Reviews University of New Mexico Press

New Mexico Quarterly Volume 32 | Issue 3 Article 27 1962 Reviews University of New Mexico Press Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmq Recommended Citation University of New Mexico Press. "Reviews." New Mexico Quarterly 32, 3 (1962). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmq/vol32/iss3/ 27 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the University of New Mexico Press at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in New Mexico Quarterly by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. : Reviews 209 R€VI€WS OF: POETS AND MARKETS A Mixed Bag ofLittleMagazines This past year, the Quarterly received a small card headed "Memo from Harper-Atlantic" stating: "It just isn't true that magazines spend all their ti~e in destructive criticism of each other. See, for example, the delightful compliment Newsweek 'paid the Atlantic's April issue." While it is a little sad to read how happy "Harper-Atlantic" could be come through recognition' by Newsweek (Richard Rovere calls News week the magazine of the policy makers, a position which The Atlantic held even after the editorship of Oliver Wendell Holmes in a more literary era) the sentiment of the card seems sincere and incontestable. There are many brave new magazines deserving a salute, even if but ave et vale-chief among them, the little magazines publishing poetry. NMQ regrets having to turn down good verse simply because of space restrictions and is honestly deligpted that there are new outletS for poems. Fortunately, there is a burgeoning 'renaissance in the world of poetry, and no town-gown clash between scholars and poets. Univer sities welcome the bards with their choicest bays and laurels, and per haps more to the point, with salaries; a novel form of night club entertainmenthas been thereading ofverse in coffeehouses; and almost every week in the past year has 'seen the birth of a new little magaz~ne . featuring verse. Many of these are born to blush unseen, to die after an issue or two when the little money and great enthusiasm run low, but some hardy few find their niches and struggle to the light among the thorns. A trio of little magazineS in New Mexico which have not wasted all their fragrance on the desert air are Inscape, Targets and Quicksilver, Published by UNM Digital Repository, 1962 1 New Mexico Quarterly, Vol. 32 [1962], Iss. 3, Art. 27 210 REVIEWS· the first two published in Albuquerque, the last and latest in the state, so far as we know, in Taos. Radio is increasingly featuring poets reading their own and others' work. Robert Creeley, for example, rapidly gain ing recognition as a major modem, supplemented his lecturing schedule at the University of·New .Mexico with a radio program on KHFM, Albuquerque FM station, where several noted poets read. What impulse creates the poetry magazine? Joseph Ferguson, one of the poet-founders of Inscape, has this to say about his Own experience: When I was an undergraduate majoring in English I wanted to start a poetry magazin~. I went to a poet friend of mine who had won some priZes and suggested that we undertake the project together, but he would not listen; there are too many magazines already, he said, with nothing between their covers. I thought about it and decided he was right. Every month nowadays a new poetry magazine is born and an old one is resurrected. This unique population explosion threatens the survival of good poetry instead of encouraging it. In the wilderness of published poetry, how many good poems go unnoticed for every one thatis discovered? To be sure, the good poems are there, widely scattered on a multitude of biased pages, but how many serious readers stiIIfind it worth the candIe to look for them? Yet each little magazine justifies its position by explaining that there is more good poetry being written than there are pages for it. Actually, the reverse is true. And those bigger magazines with the solid reputations which publish poetry are not innocent of the literarY chaos which exists. Blessed with more intelligent readers than the smaller magazines could ever hope to have, they offer thek 4udiences truly fine poems like Robert Mezey's "Late Winter Birthdaytf and Robert Berkowitz's "Girlie Magazines," and then on the same pages they print senile and insipid verses because they bear the name of Robert Frost (who did write some good poetry once) or Edith Sitwell (who never did) or her brother. Then, to add tQ the confusion, the haughty and academic "literary" magazines grind out their quarterly grist. of poetry which is not only haughty and aca demic,but "literarY" and heartless. These magazines, no less than those brewed in the coffee houses, have cluttered and muddled the con temporary poetry