My Annapolis newspaper is getting thinner. The Capital Gazette is light in the hand. The Washington Post just cut out its business section and the Book World is no longer in a print edition. The LA Times stopped reviewing poetry in the 90’s.(I think.Maybe 80’s.) Let us now praise small literary magazines. It’s April, poetry month, and we need to bless the “little” magazines who knew financial adversity, a lack of subscribers and improvidence from the beginning of printing in a basement. Americans generally consider POETRY Magazine (1912) the first poetry periodical of note. It may be the one we know the most about but that it was first is not true on several counts. Washington DC's POET LORE preceded by several years. In fact Walt Whitman took out an ad for his work in its pages, near the close of the 19th century.
Reed Whittemore's pamphlet Little Magazines, c1963, published by University of Minnesota's series on American writers, is the definitive work on the movement of the literary journal in the first half of the 20th century. Reed himself was editor of FURIOS0, along with John Pauker, from their college years at Yale (1939.) Reed went on to create others in his career, notably the Carleton Miscelleny from Carlton College where he later taught in Minnesota. From magazines of the 1930's, Whittemore cites that The Partisan Review, was originally begun (but not ended) as a communist organ, along with other southern magazines with political leanings: the Fugitive, the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, the Sewanee Review. In all, there were forty prominent Little Magazines started before 1950. The bridge to the present was substantially during the 1960's when the " cultural revolution " broke all literary norms and introduced freedom, chaos, new poetic forms and new voices to the country. The point to be made here is that new voices erupted, and there had to be some place to put them. With a newfound sense of entitlement, poets created their own spaces, their own small press. The small press movement, for poetry collections, is of course time-honored, Every great poet we can name started in small press, many self-published (Frost, Stevens, Pound, Williams, etc.) but now there were little journals cropping up from people's back rooms. The 60's and the 70's saw an explosion of mimeo, stapling, and High Holiday. The printer on the corner who, to this time specialized in wedding announcements, became a literary buff.
Everyone wanted to be invited to the party. So everyone threw the party. In the mid 70's, in DC, we started the WASHINGTON WRITER'S PUBLISHING HOUSE, (still thriving.) Our book distribution consisted of running into a bookstore and placing poetry on the shelf. And back into the car double-parked in the street "The drop and split method” worked. Lots of books were sold, a testament to "I will do it myself, thank you. These poets need to be heard in books." There are many other presses such as DRYAD, The WORD WORKS and PAYCOCK PRESS, in DC more than 35 years growing, and still going strong.
Fast forward to ezines and on line magazines. At this moment in history the conversation is about the “materiality of the text” and what will become of print, now that websites shift contemporary memory to an electronic future. Beltway Poetry Quarterly, a dot com in DC is a great literary journal: There are legions doing good work , look where I am writing from, BAP! And MiPOesias is expanded to print, audio, heading the parade from paper to magical bits that electronically evoke image and sound. The energetics of a literary magazine continue to be a spiritual life force that goes on. Poetry Month must thank the ink of the brave tough poetry pioneers, especially those early on.
Here are a few photos to uplift our sprits taken by Dan Murano. (Click the photo to see a larger image):
