS Address for orders:

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These are some of the people who have written for A. Alvarez, Jonathan Baumbach, Samuel Beckett, Norman Birnbaum, Harold Brodkey, Peter Brooks,

Anthony Burgess, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, Robert Coover, Robert Creeley, Frederick Crews, Morris Dickstein, Martin Duberman, Jules Feiffer, Leslie Fiedler, Michel Foucault, William Gass, Richard Gilman, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Handke, Michael Harrington, Lillian Hellman, Richard Howard, Irving Howe, Frank Kermode, Christopher Lasch, Doris Lessing, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Jack Ludwig, Norman Mailer, Steven Marcus, Herbert Marcuse, James Merrill, Leonard Michaels, Mark Mirsky, Juliet Mitchell, Hans Morgenthau, Victor Navasky, Joyce Carol Oates, Marge Piercy, Richard Poirier, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Rose, Harold Rosenberg, Philip Roth, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Alan Sillitoe, Susan Sontag, Gilbert Sorrentino, Stephen Spender, Christina Stead, William Styron, Ronald Sukenick, Tony Tanner, James Tate, Diana Trilling, Gore Vidal, Robert Penn Warren

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Iowa Review

VOLUME NINE NUMBER TWO SPRING ]lJ78

Fiction, poetry, translations, and essays in American autobiography

Austin Warren, Michael Cooke, Philip Levine, Jayne Anne Phillips and others. For subscriptions and individual orders write to:

The Iowa Review 308 EPB

The University ofIowa Iowa City, Iowa 52242

Single copy price: $2.00. Yearly subscription: $7.50. Yearly in all foreign countries: $8.50

Pacific Plainsong I-XIII

by Peter Michelson 132 pages, perfect bound, with embossed cover

and jacket.

$4.95 paperback For further information or to

place

orders, write:

Brillig Works Publishing Co. 1322 College Ave. Boulder, Colorado Chief Hairy Chin, July 4, 1889.

Like an elegant shroud, this new book of poems by the author of The Eater and The Aesthetics of Pornography covers that near genoci dal chapter of American history known as the "Winning of the West." Yet it is with a personal voice and commitment that Michel son probes, registers and mimics our history with the Indian. Paci fic Plainsong I-XIII is a beautifully produced book with fourteen photographs, seven by noted western photographer David F. Barry, that invoke perfectly the complex tone of the poem. It may not, hopefully, will not be the last word on the American Indian, but it's definitely too close for comfort.

Pacific Planning I-XIII is the first book to emerge from Brillig Works Publishing, but by year's end we hope to place in the inter ested reader's hands books by Nathaniel Tarn, William Burroughs Jr., and Michael Brownstein.

BRILLIG

WORKS

MICHAEL ANANIA

RIVERSONGS Anania's second volume of poems is, in the words of poetry editor Laurence Lieberman, "an amazing advance over his splendid and original first volume. While the book as a whole exhibits an

impressive range of modes and styles, the opening sequence of

river poems evoking the aura of the Lewis and Clark expedition is remarkable. To a degree I have rarely encountered in

particularly

contemporary poetry, he blends historical materials with the charm of personal witnessing." Anania is the editor of New Poetry

Anthology, and his own poems have been published in many

journals and in Heartland Two: Poets of the Midwest. His first collection,The Color of Dust,was published by the Swallow Press. Cloth, $7.95; paper, 83.95. UNIVERSI'IT OF ILLINOIS PRESS 54 East Gregory, Champaign, IL 61820

Newly reissued in paperback

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD Zora Neale Hurston

with a foreword by Sherley Anne Williams Considered by scholars to be Hurston's most important work, this powerful novel about a black woman's belief in self was first published in 1937. Her magnificent character Janie Crawford was fashioned out of the stuff of which Hurston herself was made: determination, pride, beauty. Janie Crawford's strong identification with what is now called "the woman thing." and her passionate embrace of things sexual and ro mantic will delight both the general reader and the student of black studies, anthro pology, sociology, literature, or women's studies. for whom the book should be re

quired reading. "There is

than this one."

book -

important to me

ALICE WALKER.

good read when the ERA is being dis

cussed and even better in quieter moments." ROGER ROSENBLATT.

Nell' Republic,

I urge you to read it."

$3.95

DORIS GRUMBACH.

Saturday Review, $3.95

and for correlative reading

WRA NEALE HURSTON A Literary Biography Robert E.

Hemenway

Hemenway's book is vintage. For a long, long time it will be the standard vol ume on Zora Neale Hurston." Black American Literature Fortlln." a subtle blend of fact and close reading that re-cre ates the internal mood of a black writer be tween the Jazz Age and the McCarthy era Perhaps Hemenway's excellent biog raphy will allow Miss Hurston to he read Nell' again. for all the right reasons." York Times Book Review, $15.00 "Robert

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Urbana. Illinois 61801