scene. Having said this much, I confess that two years ago, with the aid of three friends, I start~d my poetry magazine. We founded our maga~ zine without illusion, not because the world needed another one, but I t https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmq/vol32/iss3/27 I2 : Reviews NEW MEXICO QUARTERLY XXXII 3& 4 211 because we wanted it. In spite of the fact that there are too many poetry magazines, there are not enough of them that can discriminate without prejudice. Too many bad poems are in print; some good ones are over looked. While Archibald MacLeish and CarlSandburg and the Sitwells are fixed before the public, we think discriminating readers may justly wonder why then Winfield Townley Scott (whom Dame Edith has never heard of, according to her) and Charles Philbrick, to name two, have written better poems; and in Robert Creeley, Tom McAfee, Lucille Adler, and John Pym we feel we have published poets who are more interesting, to say theleast. We·do not pretend to be unique in any way; in another relatively new journal, for example, I discovered Jerome Rothenberg's "Please TeII Love for Me," which is perhaps as fine a lyric as has been published in the last decade. Neither do we pretend that our value judgments are not, like all the others, subjective; but at·least they are considered judgments, not biased by nervous creeds or intimated by sacred names. Finally, experience has convinced us that there is a wealth of fine poems to be discovered, even if there are rio giants among the really contemporary poets. We feel .that the search for a good poem is' infinitely more important than the search for those comparatively trifling things.that seem to absorb all civilization, such as hundred megaton bombs. The Quarterly asked Robert Creeley, representing the radio,.to tell us who, inhis opinion, were thereally good contemporarypoets, say four ofthem. He generouslymentionedmore. I think those poets now most useful are Charles Olson, Louis Zukof sky, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Edward Dorn. All, with the exception of Louis Zukofsky, are to be found in Donald M. AlIen's The New American Poetry (Grove). Books by Zulcofsky are 44A":1_12 (Origin Press) and Barely and Widely (C. Z., Brooklyn). He is for me the extension from Pound,'in his technical quality; as are also Olson and Duncan. Means continue to be my own concern, and~ do not see 4'subject" . as other than a personal choice and/or environment. Allen Ginsberg is equally useful in that he extends the emotional range. of the poem literally to a wider audience. He enlarges the term of possibility. All this has to do with the writing of a poem. Readers otherwise like what they will. But in either relation some concern with clear definition Published by UNM Digital Repository, 1962 3 New Mexico Quarterly, Vol. 32 [1962], Iss. 3, Art. 27 212 REVIEWS and responsibility for statement is necessary. Anything can happen, but a choice can nonetheless -be made. Creeley, too, is represented in that milestone anthology he mentions and his favorable opinion of Ginsberg is returned. In an interview in the Village Voice, Greenwich Village neighborhood paper, recently re printed-in the anthology, The Village Voice Reader, Ginsberg stated,' "Robert Creeley writes the small, tight little poe~ that you dig." Again, reviewing Kerouac's The Dharma Bums for that publication, he includes Creeley with the "great master innovator," calling his poetry "perfect." (Poets aside butnotquite, VillageVoice will beremembered fondly for Feiffer, greatest writer of cartoonists.) Targets is a handsome little publication, square in shape only, pub lished on a dilatory basis and when last seen, sold for half a dollar. It was all verse except for some striking pen-and-ink designs and drawings. Theverse is of consistent quality although it may not be unkind to state that perhaps none of the sixteen poets published in the last issue to appear (in 1961) are very widely known as yet. At least three, Ferguson, ' D. M. Petinella, and Howard Smith, Jr., have published in the Quarterly. ' Quicksilver is a newcomer to'New Mexico but not to poetry. This quarterly was founded in 1948 in Tyler, Texas, moved to Fort Worth, and finally, with its present editors, Mabel Kuykendall and Grace Ross, to Taos. It is offbeat if not unique among the little ones (there is still Evergreen) in that it is sold nationally on newsstands. Poets are paid with copies pf the magazine and compete for a half dozen annual,prizes offered bythe magazine to its contributors. Recent issues, possessing the great virtue of coming out on time, have been attractively printed on deckle-edge tinted rag paper. The last one contained verses from thirty onepoets.

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