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New England Review
C. Dale Young, Poetry Editor

C. Dale Young works as a physician and as Poetry Editor of New England Review. His first collection of poetry, The Day Underneath the Day, will be published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern UP in Spring 2001.


1. Could you give a brief history of your journal and its mission?
New England Review (NER) was founded in 1978, and its original mission is still intact today: to publish poetry and prose of the highest quality. With such a mission, we have always made an effort to publish not merely the best works by established writers but to find and encourage the best works by those writers on the verge of emerging into prominence. I certainly believe that is essential, and I edit poetry for the magazine with that in mind.

2. What do you believe is the role of journals in contemporary American poetry?
I believe the role of the journals is to find writers an audience and to help give those writers exposure. Along with our general readers, many people in the publishing world read NER. As a consequence, my statement is not just an abstract one. Sometimes publication in our pages can mean landing an agent for a fiction writer or having an editor at a publishing house ask whether or not one has a manuscript circulating.

3. What literary journals do you admire, other than your own?
I don't admire many literary magazines. Many are competent, and many seem content to publish the same poets ad nauseam. Many are filled with trite, dull, tiresome poems. I do, however, admire Yale Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Salmagundi, TriQuarterly and (for its stamina and devotion to the art) Poetry Magazine, among others. And there are others.

4. Who are your favorite poets of all time? If your journal could feature a retrospective on a poet, who would that be?
I admire many poets, but if I have to list my favorites of all time then the list is as follows. The truly distant dead: Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, Ovid. The distant dead: Pope, Keats, Arnold, Dickinson, Hopkins. The dead: Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Roethke, Bishop. The living: Justice, Walcott. Of course, my list next week will most likely be different. For a retrospective, I would select Roethke because much of his work is extraordinary yet his stock has not kept up with the Dow.

5. Could you name a few contemporary poets who are representative of your journal's current aesthetic?
Rick Barot, Henri Cole, Carol Frost, Debora Greger, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Karl Kirchwey, Cate Marvin, Carl Phillips, Elizabeth Spires, Charles Wright and many others.

6. What trends have you noticed in the poetry you have received over the past few years?
A love of unearned sentiment and emotional excess. Thankfully, there appears to be a renaissance in the value of poems as objects that can hold more than confession.

7. Have you ever "discovered" a new poet? Are such discoveries important to your journal?
Every year since I have been affiliated with the magazine, we have published poems by someone who has never before published a poem or has one or two publications under his or her belt. That is important to me because I feel publication in NER is about quality and not about where one has already published.

8. Could you describe your ideal submission in terms of practical aspects?
The ideal submission is three to six brilliant poems with a brief cover letter. We place no limits on the frequency of submission, but submitting to NER often isn't the key to acceptance. The submission of compelling work is the key.

9. Do you read all submissions? Could you describe the selection process?
I read all poems passed on to me by our preliminary readers as well as the submissions from prior contributors to the magazine and submissions from those who have many established credits. Our two readers, Randall Mann and Elizabeth Powell, read the majority of the poetry submissions. They are not students but poets with MFA degrees and a lot of editorial/publishing experience. Some of the readers at NER have been there longer than any of the current editors. When I find striking poems I feel should be published in the magazine, I forward them to our Editor, Stephen Donadio.




Explosive Magazine
Katy Lederer, Editor

Katy Lederer edits Explosive Magazine and the St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter. Her poems appear in APR, Volt, Jacket and Crow. She lives in Brooklyn.

1. Could you give a brief history of your journal and its mission?
Explosive Magazine was founded in 1996. I had just arrived at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and felt displaced and isolated. I wanted my young poet friends, who lived all over the country and were often unfamiliar with one another, to read each other's work, so my plan became to structure the magazine loosely around three geographical areas: San Francisco, Iowa and New York.

2. What do you believe is the role of journals in contemporary American poetry?
I think journals should make people think in new ways about what is happening in poetry. They are ephemeral and should incite dialogue and discourse. Journals that promise to publish "the best poetry around" seem very limited to me unless they have an eye toward some larger social, aesthetic or intellectual goal.

