Maida Cummings, Java Joe, Mixed Media
Letter from the Editor
Ghetto of the chosen. Beyond this
ditch. No Mercy
In this most Christian of worlds
all poets are Jews.
–Marina Ivanova Tsvetaeva, from Poem of the End
I’m a fan of Rattle, the west coast literary journal, particularly because they go their own way, and seem more truly open-minded regarding issues of bias and taste than most journals, even when it costs them. They are maverick, and often cut against the grain of cultural trend and fashion, partly because they exist independent of and outside academia and this enables them to actually be simultaneously more mainstream and populist (and achieve excellence in my opinion) but also capture more slices of the marginalized than what DEI proponents ever could. Again, my opinion. Because I’m a subscriber to Rattle and a fan of their editorial stance, I also occasionally listen to their podcast, Rattlecast, and happened to catch one of the most recent episodes with editor, Timothy Green interviewing poet, Kai Carlson-Wee ( Rattlecast, #317).
The reason I’m bringing all this up is that in the middle of the interview Carlson-Wee laments feeling like an outsider in the poetry game he characterizes as ‘a gated community,’ and then Timothy Green offers empathetic and enthusiastic agreement from his side that poetry in the U.S. is a club, and while Rattle is number three in the country with a twelve thousand plus circulation, being outdone only by Poetry and Paris Review–they too feel on the outside. Carlson-Wee is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, and a previous Wallace Stegner Fellow there, among other fellowships and awards, and if you go to his website you will find that he’s publishing in some of the best journals in the nation. He has a very nice website, with now two full-length collections put out by BOA and a couple of chapbooks co-authored with his brother and does video work as well. To me this doesn’t feel outside, but he rightly laments how long it is to get and be published as a poet, whether individual poems or books. It’s a lengthy process with uncertain results at the end of it and certainly no living is attached through this unless one teaches or wins big awards or fellowships which one must apply for in a fickle and competitive marketplace.
As I listened to this and considered him an outsider I began to wonder not only what his vision of the inside looked like, but what it might actually look like in reality. I’m pretty sure there must be moments for even Poet Laureates and Nobel Prize winners, simply because they are poets, to feel they exist outside?! This gave me pause. I don’t mean to pick on anyone here–I mean my making an example of Rattle and Kai Carlson-Wee to act as a metaphor for our current reality. I think every poet and poetry editor must feel like they exist outside–even those on the “inside?” And we all keep lists of those we think, unlike us, are? This is a fruitless enterprise, folks–and most certainly beside any point or centrality of what we do and why we do it. Trust me.
Who is on the inside?
I’ll tell you who is on the inside–look to the right, at the table of contents of Triggerfish Critical Review, Issue #35. This is all that matters for us right now. Read them and weep. : )