An Interview with the Editor of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review
PROFESSOR PERRY GOES BACK TO SCHOOL
TO WHAT EXTENT HAVE YOU SEEN MAGAZINES IMPACTED BY THE WORLD AROUND THEM? FOR INSTANCE, HOW MIGHT THE REGIONAL, URBAN, OR NATIONAL LOCATION INFLUENCE A GIVEN MAGAZINE’S PURPOSE AND CONTENTS? OR HOW MIGHT A SPECIFIC HISTORICAL EVENT OR PERIOD IMPACT A MAGAZINE?
I think any art is affected by the culture that produces it.So there is certainly a kind of subconscious steering of things with any cultural product.For instance, with the Hamdpen-Sydney Poetry Review, I have made an effort to at least encourage submissions from southern writers.While we are not a regional journal, it is good to remember where you are.I think all journals do this to some extent.POETRY magazine will occasionally have a Chicago feature, NYC magazines always are full of writers from the city, etc. As for specific events – a monthly journal maybe can react in time, but quarterlies and annuals have a harder time.As a result, I think you’ll more often see literary journals responding to some larger change in the country’s mood – so, for instance, the 9/11 poems didn’t start showing up in journals until a few months after the attack.And these days it’s not uncommon to see some politically angry poems, now that we are fully in the age of Trump.So, yes, magazines respond, but slowly.
IN WHAT WAYS HAVE YOU SEEN MAGAZINE EDITORS TARGETING CERTAIN GROUPS AND COMMUNITIES? WHAT ASPECTS OF A MAGAZINE MIGHT GIVE READERS CLUES ABOUT THE INTENDED AUDIENCE(S)?
There are lots of magazines for specific groups, and most of them don’t hide their purpose. There are trans journals, queer journals, feminist journals, black journals, experimental journals, formalist journals, journals that feature only poems/stories about food, journals the feature poems/stories about sports; I know of a literary journal in Spain that is only about bullfighting. If the magazine doesn’t explicitly announce its audience, the best place to look is in the table of contents. What sort of authors are in this magazine? In large part, the readers of literary magazines are also writers, or hopeful writers, so who’s in the journal is a very good marker of who might be reading it.
HOW DO MAGAZINES CREATE CULTURAL MOMENTS? TO WHAT DEGREE MIGHT THIS FRAMING OF A CULTURAL SPACE BE INTENTIONAL, AND TO WHAT DEGREE DO WE COME TO UNDERSTAND THAT FRAMING TO HAVE HAPPENED ONLY AFTER THE FACT, WITH THE ADVANTAGE OF HISTORICAL DISTANCE?
I think maybe I answered this one above, but every now and then a journal will have an issue that is significant, and it seems so in the moment. I remember one issue of POETRY way back in the early 2000s dedicate the entire issue to a single poem by Frank Bidart. While I’m not a huge fan of Bidart, it felt like a bold move. One that was attempting to make a cultural pronouncement about the poem as it was happening. My guess is that history will judge the poem otherwise…. But let’s remember that cultural moments can be small too. Some of my very favorite poems – one by David Ferry called ‘Narcissus’ and a poem by Regan Good called “A Stone Should Mark the Place” I only know from magazines – the former in Raritan, the latter in the Paris Review. The Ferry poem has since been in a book, but the other one has not. So those issues, for me, are cultural totems. I know what their covers look like – I know what else is in them, I take them off the shelf every year to make copies of the poems for class. So I guess I’d say that magazine editors put poems in their journals in the hopes that any of them might become significant, to any number of people, from one to thousands.
OFTEN DISCUSSIONS OF “LITTLE MAGAZINES,” ESPECIALLY IN THE MODERNIST PERIOD, ASSUME THAT THERE IS A SHARP DIVIDE BETWEEN HIGH AND POPULAR ART. [BASED ON WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED SO FAR THIS SEMESTER,] IN WHAT WAYS DO LITTLE MAGAZINES NAVIGATE THIS DIVIDE?
With the exception of experimental journals, which to my mind just sort of pretend this problem doesn’t exist, I’d say all little magazines attempt to dispel the myth that there are barriers to accessing the work in the journal.The ‘sharp divide’ I’d say exists is between good and bad writing.There is some popular poetry out there – Rupi Kaur, for instance. And it is not bad because it is popular, it is bad because it is discernibly and laughably bad.Because of the increasing smallness of literary journals’ relevance, the divide seems to me less and less noticeable.
WHERE MIGHT WE ENCOUNTER “ACCIDENT” OR UNINTENDED EFFECTS IN THE SPACE OF A MAGAZINE? PUT ANOTHER WAY, HOW WELL DOES THE ACT OF COLLABORATION WORK IN TERMS OF CONTROLLING CONTENT, AND HOW MUCH DOES IT ALLOW FOR SURPRISES? HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO READ JUXTAPOSITIONS AND PASTICHE WITHIN A GIVEN ISSUE OF A MAGAZINE?
Well, as we discussed in the seminar a few weeks ago, the content and ordering of a journal is always purposeful, but there may be unintended crossings that occur. Any individual reader is going to notice connections between poems, or even between writers. What if you were to publish two writers side-by-side, who many years later grew famously to hate one another? Or to fall in love? That might make your issue a notable artifact, and we would read the poems through the scrim of that accident. I once published a few poems by a poet who was killed in a bicycle accident between the time of acceptance and publication. The poems, while not poems about death or loss, inevitably felt like missives from beyond when they were printed in the magazine. And I’m not sure what you mean by ‘collaboration’ in your question, but I can say that in the two issues I’ve put together with Nick Nace (all previous issues were done with just me as editor, with student helpers), there are certainly different kinds of voices now in the pages. Maybe someone could go through and pick out the poems I chose and the ones he chose, but either way, the mixing of them all makes for a slightly different feel to the journal. I think all magazines must work that way to some extent.