3. What literary journals do you admire, other than your own?
I admire many many journals and magazines right now. I think that the Chicago Review is rigorous and even-tempered. I always take their reviews very seriously. The Harvard Review and the web journal Lagniappe are also good places to find quality reviews. I think Boston Review's Poets Sampler series is fantastic. Faucheuse is gorgeous and full of great poetry and art. Cello Entry is a nice new small magazine. American Poetry Review is always good for seeing what's around, and thoughtfully reflects its time. Poetics Journal, Shark and Aerial offer some of the best critical discourse around. Certain web magazines, such as Jacket, the Transcendental Friend and Idiom are full of excellent work. Publishers Weekly and Poets & Writers are good places to find out what's going in po-biz at any given time. Both have opened up in interesting new ways editorially in recent years. VOLT, Fence, Gare du Nord and Verse are reflecting some of the best of the new trends in American poetry right now.

4. Who are your favorite poets of all time? If your journal could feature a retrospective on a poet, who would that be?
Dickinson, Donne, Chaucer, Moore, Poe, e. e. cummings and Marlowe. I also really love the writings of Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille and Borges.

I think I would run a retrospective on Chaucer. I think that many poets have not read his work very carefully, because if they were not English majors in college, then they have not had the chance to learn his language. I think his work is wonderful. It is humanist, funny, exacting in its rhythm— sad, comic, romantic and dark. I know he didn't mean to be, but if one reads his work now—with the patina of antiquity illuminating it—it seems terribly avant-garde.

5. Could you name a few contemporary poets who are representative of your journal's current aesthetic?
Martin Corless-Smith, Pamela Lu, Emily Wilson, Ishmael Klein, Lyn Hejinian, Jennifer Moxley, Juliana Spahr, Jeff Clark, Brenda Shaughnessy (though she hasn't been in the magazine)—among many many others.

6. What trends have you noticed in the poetry you have received over the past few years?
People are reading form in a very strange and, to my mind, unrigorous way. I think the ways in which the Language movement has been assimilated into various poetic milieus has caused a lot of people to just spatter words all over the page for no apparent reason. My favorite reason for spattering words is Projective—I like it when form matches breath and sound. I don't like it when it's supposed to be enacting void, or aporia. I also don't much care for concrete poetry. So, I think that a lot of people are experimenting, and this isn't a bad thing necessarily, because the poets who are terrible now might be very brilliant later.

People are also writing very decadent poetry. Lots of ornate words and phrases. Lots of fancy and archaic diction. I was reading Creeley the other day (one could say the following of early Tate, early Scalapino, or Glück just as well) and thinking to myself that I can't think of anyone who is writing like that anymore—anyone whose work is so elegant and austere. I think that many poets are writing like Charles Wright, John Yau, John Ashbery and Lucie Brock-Broido—using various combinations of languorous lines, full diction, contemplative, nostalgic tone, loose syntax, quirky vocab. I like much of this work, but I miss the old austerity, too.

7. Have you ever "discovered" a new poet? Are such discoveries important to your journal?
Yes and no. I've published a number of poets for the first time. Explosive was their first publication, but other people had certainly discovered them before I had.

Such discoveries are very important to Explosive. Young people are always doing terrific and under-appreciated work. Some of the bigger magazines have caught on, but there is still so much wonderful unrecognized work out there. I want to take it all

8. Could you describe your ideal submission in terms of practical aspects?
I publish between six and ten pages of a given poet's work in Explosive, and the page format is 8.5 by 11. I like to see huge swathes of each person's work. If the person is not known to me, though, I appreciate a regular submission (six pages). If I like it, I ask to see more.

9. Do you read all submissions? Could you describe the selection process?
I like cover letters to be short, confident and to the point. I hate it when people say "so-and-so famous poet told me to send to you," because this makes me feel obligated and puts me in a bad position.

I am especially happy when women and minorities submit. I would guess that 90% of my slush pile consists of white men. It's strange and awkward. Unfortunately, the magazine has been over-full for a year now, and I am not currently reading submissions.

I skim all submissions. If I like them, I read them, and if I don't like them, I send them back. It's very quick (when I'm actually reading new submissions).




DoubleTake Magazine
Andrew Krivak, Poetry Editor

Andrew Krivak became poetry editor of DoubleTake magazine in February, 1999. He lives in New York City.

1. Could you give a brief history of your journal and its mission?
DoubleTake began in the summer of 1995. Dr. Robert Coles wanted to publish a journal of multiple genres dedicated to the documentary tradition. That's why in DoubleTake one finds photography, fiction, nonfiction and poetry all existing side by side, and seemingly in conversation with each other. The magazine also comes out of the spirit of the poet William Carlos Williams. Coles had a long friendship with Williams, and if one had to sum up DoubleTake in one phrase, it would be, in the words of Williams, "to go out to look."

