Needle Has Not An Eye

Heaven bless the internet. Over the past couple months, I've had conversations with Salt via their Twitter feed and a local colleague, David Hadbawnik, via his blog, facebook, and email that have had me reevaluating my thoughts about poetry's audience, marketing, and community -- in a lot of ways. I've never had illusions that publishing in a giant, nationally-distributed literary magazine means being read, for example, but I'm thinking more directly about how aesthetically useless those organs are, although -- and here's where I depart from Hadbawnik -- a very necessary evil, necessary for one's (my) career. Before I got to Buffalo, I didn't even realize there were alternatives; smaller press, smaller distribution, the even more ephemeral event that has no printed correspondent. That had already had me readjust my notion of what publishing is and can be, but I never got very far into it. None of the poetry people have been doing here speaks to me. One ongoing magazine, P-Queue, I think is excellent but still not to my taste, which is, admittedly, unfashionable. I'm like the 1940s walking around, as far as that goes, and not even the avant 1940s, just the poetry that was "very good" at that time. I think this is fine; I don't think we've exhausted that well, or many others that we opened in the past century, and I think it's perfectly legit to work these excellencies while they remain unexhausted, which I think will be the state of things at least through my lifetime.

So I had these interesting models, but no home for the poetry I love in it -- which isn't even the standard-issue magazine verse; when I go through all the pages of a lot of issues of a lot of magazines, I'm still wincing regularly even at publications that, more or less, I can say I like. I have no patience for flat urbanity a la Billy Collins or flat sappiness a la Virgil Suarez or the hordes of people still writing bad prose given the visual form of poetry without its guts; I can't handle didacticism or philosophy stated as such; I have trouble taking poems about McDonald's or watching tv seriously, even very witty poems about McDonald's or watching tv; etc. Buffalo is safe from all that, of course, but we have our own issues. I think you should not be quoting Heidegger or Agamben in your poetry unless it's because you found a beautiful sentence; it makes me a bore, but I'm not interested in poetry readings where there's a lot of laughter or spontaneous applause, and I'm very rarely interested in the poetry that gives rise to those scenes. Again -- 1940s walking around. Sue me. With dove|tail, I tried to make an entry into the existing culture for poetry and events more along my favored lines; I wanted to get people who love literature but don't identify as poetics students out, and I definitely did that, but I wanted then to bridge the chasm between that world and the more exclusive world of Buffalo poetics, and the poetics people themselves didn't show.

In retrospect, and thinking about Hadbawnik's track, that was a failed project from before it began, because someone who's not, in an almost ontological sense, a member of a community, isn't going to be able to speak into it. What he's done differently, in multiple places and over a long while, has been to establish and maintain a position for work he likes, without first kowtowing to a dominant paradigm. He may have succeeded at this better than I did partly because he's easier to get along with than I am, and possibly tougher as well, but probably -- hopefully -- more because he was more clearly aware of the task he was taking on. Hearing his stories, it looks like he has approached poetry in terms of making a location, rather than by trying to work with whatever territory he came to. Those things are often very rigid -- as much so if there's an established clique as if there's an established absence of poetry, period. In all my years here, as well as the ones in Louisiana, I don't think it ever occurred to me to be my own center of gravity, even though, retrospectively, it's very clear that that's the direction my actions tended. Depending on where I end up jobwise, I'm hoping, now, to get a chance to go back and make some things right, thinking out of this.

At the moment, that hope is taking the form of a magazine. Hadbawnik is absolutely right that in a hundred years, no one will be reading old issues of Puerto Del Sol -- they'll be going through the scant files of some small-scale magazine that had a focused, particular, discernible vision, and that put the work ahead of the names who sent it. Big (in the very relative sense that anything is big in poetry) magazines can't afford to do this, and the ones that can afford to pursue vision have trouble being widely-known; I want to make something on one of these more restricted models. Hadbawnk's kadar koli "whenever" model of printing appeals to me a lot -- that's a magazine that's reliably interesting and reliably good, and he puts it out when he has material to make an issue like that, and time to do it right. My aesthetic is a good bit "prettier" than his, though, and if I don't accomplish anything else in my life, I'd like to make a stand for beauty in poetry. Innovation and cleverness both coming second, although those are decidedly good things -- they're still not my polaris, and I haven't personally run across anything really pushing that as its principle. Interesting, experimental, brilliant -- those words get a lot of mileage, but not beautiful, and that's the hole my prosodic soul has been keening over for years now.

I definitely know enough people who write work I love to be able to compile such a thing, and it would probably remain more on the model of editor-requesting than getting work over the regular transom, not because I have any opposition to that at all. I used to rail at Kevin at Pleiades because there would always be some really good stuff come in through our regular submissions, which I read, that would be obviously better than many of the pieces by big names we'd be printing. But if you're operating on a small scale, you're just not likely to get enough material to get good material. Fund it out of my own pocket, so I don't have to be beholden to a dean's office about circulation or reliably regular appearance (and this is another place Hadbawnik and I differ; he's far less skeptical about institutional funding than I am). Bring it out on the dove|tail imprint, which has its preexisting tiny presence in the world; possibly use that as grounds for finding dove|tail chapbookists, as well as or instead of doing them via a reading series. I did love designing books and I want to keep that up. Send it to the contributors, to the archive here, and to other poets and poetry people who'd be likely to read it. Decline to worry about numbers.

If I land somewhere with a literary magazine, I can see this being a problem, if the school saw my duties to Unnamed Mag as conflicting with duties to Their Preexisting Mag. The chances are fairly small that I'll even get on somewhere with a literary magazine, and if I did, I think I'd just talk to the other editors, writing faculty, etc., and see what they thought. Ideally, Unnamed Mag could be my project where I got out my wish-fulfillment, leaving me free to edit Preexisting Mag in better accordance with whatever it already did -- but that's getting very far into a future in ways it can't be predicted. I also have no name yet, hence the placeholding tags here. I want something that suggests sharpness, even potential violence, and beauty, and was thinking about something to do with dragonflies, although they're kind of coopted by cute girl clothes and accessories. Quite a number of which I own. Maybe something with fountain pens or their manufacture. I like verb phrases, too -- what I love about Spicer's titles is how often they're (incredibly peculiar) statements, and I thought of needle has an eye but a.) boring; "has" isn't much of a verb and b.) immediately open to all those stupid eye/I puns that haven't been interesting in decades but that continue to make their ways to conference panel titles. But something sharp, and beautiful, and acting. Watch for it.