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July 18, 2005    File under: Editing , Poetry & Poetics , The South

Tony,

I hope I wasn't putting you on the spot in an uncomfortable way. Your post came up as I was thinking a lot about the editing I do at storySouth and Thicket and what I've begun to do with my students here in Denver with Copper Nickel, and I was hoping to enter into an exchange in which I too could think about what I think about journals.

I think that, at storySouth we probably fall into a standard format situation such as you describe, though I think I do a few things differently --- and am trying to do those more and more often. We do try to anchor each issue (for the benefit of those readers who even now are just coming to online journals (surprisingly a lot of readers)) with a well-known poet or a poet who might be considered a rising talent, someone who has enough work from which we could assemble a retrospective or a prospective grouping so that the feature would be interesting in and of itself.

One of the ways in which, I think, we diverge from the norm is that, while I do like to see very good poems in my inbox, I treat the feature as a kind of license that allows me to accept and present poems that might now clearly be the most excellent examples of the aesthetic projects they represent. I like to collect groups of poems that say something to each other --- not necessarily or even often in a propositional fashion. I mean pieces that implicitly question each other's aesthetic and cultural positions, especially those positions that say something or suggest something about the South --- what it is, what it means, &c. When I'm considering this, I'm thinking, very much as you are, that I am "finding out ... what is going on there that is interesting/challenging/etc... then presenting that, or making that one component of a view of poetry." It's not always easy presenting what I want to present, but this is my aim in any case, and I couldn't have said it better myself. The established writer is part of that scene, part of what's happening, but just as important are those writers with little or no established reputation, and those are the writers I'm most interested in. All this is to say that my own aesthetic concerns are involved but they're often necessarily sublimated to my interest in presenting an account of, or evidence of, what's happening in and about The South, not just as a locale, but as an idea, a concept. Just so with the spin-off project Thicket which looks at Alabama writers and is becoming a sort of hybrid journal/weblog/anthology/repository, collecting both those who are well-reputed and those who are coming up and those who just have something to say. I like it if the pieces are articulate in some manner, but I think in each case I may be seen as choosing work that falls well beyond my own aesthetic interests (though to confirm that you might have to look at what I didn't choose).

Another thing we're doing more and more of is asking poets --- not editors --- to compile and present views of poets they admire or to create editions of work that will address a particular question that might be asked of Southern writing and Southern poetry in particular. In this way, we're both expanding toward a question model (while not entirely abandoning the poet model) and toward an aesthetic-accounting model, wherein editorial predilection is foregrounded so the conversation, which is what's always been most important to me in storySouth can be fueled.

This is not very interesting to many people, but this is what we try to do.

Working on Copper Nickel with my students, I have found that the "famous writer angle" is much more important, mostly because we have to pay the bills --- it's a print journal (if anyone wants to check it, you can subscribe for a mere $8) --- and the money people like to have some measures of success that appeal to their, shall we say "general"?, cultural knowledge. At the same time, I find myself thinking more and more about design as responding to particular pieces, often daring work by people I never knew (we have some interesting work in our September issue that's forced a complete redesign) --- thinking about the journal as an artifact itself, as a locality itself --- ideas I think I hear in your considerations of FASCICLE, ideas that excite me personally and intellectually, which is why I entered this.

Maybe I'm missing something, maybe I don't get something important here that would show where we don't intersect --- I often think that I'm blind to something important everyone else sees and that what I'm doing is essentially stupid though I can't see it as such, though I keep working on principle until I can be shown my own stupidity --- but it seems like, again, we're in a similar mental space....

All this to say I am excited by your thoughts and am looking forward to your new projects...

Thanks again,

Jake

Posted by Jake Adam York at July 18, 2005 7:29 PM