2. What do you believe is the role of journals in contemporary American poetry?
I think the role of journals in contemporary American poetry has to be both for the readers and the writers of poetry, though I think it is becoming increasingly for the writers of poetry. DoubleTake forces itself to be for readers simply by offering so many voices, not just in poetry, but in its striking photography and edgy nonfiction. One reader described it as "polymathic." I like that. But it's certainly for writers as well. We try to bring as many new, good voices to its pages as we do familiar and much-loved voices. And I think that's good for poetry as a public form.

3. What literary journals do you admire, other than your own?
There are so many journals out there; I wish I knew them all better, especially some of the newer ones. My favorite, though, for a long time has been The Southern Review. I miss Antaeus since it stopped publishing. And I always read the poetry in The New Republic. I also read journals dedicated to the art of the literary essay as well as poetry, and for that my favorites are The American Scholar and Raritan.

4. Who are your favorite poets of all time? If your journal could feature a retrospective on a poet, who would that be?
My favorite poets go as far back as Homer. I studied Greek as an undergraduate and we had to memorize passages from the Odyssey. Of this century, though, there is, of course, Williams and Stevens; Lowell has been a favorite of mine in every phase of his work; and I've always been drawn to the darker side of Frost. Some personal favorites for what their work has taught me are Hugo, Matthews, James Wright and Galway Kinnell. Sorry to be so heavy on the men here. Rich's "An Atlas of the Difficult World" is one of my all-time favorite poems. And I've always loved the work of Amy Clampitt. Recently I've been reading lots of Mary Oliver, and everything I can find by the Australian poet Les Murray and the Irish poet Paul Durcan.

If we were to do a retrospective on a poet I think I would look at Joseph Brodsky. Americans have always learned from and had a deep respect for Eastern European and Russian poets. That was surely the case for Brodsky. Even in English his poetry has the quality of Frost or Hardy, and I would bet that a lot of poets writing today have at least a few lines or images from Brodsky floating around in their heads.

5. Could you name a few contemporary poets who are representative of your journal's current aesthetic?
I think the poetry of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski that appeared in the Fall 1997 issue of DoubleTake, along with an excellent introduction by Ed Hirsch, is the best representation of DoubleTake's "aesthetic." To quote Hirsch: "Zagajewski has never forgotten the importance of addressing communal concerns, the necessity of civitas, and yet he has also learned the fundamental value of privacy, the morality of speaking only for oneself."

6. What trends have you noticed in the poetry you have received over the past few years?
I've noticed a trend toward prose in poetry. So many submissions we receive are spare, minimalist fiction or nonfiction broken up into random lines and stanzas instead of sentences and paragraphs. The intent I think is to write a poetic narrative, but unfortunately most attempts are more narrative than poetic.

7. Have you ever "discovered" a new poet? Are such discoveries important to your journal?
I wonder if it's even possible to "discover" a poet based on one or more submissions in American poetry these days. It takes so many submissions to get a book out; so many books to become a name. When I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts I once found in a book store on Huron Avenue a first book of poems by a young poet named Charles Rafferty. It was called The Man on the Tower (University of Arkansas Press). I loved that book, and when I began at DoubleTake wrote to the editor of that press asking him if he would help me track down Mr. Rafferty. I did, and we're going to publish some of his work this summer. Who knows. Maybe he, or any number of excellent young poets whose work has shown up in our pages, will be published by FSG or Knopf one day.

8. Could you describe your ideal submission in terms of practical aspects?
The ideal submission has a brief cover letter (we like to know where you've published before, and what you're doing now), three to five pages of your best work, and sufficient postage on the SASE. If you only want a reply, say so. But if you want the manuscript back and you've only provided a 33-cent stamp, don't be disappointed when you only receive a note. Frequency of submission doesn't matter. Some folks, like the magazine, appear quarterly.

9. Do you read all submissions? Could you describe the selection process?
Believe it or not, I read everything. It has to be phenomenal on the first read before I'll read it twice. When I find something that I feel the magazine cannot do without, I send it on to Dr. Coles, we discuss it, pass it around to the other editors, and then notify the poet, one way or the other. I also try to solicit a great deal of work, so poets should know that the percentage of unsolicited work we accept is very small. Still...if you send it, I'll read it.